So we’ve begun the complicated dance they call ‘professional home renovation’. It’s a complicated number; it involves being clean and dressed by a certain time, and the steps are more tightly choreographed. I’ve always compared it to swing-dancing in a minefield, based on my previous experience.
Up until the reality of hanging thousand-dollar cabinets in an out of square room hit me, I was happy to do just about everything myself. For the more specialized and dangerous tasks, like hooking high-voltage circuit breakers up to the board, or sanding oak floors, I was happy to hire somebody in. But this kitchen is a whole project; there’s demolition, plumbing, electrical, carpentry, framing, and finish work to be done in a particular order, and it’s all pretty specialized. If I had a million dollars and a month off work, I’d actually be looking forward to doing things like moving the gas line, or hanging the cabinets myself. But this house is out of square in four dimensions—which means I’d wake up two weeks after I started with nothing done, holding a pile of sawdust and some nails, and have no recollection of where I’d been or how the basement got flooded.
We’re thrilled with the kitchen planning company we went with (more info on that later: Movable Type now has unlimited weblogs, which means the house will get its own specific page) and we already have a plumber we know and like. We had an electrician, too, but I kept losing his number. I’ll back up:
Two years ago, we moved into this wreck of a house with a few conditions on the settlement. One of them was for the sellers to merge both electrical services into one (the doctor’s office was separate from the house) and upgrade the panel, which dated back to the 60’s and was a brand known for its ability to spontaneously catch fire. BG&E Home sent out a crew the first week we were in the house, which was a minor miracle based on further experience—I’m not recommending them—which consisted of one very nice man named B. who came to sort out the rat’s nest of wiring in our basement. I was at work, and Jen was upstairs in the kitchen unpacking our collection of orphan dishes, when she realized somebody was standing in the back doorway: The doctor’s son, who smelled like he’d fallen into a bottle (this was before noon on a weekday.) Jen’s curiosity got her talking to this man, and she felt safe enough to walk outside with him, knowing that B. was downstairs and by the window. (I’ll let her tell the rest of that story.)
Later on, after seeing the work he’d done, we got to talking with B. and asked him if he did electrical work on the side, pointing at all the ancient, deadly outlets around the house. He gave us his cell number, and I promptly lost it in the shuffle of housework and an upgrade to OS X. We tracked him down through BG&E, who gave us the number of his current employer, and I did a little social engineering with their receptionist to get his cell number. He came back out to hook up the wiring I’d prepared in the bedrooms, and a fair price for four hours’ work turned into a fair price for eight hours’ work (through no fault of his). He also got to meet Jen’s Mom, who had that particular ability of the terminally ill to ask probing questions into his personal life. He took all this in stride, which meant he was Good People. At this point he’d left BG&E Home and was working for another company, but was doing work for us on the side so we weren’t paying the markup. Unfortunately, I lost his number again during one of the many moves up and down the stairs before the wedding, and my focus was directed elsewhere after we returned from the honeymoon.
I should also add that my previous encounters with electricians have all been expensive and unsatisfying: For example, the job done in my first house was three times as expensive for half the work (and I’d done most of the prep, thinking it would save money.) This did not make me happy, and I decided never to re-hire that particular white trash electrician and his toothless apprentice.
Now that we’ve got the gears whirring, I realized we had to track B. down again through the various things we knew about him. Jen did a search online and found his old address down the street. (Aren’t the internets wonderful? Isn’t that also a little frightening, too?) There was no phone number associated with the address, and 411 couldn’t tell me anything. We decided to do a little footwork, and stopped at the address last weekend. I rang the doorbell, and we waited outside for a few minutes, but nothing happened. As we were walking back down the sidewalk, the door opened, and a woman in the throes of a massive sinus infection asked if she could help us. It turned out that this was B.’s wife, and that she didn’t have his number (they’re separated) but she’d pass along our information. We gave it to her, apologizing for getting her out of bed, and put the whole thing in the hands of the Sky Pilot.
As I was driving home yesterday evening, I called Jen to talk about dinner plans, and she told me she was talking with B., who was standing in our living room! He’d heard part of the story from his wife, knew of only one family on that side of Frederick road he’d done work for, and stopped by to see if it was us. As Jen explained all the work we had, his eyes got bigger and bigger. We stood and caught up for about a half hour, and he seemed happy to know we were looking for him. The sense of relief we have for getting him on the job is immense—he’s reliable, he’s good, and we like him. We’ve got first dibs, but if you need a good electrician in the Baltimore area, let me know. Because we have his number.
