Hey Ma, ain't that blue smoke in the air over Pentoga?

September 23, 2012 – Sunday morning

Pentoga Road

I wonder who the sick, perverted, Chinaman was who invented “Futon-in-a-Box?” I guess someone figured wine in a box worked, why not a futon?

By the time I finished assembling a Wal-Mart special yesterday, a futon made in China that came in a box, I probably set any American/Chinese diplomatic relations back a century or two. For certain, any semblance of diversity and tolerance went by the wayside.

Saturday morning began poorly with breakfast. While moving the contents of Sargie’s kitchen cabinets a few days ago, I had discovered a large box of Bisquick, one that had been stuck in the furthest nooks of a top cabinet and long since forgotten. Mmm, biscuits and gravy.

While Sarge was getting ready for work, I mixed and kneaded and plopped several balls of dough on a cookie sheet and put them in the oven.

I later read the contents of the box had expired over a decade ago. The biscuits were a dismal failure and tasted like… biscuits made from a ten-year-old mix. Resembling miniature canon balls in both texture and quality, they were dumped into the bear food bucket. In the end, I made pancakes. I dislike cooking failures and allowed a small amount of blue smoke to exit my ears.

One positive note about Saturday’s breakfast; a cantaloupe from the garden was one of the best I’ve had in years. It was juicy, succulent, and very sweet. The first meal of the day wasn’t a complete failure.

Sargie had just left for work, the weather was lousy, and I decided it was Futon Day on Pentoga Road. We’d purchased the folding couch-like bed this past summer while on sale to serve as an extra place for company to sleep. There was already a spare bed, a queen-sized sleeper sofa, an inflatable double mattress, and Sargie and I thought with the futon, we’d be able to accommodate a fairly good-sized crowd of people, even Sargie’s sons and friends, the Pennington boys and families, and the Milligan cousins, who number in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

I carried a good attitude about the entire construction process while arranging my tools, a power screwdriver, a hex key, and a wrench that was included in the nuts and bolt’s package.

Right out of the box

Small, detailed, instructions were never my forte. Sargie had brought home a large magnifier last week to aid with my reading. I found myself holding it in front of the photocopied instructions with little success.

Maybe being closer to the window… how about placing them flat on the floor and illuminating them with my hiking headlamp? I even lay on my back with legs in the air holding the instructions overhead in an effort to gain a better perspective of how to assemble a futon couch made in China that came in a box.

In the end, I simply started assembling. There were more pieces than Milligan cousins.

You no doubt saw the blue smoke rising from Pentoga Road late Saturday morning. From where you live, chances are, it rising in the north. No, it wasn’t me burning the trash. It was Tommy P in the assembling and disassembling process. Hours later, by process of elimination, I emerged from the room victorious.  The nuts, bolts, and pieces all came out even and our newest piece of furniture sat solidly against one wall.

I figured while I was miserable, I might as well clean the upstairs, run the vacuum sweeper so Sargie wouldn’t feel as though she needed to clean on her one day off this week.

The previous owners had a huge, fake wood, particleboard, entertainment center that completely covered one wall in the dining room. Rather than waste all that good imitation wood, I made a much smaller cabinet in which to store old VCR tapes and DVDs.

Saturday morning, I grabbed hold of the cabinet so I might sweep in back of it.

I lifted one end and pulled. The top came off. More blue smoke rose from the vicinity of Pentoga Road.

But still, the futon was assembled and after trying it on for size, discovered it was downright comfortable. The upstairs was vacuumed and fairly clean. What else to do on a windy, intermittently rainy day?

I wanted to go to town and purchase a brush to scrub the inside of the chimney. No flue fires for us this year. First, a call was made to Sheri.

Could she use another batch of ripe tomatoes? She said, bring ‘em on in.

I loaded two grocery bags with tomatoes, put them in the Blazer, and started down the road.

Wait, was the flue six or eight inches?

I drove further fairly certain it was eight inches in diameter.

But, maybe, it was only six. Better turn around and measure.

It’s a good thing I did. It’s a six-inch chimney.

To the left is a shield to prevent the snow and ice from sliding down the tin roof and taking the chimney with it.

I enjoyed my visit with Mark and Sheri and especially enjoyed Leroy and his baby sister, Sheri’s nephew and niece with whom they were babysitting for the weekend. We big people talked and gabbed and Mark even shared a few White Castle sliders.

I bade all goodbye and had started for the door when I discovered I’d failed to bring my wallet.  You might have seen the blue smoke rising from Caspian, Michigan, at that point.

I don’t care to drive anymore, at least on the roads. I’m sure there was blue smoke streaming from the SUV’s windows as I navigated the ten miles from town to the house and back to the hardware store.

A nylon bristle head or wire? Of course, wire. I wanted the brush to scrub that chimney. No feel-good interior wiping down for me. One eight-foot section of handle or two? Flexible or solid?

The choices a man is forced to make so he may clean the inside of a flue are mind boggling, confusing, and in the end, expensive. I walked from the hardware store much poorer and dreading the chore that lay ahead of me.

I pried the chimney cap off. I couldn’t see inside the darn thing. Was it clean or dirty? I didn’t really care. I’d just spent half of next month’s retirement check on the brush and handles. It was getting cleaned, regardless. But still, I wanted to know.

I almost lost my camera down the chimney as I snapped a picture. After, I downloaded the image on my computer so I might see what I was dealing with.

And I scrubbed… up and down, round and round, in and out. At one point, the brush caught something inside the chimney.

I pulled and yanked, pushed and turned. Whatever it was, let go. Later I discovered the pipe had come off the stove.

I won’t write about the mess I found inside the living room, the piles of soot laying around the stove and on the floor... or the minute, fine, black, dust that lay over the furniture and filled the air.

I’m not even going to mention the blue smoke that once again rose as I attempted to use the wet/dry vac to suck up the mess only to find it was spitting out the black particles as fast as they were being inhaled.

At this writing, the flue is scrubbed and cleaned and ready for another winter season’s worth of use. The living room is spotless and looks as though Better Homes and Gardens will be doing a photo shoot later today.

The inside of the chimney is spotless. Notice how there are no pictures of the living room?

Jerad and a friend stopped last night to visit. It was good to see my young buddy. We talked about his work, but mostly, of the upcoming hunting season.

Sargie had to work late and arrived home exclaiming how nice the living room and stove looked. She journeyed upstairs to the spare bedroom, sat on the futon, and expressed how comfortable and solid-feeling it was. For the first time all day, no blue smoke clouded the air and everything was good in my world.

Sargie’s off today, the sun is out, and I swear I just saw a bluebird fly past my window followed by a butterfly and ladybug. Somewhere in the background, I hear Zippity Do Dah being sung accompanied by a hundred piece orchestra, and who knows, maybe we’ll enjoy mint juleps out on the veranda.

Failing that, we might try to move one of the last loads of Sargie’s belongings from her old house later this afternoon between rain showers. There’s also an old maple tree at the camp to cut, work up, and bring home. And most importantly, it’s NFL Sunday. That, along with Sargie being home, makes all the blue smoke of yesterday seem to dissapate.

And so are the tales from Pentoga Road…

Who is that girl behind the sale bill?