Sunday, April 29, 2007

A work in progress


The backyard construction zone at sunrise. Still much to be done.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Crap!


I just realized we have a wedding shoot booked for July 14, which, besides being my birthday, is right smack in the middle of the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America International Rally.
Dammit!

Anniversary

My Treo smartphone reminds me of birthdays and anniversaries. The reminder icon was blinking when I turned it on this afternoon.
Today would have been my parents' 68th wedding anniversary. So here they are, circa 1950.

The Deck is Done


The deck crew showed up about 10 a.m. and had the project finished by noon.
Dave, the foreman (back row, far left), decided the support post (sticking out of the top of his head) needed to stay. The original thought was that it served no purpose, but after a couple of days without anything under it, he noticed the porch roof was sagging a bit.
No big deal. We've been walking around it for six years and didn't think of it as a significant problem.
Dave opined we should give the concrete footings about a week to set up properly before moving the hot tub onto the deck, so that gives us a few days to apply Thompson's water seal to the deck and to properly clean and stain the redwood enclosure on the hot tub.
It's great to have full use of our back door again.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Cool logo

One of my favorite t-shirts - from Portland, Ore.

Progress


We drove to Bloomington yesterday, leaving the deck crew hard at work about noon.
The mission was to witness the induction of Maria's daughter, Morgan, into Phi Beta Kappa.
For those who aren't up to speed on academic honoraries, Phi Beta Kappa is the premiere liberal arts honorary with such illustrious members as Tom Brokaw, Michael Crichton, Joe Lieberman, Angela Davis, Bill Clinton, Lynne Cheney, Elizabeth Dole, Sen. Dick Lugar, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Clive Davis, Henry Kissinger, Susan Sontag, Alen Specter, Stephen Sondheim, George H.W. Bush, Betty Friedan, Caspar Weinberger, Robert McNamara, Richard Helms, Dean Rusk, Dr. Jonas Salk, James Michener, William O. Douglas, Alfred Kiinsey, Dean Acheson, Pearl Buck, John Foster Dulles, Felix Frankfurter, Theodore Roosevelt, william Howard Taft, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Morse, Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams and John Marshall. So she's in pretty good company.
When we returned about 11 p.m., we found much of the deck completed, including the screening fence on the driveway side. We learned this morning that they stopped because they ran out of lumber. As you can see from the photos, there's still a big opening just outside the back door. That will be covered by a raised level of decking. This morning was a washout because of rain and since it's almost 3:30 p.m. now, I expect we won't see the crew until tomorrow at the earliest.
The hot tub will be placed between the screening fence and the back door.
So far, we're pleased with the way it's coming together.

Monday, April 23, 2007

The Deck


We expected Dave, the deck guy, to show up this morning, sit down at the kitchen table with us, drink a cup of coffee with us and hash out a plan for our new deck.
Instead, a crew of five guys appeared about 9 a.m. with sledge hammers and other implements of destruction to rip what was left of our deck from the rear of the house. We had left the small platform and steps just outside the back door, so as to facilitate the use of the door, which is about four feet above ground level.
They were well along by the time Dave arrived. His design style is to walk around the site and point out what he thinks should go where. At no time did he turn to pen and paper. This seat-of-the-pants style makes me pretty freaking nervous, but I went along with it.
We ended up agreeing upon a plan that places the hot tub on the deck between the back door and the driveway with a 9-foot-high screening fence between the tub and the driveway, shielding the tub from the sight of neighbors to the south. The projection of the kitchen from the rear of the house blocks the view from the neighbors to the north and in both cases we should get relief from the wind.
After staking and stringing out the outlines of the structure, Dave left and the worker bees dug post holes and set the main support posts in concrete. Dave seemed to think the deck could be finished tomorrow, which seems pretty ambitious. We shall see.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Dress shopping