Two years ago, only a few scant weeks after Jen and I moved into an old, creaky house surrounded by old, creaky trees, hurricane Isabel flew through our neighborhood and knocked out the power. The two of us hunkered down on our mattress in the living room (this was before we’d accomplished anything upstairs) and and waited out the storm by candlelight, hoping we wouldn’t wake up in bed with the neighbor’s car. It turned out alright, though a family down the street had their house crushed by a tree (and almost wound up getting crushed themselves.)
I suppose, since there were dire predicitions of disaster earlier this year, that I got a little callous with Katrina. I also figure because I wasn’t watching as much TV this past week, I wasn’t getting the breathless “Storm Warning Updates” by the chuckleheads on our local newscasts. I was dimly aware of the hurricane and its aftermath, but it was only last night, sitting in front of CNN and watching footage of the disaster, that I really understood how fucked up the Gulf Coast actually is. Jen and I talked about making a donation to the Red Cross (which is apparently the best thing to do right now-they can’t handle canned goods or delivering supplies just yet) and we’ll get some money out to them in the next day or so.
My heart goes out to the folks in Louisiana and Georgia. God bless, and good luck.
Remember when I was talking about shark attacks a week or two ago?
There’s all this crap on the news about shark attacks this week. Does anybody remember four years ago, when there were all kinds of hysterical reports about shark attacks? Something else happened, and we forgot all about it.
I don’t think I’ve talked too much here or elsewhere about my Dad’s reposession agency. Back in 1984, my Dad decided to leave the rat race and purchase his own business. After a bunch of research, he found the most unlikely of ventures in the most unlikely of places: an established reposession agency based in a sleepy town north of New York City. I’ll have to go into some of the stories of culture shock at a different time, but this was a huge leap of faith for the whole family. We moved into a prewar house on the side of a mountain, surrounded by forest, and facing a fenced impound lot. When I say fenced, I mean chain-link fence topped with barbed wire and floodlights. The house was decent, if you count the inground pool, jacuzzi, and huge living room; it sucked for me because I lived in a tiny unheated room in the middle of nowhere with no car.
Having no car wasn’t an issue until I turned sixteen, because I wasn’t driving anyplace anyway. The bus sucked ass, but I knew my parents were too busy to be carting me all over creation. Besides, I got to drive cars all the time. I had a built-in job helping the yardman start, move, release, and fix the cars in the lot. How many people do you know who were driving Porsches at fifteen? I could parallel park a standard-shift car two years before the driving test. (I got pretty good at picking car locks, too, but that’s another story.) Besides working for my Dad, blowing shit up and exploring the local woods were pretty much all I did in the 9th grade.
By the 10th grade, though, life was getting pretty hellish. The local asshats were making bus rides a nightmare (it’s difficult to stand up to four guys who each outweigh you by 100lbs) and I was getting involved in school activities which meant I was staying after a lot.
Now, my best friend S. was taking a driving course at the Boces which meant he didn’t need a learning permit after taking the test like all the rest of us pukes. He also came from a large family which demanded a part-time chauffeur, something that was difficult for his parents, who worked all the time. They decided that he could help out and be the chauffeur, so they bought him a car. Not just any car, but a used 1970-something Cadillac Coupe De Ville. It was the ugliest car on the road, which is probably why it was affordable. It was also huge. Each door weighed about 500 pounds. The rear bench seat was half a mile wide, upholstered in a lovely shade of blue vinyl. (The car had once been baby blue, but someone had painted it rattle-can gray in the early eighties, and the paint cracked, so it looked like cat puke on a blue rug.)
Now, bear with me here. We spent a lot of summer days at the Dugan house, because of the pool. We also had a fully-stocked garage with lots of outlandish and exotic tools. One day S. came by with the Caddy and asked if I could help him replace the original AM radio with a new cassette deck. No problem, I said. This shouldn’t take more than an hour or two, and then we can swim for a while. We grabbed some pliers and screwdrivers, turned on the radio in the garage, and got to work taking apart the dashboard of his car.
