But there are things to be done outside too. The siding crew are hard at work covering the exterior timber walls with planks of a substantial synthetic material representing planks. For more interest, the walls in key places are covered in irregular shaped tiles of the same material, resembling cedar shakes. Work on the Great Wall of Dahlonega continues to shore up the ridge beside the house – it is turning into an expensive business, 100 feet long and up to about 12 foot high in places. In fact there are two walls – a lower one to give a solid base and then the higher one to give ultimate protection. Between the lower and upper walls is a gap of about 5 foot – this is going to be a huge planting bed.
Lisa has already sent off soil samples to the local university to find out what we need to add to the red clay for good fertility. But no nasty chemicals. If your exposure to Georgia gardens has been the televised golf Masters competition in Augusta, you will have seen the brilliant green fairways and weed-free putting greens. We are reliably told that this is only achieved by the use of huge quantities of appallingly dangerous chemicals banned for agricultural use. Wells in the locality have to be regularly tested due to the quantity of arsenic in the groundwater. We promise not to do that.
On the build site
The rough fit of services to the house is now complete. Cables installed and neatly coiled. Shiny central heating ducts winding about the rafters. Pipes popping out of the floor (currently equipped with pressure gauges to prove that there are no leaks). The next major step is to get the building inspectors in to sign off the work, and this is scheduled for Monday. Once that is done, the insulation can be installed (extra thickness for soundproofing around the bedrooms, Bill the builder has advised – I wonder what he thinks might be going on). And at the end of next week we will be ready for the interior dry walls. These are made of sheetrock (plasterboard to the English) and then covered in “mud” and sanded down two times to give a lovely smooth finish. Bill warns us that this is a messy job (i.e. keep away whilst this goes on) and will take about two weeks.
Not that we haven’t been busy too, though. Orders for reclaimed bricks and for the reclaimed heart pine flooring have been placed. We have located a supply of reasonably prices interior doors – not an unimportant matter, as we have 30 of these to purchase. They are at a discount building supply store near Atlanta, who has an apparently unlimited supply of top brand name doors at a really knock down price. It seems incredible how many doors there are in this house – but count the number in your own home and you may find that a surprise, too. We have picked rocks for covering parts of the front of the house and the fireplaces, and now are thinking about a few pendant lights, paint colours, tiles for bathrooms and other requirements. We are determined to be ahead of the builders with the things we are sourcing and with any decisions we make so that if there are any delays, it will not be our fault!
Finally, a little fame. We are now featured on the website of Garrell and Associates, the architects who designed our house. You can see the report at the Garrell Associates website.
Robin’s Opinions of America
Continuing my weekly Likes and Dislikes section , here’s my personally opinionated thoughts for this week on life in USA.,
Likes
Friendly People
Some Americans have a reputation for being unfriendly and impolite. This characteristic seems to be a speciality of big cities like New York and Chicago. But out here in the country, with an economy size city like Dahlonega, things are very different. Strangers will often approach us, me particularly, commenting politely on my accent. Strange, I didn’t think I had an accent (and it seems slightly impolite to suggest that they are the ones with the accent!) Anyway, they are usually very friendly and open. A couple of recent examples:
> The truck driver delivering a special air-conditioning unit for the wine cellar got very chatty asking why I was in US, and what I liked about things here. We rapidly zeroed in on a mutually shared pet hatred – lengthy TV commercials for prescription medicines which contain a vast number of dire warnings potential side effects. He was particularly scathing about something to combat the dire ailment of “itchy eyes” – which offers as a side effect “itching eyes”. I am more alarmed by those with the risk of serious complications “including death”.
> I don’t know if my Britishness (and therefore trustworthiness) was detected in advance, but I was approached by a young lady in Walmart. She had no compunction about soliciting my advice on whether the vegetable she was holding was a cauliflower. She explained in some detail that her mother had sent her to get one from the fresh produce shelves, and she wanted to sure that she had the right thing. I suppose that also says something about the state of food awareness in USA that someone can reach their twenties without being able to identify a mysterious exotic vegetable.
There are a few local guidelines to prevent misunderstandings –
> Keep your distance – the magical circle of “personal space” is much larger here than in Europe.
