The Farm House Journal Blog.

Back in The High Life Again

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Sat, 9 Mar 2024 01:10:00 -0800

It's high time I checked in with you.

The big event I have not mentioned in these pages happened back on August 30, 2020. At about 10 PM that evening, I was standing in the parking lot of the local Smart & Final, watching Wifey returning the cart as I stood by the Sienna waiting to get in, when I suddenly blacked out, fell backwards, and hit the back of my head square against the concrete.

Why did that happen? No one really knows, but I strongly suspect that it was a reaction to a continued heavy dose of several blood pressure medications that were being administered to get my heart to calm down after years of pumping as hard as it could to get blood through my tiny little faulty aorta. I think my heart simply stopped beating; the therapy had worked all too well.

I plan to relate that experience, and my long recovery, later on, but for now let me discuss a few more things from that day, then skip to right now. The impact got my heart started again, but I sustained a brain injury which very nearly killed me. I was not expected to last the night. but—spoiler alert—I did, quite well. My marbles may have been thoroughly jumbled, but they were all still there.

The overall main story arc for me since then is the continuing recovery of my brain from The Big Koonk. It's taken a lot longer than I expected. It mostly subsided to the background for some time, probably since the beginning of last year, and during that time I had little awareness of the passing of time. I was more or less constantly in the moment, and looking back at that period now I can't reliably place anything accurately on the timeline. My head would poke above the water from time to time, only to submerge again.

In November, suddenly my head popped up for air with my awareness of time restored, and I found that I was actually able to write cogently again for the first time since the accident. Determined not to slip down again, I seized upon the opportunity to flog my brain back into something closer to normal working order.

Since then it's been a bit of a rollercoaster ride, up and down, but gradually upwards. I'd go through periods of differing ability sets. One week my voice came halfway back, and I could sing again, a little. Then that subsided, and I went through a week of not being able to remember the names of actors in films. Then that would go away and I'd find myself reaching for words that were suddenly not there. Then I went through a period where my sense of smell came back partially. That went away too.

I soon recalled that the last of the neurologists I consulted, the only one who was actually communicative and did an MRI of my brain, more or less told me that this would be happening at a certain point. It was evidence of the brain working to restore internal communications among the various processing centers, passing around roadblocks to find new routes. Thus did I enter the final stretch of my recovery.

While this was highly encouraging, it was also pretty disorienting. The harder I tried to gain control of the process, the more I descended into ineffectuality. I found I had no option but just to ride the rollercoaster and take each day as it came.

Then, several weeks ago, a subtle change occurred. To put it simply, I had reached a certain equilibrium in my brain function. I found myself able to think rationally at a constant, if still somewhat diminished, level. A growing list of seemingly insurmountable problems I suddenly found myself solving, one by one, with increasing ease.

There is no real improvement in my sensory deficits at this point (no sense of smell, little sense of taste, loss of singing voice), and there are still some loose wires in my memory. But my brain is now working in concert in terms of sentience, and that is the important thing. I am now within shouting distance of being myself again, after a long time of having to portray a credible simulation of myself to family and friends. Now I know what the members of the Monkees had to do for their TV show. Oh yeah, and Jack Benny in his professional life (you realize that he really wasn't an egotistical skinflint and lousy musician, right?).

A few nights ago I was at a local bar listening to some of the very best improvisational jazz I have ever heard, real postgraduate stuff, and I actually seemed to feel my brain improving as I listened. I then remembered that music is the carrier frequency of my thoughts, and those synapses need re-connecting too. The music was absent from my brain for a long time.

So where does this all leave me now? Well, I still need to address my sensory deficits, which my experience indicates are not permanent, but will require some proactive effort to banish. But that will have to wait until the dust settles completely, and I have a better idea of what I have to work with. I'm not quite done healing.

But I am close, and that's great! The comeback is becoming fun. I have a rare chance to become a better, more effectual person than I was, and at my age that's a nice place to be. I plan to take full advantage of it.

The Big Algorithm

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Fri, 24 Apr 2020 18:35:00 -0700

As I have mentioned in these pages, I collect old records, of the type commonly known as “78s,” and I enjoy restoring them digitally, removing the noise and making them sound as originally intended (or as close to it as possible). It is in fact my favorite pastime, but about four years ago I more or less stopped working on 78s, because I was growing increasingly dissatisfied with my results.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was an early sign of my heart condition. My declining circulation diminished my aural acuity, and rising blood pressure introduced tinnitus (the perception of noise that isn’t actually occurring), which I didn’t really notice because of my diminished aural acuity.

I did continue to work on restoring the occasional LP and the like, because restoration of this kind of thing is usually a comparatively trivial matter, and I hoped it would serve to keep my skills from deteriorating completely.

After my operation, my blood pressure increased temporarily when I was taken off blood thinners, and then I was able to hear the tinnitus, because thanks to the new valve my aural acuity had greatly improved. In fact, it got to the point that I could eventually tell what was happening with my blood pressure by the loudness of the tinnitus.

This annoying but useful condition soon showed me that my blood pressure would rise whenever I ate anything with any salt in it at all. I found different things to eat, and in early February of this year my blood pressure finally returned to normal healthy levels. The tinnitus was now pretty much gone.

February was a pretty wet month hereabouts, and one of the rainy-day projects I set for myself was to clean up the “Current Projects” sound-file folder on my computer—something I had never done in twenty years at the activity. Believe me, there were very few projects that still had any currency!

Still, I did find over three dozen 78-restoration projects that I had abandoned in frustration over the previous nine years (which indicates just when my hearing problems began). I decided to try to finish them, and discovered to my great joy that I was miraculously now several orders of magnitude better at the task than I had ever been before.

I can only conclude that, like Demosthenes and his pebbles or a sprinter running with leg weights, the process of attempting to work through my temporary hearing impediment over those nine years somehow strengthened my abilities and honed my skills. Or, it was a miracle. Either way, I was elated. What used to take me days or even weeks was now taking just hours, and my restorations were noticeably better than ever: less noise, and a livelier sound.

Over the course of the next four weeks I completed all my abandoned projects with resounding success. At the same time, I fully re-engaged with the whole record-collecting thing, cleaning and cataloguing all the incoming records that had piled up since months before my operation, and playing them for Wifey in the evenings.

This was a doubly-fortunate development, because at about this time it became evident that Wifey and I would be spending the next month or so in relative isolation. It looked like the perfect opportunity to indulge my favorite pastime in a big way, and also to take care of some long-deferred interior home-improvement tasks. Goodness knows that I had little else to distract me, because the weather was perversely bad for spring hereabouts, and I couldn’t go about my usual springtime duties of renovating the yard.

Soon thereafter, an odd distortion began to materialize in the sound of the records as I played them: a hard echo that sounded only once. It was a bit distracting, but I didn’t let it bother me, because it didn’t show up in the digital transfers of records I was making.

And then, one literally and figuratively dark day, it did, and all the transfers I made that day were worthless. Now I was bothered, mightily, because my triumphant return to my favorite pastime was dead in the water. My very next task was finding the source of that distortion.

* * *

At this point in the story, I should mention that during my banking career, one of my main tasks was the monthly auditing of all the branch asset and liability accounts. These audit activities may sound boring, and I certainly found them so when first I was assigned them. So boring, in fact, that I tackled them hard so that I could get them behind me as quickly as possible. I tend to address my most dreary tasks first, because I crave happy endings.

I was soon rewarded for my efforts. It wasn’t very long before I began to see patterns in the kinds of errors I found. For example, a difference of an amount divisible by 9 was virtually always caused by the switching of two numbers in a figure, e.g., 15.49 instead of 14.59. And, since banking seems to attract the dyslexic, this happened with remarkable frequency.

This indicated that when I discovered a difference divisible by 9 it was quite justifiable to assume that switched numbers were the cause. I could thus omit the laborious search for needles in a haystack that was the standard audit process, and confine my search to locating this specific kind of error, cutting the time spent from several hours to several minutes. And there were other patterns that offered similar savings of time and effort.

At that point, I actually began to enjoy the work, because it had ceased to be pure, rote drudgery, and had become instead an exercise in deduction. Suddenly I was Sherlock Holmes, and every out-of-balance condition became an opportunity to hone my sleuthing skills.

Certainly there were instances where I did have to make a full audit to find the error, and in these cases, it is true, my method ended up taking longer than going directly to a full audit, but as I gained in experience, these instances became increasingly rare. With time, I developed an algorithm that yielded a solution unfailingly with a minimum of time and effort. I can state with pride that never once in my career did I allow a penny to go astray. I never left behind any unsolved cases.

This talent served me well in my banking career, and in my life in general, because I naturally began to apply this sort of algorithm to every little mystery I encountered. Whenever a problem cropped up in any area, say an inoperative electrical circuit or a stuck window or a suddenly-unfriendly friend, I would apply the same sort of algorithm. I would assess the situation, prioritize my investigation in order of probability, then start investigating.

Thus, when the distortion appeared in my transfer setup, I naturally approached it in the same way that has been so successful for me in the past.

* * *

My setup for transfers is a turntable connected to a switch box that also has a cassette deck connected to it (allowing me to transfer cassette recordings as well). The switch box then goes to an analog processor that serves to recover latent sound in the recording. From there, one output goes to the digital recorder, and the other to a high-quality amplifier, dedicated to this purpose, and then to a big old pair of speakers handed down from my Grandpa Kesling.

I began my investigation by considering the facts already in evidence, which were a bit confusing: at first, the distortion did not appear in the digital transfer, and then it did. I decided to disregard that for the present, and proceeded with the situation as it then was, because I was eager to find the problem and solve it as quickly as possible so I could get back to restoring records.

This meant that the problem was occurring somewhere between the record and the digital recorder, and thus the source was one of three things: the turntable, the switch box or the processor box. The easiest of these to check was the turntable, so I switched over to the cassette deck and played a cassette. The distortion affected the cassette, which eliminated the turntable as the source.

From there, I went on down the chain. I disconnected the turntable from the switch box and connected it directly to the processor box. The distortion was still there.

At this point, I began to grow quite concerned, because the processor box is the single most expensive component in my system. It’s a professional unit, and pro electronics are always prodigally costly. Now, Wifey kindly said to me, “Well, let’s just buy a new one.” But when I checked to see what the current price was, I discovered that the box is not made any more.

I then girded my loins and set about the grim business of confirming the passing of my dear processor box. I took it out of the chain, connecting the switch box directly to the amplifier.

To my great relief, and my utter consternation, the distortion was still there! I had seemingly eliminated every possible source of the distortion, and it was nonetheless still there. Out of leads to follow for the moment, I put the matter completely aside for several days as I awaited the arrival of further inspiration.

It eventually came when I remembered that my turntable did in fact have internal electronics: a switchable onboard pre-amplifier. Turntable preamps used to be built into all home stereo amplifiers, back when everyone had a turntable, but over the past twenty years or so they have begun to disappear.

Thus, all turntables now come with internal preamps so that they can simply be plugged into any standard line-level input. While it seemed impossible that the preamp could be the source of the distortion, I decided for the sake of thoroughness to check it anyway.

Fortunately, I do have a high-quality stand-alone phono preamp. I connected it between the turntable and the processor box, and switched off my current turntable’s internal preamp. Then, I fired up the system and played a record. No sound came through the speakers. The stand-alone preamp could not possibly have simply stopped working, but I just could not figure out what the problem was.

Well, there was only one logical conclusion to derive from this: I was trying too hard. I was missing something. There were other steps I could take at this point, but the most prudent step was away from this whole mess to get some perspective. I had to get back on my good foot with my algorithm.

I switched the turntable’s inboard preamp back on and reconnected everything the old way so that we could at least listen to records, and then I turned my attention to some of the million other things that needed doing.

* * *

A few days later, on a nice sunny day when Wifey was working from home, we sat down to lunch in the den, and she said in an enthusiastic voice, “Why don’t we listen to a few records?” So I put on a record.

The distortion was gone! Gone with the wind!

I thought back to the early days of our marriage, when the toaster or can opener stopped working and Wifey would say to me, “Try unplugging it and plugging it back in again.” I would smile at her indulgently, try her fix, and it would never work, because of course it didn’t.

Soon thereafter, toasters and can openers and pretty much everything came with computers in them, and the first suggestion in the troubleshooting section of all their instruction manuals was, “Try unplugging it and plugging it back in again.”

I just sat there for a minute, completely paralyzed by the arbitrariness of it all. I struggled mightily to trace a logical path through all that had happened. I thought to myself, “So disconnecting the internal preamp and then reconnecting it fixed the problem, did it? Huh. Well … okay. I guess the preamp switch must’ve been dirty, and turning it off and then back on again cleared the dirt. A simple dirty switch caused that weird distortion. It figures it would be something stupid like that.”

No, wait—it didn’t figure at all. It didn’t make sense. Nothing about this whole mess made any sense to me. First the distortion didn’t affect the transfers, then it did, and then the turntable wasn’t the source, and then it was? I just couldn’t accept it.

Because of this, I had no confidence that the distortion was truly banished. I fully expected it to reappear just as capriciously as it had disappeared. A deus ex machina may be acceptable in a story, but I had never encountered one in real life, and was not about to accept it now. It didn’t fit my algorithm.

While I resolved to get back to restoring records for as long as the distortion stayed away, my heart was not in that resolution, and I spent the next few fleeting days of sunny weather catching up a bit on the yard work. The exercise cleared my terribly fogged mind considerably, and finding myself in a mood to write, I resumed work on a project I had started back during my recent restoration work that was related to it.

So records and restoration were on my mind just the other night as I was surfing the Net doing some technical research. I was reading about turnover frequencies and electronic circuits and time constants when I heard a voice that sounded a lot like my own say, softly, “The dimmer.” And then, if I am not very much mistaken, I heard the ding of a little bell, but I couldn’t swear to it.

