Lory's Project Happy Life

(*tap tap tap) Is this thing on?

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:16:00 +0000

Hi there,

I'm not sure if anyone is still receiving this blog via email, so this is a test! I'm moving to a new web site, and I'm bringing all my old blogger posts over, so that got me wondering if anyone is still subscribed.

If y'are, I'll let you know here and now that the reason I'm moving this stuff over to a new web site is because I'm starting to offer woodworking classes. I've done a few pilot classes, and they've gone really well. I feel like I've spent my life learning how to make things not just because sometimes I need to make a thing, but also because, I want to SHARE how to make things! That's what all these blog fits and Youtube starts and Instagram what-nots have been all about.

So, fair warning, I'm turning 55 this year, and I've got stuff to say.

Yours,

Lory

Fixing a picture frame for a lost and found letter from 1926

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Sat, 09 Feb 2019 20:49:00 +0000

I have to admit - I was really angry when I discovered this frame had been cracked. But now that I've calmed down, I realize it gave me a nice opportunity to share the story of the letter for which I made this frame with you.

https://youtu.be/6RiyB_I6akM

How to fix a problematic door

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 22:28:00 +0000

Today I posted another video. This one is about a door that needed fixing in several ways (and it took me a long time to really get it). As soon as I posted it, I saw plenty of things I'd like to change or do differently, but I'm learning about making videos as I go, and I'm learning how to be slightly less of a perfectionist in favor of getting slightly more things done.

https://youtu.be/Mk8T8Sg7inc

A Makeshift Hoop House for the Greenroof Onions

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Sun, 20 Jan 2019 15:49:00 +0000

I made a quick little video about my makeshift hoop house. I've got some Mystery Onions (or Alliums, if you will), and I want to see if they'll keep growing when it warms up this year. So, in the hopes of keeping them from freezing, here's my little solution.

Here comes the cold!!

Singer Sewing Machine Key from an Old Blacksmithing Project

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 16:46:00 +0000

I've been looking to buy an antique sewing machine for quite a while, and I was lucky enough to find this one for $50 this past summer. I've done a bit of work on the actual sewing machine, which I show you some other time. Today we're going to focus on the sewing machine case. Specifically, when I bought it, it didn't come with a key, so I couldn't lock the lid on and carry it by the handle. So I decided to make one.

It's a simple key - I tested and found that a #2 square drive screw bit works in there. So I looked around the shop for something I could grind to fit, and this is what I came up with! These blacksmithing leaves were a practice project given to me when I took my blacksmithing class at Bryn Athyn a few years ago, and the best of the bunch turns out to have been just the thing I needed.

Here's a video of the process. Hope you enjoy!

https://youtu.be/qepdwguuuUo

Where YouTube, Life, and Artistic Expression collide?

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Mon, 24 Dec 2018 01:56:00 +0000

Halloo and Happy Holidays!

I've been trying to work my way past some emotional hang-ups surrounding my perfectionism. I've been filming all of my work for the past 2 years (gosh, has it been 2 years since I left Blue Man?), which is great. What isn't great is that I've not been able to take the time to review and edit together movies with what I've shot. In addition to having been legitimately working too hard against deadlines to take the time out for editing, I have been finding myself stuck in a whirlpool of thinking - trying to figure out how to introduce myself and begin the story of these past two years, and struggling with software just to organize the files! Procrastination, excuses, problem solving, problem not-solving, stewing, procrastinating, and then back to edit - body sore from sitting, constant interruptions... And the worry. Will it be good enough? Will I ever be able to make something out of all of this? Then flashes of inspiration or just good-hard discipline arrive, I make some headway, get interrupted, and the struggle begins again.

So, this is a different approach - a small project and a small, simple video about it. It's just a documentation of what I did - a "Ta-da! Movie," if you will. And I offer it to the universe as well as to myself, because I want to join in, and be, as some friends once said, a part of it all.

Behold! My latest youtube video:

Green Roof Tour, Summer 2018

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Wed, 27 Jun 2018 20:29:00 +0000

Hello!

We've been mentioned in an article about green roofs in The Fix column the New York Times, so I thought I should do a quick video about how things are going on our green roof at the moment. Here 'tis:

Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrXAq5F1bOY&t=5s

And, if you're wondering what the off-broadway play we're working on is all about, it's called Recreating Keiter. It's the story of very personal, pivotal moments in my wife, Cindy Keiter's life, using the art of the "baseball recreate", in tribute to her late, legendary sportscaster father, Les Keiter. You can learn more and buy tickets to come see the show (running through July 8th, 2018 at the Lion Theatre on Theatre Row in Manhattan) at the Recreating Keiter web site.

Here's a shot of Cindy and me on opening night in the dressing room. Love!

Fix Stuff - Don't Throw It Out! Replacing a broken suitcase wheel

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Wed, 11 Oct 2017 13:07:00 +0000

If you have a broken thing, chances are, you can fix it. And if you can't fix it, you can at least take it apart and see how it works as you break it some more. For Cindy's birthday (which was in February), I fixed her suitcase. It was a simple job, but I got more than I bargained for. Watch, learn, and enjoy:

I'm intending to make more how-to and little diary style videos. I've been filming most every project I've worked on for months... now the task is learning how to fold editing time into my regular day!

Let me know what you think and what sorts of videos you'd like to see in the comment section below:

Fixing a very leaky roof - what worked!

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 15:24:00 +0000

Our roof was leaky for YEARS. I bought the house in March of 2005, and although the roof had recently been replaced, there was water coming in the upstairs hallway and kitchen before the year was out. Every time it happened, our tenant would let us know, and I would run up to the roof in the rain with a bucket of asphalt patching tar, smear it on to what I thought might be the source of the leak, and hope for the best. Usually the patch would hold for a little while, and then the cycle would repeat itself.

In September of 2006, the leaks in the upstairs kitchen had become essentially un-patchable. I thought the problem was coming from where the chimney and the roof met - you can understand why when you see the condition of the chimney after a big piece of sheet copper was removed from the side of it:

And this is what it looked like when it was all buttoned back up. You can see the solar vent fan I installed myself in the lower left (which has never leaked, by the way):

But, the kitchen leak and hall leaks kept coming back.

So, in 2007, I took out a loan and had the roof fully stripped and replaced. In preparation for the green roof I already knew I wanted to install someday, I also had a couple of water-compromised rafters replaced and the roof access hatch moved from within the upstairs apartment closet to above the 2nd floor landing.

Here's a shot of the roof, stripped to the boards, with the hatch still in its original position (where our apple tree is these days)

A new layer of plywood was laid down over the existing planks, then a layer of insulation board, and finally a new rubber roof. This photo was from a year or two later, but you get the idea.

That work solved the problems with the main roofing membrane, but problems continued to pop up with some of the myriad penetrations in the roof (we have 4 skylights, 3 plumbing vent stacks, a roof hatch, and the solar vent fan).

For example, there was STILL that leak above the upstairs kitchen.

I'll smugly tell you that I myself finally figured out that issue and had the roofing company take care of it - the vent pipe had been blocked by something where it transitioned from 3" pipe to 2" pipe just above the kitchen ceiling, That blockage had allowed water to get trapped, which froze and expanded, breaking the pipe about 12" below the roofline. The roofing company cut a hole in the ceiling, sleeved in a new transition coupling and pipe, and sealed around the new pipe with a rubber boot on the roof.

Also, the skylight over the main staircase started leaking a few months after it had been re-installed (we had it raised up on a higher curb so it would clear our eventual green roof). After a couple of failed patching attempts, we had a new one made and installed in 2011,

...only to discover a pinhole leak in the new skylight in the fall of 2012 (after the green roof went in. The roofers came back, temporarily detached the skylight, and I added a dab of solder to the hole while they added more waterproofing to the curb.

Things seemed pretty stable after that.

... But not really.

That damn kitchen vent pipe leaked again! It turns out that the boot was too close to the parapet wall to make a perfect seal, so when it rained fast enough, water would pool in the drainage rock by the down-spout and pour in under the boot. I fixed that (according to some advice from a roofer) with roofing tar and roofing fabric around the vent pipe rubber boot (so I'm sort of back to the temporary patch deal...):

With all the use the new roof hatch was getting, it was already wearing out, and it too somehow sprung a leak:

I called the original roofing company, but the new roof hatch was out of warrantee, so I hired a different company to replace it with a swanky (and much quieter and easier for Cindy to operate) new-new hatch.

The new-new hatch didn’t leak or squeak, but the roofers didn't insulate the sides, so it lost a lot of heat and developed condensation on the inside like crazy. The tar on the curb never dried and was getting on the drainage rocks, my hands and my clothes. So I solved both problems by insulating the sides of the hatch with foam boards and covered the insulation and the tar curb with sheet aluminum:

....Aaaand there was a leak in the upstairs living room, coming from between the side wall of my house and the side wall of the attached house next door:

The same roofers who replaced the hatch raised the parapet wall up a couple of courses of brick and installed a sheet metal flashing to cover the gap between the walls:

None of the leaks were due to the green roof system, which was a tremendous, face-saving relief. All of them were serious bummers, which lead to another leak - fluid coming out of my eyes.

BUT! It has been 3 years since the last of the repairs, and apart from a small leak in that same kitchen vent stack boot I mentioned above (which I fixed with more patching cement), the rain has stopped coming in the house. Someday, maybe I'll move that vent pipe away from the parapet wall the proper amount, but since that leak isn't a mystery, I'll keep an eye on it and not get too fussed.

In 2015, with the roofing work finished, I employed a plasterer. The walls in the house are true plaster (and lath), and as a preservationist, I'm only interested in replacing them with the same - no drywall. It would be disrespectful to the house to do otherwise. Proper plastering is an art form that takes years to master. But I wanted to learn what I could, so when I hired the plasterer, it was with the understanding that I would be allowed to help and thereby to learn some of the tricks of the plastering trade.

Here's a shot of the repairs in the living room as they were ongoing. It always gets worse before it gets better.

Here's the wall as it is today (it still needs some work, but we're focusing on fixing up some of the other rooms in the upstairs apartment first):

I used some of the techniques I learned from our nice plasterer to repair our bedroom wall myself, and I made a 2-part video about it for youtube. Check it out and subscribe! I'll be putting more videos up in the future.

