Brad Moon Rising

Brad Moon Rising

I have now given Handy Brad eight months of more or less continuous employment. Assuming an average 35 hour per week, that means I practically have had a full-time staff member most of the year to help me with my projects around the house. Those have included re-stuccoing the back side of the house and deck, re-flashing the deck, power-washing the entire house’s stucco, replacing the utility room outer doors, building concrete steps and pathways around the back of the house (complete with railings), building out the Cecil Garden with me, cleaning out and rebuilding the entire south and east sides of the garage to utility perfection, replacing the garage side door, helping with the complete interior garage renovation, building out the Moonstruck Madness play area with me (including building fencing and laying DG on the pathways), putting in a garden bridge over the faux riverbed, helping me rebuild the patio garden (including core-ten steel edging), building an attractive concrete and stone spa-side umbrella platform, and now rebuilding a rock stair and terraced rock garden heading downhill off the spa. This has all been in addition to numerous indoor projects for Kim including fixing a screen door, replacing several toilets and toilet seats, putting in various hooks and doorstops and installing one Big Ass Fan in the office. Brad has been joyfully employed and busy and from the look of the patio at the Hidden Meadows Market, where all the retired part-time handymen hang out talking about the difficulty in finding good work, I imagine he is as happy to have found me as I am to have found him.

During these eight months I have become quite familiar with Brad and we have long ago dispensed with mask-wearing as we consider ourselves to be a pod of sorts. He and I have both been healthy all year and while we still stay several feet from each other, we have made the risk assessment that we are both good with each other’s germs at that modest distance. I imagine that these are the sorts of trade-offs everyone makes in a year like this. Now Handy Brad is very dogmatic about his work ethic. While he is “on-the-clock”, we have agreed that he goes home whenever he gets too hot or too tired or just plain feels like an afternoon off. He has worked a Saturday or two because he has come to understand my impatience and my need for completion, but he also knows that I never want to have him feel that his priority isn’t his own personal life and needs. It is a fine working relationship with mutual respect flowing meaningfully. I gotta get shit done and Handy Brad’s gotta do things his way and the right way. That blend of timeliness and diligence works extremely well for the two of us and has shaped this place up nicely over 2020.

There are certain jobs that I can tell Handy Brad does not want to do. He has an inordinate discomfort with heights so any ladder work over twelve feet or so is not his cup of tea. Right now, based on some strange noises on the roof a few weeks back, there is a Ring camera and solar panel in the garage waiting to be installed on the roof. It ain’t happening, so Brad has finally agreed to get a pal of his who is roof-able to come over and do that job under his direction and with his rental of the appropriate height ladder (we do not keep anything bigger than a stepladder here so that I will not be tempted to try a Flying Walenda trick myself). I spent months telling Handy Brad that I wanted him to build a platform for the Moroccan Fountain near the side door so we could get it pumping water again. He has spent months asking me over and over again when I bring it up about exactly what I want. I finally got the gist that he was not going to do it, and I was not about to “order” him to do something he didn’t want to undertake. So, I decided to buy a piece of nice stone and make do with a rustic base for the fountain. On Monday we found a wonderful piece of turquoise that matched the Cecil Garden entry stone (you will recall that weighs 443 pounds). This stone weighed in at 1,100 pounds, more than half a ton. That would certainly do the trick.

My local rock store arranged for a stone cutter named Church to help me trim it to the size we needed and he came over yesterday with the cut stone and the narrower piece he had cut from it. I figure the split was something like 850 versus 250 pounds for the two. The smaller piece was gorgeous so I made a command decision that we would place a new four-foot high obelisk of turquoise over by our patio path entrance opposite my small stone pagoda. Handy Brad dug the hole and Church (who is a stone wrangler par-excellence) got it upright into the hole. That obelisk is there for life and looks beautiful. The other piece he placed with his mini tractor/forklift against the entry to the house. It looked equally gorgeous, but Kim came out and declared it too big for the spot, where she thought it blocked the entry too much. So, back to Church’s shop went the 850-pounder to have a wedge clipped off the back side. At 26 cents a pound plus cutting costs, I figure Kim’s spatial sensibilities are costing us about $230, but what’s that compared to marital harmony? The fountain should be up and running this week if I have anything to say about it.

Handy Brad has now spent eight months listening to my rantings and ravings about Trump and our political dilemma in this country. He is a quiet man of few words who would rather work than talk, but when he is resting (it has taken me months to get him to sit while he rests since he has been trained to never sit while working) he has listened since I suspect most of it is news to him since I doubt he watches much MSNBC (or any cable news for that matter). Yesterday he proudly told me that he has registered to vote for the first time in his 65-year life. If I had known he wasn’t registered I would have been on him months ago about that. In some ways I am glad I didn’t know because it is somehow more meaningful to me that he got there on his own. I suspect the blue team has a new supporter.

Last night there was a full moon that woke me up at 3:30am. I watched it turn from bright yellow to orange as is dropped towards the Pacific Ocean. It was quite a sight to see. It is equally a sight to see a new force of nature, what I am calling a Brad Moon Rising on the horizon.