Tolkien never wrote about repairing the keeps

Replacing rotten boards on the garage turned into an epic. What I thought might take a day or two turned into six days of doing not much else. In the end I got six of the eight boards replaced which I intended to replace. The other two, the left side of the left bay, have to wait until a long weekend. I'll be able to replace them fairly quickly, it'll just take a while to replace all the siding which goes along with them. Fortunately, I have all the siding primed, so a good bit of the time consuming work is done. I still have to finish the last of the trim on the right bay and do the painting. But we have replaced a lot of wood and all the siding up to about seven feet on the middle and right side. Honestly, most of the siding on the garage and the rest of the house is toast. We need to replace it all. I'm going to try to only think about that one section at a time.

Two good bits out of this project:

The contraption I made last fall for drying siding worked out just perfect. I had built the ends (picture combs with teeth on both sides about 6 ft tall) and set aside the ends and cross pieces so it wouldn't take up room until needed. Then last week I just screwed the cross pieces in place, creating something 6ft tall by 5ft long, by 2ft wide, and started loading it with siding. We put the unprimed boards in the teeth on one side, take them off one at a time and prime the front/ends/sides then replace them in their slot. Once they are dry on that side, we move them to the other side of the rack, then repeat the process for priming the back. Working that way, one person can be busy for hours or two people can work at once (one from one side, one from the other). The legs on the bottom will hold a bundle of siding waiting to be done on one side and we can probably stack another bundle or two of completed on the other side of the legs.

Because there was no way to buy a match for one of the pieces of trim at any of the local stores, I also tried my router set up for the first time. I was able to buy the regular (cheap) dimensional lumber and shape it to more or less match the existing pieces. My boards weren't perfect, but I had less router marks in mine than whoever created the old ones.

Not much else got finished during the week off, but that's what happens when you open a big can of worms. I did get the dying lilac cut down and transported to the brush pile. I also managed to bring down a maple limb which was dangling but still partially attached 25 feet off the ground. I always consider it a victory when I get one of those widowmakers down without making any widows.

reading

27. Asimov's Science Fiction July/August 2021

L.X. Becket's take on living through a post social collapse world in "The Hazmat Sisters" was interesting. The central conceit was surprising, but how the characters act and interact rang true for me. Michael Swanwick's "Huggin and Muninn - And What Came After" comes with well deserved trigger warnings. An unblinking frank story wrapped in an parallel universe box. Taimur Ahmad's "Tweak" was a dark warning about what people will do to make themselves feel good about themselves. "Philly Killed His Car" by Will McIntosh gives us a very realistic look at a near future. I really liked how he wrote his way out of the dead end the character got himself into.

Rudy Rucker & Bruce Sterling's "Fibonacci's Humors" didn't do much for me.

28. Helen Simonson "Major Pettigrew's Last Stand"

Helen Simonson's "Major Pettigrew's Last Stand" was a pleasant surprise. For me "New York Times bestseller" usually translates to unreadable book with no redeeming qualities. This one was actually a good read. It is a diatribe against prejudice and intolerance disguised as a romantic comedy. The characters are pretty much all flawed humans with varying degrees on the flawed bits. Quite often they walk on stage as stereotypes, then get progressively more complex and human. Most of them are just trying to get on in life, which when it comes down to it is what most humans are doing. Not all the story arcs end as you might expect them to. In some places the characters had to go through some unnatural contortions to get the plot resolved the way the author wanted, so it loses some marks for that.