Lastly, here's a picture of Buster. He's pretty happy about the fact that we're getting this place fixed up.

Special thanks to Ian and his various roommates for putting up the roof problems in the upstairs apartment for all those years.

Lewellyn Media Cabinet, Pt 1

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Wed, 07 Jun 2017 13:12:00 +0000

Cardboard mock-up of early version with fancy-assed walnut plywood in the background.

I finally got started on the media cabinet commission I've had since last August. In my defense, part of that time was a long design phase. Then I had to wrap up at Blue Man. Then Cindy's mom died. Then I had to go out of town for a week for the Wilderness tour. Then it was about 6 weeks of work on The Panther Room workshop... And then I had to clean the shop and catch up with all the other stuff that had been languishing - getting the garden planted, finishing the photography phase of a neighborhood survey to extend the historic district... and then the trip to California for blacksmithing and visiting family...

Current drawings, minus 2" of width.

Before I went, I did some experiments with various cutting methods. The plywood I'm using for this cabinet is SUPER expensive - custom-made 5/8" Russian birch ply with A/A bookmatched walnut veneer finish. I was afraid (understatement? perhaps paralyzed with fear?) to cut the stuff and not sure what the best way to cross-cut it without getting tear-out on the veneer would be. I bought a new 5/8" router bit, thinking I could try to cut it with that (as well as use it for dados to keep the plywood together), and I bought a fine circular saw blade. It turns out the saw blade won the contest. With painter's tape on the cross-grain cuts, I didn't get any chipping, and the edge was almost as smooth as it would have been if it were planed. I free-handed the initial rough cutting, and then I made a circular saw guide and have been switching back and forth between that and my table saw for the final cuts.

Plywood edge as delivered

Plywood edge as cut with sweet new circular saw blade. (fuzz on the underside is painter's tape)

As with many things in life, the plywood didn't come in a state of perfection. The edges hadn't been trimmed, and the corners weren't square. So contrary to what we used to do back in my MPC scene shop days, I'm having to cut all 4 sides of each piece and try to get them square (I've resorted to diagonal measuring as a backup for my framing square, which is more flexible and fallible than I would have thought), rather than parallelograms.

I got the bottom, back and sides cut to dimension and started routing out the grooves for the shelves when I realized I had under-estimated the width of the cabinet by about 3/8". You can't have a cabinet that's made to hold a record player and record cleaner, and neither one will fit! I had to make a new back (I made it 2" wider to leave more wiggle room) and re-route the dados, but I got it all finished and up-to-snuff by the end of the day. Good thing I ordered some extra walnut plywood to begin with!

The screw up with the back yesterday reminds me of a time when I'd borrowed Dan's 1970-something Cadillac El Dorado convertible. I was desperate to return it to him without a scratch, and wouldn't you know it? I hit a deer on Carmel Valley Road one night. In that instant, about which I felt terrible (especially for the deer, but also for Dan's car), everything changed! The thing I was afraid of happening, happened. And after that, I was much more relaxed. So it goes with this expensive plywood. I had to re-cut the largest panel in the whole cabinet project. There's still enough left over if I make another mistake. And, although I wanted to call my mom or Cindy to talk my mistake through, I knew the only thing that would fix it was carrying on. So that's what I did. That's what I'm doing. I'm carrying on. And I'm pretty pleased with my progress.

Baby Steps Outside

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Sun, 04 Jun 2017 13:59:00 +0000

Occasionally people ask me what life is like since I left my job at Blue Man Group. I can tell you, it's strange! For a long time, I was struggling to figure out what day of the week it was. I kept thinking it must be Sunday - that it looked like Sunday. When I finally realized it looked like day, which I normally only saw on Sunday's (I was off Monday's as well, but those always had a miserly feeling with an undercurrent of dread - knowing time was slipping away and there was a coming need to return to work on Tuesday), I couldn't stop laughing. I've probably told that to half the people who will ever read this post by now, but it is significant. DAY. I spent 8 years working 40 hours/week (more or less) in a windowless basement office with only occasional sojourns outside for lunch or walks. This year, I got to see spring unfold, I've more-or-less been on top of my planting timing in the garden(s), and my eyes are awash with color and light. I'm even getting a farmer's tan that reminds me so much of my childhood and of my grandmother's tan that I get these wonderful/tragic little flashbacks.

I've also been to California for a week. My sister in law, Jodi, got me a rental car and a round trip ticket to go out and help with her school's California Gold Rush festival. I was the mining town's blacksmith. I spent most of the week visiting with my step father, Daron. There is lots to say about that, but I've got to go to New Jersey later today for a tech rehearsal. Another United Nations gig is coming up this week (World Ocean's Day), and I'm getting too antsy to sit in front of the computer.

Making my first pair of tongs, Daron operating the forge blower. The school's garden (with chickens) is in the back.

So, I'll sign off for now with one last thing: I'm trying to post something to this blog or Project Happy Life's social media at least once/day. Most of what I've been doing lately is on Instagram; I've been wrestling with the perfectionist tendencies in my mind and letting the blank blog post scare me... pressure, you know, it has to be good... blah blah blah. This is me trying to train myself to let go and take baby steps as needed.

First Lesson of Project Happy Life

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 16:52:00 +0000

I want to find the perfect way to tell you that there have been huge changes for me lately. Maybe you've heard:

I quit my job at Blue Man Group.

I never really wrote much about the fact that I worked there. I wasn't sure what the rules were, and I was afraid, honestly, that I would inadvertently break one and get in trouble or embarrass someone or hurt someone's feelings. There's a lot to say about what working there has meant to my life. I'll get to that another time. For now, the actual departure and aftermath:

The day I left - the day I had cleaned out my office and had everything packed and ready to get loaded into a cab for home, we also had my dear friend, Zea's birthday dinner to attend. So we left all my things near the exit on the wardrobe work tables, and went to dinner. On the way back to the theatre to get my stuff, Cindy heard a message on her phone that her mother had just passed away. As we walked, she stopped every 50 yards or so and threw up in the street. When she was as collected as possible, she hailed a cab, and I shuttled things up the stairs and out onto the sidewalk. Our friend Elvin came by and jumped in to help as soon as he knew what was going on. The cab driver was lovely and sympathetic. Cindy sobbed most of the way home. The driver even helped unload all the stuff into our house!

And then we were home. I had no more job. Cindy had no more parents. I didn't know what to feel; I'm not sure I had any feelings. Cindy was monumentally sad. She was trying to figure out how she could immediately fly to Hawaii. I was trying to figure out how I could immediately get to work on Project Happy Life. Actually... I was a little angry. I felt a little robbed. I had just finished my last week in a job I'd had and loved for 8 years (one of the many I've had at Blue Man over the 20+ years I worked there). I was the Production Stage Manager for the New York production. My last week was beautiful. I had my final show on Wednesday, and my best friend, Bernadette (who is also the Stage Manager there) and Akia organized a party for me in the lobby afterwards. So many people said such nice things to me. I wanted time to reflect. I wanted to put those memories in my pocket, so I could have them whenever I need them.

But I said I felt robbed. I had all these impulses - to stay at home for a couple of weeks and ball-up. I wanted to have a good cry and to take stock of everything that happened to me. But at the same time, how could I not go with my wife to her mother's funeral? Honestly, I looked for excuses to stay home. The first day of school for the class I am taking this semester was that Tuesday. Cindy and her brother urged me to stay home and attend my class. But, I knew that wasn't right. As I made my peace with the fact that things weren't going to go as I had planned, some friends offered to skype me into my Tuesday class from Hawaii. It was settled. I was some kind of relieved. I was going with Cindy. We organized and packed on Sunday, and we flew to Hawaii on Monday morning for the funeral.

We've been home now for 5 weeks, and for the majority of the time, as Cindy has been grieving, I have felt like I've been working without inspiration. I've felt aimless and yet excessively busy with school, theatre projects, organizing... I haven't really known what to say to you. I wanted to have some big sort of splashy reveal of Project Happy Life, LLC and how it will work. I wanted to be able to tell you about all my big plans. But it's honestly, I overextended myself with theatre projects and volunteer projects and class projects. First lesson of Project Happy Life - don't take on too many projects, and leave space to show up for the people you love.

More to come.

Green Roof Update - Late Summer 2016

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Mon, 05 Sep 2016 08:00:00 +0000

It's high time for a Project Happy Life green roof update. And, while going through the pictures I've taken this season, I found a bunch of good ones that I'd like to share. So, in chronological order, here's what has been going on in this, the 4th growing season of our Brooklyn green roof.

Spring always brings a blanket of flowers to the green roof, although which species of sedum blossoms the most has changed over the years. This year, we hardly had any of the tall blue-green sedum plants blossom. They would make buds, and then it looked like the ants would get them. Here, however, is a shot of the shorter sedum in bloom along with a couple of sage volunteers that seeded themselves in that spot last year. I wish I liked using the sage as much as it likes to grow.

Here's some of that happy sage parent plant. I love the color of those blossoms!

The strawberries in the Woolly Pocket are still doing well. And, because we've had fewer squirrels on the roof so far this year, we've gotten to eat a lot more of what we're growing. But all is not well, as you'll see later on...

A wide shot for you. I've tried a couple of times to get peas to grow up the railing from those copper planters above the strawberries, but they never make it. I think the soil is too poor and the railing gets too hot. Next year, I'm going to fix that soil up (I've been composting like crazy, which is another story for another day) and give them some string to climb on.

For the first time, last year I planted some flowers on the green roof, and the bachelor buttons have been re-seeding themselves and spouting in some spectacular colors (last year, we just had blue and white).

I also experimented with planting a purple coneflower (echinacea) last year, and it came back really well this year. There are even some seedlings starting in a couple of other spots on the roof now!

I had the opportunity to try my hand at stone carving when I was in school this past Spring semester. I made a little addition for the green roof that we see as we're coming out of the hatch.

The berry production was prolific this year. We had red strawberries, alpine strawberries, blueberries, and black raspberries. For a while, our breakfasts could not have been beaten by the finest restaurants in the world.

Blueberry glamour shot.

