Where there's a will...

...there's a way

"It's almost like the climate changed," has become one of my frequent quips, and then if the hearer laughs, I follow with, "If only it were funny." A couple years ago, with the new, early arrival of warm temperatures, I was ventilating the house at night in early spring to capture cool air. It was atypically warm, and cooling that early in the year was atypical, but bears were rising from their winter summer right on schedule with the increasing daylight.

At the end of its winter rumination, a bear wakes hungry. Hunger is a tremendous, insistent motivator that can defeat an animal's usual, preserving fear of humans. When living in Connecticut, I would regularly see a three legged fox whose crippled condition had forced it to overcome fear and learn to raid household dumpsters, even in daylight. Bear sensibly avoid people, but a hungry enough one was too enticed by the smell of food in my kitchen and started to enter through my screen door just after I'd retired to bed, but alas, that meant entering through the screen, not opening the door.

I made a meager attempt to repair the bent and broken aluminum frame for the screen, but decided the end result would be well below even my par of a non-golfer, so for the past couple years my ventilation area has been decreased by one door, but then on Wednesday, riding south from Greenfield, I spied with my big eyes a screen door insert in a free pile on the side of the road. Oh wow, just what I need, just about twenty miles from where I need it.

Shocker, I know that road, and another two miles further along my way, I there was a substantial patch of woods where I could stash the framed screen until I returned another day with a trailer for transporting it home. A couple miles isn't that far, even riding one handed to free my right hand for carrying a six foot by two and half foot screen, but only three quarters of that was enough for me to decide I'd rather avoid the forty mile round trip with my long trailer and realize that after disassembling the five pieces of frame with my multitool (found of course in the road few years ago in New Hampshire, a few weeks before finding the identical tool, but in black, in the road in Belchertown), I could roll the whole screen into a compact load that could be strapped along the top tube!

Awful after sunset picture,

but that vertical pole is in fact the screen.

I was partly wrong. The disassembled and rolled mass instead went in a pannier with a bungy wrapped round it for some degree of stability. Well, it was enough stability and all of us made the trip home along with a few errands and an architecture lecture at UMass on the way. Wouldn't you know, one of the concepts in the talk touched on passive ventilation for occupant comfort in buildings! 

It all brings to mind my favorite line from Sexy Beast that Peter Waite loaned me saying it was then his favorite movie.

Warning: video clip contains swearing