saturday and sunday

Yesterday was the first time I've had workers in my house on Saturday. They wanted to finish up so they can have the inspection early this week. 

I had too much to drink on Friday night and got home after midnight, which is scandalously late for me these days. But I managed to get myself up and dressed so that when Edwin knocked at 9:00 -- making sure he wasn't barging in on anything -- I was about ready to walk down to the post office and get bread (for me) and pastries (for the electricians). 

I drove to the outer Sunset to do laundry, put air in my tires, and walk a long way on the beach. It was a good day. 

This morning I taped a bunch of paint cards on the back of the house and I've been contemplating them intermittently. I drove to the Home Depot in Colma this afternoon to get Behr paint cards, painter's tape, LED bulbs, and a white ceramic light fixture for the laundry closet. I ran into neighbors -- Rebecca and Steve. I had forgotten how lovely it is to drive on Guadalupe Canyon Road. 

I am surrounded by large boxes -- the washer, dryer, dishwasher, and gas range. The smell of cardboard is a bit oppressive but I can live with it for a little while. 

electrical

I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
-A, Camus

Tennessee Valley (and windows)

windows

sun room without sun

As Ariel promised, the back of the house is now accessible. The water heater has been installed, and there are pipes in the light well. I still feel guilty that I bought that model without getting permission first -- even though it's my house, dammit! And that Rinnai seemed like the best one. My need to be the good girl never fades.

I got what I hope is a final bill from Joe Born -- my accounts are getting low and I'll have to take some money from the mutual fund. And I got a jury summons for August 1, which is my fault. I should have rescheduled for September, but now I'll have to decide whether to go through the motions in the hope that I am not chosen or push it back again to make sure I can make my Asilomar gig. I guess I can call and ask about it tomorrow.

I woke up a little before 6 but went back to sleep until 9 this morning. This afternoon I will pack up again and drive over to KW's place for a few days -- I'm getting very tired of living without a kitchen and am grateful to have access to her place for the next ten days, while she is in the northeast with her family. I have mixed feelings about going back to work, but it'll be fine. I'm not looking forward to paying for the bike tune-up -- these days, I feel anxious about every little bit of cash I have to spend.

I need to figure out what to do with the Wedgewood stove. Someone must be willing to pay a couple hundred for it, right? Ariel said the guys would take care of it for me, but that's a last resort. I'm hesitating about buying the Capital -- I either need to run it past Ariel or get over my good-girl complex. It's not easy to know in advance which interactions will take you down to the most basic emotional level -- trap doors open up in the oddest places, and you find yourself swallowed up by darkness and fear. It gets easier to recognize what's happening but I don't think I'll ever be able to sidestep it altogether. Humans are only human.

Three or four more weeks of this, and then I'll be done worrying about all the spending. I'll have to pay it all back, of course, but it'll be easier once I know how much I owe.

Asheville anniversary

It was a good visit -- I think five days are enough. The dinner out was good, though I suffered a bit, digestively, in the middle of the night. I don't know if it had to do with the trout that I ordered -- traveling causes all kinds of disruptions.

Dad is still low in energy, and I think it's probably a permanent condition, and maybe he's attributing too much to the side effects and too little to the fact that he's 86? I don't know. One night I noticed mom looking intently at him across the living room -- he was sitting in the fawn-colored easy chair, lost in thought, and she was in the rocker.

David and Lauren left relatively early on Thursday, though not as early as they usually leave. But they didn't say good bye, which made Dad a bit sad. We are all minimalists when it comes to communication, but David is in a league of his own.

It rained a lot -- sometimes heavily -- and I barely went outside. It did not rain on Wednesday until late in the afternoon, which was helpful for our wine expedition. We  came home with eight bottles from two wineries that M+D and I had been to on one of my previous visits. I watched some Wimbledon matches downstairs in the computer room -- Lauren is a fan, it turns out -- but mostly I just sat around upstairs reading the paper or my book, or helping with dinner or cleaning up.