We have had some spectacular skies over Brooklyn this year too. We have had two double rainbows.

Some incredibly colorful sunsets:

Beautiful cloud formations:

And even a night when we could see the full moon in one direction,

And a lightning storm in the other direction.

As the summer has worn on, a lot of the bachelor buttons have dried out. I can already see the next generation sprouting, though. One neat thing I hadn't expected when I made the redwood planters last year was how many things would grow out of the sides of the planters. In this shot, you can see some of the bachelor buttons even did it!

Two days ago, I even found a mushroom growing out of the side of one of the planters!

While I'll steer clear of eating that mushroom, we've had some nice harvests this year. Our summer crops have consisted mainly of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and carrots.

But I also planted some of the little "Rich Sweetness 132" melons from seed I saved last year. They've been doing well. I like how they echo the cucumbers strips in a different color palate.

I'm growing my first crop of onions, and they appear to be doing well. I started these from some little green onions that my neighbors put in their compost, because they were a little wilted. I stuck them in water, and they sprouted roots. So I transplanted them to the roof in the early spring. I saw a youtube video that recommended cutting the tops back to encourage bulb formations, so that's why they've been lopped off.

I'm also experimenting with growing crops right in the sedum. I've got a couple of collards and cabbage plants in there. There used to be four of each, but I'm having a problem...

Doves, mockingbirds, or robins are digging up the sedum! They're practically mowing it down - ripping up big clumps and tossing the clumps into the drainage rock. In the process, I've lost some of the collards and cabbage seedlings. I'm not quite sure what to do about it; I assume they're eating some grubs or something. But they sure do make a mess!! There's a walking path buried under the sedum clippings the birds have made in this shot.

I've noticed that our mint blossoms are being visited by a bunch of black and orange wasps that I've never seen before. They don't linger, so I couldn't get a great picture of them, so here's an excellent picture from bugguide.net. They're called "blue-winged wasps" or scolia dubia, a wasp that preys on Japanese beetle grubs. I'm guessing these wasps' presence supports my grub theory about those birds.

No matter what the reason is the birds are tearing up the sedum, at least it'll make it easier to plant more crops on the main "lawn" of the green roof next year! It's always so hard to think of pulling up the sedum to make room for other things when it's covered in little flowers in the spring.

Anyway, in case there's any doubt, the green roof continues to be my favorite place to be.

Prospect Lefferts Gardens - a historical history in many movements. Opus 1.

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 17:41:00 +0000

What follows is a rewritten excerpt from a paper I wrote for my History and Theory of Historic Preservation class at Pratt last autumn.

Prospect Lefferts Gardens is Changing

As I was walking around, admiring the architecture in my neighborhood and feeling fine, I pondered the question of how landmark historic districts relate to the cost of housing in Prospect Lefferts Gardens (PLG), where I have lived for the past 11 years. I wondered if historic districts drive rental/housing prices up, or if they help keep prices stable. PLG is a small neighborhood with three historic districts within its boundaries. Since the buildings in the historic districts are protected (more or less), large-scale housing developers, who haven't paid much attention to the neighborhood for decades, are now focusing their attention on the areas surrounding the historic districts. As a lover of old buildings, I originally thought maybe the quality of the area's historic architecture (due to its landmark status) was the main reason for the local rapid price increases and gentrification. In other words, I wondered if the historic districts were so nice, it made the neighborhood more desirable to live in.

But, I found out that things are far more complicated than I thought, and it has to do with the history of Brooklyn and the history of race relations in this country. Let's start with a basic history of the neighborhood.

This is the first installment of a journey through gentrification, if you will.

PLG Resident Groups Through Time

Picture in your mind verdant forests filled with huge trees, meadows, streams, and pleasant hills. The Wisconsin Ice Sheet had receded, leaving Long Island behind. Native peoples and all manner of non-human animals, birds, plants, and insects lived here. As far as we know, Brooklyn carried on more or less in a state of lush abundance from the end of the last ice age until the early 1600’s. The first white (Dutch) people arrived in the area and purchased land from the Lenape people in the 1630’s. Prospect Lefferts Gardens is today’s name for an area on the northern end of the original Dutch village of Midwout (established in the 1650’s). The village was renamed “Flatbush” in 1664, when the British took over. In the 1800’s, the bustling country town of Flatbush was home to Erasmus Hall High School (established in 1786) and Kings County Hospital (originally founded in 1830 as an almshouse for the poor). By the late 1800’s, with the urban expansion of Brooklyn, the town-turned-neighborhood boasted several thriving theaters and cinemas, including Lowes King’s Theatre, an opulent building which was neglected in recent decades before being restored and re-opened in 2015. In 1913, Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team was opened. At one time, Flatbush had so many impressive Victorian mansions (including one belonging to the Vanderbilt Family, which was very close to today’s Prospect Park subway station), the town was a tourist destination, and picture postcards of the mansions were popular. In 1957, The Empire Rollerdrome was opened in an old Ebbets Field parking garage, and by the 1970’s, it was the epicenter for roller disco.

The Flatbush neighborhood is currently bordered to the north by Crown Heights, to the east by Brownsville/East New York, to the south by Flatbush/Ditmas Park, and to the west by Prospect Park. The area was also briefly referred to as "Prospect Park East" by real estate developers in the early 1910's, but that name didn't last, probably because it's kinda lame. In 1969, residents defined and named a small neighborhood within the larger Flatbush area “Prospect” (in honor of Prospect Park) “Lefferts” (in honor of the original prominent Flatbush land-holding Lefferts family) “Gardens” (due to its close proximity to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden).

In addition to your run-of-the-mill professionals and immigrants, it's fun to think that what is now Prospect Lefferts Gardens has over time been a center for baseball fans, horticultural enthusiasts, park-goers, those needing to make a stopover on their long, horse-drawn journey to Coney Island, and disco roller skaters (including Cher).

Cher and Bill Butler at the Empire Roller Disco 1979.
Photo: Pinterest by way of Brownstoner.com

Flatbush has always been home to a mixture of different people, however original homeowners in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens area were predominantly Dutch farmers. As the area became developed, it was home to prominent Protestants of Western-European descent. From the 1920’s through the 1950’s, Irish, European Jews, and Italian immigrants settled in the area. In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball and began playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field, just north of Flatbush. And in the 1950’s, although the neighborhood was still 99% white, a handful of black families started to establish themselves in the area.

Ten years later, in 1960, at the end of PLG’s first 50 years as an urban neighborhood (as opposed to a sleepy farming town or Revolutionary War battle site), parts of the neighborhood were changing. Although there was still a majority of white people, in some census tracts, the majority had shifted from 99% to around 75%. “White flight,” redlining, and blockbusting had begun. Within only 10 years, by 1970, black people held as much as a 70% majority in the blocks East of the Manor (I’ll explain what The Manor is in a later post). The total number of people living in PLG in 1970 was reportedly very close to what it had been 10 years earlier, however there were likely significant numbers of undocumented black workers from Haiti and other West Indian countries in residence. Also, the majority of the white population by then would have been Hassidic Jewish residents from the border of Crown Heights further east.

By the 1980’s, the entirety of PLG was 70-80% black of either African-Caribbean or African-American descent (two separate groups which have had tensions between them). The neighborhood has had a white minority for the past 30-40 years, and since the arrival of my white self ten years ago, I have occasionally sensed and been witness to expressions of worry and displeasure from some long-time neighborhood residents that my presence was a sign of coming gentrification. My neighbors were right, but it took a while. The neighborhood racial makeup (mostly Afro-Caribbean) stayed generally steady through the 2000's, until the past 3-5 years, which have seen a large influx of young white people. There has certainly been some racial turnover in home ownership (as happened with my own house, for example), however today’s new residents are mostly moving into neighborhood apartment buildings, because what working class person can afford a house these days?

That pretty much catches you up on the history of PLG’s human residents. In the next post on this subject, I’ll explore the architectural history of the neighborhood. Then we'll get to shenanigans, and eventually wrap up.

Planter Project - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Tue, 24 May 2016 02:56:00 +0000

When last I wrote about the redwood planters (Planter Project - Part 1), I hadn't yet filled them with soil and plants. I ended up making 19 of them in total, and I can't remember for sure how many bags of potting soil I carried up to the roof. I think it was 4 bags per planter, but I've brought up some compost and stuff since then as well. Just to button things up, here's a little photo-journal of the rest of the story.

Once I had all the planters built, I decided I should level them so the water in the bottom tank portion of the planters would be the same distance from the filter fabric along the full length of the planter. If they were left to rest evenly on the parapet wall, the water would have filled up to the fabric on one end, and barely made it into the net cup on the other end.

I got the first shimmed and leveled, and then I could fine-tune the shimming and leveling of the subsequent planters down the line. The were then screwed to each other.

I have a 1/2" drip irrigation line running around the perimeter of the roof, and I have one 1/4" line branching off for each planter (in addition to the other lines branching off for pots and such).

The line runs up, between the pond liner and the redwood, then it pokes up through the filter fabric, before arching back down, and poking through the filter fabric into the inside of the pond liner tank.

Shimming and plumbing my way down the line. It's too bad I cut the parapet capstone profiles into the bottoms of both ends of the planters. I ended up having to fill them with scrap pieces on the down-slope ends.

Rooftop storm glamour shot.

I had some seedlings from the farmer's market waiting in this planter.

Once all the planters were shimmed and plumbed, I cut the top horns off.

I know it doesn't have much to do with the planters, but I bought some blueberry plants last year, and I was very impressed that they actually made blueberries! On the roof! And they are producing even more this year!

These planters really allowed me to increase our crops last year. This is from May, 2015.

And here's how things looked in July, 2015. The drip irrigation system turns on for 20 minutes, 3 times/week. It waters all the potted plants, and it fills all the reservoirs in the planters. Some day, if I ever make a second generation of these planters, I'm going to work out a float valve system that will allow the reservoirs to stay full all the time. But, for now, it's working well enough.

It's fun to go back now (May, 2016) and see these pictures of how the roof had gotten even woolier by August of 2015. I'm planning to make a special redwood planter for a small crab apple tree this year. And I'm going to try planting tall plants on the short side and short plants on the tall side. Project Happy Spring!

