The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/audio-version-casting-the-first-stone1.mp3[/podcast]audio version —- casting the first stone

On some of my more uppity days, I look down the road and my nose at my neighbors’ houses, most of them running 3000 square feet with garages the size of an airplane hangar.  And I think:  how much stuff do you need that it takes 5 bedrooms, his and her walk-in closets, 3 and a half baths, plus a 3 car garage that parks a 40 foot travel trailer big as a mobile home?  All this for a family whose kids have grown and left the South End.  And while I’m up on my High Horse, I start wondering why is America so hooked on material acquisition and always wants more and needs, apparently the new and improved version of everything from their riding lawnmower to their garbage disposal with the 50 tooth slicer-dicer and odor control setting.   I can get pretty damn smug.  I can rant and I can rave.  I will even vent about living in my dilapidated 800 square foot shack, poor as a church rat, and finally end up babbling about those humble beginnings, living modestly, close to the Land.

This past couple of weeks I went into spring cleaning mode — even though it’s August now.  Started out back in the woodshop.  Tools got dragged out and junked or donated, the place got cleaned and rearranged, a lot got burned.  I moved to my bike shed, hauled out everything non-bike, paneled the interior with cedar and now I had all my boat gear in the lawn.  So I remodeled my lawnmower shed, tossed decades old tools and dead chainsaws and mulching blades and rusty junk, moved a 1930’s wringer washer out and put it in the garden shed, then went at the garden shed.

Eventually I made it to the boatshed, then out to the kayak shelter and finally into the old shack itself, now a glass studio, the living testament to frugal living, a shrine to my oh so ascetic lifestyle.  Course now it’s bigger by double, a second house really, bedroom, bath, all the comforts of home even though we have one up top we built 20 years ago.  If you add them all up — and I did— my neighbors look like the folks who downsized, who cut their carbon footprints and who probably should apply for food stamps any day.

Our 16 buildings, yeah, I said 16, from the sauna to the boathouse, the bike shed to the wellhouse, the garden shed to the studio, woodshop to outhouse, rootcellar to garden shed, woodsheds to kayak shelter, well …. I guess they seem maybe a bit extravagant, if not deliriously deranged.  Maybe not a McMansion, just a McNuthouse.  I know this:  I’m gonna stop pointing accusatory fingers at the neighbors and their piddly little domiciles.  At least until I find out they’re depressing the property values here on the politically correct South End.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/audio-sailing-back-in-time.mp3[/podcast]audio — sailing back in time

Over 20 years ago I built myself a little sailboat, one I hoped would be seaworthy enough to sail into the Scylla and Charybdis of the San Juans, stout enough to withstand riptides and whirlpools, big enough to haul camping gear and coolers.  Took me most of a spring and half of summer and when I was finished I rigged it for fishing as well as sailing.  It was, at least for a boy who had never built much of anything, a thing of unbridled beauty.

Cedar planking hid my plywood hull, the rudder was mahogany, the gunwales were white oak, the big oversized tiller handle was yew.  Exotic woods comprised the artsy fartsy ornamentation and a brass bell hung up near the mast.  It had a bobinga bowsprit and handles made of padauk, a bright red wood from Africa.  I had an old 2 inch diameter rope that was the bumper, fastened with copper fittings.  I christened it the S.S. Pterodactyl because the mainsail and the jib were black, huge pirate wings, the scourge of the  South End Seas.

For that summer and most of the next, I sailed every day practically.  Folks would mosey up while I was rigging for launch at the state park and remark what a fine old boat I had.  It kind of annoyed me they thought it was old —- after all, I just built the damn thing.

Course, now it IS old.  Just like the Popeye who built her.  I pulled her out of her drydock this year — it’s been awhile since I’ve sailed her — and sent the rats packing.  Cleaned her up, repaired some torn sails and replaced some lines.  If folks thought she looked old new, believe me, she looks like the Ancient Mariner’s tug now.  And you can guess what I look like.  Naw, not the albatross….

