yo soy insulados

After a day and a half of watching men in strange white suits emerge covered with flecks and daubs of strange whitish goo, we wandered up to the new space to discover...insulation! Okay, we knew that's what was going on...but it did look kind of science-fiction-y. Still does, actually:





This "foam in place" insulation provides better R-value (the measure of insulation) and is soy-based (thus my atrocious pseudo-Spanish pun as title). Unlike its distant cousin, such as the polyurethane used in the hideous Wisconsin Dells "Xanadu, House of the Future" - which we saw just before it was destroyed in the mid-'90s, this stuff won't give off a terrible funk...which at Xanadu wasn't just because of the Prince-style decor, which included a round bed and pink-purple shag carpeting. I think everything was sealed up so tight there was no airflow. Although you want insulation to insulate, you still need to allow air to circulate...

Of course, our freaky future-cave walls aren't the real walls, only the insulation - the drywaller's scheduled within a week or so, after the windows are installed.

We also had an adventure with a rogue squirrel. Seems he managed to get in, probably yesterday, via an opening in the plastic covering one of the windows, and then managed to sequester himself within the soffit space. They tend to be scared of noises and people, and we had plenty of those. Unfortunately for Soffity the Squirrel, the noises and people were the aforementioned men in white suits with hoses full of plastic goo (okay, "soy-based goo"...), who were not Devo but were insulators - and after their work, Soffity was trapped. We heard him scratchiting about last night, trying to find a way out. So this morning, we went up on a ladder and freed an opening in the soffits. The Humane Society's website said squirrels do not like noises and suggested playing loud, percussive music or talk radio (squirrels hate right-wing politics), so we set up two boomboxes at either end of the attic and deployed each one with an Einstürzende Neubauten CD on shuffle mode. Fortunately, Soffity is not a fan of the German avant-noise scene, and as far as we can tell (no scritching tonight) he left through the exit we provided for him. We do hope he didn't drop dead of a heart attack - I guess we'll find out in a day or so.

(Fun fact: two Neubauten tracks playing simultaneously is nearly indistinguishable from a single Neubauten track!)