Scott and Kristin in Washington

The week that winter came all at once...

2012-02-10T12:19:00.000-08:00

Going up?

2010-04-30T21:15:00.000-07:00

First Pictures of Spring

2010-03-18T21:21:00.000-07:00

I left the old house numbers where they were sitting after I installed the new
house numbers and they live on the garden path now.

The patina of old copper lantern against the pale green of

the wallflower and the sharp, dark green of the azaleas.


The off-season lives of renaissance faire props. A 16th century wheelbarrow makes a nice foreground for a fool's paradise...


Over 150 daffodils dance along the road, bringing cheer to passers-by.

The park bench and planters waiting for the roses
of summer...

Every garden needs a gnome to make it a home...


Flowering rosemary hold the center of the newest beds in the fool's gardens...

Free

2009-11-07T11:19:00.000-08:00

There's no such thing as a free cat, a free lunch or a free front door. Free cats come with vet bills and while I can't say as I have a lot of experiences with people trying to foist free hamburgers off on me, I have eaten a lot of pizza that came with moving boxes attached...

Front doors are a new addition to the list, so perhaps I should explain.

The first shock I received as a new homeowner (after we signed the mortgage papers anyway) was the sticker-shock of a new front door. Thousands of dollars for any of the ones I found even remotely attractive. Seriously? You've got to be kidding me.

So I bought a lot of books on how to build doors and had every intention of doing it myself. Then Kristin went to work for a company that makes windows and doors. And along came the opportunity to have one of the display models after they decided to stop making front doors (actually, they were made by another company and sold with the Milgard logo, but it amounts to the same thing). A free door! FREE!

Well... sort of.

You see, it wasn't prehung. Which means it was a door, sure enough, but didn't include hinges, handles, or framing. It was just a door. A very pretty French-style door (which would look great because the front door is right next to the pretty French doors leading into the library. Score!)

A long time ago in a Missouri far away, an eight-year-old Scottie watched his grandpa hang a door. Cut the mortises for the hinges with a chisel, a hole for the knob with a coping saw and up on the wall it went. Took the man about an hour if twenty-eight year old memories are worth anything. And so, with the cavalier gusto of my gender, I told Kristin "Sure, I know how to hang a door." No problem. Grandpa showed me how!

I say that a lot and I should clarify. What Grandpa was usually doing was trying to accomplish something amid interruptions from a bored eight-year-old. So he explained what he was doing and occasionally he would even tell me why he was doing it. Usually this included a "Don't do it like I'm doing it, you'll cut yourself".

So the door leaned against the hutch for a week or two while I wandered past. I would pause to contemplate the unblemished frame, the beautiful untouched glass and then turn to regard the weatherbeaten 1970's vintage door that was already there and then I would resolutely go find something else to do.

Last weekend, I finally ran out of Other Things To Do and with fall weather fast approaching it was down to Do It Now or Wait Till Summer. And I wanted that door changed, by golly. And how better to learn than on a free door?

What could possibly go wrong?

My first surprise came from the way in which a modern front door is constructed. Gone are the days of Grandpa's hardwood doors. Well, not gone entirely, but fewer and further between. Many - if not most - of the front doors sold in home centers today are fiberglass with a core of either wood or sometimes foam. (You can't cut the fiberglass they use with normal tools, so it was just as well that this one is wood with a vinyl overlay.)

The second surprise is that the home centers and lumberyards and even Ace Hardware have decided that Thou Shalt Not Hang Thine Own Door. In all honesty, they probably arrived at that conclusion because people stopped doing it. Prehung doors are so easy, what fool would want to do it themselves? (Ahem) So finding appropriate framing materials turned out to be harder than it should be.

At long last, we found a pre-cut framing kit on a clearance rack at a local Home Depot (of all places) and with a hole saw for the drill, we were ready to go. We went home, took the old door off the house (to measure the old hinge-placements, the old door had to come down.)

I've a deft hand with a chisel, so there wasn't much problem cutting out the mortises. The matching mortises on the frame were cut with the router, so no worries there.

Then came the door handles. So I screwed the hole saw into my trusty old drill and promptly realized the poor old thing was too old and too weak to pull it off. The smoke rolling off the drill's motor was pretty thick. (taps plays gently in the distance.)

So off to the store to buy a whole new drill. Kristin stayed home as I ran to the store since now there's a big hole in the front of the house where a door should be. Racing the daylight, I make the forty-minute trek to pay my homage to the Despot and back as the sun is setting.

For the record, I was right about one thing. I do know how to hang a door. I remembered well enough what I saw grandpa doing that I could repeat it. Which is fun to know.

Anyway, finally, eight hours after we began, the door is up. The wind has stopped blowing and we were able to let the cats out of the library where we'd had to coop them up to keep them from wandering the neighborhood. It's a pretty door and lets the much-needed light into the room. Also the glass is double-paned, so the room is warmer than with the old stained-glass door.

So... Sixty bucks for a drill, forty bucks of lumber for the framing, twenty for the hole saw... and one free door.

Two Fools in Love...

2009-10-19T22:06:00.000-07:00

Because sometimes people forget why we call our home "Fool's Paradise".

Well... one of the reasons, anyway!

Photo from by our good friend Chris Yetter and posted with his kind permission. More photos available on his site and prints can be ordered for a resonable printcharge.

Fool's Paradise

2009-10-19T21:17:00.000-07:00

The last of the paint hit the eaves of Fool's Paradise as the colors of fall began to penetrate the overhanging canopy...

Someone told me to always be sure to back up before installing Windows. So I take a step back to check my handiwork before putting on the new flashing and installing the trim around the bedroom window.

Because Kristin usually has the camera, sometimes people seem to think this a one-man show. Not so! And I swiped the camera to prove it.

And we finally got rid of that stupid extra door. It's gone. Nothing but nice clean, well-insulated wall! One big heat-sucking hole in the house plugged. Yay!

The front of the house is essentially done and not a moment too soon as the autumn floodgates open and the buckets start to drop...

New paint and new window trim applied in plenty of time to beat the oncoming weather of winter...

(Now that I no longer have to think about painting around it, watch for a new railing for that porch, first sunny weekend to come my way.)

We filled every gap with insulation and bought a new little electric fireplace (pictures to come) for the library. The house is snug as a bug and buttoned-up for the season.

The gardens are going dormant and nature's cycles are having their way with the world outside, it's time to go inside and work on some trimwork and finish carpentry...

And the bedroom windows with the moulding up and primed for later painting... as soon as we settle on a color scheme for the room. The green never quite lived up to our expectations. Will probably go lighter but stay in the warm earthtones and craftsman colors.

And a closeup showing the tone-shift from the stained wood to the painted trim (this is deliberate). The primer looks like a whitewash in this shot. Nails will be set and filled and then the moulding painted, probably a shade of white. The stained sill and returns will remain the color and finish seen here.

In keeping with the craftsman aesthetic of using local wood (not to mention our personal tastes) the library is using a beautiful clear fir for all of the moulding. Fir has a nice straight grain and takes well to a warm stain. It also ages well and behaves in our climate.

Traditionally, Craftsman woodwork wasn't varnished and looks bizarre when people try to do so, so we get the best of both worlds with a 'hand rubbed' satin polyurethane. In these pictures, the nailholes haven't yet been set & filled.

Below, you can see the window looking out over the front garden getting its dry-fit before final fitting, staining and nailing...

And a closeup of the wood against the venetian plaster of the library walls. I love the subtle color shifts of the wall and the grain of the fir. The lighting wasn't great because of the rainstorms rolling through, so watch for some better photos at some point...

Except for the sill in the master bedroom, 1x8 stock was used to create the sills to accommodate the cats. Dusty's posterior says thank you.

Speaking of the boys, they've been weathering the recent round of home improvements well, even when they were shortly deprived of windowsills for the sitting...

Dusty & Figaro say Hi! Signing off from the Fool's Paradise.

Kitchen Design II

2009-07-04T17:31:00.000-07:00

Mom asked for some photos of the stuff we've chosen to begin outfitting the kitchen. The unfitted kitchen concept is classic European thinking, which has given rise to a bit of a vineyard sensibility to things.

The metals in the kitchen will be almost entirely pewter, brushed nickel or blackened bronze. The appliances are white because stainless is a pain to keep clean and generally more expensive than we feel it's worth.

I like to think of it as "Rustic with refinements". The organic viniform will be carried into the metal fixtures that live on the large rustic harvest-table style island that I'm building.

The vines and grapes helps carry the provincial European theme without getting too French (Scott doesn't like toile, for instance). The organic plant-themes from the garden will carry throughout the house. In the kitchen, this takes the form of grapevines on select ceramics and metals (such as the wine rack).

Note the lidded bucket. Buckets and baskets will provide the rusticity, balancing the more refined ceramics. There will also certainly be a lot of hand-thrown ceramic vessels and bowls that aren't pictured. Scott has a collection of pewter as well as over twenty handcrafted pitchers that will find residence on the shelves and display areas beside the more workaday wares.

NOTE: None of the permanent fixtures or wall treatments will necessarily be grapevines or anything since I don't want to be tied-down to a specific theme to the point where we have to remodel if we change our minds.

As you can see, this also resolves the "What do I do with all these rolling pins?" problem that plagues Scott. Wine racks double as great places to keep rolling pins handy but out of the way.

The fabric shown may or may not make an appearance in the final kitchen, but it gives the general feel of what we're thinking.

I can't wait to cook in this new space. Bright, open, rustic yet refined... coming soon to a kitchen near you!

Someone bring me my Police tapes and a walker...

2009-06-29T10:24:00.000-07:00

The BBC is trying to make me feel old.
BBC News -- Giving Up My iPod for a Walkman

The kid took three days to figure out that the tape had another side. Sadly, that doesn't mean the kid's stupid, it just means that I've reached that age when the things I coveted as a child are no longer recognizable to the current batch of whippersnappers. He probably looked at his dad with the same look I gave my dad at that age when he told me that people used to shave with a straight razor*.

Stupendous. I mean, get real, kid, that's some bona fide high technology there. Before that, we had to carry around a Barbie record player if we wanted to listen to music on the go. Next you're going to tell me that the Atari 64 isn't the wave of the future...

Much like the iPod, those things were pretty expensive for the time and my parents didn't see any reason to hand a piece of expensive technology to a kid. Especially a kid who couldn't keep from dropping a peanut butter sandwich, much less a tapedeck the size of a small paperback. They were probably right -- If I hadn't dropped it, I would have lost it because that's the sort of thing I'm famous for. Ask me about my retainer some time.

Not that I owned a Barbie record player either. Our "Hi FI" stereo set was a piece of furniture. It was made of wood and was roughly the size of the USS Constitution (though it may have contained more trees). My sister and I sat in front of it listening to the Carpenters and Roy Clark with my mom and dad. We had a little turntable in our room that our Aunt Cookie gave us for Christmas but it sat on a little rollie-cart and couldn't be taken anywhere.

The whole thing was anti-portable. It was big and clunky and by golly we liked it! Carried it uphill to school in the driving snow... and... um... (grumble)

I eventually bought a Walkman, of course. With my own money after the price came down and they weren't as trendy anymore. It's probably still knocking around in a box somewhere. Shortly after I obtained my precious tapedeck, the CD was introduced. It taught me that chasing technology is an unwinnable game and you should note that I still don't own an iPod or whatever.

By the end of the week I'll officially be six years past the point where I became untrustworthy by the standards of my parents' generation**. (That's pretty funny to me.) And this creates an interesting through-line for my nephews: The things you are so desperate to have now will be silly and/or alien to your kids. Meanwhile, my Walkman will be a certified antique and I can sell it to my grand niece or nephew and retire on the proceeds.

Cranky old curmudgeons have to plan ahead.

---
* We'll ignore for the moment that when I do shave (which obviously isn't often), I use my great grandfather's straight razor.
** The internet wants me to believe Pat Boone said it, but it was probably just a cover of someone else's quip.

Cross-posted from Scott's writing blog: Pages to Type Before I Sleep...

Painting Fool's Paradise II

2009-06-28T14:01:00.001-07:00

The front of the house is done... the yellow part at least.

Looking around the corner, continuing the photo-montage from
where I left off last time at the carriage lanterns.

The broom should've moved before I took the picture, but conveniently,
it is almost the same color that the door will eventually be painted. :O)

Roses and yellow houses.

With the sun on the front of the house, it almost looks like we've already painted the wainscot. Alas, that's not quite so but at least we get to do that with the roller! Hand-painted shingles are not fun.

Maritime Parade Video!

2009-06-16T11:03:00.000-07:00

This is some of the best video yet that really captures Calabash and Daf in all their foolishness. One of our "Friends of Faire" brought his video camera equipment to document the appearance of our new cast and queen at the Gig Harbor Maritime Festival.

Huzzah!!

And yes. At one point, Calabash is indeed shouting "Guards Shave the Queen." :OP

Painting A Fool's Paradise...

2009-06-13T19:56:00.000-07:00

Work progresses on getting the house painted its new color of cheerful yellow. Here are some Work In Progress photos to give you some idea of how it's going...

You can see the "laying-in" I had to do by hand in order to get the lip of each course of shingles and between the shingles where there was a gap large enough to horn a brush into. Small brushes, artist's brushes and even a toothbrush... whatever fits.

At the end of the day, a glimpse of things to come. I'll leave it to you to mentally turn all the grey wainscot and trim and eaves white...

Gonna go take some Tylenol now! (Oofff!) Cheers!
-Scottie

Courtyard (and not the Marriot)

2009-05-17T22:01:00.000-07:00

First there was this: a parcel of dirt and a few token stones placed as reminders of what was to come...

Then a week passed. :O(

And the blocks of cement waited patiently in the pouring rain for the sun and the Scott to return... here's the patio beginning to take shape. You can see the pinwheels and the empty squares awaiting the river rocks that will fill them...

I call the pattern "Clowns and Pinwheels" but there may already be a name for it. The blocks are laid in a diamond pattern reminiscent (to my mind anyway) of a harlequin's cassock, with the alternating diamonds filled by bricks laid in a pinwheel pattern.

At the center of each pinwheel is a larger stone set in pea gravel to allow the patio to be water-permeable. Water will not pool, so it's better for the foundation and also better for the environment because there's no runoff or the resulting erosion.

Below, almost all the block are in-place and only the stones wait to be added.

Here I am painstakingly scooping a cup-full of pea gravel and placing each river rock into the center of the pinwheels. This took most of the afternoon.

As dusk fell, I swept the last of the sand into the crevices and knocked the final scattered gravel into place and I was done with just enough light to take a few quick photos. I love the courtyard feel of the area, especially with my barnwood cafe table and chair in place.

Losing the light! Egad! One last shot after we watered (you can tell we just dragged a hose across the patio, the pavement is wet).

And now... my paths finally go somewhere! Ta daaaa!!!! A dream fulfilled! Here's a quick tour of the front garden in its current state with cameos by Scott's voice, hands and one of my flipflops, I think. :OP

Enjoy the video! (Click to play)

Garden Update

2009-05-10T21:12:00.000-07:00

This is the unloading process. The blue tarp atop the army blanket not only protects the interior of Woodstock's cargo area, it also allows me to grab the tarp and slide the pile closer to the tailgate as each successive row is unloaded. (No reaching & stretching bad backery nonsense.)

These are the blocks that will someday be a patio. (This week, hopefully...) They were hauled over in the wagon you see in the background and stacked along the site of the future patio. They're stacked in an offset pattern like that because it makes it easier to grab them when I start building. The patio will be laid out in a dioamond (harlequin) pattern.

This is the bare spot of soil between the house and the rose garden that will be the site of the new patio. The block laid out on the ground in the photo is just there to guage the number of blocks needed for the project.

Though it be madness, there is method to it. Honest. These are the plans, such as they are. I'm not usually a fan of drawing plans, but I had to use paper to decide how many blocks to buy. (Click on the photo to enlarge to a semi-readable size if you're curious.)

In the meantime, the first blooms of spring are beginning to fade and the next wave are still just buds. I think of this as the first autumn of the year, and interstitial moment between fractions of the season. The containers were overplanted with tulip and daffodil bulbs last fall, giving us lots of early color in the gardens.

This is the new herb garden out front. The parsley and oregano from old gardens out back have been transplanted (which is why the parsley looks a little peaked) and sage, tarragon and chives are gaining a foothold, protected by a layer of bark and mulch. This is the footpath and terrace we were building in the update a couple weeks ago.

Incidentally, bark isn't something I usually "do" but it helps retain water and this is a pretty sundrenched area. If I want the plants to live long enough to develop the root systems necessary to survive in this environment, I must bark.

Don't worry, it's worse than my bite.

The view from the deck. The herb garden is to the right, dotted with terra cotta pots (with rosemary). As you can see, I have lots of lawn left to give. (sigh) The dirt scattered out there is because I decided that if I was going to have a lawn, by golly it should be level, so I've been going about filling in holes and low places and (shudder) reseeding the grass.

That's a lot of earth shifted and I'm pooped. Time to dust myself off and go inside to take a shower.

Happy Mother's Day everyone!!!

De-lawnification

2009-04-26T22:09:00.000-07:00

Hello, my name is Scott Perkins and I basically hate lawns.

I know that sounds irrational, but it's true. I hate them. Green swaths of stuff that makes me sneeze but I have to mow it anyway. Water it, feed it, de-mossify it... and all the while I'm riding the Benedryl dragon.

Today I am proud to say that I have approximately 25% less lawn to annoy me than I did on Monday. A minor victory but only one battle in the larger war on the American lawn.

Getting rid of your lawn isn't easy, but as it happens, I have a twelve-step plan to help you get through it...

Convince yourself that you don't need a lawn.
Convince your spouse that you don't really need a lawn.
Realize that you need to decide what to do with all this bare ground you've created in your battle with the grass. (Trip to garden store and local bookstore ensues... return with a plan and books with the word "Cottage" liberally pepper through the titles.)
Draw up an elaborate plan involving winding stone paths, raised beds and the sort of mature plantings that take decades to evolve on their own. Present these to your spouse.
Revise plans when your spouse wisely points out that you're not a Rockefeller and don't have any experience as a stonemason.
Remove part of the lawn and realize how pernicious grass really is.
Finish about a quarter of the project and find other pressing things to do.
Wait until you forget how pernicious grass really is (this may take some time, it took me two years).
Buy tool to make pernicious grass removal easier and boldly set forth to remove your pesky lawn.
Realize that new tool sucks and go buy a decent shovel and a large bottle of Advil.
Get really mad at the pernicious, evil, weedy little parasites that we laughingly call "grass" and vow to go outside and come back on your shield or not at all.
Plant things that aren't grass and step back to take your Advil and ponder the next phase in your campaign, for there are lawns yet to be conquered...

It began with an ugly fieldstone flower garden. NOTE: This picture was taken after Kristin cleaned it up and I tried my utmost to make it look less like an oblong pile of stone.

This was one of the first projects I undertook when we bought the house. I built a new deck and re-used the flagstones that had formerly been the walls of the flowerbed to make this fieldstone path to the door...

The flowerbed was moved over slightly and remade from red blocks from the home depot. In the timid first shots of my war against the lawn (Kristin wasn't quite on-board yet) I pulled out the grass in a circular path around the bed and laid a decorative gravel walk that didn't go anywhere except in a circle...

So I built this stone step and a short path that also went nowhere... (at least I'm consistent)
Then I put my feet up and rested for awhile... (Actually I went inside and built a library, but that's another story.)And the garden slept...

Last week, I unleashed the second phase of my plan... a path that would connect the front path to the circular path and thence up the step the the path that still doesn't go anywhere. (More on that another time...)I experiemented with cement blocks, but ultimately decided to stick with the flagstones (still leftover from the consarned flowerbed way back at the top fo the page) for the sake of consistency.

Then, in a surpise maneuver, Kristin and I ripped out all of the grass between the new path and the house. All of it. Gone. And good riddance to it...
In honor of "Earth Week", we used old newspapers in lieu of landscaping cloth. The damp newspaper will hold moisture in the soil and smother weeds, plus have the added benefit of biodegrading into the soil instead of staying around forever to vex me a year from now. (The advent of soy-based ink makes this possible without contaminating the soil.)

The new beds were planted with herbs and marigolds (deer hate marigolds) and then given a top coat of fresh compost and cedar mulch.