Little Story. Little Sign.

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Sun, 17 Apr 2016 04:40:00 +0000

Home.

I've got my fountain pen spiffed back up. Janie (our cat) is in the bathroom - begging for someone to put her in the tub so she can drink the drain water. Cindy is in Amherst at her good friend Robbie's induction into the UMASS Amherst Sports Hall of Fame (if it's not called that, close enough). And I am very much avoiding doing some research on either of the two projects I'm supposed to do for school. Spring is springing. I'm on my own for a night. Who wants to do homework? I started in the late Summer last year, and I've been studying pretty solidly full time (outside, and (who am I kidding?) sometimes inside work at Blue Man too).

But today, I'm so excited and jumbled and lazy-feeling that I'm spinning my wheels - getting ahead on some things, like cleaning the kitchen or paying the bills, but potentially falling behind on other stuff - like doing my goddamn homework.

So, the original plan was to go to school (Pratt's Historic Preservation program) just for fun. Then I let myself get talked into aiming for a Master's of Science. I was given a scholarship for full-time attendance, so playing on my genetic pre-disposition to take advantage of a way to save money (thanks, Mom), I took a "fuck it" attitude and threw myself into school. Full time.

Now I'm within spitting distance of my first year done, and I've taken a close look at the balance sheet. On the "pro" side, I've found this energizing. I've gotten much better at keeping myself motivated when I'm home as well as when I'm at work. And I've learned a fair bit.

But, I haven't learned as much as I thought I would learn. Or, rather, maybe I'm not getting as much out of this semester as I was last semester. I should not have let my advisor talk me out of taking the 3 sustainability elective courses in exchange for this one required course in Historic Preservation. It doesn't suit me. No knock against the teacher or the class. I love learning, and a good conversation about "the concepts of heritage" can be fun. But this isn't what I thought historic preservation was all about, and I feel like I'm just doing busy work.

So, instead of homework, when I got home from work today, I did science in my thermos bottle with baking soda, peroxide, and boiling water - to get the tea scale out of the bottle and off two tea strainers with a fizz volcano. And I put a new clip on Cindy's clip board. And while I was at it, I put a couple of coats of Plasti-Dip on a pair of lineman's pliers... I have not filled out my portion of our outline for our group project: writing an executive summary of a site management plan for the Ksar of Ait-Ben-Haddou in Morocco. Nor have I read George Nakashima's book, The Soul of a Tree, which I actually want to read, but obviously don't want to read it for research so I can write another site management/conservation plan - this one for a different class and for a different site: the Nakashima place.

So, I digitized an old cassette tape, watched some home reno shows on HGTV, scanned receipts, glued my model canoe where it had been broken...

Yup. It seems like I'm getting a sign: Pratt's HP program doesn't have what I'm looking for - at least not if I do it their way. Because if I'd rather be sewing seeds on the roof than doing my homework (which I would), then I'm not studying the right thing for me.

Door to the Pole Barn (lumber storage) at Nakashima's. Symbolism.

Planter Project - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Tue, 26 May 2015 11:30:00 +0000

I decided to make some planters that go along the parapet walls of our green roof, so we have more growing space.

Keiter and I rented a zipcar SUV and went out and bought 125 6-foot Forestry Stewardship Council Certified redwood fence pickets. We had a little adventure getting them, because the only way they would all fit in the car was if we put the passenger seat all the way forward, the driver's seat as far forward as we could, and if Cindy (who is considerably shorter than I) drove home. I had to ride home laying on the stacks of lumber in the back. It's a good thing they were pretty wet. Had they been dry, my entire front side would have been full of redwood splinters!

Anyway, we survived, got things stacked in the basement, and had the zipcar returned on time. Here's a shot of the stack after I'd built one or two planters... Yup, I own a perfectly serviceable mitre saw, but I'm using a hand saw. It's good exercise and practice.

The following Sunday, the experiment began! My plan was to make planters that were three boards tall, sleeved over the capstones, and functioned as self-irrigating or wicking planters. I wanted to get one long side and one short end out of each fence picket (using 6 fence pickets per planter). I started by working on finding the right dimensions for the planter. I made a rectangle the same width as the capstones, carried it up to the roof, and took a look.

I like the look of it, but I wanted it to sleeve down father over the capstones. I'm planning to use a pond liner for the bottoms of these (to make them lighter, and to save wood), and I wanted the bottom edges of the sides of the planter to sit relatively close to the capstones, so the pond liner didn't pooch out the sides once the water got in there.

I ended up making the planter wide enough to sit on the outsides of the flanges. I cut the contour of the capstones into the end boards to make the planter sit low enough. Before pulling them up to the roof, I staple the pond liner to the sides.

Then I fit these corner pieces in - they hang down below the edges of the capstones, and I'll be able to attach brackets to the bottoms of the corner posts that wrap around the underside of the capstones if the planters aren't stable enough on their own.

Here's one after the pond liner is installed and trimmed, and I'm starting to stretch the filter fabric.

This is what it looks like after the filter fabric is stretched, stapled, and cut around the corner pieces. I've created a water reservoir in the bottom section of the planter. The dirt will sit on top of the fabric. How will the water get up into the dirt? You'll see in a minute.

In the basement, I pre-assemble the wooden rectangles of the planter (you can see the 2nd and 3rd courses in the background in the photo above). So, once the fabric has been trimmed, I sleeve the wooden rectangles over the corner posts and screw the whole thing together, like so:

This is how the water is going to get up into the soil: I set three little net cups in position on the fabric in the bottom of the planter. The soil is going to wick water from the lower trough up into the upper chamber through those net cups. You can learn more about this style of planter by doing an internet search for "Self Irrigating Planter" or "Wicking Garden."

I install the net cups in the fabric by cutting a little "X" through the fabric and pressing the cup in.

Finished. Don't ask me how I'm going to get water into the bottom reservoirs; I haven't finished deciding about that yet.

By the way, it sure is easy to tell which side of this picture is our roof and which is our neighbor's! I can tell you from personal experience, black roofs (or is it "rooves"?) are HOT - and not in a good way!

I set the first planter on the wall between my house and my neighbor to the East to see what it looked like. On this side, I plan to install trellises on the backs of the planters to act as a bit of living screen. I already like how much of my neighbor's unfinished roof is obscured by the body of the planter box.

A wider perspective:

The next day, I made 3 more.

And then I made 4 more. I spent both of my days off this week making planters. 4 planters/day is the speed at which my process has settled.

In case it wasn't clear earlier, I make the bottom rectangle (with semi-attached pond liner) and the 2nd and 3rd rectangles in the basement. Then I hoist them up to the roof on ropes. Ignore the messy back yard.

So, after another weekend spent making planters (today and yesterday), I've got a grand total of 12. I really hope they work.

I had originally planned to have the planters in groups, with some empty space in between. But now that we have so many of them up there, we have really started to like the way they define the space and give us a bit more privacy. We have decided to make enough planters to fill both walls on both sides. I've already ordered more pond liner. I guess I know what I'm doing next weekend too!

So, I have to make more planters, figure out whether I need to level the planters to make the water in the reservoirs submerge all 3 net cups equally (since they follow the slope of the roof), decide whether I want to buy and install float valves in each planter (which is probably going to be too expensive, since I can't go with valves that can be fouled by roots growing into them), or if I just want to plumb tubing into the planters from the drip irrigation system and fill them according to a timer rather than their water levels.

And I've got to buy a ton of potting soil and carry it all up to the roof.

Nevermind thinking about that, though! Here's Keiter - showing off her chicken wings!

How to Get the Lead Out Of Your Soil... Maybe

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Mon, 11 May 2015 05:15:00 +0000

Urban Farming Nerd Alert!

Today's topic is phytoremediation!

Since we live in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn has an industrial past, I read that our soil was likely contaminated with lead. As I understand it, the lead gets into the soil by settling out of the air (in the form of pollution) and flaking off of buildings (in the form of paint).

I had our soil tested by Brooklyn College in Autumn 2014. The middle area of the yard tested at 332 parts per million (ppm). The flower beds around the edge of the yard tested at 413 ppm. The front yard tested at 453 ppm. The green roof soil and the potting soil in all the containers on the roof were lead-free.

Once I got our soil test results, I had to figure out what to do about it.

Brooklyn College's recommendation is:

for lead levels below 100 ppm, no precautions are necessary (the green roof and all the potted plants are safe).
for lead levels between 100 and 400 ppm, follow best‐management practices for garden soils, i.e. don’t grow green leafy vegetables or root crops, children should not play in areas of bare soil. Other suggestions would be to further investigate actual lead distribution in the area and to test the blood lead levels of children. (this applies to the middle section of our back yard)
for lead levels above 400 ppm, the soil should not be used for growing food plants, and remedial actions should be taken for residential use. (this applies to our front yard and the garden beds around the edges of the back yard)

So, for the middle area of the back yard - where the lawn has been - the recommendation is "best-management"... The lead levels are below 400, so it's okay that we've got an apple tree planted in that section, but the soil is still pretty contaminated, and I'd rather it wasn't.

For the surrounding garden beds, the lead level is over 400, which means we're not supposed to be growing any food plants in that area, and the soil should be cleaned up. Unfortunately, that's where I've got black raspberry vines, may apples (a native species of plant that produces small fruits in July, not May), and ramps. I have two theories as to why the edge beds tested higher than the central section of the yard. First, I've been putting a lot of compost in the central section to try to raise its level up to match the brick walkway. If I understand my research properly, compost can make heavy metals less accessible to plants. Maybe the compost also makes heavy metals less detectable to soil tests? Second theory: the back bed runs along the rear side of our neighbor's garage, and the paint has been peeling off that thing for a long time. I took soil samples from all around the edge beds, including the back, so maybe the soil from the back skewed the results.

Regardless, I don't want to live with lead in our backyard soil. I want to clean it up.

Back when I lived in Boston (in the 1990's), I worked with a community action group to get an area along the Chelsea Creek cleaned up. The soil there was throughly contaminated, and we were told that the only way the land could be made safe enough to become a park was to actually scrape the top 12" of the soil off the land, send it to a land fill, cap the remaining earth with plastic, add new topsoil over the plastic, and, voila: Safe park! By the looks of it, that's exactly what was done to create "The Condor Street Urban Wild":

It's a wonderful triumph that the site was cleaned and made into a public park. However, before the soil was scraped off, capped and/or replaced, the land had varied contours. It had trees. It was interesting. I like interesting.

