SNAG ~

Lordy Lord there's always a snag. Every worker knows this, it's etched on their faces. If not too many, or too deadly, it won't drive them to drink. Maybe.

Our little snag arrived with the initial steel roof order. I'll spare the name of the company, because I've always liked 'em and always used 'em over 30 years of putting up these steel roof suckers. Lots of thrills and good rides with various co-workers.

So the pallet of steel arrives, dumped off the lumber truck which is packed to take this pounding. Doesn't hurt a thing. And the steel is packed in bands and hardwood pallet boards and both sides are equally protected with cover sheets of steel. Don't ever throw those cover sheets away! Over these 30 years I've squirreled away enough steel cover sheets to have a nifty cache, and I'm planning at least two old roofs to steel over with them. Woodshed structure type, and maybe even the stone hut if it comes to that. I'm awful partial to cedar shingle and would roof every late August through October with cedar if I could find the work and someone wanted to pay for the material cost. It's like handling books, or stout pages, broadsides, crisp and aromatic. Top of the line.

Back to the steel roofing on this job — bust the pallet open and start to work. Three sheets in and we find a damaged sheet. Easy to detect: there are evenly scored scratches running a foot long alongside each rib of the three foot wide sheet. Bend down closer and inspect the scratches and you will find a finely rolled ball of paint. That's the paint come off your new roofing. Either rollers or some procedure when packing the sheets, uniformly scratched every third sheet because when we set aside the first damaged sheet and worked with the next three sheets, up came the second damaged sheet. The exact same description and problem.

Believe me reader, I've been there, on almost any other job these scratched sheets are going up on the roof. "No one's going to see them 30 feet away on the ground". And they are right. And they are wrong.

At that point you call the lumberyard who delivered the order. If you're lucky, as I am, you get an owner who is understanding. In fact he will bend over backwards to deal with this headache, although it is no worse than yours for sure — your job has stopped. It's kicked apart all scheduling. Now we have to work backwards to the steel company who issued the order and await replacement sheets. No one's digging any further down into the pile of delivered steel. Once you start fussing with steel you start scratching steel, so I leave be the good 6-7 sheets left to almost finish the job and with the torrid weather, duck out of the sun and await the replacement sheeting.

You wait a week, maybe two weeks. You are waiting for two replacement sheets. It's a surprise when one day you return from another job and there flat bam left in the yard is a 17 foot pallet dressed out just like the first order of steel sheets. This is the replacement order. The sample of touch up paint you requested from the good lumberyard owner isn't here, because another worker took that message and he, well, forgot to order the paint. I've run forklifts in lumberyards since I was 12 years old, on and off them, and off them is the worker who drops down stakes and watches how the forks slide under the merchandise. Twenty feet away from this new order I can clearly see where the forks have busted the sides of my replacement sheets. Ruined in other words. Weirdly, and just like that, my replacement sheets are gone, and weirdly a third sheet (not requested) sits there fancy and perfect. So I'm halfway home.

Still without one sheet, and already waiting almost two weeks, phone calls begin. It's Labor Day weekend and no one is thinking much about labor. I call the manufacturer and make things known, then call the lumberyard and do the same. Of course no one knows how the replacement sheets have been damaged but damaged they are. It's the new zen koan of the modern era. The Shit Happens era. Even spending some hours in my mind with vice grips and tender loving care can I think of twisting out the delicate over-flap and all important edge that have been ruined. Of course it would be the important edge to each sheet. If the damage was on the other side of the sheet we could have tucked it in and buried it.







With the sales rep at the steel manufacturer's location I ask for his name, his boss's name, this region's rep's full name, and while we're at it, let's have the name of the President of the company. Not an underling, but the one who wakes up every morning and thinks about his/her company, how'd they'd like to see it run. He or she probably wants to see his company run the same way I want to see a steel roof built and sewn. Water tight. Now this sale rep is worried he needs "a lawyer". I assure him there is nothing lawyer about me. He's just met someone who has watched a job site of materials fall apart right before his eyes and I'm past curious why. There is a why to why.

