ESL Files For Sharing: 2014-0610 Building a Playhouse

Hi all –

Sorry I’ve been in absentia for so long. (Absentia is a suburb of Sacramento where the preponderance of global warming is taking place).

Anyway, my wife and I traveled up to the Sacramento area last week and built a playhouse for our granddaughter Katelyn. Our son, Dave, and his wife, Kelly, live in Citrus Heights so the temperature was nice and toasty judging by the cars slowly melting by the curb. I’ve never seen a car sweat before!

The construction took us two days and umpteen bottles of water. I gave up on drinking the coffee because it was so weak, I had to help it out of the pot. The playset directions said that two moderately experienced adults could assemble it in one day but they must have been thinking of I.M. Pei and Christopher Wren instead of mere mortals like myself. I don’t like to think of myself as slow, but sometimes it takes me an hour and a half to watch “60 Minutes.” Anyway, in less time than it would take to carve a replica of the Taj Mahal from an oak stump using an Xacto knife with a rusty blade, we finished the playhouse. It even vaguely resembled the picture in the instructions.

Although there WERE instructions with pictures, the pictures sometimes showed the project from the front, sometimes from the back, sometimes from the exterior, sometimes from the interior, mostly all taken on a foggy day. There were aerial shots and some satellite imagery as well, I believe, along with the infrared scans, some X-rays and even an MRI or two. Fortunately, there were instructions in English as well as Urdu and Latin so, even though the manual was printed in 7 pt Gaussian Blur, we could sometimes divine where the misprints, errata and lacunae were. I’ve attached some pix below.