Friday, May 25, 2007

Raining today! The crows are all complaining. According to dad I'm wrong about the bird population-- ravens all live on the other side of the valley, so the cacophonous flock outside our windows is 100% crows. Freakishly large crows, but crows nonetheless.

I've been helping him out at work the last few days; they're building a new school and Dwight has to clear out the ancient, sooty boiler room and his wasteland of an office by Sunday. Dad's organizational skills are very... creative, not unlike my own. The floors and walls are a familiar clutter of fantasy novels and post-it note work orders with smiley faces and file cabinets so full of architectural plans and instructions that they are permanently agape, and every tool you could ever want or need and many that you'd never use in a million years, and hundreds of tiny drawers full of screws and nuts and bolts, and drills and saws and hammers and clamps, and bits of machines that look fantastically far-fetched out of context. He holds them up for me and says, "guess what this does?" and I say, "it's the world's fanciest cookie cutter!", but it turns out to be part of the motor of a microwave. I don't ask why it's hanging from a loop of copper wiring from his massive 12 ft high workbench; like everything in Dad's many work spaces, it has found its way there through a series of events that makes perfect sense in the bigger picture but might take an hour or so to lay out verbally.

So we've been loading up the old school district van with armloads of heavy metal and dolly loads of cabinetry and shelves, and taking it to the now-deserted Primary School, where we've reclaimed an abandoned classroom as his until the new school is up. I like being busy with a job like this-- it feels very nice to be doing something useful and visceral, as opposed to the ephemeral quality that office work done on computers has. I like being sore and dirty at the end of the day. Really, really sore and smudged with grease and layers of dust from head to toe.

Here's a shot of my arms last night.

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The full effect is lost in this photo, because after our first shift and subsequent de-griming, dad produced some work gloves so now my hands remain fairly clean. You should have seen them, though! Blackest black. Can you tell how pleased with myself I am?

Tomorrow I'll post lots of pictures and fix the background...

1 comment:

Lenora Bell said...

Grimy indeed. We went to the Shanghai Art Museum recently and there was a painting of what looked like a mess of boiler room pipes. I thought of D. Good for you, I'm glad he had someone to help him and make a tiresome situation better.