Sunshine

I spent today painting the side of a house. We put up scaffolding to reach the gable and the guys that put the package together for us didn’t give us any pins. My worker was like, I dunno, no pins. But I was like, the fuck? Pins are the critical element that keep those pipes together; scaffolding itself is pretty rackety. I called them back. Oh, yeah, you need pins. Then they eventually hunted down 8 and not one more for us by scavenging around their yard. This is a massive rental company.

I don’t always have experiential knowledge of what is correct. But the reason you take safety courses, even the dumb ones I’ve taken, is so that you don’t just shrug and accept the scaffold that comes without pins. That is the point of an education, I think, not to just accept what you are given. Even if it’s an oversight. We make mistakes all the time, that’s all well and good to simply follow up and fix it. But without my insistence that we needed pins, we wouldn’t have had any. If one of my workers had fallen from that scaffold, I would be liable for not making sure we had pins.

Once we got that scaffold up, we scraped and primed and got some color on under the gable. We filled woodpecker holes. One of my workers functions like a DJ, we had music all day. We got three sections done, we got a rotten windowsill out, I caulked a bunch of seams with the terrible outdoor sealant that sticks to you for a month, and the client had fresh, cold watermelon for us at 2:30. What a dream. We stopped at 4 and my dogs, who started the day with a sniff spot visit, ran their hearts out, had a dog walker arrive midday, and were sleeping when I came home, are the calmest I have ever seen them. Fritz is maniacally chewing a bully stick and Taiga has already passed out.

During the pandemic, I figured out that I could just put empty plastic containers in my trunk, fill them with gallons and gallons of water, and take them to the garden to fertilize or water. I don’t do this often, but I put in a ton of transplants last weekend and they haven’t yet had a rain. We’ve had a string of 80 degree days. A couple have died. So I loaded up the trunk with at least 25 gallons of water and took some MiracleGro up to the lot. The rainbow popcorn is showing signs of nitrogen deficiency and a whole bunch of beans have been eaten straight through by insects, a sign of stress. I don’t often use chemical fertilizers, but the key to getting the land to produce is making sure that plants can survive, 1, and making sure that you get enough growth to create some shade to hold in moisture, 2. This application early will mildly disrupt the soil microbiome. But what I want to happen is simply for these early seedlings to get an infusion of the nutrients they need to survive. If they keep struggling, then fine: they can shrivel up and head to their final resting place. But if this was the transfusion they needed: great. I’ll get a second generation of rainbow popcorn.

The area where the strugglers are planted is also at least 18” deep of decomposing wood chips. The nitrogen in the fertilizer will help that lignin decompose faster: decomposition can take nitrogen out of the soil if you have a lot of browns, which is what wood chips are. I am not super concerned about the amount of fertilizer I dumped up there today.

I was driving around town yesterday doing prep for work and sending other workers out to my sites because I have a chip fracture in my finger. I had to do some returns at Lowe’s and it’s right across from Wal-Mart. Being a contractor has totally changed my purchasing behavior. It’s extremely hard to avoid politically compromising purchases in construction and I also needed medical tape for my splint. So I got some at Wal-Mart, a store I’ve effectively boycotted for 20 years. They have $36 peach trees. I paid $50 for my slip and it’s even small than theirs. It got me thinking about how boycotts really are for the folks who can afford it. One of the peach trees I ordered didn’t take. It was $50. Why did I pay $50 for a tiny clip when I could get a nearly functional rootball tree for $36? There’s nothing that can become more yours and help you thwart capital more than self-sufficiency and owning the means of production. Owning that peach tree is owning the means of production. They have exactly the same labels as the more expensive ones at Home Depot. I got mine from Stark Brothers and it died. What game are we playing here? No one in a position of power at any company cares whether my tree took or not. While I understand the idea of voting with your wallet, the real question is whether my life will become more self-sufficient when I pay more for the fancy version. For some tools, it will. For some clothing, it will last longer. But the scaffold rental place will profit off me whether or not they give me pins.