Thanksgiving

Winter is peeking its head in the door, and I'm not scared. All of our materials for the final framing and trim are stacked inside the house, the trim is going on according to schedule, the kids all have skis and coats and so on, and there are only two more openings to close in: Our bedroom door (which is more like a big window) and the entry door upstairs. Add to this the fact that I figured out how to finish the framing of the arch ceiling and the stairs to the attic, and that I'm sitting in bed listening to Renée Fleming's Sacred Songs and you find me in a state of content rare for a mental case like myself. It's a great recording. I think if the sun suddenly kicked into supernova gear I would put this on and it might even be enjoyable being burnt to a crusty crud.
I was laid up for a couple weeks with a pulled muscle and took the opportunity to take on some of the planning and vision that I'd been putting off. One of the fun parts of this was figuring out how to build an arched ceiling. The shape that seemed to make sense was something like a segment of an ellipse, as in this sketch. What is an ellipse? It's just like a circle but with two centers, called foci. It's the shape of our orbit around the sun, where one of the foci in the center of the sun. The other is also inside the sun, so it's pretty much a circle. But other objects like pluto and some comets have orbits which are not so circular, but also are ellipses where one focus is the center of the sun.
Why does any of this matter? Because it makes a beautiful arch. Maybe it's beautiful because it represents the balance between a force and a reaction and maybe it's just a lot easier than trying to draw such a large shape freehand. But here I am after drawing a full-scale diagram of the walls and trusses and experimenting with nails in the floor for focus points and string lengths to get a radius that would fit comfortably inside the framing. Now all we have to do is cut this curve into a bunch of pieces of plywood and attach these to the trusses, and then fit little studs in between them and we'll have the bones up and ready for drywall.
The first things to do though are closing in the basement and framing the bathrooms. This will give us the downstairs to work on through the cold months. The bathrooms are priority so that we won't be held back when we're hooking up plumbing.
As for today, I'll put it down and go feast with the Grandma and Grandpa in Harvey. Go Packers.