> Politics and religion are particularly sensitive topics here (even more so than in Britain). But it’s not uncommon to be asked fairly early on which church you attend. “None” is not an suitable answer, so find a suitable form of words to prevent embarrassment on all sides.
> Avoid generalisations. Someone (also relatively new to this area) recently said to me about some of the long term residents “Don’t assume because they look like backwoodsmen that they are a bit dim or crazy – remember they have survived here for long time so they must be doing some things right”.
> Be extraordinarily careful about approaching a stranger’s house – there are lot of guns about. A columnist in the local paper recounted a recent hike through the woods when he got lost. Eventually, climbing over a ridge, he found that he was approaching someone’s back garden. He felt it was safer to retreat into the forest rather than go up to the back door to seek directions! Which reflects on the raw courage (stupidity?) of the evangelical missionary banging on our front door early on Saturday morning with his latest tract.
Dislikes
Dirty Politics
There are a lot of things to be concerned about in US politics, it seems to me. There will be elections to the US Senate in November, six months away. Already there are numerous TV advertisements every day. They fall into three categories:
1) Adverts which clearly state what policies a candidate endorses, and what good things they have done in the past. Not many of these to be seen! And some of the comments are a bit bizarre – one candidate proclaims his fiscal prudence because his private car is 20 years old. That doesn’t seem to me great financial planning, it must be very expensive to keep an antiquated gas guzzler on the road!
2) Negative adverts which only focus on what bad things the candidate claims his opponents have done or will do. The Republican adverts are spinning a scenario of increased taxes and Obamacare intimately locked together by demonic Democrats. No comment (yet) about the massive requests for federal funds that Georgia is seeking to support a port expansion project – pork barrel politics are alive and kicking. And no constructive comments on what alternatives the candidate offers – just stopping whatever he doesn’t like.
3) More suspicious are adverts from anonymous groups which offer purely negative campaigns against candidates of their selection with officially no endorsement from any candidate. The only adverts of this nature so far are opposing the leading Democrat contender, offering no positive suggestions. The worrying thing is that these group seem to have no constraints on how much funding they can accept from whom.
I do not have a word to say against democracy, it is a better approach than alternatives. What I am concerned about is the way in which rich individuals and corporations can dominate the information everyone receives in their living room. Candidates have been out soliciting campaign funds for a very long time, and have already raised huge sums – the four leading Republican candidates for the US Senate have publicly declared funds raised of $9.4 million, and that is before anyone has been selected in the upcoming primary elections. The one serious Democratic candidate has raised a third of that total on her own account. The election battle is dominated by these massive fundraising exercises, and one can only surmise at the reason for the donations.
Even more bizarre aspects of fundraising are
> the parallel stream of revenue where, for political donation purposes, corporations are treated legally as individuals with rights to give huge sums supporting candidates and their parties. Perhaps it is time for this rule to extend to other aspects of corporate behaviour, and treat them also as individuals for other purposes. Perhaps rather than a slap on the wrist or fines for market manipulation and allowing defective products to kill people, the entire company should be put into jail for fraud or manslaughter. Sure, it might be hard to lock up the entire workforce of, say, General Motors or J.P. Morgan for twenty years – but perhaps all the top management tier should be treated in the same way as an individual would be for such crimes.
> Secretive and anonymous “political action committees”. These shadowy organisations can spend unlimited funds with the only restriction that they cannot support a named candidate. But this is easily circumvented – they advertise in favour of policies supported by specific candidates and, more blatantly, directly against the named candidates they oppose. This lack of accountability or transparency is one of the cornerstones of dirty negative campaigning.
A list of an outsider’s observations on USA
1st September Thoughts on Grey Squirrels
6th October Subdivisions
13th October Flags in America
27th October The Confederate flag
10th November Groundhogs and A relentless hunt for bargains
17th November The American Mailbox and American meat
24th November Georgia Public Television and TV scheduling
1st December Serviceable roads and Awesome
8th December Wines from Georgia and Blue laws
22nd December Licence plates and Polystyrene plates
4th January Pressure balanced valves and Knocking Copy