"Now due to a construct in my mind...

...That makes their falling and their flight
Symbolic of my entire existence,
It becomes important for me
To get up and see
Their last second curves toward flight."

The quote is from Mr. Mastodon Farm by Cake (full lyrics here). Colin will tell you - no questions asked - that Cake is his music, not mine. But you all know, that this song is mine. Why? Because I inevitably see something and make it "symbolic of my entire existence...." So, today, we will be discussing construction, particularly as it applies to door hanging. Yep. It's symbolic.

As you can see here, enclosing sections of our carport with framing and doors is a bit tricky. If you look at the top of the door, you can see that the beams slope down from the house. It is a little less obvious, but the bottom of the door shows that the cement does the same. In other words, nothing is really square. As it turns out, this is pretty normal in construction. And most of the materials are also not particularly straight, either. Boards are warped, nails are bent and shims, which are supposed to be angled are sometimes the straightest bits around. But doors - well - doors are very square.

So, when it comes time to fit very square doors into the kerflooey spaces that construction materials create, it takes some doing. You need shims. You need levels. You need clamps. And you need at least two people because you have to be able to look at both sides of the door.

This, of course, is where the construct in my mind made this little event symbolic of my entire existence. (See? Doesn't that just sound like something I'd say? Clearly, this is my song!) Right now, my familiar world seems to be full of this exact kind of construction - but it is going on in all of our heads instead of our homes.

We're all trying to build new bits in our current slanted circumstances with materials that just don't want to play nicely together. So, we're looking for shims and clamps and levels. On the mental side, these are much trickier to find than the physical ones that you see here. But, we're lucky in one respect. There are more than two of us. So we can look at the problem for a lot more sides. And we can tell each other where we found those shims and exactly what happened when we put them in. And maybe, just maybe, we'll all finish the fall with some nice new work space.