The new view from the deck...

And looking back toward the house.And now... we rest!

Actually, and now, we paint the house, build the new pergola, install new windows, remodel the kitchen...but the kitties, they get to rest.

Some pictures...

2009-04-20T18:40:00.001-07:00

Some pictures real quick before we go to bed. Tomorrow's New York City and we need to be well-rested for a big day (much of it spent in the car, alas). But we will be back. Who can visit NYC once and not return?

How should I know, I've never been there?! Ask me again tomorrow...

Kristin hams it up with the elusive Mary Z.

(Yes, a rare photo of the elusive Mary without a camera between her and the lens!)

Scott pauses for refreshments.

(A full-bodied coffee with floral notes...)

Hey mister, wanna buy a newspaper? (Kristin at the old bridge with Scott's hat)

A wall on the Mostowy Farm.

These tumbledown stone walls really are everywhere around here! I though that was going to be one of those things you hear about and never see except on some theme park. But they really are under every pile of leaves. It's amazing to imagine the effort involved in building them all!

The lakeview from Grammy Julie's front yard. What a sight to wake up to every day!

Stopping on an old-fashioned Connecticut dairy farm to feed the cows and look around. This is one of the last operating dairy farms in CT, apparently.

(Left-to-right: Mary, Liza, Grandma Julie and yours truly.)

A lovely covered footbridge in "Devil's Hop Yard" state park.

Who can pass up a name like that? We had to turn in and take a picture...

Scenic Niantic Connecticut.

(I'm just kidding, it's a beautiful town. This photo was just too much for Kristin to pass up.)

Scott with his feet in the Atlantic and his ear in Missouri....
(talking on the cell to Mom, from Hole in the Wall Beach in Niantic, CT )

Miscellaneous Mayhem with Daf & Calabash

2009-04-05T13:21:00.000-07:00

Wow! It's been quiet around here, hasn't it?

Well work on the house has been hampered by the severity of our winter and the various complications of life, the universe and everything... but it's renaissance faire season again and they tell us we're actually going to have a faire this year, so I have something to take pictures of and post on the family blog!

The Daffodil Days Festival is an annual event celebrating the return of spring to the dreary climes of the Pacific Northwest. And after the winter we've had, a welcome respite from the rain and the snow and the houseboundedness of the winter with a bit of miscellaneous mayhem in the wilds of downtown Tacoma...

Caffeinated & ready to go!

Daf's snazzy new hat and mask makes her every bit the equal of Calabash.

Calabash has all the luck!

Daf blows her nose at you.

You have to take a moment to appreciate the softer things in life...

In downtown Tacoma, we encountered the captain of the snazzy hat brigade...

Daf distracts him with interpretive dance...

While Calabash makes off with his bag.
(A Bronze carpet bag? Whose bright idea was that?!)

Once we'd sorted out the misunderstanding about the bag, Calabash and Daf were promptly inducted into the Snazzy Hat brigade.

What a team!
Two fools in love.

I've been quiet for awhile...

2009-02-18T17:50:00.000-08:00

Because I have been in the process of recreating my internet presence and participating in a few new online forums... oh! And I was working too. (Honest!)

I have a website! Actually, I've had a website for awhile, but it's up-to-date now and drawing hits. Visit me at: http://swalkerperkins.googlepages.com/
I have a new blog devoted solely to matters of writing and my writing career and all the sundry news pertaining to that subject. It's called "Pages to type before I sleep..." follow the link) and it's been getting decent reviews as I feel around for exactly the right kind of content to focus on. Let me know what you think!
I have been invited to participate in a new project called RedRoom. It's a writer's-only site that features the likes of Amy Tan and President Barack Obama. Needless to say, I'm a small fish in a very very VERY big pond, but by golly, I'm in the pond!
I (and several thousand of my friends) have been fighting a battle with Facebook over their claim to own - in perpetuity - every image or word put up on their site. I and hundreds of others were pummelling them with emails, letters and blog posts. David -v- Goliath, the rematch. Late last night, the giant blinked and victory is ours!

Needless to say, it's been a busy couple of weeks here on Fox Island!
Cheers, everybody!

Writing Life, Part One -- Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

2009-01-30T12:57:00.000-08:00

Note: In the interest of continuing to 'pay forward' the love of literature that I spoke of just a few weeks ago, I will begin a series of posts regarding not only the writing life, but what I am reading, my history with it and why I think it's important. This will either be a fascinating look into Scott's psyche, or the annoying bloviating of an obsessive bibliophile... we shall see.

To kick this off is a short series about the writing life. Where possible, the titles mentioned below are hotlinked to free ebooks. For active copyrights, I have linked to the of the author or his or her estate, or - if necessary - a site of quality and interest. Anything that can be done to further promulgate the written word is a Good Thing, so please click, read & share.

----------

I began writing my first novel in the fourth grade.

I can’t say for certain that it was the cause of me taking up the pen at this time, but it happened to be the point when dad began handing me Things To Read. Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, … the list is long. I didn’t like White Fang but loved Treasure Island. I just couldn’t get into Dracula or Frankenstein, and didn’t much like Ivanhoe. I had opinions and wasn’t afraid to express them (except for White Fang which I pretended to like because it seemed like I should) and dad guided me in the directions my tastes seemed to be leading.

I can’t say this injection of classics to the juvenile pap I had been reading was the tipping point toward becoming a writer, but I can say with 100% certainty that it’s the reason my boyhood reminiscences are often woven of wildly divergent and overlapping reading levels. To this day, I never disdain to read a book that was beneath me and never feared to assay a book that was above me. That's what parents, encyclopedias and dictionaries are for, after all. If I enjoy it, or think I might enjoy it, I read it. I don’t much care in what section of the bookstore or library it is shelved.

Jack P. McGurk, Leroy Brown (aka “Encyclopedia”), Henry Mulligan & Homer Snodgrass stood alongside Tom, Huck, Holmes & Watson in the misty byways of my imagination. There was even a prescient novel by the Encyclopedia Brown guy about enemy agents poisoning a town's milk supply called 'Secret Agent's Four' that I think I may be the only person in the world who still remembers, much less misses fondly. These guys joined Allan Quartermaine & Henry Curtis, David Balfour & Jim Hawkins in a sort of prototype for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (I’m sorry to say Mina Harker wasn’t there, but I don’t really like Epistolary fiction).

This reading list – you might note – was very very Boy’s Life. It's only to be expected. Anne of Avonlea doesn't hold a lot of interest for a fourth grade boy (at least it didn't for me). The television programs I watched and the movies I enjoyed were of the same stripe. I don’t personally believe that this is the Bad Thing that some make it out to be – I turned out just fine, after all with a fully-developed sense of myself in relation to the other gender. I’m personally convinced that one’s attitudes are only formed by one’s fictional choices when there are no countervailing parental attitudes to balance them out. But what do I know?

All of this is a long way around to telling you that I first put pencil to loose-leaf page at the point in my life when active imagination and play is still encouraged yet the real world has become real. As real as the world has ever been for me, anyway.

A binder or notebook of clean paper is very much the same as a blank sketchbook to me: Meant To Be Filled. What are you waiting for, kid? Grab a #2 pencil and get crackin’!

The adolescent novel is a direct reflection of all the things you’ve read or seen on the screen up to that point. Everything that you’ve enjoyed and absorbed gets melded and regurgitated in some manner. The verbal equivalent of a Rorschach Inkblot. My literary alter-ego was named “Indiana Perkins” and all the rest of the characters were my schoolmates, focused through the lens of some pop-culture phenomenon ranging from The A Team to Goonies (heavy on the Goonies).

If I was in fourth grade now, I imagine it would be heavy on the Harry Potter. Thus is life.

Lest I take all the credit for this, I had a co-author. A schoolmate by the name of Gannon Buford signed on to co-write this piece. Gannon was more popular than I, and being a kid who was painfully shy, insular, unathletic and never “popular” in any real sense of the term. I was the kid that spent his life pretending to be someone else somewhere else not because where I was or what I was doing was bad; but because it provided a buffer between me and the world that gave me panic attacks. Anyway, Gannon’s name on the cover page made what I/we were doing almost cool, or at least acceptable to the other kids and at the very least a bit less weird. Anyway, I was only too honored to share the byline (and the blame).

It was a school trip to another city gone awry, hijacked midflight by terrorists who took our class hostage. In the ensuing story, the kids band together (led by my character and my buddies) in a MacGuyver/A Team sequence of events which were spiced with a healthy dose of Mad Scientist Club thrown in for spice. Incidentally, this is not a claim of Al Qaeda prescience. Remember that the Iran Hostage Crisis happened while I was at a very impressionable age and Pan Am Flight 73 too had a big impact upon my personal nightmares at the time even though my family never traveled anywhere, much less the Mideast.

It was fun. It got taken away at various times by various teachers and didn't get finished until grade five, but I had a blast writing it. It also taught me more than any writing teacher before or since. I discovered authorial voice and writing my own novel taught me to really LOOK at the things I was reading and watching on TV and I began to understand how to structure a story and how to write dialogue.

My playtime shifted accordingly. My GI Joes stopped being GI Joes and began taking on personas of my own creation, each with a back-story I created independent of what Hasbro might have put on the back of the box. They worked through full story arcs with complex twist endings and frequently ended badly. They waged personal conflicts, sought revenge for past slights, investigated mysteries, got involved in Flemingesque dramas… and when I discovered Tolkien and Fritz Leiber, I even created medievalish costumes for them out of craft felt and pounded nails flat to make swords and daggers for their Shakespearean tragedies. I once had them act out a strange version of the Ring Cycle, fighting over a Treasure of the Rhine made entirely of plastic beads from the craft store.

What that first effort did not teach me was how to collaborate. It should have, but it didn’t. I would like to tell you that ultimately I was far more into it than my coauthor and believed far more strongly that it was worthwhile. Both of those things are/were true but really it’s because I wanted to make things so complex that for other people it began to look like work rather than play. Or so I guess, I don’t really know because I wasn’t yet self-aware enough to make enquiries.

My penchant for ignoring what was so obvious and pre-packaged didn’t enamor me of the other children in any case. In my life I rarely had more than one friend at a time. Honestly this was owing about half to the tendency to live inside my own head to the exclusion of all else, and the rest was because I rarely got through half the explanation of what I was doing or wanted to do before the other kids lost interest.

To this day, I flash back to that first book when I’m writing anything else. Not because there’s literary merit there, but because it’s when I formed the habits I am exercising. I close my eyes to picture a character I’m developing and there are times when I dredge up those characters I created in my parents’ basement to hang upon the erased slate of my GI Joes. And every once in awhile… every once in a great while if I’m stuck, I wonder what Scottie would do.

I would give almost anything to have a copy of that novel. Alas that it has fallen into the dust of history, remembered – perhaps – only by me as yet another book that only I remember with characters and an author that only I know are missing from the pages of Books In Print.

Heartland Hamburger Heist..

2009-01-08T17:13:00.001-08:00

The Hamburger Gang cases an unsuspecting diner (Wire Photo)

WEST PLAINS, MO (LFFI) - In a daring daylight heist, a gang of leather clad hooligans entered a local branch of restaurant Ruby Tuesdays and demanded they be served hamburgers. The fearful staff of the restaurant had no choice but to comply with the demand, laying out a sizable spread to satiate the hunger of this notorious band of hamburger rustlers. In the wake of their feast, the matriarch of the gang - in a feat worthy of Ma Barker - made them all wash their hands ere they paid the bill and fled the scene in a red Mini Cooper.

Several subsequent sightings of the well-attired band of grub-rustlers went unconfirmed at press time.

"We're getting reports from all up and down the 65 Highway corridor, it's like they're everywhere at once," said Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife. Reports that the band was accompanied by a two-headed individual is "unlikely" according to Deputy Fife, despite cell phone photos appearing on several websites of what appears to be a dual-noggined individual.
One witness described the scene at the nearby grocers where the group then absconded to: "There I was; standin' overe there by the tomaters, and there he come, running through the pole beans, through the fruits and vegetables," said Mr. Stevens of Branson, MO. "I shouted 'Don't look Ethel'! But it was too late."

Mr. Stevens broke down thereafter and was unable to continue the interview. What havoc this group might have wreaked upon this unsuspecting small town is not fully known at this time.

Sheriff Taylor was unavailable for comment as of press time.

Two hamburglars - described by authorities as the masterminds
of the heist - gloat over their beefy prize.

-----

Disclaimer: Live From Fox Island News makes no claims as to the veracity of any of the preceding reports... really, it's all a little silly, ain't it?

Wacky Washington Weather Woes

2009-01-08T16:56:00.000-08:00

I just have two questions:

Does anyone have a good source for Gopher Wood?
Can anyone recommend a good animal handler?

http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/story/588078.html

Oh the weather outside is frightful...

2008-12-21T22:29:00.000-08:00

Seattle (or Far-West Milwaukee as I like to think of it) has been hit by one of those storms that they refer to as 'Century Storms'. Since Western Washington has been hit by THREE so-called 'Century Storms' in the past five years, I - on behalf of the peoples of Western Washington - respectfully submit that we need to come up with a new name for these weather events. Unless we're set for the next three hundred years.

I'm just sayin'.

Seriously, we can all blame Kristin. She was singing that song on Friday... you know the one. "Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!"

She's fond of tempting fate, that one.

My friends and family in less temperate climes might be tempted to glance at a map and point out that Seattle is - indeed - America's northernmost major city. Which would generally make you prone to look at our snowstorm and say "Yeah, so?" Geography is more than latitude, however. Our beloved Puget Sound, the windbreak of the Olympic Mountains catching the moist air off the Pacific and forcing it to drop most of it's moisture (yes, really) and our proximity to the average position of the Jet Stream in the winter months all combine to give Seattle (and its environs) a very temperate climate. Sure, it rains or mists constantly, but so what? It hardly ever snows or ices over...

hardly...

ever...

Which brings us to the eleven inches of accumulation sitting on my front lawn this evening. And the schools that have been closed since the first inch hit the ground on Wednesday...

Every once in very great while, God notices that the Seattlites have been getting a little snotty about their lovely winters and soon thereafter, a cold arctic air mass displaces our lovely Jet Stream and sits on the Puget Sound region until it says 'uncle'. Which we are prone to do rather quickly since we only have three or four snow plows in the entire state. Ok, that's an exaggeration, but not by much.

This is compounded by the number of people out there who simply don't know how to drive when the weather goes haywire and it's only logical that we just shut everything down, hunker in front of our fireplaces and wood-stoves and pray for it to pass.

None of this would be particularly bad if not for the bored television crews - who are probably snowed-in at the station anyway without enough board games to occupy their time - who tend to treat any snowfall as the first sign of Armageddon.

I don't have a television set (at least not one that's hooked to anything less benign than a Playstation... like Cable) but I have the internet and I can see them doing their live remotes as though reporting from the eye of Hurricane Katrina.

Seriously folks: It's just snow. Stay home. Or go where it's safe and warm. Get off the roads. Drink hot cocoa. Read a book or play a video game. Maybe go out and make a snowman or snow women... or snow angel, whatever floats your boat. It's not the end of the world. Honest, it will melt. Damage can be fixed. Damaged humans aren't as easy to repair.

This too shall pass. And somewhere a young Laura Engels Wilder is scribbling madly in her diary about the great blizzard of 2008. So there's literature to look forward to as well.

And a happy white Christmas to all. And to all a good night!
(And may this all be melted in time for us to catch our flight!)

Random Fun

2008-12-16T11:52:00.000-08:00

The spreadsheets get into the spirit of the season...

The World Needs More of THIS!!!!!

2008-12-15T01:19:00.000-08:00

"Dance till the stars come down from the rafters
Dance, Dance, Dance till you drop."
~W.H. Auden

The fellow in the following video has been penciled in in the margin of my ongoing list of heroes.

His name is Matt Harding, and he lives in Seattle. This in and of itself usually isn't enough to catch my attention or earn you a spot on my List of People Making This Planet Less Boring. I know a lot of cool people and many of them live in Seattle. Nice people every one of them, but one has to maintain a certain standard in these things, you know?

Suffice it to say that this particular guy earned my notice when he convinced a chewing gum company that it would be worth their money to send him around the world and get people to do the same silly dance in the places he visited. 39 countries on 7 continents later they realized they were right. In fact, they liked it so much that they sent him out to do it a second time... and film it.

I'm posting this video for several very good reasons. The greatest of these is the deeply-held belief that the world would be a better place if we spent more time being silly together.

This is his full story

And this is his video:

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Causing a scene...

2008-12-12T15:25:00.000-08:00

The very best in guerilla theater. The folks from improv everywhere want to cause a scene...

There is unrest in the toychest...

2008-12-09T01:33:00.000-08:00

A Foggy Tour...

2008-11-16T17:51:00.000-08:00

It's that foggy time of year again. When the bridges we cross back and forth across Puget Sound every morning seem to cut through the aether, a span of metal and stone across the vastness of space and time. It's a strange feeling to be on a bridge where you cannot see neither the beginning nor the end and there is no inkling even of what you are crossing over.

Ethereal moments in an otherwise mundane thing like driving into town for groceries...

When we went out this morning to run errands, Kristin took a couple of videos of the bridge crossings. The first is the Fox Island Bridge which connects our little island to the mainland.

This second one (below) is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which is actually twin suspension bridges as you can see in part of the video where the sister bridge looms up out of the fog at the midpoint of the traverse. The narrows is a deep strip of the Sound surrounded on all sides by steep bluffs and torrential currents. The waterway is so deep and the tides so fierce that you can only dive on the wrecks that litter the bottom of the channel (including the wreckage of the first bridge, which collapsed spectacularly) on one or two days each year. This spit of the Sound cuts us off from the rest of Washington and without these two bridges, we would have to take a ferry or drive a hundred or more miles out of our way into the southern reaches of the peninsula in order to reach the rest of the state.

But hey... that's life in Washington.

Equal time for kitties...

2008-11-15T13:29:00.000-08:00

Figaro got his picture posted, so now it's Dusty's turn.

We wouldn't want people to think we're playing favorites, now do we? And he does love to help Kristin sew and sort her beads...

And lest anyone think that all that playing in the mud Scott's been doing at college hasn't amounted to anything... here are some of the earliest samples of his first foray into wheel-thrown pottery.

The red one and the taupe-looking one in the lower left were the first and second items I threw and the handles certainly show my unfamiliarity with the medium. After some practice came the set of blue mugs and matching pitcher.

The gold-colored oval casserole isn't thrown on the wheel, obviously, but coil-built which is something I've done plenty of times before. Naturally, this isn't all of it, just a fair sampling of... of... of things I have taken photos of, I suppose.

Teaser Trailer

2008-11-11T12:49:00.001-08:00

Since we don't get to the movies much, I get my trailers online... the next Harry Potter movie is looking pretty good, I think...

A-kitchening we will go...

2008-11-08T12:13:00.000-08:00

Kitchen really should be a verb.

"What are you doing today Scott?"
"I'm going to kitchen."
"Awesome. Let me know how it goes."

Where was I? Oh, yeah, Craigslist.

If you don't know what Craigslist is, you owe it to yourself to follow the link I just provided and find out. It's basically America's Garage Sale... online. It's not eBay. It's more like the classifieds of your local newspaper on steroids. And as Tony the Tiger would say: It's grrrrrreat. There's an article in last month's This Old House magazine about a couple who got the most beautiful kitchen you ever saw entirely off of Craigs List. It's definitely worth your computing time.

Case in point: Last weekend, we borrowed my brother-in-law's pickup (we've discovered the drawback of an SUV -vs- an open-bed, alas) and drove deep into the heart of Kent (a rural town south of Seattle) following a Craig's List lead. A huge solid-wood armoire/cabinet of the sort we've been looking for. Solid wood. For a hundred bucks.

Sounded too good to be true, but you gotta check these things out.

At the door, we were met by the lister's brother, who took us around the corner of the house to a rental box truck that was parked along the street. Inside the truck was an old futon and our cabinet. The guy who listed it had been forced to move back in with his family and there wasn't enough room. Rent on the truck was more than the thing was worth, so he just wanted to be rid of it. It was huge. It was heavy. It was crafted from solid cabinet-grade hardwood plywood with a honey-oak finish. It was perfect for our needs.

