interim carpentry

[cimorene]

Still no update from the plumber. I guess he hasn't got his results back. These are supposed to take 1-3 working days in Finland, so I presume today is the third if he was tested on the weekend. Perhaps we'll hear something tomorrow. Tenant's stuff is all here as of yesterday, apparently, with a fair bit in the garage. She's still with her local best friend, the excellent chef (younger sister of MIL's bff, which we both missed until she told us and we were like OOOOH YOU KNOW THEY ACTUALLY LOOK ALIKE!!!).

A huge storm blew one of the gutters off the porch roof that overlooks our main door and our large tarp also disappeared, Wax thinks stolen or maybe accidentally taken to the dump by the contractor (we aren't sure quite when it disappeared, but I thought after then) since it was covering a bunch of construction debris that he took to the dump for us some weeks ago.

The thing is, we ordered a BUNCH of lumber to build a large wardrobe/closet upstairs and to board up the big doorway between the main house and addition (once we have water in the latter case obvs), and it was delivered today, and the actual boards are too long to really take inside, so without a tarp big enough to protect them we have to cut all of them now-ish, before it rains or whatever, so we can bring them inside.

We don't have a table saw or anything like that, just a circle saw, and we haven't used it very much so we don't exactly relish this - plus we don't have a good worktable or sawhorses to use while using the circle saw. We do need sawhorses, but as we don't have anywhere inside to keep them, we haven't got around to buying them yet. We'll need to jury rig something, AGAIN.

I prefer being distracted most of the time right now, as the outcome of the battle with fascism/nazism/mafia state now coming to a crisis with the US election most likely will remain uncertain for some time. I'll have to check [Twitter] for updates repeatedly, but I would rather limit it to short informational doses. So in that respect, having a ton of circle sawing to do without adequate equipment is actually... kinda good? I guess? But that's not enough to make me really relish the prospect. The circle saw is big and powerful. When it's in your hands, you can feel that it could run away and wreak destruction at any point, rather like a horse that's, you know, made of diamond-edge shark teeth... you know what, I'm stopping with that metaphor now, but the point is, circle saws are dangerous power tools that it's important to use correctly and I am reasonably cautious of it.

Comments

[yvannairie]

I need to learn to weld, so that's p much all I'm doing day-in-day-out and it's a great distraction from the feeling of "no matter how the US election turns out, we're all probably screwed". Making Things is definitely the best remedy against despair.

[cimorene]

Yeah, I mean... the European Parliament isn't doing anything really useful about the climate change that's been like giant red lights flashing EMERGENCY for a couple of years now and I'm like, where did we find all these politicians capable of ignoring the equivalent of blaring emergency sirens and concentrate exclusively on other stuff?! And they haven't been taken over by organized crime or nazis, so... not doing great.

At this point for climate change we're like "Hm, well, there are horses around here and if sea level rises, our house is on a hill." :|

[yvannairie]

Honestly the Article 13 debacle was the thing that made me go "oh, so the EU legit doesn't care about anything but economic growth anymore. Got it. See you when we gotta start demonstrating en masse" and have been sticking to local politics and getting an education and building up useful skills. Keeps me busy and stops me wondering about shit I cannot affect, no matter how loud I am about it.

[cimorene]

I mean Germany currently has the presidency and in spite of overwhelming EU citizen support for censuring Hungary and Poland's governments for violating democracy guidelines, they're not ONLY doing nothing about it, Merkel is making deliberate signs of support for Orbán.

Which again, yeah, you're right, I wouldn't have been surprised if I'd concluded they care only for money at that time.

Actually we had a section in my advanced Finnish language course about how the EU runs, governmentally speaking, and I won't say I completely understood it all, but after all the reading we did I'm surprised it ever gets anything done.

[yvannairie]

The EU is a commercial entity that should have pulled up its pants and become a proper political body literally decades ago, but found that making money for big companies and making gestures towards investing in "culture" to keep people from recognising its naked greed worked out better for them, tbh. I've learned the hard way in the past five years that a lot of international cooperation is profit-motivated to the exclusion of actually working together to make things better, even ignoring when it's just Colonialism 2.0