Time To Shed-dle Down

I’ve been in a bit of a weird sleep cycle as of late – going to bed at 10:00 pm, waking up at 5:00 am, that sort of thing.  I’m not all that happy about it, but it’s a byproduct of trying to implement some reparatory behavioral changes, so I accept it, and try to focus on the sunrise (the fact that I get to see the sunrise, not literally focus on the sunrise, as that would lead to permanent vision damage, and if I’m going to do that, I’m at least going to wait until June 5th, when I can see Venus transiting ole sol.

So what to do, what to do, with all of that time on a weekend morning, when spring appears to have sprung, and the bars don’t open until 10?  Why, home projects, of course!  (If you’re expecting an update on the fence project that I wrote about a week or so ago, then you just don’t really know me.  This is a brand new endeavor.)

Actually, that’s not quite true … there’s a bit of a relationship between the fence project and the new one.  To build the fence, I recognized, I need to rid the garage/shop of its winter weight, comprising all of the junk that was strewn willy-nilly over the cold months when I was too much of a pansy-ass to put anything away.  So over the course of several evenings, I did just that, and it was during this process that it occurred to me:

I need a shed.

All of the junk cluttering up my workspace?  Stuff I use twice a year (in the case of my golf clubs, “use”) or things that I should, but for one reason or another, have yet to, get rid of.  Spare bike parts and tools, the lawn mower, my table-top fusion experiment … shit be blockin’ my fence-buildin’ strategy, yo.  A shed it would be!

And so came Saturday morn, and I drove my chipper little early-bird self up to Home Depot to get materials for the base and the floor.  Wood, nails, and cinderblocks sounds like a fairly straightforward list, but sometimes complications arise, doncha know.  I did make the purchase proper in a relatively incident-free manner; it wasn’t until I reached the parking lot that things began to go awry.

My first issue was with how to transport things.  Being the only person in the state of Idaho without a pick-em-up truck, hauling large items can pose something of a problem.  I do have roof racks on the Zuke Of Earle, but space is a bit limited due to several attachments (none of which I really use, of course).  Eventually, though, I got all of the boards to fit up top, and reached for the tie down rope in the back …

… and spent the next 20 minutes untangling the rat's nest that it had become.  There were people giggling and smirking as I wrapped myself tighter and tighter, and one nice young man even came over and gave me a cinch-strap to use instead (seriously).  “Keep it, dude … just … just … oh, wow” he said, shaking his head, as he walked away.

After I finally got everything road-ready, I was getting ready to go, and a couple of women walked by.  I heard one say “Pathetic.  In this whole row of cars, there’s only one Made In America.”  So of course, the next 30 minutes were spent arguing with them about how if the U.S. wouldn’t have put out such crap 25 years ago, maybe they wouldn’t have ruined their image, and besides, cars are really a global product now, and they’re all “AMERICA LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT!11!1!!” and I’m all “AMERICA!  I DO LOVE IT AND I’LL TRY TO CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER BECAUSE I HAVE THE MENTAL CAPACITY TO REALIZE THAT MY OPTIONS RE: AMERICA ARE NOT OF THE BINARY FORM!”  and I think they took that as more of an insult than I intended, because they called me a socialist and stormed off.

I’ll have more on what has since sidetracked the shed project (it involves electricity!  And sprinklers!  And neighbors!), but I did at least get the floor of it put together ... right after I took back all the 1” x 8” boards that I had bought and purchased the 1” x 6” boards that I needed.

I am SO not a morning person.