Patriotism in unexpected places

I've been humming all day.

And grinning. Even when I am crying.

It is a remarkable day.

I know there are some who don't like this guy, but I really do. He is smart. He is bold. He challenges us all to be better than we are, to be more than we think we can be, to work more, try harder, reach farther, and achieve more.

We went to the local liberal movie house to watch a live broadcast of the inauguration. There was no cover charge, only a request to make a donation to the local food pantry. We loaded up a grocery bag and brought it. Additionally, some $1,200 and change was raised. Quite awesome, considering the place only seats about 250 people between the two tiny screening rooms.

But they serve fantastic pizza and beer and soda by the glass or the pitcher, and everyone was in a festive mood, even at 10:45 a.m. Old friends greeted each other in the lobby and in the theaters. It was a great mingle and meet sort of event. When things really began to get underway, when the past presidents and dignitaries and such were being introduced, people settled down and got serious about the drama being played out live on the big screen.

I was struck by the fact that the ABC broadcasters muted the crowd microphone pick-ups when dubya was introduced. I noticed the lack of noise - there had been even moderate applause for the chimp's dad, after all. A friend who arrived late said she heard the introduction in her car on National Public Radio as she pulled into the parking lot. She said the boos were deafening.

I smiled. Sweet. Corporate media can censor the people, but the public's radio never should. Very cool.

Let it be said here and now that Aretha Franklin is a living legend, a national treasure, and the legislature of Michigan was on the money when its members designated her voice as a treasured natural resource of the state. She had on a magnificent black-lady-going-to-church hat that was approximately the size of a barcalounger and by the time she was done singing "My Country 'Tis of Thee," I felt safe in predicting that the song will never be sung in public again without unfavorable comparisons to today's performance. Aretha Franklin is a formidable woman of substance and style and she carries herself like the queen that she is. Damn.



What astounded me the most was when Diane Feinstein asked those assembled before the US Capitol to stand while Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office to the new president, every soul in that dark little movie theater in Bar Harbor, Maine stood up. Many hats came off, and some held hands to hearts. The applause at the conclusion was deafening.

Later, when the Washington crowd was asked to stand for the singing of the national anthem, the crowd in the movie theater also stood up. Hats were doffed again, and nearly every voice there sang along. There was not a dry eye in the place.

I know the people who came to the party at the movie theater today. They are the old-school liberal lefties, the aging hippies and graying boomers. They are not prone to fits of patriotism or spontaneous acts of national pride. In fact, they are the ones who have been demonstrating on the village green every Sunday for the past eight years, protesting the war, Guantanamo, torture, and many, many things that the government has done in that time. Many of the gray heads have criminal records from sitting in back in the 1960s and again in the 1990s and 2000s. These are the disillusioned, the disenfranchised, the discouraged and cynical.

And every blessed one of them stood proudly today and reclaimed their country.

Including me.

Pride

Pride is a difficult concept for me.

Pride can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending upon how it is applied. I am proud to be of Irish heritage, I am proud to be a woman, I am proud to be a lesbian, I am proud to be a writer, and I am proud to be a tradeswoman.

I have marched in Gay Pride parades and Irish Pride (St. Pat's) parades and enjoyed them both. I have participated in conferences and panel discussions for women in the trades and I have volunteered and served on gay pride committees in two different states. In one state I had a great time, in the other I turned out to be very unpopular and got tossed off the committee in a most undignified fashion. The trades stuff has always been a positive thing for me.

Pride is considered to be one of the seen deadly sins, a thing that can result in a soul's eternal damnation. I guess I can see that. That committee experience was pretty awful.

Pride is arrogance and ego at work. Pride in its sinful form is an attitude that says "kiss my ring." I have little use for people who feel they are better than me, or better than others. But I know that I sometimes behave that way. I hold myself above others, and I really have no business doing that. I judge others and find them lacking, and fancy myself better than they. That is not right, nor is it healthy for my soul.

I like to think that I am better at this or that than others. I like to think I am smarter, funnier, more clever, and any other number of good things. More humble somehow never makes that list. Imagine.

This past week I had a really great experience. I ran into a friend last Saturday at a community supper. Turns out he had lots of experience putting in windows in houses. Imagine that. The windows for this big project I am working on had just been delivered and needed to be put in, but I had never worked with anything this large before and I needed help. I acknowledged that I was in over my head a bit on this project, and the guy agreed to help. I paid him more than I usually pay people, but he is a journeyman carpenter with lots of experience and knowledge that I needed. His ability and knowledge was worth every dollar.

