Carefully framed optimism.

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

Okay, so, yeah, we’ve been busy, what with dealing with insurance people and contractors and so on, but on a muggy Atlanta July Sunday morning, I find myself tilting toward optimism.

We have a roofline again. We have a ceiling (well, we have a subfloor) over our dining room again. We have had entertaining framers come early to work (to beat the midafternoon heat) and we (and our house) are standing up to a line of Georgia thunderstorms whipping through town with something just slightly more substantial than tarps propped up on scrap lumber.

We’ve made yet another trip north (in our tree-damage-repaired car). For this up-and-back, we had certain large-ish items on our to-do list mixed in with sociality and conviviality and we managed to check all those to-dos off with a smile…and with new knowledge! Sammy and I now know that if the guy at the hardware store didn’t cut the replacement window glass exactly square, you can sand it down enough to make it fit. It’s easier to buy new toggle bolts than to go up into the attic and try to fish out the old toggles.

These insights don’t have a widespread practical utility, but they do give us a sense that we can push ahead and accomplish a, followed by b, followed by c. Well, sometimes we skip b and go back to it, but it gets done.

It all gets done.