My fancy speech

I made a fancy speech at the fancy banquet at the end of the conference that I wrote about yesterday. I was a nervous wreck.

I had been cautioned (threatened) by the staff to not say anything inappropriate, and while I do have a natural tendency for such things, and while I do love to tell scandalous stories, I also understood that this banquet was about the organization and the work it does, not how funny and/or outrageous Dawn can be. I have ample opportunity to prove that every day. This was not the time or place. Still waiting on pictures. I'll post them when I get them.

I dressed up pretty nice, sat with the big shots and managed not to get soup on my tie during dinner. At our table were me and four friends, including L, two tradeswomen (besides me) and a stock broker; and the Commissioner of the State Housing Authority, the Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Labor, and a big shot administrator in the Department of Transportation. The Commissioner also happens to be the woman who founded Women Unlimited, my own personal hero and sometimes mentor for lo, these 20-some years, Dale McCormick. Dale also used to be the Maine State Treasurer, so she and my stock broker friend chatted on about bonds and rates and the financial news of the day. I was glad for that. My stock of stories seems to rely heavily on work screw-ups and things that are not appropriate dinner conversation. At least not at banquets, anyway.

I was introduced by the Deputy Commissioner, Jane Gilbert, who is a remarkable woman. It was humbling to be sure. I had a few notes that I scribbled on a hotel note pad. I set them on the podium, glanced at them once and pretty much ignored them for a while. I don't remember what-all I said exactly, but I am going to offer the best reproduction of it here. It might not be quite right, but it is as close as I can get.

When Lib first asked me to speak at this thing, she told me she needed a biographical blurb to put in the program. Somewhat daunted by this idea, I came up with something along the lines of "Dawn is a tragic example of what happens when an ADHD child grows up. Unable to sit still at a desk job and with an attitude so bad that it does not allow her to work for anyone else, Dawn is a self-employed contractor. And some days that's iffy."

{They all laughed.}

The truth is, though, that I have some real advantages in my life. I do have the benefit of a college education. But it has not been all that I had hoped it would be.

I grew up in a family that valued white collar work. I was taught early to get an education and get a job that was clean and that wouldn't break my back. My father was a machinist. He used to come home dirty and sore, smelling of metal and oil and smoke and with sharp little shards of metal in the bottoms of his boots. My mom used to complain about the metal from his boots getting in the carpet.

"Get an education, kid," he used to tell me. "You never see bankers out of work."

The stock broker at my table snickered, as did several others.

But I think my father was pretty typical of his time. Do better than me. Don't work this hard to make a living. Don't pay for your livelihood with your health.

So I went to college right out of high school. I majored in Education because it seemed like the thing to do. And about halfway through my sophomore year, around the same time I sobered up, I came to the awful realization that I do not like children. At around the same time, the university came to the decision that both it and I might benefit from a year's break from each other, and we parted ways for a while.

I came back to college after a year and a half, bounced around from major to major until somebody decided that I could write, and I ended up graduating and going into newspaper work. It seemed like a good fit, but eventually the flaws in that plan began to show through. See, reporters are supposed to be unbiased, and I am sure it will come as a shock to some here, but I've got some opinions. And reporters are supposed to not voice their opinions, and well, Dawn has never been really good at keeping her mouth shut. So I ended up getting run out of the newspaper business.

Unemployed, I did what I have always done: I fixed stuff for people. I painted and wallpapered and made repairs for folks who needed them. It wasn't big money, but it was something. Around that time a friend mentioned to me that Women Unlimited was going to be offering a 15-week class in something - bridge building, she thought maybe.

Bridge building? I didn't like to get up on the third step of a stepladder and she thought I should take bridge building? Hmph. Well, there was road construction as well, and something about a class B truck license, and that sounded cool, so I made a call and got an interview.

I got accepted to the class and we learned all kinds of things - we got our truck licenses, we learned to read blueprints and how to do construction math - cause you know there are a lot of fractions in construction, quarters and eighths and sixteenths and stuff. Well, eighths, anyway. Sixteenths are kinda fussy.

{"Sixteenths!" cried Dale from our table. She's a fussy carpenter. I'm more of a framer.}

And we learned welding and CPR and First Aid and we did a ropes course and I went up high and was OK with that. And we learned welding. Nancy Bailey of Nancy's Welding taught us how to weld, and I loved it. I came home dirty and smoky and with little shards of metal in the soles of my boots.

