Week 48 (13)
So I’m advising a friend who’s writing a piece set in Portland, slipping him the names of restaurants and the like to add a dash of verisimilitude here and there, and there’s this line in it about the constant downpour so typical of Portland—not the actual quote; the file, unfortunately, is not to hand at the moment, but that’s the gist of it. Bugged me a little, since, while it does rain here, a lot, between October and March (or thereabouts), it’s hardly a constant downpour. More like grey day after grey day with enough fitful spritzes to keep things damp, and even if the sun is shining when you get up in the morning, you take an umbrella with you. (Summers are completely different, mind.) So I let him know, and he adjusted his text accordingly, and for the past two days it’s been pouring rain relentlessly. Nonstop. Bonedrenching, constant downpour. So okay, already. I get the fuckin’ point.
The
current sitch.
Saturday, 00:39
My home office is currently in a sleeping porch that was built on the back end of the second floor, added on sometime shortly after WWII when this place first (as far as we can tell) became a rental. When we bought the place, it had been cut into two rooms through the judicious application of a tiny walk-in closet made of cardboard boxes painted white to look like dry wall and nailed to makeshift joists; ripping that out was one of the first remodeling tasks we undertook. Gleefully. —At some point thereafter, it was painted with an aggressively eccentric mural covering the walls and ceiling; we needn’t go into all that.
Remember the squirrels? —I’ve mentioned the squirrels once or twice. They’ve been bedeviling me and the cats by scampering back and forth across the crawlspace over the sleeping porch, and occasionally getting into screaming fights right over my desk. We caught them, finally, with one of those humane traps and a dollop of peanut butter, and drove them across the river and let them out in Forest Park, and when we got back I promptly began ripping out the ceiling over where my desk had been (hence the moving of my office, down to the other end of the porch) so that I could a) clean up whatever nest had been left behind and b) nail up the holes under the eaves through which they’d scampered with such alacrity.
So. I’m now working away on my faithful tangerine iBook on the spindly secretary we bought back in Massachusetts (our first piece of joint furniture; sigh) huddled under a lap rug with a little ceramic space heater toasting my feet in a badly built sleeping porch, one-third of which is walled-off with plastic because it has no ceiling; it’s bare to the rafters, with ancient pieces of cardboard stuffed between the upper joists to serve as some sort of primitive insulation or draft block, and smells of dust and stale squirrel piss, despite the plastic, and it’s freezing, and there’s a yard debris bag sitting over there half-filled with fifteen gallons of old grass, wood shavings from our eccentrically insulated attic, and miscellaneous unidentifiable fluff—the source of the aforementioned eau de stale squirrel piss—that had all been resting on a piece of badly painted drywall nailed haphazardly to the joists above my head for the past few months.
In case you were wondering why I was shivering as I type.
And not just for the, ah, devices presented herein, but for the fractured English used to present them. (To say nothing of the surging horses on the brown paper cover.)
(Yeah, yeah. I’ve been busy. Caught the squirrel in the attic. Moved my office. Did some clean up over at Ruthie’s. Attended a hellacious Thanksgiving feast with only one relative present: the Spouse. And I’ve been writing some stuff. Some of which you might see here, at some point, in some fashion. So hold your horses. Not the ones on the catalog cover. Geeze.)
nicholas urfé
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