My mind is like that. It is exceedingly slow, but it is just as stubborn. In retrospect, I know what happened. While consciously I had disengaged from contemplation of the distortion matter, subconsciously I was still flogging the old algorithm.

Free to work without interference from me, my mind went to work dredging the muddy bottoms of its many fetid swamps, seeking a clue as to what was really happening with my transfer setup. When it at last unearthed that clue, it floated to the top of my conscious mind like the answer on the underside of a Magic 8 Ball.

It was the dimmer I had installed on the overhead light circuit in the den in mid-March, just as I finished my successful run of restorations. It’s a very nice electronic unit, designed to work with modern LED bulbs yet presenting the appearance of an old-fashioned pushbutton light switch.

Immediately, I ran downstairs, turned on the light in the den, adjusted the dimmer to halfway, and played a record. The distortion was still gone. I turned the dimmer all the way down and all the way up. I turned the light on and off. The distortion did not return. Blasted evil distortion! Where are you when I need you?

It was like when you have some annoying problem with your car, say the steering makes a frightening clunk when you turn the wheel all the way to the right, and you take it in to the mechanic and he can’t find any problem at all.

But no matter. I was, and still am, convinced the dimmer was the cause of the problem. Sure, I have no proof of that at this point, but who cares? I mean, it has to be the source. To paraphrase Nick Charles in the dénouement of The Thin Man, it has to be the way things happened, because it’s the only way any of this makes sense.

First of all, the distortion first appeared after the installation of the dimmer. Second of all, as well as the dimmer works most of the time, it has shown some occasional instability, causing the LED bulbs to strobe. Third, I am told that dimmers can readily cause interference in nearby electronic circuits, even if they appear to be working correctly.

Moving to the next level of proof, I recalled that at every time when I encountered the distortion, the overhead light was on because the weather was bad, and when I first noticed that the noise was gone, it was a sunny day, and the light was off.

At this point in my investigation, I had a large number of data points—a large body of evidence, both circumstantial and direct—that all aligned one way: that the dimmer was the source of the distortion.

My investigation was done. Beyond a reasonable doubt, the deus ex machina was the dimmer. And the fact that it was a deus ex machina was a huge red flag that I utterly failed to notice.

* * *

It all seems so silly in retrospect, doesn’t it, all that drama over a simple problem? Actually, it gets even sillier: the reason why my outboard phono preamp didn’t work when I connected it was that I neglected to connect its power cord. For what it’s worth, I did figure that out myself a few days later, but sheesh.

That level of bovine stupidity serves to reveal my state of mind at the time. The world outside our door was falling apart. Now, that I could deal with, because I knew that the world would in good time fall back together again.

Nevertheless, all the disruption in our normal routine brought about by the situation proved to be such a distraction that the further disruption brought about by the sudden, capricious appearance of the distortion in my transfer setup utterly blew my mind. It was just one thing too many for me. It’s always that last tiny little straw that breaks the camel’s back.

And so, I blundered my way through what should have been a simple, straightforward investigation, eventually working myself up into a state where I was so frustrated, confused and just plain mad at the world in general that I simply lost my nerve. And thus was a noble mind o’erthrown.

I then abandoned my algorithm, my old faithful friend, like a cat leaving a sinking shelf, and proceeded to follow any wild chimera that came into my mind, just to give it something to keep chewing away upon. Dr. Thorndyke would be disappointed in me.

John Thorndyke, you see, is the main character in a wonderful series of detective mysteries written by the British author R. Austin Freeman between 1907 and 1942. Dr. Thorndyke, in fact and fiction one of the first forensic scientists, had his own algorithm, and that was to seek out and document every fact he could find before beginning to form any conclusions regarding a case.

Thorndyke was constantly exhorting Jervis, his colleague and frequent amanuensis (i.e., what Dr. Watson was to Sherlock Holmes), that one must always conduct an investigation with an open mind, scrupulously avoiding the forming of any premature assumptions. “One can never determine the relevance of a clue until all the clues have been collected,” he liked to say.

In this light, Thorndyke would have applauded my taking the time to check the operation of the internal preamp, in the name of collecting all available evidence. He would then, however, gently point out that I had begun the investigation with the mistaken assumption that the source had to be something in my transfer setup.

Absent that assumption, I might well have realized that the probable source was something outside the setup the minute that the distortion, which at first did not occur in the transfers, suddenly did. It was when I chose to disregard this seemingly inexplicable change in the situation, simply because it was inconvenient, that I went astray.

Ironically, this is the very same mistake that Jervis always makes when he tries to solve the case for himself (as Thorndyke always exhorts him to do). He always boxes himself in by starting his investigations with unconscious and unjustified assumptions, which leads him to disregard crucial data. And every time, I say, “Come on, Jervis. You’re an intelligent, educated man. Learn from your mistakes already!”

Well, all I can do now is to send forth my humble apologies to you, Jervis, and to you as well, Dr. Thorndyke, and strive to follow my own advice. And with that, it’s back to restoring records, with my algorithm, and my assumptions, restored to their proper places.

* * *

“I could have told you it was that stupid thing on the wall, but I assumed you knew.”

Rosalie

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Sat, 7 Dec 2019 06:24:00 -0800

It grieves me profoundly to have to tell you all that our beloved Rosalie passed away, suddenly and utterly without warning, on October 17. Just that previous Monday, after exhaustive testing, she was given a resoundingly and unambiguously clean bill of health.

All else I can say at the this time is that, by all the evidence, she passed away suddenly, with a merciful lack of distress–on her part, at least.

We, all of us here, are diminished by her absence.

God willing, I will be able to give her a proper eulogy, one she richly deserves, in the new year. For now I hope one anecdote will suffice.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, I was sitting upstairs at my computer when I felt the ephemeral tickle of the passage of a long-haired cat on my ankle. I said, "Hi, Simon."

Simon replied with a meow—from the bedroom, across the foyer, 20 feet away.

I am decidedly not a mystical, metaphysical person, but by that very same token I take as good evidence that which I experience directly through my senses.

And my senses combined with my logic tell me that who I felt on my ankle that Saturday was Rosalie.

It's a great comfort to know that she's still here.

Stu

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 21:38:00 -0700

I have happy news!

Several weeks ago, Wifey and I went to the Pasadena Humane Society and adopted a kitten.

We have named him Stu, after Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.'s character on 77 Sunset Strip, Stu Bailey.

Stu was born on June 9, 2019, which makes him fourteen weeks old today.

More—lots more—about Stu later.

Benny

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 04:19:00 -0700

I have very sad news.

Our dear Benny passed at 4:07 AM Monday morning, June 10, of a stroke. It was unexpected, although he was under treatment for hyperthyroidism, and that condition without a doubt is what led to the stroke.

Benny was loved by all who knew him, even those professing a dislike of cats, because he managed to exemplify all the dogly virtues—loyalty, sense of duty, friendliness, affectionateness—while still being 100 per cent cat. He greeted all visitors with a purr and a smile, and if his initial overtures were accepted, he got on their lap, nuzzled them affectionately, and then sat down and amped up his purr to fill the room and move the heart.

All succumbed to Benny’s open, friendly welcome. He was not pushy with them, but he was irresistible nonetheless. People just naturally started petting him; Benny would accept the affection, and return it in kind.

One of my sisters-in-law visits us every year, and she always has pointedly made a good long lap session with Benny a central feature of her visits. And she’s not the only one to have done this. Benny had a fan in all who knew him.

Benny came to us as an adult. He joined our family on September 2, 2010. Based upon his appearance and neighborhood reports, we judged him to be one year old, and officially fixed his birthdate accordingly, but it seems apparent now that he must have been older (although he never showed it). Adam, then seven months old, vetted Benny in fifteen minutes, and from that moment on they were brothers under the fur. I have never witnessed a closer relationship between two cats.

* * *

All cats have an inner Big Cat in them. Simon’s Big Cat, for example, is a lion, as was Adam’s before him. Benny’s Big Cat was a panther. You could see that come out when he was outside. He was sleek, his coat was smooth and it shone in the sun, and his every movement bespoke the panther within.

But he was a kind panther. Benny was an outdoor cat by nature. We rescued him from the outside. He kept appearing in the yard of Lydia’s mom Frances, thin as a rail, for weeks. He was wonderfully sweet, and seemed to make a point of visiting Lydia whenever she was there.

As the weeks passed, she noticed with concern that he was getting thinner and thinner. Lydia asked all around the neighborhood, and everyone said he'd been present for some months, and belonged to no one. So, after verifying this, we took him in.

We soon realized that the reason that he was so thin was because, while he had the big-cat killing instinct, when it came right down to it he had too much love in his heart to administer the fait accompli. I witnessed this just last Friday.

Benny was a sun-worshipper, and he needed to be outside regularly to be happy, so we put him on a harness and a leash and put him outside in the back yard most every non-rainy day.

Pasadena has a deplorable problem with wild coyotes roaming the streets freely, so we always monitored Benny's outside sojourns to keep him safe. Last Friday, I watched him catch a winsome little mouse, and ran out frantically to save the mouse's life.

Benny came up to me, looked into my eyes, then placed the mouse at my feet. The mouse just lay there. While I was touched by the tribute Benny was paying me, I was quite distressed for the mouse.

Then Benny looked down at the mouse, and nudged it with his paw. The mouse squeaked, got up, and scurried away. Benny could not bring himself to kill the mouse, God bless him.

Benny, last Friday, just after he paroled the mouse.

* * *

There is no comfort that I have ever found in a passing. It is the worst part of life. I'd gladly exchange years of my own life to see any of my dear departed before me for one more blessed minute.

But if there is any way to consider the manner of Benny’s passing that might lessen the pain a bit, it is that up to his last day he was happy and vital and keeping on. He went outside, and he played, and he sat on my lap as he loved to do, and he purred up a storm. He made all his days count. He set a good example for us all.

When his time came, he went with dignity, surrounded by those who knew and loved him best.

Benny was a manifest daily presence of God’s love in our lives from the first day to the last, and he will live forever in our hearts. Benny is at the right hand of God now. No, come to think of it, he’s in God’s lap, purring up a storm. And to his right is his pal Adam.

I'll write more about Benny when I can.

* * *

Benny
September 2, 2009 (?) - June 10, 2019

They Took My Web Site Away

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Thu, 2 May 2019 17:12:00 -0700

One of the minor disasters that transpired unnoticed during the time of my surgery and the early recovery phase was that my ISP unceremoniously terminated its free Web page support. As a result, the Farm House Journal is currently offline.

To review, the Farm House Journal (FHJ) is the precursor of, and companion to, this blog. I started it in 1999 with no comprehensive plan in mind, and so by the time I approached the end of Chapter IV, in early 2011, it was a chaotic mess, both textually and in terms of Web design.

From chapter to chapter, I would alternate between a present-tense journalistic style and a past-tense narrative style. The page layout also kept changing, sometimes within chapters, and navigation was awkward. Worst of all, I kept falling farther and farther behind in the story.

By the time I started Chapter IV, I had finally figured out what I wanted the FHJ to be, and I resolved to go back and re-write the first three chapters, but I was still clueless regarding how to fix the navigation, and in the event I was far too busy to undertake such a job at the time, because I had at last begun the exterior restoration in earnest.

And so, I started this blog, just to get a fresh start with current events while I figured out how to get the FHJ back on track. Added benefits were much easier and quicker posting, plus the ability to post video. After going on to complete Chapter IV, I just left the Web site to languish, while linking to it from here occasionally.

Once I realized that the FHJ was offline, I at first resolved to get it back up as soon as possible with a new hosting service. When I reviewed it, however, I quickly changed my mind, because aside from its textual and navigational problems, its Web design is fully twenty years out of date.

I created the site at a time when people were still using dial-up modems and CRT monitors with a 4:3 aspect ratio and at best 1280 by 1024 resolution. Moreover, the Web browsers used at the time varied wildly regarding how they interpreted HTML. I thus kept things as simple as possible, so the site would load quickly, with a consistent appearance across all platforms.

The situation now is quite different. Today’s high-resolution, widescreen displays render my 1999 design almost unreadable, with tiny fonts and long, long lines of text. The site is even less readable on cell phones and tablets.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

On the other hand, today's HTML gives one far more control over presentation, with fairly uniform look and feel across all platforms, and virtually everyone is using the latest version of their preferred browser. And by “virtually everyone,” I mean everyone but you, Nik.

And so, the FHJ will remain offline for the time being, while I take this golden opportunity to re-write and redesign it, and redirect the links to it from here. Of course, before I do this, I must learn how to code a modern Web site. This process is likely to take some time.

Please bear with me while I work to get the FHJ back online, and remember in the meantime not to click on any links that go to it. That way lies madness.

* * *

"Non legit illud. Non nimis longum esset."

Trip to El Rancho Grande

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 02:29:00 -0700

Last weekend, we took the pups up to the Rancho to meet with the Hughes Net guy so he could re-align the dish with the satellite. Our satellite connections are our only real ties to the outside world in that remote location, where over-the-air TV signals are non-existent and even mighty Verizon does not reach consistently. Well, we do have a wired telephone line there for emergencies, but who uses land lines anymore on a regular basis except for phone spammers?

It was a phenomenally lovely day there.

The skies were that startlingly deep blue that comes at high altitude, the snow was all gone, and the plants were full of swelling buds.

The pups held their usual jamboree.

As I’ve mentioned, life in a cold-winter environment is brand-new to me, and I was amazed to see that the grass was already greening up. That is, except for in the back.

This is all quite dead because we haven’t had any irrigation in the back since 2017. We’ll be fixing that this year. For now, it’s just that much less to mow.

Another task we had was to turn the water back on to the house. We had to turn it off earlier when the water-softener valve blew out; our plumber up there fixed the leak, but didn’t turn the water back on because he couldn’t get inside the house to check for further leaks.

