DEC-A-6
PROGRESS, AT
A PRICE, AS THE
I am suffering from a self-inflicted illness. I have a cold, and a runny nose, laryngitis voice and cough—but it is resolving rapidly, and I had had a flu shot so that I should be ready soon to get back into the same milieu that had inflicted this upon me in the first place! This is a “Treestand URI” and comes from sitting through the cold biting wind last weekend. But that will be different now, with the coming weekend. It will not be simply the cold wind—but add sleet and snow in the season’s first evidence of winter. At least the deer can hear better in snow than they can in blowing wind, so that the hunkered down non-moving status of opening day will have to end for the next (and last) chance I get at them this weekend.
I will drive out to the
WHAT IS HAPPENING IN DERWOOD,
EVEN AS I TYPE UP THESE “PROGRESS NOTES”
Two heavy dump trucks made their way up the long drive with a total of 44 tons of crush and run on Tuesday. I thought they would crack the tailgate of the truck and partially elevate the bed and spread the resultant “crush and run” gravel on the entire drive way to give special attention to the low spot down near the mailboxes. This is two Hopper Cars of heavy rock. What they did instead was to back up to the circle around the rhododendrons and near the new garage, opened the tailgates and raised the bed high, sluicing their entire load down in two very large piles of crushed rock. This means that a bobcat and grader would have to spread this top surface all along.
It turned out that there was a reason they could not simply “run” it along. The trucks are so big that the raised truck beds would catch on all the trees and both tear off limbs, but also actually stop the big diesel powered trucks. Also, the full loads of crush and run that I thought would be adequate for the whole driveway and the circle on top as well as the second load being used for the garage approach and a “pad” around it, was applied so thickly as to bury the center grass strip of the drive around the curve of the rhododendrons and stop there. So, the main drive and the circle at the front got no graveling at all, and all 44 tons had been thickly applied to the back and the curve around the side. They did take care of my request to attend to the low spot in the drive near the mailboxes where the heavy trucks had rutted the road very deeply making a mud groove there, by driving a front end loader down there with several loads of the crush and run from the piles up near the house and grading it even.
I had gone to Derwood at Glenn
Murrell’s request to sign each of the “change orders” including such things as
the code-mandated venting of each of the plumbing pipes, a new rule that went
into effect after the house was built, and there was no way of knowing until
the walls had been torn open and the pipes exposed to see how it would actually
be. The kitchen flooring will not be
hardwood but will be the special Mexican tile to match the Breakfast Room. And there will be special hand painted “back
splash” tiling like Portuguese blue on white or
The appliance catalogs for Viking appliances—stove tops and ovens and refrigerator freezers were procured, and Bosch dishwashers were put on order with a Bray and Scarf demonstration place to be the jobber who services the order to DG Liu. Also a choice of six door designs and windows in the distinctive front door was mailed for custom design selection. I balked only at one item—I could not spring for the special built in ladder-on-a-rail in the library. It is a good idea and a nice touch, but only accesses one of the walls’ shelving, at a cost that is only thirty times that of any standard ladder that can be bought in almost any one of the home improvement stores.
SECURITY SYSTEMS,
AND INSECURITY ABOUT WINDOWS
I had met with both Dale Kramer and
Glenn Murrel and had both emailed and called ADT whom I had last contacted when
I had written up the contract for security system with Jim Henry on May
31. I had said I would get in touch with
them after the construction got under way and then have them come in and wire
the place according to the plans and blueprint descriptions I had gone over
with Jim Henry on May 31. I never heard
from them again. I wondered what they
were dong about getting over to the house before the drywall went in. They finally had answered me that they had no
record of me ever getting into their system, since they purge everything after
30 days if no action is taken. I asked
about the two checks that I had written for the police permit to notify them if
any motion sensor inside the house above the “pet gate” level, or any breaking
and entering sensed at the wired windows. Or the fire department’s notification
of any smoke, heat or fire sensed at the various security spots. There is also a “wiring permit” I had paid a
separate check for to
We went over the property that Jim
had seen only as a blueprint, now standing in the ruins of the kitchen where we
had once had coffee. I made out the two
new checks to
This morning Jim called since the fellow doing the “pre-wiring” before the dry wall starts going in (their first estimate would be to come by at the end of the month—I had suggested that if they were not here by the end of the week, after a contract for this service signed on May 31, they would not need to stop by again) had seen all the development and the new addition and had noted the fixed foyer windows that were not worth alarming, and had suggested he was just gong to pick a few other windows randomly to wire to make it up to the number hat Jim had originally made up in the copy of my May 31 contract that they finally found.
Soon I got a call from the fellow Chris who was at the house as the carpenters let him in as they were installing the Great Room siding. He said that he had examined the new windows, and would be drilling the windows for the wiring. But he wanted to check with me first. Why? Since they are all new windows (Yeah, tell me about it!) And drilling the windows voids the warranty! Well that does not sound like a good idea!
But, the alternative is a wireless technology, that adds only another $150 per
window—remember, I have ALL new windows in every frame in the
house! They are
THE FINAL STAGES OF A VERY COMPLEX
YEAR-END EFFORT
After nursing a faulty Xerox machine and learning how to field strip it and pull paper mashings from all of its inner workings, and learning how to change the cartridge as well as the rather mundane routine of re-filling paper, I have whiled away many hours in getting the year-end letter-2003 off the presses, and into addressed envelope. Look for the final results of this magnum opus at a mailbox near you!
After investing a fortune in the photojournalism of the year and then the collation of a color collage pair of cover pages, I found out that the file for each page is so big and complex that it would take well over an hour to print an individual single copy on the high speed color printer, so I may have to pass on the objective of the color cover for the 140 pages of illustrated text. Who knows? This may be my last year of the chronicles that are regularly requested of me, but I am not sure who among the recipients is asking for them to humor me or to really read them! It always gives me pause at year’s end, not at the magnitude of the effort—thought that may be considerable as well—but to look over the breadth and depth of the year’s experience in so many far-flung places. I have been very fortunate and am very grateful. Perhaps a few of the potential readers might feel this gratitude at the year-end reviews they have received from the accounting of previous thematic years. But, effective next week, it should be your choice on how to feel or whether to read the whole of the 2003 chronicle A Calendar of Commencements!