And my girlfriend complained about the carpet.

And I told her too bad. I love this stuff.

We got all kinds of certifications and we got some confidence in our own abilities. When I left that class, I felt that I could do whatever was necessary on a job. I knew I could learn what I needed to and that I could ask for help and that would be OK.

I went to work that spring on what is now the Donald V. Carter Memorial Bridge between Waterville and Winslow and later I went down to Portland to work on the Casco Bay Bridge there. Now remember, I had been afraid of heights before Women Unlimited. And here I was, up on the bridge, and I remember the day when I realized that the white thing that I saw blowing by below me was not a piece of paper but a seagull flying. I was up HIGH! And it was grand.

I got to that job around the time they were finishing up the big piers in the middle (they're called bascule piers) where the works of the drawbridge are housed. They had been poured and partially finished, but needed to be completed. Bolted to the outside of the piers were these enormous brackets, and on these brackets were beams and on the beams was plywood, making an 8-foot wide platform skirting most of the pier. On that platform was mounted a handrail, kick-plate and mid rail, and four or five or six levels of blue pipe staging. It allowed the crews to work on the outside of the concrete structure as it was being constructed.

Well, when I got to the job, it was time for that stuff to be taken down. We disassembled the pipe staging and handed it in through the windows. Then we took down the hand rail and fed those pieces in through the window. (All of this material was then carried down and off the bridge via either crane or barge to trucks where it was taken back to either the company's warehouse or disposal facility.) Then we started to peel up the plywood, working our way back toward the window, standing very carefully on the beams. There was a lot of air under those beams and brackets, and not much else. We were probably 60 or 70 feet above the water at this point. Maybe more.

So we handed in the beams and the brackets, unbolting them as we went, working our way backwards, until there was one bracket left bolted to the outside of the bridge. And I was standing on it. There was nothing but air all around and the flat face of the concrete bridge and the hole of a window through which I had to go, taking the bracket with me. We ended up with me being held by my belt and lowered head first out the window to loosen the last bolt on the last bracket. It dropped and swung at the end of the rope we had tied to it, my buddies hauled me back inside and we pulled in the bracket. The side of the bridge pier was bare - nothing on it from the operator's house where the road would be all the way to the water line.

And six months earlier, I couldn't get up on the third step of a stepladder. Women Unlimited is remarkable. It gave me that experience.

I left that company to become the first woman apprentice in the Sheet Metal Worker's International Association Local 17, where I worked hard and learned a lot.

But I have to be honest here. I did not finish my apprenticeship. I left after my third year. I decided that maybe I could go back to newspapering work. And so I tried. For a lot of years, I tried.

I liken it to buying a pair of shoes that don't quite fit. Have you ever done that? You see these shoes, and they're not quite comfortable, but they are the coolest things you've ever seen and you WANT them to fit so badly that you try and try and try, and no matter what, even years later, they still give you blisters and hurt whenever you wear them. They never break in properly.

That's what white-collar desk work is for me. I really wanted to do it. I really wanted to enjoy it. I really wanted to be good at it. I was taught early on that THAT was my goal. Professional work was the ideal I was supposed to pursue. Only it never fit. I always got blisters.

It took me a long time to figure that out, too. But now I am self-employed, working as a contractor, doing jobs that are sometimes more than I can handle. But that's OK.

I am confident today, in large part because of my experience with Women Unlimited. In fact, sometimes it works against me. When people ask me what my greatest strength is, I say "my confidence." When they ask what is my greatest weakness, I say "my confidence."

It is true. I bite off more than I can chew, on a fairly regular basis. The lucky part is that I have to good sense to hire people who are smarter than me and have them teach me how to do the things I do not know. I am working on a project now where I tore down a greenhouse and am building an 8' by 16' sun room with custom windows and a hardwood floor. I never put in a window before this. I've never laid a floor. But I know people who do know how to do those things. And they help me and I learn.

I learn something on every job I do today. Each one is different and each one teaches me something new.

***
I think I wrapped it up in some fashion at about this point. I have no idea how I concluded, other than I thanked the staff of Women Unlimited for being so amazing and wonderful, and I thanked Dale for the gift of Women Unlimited, and I thanked the tradeswomen who attended the conference and who learned and shared their experiences with me. I remember that I thanked them for inspiring me every day.

And then I sat down. It seemed done.

Again, if you would like to support Women Unlimited, please do so by contacting them HERE. They rock. Please help them to continue to do so.