We coughed up the hundred bucks and loaded it in the truck with a good deal of help from the guy's brother. I was thanking all of the unaccustomed exercising I had been forced to do by recent phyisical therapy as we carted the darned thing into the house. Luckily it was in two pieces. Unfortunately, that gave me two opportunities to drop it on Kristin's fingers. (d'oh!) Don't worry, she was fine after some ice packs and topically applied kisses and a bit of grovelling on my part. Thankfully this will probably be the largest piece of furniture we will ever have to move unassisted, so now that that's out of the way...

This photo isn't particularly flattering, but it illustrates perfectly why we were looking for the armoire in the first place.

We've been using a narrow Ikea bookshelf and an open hutch that we bought in Omaha back in the day as pantry-storage, stacking canned goods on the wine rack and so forth. We jokingly refer to it as "The Butler's Pantry". It was inelegant but it's what we had and our current kitchen is quite tiny so we made do as we plotted and planned for the expanded kitchen and searched for the elements that would make it as fabulous as we envisioned without taking out a second mortgage to finance it.

The new cabinet swallowed all of our extra appliances, canned goods, dry goods, ceramic cookware, serving dishes and whatnot with nary a burp. It's exactly what we were looking for. There's a solidity to it that goes beyond the heft of the thing when you try to move it (or drop it on your wife's fingers for that matter... eep!) . The design will blend well with just about anything we pair it with and depending upon the kitchen cabinetry we end up with, it might end up getting painted, but I kind of doubt it.

If you squint at the far left corner of the picture above, you will notice that someone else in the family has voiced his approval of the new piece of furniture. This morning, we found Figaro sleeping behind the rows of apothecary jars up where Dusty can't bother him.

In the meantime, the cookbooks are hanging out on the old hutch and the wine rack has been put back to its original intended use while we shuffle the house around and begin to sketch out the floorplan for the new kitchen.

Exit poll...

2008-11-05T09:27:00.001-08:00

Last night a friend of mine was pulling up to her polling place and noticed there was a line. As she approached the building, she met an elderly black man coming out and held the door open for him as he exited, slowly, leaning heavily upon his walker.

"How long's the wait?" she asked.

"200 years" he replied. "Go in there and make history, young lady."

I admit it: that made me cry.

The Thin End Of the Wedge

2008-11-04T22:51:00.000-08:00

Caveat: a meandering quasi-political discourse follows... you have been warned.

-----

In 1858, a man stood up and walked to the lectern at the front of the assembled dignitaries of the Illinois Republican party. Three hours previous, the assemblage had appointed him their candidate for the United States Senate. In his acceptance speech, this man – in his high reedy voice – would famously paraphrase Jesus's words in Matthew chapter 12: "…every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand."

He was talking about slavery, of course. And he lost that election… according to many at the time, he was doomed from the outset because of the political incorrectness of that speech which went on to forecast the coming storm. As every schoolchild knows, he became our 16th president, emancipated the slaves, brought the southern states to heel and was assassinated in Ford's Theater by John Wilkes Booth, who raised the murder weapon before the crowd and shouted "Sic simper tyrranis". The state motto of Virginia then as it is now... "Thus always to tyrants."

Today, a young black man stepped up to succeed him as president. He began his run on the steps of the old Illinois state capitol building where Lincoln made that speech. And as some have pointed out, he finished his run in Manassas, VA near the battlefield known as Bull Run, the touchpoint of the American Civil War.

As I have repeatedly noted here and elsewhere, we have been quietly fighting a new civil war, one which has been largely fusillades of divisive rhetoric rather than fusillades of musket shot. In this – the longest campaign for president in history – America has stripped itself naked before the entire world, exposing our scars and our still-seeping wounds wrought by wars both figurative and literal, our economic woes ground like glass into the unhealed wounds of the 11th of September seven years past. As the campaign dragged on, we have been forced to come to terms with our feelings about race, gender and age... or refuse to as the case may be.

And here we stand at the touchpoint of another tidal shift in American history. It is quite possible that the energetic young black man who began his campaign in the shadow of Lincoln – in every imaginable sense – has just fulfilled the motto of the state where he concluded his run. And gave new meaning in the minds of the current administrations detractors (myself included)

Two speeches came tonight: one conceding, one accepting the mantle of the presidency. I admit to a degree of shadenfreude that frightens me as I whisper softly 'Sic semper tyrannis' in the wake of two eloquent speeches that herald the end of these past eight years of constitutional distress and cynical division. Inarguably, an eloquent man is now our leader and another eloquent man returns to the Senate as all eyes turn to the victor and wonder: We know he can lead, we know he can speak... can he unify us?

I cannot stress enough the degree to which this campaign season has changed the dynamic of American politics. Whether for the better or the worse remains to be seen. For one thing, this is very likely the end of presidential candidates trying to exist solely on public financing. And the part that alarms me the most... they have driven the wedges ever deeper into the cracks that divide us. Hammered them home for two straight years with speeched invoking words of hatred and division, invoked images of fear and the ineffable other. On the bright side, both campaigns have brought women and minorities deeper into the process than every before.

Which brings us back to Lincoln... sort of.

Awhile back I opined on another website (one devoted to political debate) that America had embarked upon a "Rhetorical Civil War". It's interesting to me to see that this idea isn't unique to me and has found traction in both the right and left as those few pundits with the clarity of vision to realize what's happening are standing agog, at a loss for how to stop it.

Recent conversations I have had and observed with those I usually consider to be calm and logical thinkers frighten me. The ad hominem attacks both against the candidates and against their opposite number in the argument have escalated. Names have been called. Teeth bared. Crowds in front of Palin and McCain have chanted "Terrorist" and "Bomb Obama" and "McCain, not Hussein", "Get him", and raising in an ever more shrill fashion the specter of otherness that they wrapped around their opponent.

I cannot completely quantify how this deplorable behavior played into my ballot decisions.

I listened to McCain's concession speech tonight with surprise. This was the man that I admired what seems so many years ago. A man who - had he shown up for the campaign - may yet have won my vote. It is not inconceivable that there was a combination of events that would have led to that outcome. He spoke well tonight. His words were well-intentioned, I doubt not, and I do not cast any doubts upon his intention to try to heal the wounds of this campaign. It was an honorable speech. But I hoped for more. I still do.

Too late McCain's effort came during the campaign to halt the whispers that Obama was a Muslim. He told that woman back in Iowa that the senator was an honorable man who they need not fear. But I fear it was too late, too little, too inadequate. And no attempt was forthcoming from the firebrand of the campaign who seemed so eager to unleash the rage of the chanting crowds. I look for Palin to help put the pin back in that grenade, but as a resident of the Northwest, I am all too aware of her style, tone and rhetoric and I despair that she recognizes the damage that has been done to the fabric of the republic on this quest for glory.

For most of my life I have watched as political operatives found and focused on specific issues, wedges to drive between the voters. Wedges that are hammered home with such blind zeal that any attempt to repair the broken social security system has been toxic to the career of anyone daring to assay such a thing. It has been called "the third rail of American politics." Abortion, defense spending, the war on drugs, pick your issue and find the single-issue voters who will relentlessly punish the candidate who crosses their involate line, no matter what else the might offer, no matter their intentions, no matter their reasoning...

In a change for me, I have taken an active hand in this election cycle. I have stepped out of the shadows where I have – as a rule – hidden my political opinions for most of my life. I didn't want to get involved. George W Bush and especially Dick Cheney changed that. They tortured people in my name. They broke the constitution, or at least bent it until it began to show stress fractures. And thus will you find it inscribed on the straw atop a broken camel somewhere behind me.

I have engaged. I have fought. I have won and lost and often fought to an empasse. I fought with those opposite me in the political spectrum. I have been labeled a liberal, a conservative, a libertarian, an elitist, a peacenik, a warmonger, a Jesus freak and many other less pleasant names besides. Some of them are even true.

I have been living on the thin end of the wedge.

About a month ago I realized that if McCain won, my world would not end. If he won and implemented a goodly number of his campaign promises - the realistic ones that might have actually survived congress - the sun would still rise tomorrow. I would live to fight another day. I would give him and even his running mate whom I deplore the benefit of the doubt. And began to notice the conviction with which my opponents were convinced that theirs would if the opposite were true. At that point, I began to come to grips with the core of the issues that divide us, with the dimensions of the gulf that yawns at our feet...

And I do not have the answers. I certainly hope someone does.

One thing I do know: I will continue to speak. That genie is decanted and there is no cork that could reseal that bottle. What is done cannot be undone.

As I saw it then and see it now: neither Mr. Obama nor Mr. McCain were launching a wholesale assault upon my life or system of beliefs. Truthfully, if you hold these past 21 months up to the light, you might well find that to be true for yourself as well. Or not. I don't speak for you, I speak only for myself.

My candidate won tonight, but I am not a Democrat. Too many pay lip-service to any party's political platform as the forge a path of their own devising for me to willingly surrender my desire to vote the candidate rather than the party. From the liberal-leaning Republicans to the "Dixi-crat" Democratic senators of the Clinton era, Rinos and Dinos make me cynical of any party-line vote.

The names tossed at me that I mentioned before are nothing as to what has been bandied about with abandon in this campaign, mostly from the Reds to the Blues, the gloves coming off and the nails coming out as we find ourselves in politics embodying what Tennyson might have called 'politics, red in tooth and claw.'

For too long we have sat and listened and watched in silence as our putative leaders drive in the wedges, chant and wave signs and trade barbed verbal attacks in rallies and on the internet, tell lies and sling mud as they pound gleefully upon the wedges without regard for those on the thin end. Wedge issues abound in this election, made all the more virulent by the stark differences in the candidates, the attachment of ageism to the one and the dangerous and ineffable 'other' to his opponent.

This is what scares me about an Obama victory... the reactions it might elicit.

I have watched and listened as this election has unfolded, as we regressed from a national conversation to a national argument with shouts of "Terrorist" and "Commie" coming from the cheap seats. And it has become increasingly clear to me that we stand at the potential flashpoint of our hitherto rhetorical civil war. It scares me to think that I might be right, that the leaders who set this fuse might not be able to walk back the damage they have done. That we might not heal. I can't help but think that every time we walk down this path it gets more difficult to walk back. If 21 months is the new standard for presidential elections, then we have 24 months to rest - at most - before we do this again.

Rest, America. You've earned it. Communicate with your leaders. Tell them what you want from them in the next cycle of elections as the midterms already loom large on the horizon.

Tonight, John McCain made an excellent speech. An eloquent concession and call for unification. But it cannot pass mention that those calling and hooting from the gallery were only told 'please'. And there was no direct address to walking back the charges made, the whispers spoken on the internet.

We need more. The man has yet to assume the office and already two bizarre plots to kill him have been stopped. This is a dangerous time, a time that can be the time of honor and disciplined governance from both sides that our nation needs. A time of healing and statesmanship. A time of civilized discourse and earnest disagreements given voice with passion and erudition.

In the past 232 years, we have endured 43 men in the office of the presidency. Some have sought the office. Many assumed the mantle in a time when it was considered more appropriate that the office seek the man rather than vice versa. There have been successes and failures, giants and poltroons. And the republic still stands.

Whomever is reading this, I implore you to take a deep breath. If he's not your guy, this too shall pass as the 43 men before him have. If he is, enjoy this moment. Do you utmost to see to it that your candidate becomes the president that you saw in him. That his potential is fullfilled.

I believe that the thin end of the wedge to end all wedges is poised above us. It is up to us to see to it that it is never driven home. To re-couch the words of Lincoln from the speech with which I began this rambling blog post, from the conclusion of his famous speech, his words describing the insurgent Republican party of the election of 1854, but better still they could describe the coalition of Americans we need now from all points on the political spectrum:

"Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought the battle through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud, and pampered enemy. Did we brave all them to falter now?-now, when that same enemy is wavering, dissevered, and belligerent? The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail-if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate, or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later, the victory is sure to come"

God bless, everyone. And God bless the United States of America.

Bookhunter

2008-10-26T22:38:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure I can quantify what it is that I like about books. It's rather like explaining the merits of a root beer float to someone who has never had one... or doesn't like them.

(Gasp! Tell me those people don't really exist!)

There are some things that you either feel or you do not. Much like the nuance and subtle nose of a fine full-bodied root beer, Bookhunting is one of those things that cannot be fully appreciated by or explained to those for whom a book is something you read and then throw in the pile for your next garage sale or trip to the local Goodwill.

Not that there's anything wrong with that sort of behavior. If no one ever got rid of their books, there would be nothing for me to hunt for and I... well, I would be sad.

There are certain things that I particularly love about books. The frustrated thrum of the pages as they reach the apogee of their confined arc and fall upon the page before it, staccato reminders that these ideas are contained but not tamed; they constantly seek to escape. The faded glory of spent gilding, hidden deep in the heat-stamped recesses of aged leather. The scent that wafts past my nose as the pages of an old cookbook flee my thumb, faded memories of a thousand thousand dinners, many of them obviously unsuccessful. Old typefaces laid long ago with handset lead type, tarnished gilt edges and worn marbled endpages... I could go on, but the single thing I love most about books must certainly be: the hunt.

You'll note that not very many of the things I mentioned are true of new books. That's not to say I turn up my nose at new books. I've purchased rather a lot of them and spend rather more than my fair share of hours in Borders and Barnes & Noble, and not just as an employee. It's just that - beyond the occasional odd or small press title - the hunt for a new book simply isn't that taxing.

Whatever it is that draws me to these aged agglomerations of paper, ink and ideas, beyond the contents or the authors, there is the object that supports all those things. There is gilding and sewing, headbands and backboards, cloth and leather, paper and paste, the tactile certainty of the ineffable thing. And of course, there is the quest to find the thing.

And those guys don't have the bell over the door that jangles when I walk in. I love that about second-hand and rare bookstores. They all have that bell. Like it comes with the kit or something. A jangly bell, ten thousand useless backlist titles, and ten genuine nuggets to bury among the dross.

In my wallet at any given moment is a short list of titles that I'm looking out for. In my head is a much longer list of 'target of opportunity' titles. Most of them are on my list simply because I want to read them. Or because they have some sort of personal meaning to me. Most have very little in the way of resale value. Periodically, I get to throw the list away and make a new one. Because I generally find what I set out to find. My dad taught me that. If I looked in his wallet right now, I bet he has at least one piece of paper with a book title written on it.

Patience and persistence and a willingness to shift the stacks at auctions will eventually bear fruit. If it exists in the Pacific Northwest and someone is willing to part with it, I will eventually run across it. But that's not what keeps me hunting... it's the things I find that I didn't know I was looking for. This weekend I found one of those at a Goodwill in Port Orchard, Washington.

Journeys Through Bookland was published in 1909 and edited by Charles H. Sylvester. It's a 10-volume reading plan for children and their parents to wade through the classics of western literature. Each book is bound in grey-green cloth with a beautiful art nouveau design gilded and embossed into the covers and spine. Each story begins with an illuminated capital and is lovingly illustrated with fanciful engravings and halftone plates. They've been given pride of place in my collection (and a bunny honor guard as you can see below).

There's something about holding an old kid's book that you don't necessarily get when you're holding a copy of Ulysses or something. It takes very little effort to envision the bright young minds that were inspired by these books.

Youngsters in knee-pants or ruffles, leafing through the pages while sitting on chairs stuffed with horsehair. Youngsters who went on to become moms and dads in their own right. And farmers and pharmacists, barristers and bootleggers (hey, it was printed in 1909 after all).

Were they bought for a boy by his father ere he took ship for foreign climes, off to fight in the trenches of a War to End All Wars? Was it then passed along to as the boy become man took his turn bearing arms against the Germans in '42? So much has happened since these books were published, so many stories lie between the lightly-yellowed pages. Stories I can never know but only imagine.

These books were obviously treasured by someone for over a hundred years before the finally ended up in the donation pile. Short of holding a family Bible in your hands, you cannot ask for a more poignant cross-section of a life.

Every old book has a story to tell. Beyond the story it contains, there is the story that it supported, the life that it led before it came to me.

All that aside, I am a huge fan of children's lit, picture books, pretty much anything of quality aimed at kids tickles my fancy. I'm not sure when I really came to realize how dearly I had held onto the books from my childhood while the newer books I had since acquired sometimes had to be sold or disposed of during one of my many cross-country treks. I think maybe my cousin-in-law (if there is such a thing) Janine really solidified it for me with her collection of children's books.

She was a preschool and kindergarten teacher, I really don't have an excuse.

I'm not sure why I love kid's books but I do. Probably because that's when I discovered the simple joys of a book. Without an effort, I can drum up memories of the dim stacks of the Sedalia Public Library, staring up through the wavy glass at the outline of my dad's feet as he browsed the adult sections above my head. There was something comforting about the basement space in that monolithic old Carnegie building on Third Street, at the foot of that grand old staircase.

I spent innumerable happy hours there as a kid, looking at pictures of tanks and helicopters, occasionally glancing up to see if dad had shifted to a new section. (Yes, there was an astonishing number of children's books dedicated to weapons of mass destruction in those days and I think I read every one of them.)

As all children must do, I grew up and transferred to the upper floors with my dad. Bought my own books, started my own private library just as he did. And as I sit here staring around me at the books on my shelves, I wonder what stories the antiques have to tell, and I ponder the stories that those new books of mine will one day acquire.

But that's a thought for a future hunter. I have some childhood reading to catch up on that has nothing to do with helicopters... or tanks.

A Message From Little Ronnie Howard...

2008-10-24T09:54:00.000-07:00

I don't usually make political statements on this blog, but this is seriously funny... or I thought it was.

See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die

Support...

2008-10-17T10:42:00.000-07:00

I was throwing a coffee mug yesterday (on the pottery wheel, not at someone) and thinking the things that my mental hummingbird flits to during the meditative moments of my life. A shapeless mass of sedimentary leavings, wedged, worked into a ball and then subjected to the erosive forces of water and centrifugal force on the wheel, pressure from my fingers, heat in the kiln, rare earth elements and glass and then back into the fire... just to give me something to transport the coffee from the French Press to my mouth.

Because my coworkers stare at me if I suck it straight from the cauldron.

Or maybe I will sell it. Or give it to Kristin and she will fill it with tea. It doesn't matter if it's holding pencils on a desk. For once, the coffee isn't the issue at hand, but the vessel of transport. The usefulness derived by reforming a shapeless blob of mud into a cup-shape.

The shapeless mass, what Lao Tzu referred to as the 'uncarved block' and the Romans as 'Tabula Rasa' the blank slate. All different thoughts for potential yet-to-be-realized.

Most of my life has been spent making the slate less blank. I was born with an inherent and insatiable desire to fill up the blank spots. Writing and art are both borne of that impulse to scribble on the wall, the hardwood floors, or (sometimes) the pages of a colouring book. For thirty-five years, I've been trying to fill the blank spaces with... something. Coherent or incoherent, it doesn't matter. Sometimes the chaos can be tamed - or at least confined - only by adding more chaos.

But as I move along in my art and my writing, I find myself all the more aware that it's not the scribbling that makes the wall pretty. It's not the ink that makes the page wise. It's the content... and the ability of an object to accept the content that makes art possible... Back to Lao Tzu and the pottery wheel:

"We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want."

In the lingua Franca of the art school, the word 'Support' was bandied about quite a bit. It's a generic bit of lingo to refer to the surface upon which art - theoretically - happens. The canvas, the clay, the pages of a sketchbook... all are supports. It's a good word. Sitting nestled among a dissonant array of jargon specifically designed to delineate insiders from outsiders, 'support' really is the best word for what the canvas does, what the clay does.

The metaphor can be extended to all art. (Yes, I consider even studio pottery to be an artform, not a craft, deal with it) At its very best, art it is an empty vessel, waiting to be filled by the viewer. Waiting to support their need for art... and we all need art. It's why we doodle in the margins of budget reports during meetings. It's why we convey ideas with charts and graphs and posters. Because the visual is the support for an idea which is only fully-formed in the mind of the beholder. Business statistics or a Klimt nude, the image is the support for the ideas, but ideas are useless without a mind to accept or reject them. Like a radio signal with no receiver.

