“And we’re back...”

Come on.  I know I’m not the most frequent blog writer, but you didn’t expect me to let an entire decade go by without writing something here, did you?  Hey now, you can’t complain.  It’s not like you had a paid subscription.  “Get what you pay for,” that’s what I always say.  And with that, Good Enough Publications is happy to announce the resumption of the very occasional “Learning to Play with Concrete and Stone” blog.

A lot can happen to a guy in nine and a quarter years.  And it has.  Kris and I are officially married (eight years in November).  My step-daughters Hilary and Hadley are long out of college.  Both have wandered far and wide, and Hilary has returned to academia for a graduate degree.  My own daughter Alex finished fourth grade, and fifth grade, and middle school and high school, and she has started her own journey into college.  Those were very special years, and while they sometimes seemed to take forever, they now seemed to have slipped by quite quickly.  So it goes.

I no longer work at home.  I was inspired to return to school, grab a master’s in education, and get into teaching history in high school.  After a brief stint in public school, I am back at North Yarmouth Academy, where I was an assistant track and field coach when the last entry was published.  Some things do not change.  I am still an assistant track and field coach.  The kitchen ceiling that nearly cost me my shoulders in 2010 is still painted white.  And the couple thousand pounds of rocks that I gathered for a stone wall from Secret Location #1 are still strewn through the woods adjacent to the driveway where they were hurled from the bed of our long-since-passed Mazda pickup.  RIP Little White School Truck. 

I am now a history teacher with a side job of working on the school’s IT staff, which keeps me from being the “you-must-have-summers-off” kind of teacher.  A certain wife of mine would certainly like to keep me home in the summers working on the types of home projects for which this blog was founded. That is doubly true now that she has followed footsteps to become a teacher as well, but the kind with summers off.  Yes, when we left Kris in the last entry, she was recovering from a car accident and the diagnosis of a possible brain aneurysm.  She is quite healthy now, fear not.  Among the things that have not changed in those 9 ¼ years, that diagnosis of “probably not an aneurysm” still holds true, supported by occasional imaging and the passage of time.  For the most part, we have just moved forward with our lives.  When in doubt, just live.

Time for the lightning round to catch you up (feel free to wander back to previous posts for the background – go ahead, I’ll wait).  The concrete counter, in planning some ten years ago, was laboriously created.  It was a giant hassle, but the finished product still sits on second-hand kitchen counters in our garage.  The cedar siding on the back wall of the house was eventually painted.  And now, just below that back wall lies a new deck constructed last summer. 

Our lovely Luna (RIP) decided to tear up our rotting old deck chasing a groudhog, resulting in the need to build a new one.

Standing on that deck, you can plainly see a very sharp-looking 12’x16’ shed set on the edge of the woods built a few years ago.  And yes, you will quickly notice that it lacks doors and some trip paint.  I have been caught in the wheel of nature’s seasons. 

Our shed nestled into the woods.  Some of those oaks to the right will donate themselves to our firewood pile in the coming weeks.

By the time it is nice enough in the spring to work on the shed, a family of Eastern Phoebes has built a nest inside and is busy tending to the first of two rounds of eggs. 

They are cute and romantic, and Kris will not let me drive them off once they have laid a foundation for that year’s nest.  When they sit on a branch or roof, they occasionally flick their little tail.  That’s the tell-tale sign.  And the momma and the poppa work together to gather up material for the next or food for the hatchlings.  And so they go through spring and well into the summer flying in and out of that open doorway.  And why is it I am so intent on starting sentences with a damn conjunction!?  I’m going to have to beat that habit.

I’m not going to cop to the number of years the phoebes have taken over.  Too embarrassing.  This winter, with the invaluable assistance of my new occasional helper Hadley, we cut up some tongue-and-groove (T&G) boards and assembled the custom doors.  They currently lie peacefully in the basement awaiting one final coat of paint.  Once I finish a big round of grading the knowledge and opinions on ancient history of 36 ninth-graders, I can finish them up.  So why am I resuscitating a left-for-dead blog instead of doing that grading?  You have asked the eternal question.  Why ever am I steering in any direction but the required one?  That’s the story of my life.  And of the shed.  And the rock wall.  And…you get the picture.  And another and.  Dammit!

So why am I writing?  Why now?  A couple reasons spring to mind. 

• In the past months, I have been missing writing, and I am hoping to sharpen up my authoring muscles a bit and see where that takes me. 
• We always have projects, both in-process and planned, here at our Freeport homestead.  Kris dreams (and edits and redreams) faster than I can build anything, thus guaranteeing a backlog of blueprints large enough to fill up a “What’s Hot this Spring” list on Houzz.  On deck is a new closet in the mudroom.  It was another of Kris’s fabulous ideas and I wish I could start it right now!
• I am currently working to get a better handle on my free-time, my me-time.  Think of it as a reprioritization of my interests.  Writing is part of that, but I’m looking to move into some new areas as well.  I am a very tactile person, drawn to textures and using my hands.  From that, I have realized that sculpture may be an exciting avenue to pursue.  The first medium that I would like to get into is, wait for it, concrete!  Yes, there is a connection to the title of this blog.  I am thinking of cranking out a batch of concrete mixed with vermiculite (to lighten it up) that is then poured into various block shapes.  Once set, those blocks can be carved into knockoffs of various famous sculptures.  Practicing the masters is a method that is as old as time.

Will I get to all these things?  Will the backlog of creation ever be whittled down?  Will our hero extricate himself from the piles of grading (that have not shrunk as he wiles away the hours on this blog entry)?  Stay tuned.  There are project ideas, sculpture ideas, and writing ideas all piling up, and we have just arrived in firewood-cutting season.  

It's a small pile, but it's mine.

Welcome back to “Learning To Play with Concrete and Stone”.  If you are a new arrival, welcome!  Life appears to be a bit simpler as we begin the third decade of this millennia.  Here’s hoping that you get to follow along with some of those adventures right here, in this out-of-the-way corner of the Internet.

Dave

PS – Brian, you will note that I did not avoid the penalty for not making an entry in January, for many Januarys.  I hope this slight interruption in service will not deter your enthusiastic support for this site.