All Day Practical Work

A Tuning the Air Journal

Wednesday February 10, 2010 – All Day Practical Work

A couple of pressing tasks that were not going to be able to be addressed without some preliminary legwork, and since I had an open schedule between my only two lessons of the day, the first at 8am and the other at 4pm, it seemed time to just deal with them.

I began by driving up to the local Big Corporate Hardware and Home Improvement Store to see about getting the materials necessary to build 3 more risers. We have an afternoon of practical work on Saturday, built around this task, so this was not optional. We needed eight 8-foot 2x6’s, a bunch of screws, and the most problematic item, a 4’x8’ sheet of ½ inch plywood. With a little jockeying, I was pretty sure that the boards would fit in my car, but definitely not the plywood, and I really didn’t have a plan for that going in. It turned out that The Store has a truck that it rents out for only about $20 for 75-minutes, which seemed to solve that problem. I called Igor A – we will be working at his house on Saturday – and told him that I had found a solution and would be dropping the materials off within the hour. I went to the customer service desk and waited in line, only to be informed that the truck was out for service and they did not know when it would be available. So I went ahead and bought the 2x6’s and the screws, and called Igor to tell him that I would only be delivering those. Left with no clue how we would be able to solve the plywood dilemma.

Dropped the lumber off and proceeded down into Ballard to lease the space in the self-storage facility we had settled on. On Monday I had visited and priced out several, and presented the Board with my recommendation. Since the full Board was present at the “meeting” portion of Monday evening’s rehearsal, we had approved the plan on the spot. Getting the space rented, with the necessary paperwork, was pretty painless, but took the better part of an hour, and so by the time it was accomplished it was well past lunch time, and I was starving. As I pulled away I noticed a local, large but clearly not corporate or part of a chain, lumber store across the street. Made a mental note.

Got home and had some lunch. I was a little tired, and kind of felt as though I had done my duty for the day, and would practice or take care of some work on the History Project. But I was nagged by the fact that there was only one key for the padlock I had used for the storage space, and headed up to the hardware store to get it duplicated. That done, the next logical step was to go back to the storage space and test the keys to verify that they worked. So, back to Ballard. The security system let me in the building – success. The keys worked – success. As I stepped out, I saw the lumber store and it was clear that I needed to go make some inquiries. A day of following my feet.

They had what I needed, and only a couple of bucks more expensive than at the Big Store. More importantly, they could deliver it at no charge. Score. Note to Self: always shop local FIRST. There were a number of reasonable delivery windows before Saturday, but my inner voice was shouting, “get it over and done with now”, so I agreed to this afternoon at 4pm. Of course, Igor was not going to be home at that time and I had a lesson scheduled for 4pm, but that was my problem to solve. Called Travis, who had earlier indicated he would be available to help if necessary. Unfortunately, he had been overrun by deadlines and was the only person left in his office, so his availability had evaporated. I was about to call my student to cancel or push the time back, when I remembered that Christina was working from home while her car was in for service. Called her. Her car was ready, but in order to pull off the timing I would need to give her a lift to the dealership. I picked her up, drove her to Lake City, dropped her off, and made it home in plenty of time to meet my student.

After the lesson I called her and confirmed that the delivery had been made. She had sent me an email complete with phone-photo proof, but I hadn’t opened up my computer yet. With that, I sent out a confirmation email to the team with the week’s schedule including the riser construction work on Saturday, and declared my day done. Turned off the computer. Silenced the phone. Did a bit of personal work around the apartment. Then grabbed the Beatles Chronicles and headed down to the pub for some recreational reading, a beer and dinner.