I don't do a lot of preaching or encouraging (telling) people to do this or think that or support this other thing, at least not in this space. This is my one shot. I'd really like it if you did. It is probably one of the only things I will ever ask of you. Thanks.

Of tiles and opportunity

So we are home from the conference. We are exhausted.

My session on laying ceramic tile went extremely well. I had approximately 9 people there - and since I had anticipated a crowd of maybe four or five, it was a bit of a free-for-all. A couple of the people had laid tile before and they were able to help the others who had never had the pleasure. My dear friend Lis showed up and helped me run and fetch and clean tools and keep everybody on track and up to speed. I would truly have been lost without her. The fine folks at Women Unlimited poked in occasionally to see how things were going and someone took a ton of pictures. I'll try to post them here as soon as I get my mitts on them. They're all a little fried today. I'm not going to push.

So we took eight or nine women, some of whom had never so much as picked up a tile before, and we got 'em messy, covered in glue and grout, and no longer afraid of tiles. First we had them spread the mastic (big word for tile glue) on some boards, then they laid out the tiles, using the spacers. Once the tiles were stuck down, we put aside those boards and got out the boards with tile already on them. They selected the color grout they wanted and we mixed it up with water. I got the measurements wrong on the water, so we had some fudging to do, but we got it worked out. Then we had to let the grout sit for 10 minutes while the Portland cement in it did its chemistry thing. During that time, I answered questions as best I could, admitting it when I simply didn't know. I explained how important it is for the surface you're sticking the tiles to to be extremely solid so that there were no shifts and tweaks with the seasons - those will crack the grout and allow water to leak in and rot wood, etc. I talked about the different kinds of tiles and how to cut and chip with the little plier nippers to make cutouts for pipes and faucets and such.

When our grout was cured enough, we mixed it again and then spread it on the pre-laid tiles. Everyone had different tiles to work with, so everyone had a little different experience, but I noticed that they all seemed to be checking out how the others were doing and commenting on the differences and similarities. (I made sure we all wore gloves to save our fingers from the chemicals in the grout.) Then we wiped down the tile boards, exposing the finished product. Everyone seemed very pleased with how their efforts came out, and then - bless them all - they helped clean up so the next session could come in and learn in a room that was not trashed. We had it cleaned up sufficiently and on time and they left exhilarated at their new-found skills. I left thrilled that we would not be billed for a carpet.

One of the most poignant encounters of the day involved a woman who helped me out when I was setting up the session. She worked in housekeeping, cleaning rooms and doing traditional housekeeping stuff at the hotel. She spoke with some of the Women Unlimited folks upstairs, she told me, and asked for a job bank application. She helped me change the room around to accommodate a messy project, found me some extra trash bags, and even got me access to an empty hotel room across the hall so we could fill our rinse pails in the tub there and dump the dirty water into the toilet. She hustled around to help me. I never got her name, but she was a lifesaver that morning.

I could tell she was interested in what we were doing by her eyes. They were curious and almost jealous - there was wonder and yearning in them. I got the feeling that she was not really thrilled with her lot, cleaning rooms in a hotel in Augusta, Maine. Looking around her, she saw lots of women doing lots of things that were more interesting and pretty much guaranteed to pay more than whatever it is that she's making now. The wheels were nearly visible, turning in her head as we went about the conference and she went about her housekeeping tasks.

I learned later from the Women Unlimited staff that she returned after her break with the job bank application all filled out. She wants to be a part of what she saw that weekend. She wants to do something more meaningful than scrubbing hotel toilets and making beds. She wants to make better money, she wants to have the skills and confidence she saw Saturday at that conference.

It is my hope that we see her again at next year's conference, wearing boots and Carharts and talking about her first season working on a road crew or with a flagging operation or operating some kind of equipment. From the look I saw in her eye, I think it is a real possibility.

God, but that is why I love Women Unlimited. Women Unlimited changes lives. Period. It is what they do. It gives hope and opportunity in places where no one else has offered such things.

If you are interested in helping them continue to perform miracles, get in touch with them HERE and make a donation. If you're not long on money, that's OK. Little donations are good too, as are materials. They always have a list of stuff they need. Hand tools, lumber, odds & ends. Check them out. Give if you can. Tell 'em Dawn sent you. They'll know you're OK.