Here are some pictures of what we did:

First, from the outside:


Then a couple of the inside:





And a detail of the shims and nails along the top of one of the fixed windows:



Am I proud of what we did? You betcha. The windows are plumb, square, level and weatherproofed. And I learned a ton. John was a patient teacher and a perfectionist in his craft, and I am extremely grateful. I learned how to do it the right way, not the meatball way that some contractors do when it is cold and they'd rather be inside doing something not so cold and nasty.

That kind of pride seems to be healthy to me. It is good to be pleased with a job well done. I cannot believe that is sinful, I just cannot. It would be sinful if I tried to take all the credit, for that would be dishonest. It would be sinful to claim that our work was/is better than any other team of contractors on the island, for that would be dishonest as well. We did honest work, we did good quality work, and I would be pleased to have it in my own home. We can be proud of that, and I think we are.

I don't have a problem with that kind of pride, for it is pride in honest effort. It is not false pride, it is not self-inflation at someone else's expense. And it began with me getting humble and asking for help. I did not do this job on my own brilliance and superhuman strength. I did this job by asking for help and then accepting it. I had to accept that I was not the expert, I was not the master craftswoman. I was the novice here, and there was no shame in admitting that. Nor was there shame in asking for help. That was humility, something I wrote about earlier this month. And it was healthy.

Humility is healthy, and sometimes, so is pride. It shows self-respect and self-worth. When it becomes perverted by power and ego, it becomes sinful. But this week, with this job, I am proud of what I have learned, what I have accomplished, and of how I went about it. And I'm really OK with that.

Poject progress

I am most pleased with this project. It has been challenging nearly to the point of overwhelming, but I have been able to meet and succeed at each turn. It is a good feeling.

A month ago, this is the sun room that was in place. Notice how the stone steps lead up to a platform that is actually built up over the cedar clapboards (that's bad).



A week ago, this is what the project looked like:


Things have been moving along at a steady pace. The old sun room was torn down, and the new one is beginning to take shape. The rafters have been reinforced, the subfloor is down, the walls are up and yesterday the rafters and roof planks went on.

I am especially proud of the rafters. For the record, I HATE rafters. I hate finding that correct angle, and all of that pitch stuff (so many inches per foot) just makes my head spin. Because of the confines of this project, there really wasn't a lot of calculating to be done. I only had so much room to go up, and I only had so far to go out. Essentially, I held up the two-by-six, scribed a couple of lines, made a cut and trimmed it until it fit like I wanted. Then I made the notch where the stringer meets the outside wall, and it all went together pretty much without incident.

The client wants to look at the rafters and the pine boards of the roof, so we had to be extra fussy with how they looked. I had my helper sand each of the rafters to get rid of blemishes and ink and such, and then she sanded some of the planks as well to get rid of scuff marks and boot prints. That's my helper, Anne. Her daughter is getting married this week. She is remarkably calm, considering.



In this case, we are going to put up drywall inside and it will run right up to the roof planks on the two end walls. So I had to build out the end rafters to give me something to screw the drywall to inside. Here is how I did that with some scrap two-by-sixes, a two-by-four, and some half-inch plywood. Now that portion of the roof area is the same thickness as the two-by-four wall beneath it. I will put uprights in 16 inches on center next week.



Here is a picture of the roof edge of the carriage house associated with the property. Note the curved cut and beveled edge below the end plate.



The client really liked that style and asked me to duplicate it on this project. The curved cut was especially tricky. I had to dig out my sheet metal dividers and scribe several variations of an arc on a piece of thin plywood until I got the right length of the cut and the right depth of the arc. I didn't want it to look like someone took a bite out of it, nor did I want it to be too shallow to serve as an accent. Here is what the rafter ends look like before we put any roof planks up.



Here is the roof edge with planks and a tarp to cover them for the two days of rain we are expecting. I think they are going to look really good. The roof planks will go all the way to the end of the rafters, but that will require ripping boards on the table saw and I was short on help and time by the time I got that far, so the last course will have to wait until after the rain.



And here is the inside of the room with rafters and planks in place. It is a little darker than the old way, but with large windows, it will still be very light and airy.



And here is a look at the ceiling view that the client will see inside:



The stone steps that went up to a landing where the sliding glass door was on the old sun porch proved to be a bit of a problem. Left as they were, there was no room to put up clapboards, and they would allow snow and ice to build up against the wood, which would cause it to rot. We're doing this with an eye toward not repeating the process any time soon, so the steps had to come down a notch. One level of stones, actually, is what came off. Here is the pile of rocks. They will have to be moved next week when I have a suitably burly helper, but for now, they are out of my way.