I hung around an extra day, uneventfully -- M+D and I took some stuff that had been accumulating in the basement to the Goodwill on Thursday afternoon, and we watched most of All the President's Men -- still a very good movie. Yesterday we spent a few hours downtown, on the way to the airport. We toured a very large gallery and I bought a Jane Bowles novel at Malaprop's. Intermittently we listened to news coverage of the various shootings by (and of) police.

My flights east were amazingly easy, but there was a hitch in Chicago on the way back. Some kind of fueling problem kept the plane sitting on the runway at O'Hare for an extra 90 minutes or so, which caused the flight to arrive an hour late, and I ended up taking a taxi home. On that flight I sat next to a youngish woman who spent the first hour or so reading a book with large type entitled "Reasons to Live" or something like that, and then spent a long time typing what looked like prose poems on her tablet. I peeked once, saw what looked like a lot of angst, and felt like a voyeuristic creep.

This morning I woke up with an extremely stiff upper back, probably because I spent so much time twisted toward the window, after I got tired of reading. Ouch, I am getting old. But ibuprofen is helping.

sunday, week . . . ten

When I showed up (a little late) for the meeting with Ariel and Ryan on Tuesday, they were already discussing the exposed rafters in the sun room, which had been installed 16 inches apart, per Joe Born's specs, but weren't aligned correctly vis-a-vis the sliding door and the closet -- partly because we lost 6 inches of width but mostly because Ariel was following the structural engineer's orders. So I had to decide whether the crew should redo the work. Ryan had called for even spacing and the aforementioned alignment, and he didn't notice the slight difference in Joe's specs -- and nobody thought about how the 6 inches would affect the rafters. 

Technically, it was Ryan's fault -- he should have made sure the drawings/specs matched up. And -- as Ariel said -- the two of them should probably have checked in about the rafter placement before the crew got started. But hey, we're only human, and Ryan spotted the problem right away -- when I first showed up I was so excited to see the rafters that I didn't notice the misalignment. I would have noticed it eventually, but by then it probably would've been very expensive to fix. I tried to convince myself that I'd be OK with it, but eventually I had to face up to the fact that it would have bothered me to no end. So I decided that the rafters should be ripped out and redone. Ariel very kindly said he wouldn't consider it a change order -- even though they lost a day of labor and probably some of the rafters had to be replaced. I did, of course, get breakfast for the crew the next day.

The other thing we talked about was the back yard, and that prompted me to get in touch with Deborah about coming over and helping us come up with a plan. The immediate issue is how much concrete to pour and where to pour it. All I know for sure is that I need some concrete (and a step) by the gate and I need some kind of landing pad in front of the sliding door.

I didn't take any photos of the work in progress -- I guess I was distracted by the rafter issue. I did take a picture of the ballpark opera experience last night -- Carmen, set in the 80s or 90s (I think?). We sat in the seats at the Club Level, because it seemed like it would be too chilly down on the field. The staging was sluggish but the singing was very good. 

I took the T there and back. On the way there, the train stopped at Mariposa for several minutes after a verbal altercation between two men turned into a fist fight, or a wrestling match. The fight was pointless -- it started with one guy yelling at another guy for standing disrespectfully close to him. The instigator was ridiculously aggrieved, but even so the other guy, who was probably on his way to work, could not bring himself to back down. When the train stopped they tumbled out the door and onto the platform. They hurled each other around, landing at one point on top of a man sleeping across two chairs -- he scrambled out of the way. Somebody on the train called 911, and we sat for a while until the operator opened one of the doors and I decided to walk the rest of the way to the ballpark. 

On the way home there were problems with the signal box -- or so I figured, since the train I didn't want to take was stuck at the platform for 10 or 15 minutes, and the train I did want to take passed (very slowly) a bunch of guys in orange vests standing next to an open electrical box. There were a lot of other people on the train, and most of them were in a good mood. One particularly drunk guy was rambling loudly, with lots of profanity, about the pride parade and about how he could drink on the train if he wanted. But he didn't seem physically threatening and no one took him up on anything he said. After he lurched off the train at Innes the rest of us laughed together with relief.