I'm sitting in a chair outside the fitting rooms while Maria shops for a dress at the Lafayette Macy's and a woman goes in with this boy in tow. He whines like a baby and drops to the carpet right in front of the door. Looks like he's 14 or 15. Kinda creepy.
One more reason why I dislike shopping.
Added later:
The kid was with his grandmother, mother and sister as they shopped for a prom dress for the sister. She, by the way, looked like the brother, only with longer hair and she whined constantly about the dresses she was being asked to try on.
Meanwhile, the boy flopped around on the carpet, blocking the aisle to the fitting rooms. After three women had to step over him, he decided to lie under one of the clothing racks. Several shoppers were clearly weirded out by this, but no one said anything. Oh, and he whined that there weren't enough chairs outside the fitting rooms. I was in the only chair available and presumably he thought I should give it to him. It was the most egregious example of people not knowing how to behave in public that I've witnessed in a long time.
Here's a six-frame sequence of the amazing display. That's his mother, stepping around him, in the last frame. It obviously hadn't occurred to her to tell him to get the hell off of the floor and act his age.

Research

Looking for deck ideas at Barnes & Noble.

Needing a morel compass


We went mushrooming yesterday afternoon at the invitation of Lauri and Jim at their place in the country. They live in an area of woods and ravines and creeks where the wily morel mushroom abounds.
It has been many years since I went mushrooming. My fondest recollection is of a day when I was about 10 and my dad took me mushrooming at the farm of his oldest sister and her husband up in Carroll County, east of Ockley, Ind. We tramped around the woods on their farm and, while I was a miserable failure at finding mushrooms, my dad and my uncle more than made up for it. We returned to the house with a huge haul of morels, which my Aunt Mabel soaked in saltwater, rolled in flour and fried in butter. We ate until we couldn't eat any more and it was fabulous.
Yesterday's haul was less impressive, but we had a great time tramping around the woods and watching Lauri and Jim's two sons romping around like two puppies.
We came home with a couple of handfuls of smallish morels that Maria washed and soaked in salt. Sometime around 11 p.m., we got the munchies and began eyeing the mushrooms. Maria had never prepared morels, but you wouldn't have know it from the final result. Morels have a complex flavor that especially excites the tastebuds on the sides of the tongue near the back. I won't try to describe the taste because I can't think of anything to compare it with.
But it left us wanting more!
Lauri opined that our relatively small haul yesterday was probably because it's a little early in the season.
Good. That means there's more to look forward to this spring!

Friday, April 20, 2007

Soooooo tired

Maria and I have been working nights - at least 3-11 p.m. and usually later - since she had to fire a flaky night copy editor in early January.
She also lost her prize-winning page designer in December and the 19-year-old kid she hired as a replacement is learning, but still needs supervision. Some weeks we work five nights, some weeks it's six. I have mixed feelings about it. I enjoy working with Maria and it's fun being back in newspapering on my own terms, but we're both desperately longing to get our evenings back.
I'm a morning person and this late-night stuff means I get to sleep around 2 a.m. or maybe even as late as 3 a.m. Pete the Aussie is also a morning dog and starts yarking in his kennel in the kitchen when the sky begins to get light around 6:30 a.m. That means one of us has to get up and let him and Ruthie out to do their doggy business in the back yard. If we're lucky, we can get back to sleep for another two or three hours. As often as not, I'm sufficiently wide awake by the time the dogs come back in that more sleep is out of the question.
Then there's the tricky midnight-or-later drive home. The 17 miles of twisty two-lane state highway that we drive from home to the office and back again is thick with deer. One night earlier this week, we counted nine deer strung out along the roadside. And for every deer we see, there are probably three or four nearby that escape our notice. I've had to jam on the brakes a couple of times when they dart across the highway, but mostly I just putt along at 45-50 mph with dashboard lights dimmed, scanning the road ahead.
Maria has hired a couple of new staff members, but they won't come aboard until early June, so we will probably have to soldier on for another six weeks or so.
I guess there isn't any point to this rambling post other than to say I'm very tired of giving up our nights and whatever social life we might have had and of having to run the deer gauntlet every night.
Anyone want a job as a page designer or a night copy editor at a medium-sized Indiana daily newspaper?