It's a bit like the old "Tree falls in a forest..." argument. If no one looks at it, is it art? By my definition, the answer is yes only because that art is a support for - at least - the artist. Excepting the artist from the equation, is it still art if it goes un-viewed? No. I'm afraid that it's just an empty vessel waiting to be filled. The good news is that art persists, asserts itself even in the dark places. Look no farther than cave doodles in France or fingerpainting on canyon walls in the middle of the vastness of the Sahara. Art will eventually find an audience, so take heart.

I have three mugs sitting on my desk: one is from my favorite cafe (The Mandolin) and gets me coffee for $.50 a cup; One is from NPR; and one is made from pewter and holds my pens & pencils. But we own a boatload of original artwork or low-numbered prints from artists I know. That's typical for an artist's home. Most people will never buy an original painting or sculpture. The walls of American homes are adorned with photos of loved ones and prints that came with the frame they bought at Target and figurines from Hallmark. Which is well and good, there's an aesthetic there, for better or worse and - ultimately - those count as artwork albeit of a mass-produced and somewhat eroded quality.

That is why it doesn't matter to me that my cup might end up holding tea (gasp!), or even pens & pencils, for that matter. Because that person will have we still have a piece of artwork in their home or place of business. A vessel for their thoughts, their ideas of "mugness", and yes, their pencils. A support for dreams and original art by SW Perkins which they can hold in their hands, feel the heft, trace the throwing lines left by my fingers, marvel at the variations in the glaze.

All because of an empty space carved into a ball of clay on a spinning wheel...

Mark Bittman "No-Knead Bread" Recipe

2008-10-10T00:18:00.000-07:00

Just to prove that there's more going on in the newspapers than politics, the New York Times brings us a fantastic bread recipe for those of us who don't want to endlessly punch down and knead and punch down and so on and so on...

Progress Report

2008-09-28T17:06:00.000-07:00

So... This weekend saw the windowseat finally get a lid. Which makes it a much better windowseat insomuch as you can now sit upon it without fear of falling into a cedar-lined hole. Fragrant, but not terribly comfortable, I'm afraid. There's still some staining and trimwork left to do.

Libraries are never done, they say... I hope they're just talking about the collecting of the books.

While we were at it, Kris installed the reading lamps on either side of the seat. These are not hardwired. You may recall Kristin retrofitted these sconces with plugs and switches so that we could more easily change them out....

Or replace them entirely if Scott bangs his fool head on them so often that they break. Even more than putting a plug in the cedar oubliette, these lamps add immensely to the comfort and usefullness of this space. It is a library, after all... and a reading nook should be well-lit.

The cushion, of course, comes next. But that's a project for another weekend. We have all of the stuff and Kristin's even aquired quite the knack for upholstering, thanks to our new sofa...

Off with the old ugly faded fabric and on with the new greenish/grey fabric that will help the big comfy chair blend more fully into the other furnishings...

That red medallion pillow is a pin-tucked marvel made by Kristin's mom, I believe. It's a fun little addition to the room, I think. We picked up a boatload of throw-pillow forms to cover in an array of fabrics so that we can get rid of some of the old chenille ones we have knocking around that need to be sent to Goodwill soon.

These will help bind the room together by bringing the colors and fabrics of the eclectic blend of furnitures from one piece to all of the pieces... or so we hope. Matching is for sissies, bring on the eclecticism!

The vanity for the new bathroom - which you might recall was in the bed of the pickup when we were in the accident - has been repaired and stripped to its component parts.

Not to mention stripped of the dark DARK stain that was slathered all over it and relieved of it's broken top. This will be refinished, lightly distressed (but only lightly) and become our new bathroom vanity. The kneehole will have a shelf at the bottom to hold a basket of fresh towels (and knowing our house, a kitten or two).

While I made with the varnish-eating stripping agents and sandpaper, Kristin also mowed the lawn and tamed the wild rose and clematis tangle that was threatening to cut off power to the house and hold us for ransom.

It suddenly feels like it's been a long weekend.

My nephew Morgan has a birthday on Monday. Wish I could be there, but I hope the present I sent is a little piece of Scottie to add to their lives (insert maniacal laughter here).

Cheers, everybody!

Food Nerd on patrol...

2008-09-21T22:34:00.000-07:00

Did I forget to mention that I also judged a cookie contest this past weekend? It's not every day that a grown man is invited to fill both hands with cookies and mow down.

And it occurred to me as well that I hadn't posted any photos showing the new spectacles as well.

The ones that made my eyes glow won, naturally.

Photo by Becky.

La Cucina

2008-09-20T22:58:00.000-07:00

La Cucina... The kitchen. It's the heart of the home, or so the theorists tell us, and therefore requires more than the usual amount of thought put into it in order to make the heart beat... so I've begun thinking about the new kitchen long before we're ready to really "break ground" (or 'break floor', I suppose would be more accurate). Actually, I've been thinking about it nonstop since we bought this house, with dreams running the gamut from the beautiful and austere to the homey and the country.

My favorite publisher of books - bar none - is a publisher best known for their children's books: Dorling Kindersley, or "DK" as they are more commonly known. There are a large number of their children's titles in my library because I just love the big formats and beautiful photography, and the only reason they don't overwhelm the library is because they're usually so thin.

So it shouldn't come as a galloping shock to anyone to hear that my favorite book on kitchen design and idea-mongering is also a DK book (from their adult line, of course.) It's a great workbook-style layout reminiscent of some of the better text books out there.

The Unfitted Kitchen...

What might surprise you, is which - of all of the beautiful kitchens in this book - Kristin and I independently gravitated toward... It belongs to a professional chef and foodwriter whose name currently escapes me. There are no built-in cabinets. None of what's there matches. Even the sink sits atop a free-standing cabinet, a repurposed dry sink, I believe. Open shelving houses the bakeware, and mixing bowls and plates. A large table provides a work surface and a large and curiously ornate warderobe has been pressed into service as a pantry and holder of all other oddments that a kitchen accrues.

You're keeping your beans and oatmeal in Narnia, essentially. How do you compete with that?

You can find an interesting article summarizing the resurgence of the concept at the London Daily Telegraph by clicking on the newspaper name back there.

Again, the kitchen is supposed to be the heart of the home... supposedly. Honestly, in this house, the library is currently the beating heart of the home and the brains of the outfit to boot. Even if it does smell of varnish at the moment, it's where we spend all of our time. It's the one room I cannot abide an abode without, even a kitchen can be negotiable. Just give me my library and a hotplate and I will be content. I cannot forsee that changing anytime soon.

Not to say that cooking isn't a thing for me. It's just less of a thing than books.

I take cooking and food quite as seriously as I take anything. I love to cook and if you visit me, more often than not the outfit you'll see me wearing includes my canvas chef jacket or apron. The kitchen should be a utilitarian space with some life and character breathed into it without stripping away the utility. Something more akin to the kitchens of old farmhouses than the modern temples of marble and steel that they have become. Don't get me wrong; I've seen kitchens I love, that sing all the right aesthetic notes that tingle my spine, and they include all the built-in folderol I just told you to eschew... I'm a contradiction. I love modern kitchens to a point except that in the back of my mind I still gravitate ever more back to that unfitted utilitarian space.

Awhile back I posted a picture of the hutch that holds my pewter collection (right). Imagine that... on a grand scale. A built-in library, but not a built-in kitchen? Sure! Why not? Americans lived in unfitted kitchens for centuries before the built-in look came to dominance in the early fifties.

I close my eyes and I see a tile floor, perhaps mexican terra cotta, underfoot. A massive farmhouse table dominates the space as a quasi-island, pots hanging from an iron rack above the oiled butcherblock top of the table, baskets of root veggies and the Kitchen Aide mixer sit on a shelf added underneath the table. A smaller table stands at a lower height along one end, this one with a marble or granite top, the underside bearing a large crock of flour and a rack of rolling pins for the baker to choose from.

A single wall of fitted base cabinets, flanked by refrigerator and a bookshelf overflowing with cookbooks and apothecary jars laden with spices and dry goods anchor each side. A white fireclay farmhouse apron sink sits dead center under the window. Open shelving covers the two walls on either side of the window. A large kitchen dresser and the stove sit against the 'foot' of the L-shaped space, acting as larder and in the stead of built-in cabinets. It is free-standing and may be moved or replaced as the need or mood occurs. The walls are yellow where they aren't tiles and the space is well-lit and hung with drying herbs from the garden. Chairs or a long bench are pulled up on the side of the table opposite the worksurface so the cook can be kept company by guests who are simultaneously out of the way.

The kitchen space bleeds into the dining area with the "inglenook" hearth around the woodstove, and dining space differentiated mainly by the change from tile to bleached pine flooring, which continues down the hall toward the other rooms.

Some wood is stained or oiled, some painted. The mis-matching will have to be carried out carefully to avoid a mishmash. The surfaces are utilitarian and easy to maintain and clean with an accent on tile and cement options. All of the furniture is refurbished by hand, all of it antique except perhaps the shelves and the Kitchen Aide mixer.

We already own the table we're going to turn into an island and the kitchen dresser as well. So I suppose - even though the bathroom is officially the next project - we're already on our way.

It may well end up being the heart of my home after all... but at least there are books so I guess it's ok.

Current Projects Update...(Or: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Naugahyde)

2008-09-20T12:05:00.001-07:00

Some photos of the current projects...

We found a mission-style sofa (technically, it is called a 'Settle') at a junk shop. It was there primarily because part of the internal framing was busted and partially because the fabric was faded and kinda' ugly.

The arms and most of the frame are made of quartersawn fumed Oak. And someone just tossed it because it was too much trouble to fix!

Sheesh! Some people. ;o)

Their loss is our gain; we picked it up for a song and stripped the old faded fabric off. I repaired the broken strut and reinforced it to keep it from breaking again. And now Kristin is using the old covering as a pattern for new covering, which will be a nice solid green in color which we can then accessorize with pillows or whatever to match whatever we do in that room in the future.

Soon it will be in my Arts & Crafts library and the mauve monstrosity can go out and live a life of ease somewhere else in all it Naugahyde glory.

It's my favorite form or recycling.

In the meantime, I'm finally staining the windowseat. The first coat is done and drying and then there will be sanding and the second coat and possibly a third plus the poly coat... so it's on its way to being done, but still a ways to go before I can permanently attach the lid and Kristin can then make the cushion.

Soooooo busy!!!! Gotta get back to it...

Shrewsbury Renaissance Faire (Last Weekend)

2008-09-20T09:38:00.000-07:00

Yeeeesh! It takes so long to recover from these things these days. Sleeping on the ground just isn't as much fun when your back hurts so much you don't feel like you can move a camp chair, much less boost your aching bones out of bed come morning...

Ok, I exaggerate... at least a little. It's not that bad. But King's Valley Oregon, where the Shrew holds her faire (seriously, she introduces herself as 'The Shrew', I have no idea what her real name is) is one of those climatological oddities that Oregon so excels at creating. It gets into the 90's by day and the 40's by night.

Like I said, aching bones. But it's everyone that gets stiff and sore and cranky, not just us. I cope with coffee... not drinking it, mind you, offering it to fellow grumpy campers as a bribe and/or peace offering. (And he drinks it too, of course.) Kristin copes with oatmeal. Not as effective as a bribe, but it seems to work for her, so I don't judge.

Among other firsts (like the first time our faire got canceled), this year marks the debut of Kristin's new leather fool's mask. When I was designing it, she asked me to leave the tip of the nose lopped off and hollow so she could use it as a vase or something. (I try not to ask questions).

At Shrewsbury, this feature reached it's logical conclusion... She stuck a piece of wire in there, twisted into a loop and bent down so that the loop was out in front of her mouth. Add a bucket of soap and voila!

Bubble nose. Kristin took my lovely leather mask and turned it into ye olde bubble blowing contraption. It's amazing how often a piece of artwork finds facility that the artist never dreamt of...

At any rate, the Shrew's faire always makes an excellent send-off for the summer's faire season. Now we begin the buckling-down that comes with the changing of the leaves and the cooling of the season, and the rain. Oh! The rain. Which began on Tuesday and probably won't stop until November.

That's ok, really. The grass could have used a good mowing before it started, but really, it's time for the rains and the fog. If it goes too long without rain, Northwesterners start to get grouchy. We refer to it as 'Liquid Sunshine'... which is nice, because where else can you think of that sunshine comes in buckets, or even barrels?

Speaking of the artist and his muse, for those of you I haven't spoken with in awhile, I start school again on Tuesday. Yes. Scotty's going back.

I've signed up for Ceramics at the college where I work. Just the one class for the moment... I need to be sure I can do this before we devote too much money to it and discover that my head explodes the moment I set foot in a classroom. For those of you who knew me last time I was in college, you'll know this isn't much of an exagerration. School and I have never really gotten on well. I'm counting on the fact that I've calmed down rather a lot and found paths around most of my particular challenges, even to the point of forming an uneasy alliance with mathematics.

So we'll see how it goes. Hopes are high indeed.

That's the news from Fox Island (by way of King's Valley, Oregon). Today we're recovering a beautiful old Mission-style settle we discovered in a junk shop. I had to do some repairs to the frame, but those are done and it's all about fabric and foam now.

Love to everyone! Gotta go sew!

There's something on your screen...

2008-09-14T22:21:00.000-07:00

Here, let me get that...

(Squeaky, squeaky, squeaky)

There you go!

That'll be five - fifty, exact change please, fool carries no change.

No, I didn't forget...

2008-09-12T01:11:00.000-07:00

Because I've been asked... no, I didn't forget what day it was yesterday (it's 1:00 am on the 12th as I write this).

I understand and support the people who lost colleagues and friends and loved ones commemorating the day. I don't want to take anything away from them. I understand New Yorkers wanting to take a day to reflect on those horrific events.

I didn't forget... I just didn't have anything to add to the national debate these seven years later. There are people who were there, people with stories to tell from whom we should not even for a moment take the spotlight. Let them tell it. I won't dilute the pool by adding my mundanities. I didn't lose anyone I knew or loved. For me to wax maudlin I feel would only take away from the stories being told by the people we should all really be listening to: the survivors, the children of the lost, their spouses and friends.

Listen to what they have to say. Honor their memories and their losses.

And I think it's high time we crawled out from under our beds. Want to fight a war against terror? Start by not being afraid. Because what terrorists really hate is people who aren't afraid of them.

And everyone needs to stop using those who died on 9/11 as political props. They deserve better than that.

Scott

Because it's worth keeping track of these things...

2008-09-11T12:44:00.000-07:00

In case anyone was wondering...
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

Cheers!
Scottie

(In case anyone is puzzled by the picture, it's an image created during the Trinity test-explosion of the first atomic bomb conducted in 1945. A number of eminent scientists were predicting that unleashing such a thing would ignite the earth's atmosphere and extinguish all life on earth... deja vu, I guess.)

Life, Jury Duty, Politics, Intellectual ExLax and other uncomfortable topics...

2008-09-09T15:53:00.000-07:00

In the course of my term in the juror-dungeons beneath the Pierce County Courthouse, I think I managed to read more actual newspapers in two weeks than I can recall in the past few months added together. Actual newspapers, not their websites. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Tacoma News Tribune, Seattle PI, Seattle Times... the list seems endless. It was almost like old times. Except for the sitting in a bomb shelter part.

You see, the internet was only sporadically available to me, so I had to brave inkstains to get a glimpse of the world beyond the bunker. Now I confess that on a daily basis, I read a lot of news. I'm a bit of a news junky. I almost ended up a journalist, after all. But I'd gotten away from print editions, drawn by the blinking lights and video podcasts of Google's Attention Deficit Utopia, so it kinda felt good to get my fingers inkstained.

No, not all of that ink came from Mary Englebreit, don't start with me. (I never did figure out where that stupid cat went. I think it was an errant piece from a different puzzle).

My curmudgeonly griping aside, can you really think of a better place to wile away the weeks of the national Democratic and Republican hack-a-thons than in a bomb shelter? I can't. (Well, actually, I can, but I'm trying to be realistic... and I tend to burn when exposed to too much tropical sun anyway.)

After spending a week, selflessly gifting me with a multitude of things to blog about, the Pierce County courts sent me home. Sort of.

Please, let us not confuse “sent me home” with “let me go”. I was on parole. Each day I had to check in to see if they’d need me the following day. Every night, log into the website (which was frequently down) or call and listen to the automated message to see if I was going to wake up in the morning headed to work, or the court house. Sometimes I couldn't find out where I was headed until the morning of.

Sheesh! How codependent can you get? I’m sorry, Pierce County Judicial System, but I think I need to start seeing other judges, other attorneys. You understand, don’t you?

Don’t take it too hard. It’s not you… it’s me.

Odd as it may seem, I never realized before just how regimented my life had become until first the accident and then this jury thing threw a wrench into the works. For the past year, Monday-Thursday Kristin & I have carpooled into Tacoma and she dropped me off at my first job… writing. The first shift of my day was spent at a coffee shop busily at work like an alchemist in his lab, transmuting coffee into words. Between two and ten thousand of them a day (depending on how it was going) before I set off on foot for the college and my paying job.

The accident changed that, throwing me into physical therapy two mornings a week. I gotta confess: twice weekly visits with Torquemada aren’t really conducive to writing. Not even mystery novels. And there’s a consistency piece of the writing puzzle that I can’t quite quantify. I can write the first draft of a 200,000 word novel in six months as long as I can make it a daily event.

The effect of this disruption to the daily expulsion of my inner voice to the outer world was profound. That makes me sound schizophrenic, doesn't it? Sigh. Never mind the voices, we're talking about the effects of tortuous manipulations of my body by smiling, well-meaning people in the guise of healers.

The chaos was - of course - compounded by the jury summons and my physical therapy regimen joined the writing regimen in the cocked hat. (There seems to be a lot of room in that hat... must be one of mine.)

What's that you say? Get a doctor's note and get out of it? Yeah... it's not that easy.

Remember when I said that Judge Larkin told us that only 35 of every 100 summonses ended up putting a juror's butt in a courthouse seat? I don't know how the other 65 get away with it, because heaven knows I couldn't. We must have a lot of brigands out there, on the lam from 'Contempt' citations because I could not figure a way out of it that wasn't just pushing it forward another week or two.

See, apparently, I could get a delay, but not a dismissal. My boss was summonsed at the same time I was and I watched her maneuver through the system. It didn’t work. They don’t let anyone go for any reason any more, all you can realistically do is delay it and delay it and… you get the picture. My doctors, my boss, just about anyone would have written the letter for me, but all it would have done was delay the inevitable. Sooner or later I’d end up in the bunker waiting for my name to be called. Added onto that that is the simple fact that the two weeks they assigned me for service were really the only two weeks I would have to get it done without really really screwing up my school or work schedule since it just happened to fall between quarters.

Consistency… well, momentum, actually, keeps the writing moving forward. Twice weekly torture sessions… not so much. Jury summonses weren’t much better. (I really tried to consider it research, but I can’t… I just don’t write that kind of mystery novel. Not a Grisham bone in my body, alas.)

So I stuck my courage to the sticking post (I used chewing gum in case you're curious) and made my way downtown and the rest you know. I went to the bunker, sat on a jury, got scrutinized by lawyers and aliens, and got a little work done, and a little writing done… neither one to a satisfactory degree of quality. This is why I spent so much of the week being an internet diarist. Searching hard for The Funny became my new vocation because none of the others seemed workable from my subterranean redoubt.

It became an odd thing for me not knowing where I was going to be doing the next day. Being on the wrong side of the rabbit hole made it impossible to set and keep therapy appointments with any regularity as well. Consequently it also made it extremely difficult to really get any momentum built up on my writing. Even my previously disturbed regimen was disturbed... and how do you find equilibrium when the disturbance piles upon disturbance to the point where you’re not sure how far back you’d have to go to locate the original baseline you’re trying to reestablish?

It’s a lot like throwing all of the balls in the air and trying to juggle with your earlobes.

So here I sit at the keyboard of my laptop at my fave coffee shop near school. I’m trying to get my physical therapist on the phone to see what we can do about getting my PT back on-track.

Deep down, though, I’m almost hoping that I can’t... almost.

Perhaps ‘wishing I didn’t have to’ would be more accurate. It would be so much easier to sort everything out if I could get my regimented writing schedule back on-track rather than continuing an endless loop of physical therapy appointments with no end in sight. On the other hand, my back and neck ache so to such a degree at the moment that those wishes seem all the less realistic.