Of course, when we turned the water back on we did find a leak, but fortunately it was outside the house, and just a trickle, so we were at least able to use the plumbing while we were there.

The third, and most important, task was to replace our flag. The stars and stripes is in abundant evidence in the Mountain Communities.

Another house in our neighborhood.

El Rancho Grande is no exception. One of the things I really liked about the place when we first saw it was the big flagpole in front, with a light that keeps the flag illuminated at night, as per proper flag etiquette. I’ve always wanted such a setup.

We put up a brand-new flag when we moved in, and were surprised to see how quickly it became damaged. We replaced that with a more substantial one. That one got utterly, and shamefully, shredded over the hard winter. So this time we got the most durable flag we could find.

We hope this one will last longer, but if it doesn’t, we’ll just get a bigger one next time. If that doesn’t help, then I guess we’ll have to put a flag order on autoship.

Our neighbor to the west keeps peacocks, and have recently built a pen for them. We love the peacocks; they are beautiful, and full of personality. I couldn’t manage to get a good photo of the pen, because the sun was a bit behind it and I didn’t want to distress them by using the flash, but here’s a bad one.

The peacocks sound like chickens speaking with a foreign accent.

Oh, and while we were up there, I made sure to get a better photo of the Barn.

This will give you a better idea of how big it is, although I didn’t have the right lens with me to give you an accurate idea of just how deep it is. The first owner used to restore Packards in there, and he told me he could fit seven of those big cars, with enough room to work on them all.

You can’t see all the features here, but you can see the nice wood stove, the lumber storage rack behind it, and at the back an attached storage shed. You can also see, in the storage shelves along the left side, a great deal of spare maintenance items for the house.

I’m tempted to remove the dropped ceiling and its attendant support columns, but while this will make the Barn a more inviting space, it will also make it harder to heat in winter. So we’ll see.

* * *

“What this place needs is something to herd, like maybe some big, fluffy llamas!”

Big Time at The Farm House

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 09:39:00 -0700

My 60th birthday was the Friday before last, and on the next day we had a big party with lots of cousins and friends. I was humbled by the large turnout. Everyone that could be here was here, many coming from a considerable distance. The party was, in effect, the coming-out for the new me. Everyone was pretty worried about me during the long run-up to the surgery, and this was their opportunity to see that I came out okay. As I said, I’m humbled, and grateful.

The following is a brief recap of the proceedings. I’m not going to identify anyone by name, because I didn’t ask permission, and I don’t want to violate anyone’s privacy.

* * *

The interior of the Farm House is still years from being completely restored, and I worry that the unpainted walls and age-dulled woodwork are a bit off-putting for guests. But Wifey did a great deal to spiff up the place and make it more inviting, and I noted that whereas previously people tended to congregate in the kitchen (the only finished room in the house besides the downstairs bath) during parties, this time they distributed themselves throughout all the available rooms and in the gazebo outside (which just got a new canopy and some swell, if dim, color-changing LED lights).

The pups were of necessity banished to the Lounge for most of the proceedings with plenty of treats, and most of the cats absented themselves, but Benny, our goodwill ambassador, was right in the thick of things. He even hung out with the gazebo folk outside for a while, on a short leash because his stomach had been upset and I didn't want him noshing on yard debris.

One of Wifey’s big projects was the completion of the window treatments in the parlor. Window treatments in the Farm House: wow!

Now, lets hope the curtains survive the Pet Division. The sheer panels were under attack from the cats the minute they were up; Wifey was able to repair the damage, but it looks like the sheers will have to be kept pushed back.

I received a great number of very thoughtful gifts, but I must say that my favorite gift came from this guy.

He’s my littlest cousin, and when he came in and saw me, he ran up and gave me a big hug. That made me very happy. We’re really looking forward to watching him grow up; he’s definite MVP material. Here he is with his parents (on the left); they’re doing a great job.

Oh, look, there’s Benny on our friend’s lap, keeping a close eye on the little one. And you can see another recent improvement, a rug. Rugs are a risky proposition in the Farm House; what with all our pets, they never seem to last long. But this is a new type of rug, really more of a tapestry that can be removed from its backing and machine-washed. We have high hopes for it, especially since the pets really seem to appreciate it and have treated it uncommonly well (so far).

The kitchen was the most popular room early on:

Then, it was cake time, and the dining room became the center of activity:

Wait, let’s get in closer on that Happy Birthday sign:

I bet this is the first time such a high number has been used with this sign.

The party eventually ended up in the den, which suited Benny just fine. He wanted to watch the Angels game.

It was a fantastic day, a definite milestone on my way back. It’s a great thing to feel better at 60 than I did at 50, and it’s really icing on the cake to spend the day surrounded by loved ones.

I had so much fun that it’s taken me over a week to recover.

* * *

"Now that the festivities have concluded, how's about whipping up some dinner for my friend and me?
It would be a shame if something happened to your nice new rug."

Our Universe Is Expanding

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 08:28:00 -0700

Wifey and I are a formidable team. We’ve tangled with malefactors more than a few times, and with very few exceptions we’ve always come out on top.

So it was with the two skirmishes with the City that occurred in rapid succession in 2017. Nevertheless, we were left quite angry by the experience. We were fed up with our being repeatedly put on the defensive by an overweening bureaucracy, and by the prospect of its possibly happening again.

And so, as much as we love the Farm House, we began to feel the need to establish a foothold somewhere else, in case the City really began to put on the heat.

We had in mind a place far enough away to provide a significantly different environment, but close enough to be suitable for day trips. We wanted a place large enough for us all to be able to stretch our legs, but modest enough to be affordable.

Early in June 2017, we began to look for such a place. Miraculously, by the ides of June we had found it, and by the end of September it was ours.

You’ll be hearing all about the place in due course, so I’ll just provide a sketch of the place here. It’s on one and five-sixteenths of an acre 5500 feet up, on the slopes of Mt. Piños in the San Emigidio Mountains. It is within the boundaries of the Los Padres National Forest, just inside Kern County, 82 miles from the Farm House.

The house is a fairly large, rambling affair, built by the original owner (from whom we purchased it). He started with an A-frame kit cabin, and over the course of the next forty years kept adding rooms periodically. It is solidly, if quirkily, built.

The camera is at eye level here.

The place is indelibly imprinted with the lively personality of the man who built it, about whom you will hear much more in the coming months. He is a remarkable man, energetic and full of whimsy, evidence of which one is liable to find in unexpected places.

He has his own unique way of doing things.

My favorite aspect of the construction is a 1000-square-foot second garage, known as “the Barn,” although it doesn’t look anything like a barn. It is in fact just a very long garage. But what a garage! Its possibilities as a work space, and as a play space, are virtually unlimited. I mean, we could hold a barn dance in there!

The house is bordered on the north and west by a vast meadow that requires a small tractor to mow. Happily, the house came with one, and a nice snowblower as well. Beyond the north meadow is a forested area that slopes down to a creek on the northern border of the property.

The back yard overlooks the Cuddy Valley, which for a long time was cattle country. Even now, cattle graze there during the temperate months of the year.

And speaking of climate, the summers there are much like those in Pasadena, although it is generally somewhat cooler up there. The winters, on the other hand, are much colder. It is liable to snow there at any time from early November to early May.

We christened the place El Rancho Grande, after the song of the same name. For reference, here’s Bing’s hit version of the song:

The name occurred to both Wifey and me simultaneously. It just seems to fit.

[April 2, 2020: I have updated the above link, the first of which had succumbed to a DMCA takedown order. Interestingly, the Foursome, the vocal group assisting Bing here, got its start with Smith Ballew's excellent touring band in the early Thirties, although they never recorded with him. Ballew is my main collecting interest, but I hadn't previously noted the connection.

And since I'm here revising and extending my remarks, let me add that the words of this song reflect exactly how we feel about the place.]

For Wifey, El Rancho Grande was just what the doctor ordered. From the first, she positively thrived up there. She would always leave the place feeling renewed in body and spirit.

My reaction to the place was quite the opposite. Although I fell in love with the place at first sight, once the place was ours the name we had given it began to take on for me an ironic and sinister meaning.

As it happened, the acronym of the name, ERG, is also the name of a unit of work or energy. I soon discovered that the place was so large and complex that it required a considerable amount of work to maintain. The scope of the work grew exponentially in my mind once I realized that I knew virtually nothing about the particular maintenance needs of a place situated in a snowy winter environment.

I would thus get to work the second we arrived at the place, but ten minutes later I found myself completely drained of energy and gasping for breath, done for the day. After a few weeks of this, I figured out that I was experiencing altitude sickness up there. I had never gotten it before unless I was up above 10,000 feet, and even then the symptoms were mild and of brief duration.

I began resting for a half-hour after arrival at El Rancho Grande before I did anything else, and that worked for a time. But it caused me some concern nonetheless, and when in time the altitude sickness worsened, both Wifey and I knew something was wrong with me.

This led us to seek out a new doctor, the one who quickly and accurately diagnosed my heart condition.

Thus, while El Rancho Grande was for Wifey just what the doctor ordered, for me it was just what ordered the doctor.

As 2018 wore on, I eventually had to give up the idea of doing any work up at ERG for the time being, and after mid-July I had to stay away completely for a time. We tried again in mid-November, but it was too soon.

After my encouraging physical in early February, we felt that it was safe to try again. And so, the next Saturday, we went up there. It was a nice sunny day, but there was a blanket of snow on the ground.

That, however, diminished no one’s spirits.

Everything was beautiful,

and a grand time was had by all.

Oh, and the altitude sickness was completely absent. At last, El Rancho Grande is just what the doctor ordered for me as well, because she has ordered me to get plenty of exercise.

* * *

You all are now brought more or less up to date regarding Otis, Wifey & Co. There are still a few blank spaces to fill regarding past events, which I will do as soon as I fill them in for myself, but for the most part I will now be returning to current business.

"Uh. . . hello?"

Oh, wait. I just remembered one small event I failed to mention. On February 4, 2018, Wifey let the dogs out in the morning, as usual, and instead of their going about their business, they made a beeline to the north side of the house and set up an enormous din.

Wifey ran out, and saw the dogs gathered around the base of the big Eastern oak alongside the driveway. She followed their gaze upward and saw a raccoon in the tree.

There is nothing very odd about raccoons in our trees at night, but we haven’t had one there in the daytime since we moved in. Apparently, the raccoon had fallen asleep up there, and failed to wake up in time to get to a dog-free zone.

Although we brought the dogs right back in, and kept them in all day, that poor raccoon stayed there until it was good and dark, although after a while he relaxed and made himself comfortable.

Okay, now it’s back to current business.

* * *

"Thank you."

Civics Lesson, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 09:47:00 -0700

One day in June 2017, we received a certified letter from our good friend, Robespierre Corday. We didn’t need to open it to know that it was another code violation. Our postman advised us he had been delivering many such letters that day on our block, all from the same source.

This code violation concerned our driveway approach. That’s the civil-engineer term for the ramp that gets you from the street, across the parkway and sidewalk, to your driveway. They considered it substandard.

This approach was probably installed when they subdivided the neighborhood in 1911, or not long after. It was originally six feet wide, and was designed to accommodate vehicles weighing a ton or so at the most. It’s only about two inches thick. At some point, it was widened to eight feet, as you can see along the right side.

Okay, they had a point. The approach had been disintegrating ever since concrete trucks crossed it repeatedly during the heavy construction phase, and since our contractor bailed early, they never got around to fixing it. As we discovered later, the roots of the big pine tree had something to do with the damage as well.

We called Corday, who as before was sincerely sorry to have to cite us, but they had received a complaint and had to investigate it. We didn’t tell him that the postman had outed him, and that we knew that he had gone up and down our block and noted everything citable.

In this part of town, you can’t get a policeman to come unless a violent crime is in progress, but you get to know the code compliance officers by name. Of course, the compliance officers never seem to notice the City’s own code violations, which are legion.

It would in fact have been imprudent for us to tell him that we knew the truth of the matter. No need to get his back up. Not that you can’t fight City Hall, but this fight would be so messy and expensive that any victory would be a Pyrrhic one. Forget it, Otis; it’s Pasadena.

Besides, we did clearly need a new approach. This citation at least had a valid basis, irrespective of its origin. And so, we immediately set out to correct the violation with all due speed.

The first contractor we auditioned was a referral from a landscape-architect friend, so we knew that he was qualified to do the work. He gave us a quote that did not include the acquisition of permits, advising us that it was considerably cheaper for us to get them.

He didn't know, as we were soon to learn, that as of 2017 the City requires that the contractor obtain the permits. Because, you know, the City just hates to deal with actual taxpayers face-to-face. Plus, contractors are such generous campaign donors. In Pasadena, you can represent yourself in court, but not at the planning office.

In any event, the quote was so insanely high that it was clear that the contractor did not want the job. So we got more quotes, and chose one that seemed the most qualified. They set up an initial meeting with the Public Works inspector, who has charge of such work.

Now, the City is supposed to vet the contractor to ensure he is qualified to perform the work in the City. That is their justification for requiring the contractor to obtain the permits; this is supposed to protect the homeowner, ensuring that the work is done professionally and ethically, in a timely manner.

But the City, ever disingenuous, doesn’t really bother to vet the contractor. They just send the inspector out. The contractor and a few of his men arrived early for the meeting, and were already demolishing the old approach before I even knew they were there.

I considered myself fully prepared to deal with the inspector. I was already quite familiar with the particular code requirements for new driveway approaches in Bungalow Heaven, having discussed them at length with the head of the Cultural Heritage Commission in the early days of the heavy construction phase.