Three hours later, cursing, sweating, and covered in twenty-year-old dust, we still hadn’t budged the thing. We had disassembled half the dashboard, laid it all out in neat sections on the driveway, and still couldn’t figure out how the engineers in Detroit had designed this car. It sounds like we were both idiots as far as mechanical engineers are concerned, but don’t let this story fool you: I had been taking apart and fixing things like radios, engines, and tools for years. S. also had natural skill in taking stuff apart—we weren’t just a pair of monkeys banging on suitcases out there.
For awhile it looked like we were going to have to remove the windshield to get at the back of the radio (I’m not kidding here. There was a flap of metal that curved up and over the back of the glass and down below the back of the thing) but we realized that there was another way. After taking apart most of the AC ducting under the dash, we had enough room to get at it, or at least, see the bottom of it, and we realized we had a problem: the damn thing was huge. I mean, the size of a toaster oven huge. The hole we had was about half the size, and there was no real evident way how to get it out of there.
At this point, S. had had enough of this shit, and just wanted to get the damn thing out of the car. We switched from finesse to brute strength, trading screwdrivers for chisels and hammers. Fifteen minutes later, we had a big enough hole carved out of non load-bearing metal to yank the bottom of the radio down toward the floorboards. When it finally came out, in a cloud of dust and old cigarette butts, we breathed a sigh of relief. It was then that we realized just what a bastard this thing was: it weighed about fifteen pounds, and it looked like a piece of discarded Soviet military equipment. But the corker was that it had one thick wire hanging off the back, which lead to a complicated, ancient plastic harness with no diagram. This meant bad news. This meant there would be no new radio in the Cadillac.
This radio had to die.
But how to do it? How to properly dispose of this foul, ancient, cursed beast?
It turned out that the answer was right over our heads.
At some point, when my mother’s back was obviously turned, S. and I found that we could easily climb onto the roof of the garage. From there, it was a simple matter of time before we started jumping from the roof of the garage, over four feet of solid concrete, and into the deep end of the pool. (The garage was separated from the house by the pool, and was built to withstand hurricanes. It had a two-story peak and a slope gentle enough to scale.) In a good clip, it was a one-minute circuit around the back of the garage, onto the roof, and into the water. We decided we would use this ninja skill for purposes of evil. S. backed the Cadillac up twenty feet (after filling the trunk with the assorted debris from the dashboard-half of it would remain there until the car was officially retired) and we climbed onto the roof of the garage and met at the peak. S. said a few words, which have now been lost to the ages, and lofted the radio up into the afternoon sunshine.
It came down onto the pavement with a dull thud, bounced, and came to a stop. There was no evident damage. I climbed down to retrieve it, handed it back up to him, and he threw it again. This cycle repeated at least five or six times, until one of the corners began to give way. Then, it seemed like the thing just flew apart. In a cloud of electrical components, metal, and plastic, the radio exploded, and we cheered heartily at the death of the beast.
Before retiring to the pool, we examined the lump of metal that had once been a radio. Tubes and wires stuck out the side, and little sheets of metal fell from the back plate. We realized we were standing in a circle of these things, and I bent to pick one up. It was flat, and shaped like an uppercase “E”. There were hundreds of them on the ground. It took us another half an hour to police all of the damn things up.
S. finally did put his stereo in that Caddy, hanging out of the cavernous hole left by the Beast, and it stayed with the car until its retirement. We never did figure out what the ‘E’s were for, but when I take the Jeep radio, which has begun to fail on me more and more, and throw it off the roof of our house onto the pavement, I’m going to be looking for those goddamn ‘E’s.
Somebody busted out the Nerf darts at work today. For anybody who was employed by a certain alma mater of mine (or any dot-com, for that matter), this is a recognizable portent of doom.
<huddles under desk, shivering>
Update: It’s worse than I thought. Todd brought me one of the darts, which has the company name printed on the side for GDC. The timetable for Judgement has been moved forward six months.
The End Of An Era. Growing up on the outskirts of the New York City area, the local TV stations played many commercials aimed at that market. Besides the Broadway musical, Ritz Thrift Shop, and Potampkin Cadillac ads, there was the ever-present jingle for Beautiful Mount Airy Lodge, accompanied by shots of goy vacationers skiing down shallow slopes, doing the overbite shuffle to Engelbert Humperdinck, and lounging in heart-shaped jacuzzis. This, apparently, was the height of luxury. It was to my dismay this morning to read that the whole place is up for auction, including those heart-shaped tubs. (If those tubs could only talk….yeccch.)
