Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Sometimes you can do what you can't


So I've siphoned something into twenty-four wine bottles and corked and stored them, labeled '09. With any luck it will be wine; we'll know in a year or so.

Halfway through this activity I went to get more bottles and discovered that a windstorm had arrived. I hadn't really finished securing the polytunnel and the poly wrap was doing its best to draw my attention to the fact.

As in flapping about and dumping bricks off its skirts. The whole shebeen was preparing to do its Kitty Hawk debut.

I have friends who regularly tell me I underbuild things; I know they are right, but because there are so many other jobs to be done, I get distracted and then time has a way of bringing my failings to my attention on an ad hoc basis. I've too often had to rely on last-minute adjustments in the face of hundred-year floods and the like -- as if anyone else around here was ready for the flood of '97 ...

I dropped winemaking for the next couple of hours and ran back and forth in the --quite alarming by now -- wind and rain, gathering basalt cobbles from the dry wash, lugging them around the corner of the house in a Little Red Wagon, and throwing them at the base of the polytunnel all around.

As soon as I'd distrubuted my four hundredth pound of rocks, the wind died down.

Ah, well. Job well done, stand back and admire, neh?

Here's the thing: I'm not strong enough to do rocks any more. Age: sixty; back: bad, cardio: so-so. I gave up lifting plastic buckets of rocks about six years ago, and have been trying to recruit others to this engaging and interesting task ever since.

"No, actually."

"No."

"Nope."

"No!"

And yet, this morning, with our winter's veggies and a hundred bucks' worth of polyethylene at stake, I found myself leaping into the creekbed, chucking rocks into the bucket, hauling the bucket over to the footbridge and heaving it shoulder-high onto the bridge with a resounding thump.

Sometimes you can do what you can't.

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous5:34 PM

    Plastic hoop houses require a wood base board that you wrap the plastic around and staple to. You also need to drive stakes into the ground and attach them to the base board. The base board is attached to the hoops by conduit c-clamps.
    Lisa

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  2. Thanks.

    Some of the smaller ones described by Coleman, et al., have just the pipes in-ground and the plastic buried in dirt. He himself has a larger one with baseboard.

    I didn't have dirt. And I didn't have baseboards. But never being one to let impecuniousness and lack of skill stop me, I went ahead as I tend to do, with what I had. Today we got through 50 mph. Most winters that is as bad as it gets at our place. I think I see some mods in our future, though.

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  3. What an adventure. Glad it ended well for both house and builder.

    My DH tends to underbuild too, while I stand by being all skeptical, biting my tongue. The hoop house we're building is supposed to be movable (by us 2 adults vs. 1 4-year-old), like Coleman's only much cheaper, though smaller too. I should ask him how he intends to anchor it to the ground. We're on a hill, with some nice windbreaks, but on a hill nevertheless. I'm also worried about snow load above the door, and everywhere else, actually...

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  4. Please keep us updated on the hoop house - I'm very interested now that I know you do get wind there. I currently have five gallons of apple cider fermenting away on my kitchen counter. Never tried wine, but I have a small Golden Muscat grapevine I'm hoping will survive and give me enough to play with someday (one bunch this year; very tasty).

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  5. I hope that during the less active, winter days you will get some time to pull something publishable together. You need to be writing books!

    On a somewhat related item, I am reading The Moorchild by Eloise Jarvis McGraw right now (being an elementary school librarian). I wanted to learn more about her, and found through an online search that her collection of letters (and her husband's)are housed in the U of O library. Knowing you worked there 'till recently, I thought that was an interesting connection.

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  6. Hi risa,

    I awarded you the Honest Scrap Award (http://blog.bolandbol.com/2009/10/17/honest-scrap/). Enjoy...

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