The design of our new driveway approach had to match the appearance of the original. The curb on each side must curve at the same level to meet the sidewalk, the ramp must be divided into roughly-equilateral rectangles, and the surface of the concrete must be washed when still wet to blend in with the weathered appearance of the existing century-old concrete work. This was precisely what we wanted, so I expected no controversy in the matter.

In the event, when the inspector arrived he got right to business, and dictated in no uncertain terms an approach thoroughly modern in appearance. When I brought up, gently, the particular requirements for our nieghborhood, he emphatically disagreed, stating flatly that every new approach in the City must be constructed precisely as he described.

What followed next was the most intense hour of negotiation I have yet endured. Now, we do happen to have a professional negotiator in our household, but I am decidedly not that person. Nevertheless, I had the facts of the matter at hand, and my cause was righteous, so I jumped right in with both feet.

Happily, I kept my righteous anger well in check, and the inspector was a reasonable man, so in the end I got just what I and the Commission wanted. By the time our negotiation was completed, so was the demolition of the old approach, and the meeting ended with cordiality all around. The contractor departed with the promise that he’d get started in a day or two.

Now, you all just know that he didn’t, right? Well, you are correct. I won’t sport with your patience by giving you a blow-by-blow account of the next few months. Let it suffice to say that the contractor was in fact not approved by the City, for the simple reason that he was apparently not certified by the State to do concrete work.

And for all that time, getting in and out of our driveway was something of an expedition.

After this photo was taken, I re-graded the approach, taking out the rocks and adding some dirt from our ample supply in the back yard, because the tires on Wifey’s car are expensive.

We did eventually get the work done to our satisfaction:

It’s a luxurious ten feet wide (the inspector had wanted twelve!), and it’s six inches thick, strong enough to take concrete trucks. Plus, it’s a huge upgrade in appearance.

So once again, all’s well that ends well, and it’s now a lot less of an adventure to get in and out of the driveway.

* * *

Civics Lesson, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 09:04:00 -0700

A few years after we moved into the Farm House, Wifey and I formulated a plan for the front landscaping. We hoped to install a nice lawn in the front, with a row of hybrid tea roses along the south side and a row of lavender bushes in front of the veranda. Someday.

But we were waiting until the exterior restoration was done, and the long drought was over. Until such a time, we felt it was both prudent and civically responsible to maintain the front yard in a natural state, with a weed-free, neatly-groomed, thick blanket of pine straw over everything. In other words, we had a xeriscape. All the cool kids were doing it, and the City actively encouraged it in their bi-monthly propaganda mailing.

Apart from our front landscaping’s being congruent with the City’s oft-expressed desires, it was inarguably appropriate historically in this historical district, having been a nicely-groomed version of what the Farm House has had as far back as living memory goes around here. The thick blanket of pine straw kept the soil cool, well-nourished, and at the proper pH for the giant pine tree in our yard to maintain optimal health. No additional water was required, which is the ideal xeriscape.

We did what was necessary to keep the yard neat. We kept it free of weeds and debris. We kept the area around the tree clear of pine straw. We kept the walkways swept. We kept the parkway strip, which has a Bermuda-grass lawn, mowed and edged.

We never received a hint of a complaint about our front landscape, from any quarter. As a matter of fact, we expected to have a big fight on our hands with the City when we finally undertook to install a lawn.

And then, after a wet winter, the drought was officially over in the state, at least for the time being. On the very day of Governor Brown’s declaration to that effect, the City swooped down on us in the form of a code-compliance officer—let’s call him Robespierre Corday—who served us with a citation for inadequate landscaping, giving us a month to correct the violation, and threatening us with a steep fine if we failed to comply. This was in March 2017.

This Mr. Corday was very apologetic, but despite our most eloquent pleas in favor of continued environmental responsibility, he claimed that there was nothing he could do, that a complaint had been made, we were found to be in violation of City code, and his hands were thus tied. When we asked him who had made the complaint, he said he was unable to give us that information. You see, in the rugged regulatory forest of Pasadena, one is not allowed to face his accuser.

I was greatly concerned by this development, because I was just preparing to get back to work on the house now that the rains were over, and I was afraid that the demands of maintaining a landscaped front yard would severely impact the restoration work.

And so, in consultation with our excellent arborist and horticultural consultant Javier, we came up with a plan that would satisfy the technical requirements of the code with minimum impact on the environment, our water bill, and my time. It was a simple plan that would provide both green foliage and colorful, plentiful blooms, watered entirely by highly-efficient drip irrigation.

When we outlined the plan with Corday, however, he advised that in our best interests he could not recommend it. You see, he had no authority to approve such a plan, and if executed, it stood an even chance of not being approved by the City, in which case we’d have to tear it out and start over.

We would thus as a practical matter have to write up the plan in detail, with scaled drawings, and present it before some committee for approval before we did it. This would take a great deal of time and effort, and even then we stood nothing better than the same even chance of approval.

Corday’s strong suggestion was to install a lawn. That he had the authority to approve on his own. A lawn and some nice plants in front of the house, and he would go happily on his way.

Now, it is possible that our good friend Robespierre truly did have our best interests at heart. And it is quite plausible that he was being straight with us regarding the fate of our plan. But let’s take a step back and get a wider view of this situation.

Ever since we moved here, Wifey and I have received official exhortations from the City regarding the civic virtue of water-wise landscaping. They even offered incentives to install a xeriscape. Skeptical as we are about such things, after a decade or so of this messaging we came to believe that the City meant what it said.

It was thus natural, when the City pressed us for a landscaping plan, to offer in good faith a manifestly water-wise one. Corday’s response revealed that, whatever his personal intentions were, the City was not acting in good faith. If they were serious about encouraging water-wise landscapes, they wouldn’t have put up such high bureaucratic hurdles in the way of our installing one.

And there is more to it than just that. Again, irrespective of Corday’s personal intent, he as the official representative of the City, acting under color of its authority, was essentially threatening us with costly bureaucratic sanctions if we did not install the landscape he dictated.

We had acted in good faith and against our wishes. In response, the City had reflexively shown us its middle finger. Because, you know, it can.

On the one hand, I was white-hot with righteous rage at this unjust and unjustifiable exercise of raw bureaucratic power. I felt an obligation of honor to all the signers of the Declaration of Independence and all the brave men who stormed Normandy on D-Day to fight, and between Wifey and me, I knew we had what it takes to win.

On the other hand, Corday was bullying us into installing precisely the landscape we wanted. Despite my moral outrage, I in the final analysis could not believe our good fortune. There is no honor in the refusal to take an own-goal by the other team.

You see, what I had long feared was that we would actually be forced to install the typical depression-inducing, beige-and-khaki thanascape consisting of “native plants” that render the land beneath them useless. The water-wise landscape we suggested was rather a sacrificial offering intended to arrive at something with the same impact on the water supply as a thanascape while avoiding one.

And by the way, the claim that such plants are native is thoroughly risible; I have seen many pictures of this land before development, and judging from them, the only plant truly native to this area is crabgrass. All we had to do to get that was to stop pulling it out.

Javier graciously offered to install the landscaping himself, which offer we accepted gladly because we knew that he would do it in such a way that there would be no negative impact on the pine tree’s health. Javier has always been very good to us, and I think he took on the job because he wanted to make sure that the pine tree would continue to thrive. He is truly a tree doctor, and he cares deeply about every one of his patients.

And of course, Javier did a marvelous job with the lawn. While the soil needed no amendment, he made sure to remove the many rocks, and to contour the soil so it would retain its historical rolling character without being so hilly that uniform watering and mowing would be difficult.

He in fact was very enthusiastic about the job. “You’re going to have a very lovely lawn,” he told me. “You did a great job laying out the walkways, with the nice undulation in the approach and the radiused junctions. Most people have square, flat, boring postage stamps of green. You are going to have a nice rolling meadow.”

As it turned out, he was right: we did have a nice rolling meadow.

The result was astoundingly transformative.

The vast expanse of lush greenness instantly pulled the house firmly into its environment, creating an organic whole of the house and yard that will only be intensified once I complete the exterior restoration, and plant lavender around the front of the house.

But I was right, too: the maintenance demands of the new landscape, especially the lawn, immediately ate up most of my time and energy. During the summer, the lawn grows so vigorously that it needs mowing twice a week.

This became a serious matter once my heart condition surfaced. My cardiologist cautioned me to avoid undue exertion, saying, “You don’t want to have your first heart episode in your current condition. It may prove to be your last one.”

Fortunately, by that time I had greatly streamlined the maintenance process, and had exchanged my old push mower for a swell self-propelled electric one, so all I really had to do was walk leisurely behind it, and Wifey took over the more strenuous tasks such as sweeping and raking. Even so, just the mowing took virtually all the energy I had available in the months before my operation, which is why I find myself in such a deep hole now.

Still, to paraphrase the late, great Chick Hearn: no episode, no foul. I came out okay, plus we have the front landscape we always wanted. Winning!

Of course, the City was not through with us yet….

* * *

Room for Two More

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 10:38:00 -0700

Enter Simon

In the wee small hours of August 27, 2016, Wifey and I headed north for Santa Rosa. Seventeen hours later, we returned home with a tiny orange furball, whom we named Simon.

Simon is a Maine coon, and as you can see here, he’s got something extra: opposable thumbs. Well, to be scrupulously accurate, they’re partially opposable. He in fact has seven digits on each front paw, and his thumb can’t reach them all.

As was our dear Adam, Simon is fully in touch with his inner lion.

But he’s an awfully sweet lion.

Enter Chase

On May 7, 2017, Wifey and I headed upstate once again, this time to wine-country Paso Robles to fetch our new puppy, whom we named Chase.

Chase is an Australian shepherd, and he immediately began trying to herd us, our guests, the other dogs, the cats, and all the wild creatures in the back yard. In retrospect, we probably should have named him Behave.

The Boys Today

Simon was closing in on his first birthday when Chase made the scene, but a male Maine coon is in practical terms still a kitten at that age, so it’s accurate to say that the two boys have grown up together.

And both have grown well. Just as with Adam, Simon’s personality blossomed after his second birthday. He has become quite interactive and affectionate. Benny has undoubtedly served as a positive role model in this regard.

Also, since my surgery Simon has become very talkative. Several times a day, he’ll burst into the room and start monologizing energetically in his expressive, trilling voice.

I haven’t quite learned his vocabulary yet, but I get the impression that he’s telling me what he’s been doing since he saw me last.

"There's like a million squirrels in the back yard! Oh, and I ate a bug and a Milk-Bone."

And when I start a conversation, he will answer me. I especially love that.

"I'm fine, pal. How are you?"

Chase’s personality, on the other hand, was already in full bloom when we first met him. He is energetic, affectionate, highly interactive, and startlingly intelligent.

Everybody who knows Chase loves him. That includes all the other pets, especially Sally and Rosalie.

He and Sally love to romp and tussle together.

Rosalie will groom him just as Evangeline used to groom Travis.

Chase is a strong alpha. He considers me to be the pack leader, with himself second in command. We know this because I am the only one he consistently obeys, and the only one he does not try to herd.

Of course, Peter begs to differ regarding this pecking order, because he too is a strong alpha. But he and Chase worked this out pretty quickly, because Peter is more than twice Chase’s size, and as I said Chase is very smart. While Chase is fearless, and nearly as strong as Peter, Chase is also no fool. Besides, Peter loves Chase, and Chase loves his pack.

And Chase loves no one as much as he loves Wifey. He may not obey her much, and he may try to herd her, and he certainly loves me. Still, he is absolutely devoted to Wifey, and is with her constantly, unless he is off on some caper.

Chase is a thoroughly sweet guy, and is rarely in anything but a very sunny mood. This is true of Simon as well.

Partners in Crime

Simon and Chase have something else in common: they are both juvenile delinquents. Actually, I’ll go beyond that to say that they are kindred spirits, and fast friends.

They even play together.

But mostly, they are juvenile delinquents.

It’s not that they are bad seeds or anything like that. There’s not a molecule of malice in either of them. Let’s just say that they like to stir the pot.

Simon, King of The Jungle, likes to monitor his domain from on high.

As a result, there is quite literally no horizontal surface anywhere in the house that he can’t get to, no matter how inaccessible it may seem.

"Nobody here but us audio-animatronic stuffed animals."

And if there’s no room for him, then he makes room.

"You'll find your Simple Green on the floor behind the dryer."

This is where Chase enters the picture. He is a firm believer in the old aphorism: “If it’s on the ground, it belongs to the hound.” Yes, I know he’s not a hound, but don’t tell him that. He’s definitely in touch with his inner Travis. Anything that Simon knocks down, Chase claims as his by natural right.

When this behavior first appeared, the typical scenario was as follows: Wifey and I are in the den, relaxing and watching TV after dinner. A quorum of the pack is in the room with us. Chase trots in, his head held high, with something in his mouth. That something is some cherished keepsake of Wifey’s.

Wifey sees this. She jumps up and starts chasing Chase throughout the house, saying “Chase! Drop it now!” in a stern voice. Chase thinks this is great sport, and fails to comply. Eventually, Wifey gives up, and makes the proffer of a treat. Chase drops the cherished contraband to take the treat. Wifey recovers the contraband.

This was obviously something that we had to put a stop to, so Wifey and I formulated a plan. First, I became the one who would engage Chase when he brought something in, because me he will obey; I would follow him through the house, closing doors as I went, until he was cornered and had to relinquish the item. Then, I would praise him, pet him, and walk away. No punishment, and no treat.

Second, Wifey did what she could to Simon-proof the house, moving all her tchotchkes, gewgaws and other assorted knick-knacks to safety behind closed doors.

Sounds like a good, sensible plan, doesn’t it? Well, sure it was. And it worked perfectly—for a few weeks. Then, one evening Chase came into the den carrying one of Wifey’s best athletic shoes, and just stood there in front of her. When she reached to take it out of his mouth, Chase backed up just out of her reach. When she then got up to get closer to him, Chase turned around and trotted to the kitchen. When we got there, we found him standing in front of the treat jar on the counter.