The reality of it all is that writing is almost a compulsion for me. It’s how I get things sorted out Up There, how I organize and channel things that cannot or would not otherwise find an outlet. When I can’t do it, it gets backed up in my head. The words jumble and knot and form tangles and it takes forever to sort it all out. I end up with something that I can only describe as intellectual constipation. And since I’m not willing to follow the path that F. Scott Fitzgerald walked, the mental Ex-lax isn’t available over the counter. No drinking for me… unless the election-season partisan bickering goes on much longer, in which case I think all of us are going to need a stiff drink. Come to think of it, after that metaphor, you might need one yourself.

Incidentally, on Friday I received a note from the judge in the one jury that I was on, thanking me for doing my "loyal and patriotic duty." What a nice sentiment. Though I admit that weeks of reading election coverage inspired the kneejerk thought: "Heavens. Who knew that public service was inherently patriotic? And here I thought that all you had to do was wear a flag pin on your lapel..."

Too many newspapers and scurrilous chain emails crossing my line of sight these days, I guess.

Hrm... there's an idea! Maybe I could get back in the writing swing by creating a few of those spurious political chain emails? They don’t look so hard to come up with, a few misconstrued quotes, some alarming allegations that a ten-second Google search would debunk. Pick a few fights on the FactCheck.org forums... I don’t even have to spell correctly or use proper syntax!

It's a veritable writer's utopia out there.

Heck, if I could convince myself that the cafeteria at the Pierce County Courthouse is an elaborate alien experiment, how hard would it be to do the same thing to our election system?

That would be just the thing for squeezing a little science fiction writing in between therapy appointments.

On second thought, I think the Fitgerald approach might be less damaging to my soul.

Well, anyway, that's the view from inside the cocked hat. The Phuysical Therapist called me back and I have my 'welcome back' appointment tomorrow morning. And - like the election currently tearing our country asunder - this too shall pass. And we can only hope for real and lasting healing to follow.

And remember what Tom Clancy once said: "The difference between fiction and real life is that fiction has to make sense."

Bright kid that Tom Clancy.
God bless, everyone.

Take Me To Your Lizard...

2008-09-06T11:28:00.000-07:00

A spaceship lands and when the gangplank lowers, a robot clanks its way down to terra firma and grinds to a halt in front of the assembled armies of the world. Two people watch on television, Ford Prefect (an alien) and Arthur Dent (who is a human, but not very good at it). The electronic creature stares at the army men arrayed before it, looking slightly confused... after a moment, it speaks.

"I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, "take me to your Lizard."

Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the nonstop frenetic news reports on television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.

"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like that straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."

"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."

"I did," said Ford. "It is."

"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"

"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates the government they want."

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in."

----------
Quoted from So Long and Thanks For All the Fish by Douglas Adams

Chance...

2008-09-02T20:54:00.000-07:00

No court-ordered hijinks today or tomorrow. They decided not to call my group in. I guess we were too much trouble. Or they were worried I'd blow the lid off their behavioral experiments.

Probably won't have to go back to the bunker until Thursday, just in time to allow them to call me up on the last day I have to serve for a multi-week jury. Don't laugh, I watched it happen to several people last week.

In the meantime, it's off to work for me to earn a livable wage. Which is nice. Maybe I can drum up some work to keep me busy during recesses when I'm inevitably called for the next trial of the century...

"Humanity and good policy conspire to dictate, that the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed..."
- Alexander Hamilton
"The Federalist Papers"

If I land on free parking, do I get all the money from the fines?
Or was that a house rule? I forget.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

2008-08-29T22:52:00.001-07:00

One of the few interstice moments of late summer sunshine in the past week or so found the kitties testing out the new window seat. Which is nice, because this is basically why I built it. To give the kitties and Kristin someplace to bask in the easterly rays of the morning sun.

Remodeling is so hard on the cats. Imagine your entire world, suddenly bereft of one of the constants that has been under your feet your entire life. Like God took out all the grass on earth and replaced it with... I dunno, styrofoam packing peanuts or something. Since our guys are house cats, the effect of us removing all of the carpet and laying wood or laminate it its place is much the same thing for them. A fundamental aspect of their world is changing. And while some of it is interesting, or entails new and interesting smells and places to play where the bouncy toys actually bounce... it's been a tough row to hoe and it's not over yet.

On the other hand, they're finally bonding over the experience. The past few weeks Fig has finally started standing up to the giant dust bunny. He actually knocked Dusty off of a towel he wanted to lay on, which is basically unheard of.

I like that picture (there are several like it, actually) because they look so peaceful. Brotherly. Content with at least one of the changes I've made to their habitat... does the craftsman's heart good.

In the meantime, here's a glimpse ahead to where we're headed with the new kitchen furniture and deco (more or less).

Day Four: (Final Update) Tried & Found Wanting

2008-08-29T13:42:00.000-07:00

I have been weighed in the scales and found wanting... I guess. At any rate, I was eliminated from the jury at the eleventh hour. 12 Jurors, 2 alternates. The rest of us were told to bail. They grilled all of us pretty hard. Asked a lot of personal and penetrating questions. It was interesting, I would have liked to see the trial but I'm glad I'm not stuck doing this for another three weeks.

Mixed feelings...

Incidentally, I've never been in the audience of a talk show, nor do I watch them if I can help it, but that's what this felt like. I think there are people in the world who bottle it all up their entire lives, just waiting for a talk show host or lawyer or someone to ask them these questions. The admissions... the sheer amount of over-sharing that went on in that room that went far beyond the scope of the questioning was... unnerving.

And at some points it felt like a Philosophy 101 class. What would you do if...

For instance: at one point the defense attorney called on me and we got into it about the death penalty and whether or not I should be offended that the governor of Illinois "usurped the role of the courts by commuting all of the inmates on death row in his state to life terms." This was after five death row inmates were exonerated with DNA evidence, mind you. "Usurped the role of the courts..." took the power of life and death out of my hands and commuted sentences. This is a defense attorney who seemed like he wanted me to be offended by that. As if he was... which is odd, considering his role in the judicial process.

This wasn't a death penalty case. It was an identity theft case. Prison, sure. But when did we start executing people for this? Going back to the days of hanging horse thieves? I doubt it somehow. What he was trying to get at, I couldn't say.

Anyway, I told him I was not offended by the executive branch executing their constitutionally defined role. This power of their exists for a reason, to react to new information that the courts did not know, were not aware of, or could not know at the time. When we kept going we ended up getting into the actual nature of the death penalty. He ended it when I mentioned that I was categorically against it.

There were other clashes. The prosecutor's questions were basic and straight-forward. The defense attorney's hypotheticals were torturously mangled. I applied logic to them and he stopped calling on me.

I'm not sure if it was him or the prosecutor that used their challenge to kick me out.
I guess it doesn't matter.

Friday I have off, Monday's a holiday. Back in the pool on Tuesday.

Day Four (Midday Update): Close-In Counters

2008-08-28T23:38:00.000-07:00

NOTE: For any of this to make sense (assuming it does) you would have to read from the bottom of the page up, starting with day one.

This being a snapshot of odd occurrences that punctuated the middle of day four of my sojourn among the humans of Pierce County... Carry on, human.
---

So... I got called in on the big multi-week Superior Court Case. Which is all I can tell you at the moment.

I can’t talk about the case. It’s a rule. I haven’t been eliminated in the first few lightning rounds. One of the lawyers bears an unnerving resemblance to Conan O’brien’s old sidekick. I forget his name.

Lunch, however… lunch I can talk about. And aliens. I haven’t been enjoined from talking about aliens. Strange how those two subjects tend to intersect.

The judge gave us an hour instead of the usual hour and a half right in the middle of the time during which the sign on the door of the 911 Deli warns that they won’t guarantee a turnaround of less than a half hour on any order.

Gotta love any business that can get away with that.

Instead I decide to run upstairs to the 11th floor cafeteria. I meant that literally. Run. Up. Stairs. It’s an odd fact of life here in the Pierce County Courthouse that the elevators only go up ten floors. To get to the cafeteria, one must walk up a flight of steps.

(How is this ADA acceptable?)

I tromp up the stairs, grab a soda out of the cooler, pour a cup of coffee and order a BLT. Get up to the front and the lady frowns at my debit card. “We only take cash up here.” As proof, she points to a handwritten sign (written with neon highlighters so that it’s darn-near impossible to read) posted on the glass next to the register. She smiles like I’m a street magician about to pull a hundred dollar bill out of her ear.

I step out the door and scan the top of the stairs. The door into the café proper. Cast my gaze up and down the entire front of the line. The walls all around… no signs. Just the illegible one next to the register. Did I mention that it's about 5"x7"? And practically illegible?

Am I on candid camera?
Do they still have candid camera?

“Don’t you think this would be good information for me to have had before I poured a cup of coffee and ordered a sandwich that you’re now going to have to throw away?”

“We’ve never taken anything but cash up here,” she smiles again. I blink at her. I glance down at my jeans and tennies and un-tucked dress shirt, not to mention my red Juror badge and the cheery orange number 42 (they took away my big purple one). Do I look like I work here? Why would I know this? Never? Oh for... (Deep breath)

Maybe she’s a vogon. I peer at her teeth, looking for telltale symptoms of alien ancestry. Hrm. No, she’s looks human except for the smile. Maybe she’s under an alien influence. Why is she smiling? Maybe not candid camera, maybe it’s some kind of behavioral experiment. Am I in a maze? If I eat the BLT will I get an electric shock?

I’m on to them now. Stick to your guns, man!

“That sign should be over there,” I point back the way I came.

“There’s an ATM on the first floor.” (Down and back up ten elevated floors and two flights of stairs… and it charges a fee, which I noticed earlier.)

“Yeah, I don’t think so.” I set down the tray and walk away. Enjoy my sandwich, lady. And my cup of coffee. If I’d turned left as I entered the maze, would I have been allowed to eat the BLT?

Customer service tip from someone who used to teach customer service skills: Don’t smile when you say “no.” Smirking like it’s all some kind of elaborate inside joke that you get and they don’t isn’t going to win you any friends on the far side of the counter. I don’t care how often you have to say something or how tired you are of saying it: It’s the first time your customer has heard it. This doesn’t make them stupid, it makes them human. Treat them accordingly… unless you’re an alien. I'm not saying she was... I'm just sayin' someone should keep Sigourney Weaver on speed dial.

First floor lobby and back to the alien experiment-free 21st century and the wondrous aspect of a coffee cart: “Of course we accept debit cards.” I could almost kiss the girl behind the counter but I restrain myself. I’m a married man and what would people think? Surely Kristin would understand.

Definitely not an alien. Unless it’s the Kim Basinger “My Stepmother is an Alien” sort of alien. Ok, she’s not Kim Basinger, but she does have the cinnamon scone, cup of coffee, and someplace to sit, which makes her perfectly lovely in my book.

So here I sit, sipping my coffee and typing this missive to the world beyond these walls. If you should find this bottle adrift on the tides, pause, stranger, and ponder how far into the county’s hierarchy these alien influences have penetrated. If they’ve seized control of the food supply, what’s next?

Darn it. I really wanted that BLT. (I avert my gaze from the demonic gleam of the ATM. Must resist the alien influences!) Oh well. What can I expect from a place where the elevator literally doesn’t go all the way to the top floor.

Klaatu, barada nikto!

Day Four: That Darned Cat

2008-08-28T23:31:00.000-07:00

This puzzle is freaking hard. Can’t find where the kitty goes.

(ahem)

I’m very early. My call was at 9:30 but I wanted to find parking downtown, so I got here at a quarter of eight. Bumming around the area, I spotted a couple of patrolmen exiting a place called “The 911 Deli”. How can you pass up a place called The 911 Deli?

I have a theory: If you want to find the best eats in an area, real stick-to-your-ribs vittles at a good price… follow a cop. When these guys are on patrol, they’re out and about breakfast lunch and dinner. They eat out A LOT and don’t really get paid a whole lot considering. And that means finding the best cheap eats in the burgh. The 911 Deli is just such a place.

Oh... don't follow them too closely. They don't like that sort of thing. Just sayin'.

The sign was lit, the door was unlocked, but the lights over the tables weren’t on and the counter was empty. I looked back, confirmed that the “Open” sign was lit. Am I breaking and entering? In the local cops’ favorite watering hole… great. As I prepare to make my escape and simultaneously prepare my criminal defense (I’m telling you, this place does things to your mind) An elderly Thai lady (I know because she told me) came out to assure me that they’re open, just getting a slow start this morning.

Ah! Good. (Phew!)

I order a ham & cheese omelet and coffee. The coffee’s not ready yet and the omelet will take at least twenty minutes to get it out to me. Is that ok? Um… sure. I’ve got some time on my hands.

The family that runs the joint is very nice to me and brings my omelet out. It only took 19 minutes, but it’s freakin’ perfect. I can’t count the number of quiches, scrambles, and what-the-heck-do-you-call-that’s that I’ve been served with a side of hashbrowns over the years under the dubious moniker of ‘omelet.’ This one is perfect. Light and custardlike innards without being runny, not overly fluffy either, heated-through but not browned, not even vaguely resembling a football. It’s an Omelet.

I knew the cops wouldn’t steer me wrong. The coffee’s not bad either. Not great, but not bad. I’m tempted to come back for lunch and taste their ‘Thai Iced Tea’ whatever that is.

‘Tis an auspicious start to the day. Which comes crashing down as I sit bent over a most pernicious puzzle. That darned cat. I think it might be a piece from some other puzzle. I glare suspiciously around at the other people who have finally succumbed to Mary Englebreit’s puzzling powers. Diabolical.

The room is mostly empty, but there’s still about fifteen minutes until the official call time. My cohorts will surely be along shortly. Surely.

People are filtering in, but I think they’re being eliminated from an early-morning session of truth-telling. Where is everyone? I get that momentary panicked feeling I remember well from gradeshool. Am I late? Did I misremember my call time? Misread the clock? Did I forget my homework? Am I in the wrong class? The wrong School? Where are my pants, anyway?

Get a grip. Is there such a thing as an omelet hangover?

The jokey lady is here, I can hear her laughing in the office. She must be preparing a humdinger for this morning’s standup act. One minute to call. There’s only twenty or so people in the room. Some of them culls from other juries. What gives? Does this mean I’ll get on a jury by the universal forces of attrition?

Side note: Just once, I want to hear a defendant say: “And I’d have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids!”

Time to close the laptop. It’s 9:30 and the joke lady is approaching the podium. I think I might see where that cat goes anyway. The joke lady is on my wavelength...

“A man wanted to get rid of his cat. He took the cat ten blocks from home, kicked it out of the car and took off. By the time he got home, the cat was sitting on the doorstep, waiting for him to let it in.

The next day, the man drove forty blocks, turning and backtracking several times, booted the cat out of the car and sped home. There was the cat, sitting on the stoop, waiting to be let into the house.

The third day, the man tried once more. He put the cat in the car and drove all the way across the city, backtracking, turning left, turning right, ending up MILES from his home. Hours passed and the man’s wife began to worry. She called his cell phone and he picked up on the third ring.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“A long way away, is the cat there?” the woman hesitated before telling him, yes, the cat had once again beaten him home. “Good, can you put him on the phone? I’m lost.”

(Ba-dump bump.)

9:35 am. A jury pool they called up yesterday apparently had to dismiss seven of their jurors and they need seven more. The lady calls my name.

I’m number 42.

Now I’ll never figure out where that cat goes! Well, I’m off to get hidden from the world on a case of some sort. Either I will make it through the truth-telling and be sitting on a jury for a couple of weeks or I’ll be back with my nemesis the Mary Englebreit cat on the morrow.

What this will do to my start date for classes, I have no idea. On the bright side, someone just handed me a big purple 8X10 number 42.

Methinks I hear the Vogons approaching…

Day Three: Jokes, Damned Jokes & Puzzles

2008-08-28T23:16:00.000-07:00

This being an excerpt from my diary of my third day of Jury Duty. Carry on, citizen...

---
The Judge tells me that for every 100 jury summonses sent out, only 35 jurors appear. 65 of my fellow citizens have some ‘splainin to do while I and my 34 cohorts sit in the windowless bunker, wondering when our turn will come. Again. I’ve always been told that you show up and if you get on a jury, you’re done when the case is done. Apparently not the case, since I’m still sitting here.

I told mom about the judge. She laughed and told me that she once got called into a jury pool with a judge’s mother. You see: at the beginning of Voir Dire, one of the first questions they always ask (and the judge always seems to ask it) is “Do you know anyone on the court today?”

Here’s your ten dollars, mom, have a safe drive home.
(Wait for gong to sound.)

Your tax dollars at work folks. Well, they would be your tax dollars if you lived in Missouri. Otherwise, it's just a good bit of state-sponsored silliness to amuse you as it did me when I heard it. Where was I?

The light flashes but it’s to call in jurors who have already been chosen. They troop into the room, the weird lady that runs the place walks up to the podium and tells a joke:

“Q: How do you spot Ronald MacDonald on a nude beach?
A: He’s the one with sesame seed buns.”

My dad told me that joke when I was fourteen. Apparently their awe at having the presiding Superior Court judge in the room has waned. She calls the roll, sends the first jury out with an assistant and then returns to address the rest of us. There will be two Superior Court cases and four Municipal Court cases today.

Everyone will get called, just sit tight and take a short break. Watch for the amber light. In the meantime, another joke…

“A ship captain in heavy seas spots a light ahead on the same course and bearing as his ship. He puts out a call: ‘Change your heading ten degrees!’ the answer comes back ‘Change your heading ten degrees.’

The captain fumes. He’s a navy captain in charge of a warship, and by God he changes course for no man! He calls again… ‘I’m a navy captain, you will change your heading ten degrees!’ the call comes back: ‘I’m a navy ensign, and you will change your heading ten degrees.’

The captain is aghast at this insubordination and grabs the handset away from the radio operator. ‘I’m a US Navy captain on the bridge of a warship son! And you will change your heading!’

There’s a crackle of static as everyone on the bridge watches with bated breath. Soon the call comes back. ‘Well, captain, I’m a US Navy ensign sitting at the base of a lighthouse, so it’s your call.”

I think this place drives you a little nuts after awhile, because I laughed at that. Actually, I laughed at all of them. Mass hysteria. Mob mentality. Get enough people in a room and tell them a joke and no matter how bad the joke, some of them will laugh and the others will laugh along with them to keep from feeling left out.

I suspect that there are some comedians who base entire careers on this premise.

The real trouble with having a memory like mine is that things like that stick. Perfectly innocent synapses, minding their own business when along comes a really bad joke and SNAP they’re chained to an oar in a creaking galley with a naked Ronald MacDonald beating the drums to set the pace. Yes, I will remember Ronald MacDonald’s sesame seed buns until my dying day but I forget the name of someone I met yesterday. Thankfully, there were already synapses devoted to Ronnie’s buns, so no harm done this time. (Thanks, dad!)

People tell me they wish they had my memory. If you can think of a way to get it into a suitcase, you can have it, but you have to take all of the strange side effects with it: Ronald MacDonald and his buns et al.

Second and third jury selections pass me over but I’m still not allowed to leave. The joke lady keeps sending us on little breaks, “Use the facilities, you’ll be called back in fifteen minutes.” The fifth time I hear it credibility has attenuated to the point of embarrassment.

There are no decks of cards in the bunker. Lots and lots of scary Mary Englebreit puzzles but no decks of cards. Based on the number of older white males in the room, if there were, we’d be up to our ears in a poker tournament in no time. I guess it’s a good thing. I’d hate to get called to my civic duty while holding an inside straight.

I actually don’t know how to play poker, but it’s fun to pretend. I’ve never played Scrabble either. Mine was a deprived childhood, I suppose. We owned Scrabble, I found it in my parents basement when I was visiting last year. It was quite dusty. But it we ever played it I certainly don’t remember it (remember what I said about my memory?). We also owned decks of cards, but at most some rummy or solitaire was their fate. Go Gish in the early years...

A deprived childhood indeed. How do my parents look themselves in the mirror? Deprived, but not depraved enough to want to assemble an entire Mary Englebreit puzzle, however. How bored can you get?

You know, I think the kitty on the front of that puzzle box might be looking at me. I edge away from the puzzle box and open a new document. I have work to do.

