I can't be right for somebody else

Now, just because I haven't had a job doesn't mean that I haven't been working. My dad earns a pretty reasonable and for him, generally happy, living fixing up the beaten-down old houses of people much richer than he is, and now and then he needs help, and with the speciously-employed brother now safely out of one day's driving range he called on me for the help. That's got its down side, mostly in that it means getting up around 7 am, and doing a lot of walking up and down and up and down again because fairly wealthy people with old houses have always bought seventeen-story Victorian homes with narrow staircases. I exaggerate, but less than you'd think. However, he does pay enough to keep even me in books as long as I don't have much else to pay for.

We've got rather different levels of basic skills in home repair. For example, my father has basic skills in home repair. I pretty much top out at belatedly getting around to replacing broken light bulbs. But, hey, if you can build a plastic scale model you know all the basic skills, really -- painting, sanding, test-fitting, adhesives, putting on decals, and finding after the fact you put the starship Enterprise's warp nacelles on backward. That's plenty of background for house painting, sanding down walls, putting in new pieces of drywall or actual wood, putting them in place, hanging wallpaper, and looking at how supposedly straight pieces of wallpaper hung and regularly checked with the level will go off in wildly different directions once they're stuck on and you're stuck.

Where we do get aggravated with one another it's usually over the normal sorts of things -- he'll chronically give directions with the wrong level of detail, for example. He didn't just say to mop up the spackle dust from the floor, for example; he gave me a specific number of paper towels to use and how wet they should be to mop it up. But then while at work on another part he'll hold his hand out and just grab at nothing particular, before finally saying he wanted the pliers, or whatever. My fault for not guessing before the first instruction. And we come from different schools of thought in spackle. I take a tiny bit on the paddle and fit it very carefully over the hole or crack, and brush over multiple times in every direction until you can't tell there was ever anything there. Dad is from the school that takes great big heaping gobs of spackle and applies it like a ski resort pouring on artificial snow until the room has spackle applied so thickly on the walls that the room is impossible to move in. Then he begins sanding until he reaches something resembling the plane of the original wall. My method is more time-consuming on application; his turns spackle into a good insulating material. It's hard to make a peaceful balance between the two styles.

Trivia: Joseph Henry's 1831 electromagnet, built for Benjamin Silliman Sr, was able to support over 2,000 pounds. Source: Joseph Henry, Albert E Moyer.

Currently Reading: Inside Star Trek, Herbert F Solow, Robert H Justman.