I looked at Wifey and said to her, “You truly are a gifted dog trainer. You’ve actually taught him the fundamentals of a barter economy!” Chase had learned that items Wifey values could be traded for items he values. When his initial source dried up, he simply found another. I told you he’s smart!

And just in case you don’t think Simon was in on this, wait until you hear about their latest caper, which happened just last week.

Wifey was preparing dinner, and had left some asparagus spears draining in a colander over the sink while she fried up some salmon filets (I’m on a strict diet right now). She looked down, and saw Chase munching on an asparagus spear; she figured she must have dropped one inadvertently.

A minute or so later, she turned to retrieve the asparagus from the sink, and saw Simon standing over the colander. He grabbed an asparagus spear and tossed it to Chase, who was waiting below.

I told you Simon has partially-opposable thumbs!

* * *

Road trip!

While I Was Out

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 10:29:00 -0700

When I learned of my heart condition fifteen months ago, my perspective on life contracted to the point where it only took in the present moment and my next doctor’s appointment. When that happened, I found it very difficult to write, although I certainly tried.

Now that I am on my way back to the land of the living, my perspective is slowly returning to normal, and the experience is quite remarkable. It feels as if I’ve been sleepwalking for the past year or so, and am now just waking up. That may be a trite way to put it, but it does have the virtue of being entirely accurate.

Here’s one example of what’s been happening in my brain: one day a few weeks ago, I walked into my study, looked around, and said to myself, “Gee, I haven’t straightened up in here for a while.” I suddenly took note of the fact that every horizontal surface, including the floor, was piled high with randomly-distributed miscellaneous items. I could hardly make my way into the room.

I consulted my renascent memory, and determined by the stratification of the piles that I had abandoned the room sometime during last July. I immediately began to put things in order, and in the process found a great many important items that had been missing for months, such as my checkbook.

That’s how it’s been for me the past several weeks. My world has come back into focus, allowing me at last to see just how deep a hole I am in after my long hibernation. I’ve begun to catch up on the most pressing of my long-disregarded chores, and have been conducting triage on the rest of them.

In this process, it has dawned on me that I need to bring you all up to date regarding all the positive changes that have occurred at the Farm House, and elsewhere in our domain, during the past two-and-a-half years. I can’t really begin posting in earnest about current events until I do this.

And so I shall, with the next several posts.

* * *

"Don't forget about me."

A Little Beef

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 08:54:00 -0800

My recovery proceeds apace. For a long time after I last posted, I continued to feel lousy and look worse, although it was evident from the data collected by my Two-Way Wrist Radio And Secret Message Decoder that my health was steadily improving. Over the course of January, the improvement became evident in my appearance, and by the start of February I was looking quite like my old self again.

At that time, I had my yearly physical, in which my improved state of health was enthusiastically confirmed by my doctor. This good news so buoyed my spirits that I was finally convinced to go ahead and start feeling better as well.

In general, I seem now to be reverting to my pre-2012 state, which is only fitting, considering that in retrospect, early 2012 is when my Check Engine light came on. My energy, stamina, gait, balance and general joie de vivre are all returning to where they were in the early, busy days of this blog.

Nevertheless, it must be said that my heart remains a bit skeptical of all this good news, a situation that was entirely expected at this stage of my recovery. After all those years of having to pump so hard to keep things moving through my ever-narrowing aortic valve, I still have some mileage to accrue before that Check Engine light goes out.

Never fear: this will happen in due course. But in the meantime, a few temporary conditions have arisen. One of them is that my skin has become very dry, especially on my arms and legs. Wifey, ever attentive to my condition, noticed this, and so one day recently she sat me down and told me the sobering news that I would have to give some thought to moisturizing.

Now, let it be said that I do try to keep my male ego on its range, and I think I do a pretty good job of it most of the time. At this point in our marriage, I’m a pretty domesticated fellow.

Still, I do like to maintain a respectable level of manly manliness, and let’s face it: your average manly man hates fussing with himself. A shower, a shave and an occasional haircut is all the self-maintenance he wants to deal with on a regular basis.

The idea of having to slather myself with goo all the time is galling. Not only would the added maintenance be highly annoying, it would also be embarrassing. I mean, guys aren’t supposed to concern themselves with such matters. It just isn’t manly.

All this notwithstanding, still something had to be done, and so when Wifey kindly suggested the compromise of at least trying a moisturizing body wash, I swallowed my manly pride good and hard and agreed to it, on the condition that it did not leave me smelling like a bordello.

That very day, Wifey got for me a moisturizing body wash calculated to accommodate the most fragile male psyche. I approached it as if it were potentially radioactive. I opened the bottle and gave it a tentative sniff; it smelled vaguely like meat.

Intrigued, I took a heartier sniff. Indeed, it did smell like meat—specifically, creamed chipped beef. It even smelled vaguely salty.

Now utterly baffled, I squeezed some out on my hand to get a good look at it. It in fact looked like creamed chipped beef goo, a milky gray.

So instead of smelling like a bordello, I would be smelling like the kind of diner that sports a red neon sign reading, “EAT.” If they were going to make it smell like meat, I’d rather it have been a nice medium-rare char-broiled Porterhouse steak, not bad diner food. Sure, it would be weird, but at least it would be manly. Creamed chipped beef, not so much.

But I’d gone too far to turn back, so I grudgingly started to use it, and although I don’t find the residue it leaves particularly pleasant, I must admit that it has largely dispatched my dry-skin problem, thus allowing me to avoid the disagreeable step of using a <shudder> body lotion.

And Wifey swears it leaves no lingering fragrance. I’ll take her word for it, although I’ve noticed that all the pets have become noticeably more affectionate lately.

* * *

"Mmm . . . beefy!"

Reboot

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Tue, 4 Sep 2018 14:14:00 -0700

If you inspect the blog archive listed along the left-hand column, you will note that I started with great energy, posting 70 entries in 2011, most of them related to my work on the Farm House. My output plunged in 2012, because of a creeping lack of energy, and occasional balance issues. I was under a doctor's care throughout this period, but they reported my health as excellent. I thus pushed onward.

A crippling right-shoulder tendinitis, brought on by hanging by my left hand from the peak of the north front dormer to work with my right hand on the part I couldn't reach standing on the scaffold, shut me down completely for most of 2013. I rallied somewhat in 2014, but never really got back up to speed; my last work-related post was in March 2016.

Don't worry: all this navel-gazing has a point.

I struggled to get back on the horse until the end of 2017, when Wifey found a new family doctor. I was skeptical at first. Frankly, I was tired of hearing that nothing was wrong with me, and had been made positively gun-shy by a succession of rude doctors with dehumanizing front offices.

Wifey's report of her first visit to this new doctor indicated strongly to me that she was worth taking a flyer on, and so the week after Thanksgiving I had my first appointment with her. We had a delightful visit, and as she proceeded through her examination, she became increasingly pleased by the state of my health.

Then she said, "Well, we're almost done here. Let me just take a listen to your heart." She did so, then said, "Hmm. . . I'm hearing quite a murmur here. Do you know what a heart murmur is?" I said I'd heard of it, but didn't know what caused it. She put her stethoscope on me and had me listen to her heart: "bump-bump, bump-bump."

Then she had me listen to my heart: "bump-FWOOMPH, bump-FWOOMPH."

She told me that she thought I had a bicuspid aortic valve, and subsequent testing confirmed that diagnosis. Briefly, this means that I was born with only two leaflets in my heart's aortic valve; the factory standard is three. It's the most common form of heart disease present at birth, and it affects about 1.3% of adults. It typically doesn't start to make itself known until one's fifties.

After the diagnosis, our efforts turned towards a fix. Traditionally, heart-valve replacement has involved open-heart surgery, but recently alternate options have become available. We spent a great deal of time trying to qualify for a study of a minimally-invasive procedure known as TAVR, where they access the heart through one's groin. It's a lot safer than open-heart surgery and the recovery time is considerably shorter; our doctor was extremely enthusiastic about it and the study's lead doctor, one of the two leading cardiothoracic surgeons hereabouts.

Well, after a lot of testing, and months of waiting with no news, it finally came down that I was rejected for the TAVR study, even though my age and my complete lack of other heart or vascular disease supposedly made me a good candidate. The study doctors provided no reason for my rejection.

So, I resigned myself to the necessity of having an open-heart procedure. This was made much easier by the realization that the TAVR procedure does come with its own risks. I decided that, given my otherwise excellent cardiovascular health, the traditional procedure would give me a greater chance of unconditional recovery.

And so, we investigated the possibility of getting in with the other leading cardiothoracic surgeon in town. That proved, blessedly, to be no problem. We had actually received several personal recommendations for this doctor from former patients, but our family doctor was more enthusiastic about the other one.

This angel of healing looked over all my health records and test results, in conference with his staff, then came into my exam room and said, "How would you feel about a new minimally-invasive procedure where we go in through a relatively short incision on your upper chest to do the work?"

Uh, how do I feel about a miracle? The most munificent answer to a prayer I have ever received? "Yes, that'd be great!" I exploded as calmly as possible (I had learned by that point that I needed to stay calm at all times, in order to keep my pulse below three digits).

Cutting to the present, the operation was last Tuesday. It took a snappy hour and forty-five minutes for my doctor and his associates to bring me up to design specs. I came home on Saturday, after a surprisingly enjoyable hospital stay. Without exception, every doctor, nurse and technician with whom I came in contact treated me with a friendly respect. That is a huge understatement, but it is at least accurate; all seemed to enjoy their job greatly, and showed genuine personal interest in my recovery.

Moreover, I was deeply moved by the attention and concern shown, and help rendered, by my family and friends. I sincerely did not know that I mattered so much in this world. I thank you, Wifey thanks you, and our pets thank you.

I have about a month of closely-monitored recovery in front of me, but even under the dizzying influence of a dozen medicines, I feel much better than I did before the operation.

So soon after my recovery is complete, I hope to debut Otis 2.0: now with increased oxygen content!

And I did eventually learn why I was rejected for the TAVR procedure: my aorta is bigger than their biggest artificial valve! I thus have documentary proof of what I've been saying all along: I'm a big-hearted fellow.

* * *

"Where were you?"

Death Valley Weekend

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 11:55:00 -0800

Here I am once again, apologizing for the long drought of posts. Rest assured, I have several posts in the pipeline, one of them nearly complete. I have however been distracted from writing by a cascading series of computer disasters that at last culminated in my purchasing of a big new tower computer and its provisioning with a dozen terabytes of storage.

Since then, my time has largely been occupied by the re-assembly of my computing domain, jigsaw-puzzle fashion, from my many far-flung backup locations. In the process, I came upon a treasure-trove of articles from my early days as a writer, when I was doing pretty much nothing but writing whatever was on my mind.

Of course, a writer tends to look upon things he wrote over two decades ago with a certain affectionate loathing, and most of the articles, if they ever see the light of day, will require extensive re-working. But I did find one article that, to my great surprise, is ready to go. It is a narrative of a Memorial Day weekend Wifey and I spent with our good friends, then as now, Nik and Jo. Wifey and I have determined that this occurred in 1995.

It occurred to me that the article would serve as a nice proffer to my blog readers of my intention to return soon to active posting. And so, with Nik and Jo's kind consent, I offer it forthwith, with no changes other than the deletion of a few references to then-current, now-obscure events, the explanation of which would be too painfully laborious to read (and write). This piece is already plenty long. Other than that, I have changed nothing, and you will no doubt notice that back then I used commas as if they cost a quarter each.

There is one obscure reference I did not delete, because it's an integral part of the story: “hell-architecture.” This refers to a place in Montrose that I lived in for several years in the early Eighties that was known among my circle as “Hell House.”

When I took the place over from my good pal—let's call him Lou—who had lived there for several years, it was already legendary for its many distinctive features. I could write an entire post about Hell House, and someday maybe I will, but for the sake of this story you only need to know a few essential facts.

Hell House seemed to have a will of its own. For example, the place was as hot and stuffy as Death Valley itself when it was hot outside, and cold and drafty as the North Pole when it was cold outside. Clearly, the place knew what conditions were the most uncomfortable at any given time, and made adjustments accordingly.

Another curious feature was the many items attached to its walls, the function of which defied explanation. Mostly, these took the general form of randomly-shaped pieces of wood, sometimes stacked upon one another, often with strange pieces of handmade hardware attached. None of us could ever imagine any possible utility any of these items might once have had. We eventually concluded that they were artifacts of some obscure pre-Columbian religion.

Thus, hell-architecture, as I use it in the following, means “a structure that shows evidence of Hell House-like qualities or features.”

Thus fortified, you are now prepared to move forward… into the past.

* * *

Nik and Jo like to go camping in Death Valley. Nik loves what he calls its “moonscapes devoid of vegetation,” and has utilized them several times as striking backgrounds for his photographs. Jo, I think, simply enjoys meeting the challenge of camping in style.

Some time ago, Nik and Jo invited Lydia and me to accompany them on a Memorial Day weekend trip there. When Lydia and I agreed, he immediately and with great enthusiasm began to plan the trip. He graciously took care of all the details, including the all-important morning coffee. Virtually all Lydia and I had to do is show up.

At last getaway Friday came. Nik and Jo left very early in order to secure two prime campsites. The plan was for us to come a few hours later; Nik would call us from the campground on our cellular phone en route to give us the exact location.

Unfortunately, Lydia had some last-minute business to attend to, so when Nik’s call came we were still home at the Doll House. We loaded up the car and set out at 2 P.M. We hit a traffic jam in Montebello that did not dissipate until Barstow.