Crisis averted


Our contractor and the building inspector were here this morning and we took a more accurate measure of the property line based upon a surveyor's report that was prepared at the time we bought the place in late 2001.
According to the survey, the north property line is 11 feet north of the side of the house. Extending this line east to the garage foundation slab, we discovered we are, at the worst, only 5.5 feet from the property line and most probably a full 6 feet, which is the required setback.
The building inspector seemed confident that our problems are over with regard to the setback. Now we have to see if he can fast-track the permit to continue. In the meantime, we're charging ahead with the deck, which does not require a permit.
Our contractor said his deck man will be here about 9 a.m. on Monday to work out a deck design for us.
That means we'll soon have our hot tub back in operation, which will be a huge relief.
Now that the old deck is mostly gone, we have discovered the reason our kitchen plumbing freezes every winter. Some morons removed a concrete block from the foundation to run electrical conduit to the garage and did a sloppy job of trying to plug the opening with foam insulation. (See photo above.) We will, of course, correct this and look forward to our first winter without frozen pipes and dishwasher repairs.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Interim report

We have a meeting set for 9 a.m. tomorrow with our contractor/project manager and the town's building inspector and I'm generally optimistic. I think the building inspector genuinely wants to help us.
In the meantime, Ruthie the Wonder Dog has finally figured out that the invisible fence dog containment system is not functioning. The labor crew came to me on Tuesday afternoon to report that she'd taken off and was down the street by the elementary school. I grabbed a leash, hopped into my del Sol and chased her down at the park. She did it again yesterday and, of course, thinks it's great fun to run away when I call her or pursue her.
So I went to the basement this afternoon and dug out the set of little white boundary flags that we used to train her with the invisible fence. I set them around the perimeter of the yard and, when she came outside, I admonished her, "Bad flags!" She eyed them disapprovingly, but she stayed in the yard.
Pete the Aussie has never paid much attention to the electric shocks from his collar when he crosses the line. We can't figure out whether it's just his super-thick fur or if he just doesn't care. I phoned Innotek, the manufacturer of the system, a couple of weeks ago and they suggested trimming his throat fur and coating the contacts on his shock collar and the area they touch on his throat with petroleum jelly. We tried it, but didn't notice any change. He still ignored the line and enjoyed his now-regular run around the two houses to the south.
Once our construction work is far enough along, we're going to install a new system that will be powerful enough to get his attention. In the meantime, I'm keeping an eye on both dogs whenever they're outside because neither of them has any traffic sense.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

The concrete slab is in, but now we're stuck.


A six-man crew of laborers showed up at 8 a.m. today and tore out all of the unwanted trees and shrubs around the property and finished demolishing the deck behind the house.
At the same time, the concrete guys prepped the space for the concrete slab and the pouring started about 1:30 p.m.
That was minutes after we learned from George, our head construction guy, that the town officials do, after all, think they have some jurisdiction over this project and have to issue a permit for us to continue.
George said he checked first with the county planning office and learned that our town had opted out of the county-wide planning and zoning scheme - something we had already known. Then he contacted the town officials and was told they had no authority, but nonetheless they wanted us to gravel and roll the alley that we use for a driveway. It seemed incongruous, but we were happy to comply. After all, it needed gravel anyway and I'd much prefer riding my motorcycle over compacted gravel than struggle in deep loose gravel.
But today, somehow, George learned that we apparently do need a local permit for the project. We dug a little deeper and found that the town needs to issue a building permit for the project which will involve periodic inspections. And the issuing agency only meets on the second Monday of each month, so we missed the April meeting and may be forced to put the project on hold until after the May 14 meeting. This, of course, completely fucks George's construction timetable, as well as our expectations.
What it comes down is reminiscent of the line from Animal House: We fucked up. We trusted him (George) to know what he was doing and get all of the paperwork in order before we started.
So we await clarification, which should come when we contact the building inspector tomorrow. He's a nice, reasonable guy and we hope he'll cut us some slack.
If not, we wait.
The good news is that the concrete slab is poured and is curing. Even now, I can hear the concrete guys knocking the wooden form apart. If nothing else, we'll have a really nice small basketball court with a drain in the floor.

