Behind the Ironic Column

OK, I definitely don’t need to know the setback rules for decks in a taxing jurisdiction that I lived in 10 years ago.  Undoubtedly they’ve changed anyway.  Plus, the likelihood of my ever living there again, or writing a novel that just happens to need those specific facts, is very slim. 

And likely I can dispense with the articles on how to load and maneuver a caulking gun.  Curiously enough, I don’t seem to have any files on how to handle a standard gun.  I never used the caulking gun  and I seem to remember it went away in some yard sale or other.  So there’s really no need for a how-to article on a tool I don’t even have. 

But rope splicing – now that’s a more interesting question.  Given the number of unlikely situations I find myself in, or that my friends find themselves in, there’s a good chance that the ability to splice a rope might come in handy.  Of course it’s likely to be on some occasion out in the woods where I won’t have my reference articles easily accessible.  It seems like one of those skills, like lock-picking or hotwiring a car, that you need to be able to perform without even thinking about it.  So what I really should do is sit down and practice rope-splicing.  Maybe that’s even what I intended to do when I saved that article.  Or maybe I only thought I might write about some instance where the heroine saves the day with her uncanny ability to splice a rope.  (So some of what I write is fantasy.) 

In case you’re wondering, I am once again trying to sort through some accumulated files and papers with an eye toward purging the irrelevant, outdated, or otherwise useless materials.  But I have to remind you that I come from a long line of thrifty quilt-makers.  I never quite understood why anyone needed to go to a fabric store and buy pieces of material in order to start quilting.  Didn’t everyone have boxes of “good” scrap materials?  Pieces of fabric left over from other projects that were too big to be discarded but too small to be used for real garments.   In my family we have enough good scraps to make quilts for generations – not that any of us are actively making quilts at the moment, but you never know.  

So I’ll sacrifice setbacks and caulking, but not rope-splicing.  Because you never know.

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