I got to thinking this year that the Pterodactyl was a symbol of my more adventurous years.  I went on to build my house, stud by stud, stick by stick, mostly on the confidence that little boat gave me.  You hate like hell to think those years are receding faster than a minus tide while you watch from an armchair, living intravenously on memories.  So I pulled out the old girl this week and went back out.  I’m not looking for some vestigial glory days.  I just wanted to set the sails into a Puget wind and feel the pull of wood and rope and sail fighting the outgoing current.  Time will come, I guess, to ease her bow downwind and carry us both to a far shore.  But not yet.  We just LOOK old….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/audio-u-store.mp3[/podcast]audio —- u-store

I’ve been cleaning house this past couple of weeks.  Okay, cleaning shack.  All right, full disclosure here, I’m cleaning shacks, sheds, sauna, wellhouse, studio, woodshop, root cellar, anything with walls and all the accumulated stuff inside.  Started out putting some cedar planks on the bike shed, sorta Martha Stewart the inside, which resulted in a lot of extraneous boat gear getting evicted.  Reduce the clutter, keep the bike shed strictly bike.  Course that kicked a ball down field.  Now I had to find a place for oars and fishing poles and life preservers and tackle boxes full of rusty lures and monofilament tangles.

Undaunted, I hauled my homemade sailboat, the S.S Pterodactyl, scourge of  the South End Seas,  out of its drydock and cleaned it bilge to gunwale.  Sure I felt bad for the family of mice, but isn’t it more humane to send them packing on dry land than walking the plank some storm tossed sailing venture?  So that added more gear, everything from buoys to crabpots, to the growing pile of homeless stuff.  Eyeballing my lawnmower/chainsaw/ rototiller shed, I crawled in through everything from a 1930’s wringer washer, back behind truck parts of trucks long since scrapped and crushed, plus odds and ends of what some might hope were antiques but are actually rusted junk.

I emptied it.  Then refilled it, christened it the BOATHAUS, and moved the new debris out onto the lawn.  Some stuff got moved into the studio, some to the garden shed, a lot into the burn pile, a small mountain for the dump runs, a few things for the woodworking shop, some odds and ends went to the garden fence where objects of marginal interest get hung, but when the dust cleared there was still an antique store’s worth of my life’s detritus, although not really salvageable after all my neglect.

Maybe when the radioactive tsunami litter rolls in I can slip this stuff in down at the beach, scribble on some Asian looking cuneiform, then let the beachcombers have a field day.  My only fear is I’ll inadvertently buy half of it back from them at their garage sales in five years.  Course, maybe by then I can build a couple more sheds….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/audio-heat-advisory.mp3[/podcast]audio —- heat advisory

I came in from weeding nettles that were stealing light and moisture from my vegetables in their cold little garden plot and I noticed I had broken a sweat.  It’s a couple days from August so I assumed summer might have arrived when I had my flannel-clad back turned.  Hot!  Man, it felt real hot.  The rest of the country’s sizzling, maybe it’s our turn to fry.

And yessir, when I struggled up my hill to the house, tearing off layers, one for winter, another for spring, and reached the only working thermometer, it was practically at the Red Zone, mercury ready to blow right out through the glass tube top.  67 degrees, it read.  I cleaned my sweat smeared glasses on my red bandana and peered once more.  Couple degrees shy of 70.  But the way the temperature was boiling up, I would’ve bet dollars to icecubes we were going to bust right through the big Seven O.  I opened up a couple of windows even though the house was a little chilly, but I like to live dangerously.  Plus it would be good to introduce some fresh atmosphere into the hermetically sealed rooms that held mostly 2011 gases and odors.

The meteorologists on the evening news would be writing their copy already.  Heat alerts and advisories.  Don’t lock your dog in the SUV with the windows rolled up — Woofsy will look like a brat in a microwave when you get back.  Drink lots of fluids.  Tie a wet towel around your neck, but not too tight!  Stay indoors if you don’t have a pool.  Run the air conditioner at maximum coldness, full fan.  Don’t wear your winter coats.  And whatever you do, slather on sunscreen every half hour with SPC 500 or more.  Use lard if you have it.

Thank God for the TV weatherfolks is all I can say.  Save us a body count nobody wants.  I just pity the poor yahoos who don’t watch TV, the ones crawling in their longjohns across a lawn rapidly going to desert, desperately trying to reach a faucet.  And the sun, the implacable searing sun, cranking toward 70, beating down on their uncovered heads, another victim caught unawares and definitely unprepared by a stealth Sound End summer.  Don’t let this happen to you!