Enough is enough.

It seems that,  every single time there’s a little bit of rain or wind,  the squirrels in the neighbourhood decide to hang out at the front of the house and chew on the cedar. 

If they could do it quietly,  I probably wouldn’t even notice.  Or maybe if the cedar were toxic?  I could live with that.  Turns out the dust is toxic to me,  but chewing on it doesn’t bother the squirrels.  Wonderful.

And yes,  I suppose having all that cedar on the front of the house is a dumb idea,  but I’m pretty much stuck  with it.  The Contractor Dude who came to have a look-see a few weeks back was going to give the place “curb appeal”,  which would have meant removing the cedar along with a lot of the stone work (say what?) and basically taking heaps of our money to accomplish this miracle.  Not sure what we would have ended up with,  but the fact is, the house is NOT like any other house in the neighbourhood,  and that’s just the way it is.  Not looking to sell,  so “curb appeal” is a somewhat fleeting characteristic I would say. 

Anyhoodle,  I had been toying with the idea of simply replacing the tongue and groove boards that I had removed many…many years ago,  since that would at least make it more difficult to hang out up there.

Today was the day.

 

By eleven I had the new boards in.   The curious thing is,  they were just there leaning up against the inside wall,  waiting all these years for me to do something.  I had completely forgot.   They already had finish on them.  I just had to whack ‘em in.  Well,  I used an air nailer,  but you know what I mean.

I did have to replace some of the wood where the little buggers had been chewing,  so as to have something to nail to.  And now of course it looks like I really should just continue on and replace the rest of them? 

Well  theoretically,  that would be a wonderful thing to do,  except there’s more to it than that.  All the timbers either need to be sanded and refinished,  or in the case of the rafters up at the peak,  replaced.  The purlins are in good shape,  they just need to be cleaned up and refinished.   The girt that you see running along the bottom that’s supported by the lower purlins is a bit rough,  and probably could do with replacement.  

These are not things I wish to do. 

Not only that,  but I’d just as soon clad it all in some sort of material that *looks* like cedar,  but doesn’t need to be looked after.  

Muggins here ain’t getting any younger.

 

 

**********

 

The Formula One race from yesterday was a bit of a snooze fest.  And that’s not just my point of view,  this also came from our host,  who is an avid F1 fan. 

I think what impressed me the most was all the sports channels he had.  Holy moly. 

And I just noticed,  the colour on that wall is really close to the colour I painted in this office.   Huh.

Well,  it’s probably “different”,  but I just don’t have the colour acuity to really notice.  Looks “red” to me,  but there’s probably some fancy name.  They do that.

 

Anyway, everything from NFL to Nascar to Rugby to golf.  You name it,  and we could watch it.   There was probably some table tennis or caber tossing on there somewhere,  but we didn’t go looking for it.

Of course, and this started to get a bit annoying after a while,  there were heaps of commercials.  Heaps. 

This is probably why we find it much less stressful to simply watch media files and avoid commercials altogether.  After a while it gets ridiculous.   Well,  I mean there are bathroom breaks and such,  but you’re gonna have to sit through a few of them eventually.

Of course,  all that snacking throughout the afternoon,  and then a generous Sunday dinner meant that I was up just about every two hours making trips to the loo.

I’ll not offer any explanation,  except to say that cashews and peanuts and pizza does tend to *gasify* the situation?   I know “gasify” isn’t a real word,  but I think you get it. 

Gah.

Oh, not to mention beer.  So let’s not mention it.

 

I may need to sort of “coast” for a few days this week?   That should do it.  Yup.

 

Watch that calorie intake.

 

Thanks for stopping in.

 

.