We insulate the dining room, or, the best laid plans of mice and men.

There is a saying, “The best laid plans of mice and men…” It means you try your best to make life turn out how you want, and sometimes things work out like you intended, and most of the time, not.

So, for the big holiday weekend, the big decision was, do I get work done outside to push the shop along a little further (top priority) or do I work inside because they are predicting thunderstorms and rain. Because they kept predicting rain for Monday, I elected to get some work done in the house. The next step was to install ¾” cabinet grade oak plywood to “bridge” the (old) outside wall framing to the (new) inner wall framing. This will make for nice, sturdy, attractive deep window openings and window seats all through the house eventually.

So, that was a bit of fiddly work, since the old framing is only a very rough approximation of square and straight and level and plumb. The trim will hide all the gaps and look ship-shape when finished.

Getting that done allowed us (That’s me and Joel, my small-group/church homie) to blow cellulose insulation into the exterior walls of the dining room. That is the dustiest job there is I think. It got so cloudy in the room that you could “see” the other person well enough, but I couldn’t really see if he had the insulation nozzle ready for me to turn the blower on again. We had to resort to manual verbal controls with a few gestures.

After a few initial hiccups, the job went pretty smoothly and we packed 24 bales of insulation in the space that a normal house would have used 7 or 8. Mark my words, foot thick walls will become de rigueur before long.

So that’s all great. We made a plan, we got our equipment and supplies, and we accomplished the plan. So why the title? How did our plans go off track? Monday was gorgeous all day. Not a drop of rain. A few clouds, a little breeze, but no thunderstorms at all. I understand chaos theory and why that makes predicting the weather a risky game under the best of circumstances. But they totally struck out this time.

Oh well. If that was the worst thing that happened over the weekend, it was a good weekend.

To reward ourselves for a (dirty) job well done, we had burgers and whatnot at the local exotic game restaurant. Joel had the elk burger and I had the angus burger with olives and mayo. Neither of us could really decide if the sodas and burgers tasted fantastic because we had worked so hard at our manly work, or if they were just that good. We also had an interesting conversation about the nature of life on the New Earth in the afterlife. The basic question was how you could have sinless perfection, without ending up in a static unchanging everlasting existence.

Can you have problems that need solving in a “perfect” world? Will we need to perform work? We concluded that yes, you can have work, and progress in a perfect existence.