Indoor Electricity

This is the quiet time. I've been through a lot of building, rebuilding and demolition projects. They have a rhythm, a rise and a fall,  arsis and the thesis. This is the quiet time. The demolition opened with a flourish,  cannons and bigger hammers, clouds of dust and the 1812 Overture as soundtrack, framing has more of a baroque feel, the ordering, the procession of vertical studs, holding up the roof and ceiling. J.S. Bach and well tempered framing material, the measures of cut, place, pop, pop, pop of the nail gun. One wall is 4/4,  another a waltz in three quarter time and the dance of 6/8 on another.

Now is the time of development, weaving the fibers of pipes and wires through the skeleton, the circulation, the nervous system of the building. The pace seems to slow, contemplation, either figuring out exactly what the architect or engineer really meant or deciding with the owner how we need the building to work, to breathe, to think. I hear a Brahms fugue, theme, theme, theme and variation. Look at the pipes and wires, there they are, the same figures, repeated with variations, drain and waste, supply, drain, vent, supply, circuit here, outlet, switch, outlet, light, circuit there light, light, light, switch, syncopation in 12/2.

Our staff Pick of the Day is  The Swiss Family Robinson. It predates all the secret banking, neutrality questions. It's more the amazing story of the paterfamilias whose encyclopedic knowledge and execution carries his family through shipwreck and disaster to idyllic settlement of their own new world. This is who MacGyver wishes he could be. We have a nicely illustrated edition, hard back, priced at 30% of cover price, in the young adult section. Look for it in the store come May. Stop by for a cup of coffee, a slice of pie and a good read.

Indoor Plumbing

It's a good thing. Thursday the county said our new pipes in the ground were correct. Thanks Will, we agree. Since then Steve Kaiser has put lots more pipe in. I got to help a bit with the vent through the roof, crawling in pitch black through the attic, laying on my belly drilling through asphalt, paper, and old fir so we can let the air go up when the water goes down. Indoor plumbing, is a very good thing. It beats the blackberry bushes all to heck, and back.
I hope all the folks appreciate what happens, how the water gets in and the other stuff gets out. It makes for a more pleasant house and a more pleasant store.
Tomorrow the county looks us over again and on we will go to indoor electricity, it's a good thing.

Sunny Thursday Afternoon

Just in from the work in progress. Framing the new bathroom, hall and kitchen area. Passed our first county inspection today, 'plumbing groundwork', now the hole in the concrete slab is filled with sand bedded drain pipes and new concrete slab. We tend to think of all the recent advances in technology, Moore's law and Chuck Yeager's right stuff, but  indoor plumbing deserves some love. I'll bet that the folks in Sendai and all along the Japanese coast would like to be appreciating the simple things in existence these days. If on one hand you could have functioning indoor plumbing and on the other a nuclear reactor, I wonder what the lasting choice will be?

Today's Staff Pick is a from Yale-Nota Bene, Yale University Press, published in 2004 in the Terry Lecture series, One World, the Ethics of Globalization, by Peter Singer. Singer asks a lot of questions about our modern life and the role of nations as citizens of the world. The questions need to be answered. The book is drawn from the lectures and it it retains in written form the organization and clarity that a good teacher delivers. This book is hard to put down. I wanted to push off the carpentry for a morning of coffee and political philosophy. When we open in May, you can find it in the Philosophy/Contemporary Culture section, Used, As New condition.

The news today is horrific and volatile. The weather here was spring like, blue skies and the sun on the beloved Cascades. Sometimes those are hard to reconcile. In the back of our minds the arrival time of our 'big one' looms.

Rainy Sunday afternoon

Almost back to square one. Friday was a big demo day, plenty of vintage sheetrock dust, a big trailer load and 1120 pounds in the old Dodge for delivery to Coupeville transfer station. Today was cleanup, vacuuming, capping water pipes and cutting first generation wires, we will be Gen 4, I think. The changes will make room for the new ADA restroom configuration, a new exit door, new front doors and a beautiful Vermont Casting  blue enameled gas stove in the back room. I was imagining that while pulling the straggling sheetrock nails and vacuuming.

Back at the book processing center, we whittled away at the stacks. Sort, clean, inventory, catalog and stack more boxes. Two months ago we did not even have a clue what 6,000 books looks like, now we have a very good idea.

It feels as it the prep is almost done and we are set to move forward. And that's a very good thing.