When You Do House Siding, It Always Rains

Progress has been made on everything except my book. I think my agent is going to send a hit squad to come get me soon. I'm finding myself doing avoidance behavior I've never even thought of before -- I'm even going out to the barn and removing disgusting old ceiling tiles (that rain mouse turds and hundred-year-old sawdust on me) rather than sit down and write.

What the hell's wrong with me? Writing used to be a pleasure, even under deadline. What is it about this book contract that has me avoiding it so assiduously that I've put myself in an unarguably impossible situation with both my editor and agent? Egads: I've turned into The Author From Hell.

Someone just shoot me now.

Okay, back to the progress....

We've successfully destroyed the inside of the old "kitchen" (calling it a kitchen is a diplomatic statement: it was a hellhole disguised ingeniously as a "summer kitchen") and the room behind it. Tore out most of the bathroom except the Mary-Kay-pink commode, leaving the reasonably good pine wall boards where we could. The commode goes as soon as the Dumpster gets emptied again. We have rescued a pile of rather nice old farm boards from the ceiling, where they were covered up by a nasty set of tiles from the sixties; the boards are rustic, some as wide as sixteen inches, and can be planed down and used for flooring down in the book room we're building on the garage level (for office archives of books).



This area will be our new office, in the ground floor of the barn.



We're also in the process of tearing the aluminum siding off the barn, and eventually the house, too. We'll be resealing the old clapboards and painting the whole kit and kaboodle white with either dark green or indigo blue trim. (I'm all for the blue, a la French Canadian houses, but Elric likes the dark green. We shall see who wins.)



When I say "we," the hard work is primarily being done by a good friend, Bruce, who is overseeing the contracting and doing most of the work himself. He is a true mensch, even if he is a good old home baptist kinda New Englander.

If you want to see a Quicktime .mov file of Bruce playing with the crane we had today, click here. It's about 2.5 megs in size, so be patient. It only runs for 8 seconds, so don't blink. The extra pair of legs in the crane basket is me -- I'm so short, I disappear behind Bruce.