Quote of the Day

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, when asked by a member of Parliament why he believes so much in the United States:
"A simple way to take the measure of a country is to look at how many want in... and how many want out."

Monday, April 16, 2007

Back on track


It's sunny and 60 degrees and the concrete guys showed up today. Our construction guy was here at 9:30 a.m. to stake out the site and then the concrete guys started building the forms. They laid in some rebar and shot in a truckload of gravel(above). Pouring occurs tomorrow, so Pete and Ruthie will spend the day indoors - or at least until the concrete sets up enough to be immune to doggy footprints.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

From The Kansas City Star

Imus isn’t the real bad guy
Instead of wasting time on irrelevant shock jock, black leaders need to be fighting a growing gangster culture.


By JASON WHITLOCK - Columnist
Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.

You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.

You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor.

Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.

The bigots win again.

While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.

I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.

It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.

Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.

It’s embarrassing. Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius. Black comedians routinely crack jokes about white and black people, and we all laugh out loud.

I’m no Don Imus apologist. He and his tiny companion Mike Lupica blasted me after I fell out with ESPN. Imus is a hack.

But, in my view, he didn’t do anything outside the norm for shock jocks and comedians. He also offered an apology. That should’ve been the end of this whole affair. Instead, it’s only the beginning. It’s an opportunity for Stringer, Jackson and Sharpton to step on victim platforms and elevate themselves and their agenda$.

I watched the Rutgers news conference and was ashamed.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for eight minutes in 1963 at the March on Washington. At the time, black people could be lynched and denied fundamental rights with little thought. With the comments of a talk-show host most of her players had never heard of before last week serving as her excuse, Vivian Stringer rambled on for 30 minutes about the amazing season her team had.

Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that the comments of a man with virtually no connection to the sports world ruined Rutgers’ wonderful season. Had a broadcaster with credibility and a platform in the sports world uttered the words Imus did, I could understand a level of outrage.

But an hourlong press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction.

In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive?

I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?

When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is — a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim.

No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.

To reach Jason Whitlock, call (816) 234-4869 or send e-mail to jwhitlock@kcstar.com. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Bobcat in the rain


The concrete demolition guys showed up in the cold (41 degrees) drizzle about 11:15 a.m. and attacked the old garage foundation with a Bobcat-mounted jackhammer. Very impressive.


It's now about 3:30 p.m. The demolition guys have left, having broken up and hauled off the concrete footprint of the old garage and scraped off a bunch of topsoil where the new garage will be built. And it's 38 degrees and spitting sleet and snow.

Friday, April 13, 2007

Non-progress report

Just for a warmup, I figured my stepdaughter's taxes on Wednesday and started on ours yesterday. So far, it looks like we're going to owe about $2k, (ouch) but I still have a few deductions that may soften the blow.
In the meantime, I have my Honda del Sol back with a quiet exhaust system and all new brakes for $1,444. Ouch.
We haven't seen any work on the garage project since Monday. It's sunny and 47 degrees - the best weather in several days - and nobody showed up today to break up the concrete floor of the old garage. WTF?
I've been playing phone tag with our construction guy for four days, but no luck again today.
************
He called this afternoon to say the concrete demolition and site prep guys will be here tomorrow. Of course it's supposed to be overcast with a rain/snow mix and a high of 39 tomorrow.
Then he'll be here Monday morning to stake out the footprint of the new garage. At last!

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Rainout


No work on the garage project today. Cold and rainy with more of the same forecast for tomorrow.