Willow, ‘Last of the Mohicans (1992)’, ‘Syriana’ again, gutter work, ‘All About My Mother’ (posted from home)

(this post covers 30 June-8 July)


Saturday, 8 July—
I wasn’t looking forward to today. I spent all day working on the gutter. I put all the gap-covers in place, cleaned the inside of the gutter (mostly residue from the roof accumulated over the years), cleaned the outside of the gutter, and then re-hung the gutter with a proper drainage angle. Instead of using gutter nails I used gutter screws, a much more secure fitting than the nails, though a pain to install. By late afternoon I was exhausted from all the trips up and down the ladder and from moving the ladder time after time as I worked my way back and forth.
That evening we watched ‘All About My Mother’, a Pedro Almodovar film. This 1999 Spanish film received a very high rating on rottentomatoes.com and it’s well-earned. It’s a bit of a strange film in that the plot summary is something like this: A woman’s life is shattered by the accidental death of her son. She goes to Barcelona to tell the father (who doesn’t know about the son at all) but can’t find him and instead finds one of her and her husband’s former friends, a pre-op transvestite. She also meets a pregnant nun, who was impregnated by the same man, who, we later learn, is also a pre-op transvestite! Interesting stuff happens. I know, it sounds sordid. But it’s actually very funny and very human. And the interview with Almodovar is interesting. He says he does stories about women because the Spanish men are so macho that they aren’t interesting, they’re uni-dimensional where the women lead more interesting, multi-dimensional lives. That’s an interesting observation. I’ve always thought I wouldn’t want to be a woman because women have too many, often conflicting, roles to fill. Men are like dogs, life is much simpler for us. Arf.

Friday, 7 July-
Today I worked on the leak at the window. The inside is drying nicely under the fan we set up for it and the outside is now ready caulk and paint. I found a soft section of wood along the sill of the other basement window and dug that out to dry. I can fill that in with bondo (rather than replace the entire window frame). I pulled off the gutter cover from the rear gutter and started repairs. Whoever installed the gutter and soffit originally hadn’t done it properly. The aluminum face cover wasn’t fitted under the drip strip at the roof line. It wasn’t even close. There was a gap of about an inch of bare wood there—a perfect place for water from an over-flowing gutter to work its way back into the house. So I started the process of pulling all the gutter-nails to pull away the gutter and fix that. It didn’t take me long to realize that I could cut suitable vinyl pieces from the now-discarded gutter covers and use them to fit into the drip-strip and cover the gap. I spent the rest of the day covering the gap along the entire length of the roofline.
That evening we watched Deadwood2, Episode 10.


Thursday, 6 July-
This morning we were moving some items in the basement when we saw a water leak at the window. It has been raining every day but last night’s rain was both fairly hard and also wind-blown against the north wall of the house. This is an area where Labashi had done a very good job of stuffing in the insulation in preparation for eventual drywall. It was disheartening to have to pull out the insulation but in actuality was pretty easy. It’s much better to have this happen now than after dry-walling. I believe the leak is at the top of the window frame so I removed the shutters and started the process of chipping out all the old caulk and sanding and scraping the window frame for repainting.
We also noticed a damp spot on our bedroom ceiling along that same wall. I think that one comes from water overflowing the gutter because of gutter covers I installed some time ago. Those gutter covers have been a pain from the beginning. The idea was to put on the covers to keep the pine needles and leaves out of the gutters but I’ve spent more trips up the ladder to fix the gutter covers than I did to clean out the gutters twice a year. The covers also resulted in large icicles forming all along the roof in winter as well as causing our sidewalk to ice up at our front door. I’ve decided to take the covers off.
I also picked up the Miata today from its appointment to fix a noise I had diagnosed as a release bearing. That turned out to also involve the pressure plate and clutch so those were all replaced. Cost was $475.
I also jogged at Pinchot today, just a little slow-jog near the disc-golf course for an hour.
That evening we watched Deadwood2, Episodes 8 and 9.

Wednesday, 5 July-
It was a rainy day today. I drove Cherry Larry up to Duncannon and talked to ‘Terry’ in the municipal office there and gained permission to put geocaches on their property. Afterwards I went looking for a water bottle holder for jogging at Wildware and at Bass Pro Shops but couldn’t find anything. On the way home I jogged at Pinchot, this time pushing it a bit with a faster jog. My new watch says the benchmark for this section is now 49 minutes.
That evening we watched ‘Syriana’ again. It was very helpful to have watched the features and to read a few reviews before our second viewing. The movie has an interesting premise but we still feel the story-telling method gets in the way rather than helps us understand. I get the feeling that the book on which the movie is based would be more interesting than the movie.

Tuesday, 4 July-
I took it easy today after yesterday’s excess / success. I spent the day on the web, mostly researching some alternatives for my geocaches.

Monday, 3 July-
Today I overdid the jogging a little. I rode down to Rocky Ridge Park around lunch time and jogged the end-to-end jog which took an hour and a half according to my new watch. After cooling down, I started home but decided to stop at Rudy Park to check out their 5K cross-country trail (I had learned about it last week from some walkers I met at Rocky Ridge). I sat on a nearby picnic table in the shade for awhile and wondered if I should try it today. It was quite warm (around 90) and I could tell from the map that there’s very little shade on the course. I saw that the course looped around the outer edges of the park so that meant I wouldn’t really be all that far from the bike if I couldn’t go on--- I’d just have to cut across the soccer fields or open grass areas to get back. So I gave it a shot. I felt fine after the first loop of the observatory field but by the end of the second loop I was starting to struggle—that would be only about half-way through the three-mile course. But I eventually made it. I wouldn’t say I was moving very quickly toward the end; a walker could have overtaken me, I think.