Digging our own backyard down 12", throwing all the soil away, buying 12" of clean replacement soil, and carting everything through the house both ways (we don't have an alley or any other way of accessing the backyard) didn't sound like a viable option. It sounded wasteful in every way, and it would likely remove any character that's there.

But then I remembered I had once heard that sunflower plants pull toxins out of soil. I did a lot of internet research and found that sunflowers aren't the only plants with the ability to "clean" soil. In fact, other species of plants draw lead up into their roots, stems, and leaves even better than sunflowers!

According to my research, indian mustard (Brassica juncea) was one of the best plants for bio-accumulating lead and phytoremediating soil of all those I read about. Here's how it is supposed to work:

You seed the contaminated soil with indian mustard, grow the plants to maturity, pull them out (roots and all), and dispose of them. While I could find no record of any land that had been 100% cleaned by this process (perhaps because no one has tried for long enough), The Boston Health Department conducted a study for 2 years in Dorchester, MA in 1997-98. During those two growing seasons, they managed to reduce the lead in the soil by 63%.

So I thought this year I'd give it a shot! I tilled the middle part of the back yard with a pitch fork and sowed the whole thing with indian mustard seeds. I left the side beds un-touched for a control to my experiment. In the Fall, I'll pull up all the indian mustard plants and retest both the central area and the side beds to see if there has been any change in the lead content. Of course, I'm hoping we see a noticeable improvement in our lead levels.

Half-way through tilling the back yard with our new tiny pitchfork.

Mustard Greens (about 3 weeks old)

Below is a wide shot of the back yard today. You might notice that I've taken down the back fence, scraped and painted the back wall of the neighbor's garage, and thereby hopefully stopped the flow of lead into the soil from that source.

In my next garden post, I'll explain the cube-shaped contraption in the back. In the meanwhile, baby mustard greens look nice as a lawn!

If you'd like more information on phytoremediation and creating a lead-safe garden, have a look at the Lead-Safe Yard Manual and this paper called Phytoremediation for Lead-Safe Yards.

Where Have YOU Been?

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 14:40:00 +0000

It has been a while since Cindy and I went out to Carmel Valley to work on the Arnold Cabin. I gave you a peek at the emotional perspective in my previous post on the subject, The Arnold Cabin Project Part 3: The Real Story, but there's always more to say, isn't there? For the more nuts-and-bolts perspective, I will kick off a little series of "how did" posts (as opposed to "how to"). And, as luck would have it, I've been invited to attend a family function out at Hastings this weekend. I'll use the occasion to take some update photos of how things look after the Winter.

But first, a word on where I've been: We got back from the cabin project in August of last year. I've written before about my neuropathy (numbness and nerve pain in my arms and hands), and through the paleo/primal diet and some great work by our chiropractor/functional medicine guy, Dr. Mango, I thought I had put that stuff behind me. Unfortunately, I was wrong. By the end of our week working on the cabin, the numbness and pain in my right arm and hand were back. Working on my computer made the aching worse, and since I have to do so much computer work for my job, I kept it to a minimum at home. That helped.

Then, in October of last year, I was raking through the drainage rocks on the green roof to wash the silt out of them (so we can collect the rain water from the roof without having to worry so much about filtration). I was using a little hand fork to move the rocks around... for days. You know how you can get absorbed in work and not notice what's happening to your body? Well, I screwed up my elbow and became unable to use my right arm for any real work for months. I switched to using my left hand to work the mouse on my computer at home and work, which helped a little. But through January, I still couldn't grasp with my right hand without a sharp pain in my elbow. Honestly, it was depressing.

Again, Dr. Mango came to the rescue with some intense muscle work. I've also been working daily to improve my posture (with stretches and mindfulness), keep my inflammation down (by eating primal/paleo and avoiding sugar - within reason), and strengthen my back (with exercises and converting to a standing desk at home). In March, my elbow finally started to improve. It's not fully healed yet - I can tell the difference when I work the track pad on my laptop with my right hand for a few hours vs. my left. But, I'm learning how to keep my shoulders and arms healthy and can add some more typing and computer time back into my life - just in time for Spring green roof updates!

Speaking of the green roof, here's Cindy mixing and adding some store-bought cow poo to our potting soil on the roof last weekend.

Epic Kitchen Door Restoration Project

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 12:30:00 +0000

This past weekend, I finally finished a project that has been no less than 4 years and 3 months in the making: the restoration of our kitchen door and door jamb. Here's a photo of what it looked like in 2005 when I was in the process of buying our house. Notice that all the walls in the entire house were painted that weird brown. And all the original woodwork was buried under several coats of paint.

In 2010, I pulled the door out, took it downstairs to the basement, and started working on the door frame. You can see I'd re-painted the hallway by then. I still haven't gotten around to replacing the dark brown plywood cabinets on the right side of these pictures.

In the early days, I didn't have my saw horses built, so I was using my old tablesaw for a work bench.

With the paint removed, I found that the spot for the bottom hinge was completely splintering out. I screwed some backer wood behind the good wood, and created an oak patch for the hole. I later plugged the screw holes with oak plugs.

I didn't take any photos of the main door-stripping process. Cindy did most of the early work with a heat gun and scrapers. A few of the window panes were cracked in the process, and Cindy felt so badly about it, she basically stopped working on the door, and it sat in the basement for a couple of years. I built some sawhorses in 2013, and I found them to be perfect for the kitchen door, so I started working on it when it was too rainy or hot for working on the green roof.

I removed the window panes and discovered that the wood around the windows was splintered and too weak to keep.

At first, I hoped to just replace what was too weak to keep. I couldn't get any kind of router plane (electric or otherwise) in there to make channels for new dividers, so I hand chiseled them by giving my chisel a couple of taps to raise a chip of wood, then moving down the line about 1/16" and doing it again. Once you've got a bunch of wood chips standing up in the channel, you can go back through, scrape them off, and smooth the bottom of the channel.

Once I'd done all of them, I milled some oak and cut some ship-lap joints for the intersections and glued them in place.

In the photo below, you can just barely see that there was a long strip of light, tight-grained wood along the edge of the door that we uncovered when we stripped all the paint off. At some point, someone had tacked a long wedge of douglas fir (or some such stuff) along the whole length of the door. I don't know if the original edge was damaged, or if the house long ago settled and it no longer fit the jamb properly, but because I had no intention of re-painting the door, I needed to replace that wood with something that looked more appropriate. The trouble is, I wasn't 100% sure the door was oak, and I wasn't 100% sure how to go about replacing that strip properly.

I thought about and procrastinated about that problem for several months while I turned my attention to scraping away the burn marks left behind from Cindy's early experience with the heat gun (another reason why she shied away from continuing to work on the door).

One day, I realized I could clamp a straight edge to the door, pull the offending wedge of wood off the edge, route a clean edge along the length of the door (using the straight edge), nail on a replacement strip of the secondary wood (most doors are actually made of two different types of wood - a cheap one on the inside, and a thick veneer of the good stuff on the outside), and then glue on a strip of primary wood to bring the door back to it's proper width.

There was a good chance the door was oak, but when I started trying to find some oak that matched the door's grain patterns, I couldn't find a match. So I began investigating American Chestnut wood, which I had always sort of suspected might have been what our woodwork was made out of when I wasn't thinking it was oak. The American Chestnut tree used to be the most prevalent tree in our North American forests. But it has been nearly extincted by a blight. It is essentially impossible for any remaining American Chestnut trees to grow large enough to reproduce or to be suitable for lumber, so the only way to get American Chestnut lumber is through salvage dealers. After a lot of searching, I found a company in Massachusetts that had a few thin boards of the furniture-grade quality I needed in order to be able to patch my door.

This is a photo of the secondary wood strip attached to the door with the American Chestnut wood glued on for the final "show" edge.

After the glue dried on the above edge pieces, I planed the edge flush with the interior strip of wood and began gluing on the front and back veneers.

Then I clamped the door to my work table and planed the face veneer flush with the edge veneer. By the way, that antique coffin style plane is dreamy.

It's around this time when I figured out I can wake up early and get some shop time in before my day job, so this project really started to move along much faster. It took me about 4 years and 2 months to get to this point. The rest only took about 4 more weeks!

Then I figured out I could use my saw horses as an elegant way of holding the door up while I worked on patching the bad hinge mortises and filling the old screw holes with pegs.

The original screws had probably started pulling out of their holes, so someone moved the hinges to fresh wood at the top and bottom of the door. That's why there was a second hinge mortise to patch.

One side of the door was originally stained a very dark color. Here's the stain getting scraped off.

I had left the new edge on the door an extra 3/16" wider than the original, so I brought the door up to the kitchen to see how much of that wood I needed to shave off. But it fit just the way it was!

You'll also notice that my new American Chestnut wood is awfully bright compared to the original stuff. Although I didn't take any pictures of it, after I had the door back down to the workshop, I did some experiments with wood dye and made the new wood match the old a bit better. I was talking to Cindy about making it perfect, and she mentioned that she liked being able to see it a little bit - it sort of tells the history of the door. In later pictures (below), you can still see the patch, but it's blended in somewhat - just the way I left it.

The light in this photo below is wonky, but you can see that the bottom panel of the door was cracked. I had been debating about whether to try to glue the panel back together, and after seeing the light stream through, I decided I had to give it a shot.

First, I gently pulled the molding out from around the panel. I broke one piece in the process, but it glued back together pretty seamlessly.

I put blue tape on either side of the crack to keep the glue squeeze out from making a mess of the wood. The panel was tucked under the veneer on the side rails of the door on both sides, so it was impossible to take out without breaking. I decided to thread the end of a ratchet strap around the panel and tie it tight for my make-shift clamp.

I couldn't wait to see how the crack looked after I took the blue tape off, so I flipped the door over for a look. It's not perfect, but it's not bad either. The glue wasn't completely dry yet, so that strap was still on there.

Here's my mortise for the lock.