Honestly, I don’t “get” Mary Englebreit. Her artwork is a little strange. Like a crossbreed of tole painting and The Busy Busy World of Richard Scarry. So much going on, busy busy busy. Little worms and kitty cats driving cars made out of apples and bananas and stuff.

Work to do. Concentrate. The cat is not looking at you. The flowers in the border are lavender anyway. I’m allergic to lavender. Couldn’t assemble it if I wanted to.

The Judge slipped out at some point. Probably has his own cases to hear, lawyers to frustrate, bad guys to punish. Yes, he’s gone to the bat cave. Or he’s tired of the lady's jokes too and is lucky enough to have an office in the building to escape into.

Work to do. Bye for now...

---

2:30… the amber lights flash again. Everyone files into the room, puts down the piece of the folk artsy kitty they were trying to find a place for in their puzzle, closes their Grisham novel or looks up from their laptops.

Joke lady walks up to the lecturn… and doesn't tell a joke. A miracle!

A new Superior Court criminal case has been called into session! Forty-five jurors will be called up! A frisson of excitement mingled with dread runs through the residents of purgatory. She reads out names. This is a big one. These cases can run days or even weeks to get through voir dire, witnesses, expert testimony, in and out as the lawyers wrangle over minutia. I set aside my puzzle… I mean close my laptop and lean forward. This could actually be interesting. I haven’t seen a big case yet. I notice the judge isn’t in the room.

Ten jurors in a row are called, all of them on the last day of their final week of rotation. Oooo. That's gotta suck. They howl, they complain, they protest. It’s the computer. It’s random. It’s your civic duty. Take your number, citizen. The computer is your friend. Now, get in line.

My name wasn’t called.

The remaining municipal cases have all pled out. No more jokes for today. Go home.
Ten more dollars. Cold hard cash.

---
(NOTE: The title is from a famous quote by British statesman Benjamin Disraeli and popularized in America by native son Mark Twain: "There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned lies and Statistics.")

Day Two: Telecommuting From Purgatory

2008-08-28T23:08:00.000-07:00

This being an excerpt from my diary of my second day of Jury Duty. Carry on, citizen...

---
Sitting in the batcave again. We’re told that if there’s an earthquake this is the safest part of the building, built as a bomb shelter. Nice to know, I guess. We spend a lot of time Not Thinking About Earthquakes in Washington. As if they never happen here. There were two in Pierce County over the weekend. Weak and deep, but earthquakes nonetheless. Guess that’s why they brought it up.

A few people have struck up conversations. Nearby a minister is writing his Sunday sermon. I’m on the laptop (obviously) writing this at the moment. I have actual work to do open on another window, which I will get back to in a minute.

The introductory speech has been given and the orientation movie watched when a man gets up from the middle of the crowd. He’s the only one in a suit. White-haired and distinguished-looking. He’s the presiding Superior Court judge and he’s been called in for jury duty. He gives a lovely speech about how much all of our participation means to the jury system and how it all underpins our form of government. Tells us about a pilot program currently running in other counties where jurors are paid minimum wage and how he finds the initial results encouraging.

We still just get ten bucks a day here in Pierce County. Sorry kid, maybe next time around.

The people running the room look a little shell-shocked. They didn’t know he was here. I notice thereafter that they’re all moving with a bit more alacrity than yesterday. The boss is in the house. Hope I end up on a jury with a judge. That would be interesting.

The first culling goes by without my being chosen.

Second culling… still no call for me. (Or the judge.)

Question: If you’re an attorney do you want the county’s presiding judge on your jury? I wouldn’t think so, but if you challenge him during voir dire because you don’t think he can set aside his prejudicial feelings as a jurist to render a fair decision... the 22 gets caught, doesn't it? Because aren’t you casting into doubt the single central salient aspect of the whole system, the ability of a judge to leave his or her bias at the courtroom door? Food for thought.

This is why I hope I’m in the room when he’s called. If nothing else, when the judge and attorneys ask if anyone on the jury has a relationship either personal or professional with any of them there, I want to hear how they handle it…

Get up to fetch another cup of coffee and then back to my seat. Open the laptop again. Stare at the screen.

I’m going to be here awhile, I guess. The gears of justice grind slowly. We’re told to stick around. Everyone will be part of the next call. That will be this afternoon. Get some lunch. Take a break. Come back at 1:30.

I brought my own lunch and just enough money for coffee. Nuts. I should get out there and walk around. Run over to the library and check my email. Instead I spend a few hours working on some things I brought with me from work.

I’m writing a manual for the Northwest eTutoring Consortium. Telecommuting from purgatory in a manner of speaking. Hours tick by in the windowless bunker. The minister is discussing the WSU football team with a woman who sat down next to him. A man is talking to a private investigator on his cell phone with a loud voice. (What?) Another man’s on his phone talking to a kid about losing his first tooth. My phone doesn't work in here. I wonder who their carriers are?

Another day in purgatory. Back to work.

It’s almost two o’clock. The people running room confer, mill around near the door. They don't seem to know what the holdup is. Patience, they tell someone who pipes up to ask. The judge isn't here, he's probably holed up in his office. I would imagine he has work to do too.

Wonder if they’ll ask more pertinent questions during voir dire this afternoon? Or is this what it’s always like? I'll sign off and do some real work. Talk to you later.

----

2:30... they finally get word from on-high. They call out a list of names. The lucky ones who didn't just waste an entire day leave in train to go get grilled by defense attorneys and prosecutors. People from the first culls enter, mill around and then leave again. What was that about? The judge's name is called but he's not here anymore. The lady makes a few snide remarks about judges being late for everything, living in their own time zones. The boss is away, we can be silly now, I guess.

Roll call. We're all here. (Except Judge Wopner)
You can all go home, we won't need you. See you again tomorrow.

Shut down the laptop and pack up.
I packed a lunch for this?
Another day, another ten bucks.

Sigh.

Day One: Juris Prudence

2008-08-28T22:47:00.000-07:00

This being an excerpt from my diary of my first day of Jury Duty. Carry on, citizen...

----
A hundred and twenty strangers sit in a windowless room. We sip coffee, type on laptops, read books or newspapers and generally ignore one another in the manner typical of such gatherings. Every once in awhile a yellow light flashes. Numbers are called and some depart, leaving the rest to wonder when our turn will come. Some of those called away return. Most do not. Our eyes drop back to our screens and our books, waiting for the next flashing harbinger of a new selection.

We are all of us here, none of us voluntarily, and each getting paid ten dollars for our presence. Plus mileage. Welcome to my very own corner of the Criminal Justice System.

This morning, Kristin packed me a lunch, made sure I remembered to put my MapQuest directions in my bag, patted me on the head and sent me off to do my part in the whole "smiting evil" thing. I didn't know it would entail an actual bat cave... ok, to be honest I haven't seen any bats per se, but that's not proof that they're not here.

To be honest, I’ve never done this before, and the whole thing has had a certain ‘down the rabbit hole’ feel to it. Like most people, I really wanted to get a good solid case in front of me, a mustachioed villain facing life for tying a rancher’s daughter to the train tracks. Or a man in a purple suit stammering out a defense and blaming it all on the guy dressed as the giant bat. Real criminal justice is just so… banal.

Defendants are just normal people in a bad place, at a bad time. Having a bad day. Or a series of bad days. Cause and effect. If they are guilty, then their choices put them here, if not, then our choices will set them free... at least theoretically. Hence the assumption of innocence. And the appeals process as well, I suppose.

With this in mind, was I summoned early by the amber light to endure the oddity of Voir Dire.

Handed an 8x10 number and herded into a small courtroom to be asked penetrating questions by savvy lawyers to discern your prejudices and biases. All questions will be general, if you have an affirmative response, raise your number.

Voir Dire, by the way, means “Telling the truth.”

Questions: Have you ever been in an auto accident where you were injured? (Scott’s hand rises) Do you have any problem or have you had a past negative interaction with law enforcement? (Scott’s hand stays down), Have you ever been prosecuted for Wreckless Driving (Scott’s number remains in his lap). Why are you here, why didn’t you beg off like most people do? (Scott is called on and says “If I didn’t do it, who would?” they nod sagely and move on) etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseum.

Some of the questions seem pertinent. Others don’t.

At one point near the end of proceedings, after several rounds of questioning by both parties, the defense attorney singles me out. Consults his jury list, addresses me by name. “You’ve been quiet this morning. But I guess no one has asked you any questions, have they?”

Well, there was the one about why wasn’t I smart enough to figure out a way to get out of jury duty…

“What do you do for a living?”

I tell him.

“Then you can teach me how to write?”

Scott swallows his first smartalecky impulse and says: “I could certainly teach you to write, but I’m an administrator, not an instructor.”

What does that have to do with anything in a wreckless driving case? Or racing? He doesn’t ask me any more questions. Neither lawyer ever asked me about the accident I was injured in or anything pertaining to the case.

I’m chosen for the jury. I have no idea why. Maybe they like people who work in education. Maybe because I have glasses. Nerdy guys with thick glasses make good jurors? I assume I’m less offensive to the needs of either party than those who were dismissed. There are seven of us. Five men and two women. A good mix of ages and people pinning down several levels on the graduated scale of melanin. Nice that we’re not all the same age and backgrounds, I like to think that justice is a bit more blind the farther the net is cast across the spectrum.

We’re told that one of us will be eliminated at the end of the case as the ‘alternate’. Like some kind of Jurisprudence Survivor. I wonder if they’ll make us eat anything icky?

Both sides and the judge tell us this one will be over quickly. They repeat it several times. Everyone there says it at least once. One day unless deliberations drag on into tomorrow. They kind of laugh when they say it. Seems odd. Some kid’s criminal record is in the balance but everyone’s being just a little laid back. The lawyers are almost flippant. Everyone seems laid back, confident in a win.

How weird.

The county’s prosecuting attorney for the county is new. Young. Green. I swear he needs to find someone to tailor that suit for him because it looks like he’s wearing his dad’s jacket. He has a senior attorney with him as co-counsel who is acting as a trainer and giving whispered input on everything the guy says. It’s a little distracting, but I’m good at ignoring things. The defense attorney is older, has an earring. Longish hairstyle. Hip old guy.

I squint at the defendant. No curly mustache. No purple suit. He’s just another kid. Young, good looking, wearing street clothes and a determined look. How are you supposed to tell the good guys from the bad guys when they all look like good guys? How do you know when you’re looking at a basically normal person who is having a bad day?

Opening arguments. The cop who pulled the kid over testifies. Cross-examination. The kid testifies. Cross-examination. Jury instructions are given. Closing arguments are given. They each go over the legal definition of racing and one of the women is eliminated from our jury by a random drawing of names.

(No one had to eat anything icky, alas.)

A jury of six? What happened to twelve? Must be different in lower courts, I suppose.

We bid our alternate goodbye. We’re locked in the room. We elect a foreperson by the age-old method of whoever doesn’t say ‘no’ fast enough gets it by default. We discuss things. Two of the older men have a history of drag racing as kids. They tell some stories to illustrate their points. It gets a little too "American Graffiti" at one point and some of us have to intervene to get things back on track.

After some discussion, we find for the county.

We notify the judicial assistant (which is the new term for Bailiff) and the verdict is read.

Afterward, the attorneys follow us back into the jury room.

This is odd, I’ve never heard of this before. And then conduct a debriefing? An after-interview? This is strange. I just want to go home now. This is voluntary, we’re told, just a way for the attorneys to get some perspective on how they handled the case. I would leave, but I don’t want to be the only one to do so. Awkward. I read the newspaper through the whole thing. I want to quiz the attorneys but I don’t. It was either a strategy that I don’t understand or not in which case… I don’t see any value to knowing. Some of the others ask desultory questions about the young prosecutor in training and then we’re thanked for our service and told we can leave.

Home by four o’clock. Asleep in the couch by five-thirty. Even though I was on a jury I'm to report again tomorrow to go back in the pool. Two weeks of this.

At least I get Memorial Day off.

No idea what happened to the kid. Is he sleep on his couch?
Guess I’ll never know.

What a strange system this is... will they all be like this?

Car Shopping

2008-08-24T12:31:00.000-07:00

We bought an SUV the other day. A 2004 Nissan Xterra. We needed a hauler, a light truck or something, and the SUV was - contrary to news reports - the most economical option for us. It's not something you'd necessarily want to drive every day on your commute (that's what the Honda Accord is for anyway) but it does pretty well for its size. There are several Hybrid trucks and SUV's out there now which we contemplated, but they're unbelievably expensive for what you're getting.

Incidentally, contrary to the news reports I've been reading and hearing, the hybrids are not even all that hard to find sitting on the lots. The Toyota Dealership we went to had 35 Priuses sitting on the lot. 25 new ones and 10 used (returned lease vehicles, I believe). And despite this evidence that the scarcity that is being alleged in order to inflate the price is either exagerrated or non-existant, the prices are still exorbitant with a sizable add-on to the sticker prices because they're 'in demand'.

Uh huh, right.

I wanted to buy a truck, not put us in hock. Can we just write a cheque please? And don't get me started on how much paperwork is involved in paying cash for a car. These folks seemed a little bumfuzzled by the very idea that anyone would do such a thing and we sat for over an hour drinking free espresso drinks in their 'Bean Counter' cafe while they sorted it out.

So we bought the Xterra. It's a really nice truck. It's bright freaking "CAN YOU SEE ME NOW?" yellow, which someone who has recently been injured (though not as badly as we might have been, thank God) in a major auto accident finds especially attractive.

Don't get me wrong. I really like the idea of kissing Shell and Exxon-Mobile and the Saudi prince of your choice goodbye, but how is it possible? The market is extremely confused right now. A four-cylinder 2000 truck that's been beat to hell & gone cost more than a pristine 2004 V-6 with lower mileage and commensurately lower maintenance costs & carbon emissions. I sat down with these clowns at the Toyota dealership and butted heads.
"It's a 2000. It's dented and scratched and needs a new paint job. But you want $15K for it?"

"And not a penny less. These things are really in demand."

"Is that why it's been on your lot for three months? Is that the definition of 'in demand' you're going with?"

"Nevertheless."

"Nevertheless, I could tack another 5 grand on and get a brand new one!"

"We'd be happy to work out financing for a 2008, you'll really like it." "

We don't want to finance, we want to pay cash."

"I'm sorry but these are really in demand. We won't go below 14k"

"I'll give you 9."

"Are you nuts?"

"No, but I think you might be..."

And so on. And don't even try to buy a hybrid Chevy Tahoe or Ford Explorer or any of the Japanese brands. Just forget it. The environment can wait, there's money to be made and we smell blood in the water...

So we went down to the Honda dealership and bought an SUV.

I know the arguments for allowing the market to address issues like this, that supply and demand will eventually self-correct. And to a certain degree, that may be true. But watching over the course of the two months I've spent shopping for cars has made it abundantly clear to me that the current market has to date utterly failed to take us off the greasy grid.

And until today (I'll get to that in a minute) I had despaired that it ever would.

For some time now, I've been debating the feasibility of the various options to fossil fuels with my buddy Denny in Ohio. We've touched on hydrogen and hybrids, but mostly, this has centered around the always-on-the-horizon Chevy Volt electric concept car. If they ever get the battery situation sorted out it might be a nice addition to the American highway, but I have my doubts that they'll get it out in time for it to really be the revolution they've promised. There's already a plug-in modification kit out for the Toyota Prius that converts it to a full-electric car. As usual, Detroit is a day late and a dollar short.

Overall, I've had my doubts about the feasibility of electric or hydrogen motoring stepping in to take the place of the petromobile for many reasons (at least anytime soon) not the least of which is the lack of supporting infrastructure. To get, say, Hydrogen cars into every driveway in America is beyond daunting. It would require either our government or an entity the likes of a Standard Oil to step up to the plate and say: "We're focusing all of our energy and billions in capital on this technology to the exclusion of all others. We will develop and implement the infrastructure, the technology, the science and then we will convince the American people (or the Russian people, whatever) to buy into it."

Uh huh. Good luck with that.
And good luck convincing a risk-averse Wall Street to pay for it.
More oil please, and step on it!

The government has historically lacked the political will of your average hive of bumblebees. The petroleum companies are paralyzed with indecision, and I've been convinced up to this point that they were ultimately going to have to be the ones to admit that the need for another option is indicated. What idiot in what boardroom in what petroleum conglomerate hasn't said "You know, cornering the battery market might actually allow us to survive into the next century..."?

This whole thing - of course - is complicated by the complexity of the technologies in question. Gasoline infrastructure was pretty easy to create by comparison. An internal combustion engine was an internal combustion engine. By the time it got more complicated than that, the standards were engraved in stone. Now, there are so many competing technologies, fuels, alternatives and (heaven help us) PAC's pushing thier pet solution(s) that it boggles the mind. And no standard has presented itself. No infrastructure plan has sounded workable. And - again - who will pay for it?

I know that there are many and diverse opinions here about the veracity and scope of global climate change claims. It all seems obvious to me, but to be honest, I don't really care what you think about the Greenhouse Effect. Because it's a reality that what we're really facing isn't melting glaciers or rising temperatures or the increased ferocity of storms on a global scale... those things are too esoteric, too hard to pin down to change the minds of the average American consumer. What we're talking about here on the ground is a choice between energy independence and the continued yoke of the oil states, including the one that just invaded Georgia, a debutante by a re-emergent economic and military power buoyed by petroleum revenues.

That's the argument in the driveways of America and no other will ever find traction. Cynical? Yes. But it took $4.00 a gallon gasoline to make us - as a nation - even think about these things and the only so-called solutions being floated involve more of the same, just in a different place.

Incidentally, it's worth noting that America's number one oil supplier isn't Saudi Arabia. It's Canada. But our economy floats on what OPEC wants to do on any given day. And for as long as our dependency on oil continues, this will be the state of things and our claim to Superpower status will continue to be undercut by global petro-politics. They have it, we don't. We need it and we need them to give it to us at the lowest possible price.

We can wring the last drop of oil out of every moose in Alaska, put up a wall of oil derricks off the shores of both costs, squeeze every last petrochemical out of every handful of mud in the Yukon territory and the likelihood of truly slipping the noose of Asian and sub-Saharan oil oligarchs is a vain hope. It's a wyrm that eats its own tail.

So the paradigm needs to shift... but where? Electric? Where does the electricity come from? How many people can plug cars into a powergrid already groaning under the load of booming demand and brownouts up and down both coasts? More nuclear? More coal? Wind? Solar?

Unless someone steps up and says "I have an idea" and goes on to prove that it's not only a good idea, but it's scalable to the demands beyond just the coastal population centers, that it's affordable, feasible now... well, if you followed the link above to the Wired.com article, you'll find an intriguing article about a guy that's thrown his hat into that ring. Shai Agassi not only has an idea for an infrastructure, but a way to implement it using existing technologies. No waiting for better batteries to be invented (as in the case of the Volt), no waiting people to get over a generational hindenberghydrogenophobia.

The guy's a dreamer on a grand scale. What if we could tell the entire oil-producing world "Thanks, but we've got another idea..." What if the need for oil was reduced to plastics and lubricants? How would our lives be different if we didn't need the good will of countries like Saudi Arabia? Russia?

It's not a perfect plan. Neither was gasoline, frankly. Outside population centers it will be slow to catch on, but then, so was electricity and telephones and broadband, and... and... and... and when I was a kid, my grandma and grandpa were still on a party-line style phone system. These things take time to implement across a country as large as this one. Which is why we need to start now. Because based on past figures, it's a twenty-year time window for implementation in the more remote or lower population areas of the country.

I'm not convinced that the extant grid can accept the additional load, but if he builds power generation plants dedicated to this specific use... I think it could work. In fact, he's sold a lot of people on the idea, including venture capitalists, the governments of Israel and Denmark. Proof of concept will be those two countries.

That Wired article is pretty long, so I'll sum it up. Here his the idea in a nutshell.........

You own the vehicle. The company owns the battery. You pay by the mile, like a cell phone plan. The car's OS calculates your destination and how much power it will require. If you have enough time to generate a charge, you plug into the grid and charge normally. There will be stations set up at population centers where you would generally expect to find a gas station. If there's not enough time for the desired charge to be generated, the computer contacts a repository (think a Jiffy Lube for batteries) and arranges for you to have a fresh battery installed for your longer trip. Fully automated. No charge for the change because the batteries belong to the company in much the same way your Visa card belongs to the issuing bank.