And yeah, I made a fancy speech on Saturday night at the banquet. I'll write about that tomorrow. I am still processing it all. And stay tuned for pictures, too.

Building bridges

After yesterday's post on hate, it seems both wise and healthy to turn my attention in another direction. But honestly, I'm really a bit wiped out this evening.

See, I went up to the big city of Bangor today to help out at another of those amazingly cool Totally Trades days for high school girls. I've had the flubug or something for about two weeks now and still feel pretty crappy, but I figured this thing wouldn't actually require me to work, so I'd be OK. Well, I overslept and had to grab a bite on the way there. Sustained by coffee and a chicken sandwich, I made it there and volunteered to help out with the bridge-building workshop taught by my dear friend and hero, Lib Jamison. I can use her whole name here because she was on TV talking about the program today. That and she's the grand poo-bah (executive director) of Women Unlimited, that amazingly cool non-profit organization I talk about every now and again.

So back to the bridge-building workshop. First, there's a movie. I like that. I don't like movies as a rule, but this one is so incredibly cool. It is a montage of footage taken by old super 8 home movie cameras of the brief, tragic story of November 7, 1940 in Tacoma, Washington, when the beautiful new bridge there broke apart in a gale and fell into the river. The footage is very dramatic and is narrated by Lib, who points out the different bits of oddball stuff on the screen. "See that ball thing right there? That's a piece of concrete rolling around." It was the size of a bowling ball. Holy crap.


Here is a YouTube version of the video. It is narrated by a guy who sounds like an engineering professor. He's not nearly as fun as Lib, but he gets the story right, even if he is achingly dull.

To tell the story in a nutshell: Tacoma Narrows is a windy spot across a fast-moving river and when the engineers drew up the plans for a bridge with 25-foot open trusses, everyone went "ooh" and "ahh" until those same engineers said it would cost $11 Million dollars. In 1938, with the Great Depression still looming large in everyone's memory, the local community howled in protest and demanded a lower price, so a $4 Million bridge was proposed and approved.

Only the new version had huge steel I-beam girders for support and was held up by two large piers and a cable suspension system. There is one remaining example of this kind of design left in America, and it is just a few miles from here where it connects the coastal villages of Stonington and Deer Isle, Maine. It has gizmos mounted over the girders to divert the wind, though. Here is a link to pictures of it. The guy who took the pictures is David Denenberg, and his website has a very cool collection of photographs of suspension bridges of all kinds and styles. Engineering geeks are encouraged to poke around there. Very cool stuff.

So anyway, back in the Narrows of Tacoma, Washington, where the wind comes-a-howlin' through, as wind is wont to do in places called "narrows" those girders acted very much like sails. The wind hit them and caused the bridge to sway. In a most dramatic fashion, I might add.

Now the deck of the bridge (the part you drive on, not the wires and support stuff around it) is made of concrete over which is a layer of asphalt. Concrete bridges require expansion joints so they don't just crack and crumble at the first major temperature change, so there were several expansion joints along the half-mile span of the bridge. Well, when the wind kicked up, it caught in those girders, making everything sway and flex a bit, and with all those joints offering further flexibility, the thing started thrashing around like a giant pool noodle held up by strings. The video is very dramatic. So anyway, the thing crashes into the river and it takes the engineers another 10 years to build a new bridge at that spot. All of the old bits were so bent and twisted and broken that they were useless.

So we get to watch the video, then each team of girls is issued a glue gun, three sticks of glue and a plastic bag with four ounces of Popsicle sticks (approximately 75) and instructions to build a bridge. Or more precisely, build a truss that will withstand pressure when squished from above. I built the squisher used to test them when they're done, but that is another story for another day.

I was astounded at how intense the concentration is for the girls, and how quickly the sticks and glue seem to get used up. There were a couple of burned fingers from the hot glue, but nothing requiring a bandage. In the second session, I sat in with a girl when the class came up short on partners and we had a great time building a truss bridge thingamacallit. Turned out she'd been in a building trades program the year before and was presently taking automotive (mechanics) repair. She understood how support things worked and how to build what we needed. Our bridge withstood 178 pounds of pressure before the STICKS BROKE. The glued connections did not fail - the materials themselves failed. I call that pretty freakin' great for a handful of sticks and some glue. She designed the criss-cross bits and figured out how to hold it all together and I cut up some of the sticks and held the pieces together until the glue cooled.