And finally, I turned my attention back to the windows. I cut new panes of glass to replace all the broken ones (I broke a few myself too - it wasn't all Cindy's fault). I have collected a bunch of old windows off the street from time to time, so I have a good stock of old glass lying around. It took a long time to clean it up, but I love that it's a bit scratched and has waves and bubbles in it.

In this picture I'd milled a bunch of sticks out of more of the American Chestnut wood to hold the glass panes in place.

All the sticks were hand mitered to fit.

See?

Then I started shaping them by hand.

Once they were all done, I clamped and nailed them into place.

I finished the door with two coats of a clear, satin water-based polyurethane finish. That's blue tape to protect the glass from getting a bunch of finish on it. I was very excited to install the door back in the kitchen, but my first attempt didn't quite work. You can't really tell from the photo, but the door didn't close all the way.

I had to mortise the lower hinge deeper into the door jamb.

And I had to re-patch and re-install the upper hinge on the door.

I really love those saw horses. And, yup, that's our kitchen floor. It was pretty much worn out when we bought the house, and I still haven't found the time to replace it.

The hinge adjustments worked!

I'm particularly proud of how the new wood to keep the windows in place turned out. And there's Cindy's silhouette reflected in the window. She was making us eggs and lox.

Man, I can't tell you how nice it is to have that ding-dang kitchen door back in the kitchen where it belongs. Wow.

The Latest on Lanikai

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Tue, 23 Sep 2014 19:03:00 +0000

Lanikai Elementary School has a stage!

When last we spoke about the Lanikai Elementary School stage project (in this post), I was daydreaming about little kids performing the hula on that stage, under that beautiful banyan tree, a short walk away from the picturesque beaches of Lanikai and Kailua.

But, I needed to get my head out of the clouds. We had work to do! Kat managed to hook up with Shawn McKay. He's another parent at the school, a husband to one of the school's teachers, AND an actual contractor! With this video fly-through that Kat made of my sketchup model, and what I am sure was a kick-ass speech she gave at the fundraiser, the school got enough in donations to fund the project.

I'd given them the overall design of the stage, but the school couldn't start building until everything was approved by professional engineers. Enter our new friend Jon, the structural engineer, working pro-bono (on occasion) for the school system. He was immeasurably helpful. I gave Jon this layout plan:

and he turned that into engineered construction drawings:

I took Jon's construction drawings, which indicated but didn't show how the framing would work, and I made this plan to help visualize the framing. That's a lot of lumber!

And I made this model to indicate how the Trex decking should be laid out:

We had some fits and starts with scheduling the construction. We thought for a minute that we'd be able to do the work during the school's Spring break (back in April)- a slender window of time that would have allowed me to fly out to Hawaii to participate in the construction before flying back to NYC and then down to Barbados with Cindy, our friend Kendra, and the Castro's (Bernadette, Arsenio, and Axel) for our dear friends' the Spangler's wedding. But that didn't work out. There were a number of complications, not the least of which was the fact that Shawn-the-Contractor's wife was 9 months pregnant and due to give birth.

Then, one day during the Spangler wedding trip, this picture popped up on my Facebook feed. It documents the arrival of the first pile of lumber. I don't believe I've ever been so delighted by a pile of lumber in my life.

A few days later, Kat posted a time-lapse video of the initial framing of the stage. I was elated to see things coming together! But I'll save that video for later; it's now included in a time-lapse video of the entire build process.

In the meanwhile, here are a few still-shots of the stage framing. I understand that the construction was done both by Shawn McKay's construction team as well as parent volunteers.

I wonder if they bought the stair stringers pre-cut or if some poor soul had to cut them all out individually with a circular saw...

And here's the decking, staged to go on the stage. (You see what I did there? You like?)

And now for the complete construction in under 3 minutes (apologies for the abrupt ending of the music):

Here's Kat's rig for her GoPro camera. I'm thrilled she took the trouble to make that video, because not being able to participate and help really bothered me. Getting to watch the process (even after the fact) helped me not feel so terribly far away.

And here's the best part! Blessing the stage and the kids dancing the hula on it!!

And another best part: everyone uses the stage during recess. Some kids use it to sit and chat, some are dancing, some adults are supervising the kids, and a couple of girls had plunked themselves in the middle to color and draw. That's Kat in the pink dress on the left.

By the way, if I forgot to mention it earlier, I chose to wrap the stairs all the way around the stage this way so that the sides could be used as a small stage or lecture podium if any teachers wanted to bring their classes outside and stay in the shade.

The school is currently working on arrangements to make the hand rails and a safety railing that will go along the back of the stage where the wooden barricades (leftover from the May Day Celebration) are currently standing. I provided the school with 3 hand-drawn sketches when the rest of the drawings were submitted, and we chatted about it a bit today. The project is down to punch-list items. I'll post again when they get the railings and stuff up, but other than that, Lanikai Elementary has a stage, and we're all thrilled!!

Arnold Cabin Project Part 3 - The Real Story

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 16:48:00 +0000

I can hardly believe it as I write this.

Cindy and I have been back from our 2 week California Cabin Restoration Odyssey for three weeks now, and it has been a little hard to make sense of the trip. These things, after all, never seem to quite turn out the way one expects, do they?

As we packed our suitcases, and as we sat aboard the airplane on our way, I kept having these wonderful, "I can't believe this is my real life" moments. I was excited to commune with the decisions of my great-great grandfather and mother. As I had photographed, measured, and modeled the cabin, I came into contact with the remnants of thoughts and actions done by my ancestors. In other words, the cabin is 21' long and 21' wide. Clearly, because of it's two different roof pitch lines, you can see that it was once a smaller cabin - with only one room. I happen to know that Henry and Sarah Arnold had 6 children (3 girls and 3 boys), and they also raised some of Sarah's brother's children and some of their own grandchildren in that cabin. It stands to reason that they would expand, and they did so in two directions - they lengthened the cabin along the original ridge line, adding a 6' room facing down the hillside. And, either at that time or later, they added a 9' section (divided into two more rooms) along the back of the cabin like a lean-to, adding that second slope to the roof.

That's a bunch of deduction - detective work, if you will. And I expected to be working with a cabin that was (apart from having been re-roofed at least once before and having some additional support added to the foundation) largely original. What I found was somewhat the opposite. In the entire time of climbing all over that cabin, I only remember seeing one original square or "cut" nail. The rest had been pulled out and replaced by more modern, round-headed or "wire" nails. And when we started talking with Vince, the Hastings Director, he told us that he had recently come across some photographs of people re-building the Arnold Cabin in the 1970's. He said they had almost taken the entire thing apart and re-built it at that time.

Now that I was finally at Hastings and able to spend (nearly) as much time as I pleased combing over the Arnold Cabin, I saw more and more things that weren't original, which is to say they weren't made of redwood either. Redwood is very rot and insect-resistant. Pine and Douglass Fir are not (unless you treat them with chemicals). Many of the original redwood parts that make up the roof system had been replaced with pine at some point in the past.

I won't sugar coat it. This disappointed me.

In the span of time that cabin had existed since it was built, interlopers had (rightfully) put their hands on it. It had been naive of me to think the cabin had stood all this time in its original condition without any restoration or shoring-up. And yet, I had so hoped to be able to get close to Henry and Sarah through this strange form of contact - touching things left exactly where they had been put. All those little round nail heads slightly dampened my enthusiasm on the very first day.

I didn't talk about it much, because there were bigger challenges afoot. First, Cindy is very allergic to poison oak, and while Jaime, the Hastings Steward had cleared most of it from around the cabin, we were constantly walking on a bed of dried leaves, many of which were dried poison oak leaves. Also, the cabin was somewhat entangled in poison oak vines - both inside and out, both living and long-since dead. And thirdly, there were face flies.

If you haven't heard about face flies, you might be able to guess what they are by the name. But in case you imagine them less of a nuisance than they are, I'll get into it a little bit. They are small flies, and they constantly hover, buzz, and attempt to land in the orafices of your face. Barring the ability to do so, they find their way to your exposed skin, alight wherever they can, and if they aren't shaken immediately off, they bite you. They are weaker fliers than your typical house flies, so you can blow them out of your face by puffing out little bursts of air, but within seconds, they come back for further attempts at landing in your nose, mouth, eyes, and ears.

While working on the cabin, my hands were constantly in motion. And my head was constantly filled with calculations of angles, force, whether this would need to be cut or how to get that up on the roof. There were assessments to make with every move whether the cabin was sturdy and I was stable enough to maintain my position without falling or breaking through and then falling. The motion of my hands kept the flies off my arms for the most part. The flies did, however, manage to get under my shirt and bite my stomach and my lower back. But the thoughts in my head kept the noise of their buzzing in my ears from bothering me too much. I blew the flies away from my face with my breath, and when I had a free hand, I swatted them away with my gloves.

When the day was hot, the flies were thicker, and one's relationship was suddenly with a small cloud of flies rather than 5 or 10.

Cindy, on the other hand, was at the ready to be helpful. She moved slowly, for fear of slipping and for fear of touching poison oak. She spent a fair amount of time watching over me - fulfilling her usual role of Safety Captain - cautioning me against falling or otherwise hurting myself. Sometimes, she was paralyzed with fear for herself or me. She was not in charge of making sure all the pieces fit and were solidly attached, so she didn't have the luxury and chore of doing as much figuring as I did. As best she could, she learned the names of things, but ever cautious of making a mistake, when asked to hand me a thing, she would double check: do you want this thing? Or this other thing? She was bathed in fear.

And yet, she kept going. As I worked, she worked. Or, if she couldn't do anything to help, she stood and actively worried. Some tasks she could handle on her own - asking me to check them over once she had gone a certain way, to make sure she was doing it correctly. But, again, there were long moments where circumstances prevented her from moving quickly. And the nature of her role as assistant meant that she had more space in her head to hear the buzzing of the flies.

Little Cindy Keiter - Actress, history buff, entertainer, mench, tour guide - picking her way through the poison oak, afraid for our lives and limbs, fighting against the urge to panic in the face of danger, struggled with the full force of her concentration to get the hang of which screws were required for which operation, or the names of the tools, or the names of the parts of the roof... stuff she only cared about because she cares about me - that Little Cindy Keiter - persevered through it all.