One of the drawbacks to electric cars is the time necessary to generate the charge necessary to go, say 100 miles, as it compares to the amount of time it takes me to put 100miles worth of gasoline in my gas tank. This system would - in theory - eliminate that drawback with it's battery exhange program.

Until the personal teleporter is perfected, this might just be the ticket we need to cut the middle eastern apron strings.

So this isn't a polemic, it's an extended meditation on the problems and the possible solutions presented by one person in the ring. I don't think either of the presidential candidates is saying anything compelling or new about energy. This is just Official Notice That Scott Is Intrigued... in case anyone cares.

I want to learn more. And I'm curious to know what everyone else thinks.

In the meantime, like a hundred-million other Americans just like me, I'm going to have to make the economic decision and find ways to mitigate the impact as best I can. Until the market corrects and the hybrids or electric vehicles become affordable for the average consumer - or until someone gets that flying car or jetpack option up and running - I'll enjoy my crazy yellow SUV and continue finding other ways to support and sustain the environment. Like planting my kitchen garden...

One

2008-08-21T15:59:00.001-07:00

A bipartisan message... from a celebrity with lots of voices in his head.

It followed me home. Can I keep it?

2008-08-17T19:50:00.000-07:00

Yikes! Scotty's been eaten by a Ginormous bumble bee!

Actual it is our new Nissan Xterra. Fresh off the lot. Well... not too fresh as it is an '04.

I know we said we were going to replace the truck with a truck, but we couldn't find one we liked (although the Honda Ridgelines are nice). In the bright sunshine of our 80deg plus day this one caught Scott's eye, so we came home, did a bit of research, liked what we found and went back for a test drive. and since she followed us home, we decided to keep her. She is adding a splash of color to the front of the house.

BTY - the center of the black seats is yellow. I'm sure more pictures will follow, but for now the only one we have is the one posted.

Hey Four Eyes!

2008-08-14T19:12:00.000-07:00

I was trying on new specs at Costco the other day and I hate doing that because I'm blind as a bat and can't really see what I look like. It's a lot of trust to ask someone to judge your new specs for you. Anyway, Kristin had the bright idea to pull out the camera so I could at least see the small image of myself on the screen. It kinda helped.

It made a fun montage, anyway...

Want to sign a petition?

2008-08-10T22:25:00.000-07:00

People keep asking me if there's anything they can do to help in the effort to get our faire back up and running. A letter to write. Or an email. Or... anything.

I appreciate the well-wishes and I appreciate that you have some grasp of what the outlet that faire provides means to us. As I am but peripherally involved in the actual running of the thing insomuch as I make sure my people show up at the assigned place and time, I can't say what it is that faire most needs to get back in the game...

However, there is a petition online that has been created by our supporters in the community. It is garnering signatures to show the Mason County Commissioners just how many tourist dollars that are turning away. So... if you have ever been to my renaissance faire - no matter where you live - I invite you to sign the petition. It will be presented to the commissioners of Mason County in open session, as many signatures as possible from as far and wide as they may be garnered.

So if you like, it is to be found here (click the link)
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/washington-renaissance-faire.html
As of this morning, there were over 830 people on the petition and more have been gathered in-person at Mason County events by our volunteers.

If you would in addition like to write a letter of protest to the Mason County Commissioners (Or just drop them a line to say 'hi'...) you can find them here...
Tim Sheldon: Tims@co.mason.wa.us
Ross Gallagher: rossg@co.mason.wa.us
Lynda Ring Erickson: lyndare@co.mason.wa.us

Please keep all communications with opposition groups and local politicos cogent and cordial. I've been stressing the need for that to a lot of distraught actors in the past few weeks. Needless to say, our cause cannot be helped by hystrionics. There's an old saying about catching more something with honey than you will with vinegar...

Anyway, just because some of you asked...

Cheers!
Scott

Here's an interesting idea...

2008-08-04T18:05:00.000-07:00

Watch this guy's video (below). It'll make you think, even if you think he's a loon, it will make you wonder why we're hearing about ways to increase our oil supply rather than talking about ways to decrease our oil need.

It's a compelling idea to me. In WWII my grandparents' generation relieved the burden on the national infrastructure by planting victory gardens in their yards, tomatoes among the tulips in American front yards. Not everyone did it, not everyone could. There are those who simply physically cannot undertake such a thing, or their time is scheduled so thin such a thing seems fantastickal... but many of us could. Time spent in front of the television (or on the Internet) re-purposed to green and growing things, toward the national good and the reduction of our collective dependence upon fossil fuels.

According to the "Population Clock" managed by the US Census Bureau, there are approximately 384.7 million citizens living in the United States. The US Department of Labor and Statistics estimates that in 2004 (the most recent numbers available) US Households spent roughly 14% of their income on food. That's a lot and it's increasing as other things - by necessity - decrease, in large part owing to the increased cost of a fossil-fuel based economy.

No matter how you feel about the 'Green movement' or Global warming or whatever, the numbers are difficult to argue with. Even the most staunch conservative (real conservatives) wants us to get away from the reliance on foreign oil, to free our nation from the yoke of Saudi oil fields. But why isn't conservation even being talked about?

If one in every ten families relieved a portion of that burden from the national infrastructure... how many Toyota Prius's would it take to equal that? How many offshore drilling platforms would we have to build in order to equal the savings, or national monuments would we have to despoil? There are ways to think our way out of the current situation with technology pioneered thousands of years ago... the shovel and the hoe.

Think about it.

Years of a Clown

2008-07-19T08:35:00.001-07:00

It's over. After a tense series of meetings and hearings, with one particular politician inciting the locals against us, the county commissioners shut us down with a little help from the state. It's over. Faire is cancelled, at least for this year, and the future is uncertain. There is talk of bigger and better things next year, but it's all up in the air, wrapped in a hydra of legalities being cast against us by a group of people who don't seem to like us very much for reasons I cannot fathom and a local politician who seems to have made it his mission to steamroll us.

This is long and meandering. Consider yourself forewarned.

I don’t really know what most people get out of faire. I assume that if you’re engaged in this enterprise at the level of a volunteer performing artist in for a for-profit enterprise, then on some level what you get out of it is more than the sum of its parts. We are unpaid actors entertaining a paying audience, after all.

There are several ideas being bandied about for reproducing the salient aspects of faire that most people will miss: period camping, campfire cooking, after hours at the alehouse, and even jousting. I don’t know what – if anything – will come of these ideas. All of these messages begin with the same message: “Find what you will miss about faire and we’ll figure out a way to reproduce it…”

I don’t think I can.

I will miss the camaraderie of my fellow actors, to be sure. I will miss the evenings of talking around a campfire (or lantern in the dry years), toasting the health of my friends at a wine tasting in the Nunnery, and the low chatter of voices beyond the canvas walls of my tent as I surrender to sleep, the first cup of coffee out of the French Press passed around, the dyspeptic grumble when people realize that if they want more they must grind their own beans and all I brought was a mortar and pestle.

I will miss those things and a hundred more. And I will attend as many of the shutdown weekends as I can make it to. Because all of those things that can be reproduced in a campground or the back forty of someone’s land. I will attend because we are friends first and Ren Faire Actors second.

But that’s not the sum of the pleasure I derive from those three weekends of August. What I get out of faire doesn’t happen after hours, in a camp (period or otherwise), an alehouse, or on a horse in the list.

I’ve told this story before. My ‘career’ with renaissance faire almost died the first day.

I started faire as a generic ‘Guy With A Sword’. Officially, I think the roster said I was a mercenary named James Wylde, but the mercenaries weren’t an organized guild and for all his historically-correct backstory, James wasn’t a character with a pulse. We didn’t gig or have anything assigned to us to do. There was a lot of time sitting in the guildyard. My wife was in the same boat, playing the ‘Pretty Girl in Noble Dress’ (on the roster she was Princess Claude de Valois) and the nobles didn’t do much that year either. They were hired outside players and snubbed the volunteers at every opportunity. If it wasn’t for Richard Curtain taking her under his wing, loaning her his two footmen to wait on her, I think she would have been even more upset than I was with that first day.

We tried to fit in, to find our niche, but it was for naught. I distinctly remember talking about not returning the second weekend.

Several things happened the night of that first disappointing Saturday of faire that brought us back. The first was that Mary found us. As the irrepressible Mistress Sophie, Mary was the heart and soul of The Hearth of St Brigid, as she had named our peasant guild. She led the wayward wenches and it was through her that we began to see not only that we had miscast ourselves as princess and pawn but that there was a *way* to do these things. The Tao of Renfaire. We also discovered that we had friends there. We met Zoe that night. Malakai fell asleep wrapped in my cloak. We sang songs we’d learned at the Kansas City Renfaire and found Charles when he and his group walked over and joined in the song. There was David, Mel, Holly, Denise… and many others who aren’t around anymore. And many, many more since. And where there are friends, there is a way.

When Saturday morning dawned, we gave it a second try. We had been attending ren faires forever, as patrons whose costuming made even the actors – and once the directors – think we were actual actors. We knew how to milk the life out of even the smallest faires and festivals. We spun away from our alleged guilds and walked together through the shops, Kristin played princess to every little girl who cooed over her gown, and we generally found our own faire… but we noticed that the people who were having all the fun were in Mary’s guild. They were the peasants. They climbed trees, tussled on the ground, quaffed ales in the alehouse… and they interacted with the patrons. The only guild that seemed to be doing that with any regularity.

That was when the last two things happened that rescued our faire experience and cemented forever what we would derive from faire – and I suppose what faire would get from us too.

Escorting Kristin through a booth, a leather mask caught my eye. It stood out among the flaming faces, fairies and green men and standard tissues of modernist whimsy. It was simple, yet distinct among the others. Dark reddish brown commedia-style leather, prominent nose, flaring nostrils and arching eyebrows… perhaps Pantalone without the bushy eyebrows, or a particularly disdainful Capitano had been in the mind of the maskmaker. Among the stonefaced bland masks surrounding it, this mask had character, cheeks drawn up in mischievous glee, one eyebrow arched in perpetual amusement.

I was entranced. I paid $85.00 for it. Today I can’t find any like it for less than $125 and they haven’t the quality and my mask is quality. And even though I can make my own now – and probably could have then – it was worth every penny paid for it. Last year, I spoke with that merchant and she told me she still occasionally got catalogues that had a mask like mine in it and decided not to order another one. Said she only knew one person who wanted one and he already had one. Then she winked at me.

All the following week, that mask sat on the shelf above my computer as I worked, drawing my eyes away from the screen. I turned it over and over in my hands, examining it from every angle. It was sturdily made from heavy leather, sealed inside and out. An elastic headband was attached… I put it on and stood in front of a mirror, frowning at my reflection. The mask looked manic, a pent-up id waiting to escape.

Saturday of second weekend dawned. Kristin dressed and got out of the tent as I sat staring at the mask, questions tumbling over themselves in my head. I hadn’t asked permission to change characters. I was in the mercenary guild. Could I just create a new character and slip away from my guild without getting in trouble? I should ask Amy, she’s the director. I didn’t care. Forgive me, Amy, but at that point I was fed up with my faire experience and needed to change or leave. I had nothing to lose. I needed a name. What was my name?
I put the mask on and stepped out of my little tent. Mel laughed when she saw me and I felt better. My mind still a-twirl with questions, I sketched an elaborate bow to Mel, waved to Kristin and the others and skipped away down the trail toward the faire site. I needed to be alone on the faire site. See if I could do this. What was my name? Who was the guy in the mask?

As I traversed Shadow Glen, Mary was standing talking to someone. As I stepped onto the troll bridge, still wondering if I was going to get into trouble, Mary hailed me.

“I KNOW YOU, MISCHIEF MAKER!”

It all clicked.

I whirled into a clumsy pirouette and favored her with an even more elaborate bow than the last.

“I am Calabash!” I called. And I was. In that moment, it happened. No longer a man in a mask, it was all of one, a character whole. Mary saw it happen, I think. She laughed. No one can laugh like Mary. There’s something about it. Something infectious. It should be studied. If you could distill it, reproduce it, we would have world peace (or maybe three billion Calabashes… who knows?) I stopped questioning and capered away across the bridge and up the hill onto the green for the morning meeting.

There have been years since where I didn’t get what I came for. I was captain of the Queen’s Guard once upon a time. I had fun, playing an actual historical role. Tromping around in my big boots and pumpkin pants, pike held high as I shouted for people to get out of the way. But that’s not really my thing. I didn’t get out of that role what I got from playing the fool, which is why I passed it on.

I have since led the reincarnation of The Hearth of St Brigid with Mary’s blessing and tried to honor the ideas she taught us, the atmosphere she created before she moved on to other things. At times – when I have been ill or it has been too hot to wear the mask – I have taken back the mantle of Seamus the Scrivener. An upstanding man of the village, an artist and natural scientist and I enjoy that role, derive great pleasure from the intellectual aspects and teaching children to write with a quill, or demonstrating period optics or whatever.

Always I come back to Calabash. The unbridled id. Fascinated by children. In turns, playing each role of the Commedia as well as some maniac cross between Bugs Bunny and Harpo Marx. It took me about eight hours to realize I needed to make the mask somehow less intimidating to smaller kids, and a favor from the Green Seattle Knights (who were our jousters at the time) went up one nostril to trail in the breeze as I capered and spun. These many boogers later, the mask looks naked without it.

I don’t know how others will distill their main pleasure from faire into something reproducible in the context of another event or private gathering. But it is through the lens of Calabash that I get from faire that which keeps me coming back. Children giggle when I chew on my booger, or pull it out and jump rope, or pull a coin out of their ears… or whatever. I lead processions in manacles and run away from the guards, trying to sell the manacles to patrons as I dance around them trying to get away from the guards. “May I interest m’lady in a nice matched-set of bracelets? Chained together so you cannot lose one…”

There’s an energy created by the interaction between actor and act, between the stage and the audience. It’s ever the more intense when there is no division between the recipient of the actor’s attention and the actor, no footlights to blind us to their presence. It cannot be quantified, or measured. Some tell me that it generates more light than heat, that it’s somehow beneath other forms of art… and I smile because they do not know. They cannot because they don’t have a Calabash.
How do you get from a private gathering what I get from the patrons as Calabash? I don’t think I can.

I will attend these shutdown events and I shall enjoy the presence of my friends and the camaraderie of the campfire. I will sleep in my tent and drink from my tankard, sing the songs we all know, and dance the dances forgotten by the world without. And it will be fun. I will enjoy myself thoroughly.

Calabash will sleep in his box, waiting for the next faire or parade or folklife event. The next gathering opportunity to emerge into the light of childrens’ smiles, and the incredulous stares of parents or gasps of teens as he slurps a meter and a half of booger out of his own nostril.

La La La LAAAAAA!

2008-07-18T12:52:00.000-07:00

Oh yes. There are more.

What would we do without the Internet?

Statler & Waldorf... the Classics!

2008-07-18T12:45:00.000-07:00

Some thing's happening on the worldwide web... The Muppets are making a resurgence on YouTube and they're bringing a panoply of classical music along for the ride. Now THAT's what I call an effective use of the medium. But I think Tammy's ears are going to be bleeding ere the end. Sorry sis. (snicker)

Is it just me or does Beaker look a lot like Bill Nye, the Science Guy?

Rust never sleeps...

2008-07-13T13:14:00.000-07:00

As Kristin and I get our backs back (and the rest) we're easing back into the project load. Well, I'm easing into it, Kris jumped in with both feet and decided to push ahead with the sewing room remodel.
Kristin emptied the old shelves - a Herculean task in and of itself - & remove them...

The living room is a fabric store for a couple of days. Take careful note of the garden cart in the foreground. That's how she got that much fabric from the room to the sofa.

Kris installed the new floors...

And craftsman base molding like we have in the library. For the craftroom, we painted it because of the sunshine color of the walls that we love, but the overall effect is the same. Eventually crown and possibly a chair rail will follow.

New shelves (actually the old bookshelves)

And a re-filled (and in the process of being reorganized) craft/sewing room that is brighter and easier to clean (thread & fabric scraps are a beast to get off of carpet) and even feels bigger with the laminate flooring down! (Can you spot the cat in this picture?)

Done in record time too! (Woo hoo!)
Bathroom's next. (groan)

Scott - whose back still isn't quite up to remodeling yet, but it's getting there - took some time today to make a new leather mask Kristin's been asking for.

It's like sculpting only you do it with wet leather, forming it over your willing victim... I mean model's features until you get the level of exagerrations you desire. The picture below is on a Styrofoam wig head I had lying around because when it was on Kristin's face, there wasn't anyone to take a picture! :o(

There are ways of doing it with molds and whatnot, and there are certainly more elaborate ways of making masks out there... but this is basically how it was done in the renaissance, so I'm content with my methodology. Kristin will be wearing this at faire this year as Calabash's apprentice fool.

The Book of Hours

2008-07-07T21:58:00.000-07:00

common complaint among those who know me is that I am not an easy man to shop for. It's not that I don't like gifts, it's just... I don't know what I want until I see it most times. I like knowledge, I like art, I like people (not necessarily in that order) and the only value I find to hold true is sentimental value. Knowledge is free at the library, art is relatively inexpensive to look at at museums, so it's only the people that I can't get that at Macy's.

Give me love and companionship... the stuff is just extra and, well, most of it really is just stuff.

If it weren't for attached bookstores and Christmas (and - in the past - employment) malls would never feel the tread of my sandal. Though even Kristin hesitates to buy books for me because I own thousands of them and she can't normally be sure whether I already have it... which - come to think of it - is an issue I know all too well from the moments I've spent standing in front of a book rack contemplating a gift for my dad. He's just like me... or rather I'm just like him. I'm rather proud of that actually.

I should make it easier on people, I suppose, but I hate feeling like I'm standing there with my hand out. There are things I collect, typewriters, writing implements of all sorts and other neat and mostly archaic oddments, most of them not terribly expensive, but you can't tack things like that onto a Christmas list without people looking at you all squinty-eyed and saying "I'm sorry, did you just say you wanted a straight razor?" Um, yeah, never mind.

Anyway, all that is just buildup to my surprise and enchantment when Kristin handed me a book on Thursday morning and said 'Happy Birthday, honey'.

In my hand was a facsimile edition of a 15th century Book of Hours from the National Library of Florence (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale) known as The Visconti Hours. Commonly known as "Libro d‘Ore Visconti" (which my sketchy Italian translates as "The Visconti's Golden Book" ... which makes you wonder if "The Pokey Little Puppy" mightn't be hiding in one of the beautifully gilded illuminations, but I digress) this is an exceptionally important and beautiful example of a Book of Hours.

The fascimile edition I have sitting on my lap as I type this holds over 128 full-color plates faithfully reproducing the original text and illuminations, the patina of the aging parchment aand brilliant hues of the rubrication and even the earthy tones of the fading walnut ink. The pages shine with gold leaf bringing across some inkling of the true beauty of the original. The book has a sewn binding - as is right and proper - and a slipcase to protect the lovely cover. Each facing page carries some basic paleographic analysis of the scribe's hand and the illuminations as well as an English interpretation of the text and the book's history is told in the forward and endnotes.

It is a beautiful book, and will be treasured always. Though as my friend Mark rightly pointed out when I crowed about it to him, it shouldn't be "My wife got me a really cool book for my birthday" it should rightfully and rightly be stated that "My really cool wife got me a book, for my birthday".

In all honesty, I will treasure this book as much for the look of triumph on her face when she handed it to me as for its beauty or historical import... probably more.

And so with full awareness of the principle of "Amantes sunt amentes" in mind... and with lot of love (and not a little lunacy)... I bid everyone adieu for another blog post. Hope you all had a happy and safe fourth of July weekend.

Puppet Patriotism...

2008-07-04T12:46:00.000-07:00

I miss the Muppet Show...

Your Daily Dose of Cute

2008-06-23T17:02:00.001-07:00

We wore Figaro out by forcing him to preside over library construction... by the way that's Kristin's latest beauteous embroidery project peeking out from under him if you can see it.

Pre-Faire

2008-06-22T20:20:00.000-07:00

Out of the library and into the world of renaissance faire planning and preparations...

Well, the new permanent site for our renfaire is well on it's way into being turned to a fairyland of cool grassy meadows under towering trees. We drove through the nascent site today and the transformation is remarkable. Oddly, they've assigned us a camping spot already but we STILL don't know where our guild site will be.