We pulled into the campground in a somewhat crazed state at about 10 P.M. I was afraid Nik and Jo would already be asleep. Not only were they still awake, but Jo had an excellent dinner of game hen and grilled vegetables waiting for us. After Nik helped me set up our tent, we dined in style.

The next day dawned overcast and muggy. It took four pots of Nik’s strong but excellent coffee to revive us. We spent the day exploring the valley floor. Death Valley, like all of California, saw record rainfall this past winter, so Nik’s beloved moonscapes were uncharacteristically scarred with vegetation.

We drove by a marvelous old huge stone lodge called the Furnace Creek Inn. Nik suggested we give it a look-see later in the day, but I noticed as we passed a sign saying “Closed for the Season.” I asked Jo whether there really were seasons in Death Valley; she replied that there were but two: Too Cold and Too Hot.

We drove first to Dante’s View, which overlooks a massive salt flat called Badwater. Looking down at the view, I began to understand what Nik had been talking about: the place was perhaps a bit more colorful than the Moon, but it certainly did not look like a Class M planet. The only things marring the effect were occasional clumps of beautiful little desert wildflowers, which seemed to annoy Nik with their presence.

We then descended down to Badwater itself, which at its lowest is 282 feet below sea level—the lowest point in the United States. The place was very crowded. Oddly enough, most of the people seemed to be German. We walked out on the salt flats themselves, which were still moist from the winter rains.

To my great horror, Lydia picked up a bit of the well-trampled, dirty white earth and tasted it. “Hey, this really is salt!” she declared triumphantly.

I snapped, “Great! Now you have Teutonic hoof-and-mouth disease!”

“But I walked all the way out here to a clean area!” Lydia protested.

Nik grinned. “Now, Rob, Lydia was merely conducting a scientific experiment.”

Jo added, “Yeah—taste is a perfectly valid way to assess the composition of something.”

Alone among the sane, I remained unconvinced. “Well, I still think that you’d better gargle with some Liebfraumilch later.”

We then drove to the Devil’s Golf Course, a part of Badwater so named because gases rising from below the salt cause little spherical formations that resemble golf balls. Unfortunately, the winter rains had destroyed this effect, and the place looked more like the Devil’s Sand Trap.

As we drove away, it began to drizzle, which Nik said was a fairly rare occurrence on the valley floor. Lydia was unimpressed nonetheless; she said that it always rains when she goes to the golf course.

We next visited Artist’s Palette, which is aptly named. It consists of a small outcropping of hills forming a natural amphitheater, featuring scattered patches of muted pink, blue, green, yellow and purple earth. It looked like a giant chalk painting funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

After this was Zabriskie Point, which is supposed to be of great interest but was to me quite unremarkable. From it, one looks out upon a tiny valley-ette, perhaps a tenth of a mile across at its widest, which looked to me like a Caltrans excavation minus the lounging workers.

At this point we headed back to camp for lunch. We returned to find ourselves surrounded by even more Germans. It was quite astonishing to us that so many of them had traveled so far to camp in such an inhospitable place. After some discussion, we concluded that it is wise to view bargain package tours with circumspection.

After lunch, we were all in need of a good lie-down. Bouncing along dirt roads in muggy 92-degree air had taken its toll. Fortunately, the sky cleared in the late afternoon, and we spent a pleasant evening star-gazing through Nik’s powerful yet compact new telescope.

The next day dawned clear and very hot, so we decided to leave the valley floor and explore the higher (and cooler) elevations. As the mercury rose to an eventual 110 degrees at our campsite, our intrepid guide Nik pointed his trusty Tracker south to gold-mine country.

As we left, we stopped off at the Furnace Creek Resort, a small concession area that has guest bungalows, a golf course, a store, two restaurants and a saloon. Lydia and I took particular note of this last item.

On our way southward, we passed through the Devil’s Cornfield, so named because the creosote bushes there had arranged themselves in a remarkably even-spaced configuration that resembled rows of hellish corn. Nik commented, “You'll find that the Devil owns a lot of real estate here.”

After a time, we left the glass-smooth surface of California 190 for a rude dirt road. Its washboard surface was pitched at just the right frequency to induce harmonic resonance in the Tracker’s chassis. We hummed along like a 64-foot organ pipe for about nine miles until we reached the site of Skiddoo, a gold-mining town that existed from about 1907 to 1915, then disappeared without a trace.

Once there, we stopped to stretch our legs. It was oddly beautiful up there. Nik was right when he said that this was a desert unlike any other. The sky was a clear, deep blue, the temperature was in the mid-70s, and everywhere one looked there were clumps of charmingly beautiful little wildflowers, some of which are evidently found only in Death Valley. It was astonishing to see vibrant orange poppies and pastel-hued daisies springing from otherwise barren earth. Lydia found this an image heavy with meaning.

Nik had brought along a book on ghost towns, and as we took in the spectacle he read us the story of Skiddoo. After he was done, I looked at the book, and read that a few miles further on stood the remains of the Skiddoo stamping mill. I was surprised, considering how assiduously the Forest Service had demolished all such structures in the Angeles National Forest.

Evidently the National Park Service is less concerned than the Forest Service about idiots hurting themselves, because there the mill stood, just as the book said, a few miles further on. It had deteriorated noticeably from when the picture in the book was taken, but it was still spectacular: well over 100 feet long, it was composed of several levels built down a steep incline.

It reminded me of one of those cable cars that used to ascend the incline to Echo Mountain House above Pasadena, except that it was fifty times bigger. There were obvious signs of a recently-begun trussing of the structure, but otherwise the site looked as if it had lain untouched for the eighty years since its last use.

It seemed as if the workers had simply laid down their tools, walked away, and forgotten all about the place. There were implements, now nothing more than lumps of rust suggesting their former shape, strewn all about. An ore car still rested on its tracks, awaiting its next load. Towering above everything, the four stamping mills stood in a row, silhouetted by the sun, still seemingly complete.

The fact that all this had remained evidently unvandalized for so many years by all but Mother Nature improved my assessment of human nature just a bit.

Curious as to what other treasures these mountains held, I picked up the book again. I saw that a few miles further up the paved road was another dirt road leading to another collection of promising sites, all bearing the rather odd name of Aguereberry. We went to investigate.

I will omit much of the historical detail for brevity’s sake, but perhaps a little background is in order here. Aguereberry was a Basque who came to Death Valley in search of gold. He found it—or so he thought: a vein that initially assayed out very promisingly. As it turned out, there was little actual gold in his claim.

Nonetheless, after securing sole rights he began to mine the vein in earnest, establishing a little compound nearby. His best efforts yielded scarcely enough gold to live on, so to augment his income he hired himself out to tourists as a guide. To provide an attraction, he graded and paved a road up to a mountaintop from which one could take in a view of much of the valley and the surrounding mountains.

We hummed up that road, long since stripped of its pavement, and took in Aguereberry Point. It was a restful place, miles away from the nearest German. In fact, the only other person up there was an aging hippie sitting on a rock in front of a view camera. His hardy Bug, which I reckoned he had owned since his youth, stood faithfully nearby. I anticipated that the presence of a fellow large-format photographer would pique Nik’s interest, but he quickly walked off in another direction.

I expect this was because the fellow’s appearance was rather off-putting. He was shirtless, and his skin, tanned cancerously dark, draped over his midriff like a leather muu-muu. He was otherwise quite inoffensive, however; spying my Angels cap, he initiated a friendly chat about their performance and prospects this season.

After this fellow and I had managed the Halos to a pennant, Lydia and I hiked up to the very top of the mountain. Badwater lay 7000 feet below us, and Mt. Whitney stood over on the horizon. I realized suddenly that our gaze was taking in the lowest and highest spots in the continental U. S. simultaneously.

Again, wildflowers were everywhere, and we became quite enchanted with one species that sported a plume of cheerful scarlet flowers. Subsequent investigation revealed the name of this plant to be “Indian Paintbrush.” Sadly, Home Depot does not stock these seeds.

We drove back down to Aguereberry’s mine, expecting to find more ruins. These we found, similar to but less elaborate than those at Skiddoo. There were more rusted remains of tools, and an ore-crusher built down the side of a hill in a similar fashion to the Skiddoo stamping mill.

What we didn't expect was to find that we were able to enter the mine itself. Generally these are fenced off and forbidden, but evidently this mine was judged to be safe to explore. There was a plaque at the entrance explaining that the mine served as a hibernation spot for some endangered species of bat, and that they did not take kindly to being disturbed.

The feeling was mutual, so I was glad it was almost Summer, and the little disease-carriers were out frolicking elsewhere. The plaque also warned against entering the mine without a good light-source. Fortunately, we had brought along a lantern, and so we went in to investigate: single-file, Nik in the front with the lantern, I in the back banging my head on the ceiling. “I hope no one here is claustrophobic,” Nik said cheerfully.

The tunnel branched off after a short distance, and at the fork rose a chute, evidently used to haul ore to the crusher directly above us. The air was cool and surprisingly fresh. We were able to go in about a tenth of a mile before the inevitable fence prohibited further progress. I had never seen the inside of a real mine before, and it was impressive to see how surgically Aguereberry had cut his passageway. It’s amazing what one man and some dynamite can do.

We then made our way around to Aguereberry’s little compound. This consisted of three buildings assembled around a fire ring. The center building had been the residence; to one side was a galley, to the other a supply shed. Again, it was fascinating to see how unmolested these buildings were. The galley still had its refrigerator and a full-size kitchen stove (made by Coleman, just like Nik’s camp stove) that ran on gasoline.

The residence was hell-architecture at its most assertive. How else could it have stood for so many years in this hellish place? It did have indoor plumbing after a fashion, but as there was also an outhouse out back, I assume the toilet was a later improvement. The wiring, all external, probably was also.

The most telling hell-feature was the presence of a number of mysterious wooden appurtenances nailed to the walls. I wonder if Aguereberry’s travels ever took him through Montrose? What a cool bachelor pad the place must have been in its heyday.

With time now pressing, we made our way hastily around the rim of the valley to Scotty’s Castle, near the Nevada border.

Death Valley Scotty was a yarn-spinner and small-time con artist, just one of the many odd creatures an odd place like Death Valley naturally attracts. His one honest asset was an encyclopedic knowledge of Valley topography, which he used to spin a convincing tale of a “secret gold mine,” the location of which was known among the living only to him. This story managed to hook a big fish from the Midwest: Albert Johnson, an insurance tycoon looking for a good speculative investment.

Johnson was no fool, and he soon spotted Scotty for the charismatic huckster he was. He and his wife were nonetheless quite charmed by Scotty, and the three soon became fast friends. The Johnsons were also charmed by the Valley itself, and decided to build a vacation home there.

Scotty found them a prime location in Grapevine Canyon, which among other attributes contained a spring providing ample water for the elaborate compound they quickly began to construct, a compound complete with a power-generating water wheel, huge solar water heater, and even a clock tower.

Eager to avoid the scrutiny of a public naturally curious to see such a prodigious effort underway in this remote location, they used their friend Scotty as an able front man, encouraging him to represent himself as the owner of the spread. Scotty had finally found how to make an honest living out of dishonesty.

Mrs. Johnson was a devout Christian of a Protestant evangelical sect, and when the Depression hit, the Johnsons ceased construction, by then only about 85 per cent complete, in order to use their funds to help the needy.

The three of them lived out the rest of their days in this unfinished oasis, which when they passed was bequeathed to their church. This church conducted tours of the estate to raise money for their missionary efforts for over twenty years, finally cashing out to the National Park Service in 1970.

While it was fascinating to see how ingeniously Johnson’s architects had met the challenge of building a palatial estate in such a hostile environment, I found myself becoming increasingly saddened by the significant deterioration the Feds had obviously allowed to occur.

By then evening was approaching, and we decided to brave a return to the valley floor. It was still devilishly hot, however; despite the best efforts of the Tracker’s air conditioning, we could feel the temperature rise uncomfortably as we descended. Lydia, quick on her feet as always, suggested we take refuge for a while in the air-conditioned comfort of the saloon we had seen that morning.

At this point in my story I am reminded of a line from the John Wayne film Angel and the Badman: a doctor, ruminating on the inherent limitations of the physician’s craft, says to the Duke: “It’s amazing, the varied uses to which men put alcohol. To each different individual, it’s either a stimulant, a depressant or an anodyne. Just now, I’m using it as an anodyne.”

Just then, we four were in grave need of an anodyne ourselves. Nik and Jo had gone to great lengths to ensure us of an enjoyable stay in the Valley, and while they had been enormously successful at this, still we were hard pressed so to convince them. After all, Death Valley is widely known as one of the harshest environments on Earth, and a weekend of exposure to it had rather blunted our social skills.

Even Nik and Jo, experienced Valley-dwellers as they were, had felt the effects of what Nik called afterwards “the hottest weather I have ever experienced.” A round of frosty Margaritas, silly but festive, was under these conditions exactly what the doctor ordered.

Our spirits (if not our bodies) restored, we chatted amiably while munching the complimentary popcorn and watching the Dodgers drop another one to the Phillies. At last Lydia and I were able to show our gracious hosts that we were indeed enjoying the Death Valley experience.

After yet another fabulous dinner, as we relaxed in the relative cool of the evening, Lydia remarked: “You know, I feel like heck, but I feel great.” I felt this to be a remarkably apt description of the camping experience in general.

Dawn came especially early and hot, and we quickly struck camp so that we could skedaddle before our brains shut down entirely from the heat. After bidding farewell to Nik and Jo, we departed.

Unwilling to face another Brobdingnagian traffic jam, we left Interstate 15 at the first Barstow exit in order to pick up old U. S. 66. This turned out to be fortunate timing on our part, for as we looked back at the freeway we had just left, we saw cars at a standstill approaching the junction with I-40. There but for the grace of God… .