There is a reason why the materials were packed and delivered damaged. Honestly, there is. There is a reason why the replacement sheets were damaged and still delivered that way. If the driver — and this lumberyard always has square-shooters at the wheel — was halfway decent, he would have reported the damage as soon as he returned to headquarters. When I called bright and early the next morning the owner knew nothing about it. Holy-moly do I miss the old ways. This long about many decades worth of fear and trembling is for the birds.

So the steel manufacturer and the lumberyard — guys making trouble but I also think guys wanting to make things right — will continue with us into September.

The big bad trapezoid shape roof old estate farmhouse built by a revolutionary war soldier and his family and tended to by my family now for many decades will persist, and I promise you, finish.

photos © susan & bob arnold

STAND ~

What do I know, except there is something quite lovely how Chrissie Hynde is talking, while performing on stage, with a few women in the front row. For a long time, many of us have had an affection for any artist that works this way. I sense a certain women bonding and joy at the moment and just how Hynde goes on to sing the song. Somebody's video/cell phone gives us the capture in time. And for whatever reason I woke up this morning thinking of this, only learning at the end of my little escapade, that today (7 September 1951) is Chrissie Hynde's birthday.

Hynde is the owner of a vegan restaurant in her hometown of Akron, Ohio. "The VegiTerranean.

Oh yes, since 1970s she has been a driving force in the punk/rock 'n' roll scene, a ground-breaker one could say. Some women have been known to bring down monolithic scenery of rock 'n' roll history; with a slinging guitar, vocals, stamina, and songwriting verve, Hynde has been the mainstay of The Pretenders. No one wears boots like her.

ADVENTURER ~

~ George Hitchcock ~


poet, pressman, designer, artist, publisher of the great Kayak,
novelist, playwright, teacher, Californian, gardener, raconteur

Goodbye !
1914-2010

flickr.com

LABOR ~

Mississippi John Hurt

Greatness sometimes walks around with a one-word name, even greater might walk around with a state name before his name. John Smith Hurt was born in Teoc Mississippi in either 1892 or 1893; anyway, it was a few years after Ezra Pound, and he would die in 1966 after many long years of hard lived obscurity as a musician, and those last re-discovered years with an affection from devoted followers and fans. His music began in the 20s when he was first recorded by Okeh Records, which went belly up in the Great Depression, sending Hurt back to the fields of labor. There, hidden, he stylized his own home remedy of country flavor, and no one but no one has been able to copy it to this day. Many try. Before Okeh quit, they gave him the moniker "Mississippi John Hurt" as a gimmick, but he spun it into legend.

crossroadsclub27biographies.blogspot.com

EARTH ~

Born outside Manchester UK, 1941. A self-employed musician — the majority of his recordings can be found on his own label Science Friction — and he's played with all styles from skiffle, folk, ballads, rock 'n' roll, full jam, with a devoted following. Nearing his 60th year in 2000 Harper released one of my favorite of his recordings The Green Man. Sylvan through and through. I found myself playing the song below late Saturday night into Sunday morning.

EARTH ~

We're on the home stretch of rebuilding the roof, setting on the spruce purlins for nailers, and getting the last leg of steel roofing up and anchored on. I'm curious to see if between Sweetheart and me we can rig up a ramp system to slide the seventeen foot sheets six-feet up the ramp and then climb onto the scaffold and pull the sheets up and onto the roof. More husband and wife team stuff. We do it all the time with stone, logs, and snow, why not steel? Seven years ago on the back roof we pulled up 18 footers, but we had boy wonder Carson with us then. Nothing like a young lad. I'll have to see after I build the ramp, and lock it in at a comfortable angle onto the scaffold, then watch how the material slides and how well we can maneuver ourselves ground-to-roof. We're still pretty quick. If it becomes obviously nuts, Greg will come down and help give us a lift. Nothing like a friend. I've even thought of grabbing the first stranger going by: walking, bicycle, scooter "Hey, want to help us a moment and give this sheet a lift?" The ever grounded feeling of common community.

Getting up high with the last pieces of 16-foot spruce purlins. It's a Sunday morning, maybe nearing on 11AM and the roof asphalt must be 110 degrees. I mean hot.

