Being awake is a reason to drink coffee. Get up before the sun rises, make coffee, work. Weekdays, work consists of being around other people, so throw a wash-up in there. And Sunday I take Mother to church, so that’s a wash-up too. Oooh, I love Saturdays: Up, work, logic circuits afire, fueled by coffee.
I tried putting concrete-based filler in the basement floor cracks, but about half of them failed. The basement was to be a foot deeper but 
they hit a mesa-sized sandstone slab and said short of dynamite I’d have to leave it there. Fine, except they didn’t explain about settling on the lumps and natural contours of said stone. Long ragged cracks. Thus I have determined that I need to solve a simple ‘fill the spread cracks issue’, not a ‘water and mud striving to rise to fame issue’, meaning the equation is not solved for holding backpressure but for leaky-leaky.
I got some rubber stuff to try now. I saw the stuff advertised on TV, however ‘As Seen on TV’ is generally a folly, so I grabbed a cup of java and did some turbo shopping. Amazon’s 2867 reviews on the subject convinced me the same folks I bought the epoxy floor covering goo (with a baggie of sparkle chips) I got a few years ago and never put down because of , yes, the cracks, was the right choice. I chose a narrow wire brush at the same time, with a long ergonomic handle and a mean looking pointy scraper on the end that I’ll try to clean the ooze and failed concrete out. Enough uncertainty exists to cause me to fix up about six feet of a crack and wait a month to assess resilience and overall effectiveness. Phooey, my cup’s empty – be back in a tick.
The affection I have for good but not environmentally criminal coffee made inky strong and poured into a stained mug with no iota of anything to sully it is mighty indeed. Standing here, I got a great idea about a cherry cake thing I’ve been experimenting with. What if I put another egg in and cut the flour by half and used brown sugar instead of busting up the lumps of the regular white stuff that’s been here forever? When I went to the grocery, they had a good price on the dozen eggs, but if you calculated the per egg cost, the triple row eighteen egg carton was a better deal. That doesn’t drive the decision to add that third egg to the cherry thing, but it does facilitate it. They had the cherry pie filling on sale, so I got a couple more cans of that even though there are still a few in the pantry. You have to get enough to take you through the doldrums when there is no wind in the sales! Empty mug already? Good thing I’m right next to the pot.
Okay. I’m back. Looking around, I question some of the cabin design decisions made in ’92. I like having two windows in each wall of this great room over the garage (a pass-through windowish opening and an open double doorway graces the wall between the room and the rest of the house). I like the barky double door frame and the wide door opening, that was brilliant and a winner because it eases moving stuff in and out and eases air circulation as well. I don’t like the narrow, enclosed stairwell to get up here. This set of puny, ugly steps are the only way to get upstairs and are a chokepoint. They were supposed to be wider and open on the side with a nice handrail but I let the guy at the company cutting the parts for the log house cut four feet off the width of the house. He said the carpets would have to be fifteen feet wide $$$ and the rafters would cost more. I don’t have a carpet in the entire house. I think he had an ulterior motive about the rafters as I had ten sets of drawings (self drafted) out for bid and he wanted to undercut the other outfits. I went with them even with that because they added all operable doors and windows at no cost so I added fours pairs of operable roof windows all across the open part above the living room and dining room. Beautiful and of course, functional.
After church, after lunch. Reheated coffee is horrid, and I certainly don’t need to make more. I dress in wispy, watercolor clothes and don a floppy straw hat. With a tall glass of marvelous spring-like well water, cold from deep in the ground, I take a basket of supplies and a folding lounger to my shady spot on the porch. Songbirds are particularly fond of this area around the flowerbeds, and lyrical warbles and trills fill the air. My faithful mutt Bash makes her way over and looks at me. I smile and she sprawls at my feet.
I take my notebook of thick, lined paper from the basket and rummage through the doodle book and the pastels and the marbles (where’d they come from?) for my beautiful Montverde gel pen. Click. I imagine I see an old man on a high white oak limb over yonder. Does he think he’s Zachias? He’s fingering a rope with what looks like a noose on it, yikes! I wind the story through this and that and add a recalcitrant horse. By the time the sun reaches my shady retreat, I finish the tale. No, I wouldn’t let Arthel hang himself. An orange fritillary just wafted past my nose! Looked like two for a moment; crossed eyes.
Simply being awake may be a reason to guzzle coffee, particularly when the meshed mental cogs of my left brain whir like the window fan. Consider though, that being aware of the continuum of our ancestors into tomorrow, opening your heart to the intricacies of nature, and having delight with small jewels logic would find insignificant are good reasons not to overindulge. Some dark, smoky Assam tea (with no iota of anything to sully it) of over ice would hit the spot right about now. Yes, it has caffeine, but a glass or two won’t hurt anything, will it?
How Would You Do It? 