We stopped at the Barstow Bun Boy for a delicious repast, then continued along old Route 66 through Victorville, eventually joining up with the Pearblossom Highway. We had originally planned to take Angeles Forest Highway, but on a whim I turned early and headed almost straight up the mountain to Big Pines, in the heart of the Angeles National Forest.

Up there in the cool fragrant mountain air, surrounded by tall pine trees, our spirits soared. Now that the ski runs had closed for the season, we had the place to ourselves. Under the command of yet another whim, we parked the car and took a walk among the trees.

We realized that, fascinating as Death Valley was, it was here in the forest that we felt truly elevated. Invigorated, we returned to the car and followed Angeles Crest Highway down into the smoke and haze of civilization.

The first thing an Angeleno does upon returning to the city is turn on the radio to catch the traffic report. It is a time-honored rite of re-entry. The big news was a miles-long traffic jam on the south I-15 stretching from the I-40 junction to San Bernardino. It’s so nice to go trav’ling, but it’s oh so nice to come home.

Looking back on the experience, it occurs to me how lucky we are to live in California. I have lived here all my life, and still the state continues to surprise and delight me with its seemingly endless scenic variety. Within striking distance, we have inviting beaches, rugged mountains, fertile farmland, and—Death Valley.

Surely Death Valley is unlike any other place on Earth. There one may see Mother Nature at her least accommodating. Parts of it are not just uninhabitable, but positively malevolent: one way or another, it is always trying to kill you.

And yet, I find myself oddly attracted to the place: if you can survive it, it rewards you by expanding your understanding of what is beautiful. My mind keeps returning to the image of the beautiful little poppy poking defiantly out of the gray earth. It seems Lydia saw immediately what occurs to me only now: even when life seems quite barren, still there is hope that good may spring forth.

But let’s not forget about the malevolence. Camping in Death Valley is not for the faint of heart, which is why I’m glad Lydia and I had Nik and Jo with us. Not only are they able campers, but good companions as well, with a gracious sense of humor that helped us take the full force of Death Valley’s assault in stride. We look forward to camping with them again—but next time, in some more habitable spot, preferably with trees and grass and perhaps a nice stream.

As for Death Valley, I am sure we will return for further exploration, but next time we’ll stay at the Furnace Creek Inn.

* * *

Postscript: At the end of scheduled play, the Angels and Dodgers had identical 78-66 records in the strike-shortened 1995 season. That won the Dodgers their division; they went on to meet Cincinnati in the National League Divisional Series, which they lost, 0-3.

The Angels found themselves tied with Seattle for first place, and had to play them the next day in an elimination game, which the Angels lost.

Nik still has the Tracker, and that swell telescope.

"But we won it all in 2002."

Happy Birthday, Morning!

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 00:39:00 -0700

Today, August 25th, is an important day in Farm House history. On this day in 1865, Anne K. Johnson was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Of course, we know her better as Anne J. Wilson, who moved to the Farm House with her two sons in 1902, and lived here until her passing in 1969 at 104 years old.

I have a great deal to relate to you all. Let me give you a small preview by telling you that one of Anne's grandsons, Christian Gerard, visited some time back with his family. It was a red-letter day for the Farm House, and I promise to tell you all about it when I get my notes together. But let me give you one tid-bit right now.

Christian, whose family lived in the bay area, visited here one day in 1955, en route with his family to a new local attraction, Disneyland. He tells me that the family knew Anne as "Morning."

So Happy Birthday, Morning! It is very nice to get to know you better.

We Are One Fewer

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Fri, 6 Jan 2017 15:58:00 -0800

I apologize for the long season of sadness in these pages.

In this new year, I would like to go forward in a more cheerful frame of mind. I do have a few happy things to report that I have held in abeyance for several months, simply because one of the happy things has taken up the majority of my time.

But before we move forward, I am sorry to have to tell you all that I have more sad news.

I am grieved to report that our beloved Travis has passed away. He was eleven years old. He was truly the straw that stirred the drink here at the Farm House, and as such, his absence is felt palpably--keenly--by all of us, every waking hour. Everyone loved Travis.

I will write more about Travis later.

Travis
August 12, 2005–December 18, 2016

Adam, My Star

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Wed, 28 Sep 2016 16:33:00 -0700

I realize that most of my subject matter in these pages is terribly dry and prosaic. It consists, after all, mostly of matters such as digging holes and patching wood. These are not things that readily stir the heart or fire the imagination.

I of course do my best to present this subject matter in an entertaining way, but even the most adroit wordsmithing can only go so far towards making silk purses out of these sow's ears.

And so, to bridge the remaining gulf between informative and entertaining, I have long relied upon our Pet Division. I'm always snapping pictures of our dogs and cats, and very early in the blog's history I started trying to work them into my posts as a way to provide some visual relief.

The pet I have most relied upon for this function is Adam. This has not been a matter of favoritism, really; it's just a practical result of his having been my constant companion (with time out for litter box breaks, of course), combined with my always having a camera on my hip or within reach. Well, one must also consider his wild good looks and expressive face.

Let's face it: the camera loved Adam. Adam was the star of this blog.

With your kind indulgence, I'd like this post to serve as a commemoration of Adam's significant contribution to these pages, and also, for the time being, as a token of his significant contribution to my life.

Adam's first appearance was actually in a video, a wrasslin' match with Benny shot when he was nine months old: "It's Movie Night!" Adam and Benny's fights were always quite entertaining and often quite epic.

Adam's first photographic appearance in these pages was on May 8, 2011, in the post "Better Living in Two Parts, Part Two."

I was describing how before I got to work on the house that morning, I brought Adam, Benny and Travis out to get some sun; I included a photograph of each to illuminate the text. It's one of my favorite pictures of him, because it looks for all the world as if a small wild lynx had somehow wandered into the back yard looking for prey.

It not only captures his relentlessly inquisitive nature, but also his impressive stature. Adam was a long cat: nearly 45 inches from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail, once he finished growing. They simply don't come much longer than that. In point of fact, the Guinness Book of World Records Longest Cat in The World is also a Maine coon, and he is 48 1/2 inches long. It is thus verifiably not hyperbole to say that they don't come much longer than Adam.

Adam was long, lean and stronger than most dogs three times his size, and you can see all that in this picture. And he hadn't finished growing when this picture was taken. He was only a petite 3 feet long at this point.

Adam was the subject, and the inspiration, of the first coda picture I ever posted: May 27, 2011, in the post "No Snickers, Please":

No rinsing needed.

I recall coming into the kitchen, seeing Adam sitting there looking so nonchalant, suppressing my laughter, and having the good fortune to find my camera right there on the kitchen table. The caption came to me immediately when I looked at the photo, and it occurred to me that this would be a great thing to put at the end of my next post. I was so pleased with the result that I resolved to make a concluding photo of our pets--what I now call a coda picture--a regular feature. Since then, there have been few posts without one, and it all started with Adam.

The next post, two days later, was of another Adam/Benny combat video ("Million Dollar Movie"), this time with the two battling for possession of the love seat in the den. It is one of the top four posts in the blog's history. A coda picture seemed duplicative here, so I left it out.

But I was back at it the next day ("Breezin' Along with The Breeze"):

"Nobody here but us dogs."

This shows another distinct character trait of Adam's: he was quite democratic. As long as you were of a predator species, he was willing to take you as you were. He was as likely to hang out with the dogs as with his fellow cats. As you can see in dear Nellie's face, this made the dogs a bit uneasy at first, but they tolerated it, and in time became comfortable with it. Nowadays, our dogs and cats form a unified pack and mingle comfortably, although Adam's little cousin Rosalie is the only one who actually will cuddle up with the dogs. Perhaps it's a Maine coon thing.

I have a great number of photos with Adam hanging out with the dogs, but only two others made it into these pages. Here's the next one:

Absit invidia.

(from "A Posse Ad Esse", 7-20-11)

Adam has made himself so completely at home that he is grooming himself, and practically leaning on Travis while he does it. Travis' "what the---?" expression bespeaks an offended sense of propriety, but it's really just a karmic payback, because as a puppy he did the same thing to our first Maine coon, dear Roger:

Judging from the look on Roger's face, his forbearance here in not smiting Travis on the sconce is masterful.

I should explain all the Latin I'm throwing around here. Absit invidia means "let there be no ill will;" it's a phrase that is customarily used, similarly to "no offense intended," to smooth over small offenses before they become big ones. The phrase in the post title, A posse ad esse, translates most accurately (I think) as "from potentiality to actuality," but I like to translate it in this case as "I finally figured out how to do it, so I done went and did it." The post was a review of several difficult tasks that I had somehow managed to complete successfully. The Latin title induced me to provide Latin captions for each photo, and I naturally carried that theme through to the coda picture.

Here's the third Adam + Dog coda picture, again with Travis, who's a pretty photogenic fellow himself:

"You missed a spot."

(from "Reunion", 11-9-11)

Travis' unruffled "really, dude?" expression here reflects his and Nellie's gradual acceptance of the fact of Adam's frequent propinquity.

As I said, Adam was just as likely to hang out with his fellow felines:

Must be dinnertime.

(from "Unpacking A Mess", 6-19-12)

Oh, look! There's our dear CEO Emeritus, Evangeline! She and Adam had a sweet mother-son relationship.

"Kenneth, what is the frequency?"

(from "A Rather Irksome Revelation", 9-18-11)

"Our minds are one: I feel what you feel; I know what you know."

(from "Woodworking for The Inept, Part Two", 9-1-11)

For one who grew up watching Star Trek, the above caption wrote itself. It was during a period where Adam was putting out Trek vibes. At first he was doing Spock:

"Live long and prosper."

(from "Writing Stories", 8-29-11)

But he soon switched to doing Kirk, which I think is perfect casting:

"Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnn!!!"

(from "Inch by Inch, Step by Step", 9-7-11)

One day when I was working on rehabilitating the north windows, I left one open, and soon Adam appeared, standing on the sill majestically like the Lion King looking out upon his domain. He was six and a half months old, just starting a massive growth spurt, and it was the first time I saw the bold, majestic, royal bearing that was to become his hallmark. Our little kitten was growing up. It gave me an idea, and I assembled a story arc of coda pictures that ran with the next five posts:

Space: the final frontier.

These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. . .

. . .its ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds. . .

. . .to seek out new life and new civilizations. . .

. . .to boldly go where no man has gone before.

(starting from "Regaining Focus", 10-22-11)

I love every picture in this sequence. The second one, with Adam and Benny on top of the cat stand, accurately captures the character of each, right down to their bling: Adam the star, of course, and always-impeccably-groomed wing man Benny with his bow tie. Benny still has his bow tie, but all the information has worn off of it. He needs new bling.

The three middle ones taken together remind me that much of the time, Adam, Benny and I were the Three Musketeers--or, perhaps more accurately, the Three Stooges. The last picture is easily the edgiest one I've posted here, but I had to use it: it fit the caption perfectly. I hasten to add that I shooed Adam down from there right after I took the picture.

* * *

Looking back reminds me how easy it was to write captions for Adam's photos: they were all dictated by the expression on his face, which always seemed to convey a distinct mood, thought or sentiment:

I. Am. Awesome.

(from "Overnight Thread", 8-6-11)

Of course, this brought an immediate rebuttal from Evangeline:

I invented awesome.

(from "Epoxy Revelations", 8-10-11)

Which begat this response from Adam:

"Thirteen pounds, nine and a half ounces of wild feline awesomeness."

(from "Woodworking for The Inept, Part One", 8-31-11)

Later, his niece did this homage:

"I. Am. Fabulous."

(from "Board Surfing", 8-5-12)

She has since only become more fabulous, I assure you.

More of the many moods of Adam:

"You want cute? I can do cute."

(from "Vision Quest", 10-4-11)

"Your nail set's stuck in your hair."

(from "Furnace Gap, 1943-2011", 11-17-11)

"Shouldn't there be a big pointy tree with lots of prey on it here by now?"

(from "Patching Away on The Thin Wood of A New Day", 11-29-11)

"Let's see. . .f/5.6 at 1/125 sec. That should work. Now where's the danged shutter button?"

(from "Rendezvous at Furnace Gap", 11-10-11)

"Words fail me."

(from "Aftermath", 12-16-11)

He who controls the remote, controls the future.

(from "Goofus And Gallant", 6-19-14)

There are some stories only cats can hear.

(from "CSI: House", 5-4-2015)

Occasionally, I was smart enough simply to allow the photograph to speak for itself.

(from "An Instructive Transformation", 5-18-12)

(from "I Get The Blues When It Rains", 11-6-11)

I've been doing pretty well so far, but I have to admit that this last photo chokes me up a bit. It captures his spirit so very well: sweet, forthright, fearless.

These next two are my favorite Adam coda pictures, because each has a significant story behind it.

The wily Forest Cat returns to his lair with the day's catch.

(from "Everything's Up to Date In Pasadena", 6-11-11)

I love this photo because some of my fondest memories of Adam involve his carrying this big dog toy throughout the house as if it were fresh-killed prey, looking for a safe place to put it. Someday I'll tell you all about this remarkable, endearing and at times hilarious aspect of Adam's character, but it's too long and involved a story for this already Brobdingnagian post.

We had a set of these dog toys, and although the crocodile was far and away his favorite, he at times used all of them as prey, as we see in the next photo:

"I bring you this offering of fresh-killed prey in token of my appreciation for your fealty."

(from "Well, How 'Bout That", 3-17-12)

Despite the slight astringency of the caption, this was quite a tender moment, one that marked a turning point in our relationship. While Adam was from the first my constant companion, up to the time of this picture (he was then a few weeks past his second birthday) he was not particularly affectionate. Not that he wasn't friendly, but he was not terribly interactive unless we were playing. He always seemed preoccupied, as if he were listening to the call of the wild.