Buried within the top layer of stones on that platform was an old metal safe box. It was topped with a wood cover that had been double-wrapped in plastic to prevent rot (it did not work) and the top had once been sealed, but years of neglect had taken a harsh toll. It was filled with nothing but very rusty water. Here is the empty box. We were much disappointed.



This is what the stone steps look like now.



Here's what it looks like when you step back a little. Notice how the steps only go up to about six inches below the sill. This will help prevent rot in the future.

Two weeks out

Ok, so many years ago I swore I would never get involved in a Gay Pride thing again. I got burned pretty badly, and was voted from leader to outcast on my birthday. By an ex-lover and her new girlfriend. But I'm not bitter.

So anyway, as both of you know, I belong to this thing called Maine Gay Net, which is a thing called a list serve, which I really don't understand, but it is kinda fun. It's like a big (135 members, give or take) chain e-mail club. A member can post something, which ends up in everyone's e-mail in box. Others can reply in public for all to see or off list so the conversation is private. It is kind of like a large cocktail party of people in a completely darkened room. But without the groping. We can hear each other in some conversations, but not in all of them, and we can't see each other's faces. Come to think of it, there might be groping going on, but it's dark, so I can't see it.

So this gaynet thing has been going on for something like 15 years. It was founded by the marvelous and fabulous Paula Stockholm, who turned over the reins last year to the marvelous and fabulous Nanci Little, who now serves as our moderator. So there is this group of people, spread far and wide around the globe (Maine, Florida, California, Ohio, Thailand), who check their e-mail on a kind of regular basis and comment back and forth about issues as broad and weird as politics, sex, religion, economics, recipes and home appliance repair - really all kinds of things. Some members have been corresponding and contributing almost daily for nearly 15 years. And to date, we've never all gotten together. We've shared some really intimate and personal details, but we've never met.

Sure, some of us who live in the same area have met, but never have we had a reunion or a large-scale get-together of any kind. Until now. In two weeks, great hordes of gaynet members will descend upon my little island, filling up campgrounds and hotels and restaurants for a weekend of activities.

And I'm the one coordinating it. Goddess help us every one.

Don't get me wrong, I love this thing and am thrilled to be doing it, but it feels a lot like when I did Pride stuff years ago, and that makes me nervous. Of course this is a committee of one (me) so I am not so likely to get voted off as I was before. But you can never tell. I can be fickle.

Aside from my own insecurities, and they are plenty, this is looking to be a pretty cool thing. We're having a coffeehouse kind of open-mic/music/storyteller ice-cream social kind of thing on Friday night, some activities during the day on Saturday, a big potluck picnic and more activities on Sunday. Oh, and an informal breakfast gathering Sunday morning at a local eatery. With very attractive waitstaff. Not that that matters, of course.

I am doing my best to not over-coordinate things. Events and adventures will come about organically as people meet and decide they'd like to go for a hike or bike ride or whatever. I've got some leaders lined up, and L and I will be offering early morning trout adventures, but really we have no huge, set in stone kind of plans. Aside from the coffeehouse and the picnic, everything is really a catch-as-catch-can sort of thing.

So. Here I am. Two weeks out and starting to get nervous. The souvenirs should be arriving at my house either today or Monday. I had to order a minimum of 72, so let's hope we have some people show up to this thing or else I'll have a bunch of stuff left in my living room.

Oh hell. Speaking of my living room, I think I may have a dozen people fighting over who gets the fold-out couch. My yard is going to look like a homeless encampment with tents everywhere, and every cooler I own (and those are nearly as many as my insecurities) is going to be pressed into service for this adventure. So far, I think I have Mike, Jen and her daughter, Darlene and possibly a friend, and maybe Steph and Rena and their dog. Let us hope it does not rain. Other folks in the area are similarly booked. Some friends in Ellsworth are putting up a member who is flying in from Florida for the occasion!

This whole weekend is really, as one friend put it, not unlike the world's largest blind date. My greatest fear is that at just past noon on Saturday, when the potluck picnic is in full gear, we will all agree on one thing: that we were happier having never met any of these people. I think what will probably happen is that we will all be taller, shorter, fatter thinner, older, younger, and infinitely less clever in person than we are on line. Oh, and our voices will not sound anything like we had imagined they would.

This is sort of like meeting your favorite radio personality and realizing that he's that dweeby guy from sophomore algebra with lots of pimples and who never combed his hair. You just never realized his voice made him sound six feet tall and gorgeous. I think it's going to be a lot like that.

But I am looking forward to it. If we like it and decide we want to do it again next year, then I'll ask for committee volunteers and start taking minutes and stuff like that. But for now, we're flying blind and we'll see how it goes.

Oh, in the interest of promotion, here's the website with the flyer and a paypal thing so you can donate to the burger and hot dog fund.