Upgrade. Yesterday I took advantage of the lull at work (about half the staff stayed home to take care of their kids) to install Movable Type on my Powerbook. Following a combination of these directions and the included instructions, I had the whole thing running in about ten minutes, with some minor glitches. I’d used the previous 2.X series a couple years ago, and found it easy to use, but the lure of inexpensive bandwidth has kept me decidedly low-tech. Looking around at some options, however, I think I’ve decided to invest in a secondary web address and migrate this log off the domain to a seperate location. This will allow for (finally!) the ease of online content addition, as opposed to hand-coding every log entry; a solution to requests for an RSS feed, a local comments database, a sideblog or two, and other goodies. I’m currently wrestling the CSS included with Movable Type and redesigning the layout, and when I have a clean working layout, I’ll pull the trigger and set up a new site. Suggestions for a new domain name, anyone?
I’ve not been using my camera these days for anything besides some random shots of the hallway which never seems to progress; it’s a real shame because there are things out there to photograph, but I’ve just not been seeing them. Today, through one place to another, I visited heather’s site (she’s also responsible for the mirror project) and through hers another good photography site. I started thinking about pictures again. I remember when I first got my digital camera and was shooting everything I saw—living in a photogenic area of the city made finding subjects easy. Nowadays, I commute blindly by highway, rarely stopping to search for interesting shots. Instead of just carrying my camera around with me, I need to start using it again. Additionally: How to rig an old digital to take a picture a minute for the old Kodak sitting on the shelf.
Continuing on another thread, I’m rooting for Jay to win tonight, but thinking that Kara will probably take the whole thing.
Helpful Design Link: Fontleech, a site chronicling free fonts for poor designers.
painted hallway, 2.23.04
This morning my neck is a solid chunk of concrete, thanks to the hibernation-mode sleep I got last night. The good news is that the hallway is primed upstairs and 95% ready for a final coat of bright white paint; the bad news is that the entire house is covered in white dust again. Meanwhile Penn has suddenly developed that wierd eye swelling thing where the inside of the eyelid blows up like a balloon and makes him look like a post-match Rocky. This means I’ll have to squirt medicine into his mouth (twice) and his eye once every 12 hours for the next week or so—I think the poor cat is ready to run away from home by now.
I think that’s my old guitar…but I don’t know the girl.
In the winter of 1986, my Dad drove me out to Mt. Kisco to look at a bass guitar listed in the classifieds. I’d just picked up electric bass after playing upright for three years, and it was time to find a beginner’s instrument. We walked up a flight of stairs to a dark apartment building and met with a longhaired, half-stoned dude who took us into his practice room. He had several guitars lined up and handed us the largest of them all, a survivor from the late 1970’s: an Ibanez Blazer, woodgrain with a black pickguard. It had the longest neck of any guitar I’ve ever seen (21 frets), it weighed more than a car, and it had deeper sound than a foghorn. I tried it out with a rudimentary blues line, feeling sheepish and embarrassed, and it sounded good. I don’t know what my Dad paid for it, but we lugged it back to the Rabbit and took it home. On this bass I learned to play, finding it was easier learn jazz than keep up with Geddy Lee (not that I didn’t try.) Later, I bought a Steinberger from my friend, finding its portability and size easier for college, and the Ibanez became second fiddle (pun intended.) Eventually, in the post-graduate purge, I “sold” it to a friend so that his wacky girlfriend could join an all-grrl punk band, and it passed out of my hands. I think the bass in this Microsoft ad could be mine, only because the pickups are white—we had the original pickups pulled and replaced by the music store in town, and for some dumb reason they gave us white—we never bothered to have them switched out. I heard that girl moved to Philadelphia and took it with her years ago, so imagine my surprise when I saw it again. It’s nice to think that maybe one of us got famous. (And thanks, Dad.)
This evening, over a dinner of grilled steak, broccoli, and avocado with PBR in front of a new episode of Lost, I discovered my wife and I shared an adolescent love for Hong Kong Phooey. (One of my favorite memories of my grandma Dugan was sitting at her kitchen table in front of a pair of mini-Frosted Flakes boxes while she adjusted the rabbit ears on the TV so that we could watch cartoons through the snow.)
Gift. Looks like we have next Monday off, which should give me a bunch of time to finish off some projects at the house. At the top of the list: Finishing the hallway, which is creeping slowly toward its conclusion. There’s some finish sanding to be done, some caulking, and then I think we’re ready for paint. I’m also going to take advantage of the forecasted good weather to see if I can’t get the Scout into the garage.
