wedsnesday - work day 3

Mikal and i arrive at te house and there's no one else there. Bill shows up a bit later. George and Adam have abandoned us. they've been lured away by the power tools at another house, Rachel's spending the day at the Habitat build she worked at the previous week and Katie's gone to an H.O.P.E. project. Emily is running late.

After we get the sutters open Mikal and I start texturing while poor Bill goes back to fixing all the previous plastering mistakes. we hear howls of anguish every now and then from the back of the house...

i can't believe i haven't mentioned the shutters before. maybe because i'm writing this in chronological order and this is my first time trying to open them.

storm shutters: (my deffinition) outside metal shutters taht home owners in hurrucan prone areas may chose to install on their windows to avoid having to nail plywood to the ouside of their homes every time there's a storm threat.

or, as we came to call them pain in the a** f-ing shutters. rolling them down: piece of cake. getting them to come up, an entirely different matter. the sutters are raised by a crank mechanism. fairly simpe. that is, fairly simple once you get the stupid rod to go intot the stupid nut? bolt? at the other end. in the dark. through the wall. up a ladder. f-ing shutters!!!!!!!!

allow me to explain: there's a hole in the wall next to either of the top corners of each window inside the house. the shutter is installed on the outside and the gear mechanism that raises or lowers the shutter is INSIDE the wall. So... your mission, if you want to have enough light to work today is to take the turning rod metal thingie, insert it into the stupid hole in the wall and then fish your way around until you manage to find the stupid nut. it took us on average an hour to raise 4 shutters. 3 of which were in rooms where the only source of light came through a single window. did i mention there was no electricity in the house?

now, why, you may ask, do you have to do this every day? why can't you just leave the sutters up? well, that'd be because there's no glass in the windows. and a) it may rain, and b) there's tools and materials inside the house that we don't want walking away (you never know, right?). so that's why we spend 1 hour every day fishing for the stupid nut in the dark through a wall on top of a ladder.

so as i was saying, Mikal and i textured and Bill spent his last day in the parish exercising his patience and fixing the worst drywall taping job in the history of bad taping jobs. all in all, a very frustrating morning all around. which is why, when lunch time rolled around we all felt like a daquiri was in order. i mean, seriously, when in rome, and, don't judge until you've tried to open a storm shutter or tried to fix an entire house's worth of bad taping all by yourself.

the afternoon went by much easier. and i became the self apointed ceiling texturer. i still don't know how it happened, but my neck never hurt, not after spending that afternoon looking up. not after spending all day thursday doing the same thing. not after the same on friday. very strange, but very welcome. in fact, i was very surprised that nothing really hurt ever.

and then it was time to go back to camp and shower and get ready for the one brick celebration, writing about which i'll have to save for later.