I got an email late Tuesday with the subject line “Grab your umbrella and a dour attitude”, which meant that the stars have aligned for me to travel to London at the end of this month on business. I’m going to be shooting video for a series of interviews about the New Climate Economy. We’re planning on a 3-camera shoot in front of a backdrop, and then adding animation in post-production. I’m a wee bit nervous because I’m going to rent a bunch of gear in London and handle the logistics myself, and I have no idea what the inside of the venue looks like (so there’s no advance scouting). It could mean that I’m recording the former President of Mexico in a coat closet. But, London! Video production! I can’t wait.
Friday evening we were invited to a friends’ birthday party with a standing invitation to bring an instrument and jam with the host. I’d known about this party for a couple of weeks, and I was nervous to join in, especially after we arrived and I heard the guys playing. There was an older guy playing drums in a flailing Buddy Rich style, an excellent keyboardist who was doing double duty holding the bass line down, a guitarist, and a saxophone player who was staggeringly good. I hung out for a while, drank a few beers, and when I had my liquid courage, I got my bass and amp from the car and set up.
They were taking a short break, but everybody assembled again and the drummer asked me to lay something down. Nervously, I started a very basic figure and the whole band picked it up. From then on out, we played whatever anyone could think of, from improv noodling to a couple of songs– Sympathy for the Devil was fun as hell to play, and I was just locking into the groove of Stevie Wonder’s I Wish when it wound down. It was exhilarating, and when another guy sat down at the drums, I found his style easier to lock in with. Three hours later, by the time we had to leave, my right index and pointer fingers were numb but I had so much fun I didn’t care. A bunch of the players walked up and thanked me for sitting in, something I wasn’t expecting but very much appreciated, and all I did was gush back at them in awe. I don’t know if he’s thinking of doing that as a regular event, but I’d love to learn some standards and go back to play again. And I’m definitely going to pick up the Stevie Wonder songbook, because that was fun as hell to play.
The shutters are now installed on our front windows. The only thing left to do after priming and painting them was to get full sets of hinges, and I’d pulled four off of our existing windows. Not looking forward to another day on the ladder, we took a drive back down to Second Chance and I dug through their boxes to find only one complete shutter hinge. On a hunch, I walked back to the shutter section and hunted around until I found a pair of shutters with the hinges I needed (male hinges with intact pins) and bought them both. By 5:30 that evening all four shutters were hung, and the house looks much better, if I do admit.
Because we got a late start Saturday morning, Finley and I missed most of the yard sales in the neighborhood, but we did look at one that was right down the street. Sitting on a barstool I saw a beat up Emerson 544 radio and offered the lady $10 for it, which she took. The woodwork on the face is in rough shape, but the rounded shell is still OK, and I think I can find a way to make a new dial cover for it. So, for the first time in years, I’ve got another radio to work on.
In other musical news, Finn had her second piano recital on Sunday afternoon in the church across the street. She did really well as the 4th of about twelve kids to play, and Bear brought Auntie Christi to listen as well.
This weekend’s big projects involved lots of paint. I ordered a new sprayer from Amazon last week and picked up paint for the front door and the shutters early Sunday morning, and got to work. First the front door came off, got cleaned, taped, and dried in preparation for several coats of red. Our last door was brush-painted, and being a metal-jacketed door, the paint showed every brushstroke. This is no fault of the painter, because red paint is pigment-heavy. The new door was just as difficult to paint: I couldn’t get the red to aerosolize enough to go on smoothly, so it looks like I painted the door with bedliner. Sigh.
Next up were the shutters. Exterior primer goes on a lot smoother, and all four shutters got two coats of it and dried in the sun. In between coats, I started scraping and priming the back windowframes, which haven’t been touched in 10 years. Then I started pulling the storm windowframes out so that I could access legacy shutter hinges left behind in all of the second-story windows. As it turns out, a set of hinges for each shutter would cost more than we paid for the shutters themselves. (For the record, they are known either as Bermuda or Parliament lift-off hinges).The frames angle outwards, making it impossible to get a screwdriver straight on the screws, so it took time to pull the windows out, unscrew the frames, get the hinges out, and screw everything back in. I got all but two left-hand hinges out, and as it turns out there are only two left on the house. It’s also a minor miracle the hinge pins even fit the hinges that came with the shutters–even though the house hinges are 1/2″ smaller on both sides.
Monday I got back outside and coated the shutters with black paint, which went on smooth but thick. There doesn’t seem to be any flow control on my sprayer, unlike the old one I had, but I cleaned up the drips with a brush and covered them over carefully with the finish coat. From the road nobody will see the imperfections.
In the meantime, all of the hardware has been soaking in diesel fuel in the garage, and years of lead paint sloughed off with a few shakes. I need to find a way to soak the shutter hooks–the arms mounted to the bottom that swing out and drop into a metal pocket on the sill–to get them as clean as the hinges.