Wet, cold, tired

Wet, cold, tired is about my day so far in a nutshell.

Had meant to go hiking or go do something fun today, but with rain forecast it didn't seem all that enjoyable sounding to go take a walk in the woods. Something about switchbacks and rain and that turning into a steep, slippery, muddy mess likely to dump me down at the bottom of a slope that I want to be at the top of didn't sound all that advisable.

So I let myself be coerced into helping out with a remodeling project I've been helping some friends with for a while. Today was supposed to be nice, dry, indoors work. Installing sheetrock on a wall that I had built last weekend to turn a former big open sitting room space at the top of a stairwell into a hallway and third bedroom.

Now about that supposed to be that I mentioned... Oregon is supposed to have rain. We are a rainy state. We sell t-shirts saying "Oregon Rain Festival - Jan 1 to Dec 31" and similar paraphernalia. If you grow up here, you either learn to love the rain or it drives you insane and you move to California and the rest of us pretend we never knew you after that. This year however has been an insanely dry one. No one tosses the 'drought' word around because the idea of a drought in a state that should be getting as much rain as we are supposed to have is simply silly.

Today it rained for the first time in quite a while for any length of time or appreciable amount. We've had some light sprinkles, but I think early July was the last real heavy rain we have had. Since then, as part of the whole remodeling bit, new gutters had been put on the house. This was a project that I hadn't had much to do with, it was simple enough that even the couple who can't differentiate between a hasp and a hammer should have been able to get it right.

Today I noticed that there wasn't any water coming out of the bottom of one of the downspouts. It empties into a trench that will eventually have a length of piping laid in it to take the water to a dry sink. But no water was coming out of it.

As I pondered this strangeness, I headed back into the house somewhat distracted, to have my brain do one of those neat tricks of pattern recognition. There was this stack of oddly shaped objects against one of the walls behind some plywood. Objects that I recognized now as the gutter guards.

A long hot summer had meant that the pine tree towering over the house on one end had been shedding a lot more needles then normal and the big maple over the other side had a lot of leaves that had gone brown and dead during the summer as well as dropping its little helicopter-ish seedpods already. All of which meant the gutters were clogged and heavy and filling with water instead of draining.

I should mention that a lot of painting of the walls beneath them had taken place, and that it was between coats at this time, waiting for a dry day to put the final coat of white paint on.

To summarize this up, in the windy cold rainy weather I spend most of the day on the top of a ladder cleaning junk out of gutters and putting the gutter guards on that should have been there in the first place. Suckage.

A friend of mine who I think is likely far smarter then I tells me that I am a good person for helping them with all this remodeling. She also tells me that I am getting taken advantage of. I think she is probably correct on both counts.