This Damn House – Maintenance

Americans have always been good at projects. We can go to the moon. We can take down a foreign dictator. We cannot maintain anything. The space program and our ongoing snake pit in the Middle East are testament to that. And this is where I find myself. I am in the fourth summer of ownership of The Farm and the initial clean-up work I performed is in a maintenance stage.

I must digress. I lived for four years at the address 820 Academy St. in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Upstairs of that glorious college apartment lived three people: a man and a woman (both crazy) and that woman’s brother (legally mentally unstable). Insofar as the brother goes, you’d be off your rocker too if you drank a case of Natural Light beer every day and listed to Gloria Estefan at top volume. Anyway, I’m talking about the couple.

Every spring – and sometimes multiple other times throughout the year – they painted everything in their house, their porch, the doors, and whatever else may or may not have been nailed down. See, cleaning the house is maintenance, but painting is a project. They weren’t foolish… they were good red-blooded Americans. I see those traits deep within me, for painting covers up all the old sins.

(I’m clutching at straws here to defend the fact that in four years, I will be writing about how painting everything every year is such a gas! I can see it isn’t working. I shouldn’t have lead with the story about the nut-job college neighbors. Live and learn.)

So the backyard needed maintenance. Years ago, before PVC, vent stacks for toilets were cast iron. I have one of those in the back of the house, shooting up off of the first story bump-out and going above the roof line. That, now, is a nice clean white. It matches the stucco wall in the back, which also got painted white this spring. This left the deck.

The first project I had in this new house was to scrub the deck with bleach and stain it. That has all worn away. And what luck that I had a pristine day to do the cleaning and staining: 95F and full sun.

I have never liked sun glasses. I wasn’t wearing them this day.

I was on my hands and knees staining the deck itself after two hours of carefully staining each spindle on the railing. I didn’t feel thirsty. I wasn’t sweating either. From what I saw, I was doing a bang-up job. After I went inside, my eyes didn’t adjust for around five minutes. I thought nothing of it and promptly blacked out on the couch for a few hours from dehydration.

When I regained consciousness, my eyes were in incredible pain from being completely burned from the sun reflecting off of the bright white deck (I probably should have stained it last year…). I peered outside in the failing sunlight to see that, apparently, a rabid marsupial had stained my deck and all the work I thought I did was a dream. Then my neighbor reminded me that it indeed was I that did such a terrible job at covering wood with stain. The second coat (the next evening) went on much better.

Lessons: 1) a fresh coat of paint works well if it is done right and 2) never stain a deck in the sun. It’s also a good idea to drink a lot of water in the summertime.

Now I need to get back to the rest of the foundation work. Nothing bad could possibly happen there…

Expert, Connoisseur, Aficionado, and Artist

I hear a lot of terms used to describe a person that is supposed to know something. All those words are purported to mean different things sometimes. Other times, different. I’ve heard a carpenter called an artist – akin to a god in the way it was used – when he devised a clever way to frame out a sloping staircase that would have taken non-linear geometry to explain mathematically. And he eyeballed it. To that, I agree that the word was used right. I’ve heard friends call their tax accountant that same thing. I disagree with that usage wildly.

So, I hereby offer the new Farmer Standard on these four terms: Expert, connoisseurs, Aficionado, and Artist.

Expert: There are no true experts. Expert means technical proficiency in reality and we will from henceforth use it that way. But technical proficiency is based on the facts that science has given us, which are always expanding, so the instant that someone knows everything there is to know – technically – about a subject, something new is discovered and that expert us usurped. Or, maybe more likely, something old is refuted, and the same holds true.

Connoisseur: This term is experiential only and should only be used in regard to a pleasure. Better, for a vice. A connoisseur doesn’t produce anything qua connoisseur. Perhaps, a connoisseur is also an expert, but an expert does not mean you can blindly walk into your local X, and say that this place has the best X that Man has ever known. The expert likes the connoisseur to validate their technical execution of their trade, but the expert can still keep making cigars, wine, or love and get on just fine without anyone widely versed in those trades ever tasting their wares.

Aficionado: Experts can do, aficionados have done and still can. And better than you. Because they know why they do it. Impulse – or compulsive, so to speak – is gone. The "must" drive has given way to the "should" drive. Here is where the technical expertise meets the want to savor the fruit. The aficionado is the old man you know at the blue collar bar down the street that is missing most of his teeth, smells of cheap gin, hates you, but has every woman in the place in the palm of his hand because he developed a love in his life long before you were born that still shines through his toothless grin that can melt any woman. It’s the French winemaker you see on PBS that can somehow be drunk all day long but make wine that tastes good on a whiskey hangover. They do and they teach. There are few. Allow them to be.

Artist: This is where we all are. So much of what we have is from an armature swag at doing something better and it just grows from there. Artists don’t discount what an expert knows, but an artist doesn’t get bogged down in the weeds. Artists don’t begrudge the experience of the connoisseur, but sometime experience comes from only doing the wrong thing a thousand times. An artist gives it the old college try, swings for the fences, punches above his weight class, asks the pretty girl out on a date, and usually fails. But an artist doesn’t give up.

So, friends, those are the definitions from now on. Next time a good friend at work gets a complement of being an aficionado when he really should have just got an atta’boy, call him a shaft and go get coffee.

Note: there are a lot of accepted ways of spelling connoisseur, and I’ll never know which is right, so I picked one that makes me laugh.