God Does Not Shop At Home Depot

Here's how I know: Knocking down the remaining ducks of a house-wide renovation I discovered late yesterday afternoon that in order to get the gas dryer hooked up by the gas company today as scheduled I would need to drive to the Home Depot twenty miles away in Keene, NH in order to buy the needed vent pipe. I try to buy everything possible at our excellent local hardware stores and building suppliers, but they close early and Home Depot doesn't. So, I drive through a cinematic opening-of-the-scary-third-act kind of thunderstorm to Home Depot at nine o'clock last night. In short order, while heading to the check-out with a cart full of dryer parts -- I am not kidding -- the store is struck by lightning.

The lights went out momentarily, the emergency generators came on line and everything returned to the normal routines of selling deeply discounted mass-purchased building supplies at the expense of small town commerce. Any sensible God fearing person would at this point have fled the scene and returned to the grace and charity of local business first thing the next morning. But I'd driven all that way. And it was already in my cart. And their computers rebooted during my moment of doubt. So I bought the damn stuff at Home Depot.

Forgive me Lord. I know not why I do it.
And we can help.

Showtime

A lot has happened since my last post. The Democrats have chosen a presumptive nominee, Angelina Jolie had some babies (I think) and my plumber got the rough-in done on the house. I have been in full-bore carpenter mode this summer and I'm happy to report I still have all ten fingers. One is bent at an ugly angle, I've torn a rotator cuff and developed a strange sensation in my right knee, but nothing out of the ordinary for an aging woodchuck. I'll get a break this weekend when I go out to Chicago for NPR. Nothing like going to work to get a break from work.

A drywall delivery is backing and beeping its way up the driveway. It's showtime.

Once More Into the Breech

Sometimes it seems the only idle time in my life occurs at airports. I would hazard that ninety percent of my postings on this blog have been written in airport waiting areas. A few were even about airport waiting areas. This is the lowest form of introspection and humor. I’m not alone in this indulgence by any stretch. Comics and writers great and small spend so much of their lives traveling they are forced to write on the road and inevitably you end up with a lot of train, plane, and automobile jokes with some motel humor thrown in. Motel humor is my day job so I try to avoid it otherwise.

But I’m not going to write about sitting in the Washington/Dulles airport waiting for my delayed flight to Norfolk to do a WWDTM taping tomorrow night. I will tell you instead why I have posted so seldom as of late. Or perhaps it would be better to show you.



This is what’s left of our kitchen. We paid a crew of very talented young tradesmen to tear it to pieces and put it back together again in a different order. I’m playing the part of general contractor on the job, which means not only that I have to pay for everything, but I also have to figure out what everything is that I’m supposed to pay for and make sure it or he or she shows up when it or he or she is supposed to. Long ago and far away I did this sort of work everyday. For ten years. Let me tell you, it’s not like riding a bike. It’s more like solving quadratic equations. In other words, use it or lose it. Most days I feel like I’m solving some sinister Rubik’s Cube that changes colors as I go and bites me at every wrong move. Then while I sleep it arranges itself back the way it was.

The good news is that construction technology has come a long way since I tried to make a living at it. Cordless tools, high-tech plywood and weather seals, laser levels. If they’d had this stuff twenty years ago I might still be doing it. But, based on the frustrations and confusions of building that have not been improved upon, I probably wouldn’t be celebrating 16 years of sobriety if I was.

Free at Last. Free at Last...

If you happen to have read the "Quote Me" piece, which has been featured on the homepage of this site for a shamelessly long time, you are aware of my conundrum concerning the misattribution of inspirational quotations. Thanks to fearless reader, Bill Osmet, the mysterious Allan K Chalmers has come in from the cold. Check out the link. He was a quite an accomplished scholar and a mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Why this never came up on my previous google expeditions I cannot explain. My misspelling of his first name? Improvements in the search engines in the three years since I wrote the piece? Myopia? Whatever it was I'm more than happy to give credit where it is due. I've even found another Allan Knight Chalmers quote I like even more than the last one I co-opted, "A man gets thin if he does not read, becomes inaccurate if he does not write, but most of all loses a profoundness if he does not think."
As Einstein famously said, "I must a little think now."

Spring Colors and Sounds

With cheerful colors finally appearing along the Vermont roadsides it is officially spring. Kubota orange, John Deere green and the the dusty rose of the occasional aging Ford or Massey Ferguson dot the hillsides with the promise of summer. We dragged all the attachments out of the barn yesterday and I took inventory of the broken and missing parts I needed to get everything to work. Lynch pins, shackles, top links and zerks -- a lovely list of alliterative parts my son and I went to fetch this morning. Soon I'll be able to york rake the road, bush hog the buckthorn, and stack the brush. I think what I like best about spring -- besides the weather and flowers if you're into that sort of thing -- is simply talking about it. A person can not say bush hog the buckthorn too many times.

Witness to Catastrophe

According to CNN and other authorities, I am trapped inside of a national nightmare. I'm at O'Hare airport in Chicago in the midst of the airline meltdown, which according to CNN and other authorities, has created a refugee camp of surly passengers desperate to go somewhere, anywhere. I keep looking around for the horror so that I can bear witness to this headline catastrophe. I am in the B Concourse -- United territory -- and it looks like every other Friday morning I've sat here waiting for my ride home. I thought I heard small arms fire coming from the American terminal, but it turned out to be the popcorn machine over by the Starbucks across from the Hudson News stand. You know the one I mean.

A woman over by the window at B3 is reading People. I can tell by the "who are these people?" look on her face that she is not a subscriber. She only reads it in airports and dentist offices. There is a slow but annoying drip coming from the ceiling by the pay phone kiosk eight feet to my right. A parade of people have settled into the seat for as long as it takes to get dripped on and then they move. I should warn them, I know, but I am but an observer here -- reporting on this nightmare. I decide I will warn older people with bad hips, but nobody else.

My flight is delayed 40 minutes. A nightmare? Somehow I can't muster my "Flight or Fight" response to this. I don't get too worked up about this stuff anyway. Travel is all about managing your expectations. Whenever I leave home for a trip -- no matter where I'm going -- I assume I will spend the night sleeping in the back of a rented Celica at a snowed-in truckstop in Erie, PA. These things happen. That way, even if I end up in the back of a Jeep Cherokee at a snowed-in truckstop in Erie I can say to myself, "At least it isn't a Celica". If the truckstop is in Wyoming? At least it isn't Erie. A Motel 6 in Boise? It could be much much worse. And if I actually get to where I intended to go more or less at the time and on the day I wanted to go there -- which is usually the case -- I feel a pleasurable swell of surprise and delight.

Our long national nightmare is over. Somebody call CNN.

Big Foot Bunny Droppings

The myth of the Easter Bunny endures one more season in southeastern Vermont. Like the Big Foot hoaxes in the West, large rabbits that poop chocolate and joy are a well-documented phenom in the Green Mountains.





This picture depicts what it might have looked like had the Shackelton Expedition been a family outing.








With another 6 inches of snow falling as I write, signs of spring are everywhere...but here.