Le sigh.

Okay, fine, so my artistic energies went to work on the camping spot. The faire folks were nice enough to bulldoze a clearing for us, but getting rid of the tread marks and hauling the rocks was left to us. Rake and shovel time.

The land the faire site sits on is glacial castoff and our campsite sits on the eroded slope of a glacial moraine, as if patently obvious once you dig through the 1/4 inch of topsoil and start encountering layers of red clay atop boulders and rocks worn smooth and round as baseballs. I quickly realized that our campsite has some terrain challenges, so I marked out a terrace and we dug out and built a retaining wall with the river rocks that are scattered around the site.

I even made little curving steps that wound around the Party Tree (Lord of the Rings reference in case you were curious) left standing in the midst of our campsite, right on the edge of the terrace. Many stones were hauled, hefted, thrown, rolled and dragged into place to make a nice little area. All of the tent sites were raked to a semblance of flatness.

Next time out I'll bring along the line levels so we can mark the slope and predict runoff and tell folks how to orient their tents to avoid the morning 'slept with my head downhill' headache that can ruin a day at faire. Also - because of the terrain and the clay soil - I'm contemplating a French drain mid-camp, but we'll see where the water pools during the next shower.

In the meantime, we limed the soil (lightly, don't want to hurt the conifers) and planted grass around the area to help with any erosion issues. Lessee, that was about four solid hours of masonry today... I need to get a less strenuous hobby.

Down the final stretch...

2008-06-21T22:15:00.000-07:00

Friday Morning: Scott takes over the flooring project.
Up by 7:30, get coffee, get the flooring done by noon. That is the mantra, repeating in my head like that dadgum whistling song from Bridge On the River Kwai which has been stuck in my head since 1979.

Managed to get it all finished by 11:30! (Woo hoo!)

I give full credit to the attentive and able supervision of my mentor in the fine art of getting things done, Mssr. Figaro. He's enjoying that new window sill a bit too much, methinks. His eyes look decidedly closed. Hrm...

11:30am and all's well! Right on schedule. Next I installed base molding all the way around the room, which 'secures' the floating floor system in place. It feels very good underfoot after walking on the subfloor for all those months!

The room gets cleaned and the floor swept up as I turn my attentions to the topper for the window seat and getting the fine trimwork designed, cut and installed. I have no plan... at least not on paper.

When Rodin was asked how he sculpted the thinker, he famously said he began with a block of marble and "...I chop off what I don't need." Yeah, I'm not Rodin, but that's basically it. I have a window seat, from that I add and subtract until what's left is what I need and nothing I don't.

Kristin has a list of shopping to do for Saturday's fete so I work long into the night, paring away unnecessary wood and adding new wood where none was before. Many nails and glue and lots of router passes later and night has fallen... it itime to shelve some books!

Kristin begins with the media shelves, organizing the DVD's and the few VHS tapes we have left into something passing for organized while Scott finished what he was working on with the window seat and then starts hauling furniture into the room.

Note the kleenex box in the picture below. Yeah, sawdust does that to me everytime. No allergy medicine is proof against the awesome power of pine.

That's a corner of the 'library quilt' you can see there in the picture above, by the way. It lives on the Ikea chair at the moment where it is generally home to a dozing kitty cat.

Emptying the shelves in the other room and loading the new ones takes well into the wee hours of the morning. It's rather like shopping for books, selecting and organizing from the other shelves where they've been double-shelved for over a year (and therefore 1/2 inaccessible) but it give rise to some really fun moments, like finally have a coffee table for my coffee table books!

At 2:00am, Kristin throws in the towel. Scott holds on until 2:30, but mostly just for the sake of updating the blogs with pictures of our progress.

Saturday Morning
Not all of the books are shelved, but most of them are. People are coming over so we have to suspend operations while we clean the rest of the house and prep the yard for our cookout.

Most of the history, crafts and art books are shelved and about 2/3rds of the fiction has found a home. We took advantage of the opportunity and culled a number of duplicates that had crept into the collection over the years, but the shelves are filling at an alarming rate.

You know... I may not have enough shelves. Good thing the shelving system we designed is set up specifically to allow adding onto. New shelves can be added as needed without tearing the whole room apart again. But that's a future concern... for now there's a ceiling on my ceiling, a floor on my floor, walls on the walls and books on my bookshelves.

Life is good.

So... what's next?

New floors (same) for Kristin's Craftroom. Also the old bookshelves will go in as fabric shelves.
New flooring, toilet, sink and countertop/backsplash for the bathroom.
The kitchen and all that entails...

Floored II

2008-06-21T02:22:00.000-07:00

There's a floor on the... um, floor. Tools are back in the garage (which now needs to be cleaned) And there are actual books on the actual bookshelves! HUZZAH!!!

Of course there are more pictures and I'm sure even more shall be taken. Some of them are great. I'll post them later. I started at 7:33 am, and it's now 2:22 am the following day.

I... is... tired.

Floored

2008-06-19T23:04:00.000-07:00

Today I was given a surprise "comp day" off, which allowed me to catch up a bit so that now we're where I hoped we would be this week...

The shelf bridging the top of the window is now installed.
I did some complex profiles for the corbels with my router to dress it up a bit (without venturing too far outside of the craftsman aesthetic). The corbels we bought turned out to be duds (too small, didn't look right) so I had to make my own.
We have a window sill!!
The edges of the box opening have been trued and lined.
The newest set of shelves have a completed base shelf.
A bunch of stuff got stained.
The top of the window seat is finally installed. It's under all these boxes (below)

Just trust me, it's under there somewhere. I needed some weights once I had the adhesive on and the laminate in place where I wanted and I had all these boxes of laminate flooring lying around... Hey! It was either that or go get the anvil.

As soon as Kristin got home, we emptied the room. Kristin crawled around and scraped all of the old carpet glue off of the subfloor and vacuumed. I stuck around to see the first row get put in and helped with the second row, but mostly I was just getting in the way. It really is a one-person gig, laying this stuff.
So, I showed Kristin how to use the new powersaw and wandered off to make dinner. (Porkchops and cinnamon apples!) When I came back, she had about a third of the floor laid! What a trooper!

By the time we wrapped it up, she got just a little less than half the room done (which is a LOT, it's a big room). I think she'd have finished, but it got too late to be using power tools. There are neighbors within earshot. Finishing the flooring has migrated to the top of my list for tomorrow.

After that is the base and shoe molding along the new floor, and routing/cleaning up the edges of the seat top. Ideally, I'd like to get the seat molded and stained too, along with the windowsill & attendant molding.

Pie-in-the sky at the moment is getting those drawer fronts cut and stained. Alas, they'll have to wait a bit, which is fine since we haven't chosen our knobs yet anyway.

We have people coming over on Saturday and just might get some books on the shelves before they get here! Not all of the molding will be on, but the room will be inhabitable by tomorrow night!

Wow... that light at the end of the tunnel wasn't a train after all!

Seriously

2008-06-19T11:03:00.001-07:00

An open missive to the people of the United States of America

Benjamin Disraeli once said: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." He has since been quoted in this context by everyone from Mark Twain to the writers of Westwing. In modern parlance, I would add one to Mr. Disraeli's list... "Lies, damn lies, statistics... and email." I might eventually go so far as to add a fifth "Poltical bloggers" but that's not what this is about.

I commend to all thinking people of this benighted country the following article from FactCheck.com, appropriately entitled:

That Chain E-mail Your Friend Sent to You Is (Likely) Bogus. Seriously.

I will go so far as to say that this article (accessed by clicking the above link) should be required reading for every American voter.

The most pernicious part of this trend in American political mudslinging isn't that there are lies being told about candidates, it's that they are a cynical abuse of friendship and filial devotion whereas we are inclined to believe a story simply because we love, respect and trust the person telling it to us. It is made even more of a sin because it's not consonant with chatting your neighbor up over the garden fence, it's about the widespread and largely innocent promulgation of lies among loved ones.

This is an abuse of the Great American Grapevine by some venal cur hiding in a bunker deep underneath a white marble facade in Washington DC. It is about taking those closest to you along in the grand and sweeping lies promulgated by the extreme wings of some political party. And it needs to stop.

For heaven's sake, people, it's time to make up your own mind based on something other than internet rumors. This is an important election. You need to be thinking clearly, not loading yourselves up with lies.

Think. And stop lying to those who love you.

That is all.
Scott

(cc'd to every blog where I have a stump to stand upon)

Layin' it down...

2008-06-19T10:18:00.000-07:00

Our flooring has arrived!

Tonight's project: unloading the truck. Hrm... we may be slowing down a little. Ok, fine, we'll lay the floor too. Sheesh! How to lay Swiftlock Laminate Floors. (click if you're curious)

Battling the Weather...

2008-06-15T20:02:00.000-07:00

SATURDAY...
It's the ultimate test of my willpower... the sun came out yesterday! Ack! This was so much easier when it was cold and rainy!

Figaro votes for going outside to bask in the sunshine.

Dusty concurs. (Though when he looks this saintly, it usually means he's up to something.)

Kristin went outside to stain (and mow the lawn as you can see) and I donned my protective gear and pulled up the damaged section of subfloor. This is what I was dreading for months, but it turned out to be not so bad. I drilled the biggest hole I had a spade bit for (1 1/2 inch) and it was big enough to fit my Japanese pullsaw through, which made short work of the old subfloor. I sistered some 2x lumber to the floor joist and nailed down the new piece. Easy peasy! Not even worth taking a picture of.

Because the subfloor thing turned out to be no sweat, I was also able to get the beadboard on the wall, and get the nailers up and puttied before my friend Andrea's graduation party/BBQ Saturday evening. (The foundation frame in the picture above looks odd because it's not shimmed and secured yet.)

SUNDAY
Sunday morning dawned bright and sunny again. I never thought of the weather as being 'Out to get me' before. But nature was really trying to lure me outside. I resisted.

First thing in the morning, I had some coffee made for me by my lovely wife. No, I didn't get right to work, who do you think is writing this blog? Seriously! Work without coffee is... well, evil. So, once I had coffee in-hand, I went in and painted the beadboard a lovely 'Swiss Coffee' to match the rest of it and secured that base to the floor.

Kristin went outside to stain wood and weed the garden while the stain dried.

I got the top cut out...

Attached corners to level the top of the box with the tops of the bookshelves...
And secured to the box...

And now it's ready for the hinge and lid to be put in. The plywood you see here with all the screw holes in it is just the base for a layer of stain-grade birch plywood which will be laminated over it and secured with adhesive and finishing nails. This won't happen until we start trimming the room because I don't want it scratched... in the meantime, the cat's like to play in the cedarlined box I built 'for them'.

By this point, we have the installation of the bookshelves down to a science. The new batch of bookshelves went up lickety-split (relatively speaking) and I was able to start putting the nailers for the built-up crown molding we have planned for the room.

Sometime this week, we will hopefully get the flooring installed and have the room (and the rest of the house) ready for company by the time of Kristin's birthday barbecue next weekend! The trim won't be up yet, but we're pretty far along and the room is going to be usable again as soon as the flooring's down!

My goodness.

The New Guest bed

2008-06-13T22:07:00.001-07:00

The windowseat has a top... temporarily. I need to cut out the lid, apply the second stain-grade layer, stain it and then install the lid. But it's usable for the nonce, so there's that much at least!

Kristin and the cats think it's cool to finally have their favorite window seat again! And wide enough to really sit comfortably in too... even if you're sharing it with dusty!

So here's the thing: Cut a complex shape out of paper, transfer to plywood, cut the shape out of plywood... and do it accurately! With no more than an eighth of an inch tolerance for error because of the odd zigs and zags of the shape. And on Friday the 13th to boot. Not that I'm superstitious, but it bears mentioning.

Seriously, try it. You'll want to lay down too. It almost broke Scott, getting all those angles right plus the 'puzzle piece' front.

Come visit! You can sleep in the window. It's the new guest bed. Surprise! Just kidding, though it's big enough even I could sleep comfortably in the thing.

Anyway, tomorrow is a bit daunting. We have to saw out a piece of damaged subflooring to replace it. I have never done this before, so it's the only thing on the agenda since I don't have any idea how long it will take or what we'll find when we get down there. This is a part of the house without access to the crawlspace (which is a story for another time...). Anything else we get done tomorrow will be a bonus as far as I'm concerned. It's simple enough in concept, cut it out, nail down a new one... but the new flooring can't get put in until the old subfloor is fixed and trued.

Wish us luck!

Productivity!

2008-06-12T21:27:00.000-07:00

And it's not even the weekend yet!

I kept my nose to the millstone (or whatever) this week and got caught up to where I wanted to be on Sunday if it hadn't been for the parade and whatnot that distracted us last weekend.

The cedar lining has been put in and the adhesive is curing as I type. As soon as it is cured, there are some trim pieces to go on and then the top of the seat and the lid for the box will complete the picture.

Likewise, the shelves & drawers that will line the front of the window seat are installed and clamped together to allow that glue to cure as well. (The place smells very interesting, let me tell you, between the cedar and the two different kinds of glue... mmmm... you can practically see the air in that room right now!)

The trim will come next and the drawerfronts for the apothecary drawers, which reminds me that I need to go hunt up the drawerpulls we want to use tomorrow afternoon...

Anyway, things are starting to come together. Tonight we put on the switchplates and plug plates for the walls that won't need touch-up painting later. We hunted high and low, all through Seattle and Tacoma for the perfect plates... and ended up buying them at Target.

They're 'oiled bronze' and have a nice simple bead framing them. They offset the white beadboard nicely and even though the lighting in the photo doesn't show it, the bronze picks up the colors in the stain quite nicely.

That's the news from Fox Island! What's happening in your neck(s) of the woods?

Routed...

2008-06-08T21:07:00.000-07:00

Todays tasks...

Stain more shelves (it never ends)
Measure, size, and cut the dadoes for the apothecary drawers.

Kristin made with the stain...

This gives you an idea how far she's come. By the end of the day all of the shelves were stained except the corner shelves (which I haven't made yet, d'oh!) and the media shelves which... I haven't made yet. (Scottie needs to get his butt in gear, methinks!)

This is the first full-size fitting for the apothecary drawers. There will be six on each side, sized to hold CD's or whatever. The 'test' drawers and spacers you see here aren't the ones we're using, but they're exactly the same size (which is handy).

Scott makes lots and lots of sawdust and shavings with the router and the chisel...

Dry-fitting before we stain, sand and glue (this week).

Once we've got this part built, we have a bit of work replacing some damaged subflooring before we can lay the new floors. After that... it's all about molding, stain, paint and putting books on the shelves. Then buying more books. And putting those on the shelves. And then buying more books, and more, and more and more... tee hee hee!

Spring(?) Parade

2008-06-08T13:17:00.000-07:00

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we have entered that
time of year we jokingly refer to as 'June-uary'. Cold, rainy, overcast... yuck! Seriously, the heaters' on and I'm wearing a sweater! June. What a joke.

This winter of our discontent has been so bad this year that my strawberry plants are covered with tiny green fruit that probably won't ripen until July. In fact, on the radio the other day, I heard that the entire state's berry crop isn't expected to ripen until next month. The country roads are barren of the usual fruitstands, so it's probably true.

Anyway... June means "Gig Harbor Maritime Festival" which means "parade" which means "Scott gets dressed up and shouts himself hoarse". What fun!

On the way to the parade. The North American Renfaire Fool in his migratory phase.

Kristin tries on Calabash's fool's cowl. (It looks much better on her!)

Daf isn't having much luck with her bubble wand, amusing herself while Calabash stands in the drivethru lane of the coffee place, entertaining the baristas while they make his coffee.

"You're no bunney til some bunney loves you, you're no bunney 'till some bunney cares!" Calabash took a break from serenading local political candidates with his worst Dean Martin impersonation to snap a picture with Daf. There just aren't enough pictures of the two of us together in garb because Kristin usually has the camera and I don't.

Scott gives instructions to the marchers before we set out. "Put one foot in front of the other! Don't mix it up or you'll just get confused!"

It's not every day you can take a picture of a headache... this one's a doozy! Too much shouting, too much capering. Not enough water intake, I think.

Off to local landmark Tide's Tavern for a well-earned round of fish and chips!
"So... you people were in the parade, I take it?"
"Um, no, what makes you say that?"

What a weekend!

Quote(s) of the Moment...

2008-06-05T08:07:00.000-07:00

“Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”
- George Bernard Shaw

"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!"
- ibid

Sawdust Never Sleeps

2008-06-04T17:53:00.000-07:00

So... moving right along.

This is the 'dry-fitting' of the main pieces for the new shelves that will front the window seat to check my joinery before I start staining and gluing and whatnot... This piece will be assembled and then stained (like a piece of furniture) before it is finally installed.

There are dadoes yet to be cut for the dividers to hold my apothecary-style drawers that will line the top shelf. These will be built on the model of the one you see above so that they can hold CD's and video games (or whatever fits in a CD-sized drawer).

And my scribbled plans for the seat, in case anyone was curious or thought I was completely winging it.

Cheers!

Yet more evidence...

2008-06-02T01:07:00.000-07:00

..that I'm not alone.

Yes, this is what I want for my birthday.
Barring that, I'll take the t-shirt.

Cheers!
Scottie

Shelved...

2008-06-01T16:10:00.000-07:00

Yeah. We're there. Actual shelves. On an actual wall. The skeleton of things yet to come...

More pictures later. I think we've earned a pizza... and maybe a movie.
Wonder what's playing in Gig Harbor?

I'm going slightly mad...

2008-05-30T21:31:00.001-07:00

But only slightly. Don't worry. Nice bananas! I mean hair. I mean bananas... oh dear.

Building Blocks for Grownups

2008-05-30T08:37:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update before I head off to work. Yesterday I cut all of the foundation pieces. Some complicated angles and chisel work to get this right. And I only cut myself once! Thankfully, none of this has to be stained, though it amuses me sometimes to spend so much time on things that will never again see the light of day.

Carpentry. What an odd pastime.

The shelves are now ready to go up onto the wall this weekend...

Drawing a Bead...

2008-05-27T22:20:00.001-07:00

The nailer strips have been puttied, filled, sanded, primed and the whole shebang is finally painted. Beautiful, creamy "Swiss Coffee"! Leave it to me to have caffienated walls in my library.

The beadboard phase of the windowseat half of the room is completed. Huzzah!

Filling all of those little nail holes and puttying all of those countersunk screw heads was not my idea of a good time. I'm glad it's over!

In the meantime, I small like paint and will hie me off to the shower now.

Some of you might be concerned about the kitties during all of this insanity. We keep them out of the room most of the time, which is one reason the French Doors went up first. Which keeps them from painting themselves, as both have done at different times in their past.

We humans are getting pretty excited around here, with the day we begin putting books on the shelves coming ever closer! Yippee!

But - as you can see - the cats are just plain bead bored. They want their room back, and constantly remind me that I'm hogging the sunniest windows in the house!

Quote of the Moment...

2008-05-27T11:03:00.000-07:00

"But Shakespeare's magic could not copyed be, within that circle none durst walk but he..."

-John Dryden

Essay on Dramatic Poetry of the Last Age

Beaded...

2008-05-26T20:39:00.000-07:00

Well... it's been a looooong weekend!

We did a dry-fit of the shelf brackets we'll be using and drew plans for the foundations that will hold them in place. It was exciting to see the framework of what it's going to look like actually up on the walls. Taped in place temporarily, but still...

It allowed us to map out the footprint, mess with them to get the fit correct (and to ensure I didn't cut too much beadboard later) and work out a few minor design issues like that corner. I hate losing the corners when bookshelves make a 90-degree turn! We're working it out, though.

Alas, we had to take them down, so that I could finish putting up the beadboard. What a chore!

A few panel nails and several tubes of panel adhesive later, they were all up. I then cut the 'nailers' out of pine. Painted, measured, mitered and installed them. Then each screwhead and each nailhead was countersunk and puttied and the lines where the panels of bead board met were filled and sculpted by hand with an expanding putty so that the lines were seamless.

And here we are! Tomorrow, once the putty dries, the white paint will go up. It's funny how much this looks like mom & dad's library at the moment with all that white bead board! It will all be behind the stained pine bookshelves soon, but for the moment...