I may have to give this application a try in the next couple of weeks. Apparently it’s a stand-alone app for iTunes which will metatag all of your untagged music, complete with album art. The only hangup I have is whether or not it would overwrite my current custom tags or ratings.
I’m also going to try to install OSX on Renie’s old beige G3 and see if I can make a FrankenComputer out of it, just for fun. (I have no idea what I could do with it right now, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.)
I wrote about my peculiar fascination with a particular bit of history here a few years back. In August of 1943, a bunch of American planes flew a bombing mission to the oil fields of Romania. What made this mission unique was that they flew at low-level—where most raids were flown at 20,000 feet, this one was at treetop height. I’ve always been interested about aviation history, and loved planes, but there was something about this story that stuck with me. Since I’ve been online, I’ve searched for information on the subject, and found some places where it’s discussed in great detail by some of the men who flew the mission.
As Jen and I were leaving Baltimore last friday, we stopped at the Giant to pick up some snacks. On our way out I spied an older gentleman with a baseball cap sitting on a bench by the exits. Passing by, I noticed he had a 98th Bomb Group patch on the bill—one of the main groups involved with the bomb raid. Although we were in a bit of a hurry, I stopped and asked him about the patch, and his eyes lit up. After a few minutes of talking with him, it turned out he wasn’t on the August raid (he missed it due to illness) but he eventually flew 37 missions—no small feat in thse days. Jen and I sat with him for a fascinating half hour, and he invited us to stop up to his house to look through his collection of papers and photos from the war, and talk about history. I can’t wait.
This morning I was in downtown Baltimore for a doctor’s appointment, and decided to kill two birds by stopping by the nearest branch of the Johns Hopkins Credit Union to close my account out. This account has been open since my first “real” job out of college that didn’t involve a hammer, ladder, or dust mask, as a print designer at Hopkins. The account has been sitting and slowly hemmorhaging money since they screwed up a couple of payments on a loan and reduced my balance below the minimum, so every month they deduct $1.50 for the ATM fee and add $0.90 in interest. Driving to the Bayview campus took me squarely through my old neighborhood, so I decided to mosey around and see what was happening.
First off, I read in the City Paper that DeGroen’s Brewery is shutting down. After many years of making the best local beer around, they couldn’t make a profit (and the construction around their location killed their foot traffic.) So my favorite Märzen will cease to exist.
Canton is still dotted with real-estate signs and renovation work trucks; what was Mrs. Bonnie’s Elvis Shrine is now an empty rehab, sporting a vinyl advertisement for first-time homeowners. My old house looks good; the new owner removed the 1950’s-era storm door off and put a gold kickplate and a large lockset on the front door. The whisky barrel continues to rot away next to the steps. My old-skool neighbors are still home—the Cadillac sits gleaming at its parking spot next door, and Nell’s bench is still outside waiting for a group of friends to gather.
The cabinet factory one block over and behind 620 is now a levelled vacant lot, featuring a sign advertising three-floor townhomes (with garage) starting in at $400K. (There were rumors it was to become an outdoor biergarten and high-rise condos.) $400K for a breathtaking view of the Shell station parking lot and American Harry’s roof. sweet. The rehabbed house on the north corner of Fleet, which had been vacant and empty for three years, is occupied again; the back parking pad now houses a motorcycle and gas grill where people used to throw their trash bags. (Note to the new owners: I used to watch bums climb through your kitchen window and piss on your living room floor. Enjoy!) Linwood Avenue now features nose-in parking, which probably alleviated the local lack of parking for about fifteen minutes.
Further up into Highlandtown, the march of Latino culture continues eastwards. Empty storefronts are now brightly colored bodegas and shops (Who knew that “Zapatas Botas” meant “Sneaky Feet?”) and Provident Bank has taken up residence on a prominent corner. The once-beautiful Grand Theater has been razed to make way for a new branch of the Enoch Pratt Library. Old Baltimore still exists, though, in the old guy with the 60’s era plaid pants crossing Eastern Avenue, the combination grocer/electronic store/garden center, and the heartwarming sight of 14-year-old mommies pushing their kids in strollers. Haussner’s is still empty, but the Patterson movie theater is now a neighborhood rec center. Plus ça change, plus ça méme chose.