Sunday, 2 July-
Labashi and I needed some time together away from the house today. We started by having lunch and a glass of wine at Olive Garden. We then drove down to Nixon Park to visit the Nature Center. I had recently been to the park for a walk and had briefly stopped in the Nature Center and wanted to re-visit when I wasn’t rushed. It’s a great little place filled with taxidermy mounts and an extensive worldwide butterfly collection. The greater part of the taxidermy mounts were donated by a great-white-hunter guy from York, William Kohler and they are fantastic. They include a number of animals I’ve not seen anywhere else and the whole-animal mounts are placed in dioramas representing their homelands.
That evening we watched ‘Last of the Mohicans’, the 1992 version with Daniel Day Lewis. After having recently seen the silent version and learning about the historical background of the novel, we wanted to see what the latest version did with the history. We learned that the history is only barely referred to in passing. So now I need to read the original novel.


Saturday, 1 July-
Today I spent some of the morning checking out Pennsylvania DCNR websites to see what’s happening in the state parks and state forests. Then I took the Concours over to Pinchot Park to rent a mountain bike. My mountain bike has no suspension and I wanted to try a fully-suspended one, i.e., one with shock absorbers on both the front and back wheels. I had seen two fully-suspended bikes among the dozen-or-so bikes for rent at Pinchot and knew that I had to go over there on the weekend since that’s the only time the rental office is open. Unfortunately, both fully-suspended bikes were now broken. Rather than just go home, I took one with a front-suspension for an hour. I was surprised how much the front-suspension helped dampen out the jarring ride but still want to try a bike with springs on both ends.
After the hour on the bike I wasn’t ready to go home so did the hour-long jog from the parking area to the dam and back.
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Friday, 30 June-
I spent the morning blogging, then rode down to the driver’s license photo center to get my photo license renewed. I picked up ‘The Nudger Dilemma’, a book of detective stories, from the Starbucks free bookshelf then rode over to the Appalachian Trail Regional Office in Boiling Springs to meet with the AT Boundary Manager about my geocaches. The manager didn’t show but the trail’s chief ranger, Todd Remaley, spent quite a lot of time with me and pulled out detailed maps to help determine where the AT Corridor lies so I can relocate my caches off the corridor. After the meeting I talked with ‘Willow’, a thru-hiker who was on the porch awaiting a ride. She has an interesting and pain-filled journal on trailjournals.com. She’s from Asheville, NC and we talked awhile about Asheville and my recent visit there. She is renting out her condo while she’s on the trail and is having problems with the renters and is trying to manage that while hiking. Here’s a copy of her ‘About’ page:
I am 39 years old, a Gemini. I am the mother of two teenage boys, Joseph and Grayson. For the last 7 years I have toiled at a thankless office job for a pittance in the shadow of corporate doom and profit mongering gloom. I’ve been an hourly slave, whose college degree meant nothing, and whose delusions of security and financial stability have faded as the cost of insurance premiums out-stripped any 2.5% raise I could scrap from the inner circles of power and overtime ended with a bang. In the last two years, I have instilled more changes in my life than I could have ever thought was possible or ever thought was needed, and found that I have so much more to go. A catalyst for my freedom to make changes was the fear that I would lose the person I’ve loved since I was 19 to another woman. This fear sent me deep inside myself to find what specifically did I not have, that I thought I should have, that made me feel so miserable about myself as to stoop to jealousy, an emotion I had never really lived. I pulled out every stop in my search. I went to conferences, I wrote volumes, I started projects, I took on community service, I learned CPR, I started swimming 3 times a week, I ran a mile a day, I started doing yoga again, I taught classes and volunteered. Then, I learned to fly a plane. My searching stopped; I found my equilibrium again; I could see, finally. Somewhere over Transylvania County I realized that I had to be free again, that I had been suffocating in responsibility ever since my children were born. I had been a stay-at-home mother alone most of the time (Jody’s job kept him out of town 3-4 days a week), then I had been a full-time student, part-time employee, stay-at-home mom for a few years, and then I was a full-time employee single mom for the rest of the time. My free spirit of my early 20’s had been shackled and was fading after all this time. As I learned to solo the Cessna, I learned that I could do whatever I wanted to do, something I had always been told and never believed. For many months during college in Boone, I lived out of my backpack, keeping my school stuff and extra clothes in my dorm room and staying gone most of the time in the woods. Then I moved into a friend’s tipi while he left to hike the Everglades. I moved to a 2500 acre farm in Vermont, skiing and driving a team of draft horses. A few years later, when the boys were small and Jody’s job did not take him away all the time, we used to backpack often with them. When his job changed, all outdoor activities as a family stopped. I simply could not pull off a full fledged backpacking trip with two children under 5 alone. My backpacking days ended. I never gave it a thought, until 11 years later when I began to lose my sanity. I am coming home one step at a time.