But the buzzing of the face flies nearly broke her.

And while I expected to spend the two weeks communing with my ancestors, wallowing in thoughts of what their lives were like when they lived in that cabin, and going deep into the restoration of the place as an heir to its genetics, I found my time at Hastings wasn't about that stuff very much. I dealt with the problems that presented themselves - how to get those big, square metal panels aligned to that old crooked cabin, how to get redwood when the salvage redwood supplier I'd counted on flaked out, how to avoid sliding off a slick new metal roof when you still need to work up there, how to avoid making extra trips down the mountain to get more tools...

I figure that's what all us romantic, book-learned fools discover once we throw ourselves into the fray: a project may be grand and all, but work is still work. In that regard, I can't imagine my experience was any different from that of my ancestors'. More than once, I thought of the brilliant French films, Jean de Fleurette and Manon de la Source, and how that guy moves to Provence to become a peaceful and successful farmer, only to be forced to recon with the realities of life in the country (and his own inner demons). Have you seen them?

I was challenged by the work, to be sure, but what I never dreamed Hastings would illustrate for me in the way that it did was the measure of Cindy's love. So before I get to any talk of angles and methods of construction and such, I just wanted you to know: the real story of our time working on the Arnold Cabin was Cindy's strength in facing so many fears and the love she showed for me by doing so.

The Arnold Cabin Project Part 2: Planning

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 05:14:00 +0000

Hi there! Cindy and I are getting ready to fly to California for two weeks to work on the Arnold Cabin. If you missed Part 1 of the Arnold Cabin Project, click the link to read all about it.

Now, before all you mashers and thieves out there in Internet Land get excited about pilfering our television while we're out of town, settle down. The upstairs tenants will still be home, and we have additional people cat sitting and looking after the green roof.

With the home front in good hands, I'm getting nerdy-excited about our trip.

Here's the plan: We're going to fly into LAX, rent a car, drive up and spend a night visiting Cindy's twin sister, Jodi in Lancaster. We can't wait to see the school where she teaches and the new house where she lives. The next day, we're going to drive a bit further up and spend the night visiting Daron and his wife Marianne in California City. Daron is one of my three fathers, and if you don't know what I mean when I say that, check out this previous blog post: Three Fathers. One Me. Cindy hasn't met Daron and Marianne yet, and I'm very excited to introduce them! The following day, we'll head up to Carmel Valley and settle into our housing at Hastings Natural History Reservation.

The Barn at Hastings

I spent this past Thursday night, and all day Friday and Sunday researching metal roofing systems and suppliers for the cabin. I think I found the right thing - corrugated sheet metal. It'll stop the rain, last a long time, give the cabin a few more minutes of time if a wildfire comes through, and it'll be in keeping with the style of the cabin. I have the heart of a loyal restorationist and preservationist, so I really thought hard before moving away from a shingled roof (which is what is currently on the cabin), but I've seen photos of other family cabins with sheet metal on them, so I think my ancestors would approve.

Another thing to consider is the delicate nature of the land and the fact that it's used for natural history research. Most metal roofing systems these days, it seems, come either coated in paint or a polyvinyl fluoride stuff. I didn't want to risk all that paint cracking off or the PVCF chemicals leeching or peeling off the roof and getting into the environment over time. So I chose a product that's as safe and environmentally inert as I could find: 7/8" corrugated sheet metal coated in "galvalume".

From the manufacturer's web site:

The Living Building Challenge (LBC) certification program, administered by the International Living Future Institute, takes a broad view of sustainability and embraces the philosophy of a restorative future by looking at a building’s performance over time. In fact, certification is not granted until the building has been occupied and its performance documented for one year.

The Institute’s Declare Label is an ingredients-based eco-label around the Red List of “chemicals of concern” that have human health and toxicity impacts. Declare aims to provide transparency and open communication by allowing manufacturers to voluntarily share their product sources, materials and manufacturing locations.

Metal Sales™ is the first metal panel manufacturer to be included in the rigorous and exclusive Declare™ program. Metal Sales has fully disclosed all of the ingredients in the Acrylic Coated Galvalume® roof and wall panels through Declare, and they are designated as being Red List Free on the Declare Label.

For more information, please visit www.declareproducts.com

Are you still with me? I know. Corporate writing is snoozeville. I could hardly get through that stuff myself, but I googled around, and it doesn't seem like greenwashing. Here's hoping I'm making a good choice!

Since I've never built a metal roof, I had a lot of questions in my mind about how to deal with the corners, the roof ridge, the line along the roof where there's a change in slope (which I now know is called a "pitch break"), how the flashing and the roofing panels go together, how to deal with the little gaps under the corrugation, how to cut corrugated sheet metal...

The internet is a marvel and a wealth of free education if you take the time to poke around and always verify things across multiple sources. It seems us Americans cut sheet metal with power tools - nibblers and grinders. In the Phillippines, Australia, and New Zealand, they just snip a nick in the panels and rip them by hand. Since we won't have electricity (or water, for that matter) at the cabin, I'm excited to give the snip-and-rip method a try.

Well, the metal manufacturer had a bunch of installation diagrams and stuff on their web site, so I downloaded and read almost all of them. If anyone ever wanted to prove that I'm not normal, they need only point out that I really loved spending three days reading about how metal roofs go together.

But, before I could order the roofing materials, I had to know the pitch angles of the roof. There are 3 roof sections on this cabin. Clearly, the original 12'x21' cabin got too small for my two great-great-grand parents and their 5 children, so they added a section onto one side to make a 21' square cabin. The new addition - let's call it the West wing - created a second pitch angle. I took some rudimentary measurements of the cabin when we were out in July of 2013, but there were a couple of critical measurements I didn't think to take. In order to find the slopes of the roof, I had to trace them off photographs I had taken. But then I wanted to double check my tracings, so I ended up making a model of the cabin in SketchUp and matching some photos (taken on two different days) to my measurements. If I did the photo-matching correctly, my measurements were pretty close. If I didn't, I hope my metal order included more (rather than less) than I'll need - there's a week's lead time for orders, and we'll have to drive to Watsonville for the pickup!

Arnold Cabin in SketchUp

Arnold Cabin in real life - July 2013

While I think the cabin is pretty square, it's clear from matching the model to the photos that the walls aren't perfectly plumb. For a roof, square is pretty important so your eaves and gables - the parts that overhang the walls - aren't all crooked. I'm hoping plumb won't mess me up too much, since I won't have time to starting fiddling with the cabin's foundation. Someone else worked on that back in (I'm guessing) the '80's, around the last time the roof was replaced. Want a picture of the foundation? I'm sure you do:

Family lore has it that the boys slept down here - under the floor of the cabin. The girls, I gather, slept up in the West wing.

And while I'm trying to impress you with this little cabin, here's a shot of the interior. That's the front door on the left. I'm guessing this would have been the living room:

Here's what the ceiling in that room looks like - just shingles on purlins on rafters. Like my nifty new roofing lingo? You can see the spot where the wood stove chimney used to be.

And last-but-not-least-ly, this is the West wing with the back door.

So, the plan is to strip off the shingles, sweep out the wood rat poop, nail tin over the rat and wood pecker holes, put the metal roofing system on the house, and replace the missing redwood batons and a couple of broken floorboards.

Speaking of redwood, I found a guy who salvages old growth redwood logs down in Big Sur. He's going to be our redwood supplier. Here's his web site: http://bigsuroldgrowth.com/

Oh, and if there's time, we'll replace the broken window panes and re-glaze the rest. My Aunt Trish is flying in from Phoenix, my Aunt Lynda is coming down from San Francisco, and a handful of cousins will gather at Hastings for a little family reunion and visit to the cabin on our last weekend. And for our last night, we'll be heading up to San Francisco to take Lynda home and have a nice visit with my cousin Robert.

I'm looking forward to a great trip. New roof or bust!!

Roof Railing Update - July 2014

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Sun, 13 Jul 2014 10:56:00 +0000

This summer, I've been working on installing the wooden handrail along the tops of the steel railings I made for the green roof. It's been semi-slow going, though, because my attention has been pretty divided between getting soil and fabric pots set up with vegetables for the growing season, installing drip irrigation for all the container plants, dealing with the plumbing and washing machine issues we've had (more plumbing is in my future for this weekend, in fact - there's a water hammer and a shower faucet leak to solve), and babysitting our godson, Axel.

Oh, and I had a good meeting with a roofing guy about the parapet wall and roof hatch leak problems. He happens to be a Certified Green Roof Professional in addition to being an experienced roofer, and I had a great time chatting with him. Here's hoping all of that works out. I'll give you his name if it does.

But back to the railing project! As I wrote on the PHL page describing how I made the roof railings (found here or on the left hand side of the PHL web site), I bought a bunch of lumber reclaimed from the rubble of the Rockaway Beach Boardwalk after Super Storm Sandy by Sawkill Lumber. It's a mix of tropical hardwood species that do very well outdoors in the elements, so I won't have to worry about replacing it any time soon.

I started in April. The first step was to pull all of the old boardwalk nails out of the lumber. Alan from Sawkill told me that the "P" stamped on the heads of each nail stands for the NYC Parks Department.

Then, I had to work out the angle of the miters for the ends of the boards. I laid pieces out on the railing tops and marked the intersections where the boards meet to find the angles.

For cutting the miters, I could choose between two evils: climbing up and down the ladder and stairs between the basement and roof as I refined the fit of each piece, or I could use a hand saw. I chose the hand saw for most pieces and went downstairs to my electric compound miter saw for the cuts that needed to be done at precise-yet-unknown compound angles. That reminds me, I need to learn how to sharpen my handsaws.

And here are the first two pieces laid out.

As I worked my way along the railing, I discovered one spot in particular where one of the boards is sloping into the corner, and one is more or less level. That's a problem I'll have to figure out how to solve later.

And here's one of the uprights with the short boards roughed in.

Now I'm starting to see how the finished railing is going to look.

And a couple of wide shots of the whole back railing. FYI - I still haven't started on the front.