I love the new jiffy handsaws, so I keep mine close by hung on a temporary nail. As I need to lop off a short end piece to fit in the purlin I do it from the high staging with my trusty handsaw. No nailguns on this job.

The old steel ridgecap we'll remove from the house roof I'll be putting right onto the stone hut's ridge. You can see it needs a new one. I built this hut 25 years ago, all laid up dry except for the gable end. I started on it the day our son Carson was born. The stone all came off our land, hauled by old jeep and wheelbarrow to the site. The windows came from a friend stopping by before moving to Arizona. He unloaded what he owned to lighten his load for the journey.The old barn board door came from barn boards I found in a barn and brought home and built as a door. The chapel style window came from a chapel. That's a second run of cedar shingles on the roof. The first were white and worthless for roof work but what are you going to do when no money? Years later bought red cedar from British Columbia and cut in that star. So many basics in New England. It's only when you head down to Baltimore and remember that Edgar Allan Poe termed the Transcendentalists "frogpondians", it's all together perfect. I chuckle way high on the roof staging thinking of this.

Here's old friend white pine seen from the scaffold, directly east of the house, over the river. No one lives anywhere near it. The land over there has been heavily logged twice since we've been here forty years, and no one has taken the tree. Looking now at the tree it seems to have two out stretched arms, an arched back, and it's singing.

This is what a day off from the roof job looks like. Fellow worker Sweetheart.

At the west gable of the house, where the steel roof will finish up.

The safe passageway, kept mainly clean, of an obedient scaffold.

We're working through two layers of asphalt shingles and setting in 3/4 inch spruce strapping. I've even stripped the first layer of shingle tabs to get closer to solid footing. You want a 3-inch screw to go along here and there with the regular ringshank nails, and you want to try to remember where the chestnut 4 x 4 beams are below. Sink a screw or a nail into one of those as much as you can. At best they were set in where the setting-in was best. Farmers built this place. Otherwise, it's a full one inch softwood deck under the shingles. It'll grab.

There's always a place to hang a saw.

photos © susan & bob arnold

EARTH ~

CHANG DAI-CHIEN

Oh ~ what beautiful work.

A twentieth century master who could out smart the best with his forgeries posing back to ancient times.

He had the touch.

And he lived long enough and wise enough to range as a traditionalist to impressionist to expressionist painter.

His life took him from his native China to Kyoto to Brazil to California and finally settling in Taiwan.

Prolific, he painted 30,000 paintings in his lifetime ~

capturing the essence of balance:

calligraphy, brush painting and poetry.

Just look at those blues!






Please click onto each painting for the exquisite size











photo: www.c-c-c.org/.../ChangDaiChien.htm

COLD TURKEY PRESS ~

Since 1970 Cold Turkey Press, led by Dutch artist Gerard Bellaart, has published limited, handmade editions of books, cards, and art pieces by authors Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Ira Cohen, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, William S. Burroughs, Blaise Cendrars, Louise Landes Levi, d.a. levy, Sinclair Beiles and many others.

Gerard is now back producing large, elegant, color, poem cards.

These three by Bob Arnold are translated into French by Agnes Racine & Frederique Berringer.

Go here for a whole new world ~
http://gerardbellaart.com/artist/index.html

PLUS!

MORE from Cold Turkey Press will be forthcoming at the Birdhouse

CEDAR SEE ~

photo © bob arnold

WONDER ~

Hello everyone, or maybe it's just one or two, hello always.

Please take a moment (it'll be a great long moment) and have a look at what Steven Fama has brought to bear about my, and perhaps your friend, Cid Corman. It's an exquisite walk through the park of Cid's many small Japanese bound books done in just the flair Cid made with his own day. One on one with a poem. Steven selects his personal favorites and the company he makes for us is kitchen-table-sit-down-scrumptious. Be prepared to wanting to own a few of these books when you finish this visit! Origin Press, Elizabeth Press are the two presses involved at making these beauties through the 1960s-70s.

There is also an appreciation for Mark Kuniya's Country Valley Press titles, mostso Mark's own handwork, akin to the Corman titles. Mark is working at this as I speak. Books built like traditional Japanese houses. Park your shoes out at the door.

photo © bob arnold

NEW ENGLAND ~

photo © bob arnold