It wasn't a barn-burner of a day in the traditional sense. No fireworks. No political mayhem. No shouted arguments. Just helping out some friends and meeting some very cool young people. I guess after the past week, with all its culmination of a year of nastiness and contentious debate and name-calling and attacks, a day spent building bridges is probably just what I needed.

Wonder and discovery

So I took a couple of days to drive up the coast and visit an old colleague and then venture further on to help out some friends at a thing called Totally Trades.

The colleague and friend was Sharon, and we used to work at competing newspapers many years ago (dear god - was it 15 years really? Urk - yes it was!) in Pittsfield. She's preparing to retire to Machias if the work details can ever get figured out, and she has a little house there where she retreats on vacation. She visits her daughter and new grand-baby and paints and creates beautiful things in her studio. I was very impressed with her talent - I had only known of her work as a writer, and journalism is pretty cut-and-dried. There is not a lot of creativity involved in most stories. But her artwork was stunning. Brilliant colors, bold lines, delicate squiggles. Any effort I have ever made to produce such things always look like something a third-grader made, so I am duly impressed. We had a good visit, I got to hold the grandbaby a little bit, and I crept out in the morning dark to head to Calais for the tradeswomen's thing.

Totally Trades is a one-day conference for girls in junior high and high school to expose them to possible careers that they might not otherwise consider. Local agencies and training schools and such participate, and tradeswomen with all kinds of skills come and talk about what it is they do and help the girls do some hands-on stuff just to try for fun.

I helped out with the Women Unlimited group, which offered a couple of sessions in which the girls got to build (and take home) wooden tool boxes. The pieces are all pre-cut and bundled so that the girls can build them within the hour or so class time allotted. There is a lot of measuring and marking, followed by drilling of pilot holes and eventually, assembling the pieces into a tool box that is neat and clean in its simplicity, utterly useful, and it looks like lots of tool boxes that kids have seen. My job was mostly to make sure they were measuring eighths of an inch and not sixteenths and that they had the edge of the wood lined up with the zero on the ruler and not the end of the ruler. And I served as materials vice, holding down the ends of things so they could use both hands on the drill.

I am not one to get all touchy-feely and misted up over much, but I have to say, it was nearly magical to watch these girls go, in the course of an hour, from being afraid of measuring eighths and terrified of a cordless drill to feeling confident enough to gently countersink the screws to make a smooth surface. They learned how to change out the bit from a drill bit to a screw bit and how to drill holes and put in the screws. Several of them quickly picked up how to tell by feel when the boards were where they were supposed to be and they got fussy about making sure it was right. There was no "close enough" for these kids - they wanted the tool box to be perfect. They took pride in what they were doing.

In the second session, there were an odd number of girls, so one of the teachers from their school was drafted to participate (things work better in partners). As we laid out the pieces and got ready to begin, she said nervously to me "I've never built anything in my life."

She'd never held a cordless drill, never mind used one to drill holes in a board.

Not only was she a marvelous example for her young partner, showing that adults could learn things too, and could be willing to admit that they did not know a thing, but her emotions were plain on her face as she went from terrified to cautiously confident with the power tools. She and her young charge learned a new skill together. The kid actually learned a little faster than the adult, and both were pretty impressed at the end.

I was humbled and awed by it all.

So often I teach myself things on the job. In fact, I expect to learn things on each job I do. Sometimes I learn about hardwood floors, sometimes I learn about drip edge and flashing, sometimes I learn about window sills or copper pipes. I never think much of it, I suppose, because I have (perhaps misplaced) faith in my problem-solving skills. I know that I can learn things, and I know that if I can figure a thing out, I can master it. I don't remember not feeling this way, but I suppose I must have at some point. I don't know, though. I remember when my father was building our house, how he rolled out the plans and stood over them until he figured how what they meant. He then set about figuring out how to build from wood what was drawn on the page and how to put it all together so it would keep his family warm and dry that winter. Of all the unhealthy things that man modeled for me in my childhood, this is perhaps the one healthy, positive thing he showed me. Don't be afraid to learn new things and don't be afraid to work hard doing it. So anyway, I have confidence - sometimes when I have no business having confidence - but I've got it.

But these girls hadn't got it yet when we met yesterday. Many of them were farm girls, and knew lots of things, like how to drive a tractor and crazy stuff like that, but they lacked faith in their own abilities. They didn't really comprehend or value their own skills and talents. In the course of an hour, they seemed to gain momentum; they seemed to gain confidence, both in their skills and in their ability to learn new ones.