By the way, I attached the wood with self-tapping screws from the hardware store. I drilled holes through the steel slightly wider than the screws, and I ended up needing to drill pilot holes up through the railing lumber, because the self-tapping screws couldn't handle the hardwood. The whole thing was rather finicky and took longer than I had hoped. But it's nice to see the complete form of the steel and wood railing together for the first time.

I bought an Arbortech Turboplane for my grinder to do the shaping. I had been concerned it would dull quickly with this tropical hardwood, but I wrote to the manufacturer and they pointed me to a youtube video of a guy grinding epoxy off a concrete floor without the blade getting dull, so I gave the Turboplane a try. It worked very well. I discovered the undersides of the boards and the corners were particularly difficult to shape without getting a lot of chipping and tear-out, so I'm doing a certain amount of shaping with a rasp by hand. Here are some shots of what I did initially:

I was feeling pretty good about how things were going until I went up to the roof in May and discovered that the screws had snapped on some of the smaller pieces. We had had some rain, so the best I can figure is that the wood expanded and sheered off the screws. BUMMER!

I mail-ordered some stainless steel lag screws and spent a couple of days in June taking everything apart and replacing all the initial screws with the lag screws. All of the broken ones had to be extracted from the wood. I tried drilling them out, but it didn't work (the screws were too hard to be drilled through), so I stumbled upon this method. First, chip out some wood around the screw.

Then, grab the end with vice grips and back it out of the hole.

After doing that for all the broken screws, and re-drilling all the holes in the steel and the pilot holes in the wood, I realized I should take the opportunity to do the initial power-shaping on all the pieces before I screwed them back down (to prevent the tear-out on the corners I had experienced back in April). So, I held the pieces to the top of the railing with clamps and shaped the edges before lag screwing them onto the railing. Here's the finished product.

After seeing this picture, I decided that's the best place I've found for the home-made digital antenna, so I've since gone up and secured it in place and run the coaxial cable in such a way that it is hardly visible. After this one dies of rust, I think I'll make one that looks more integral to the fence - like a bug, but hopefully not in a cheezy way.

I've still got the hand-shaping and sanding to do on this railing, and of course, I still have to do the whole front railing, but I'm pretty pleased with how it's turning out so far. What do you think?

P.S. Happy Birthday to Axel, who turned 1 year old last Sunday. Cindy and I went to his party to celebrate. Here he is with his mom and a fiendish face full of ice cream cake and zeppole (or "fried dough" for you non-Italians):

Black And White Makes Grey: What If You're Biased Against Yourself?

noreply@blogger.com (Lory Henning) — Thu, 10 Jul 2014 11:30:00 +0000

When I was in my late teens and early 20's, I didn't know how to figure out whether I was gay or not. The only sex I knew about (straight sex) sounded to me like pretty much the most awful thing two people could do together. I knew girls were supposed to like boys... my cousin Samantha was basically boy-crazy, so I watched her and tried to make myself feel the way it looked like she felt about boys.

It didn't work, but I didn't know it wasn't working. I kept trying, and I aimed squarely at "doing what I was supposed to do." I had this white-picket-fence vision of where I was supposed to be in my life. I don't know where it came from - TV, my grandmother, talk at school... I was definitely one of those perfectionist kids who equated doing well with the path to receiving love.

Shortly after high school and not wanting to fall behind in life's schedule, I lost my virginity to a guy I was dating named Dave. I don't know what it was like for him, but for me it was uncomfortable... painful at worst and boring at best. A day or two later, after a conversation about whether he would promise to put the toilet seat down when he finished peeing (something I knew nothing about, other than it seemed an important thing to establish, since it had been a source of tension on many TV sit coms), I set to work convincing Dave that we should move in together. I was 18. He was 23 or 24, divorced, and a Corporal in the 761st Chemical Company, stationed at Fort Ord, California.

Portrait of an Army dude with a teenager...

We rented an apartment together in a grey, cookie-cutter townhouse-style apartment building in Marina, California. We bought a huge sectional sofa, a gaudy brass floor lamp, a Sega Genesis, and cable TV. If I had to guess, I'd say we had been together for about 3 months at that point. Did you ever hear the one about what a lesbian brings to the second date? A U-Haul! Normally, however, the lesbian in the joke knows she's a lesbian... but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

I went through the motions of being in a relationship with Dave for a few months, and while I felt love for him as a person, I certainly never felt anything even close to a crush or romantic love for him. But, at the time, I didn't know the difference.

I did, however, love to hang out with my friend Stacy. We were both working on SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE at Monterey Peninsula College. She was doing props, if I remember correctly, and I was on the fly rail and run crew. She was funny in her own right, flirty, sharp, charming... but together, we were absolutely hysterical. We were a dynamic duo and fast friends.

Stacy and Lory, such as they were then.

I admired Stacy's confidence. She was bold and talented, tortured and unafraid. I drove her home one night after the show, and while waiting for two men to finish crossing in the crosswalk so that I could turn left, with an air of bravado, I made a joke. I said something to the effect of, "Move it, faggots!"

Stacy didn't laugh. She didn't cheer me on. She said, "Oh, no, Lory. Don't say things like that. It makes me sad to hear you say things like that."

I was confused. Flashes of feelings and questions raced through my mind: fags were like monsters, right? Or like the devil? There was nothing good about them, so hating them was fair game, wasn't it? Good versus Evil. Wasn't seeing a fag just an opportunity for a decent person to flex their muscles and show their strength a little bit. The gays deserved it... right?

Embarrassed and perplexed, I back-pedaled, I did my best to underplay my failed attempt to impress, and I moved on.

Over the next couple of days, Stacy became distant. I begged her to tell me what was wrong. She was certain I wouldn't want to be her friend anymore if she told me. After the show one night, we drove to Carmel and talked. It took a lot of convincing, but finally, in the car headed back North over Highway 1, as we came over the crest of the hill between Carmel and Monterey, Stacy told me that she was gay and that her friend Nina, whom she had spoken about many times but who was studying abroad for the year, was actually her girlfriend.

My legs went numb.

First, is it possible to say that my legs went numb and not have you worry that I crashed the car? I didn't.

Then, is it possible to tell you so that you understand: when Stacy came out to me and my legs went numb, I awoke to the Truth that people - people worth loving - can be gay.

And that,

Changed

Everything.

I don't know what the biological explanation might be for my numb legs. It could have been shock. It could also be that my body knew I was gay in that moment - even when my mind was still clinging to the ridiculous hope that I could carry on my straight-lived charade and have a "normal" life.

Within moments, as I clung to the white-picket-fence image I had in my mind of my life with Dave, I felt a fierce loyalty and desire to protect Stacy and Nina from anyone who might want to hurt them. I fancied myself a Defender of The Gays. I would be the ambassador of Gay Is Okay to the straights!

In the weeks that followed, Stacy and I became closer than ever. She was living with Nina's family even though Nina was away, and I guess to get a break from them or so we could hang out longer, Stacy occasionally slept over at Dave's and my apartment. One such morning, we got in my car and headed to Monterey. I was taking Stacy to work and myself to school.

At the time, I was driving a hand-me-down from my Great Grandmother: a turquoise blue 1954 Ford Ranch Wagon. I still own it. Although it doesn't run now, my Aunt Trish in Phoenix keeps it for me.

"Elizabeth" - The 1954 Ford Ranch Wagon

I still remember the exact moment - the sun was crisp and low on the horizon to the East, and we were headed South, with the shining expanse of Monterey Bay to our right, and quiet Sand City to our left. The hills of the Monterey Peninsula were waiting ahead of us. I don't remember who said it first, but we pulled off the highway, Stacy called in sick to work (at a pay phone, see?), and we got back on the road - headed in the opposite direction. We were playing hooky. We were headed for San Francisco!

I've spent time in San Francisco with Stacy since that day, and now, 20+ years later, it's hard to be sure which memories go with which day. I'm pretty sure we started on Haight Street with my first falafel sandwich (a tradition I still keep), we visited Chinatown, The Castro District, and I remember driving my tank-of-a-car (which had no power steering) down Lombard Street, which was hair-raising.
We talked and laughed and stumbled around the city together. It was so much fun, I was high on that day for weeks afterwards.

Although I still couldn't imagine that I myself was gay, my relationship with Dave quickly fell apart, we broke up, and he moved out. I had seen deep, primal joy on that stolen day in San Francisco. On some level, I knew I wasn't going to see that kind of joy again if I spent my life with Dave. But I was too ignorant about life and love, and I was still in hot pursuit of doing "the right thing."

I casually looked for another boyfriend. The trouble was, I had no idea what a crush was, so I had no feelings of my own to go on. I got in the habit of relying on other people to like me first in order to know whom to date. And, when I was 20, a girl I had worked with on a production of WEST SIDE STORY gave me a mix tape, and after listening to it for days, it slowly dawned on me that all the songs were edgy, sexy... romantic. I slipped into a 2-year relationship with that talented, hilarious, and fierce woman who is a dear friend to this day (also, I suppose, in stereotypical lesbians-stay-friends fashion).

It took me 7 years and a couple more girl friends before I finally found the confidence and self-assurance to know with certainty that I was unreservedly gay. For those intervening years, it was as if I was a butterfly - flitting around labels like "gay," "queer," "dyke," and especially the oh-so clinical and stigmatized "lesbian" - trying to find a safe place to land.

My heart and my body knew who I was. But all the rules I thought I was supposed to follow just confused me. So many of the symbols surrounding "gay pride" were hyper-sexualized and, frankly, tacky. I've never been interested in putting up phallic art, or driving around topless with leather chaps on a motorcycle, or getting in someone's face and shouting "Get used to it!" In my naivety, I thought that in order to be gay, I had to identify with all of those symbols. And while they've definitely helped break down barriers and give people a source of strength (even me, occasionally), it took me a long time to figure out that I don't have to go to parades. I can be gay and quiet. I can be gay and introverted. I can be gay and stay home and garden on Pride Day.

I used to think there were a lot more rules than I now know there are. Some people have some very strict rules against homosexuality. The way I see it, those rules are like trying to outlaw the sky on a rainy day - people don't have to like it, but all their shouting and carrying-on can't make the rain stop being wet, so they might as well get used to it after all.

On The Occasion of Gay Pride Day NYC - 2014