How I spent my Sunday

Or,  How to not watch the World Series making templates for trailer wheel wells and replacing oriented strand board flooring with plywood glued and laminated into the subframe.  Wandah was manufactured in 1995 by Sunline in a factory near Harrisburg, PA.  They still have a web site up but when we drove to the address last year in hopes of yucking it up with her Makers, we were disappointed to discover another business there.  Sunline had gone under two years before, which only tells one that virtual reality may be, after all,  superior to real, everyday reality.  Like a lot of travel trailers, these things are stapled together with the cheapest and flimsiest of modern, American ingenuity.  We were heartened to hear, incidentally, that our Wandah was better than most, according to a Santa Barbara welder who rebuilt the rear bumper. "There's at least something in the frame to weld to," he told Renee. "All these newer ones, forget about it."

So, we're into the template and floor replacement not to mention bringing the furnace plenum back to life, which involved hammering and pinching in the vise with clamps and custom cut wood pieces and wedges.  The forward floor bit went "supah"  with Gorilla Glue lamination pressed together with 5 "C" clamps.  The plenum, the sheet metal box that distributes the heated air,  loved my caresses and should see action again soon. We're talking to Buffalo sheet metal guys who can create their masterpiece from our cardboard template.  Can you see Renee slowly recovering from her earlier gloom?

And we've heard from Cardinal Puff,  aka stalwart Ned, who's lamenting the course of developments on the Albion River where the Redwoods still stand, though he tore his house down.  Maybe I forgot to tell you that parts of it were rotting, so everything had to go except the kitchen, mostly because there are beautiful cabinets there that Ned has made (and, naturally, has not finished as all carpenters who work on their own, and mostly other people's houses, know. It's the time thing and how much carpentry can you stand in one day and stay away from your guitar, or the lettuce in your garden, or the latest book that's got you hooked.  Oh yeah, and you gotta play with the children. Definitely).

So, Cardinal Puff, aka Huff, wants construction to move forward in a timely manner, but not too fast, which may be the case now, because in desperation - well not exactly tearing out your hair desperation- The Cardinal, since his first telephone call to me before the tire thing where I said I was coming as fast as I could, has hired a crew that is "fitting him in" and hurrying up to get to another job. "This is wearing me out," Ned said. "Supervising.  So much is happening so fast, I don't have any time to work. If you came, Jimmy, we could find some time to breathe, get the job done and have a little fun, too." Right on!