I also have a new respect for the women who teach the toolbox class. I was merely a volunteer who happened to have an interesting profession. These women are amazing. One has an MBA. She does the financial stuff at Women Unlimited. Another does office-type things that are beyond my comprehension. Neither is a tradeswoman, but both are confident in their ability to handle these tools and to teach these skills in a way that a professional tradeswoman cannot. They can relate to the young women so much better than I. They don't build things for a living, but they are capable in this regard, and that shines through and the girls see it. It is real. It cannot be faked. And it was an ingenious idea for whomever came up with it. Get the non-tradeswomen to teach this class.

Because often tradeswomen forget what it is to be scared of the drill. We forget what it is to struggle to add fractions. We forget that people have to be told to hold the drill straight up and down and to keep it running when you pull the bit back out. That stuff's automatic for us, but foreign and scary to a novice.

At the end of the class, each student wrote her name inside the tool box she made. I overheard a conversation of plans for the girls to sign each other's tool boxes to serve as mementos of the day. It made me smile.

I hear there is another Totally Trades day in Bangor next month. We'll see what my schedule looks like, but I'd love to volunteer at that one as well. I have a new appreciation of what the Women Unlimited staff do and of the courage of these young girls to step up and learn something that the whole world so often tells them is none of their business. I need to be reminded of those kinds of everyday acts of bravery.

Cool Junk

It's junk week in my town. Next week is April vacation for the local school system, and the week in which the town hires a couple of burly young high school fellows to ride around with the trash pick-up guys and pick up piles of brush and old, dead washing machines from people's yards. In some yards it is difficult to tell exactly which hulks of metal are junk and which are art or being saved for some later purpose, so the town asks that unwanted stuff be dragged to the edge of the road for easy identification and removal.

Tradition in this town means that for the week prior to junk week (each village and neighborhood has scheduled pick-up days) everybody drags their stuff to the curb in the hopes that some entreprenurial soul will find value in it and cart it off to drag to curb in front of their house next year. In an odd kind of one-up-manship, we won the local contest for baddest thing hauled to the curb. We threw out a cast iron furnace.

Yesterday, we hauled the old, dead furnace out of our basement to make room for workspace and tool storage. It weighed a ton. It's about the size and shape of a rectangular dorm refrigerator - the ones that will hold two or three cases of beer, not the little cubes that only hold one case - and it is made out of big pieces of cast iron bolted (and now, rusted) together. I got a nice piece of steel cable from Marden's and a come-along, and I wrapped the furnace sixteen ways with the cable, secured it with a shackle, and hitched it to the come-along, which was hooked to the bumper of my van. Laura cranked the come-along while I guided the furnace up the bulkhead steps. Metal creaked, concrete blocks crumbled. The neighbor came to watch and give advice. The neighbor went away and came back with another neighbor and a length of pipe, and they both tried to help.

Boards and pipes were pressed under the furnace and lifted and rolled and shrugged and broken. The come-along eventually ceased to go click click, and I got fed up. I told everyone to stand clear and I drove 10 feet in the van. The furnace made it up over those last two steps with a sickening crunch of metal and concrete, but at least it was in the yard. We bent the hand cart/four-wheel dolly getting it to the curb, but now it is done. I'd love to see someone try to make off with that thing. Heh.

So with all this wide open space in our basement (ha!), Laura and I went junk hunting today. We got rid of one furnace and returned with four lengths of thin metal pipe (painted white - from a hammock frame) two plastic pails, a plastic mobile tool caddy, a gasoline powered ice auger, a plant hanger bracket, and a frame for a full sized bed (I wanted the angle iron for welding). We had traveled less than a half-mile. We unloaded in the yard and went out again. The second time we had to travel further and came home with a nice length of 1-inch steel pipe, five good pieces of 4 by 4 timbers, a big piece of sheet metal (I may go back for the other piece that was there), and a stackable shelf of red cube-looking things that say Canada Dry. It will fit nicely in a corner of my shop that presently is dead space. The timbers will become shelf supports, the sheet metal will go on the back of the shelves to protect the stuff on the shelves from the water that pours in through the cellar walls, the pipe will go to make a new bridge squisher for Women Unlimited, and the other stuff was just cool. I shall try to post pictures of how all this stuff works out as we go. I figure I have until the middle of next week to either find a use for this crap or get it to the curb for pick-up.