Then one day, as I sat in the den working at my laptop, he walked in, laid his prey gently on the floor before him, then sat down and gazed at me with solemn significance for quite a long moment, just as you see above. Before this, Adam and I were packmates. From this moment on, we were soulmates. He was more engaged, more interactive, more in the moment. He became quite talkative. Most importantly, on every remaining day we had together he became more and more affectionate, and more and more happy.

I can't offer any explanation for the seemingly sudden transformation other than it was a natural part of Adam's maturation. Maine coons grow up very gradually, typically continuing to grow until they are five years old. Such was the case with Adam; his little cousin actually grew visibly after her fifth birthday. Remarkably, this last growth spurt resulted in her resembling Adam, whereas before she had no particular physical resemblance other than her markings. I can't explain that at all.

* * *

The last coda picture in which Adam appeared was posted on December 15, 2015, in the post "For the Birds, Part 1":

The Wily Forest Cat lies in wait for his prey, after having hidden all the remotes.

Adam could be found here quite regularly at this time whenever the whole pack was together in the den; he had a habit of adopting a place as his base of operations, and then sticking to it for some time. In this, he was just like Roger. In this photo, Adam is looking down at Peter, which puts me in mind of another photograph, taken the night the two met:

Adam was utterly baffled regarding what sort of creatures we had brought into the house, and he spent the next several days surveilling them until he determined at last that they were, in fact, dogs.

Adam's last appearance in these pages before his passing was in "The Big Pedagogy", just two posts ago on March 7, 2016:

Loungers lounging in the Lounge.

This represented my first attempt to bring the idea of the coda picture right smack dab into the middle of the narrative, to leaven an especially-dry subject with a little humor and a lot of personality and charm. And these are---were---my go-to guys for that.

* * *

I thank you all from the deepest part of me for your kind indulgence of my reverie.

Good-Night, Sweet Prince

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Wed, 3 Aug 2016 14:14:00 -0700

It grieves me profoundly to report that my constant companion, my wing man, my second-biggest fan, my Wily Forest Cat Adam, passed away early last Mother's Day of a terrifyingly vicious cancer that first showed its symptoms the Wednesday before. He was but six years old.

I'd like to tell his story in full, but I'm afraid I am not yet prepared to do this. It happened with such horrible suddenness that I was in shock for months. I am only now starting to deal with the fact that he is no longer here in the room with me, just hanging out, waiting to follow me to my next destination once I get up and leave the room.

Still, Adam was such a constant presence in these pages that I cannot let his passing go any longer unmentioned here. I have received so many kind comments from you all, both here and in person, regarding his photographs that I feel I owe it to you to let you know what has happened.

Please forgive me, Dear Reader. I thought I'd be able at least to say a few words and share some happy memories by this point, but I have been trying for weeks, and I simply can't do more than this right now. It still hurts far too much.

Adam
February 21, 2010–May 8, 2016

The Big Pedagogy

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Mon, 7 Mar 2016 11:58:00 -0800

The fifth of January dawned cold, dark and threatening, and by the time I saw Wifey off to work, the rain began to come down gently. I scurried back into the house, confident I was ready for the serious downpour that was coming. The roofs were all clear, and the gutters all clean.

I spent the whole morning upstairs bringing order to the inchoate mass of last year's financial records, dreary work for a dreary day. Soon enough, the storm hit full stride, and though it was only of middling intensity compared to what these skies are capable of, it didn't let up until after one o'clock, at which time I went downstairs to fix lunch.

I looked out the kitchen door at the backyard, and was startled to see this:

I'd expected to see some flooding, because the turnout at the top of the driveway has always backed up in anything more than a light rain ever since the driveway was built. My surprise was at the extent of the flooding. This was easily twice as bad as I had ever seen it. I was afraid that if the skies really opened up, the water would back up into the garage.

Before I ran out and started filling sandbags, I checked Weather Underground, and saw only very light rain forecast for the rest of the storm. So I went on with lunch as previously scheduled.

As I ate, I thought back over the history of the turnout. It came into being in December 2004 with the completion of the driveway. This was just in time for the winter of 2004-05. As it happens, this was the wettest one on record here in Pasadena. Don’t take my word for it, you could look it up.

We weren't living here then, but I remember it well because at that time I spent most of my waking hours here working. I remember that our contractor's foreman—let’s call him “Rudy”—was very concerned that the turnout area would flood in a storm. He said it was because he'd noticed that patch of ground was especially slow-draining.

I took his word for it without much thought, because at the time I was very busy preparing the upstairs bathroom for the installation of the fixtures, which Rudy was pressuring me to get done, like, yesterday. Funny thing about that: for all the prodding he gave me, it took him a few months to get those fixtures in after I finished my work there.

Rudy cut a small drainage notch in the curbing at the bottom of the turnout, and even went so far as to dig a big trench leading from that notch over to a low spot of the yard as a temporary measure. He told me that eventually I would have to install a catch basin near the notch and tie it into the drainage system to take care of the problem long-term.

The turnout area did back up in heavy rain that winter, but so did every low spot in the yard, and the water would sink into the ground a few hours after the rain stopped. Of course, a lot of water did flow down Rudy’s trench, which gave the excess water a much greater area in which to sink into the ground, but I didn't give that much thought.

January 10, 2005: Rudy's trench, part 1. . .

. . .and part 2.

We were in the house by the next winter, which I seem to recall was about average rain-wise, although my memories of that winter are pretty sketchy because I was sick in bed for most of it. The entire backyard might have been under water at some point that winter, for all I knew.

After that, we went into an extended dry period, capped by an epic four-year drought. During the spring and summer of 2006, I found the trench cutting across the yard to be a hazard to navigation, so I filled it in halfway; subsequent erosion and my leveling of the ground under the gazebo all but obliterated it.

The long succession of dry winters effectively removed the drainage problem as an active concern, and I found myself able to ignore it completely as I focused upon the exterior restoration work. The turnout still backed up in the rain, and I noticed that as the years progressed the backup became larger and slower to recede, but this was never more than a minor nuisance until now.

I did have to dig out the well around the persimmon several times through the years as erosion filled it up, and over time this erosion reached all the way to the curb, creating a new escape route for the turnout overflow directly into the tree well. This did not entirely replace the drainage provided by Rudy’s trench, but it certainly helped.

After I finished lunch, I continued to chew on these recollections as I finished putting our records into tidy piles and filing them away. I came to the conclusion that the backup was so much worse because it hadn't rained that hard for that long for at least a decade, and there was now no trench to carry the water away.

During the next 24 hours or so, it rained lightly and intermittently, and by the time the rain stopped for good, the tree well had drained completely, but the turnout was still quite flooded. The following 24 hours brought little improvement.

That completely baffled me. True, the drainage notch was clogged with dirt and debris, but even after I cleaned it out only a tiny trickle came through it, and at any rate the water should have sunk into the ground in that amount of time.

I dug a narrow trench from the notch over to the low spot, and blew the water down it with my big electric blower, leaving me with this:

It's not visible here, but there is still standing water in all the low spots. The turnout was so saturated that as soon as I blew the water out of a low spot, water would flow in from the surrounding area to fill it again. I decided to wait to investigate matters until it had dried out some.

In the meantime, I turned to the Internet to learn all I could about drainage. I knew something about the subject, but apparently not enough. I read about the importance of proper grading, and the various methods of moving water safely away from flood-prone areas.

I had a lot of time for study, because the turnout took eight days to dry enough to work with it, and it really didn't do much drying out until the sun came out at last on the seventh day and did its thing. Clearly, there was no downward movement of water in that area. It was as if there were a layer of concrete underneath it.

I did pick up a few clues during this time. I noticed that the wet area of the turnout was a darker color than the rest of the driveway. At first I thought that was due to its being wetter than the rest of the driveway, but the dogs were finding great fun in splashing through our little swamp, and I saw that at the bottom of the fresh divots made by their paws I could see the contrasting orangeish-tan color of decomposed granite. I recall now that these paw-divots had no water standing in them, which is what made them stand out from the surrounding muck.

At that point it finally dawned on me that the wet area of the turnout had a layer of dirt over it. That meant that water had all along been running into the turnout from the surrounding soil. Then I remembered that the backup had seemed to get larger and take longer to dry as time passed. That was enough evidence for me to conclude that the layer of dirt was what was causing the severe downward drainage problem in the turnout.

But how could the very dirt that allowed the passage of water right next to the turnout block it in the turnout? Here was a real mystery. After some heavy cogitating in the Lounge over a few pipefuls of black Cavendish, I concluded that the soil on the turnout must be mostly silt.

Loungers lounging in the Lounge.

Silt is the part of soil that is of the smallest particle size, and is thus the lightest; it stood to reason that it would move far more readily than the rest of the soil. Packed silt can be very resistant to water movement. I thus figured that the soil on the turnout was primarily silt.

I went out and looked at the grading of the soil around the turnout. There was a big rise, about six inches, at the bottom of the turnout that had been necessary at the time the driveway was built because there was a big liquidambar tree in that area that stood at that level.

December 2, 2004, completion day for the driveway.

Sadly, the tree died about five years ago of old age. We sure miss that tree. It was beautiful, and it gave us fall color all winter. In the South they call this kind of tree a sweet gum, and they grow like weeds, but here it was exotic and special.

Anyway, there is no further need for the rise.

The rise along the side of the turnout was not apparent to my eye. I had to put down some stakes and stretch a level line across the area and sight across that before the rise became evident. It crested at about two inches beyond the bottom of the turnout before it sank down into a low area that was the vestigial remains of Rudy’s old trench. The rise lessened toward the top of the turnout before it plunged down below level where the soil had eroded into the tree well.

With this information in hand, I had my plan of action: I would correct the soil grading around the turnout so that water flowed off of it instead of onto it, and remove the layer of silt. This would reduce the amount of water entering the turnout, restore the natural downward drainage, and prevent the re-formation of the silt layer. I hoped this would buy me the time I needed to finish the exterior restoration before taking any active measures such as installing that catch basin.

Next came triage. I decided to do the work in this order: remove the rise along the side, then remove the silt layer, then work on the large rise. I also resolved to build a proper well for the persimmon tree this coming summer, when I don’t have to worry about rain complicating the work.

I saved the large rise for last because it was the most complicated procedure, involving the most planning and work. I couldn’t simply remove all that dirt and establish a downward slope away from the turnout, because that would clash with the necessity of having the soil slope downward away from the house, and it would also require my removing the two nearby benches covered with potted plants and then having to re-level them when I put them back in place.

Oh, and I’d have to remove my new feeder pole, empty my new hole, dig it deeper to reflect the new grade level, and replace the pole. I didn’t expect to have nearly enough time before the next storm to get all that work completed, so I put that problem off until the end to give me time to come up with some sort of temporary fix that would prevent water from flowing onto the turnout from that area.

I put the removal of the silt layer from the turnout second because I had the romantic idea that if it were bone-dry, the silt layer would crack and come off like a hard candy shell. And so I started with the smaller rise.

Any soil work at the Farm House is likely to be difficult. It's not the kind of soil you can safely dig right into with a shovel or a spade, because it is hard clay shot full of rocks of varying size. You really have to loosen it up with a pick or mattock first, lest you dislocate your shoulder when your shovel hits a boulder.

The only effective way to establish a new grade in this soil is to dig up the area, screen it to remove all the rocks and the accumulated debris of 130 years, put the screened soil back down, rake and drag it out to the new grade, wet it, and roll it out with a heavy lawn roller. Then, over the following several weeks you have to keep raking it smooth, wetting it and letting it bake in the sun until it sets up.

A piece of buried treasure from the Farm House soil.

I wasn’t going to be doing all that anytime soon. I didn’t have the time, and I didn’t have the weather. It's a summertime job, because until the soil sets up any rain would oversaturate it and turn the path between the house and garage into a treacherous swamp. This would have been a worse problem than the one I was trying to correct.

Because of this, I had to try to loosen only the soil that I needed to remove, being careful to keep the remaining soil as undisturbed as possible. This would have been tricky enough without the many rocks embedded just below the surface. I tried a few different ways to get the job done, but I ended up having to chip the dirt away by chopping at it with a soil scraper. This is a tool with a triangular forged steel blade mounted on the end of a stick with a D-handle at the top.

I loosened the soil in a small area about a half-inch down in this way, which I then dragged into a pile with a hoe and scooped up with a spade. If I encountered a stone, I loosened it carefully with my big iron digger bar and removed it by hand. It was slow, tiring work, but it got easier as I developed the technique. The stones got larger and more plentiful as I moved towards the house, so I ended up having to disturb the soil there more than I liked.

When I was done, I had established a reasonably even slope going downwards from the house to the garage and just slightly downwards from the turnout to the low area across the yard. It wasn’t as much slope as the situation called for, but I wanted to see what happened in the next storm before I did more; there was a chance erosion would increase any slope I put in, and it was far easier to increase the slope later than to decrease it.

Next came the removal of the silt layer from the turnout. As I said, I expected this to be a quick job, but when I began to chip away at it with the scraper, I discovered that the silt layer was even harder than the soil. I took my soil tamper, an 8-inch square piece of heavy cast iron mounted on a stout wood pole, and pounded the silt layer with it in an attempt to loosen it and start to break it up. This had absolutely no effect.

It was really quite imaginative, my envisioning the silt layer’s coming off easily. It must have been the Italian in me. As I mentioned in my last post, "decomposed" granite (“DG”) is in fact crushed granite; it settles so firmly because its individual particles are quite jagged, and tend to interlock firmly when compacted. This same quality naturally caused it to become quite firmly interlocked with the much smaller particles of silt and clay in the dirt above it, once the dirt had dried.

I realized that to get the silt off, I would have to get it wet. I had wanted to avoid this, because when this stuff is wet it becomes quite slippery, and I was afraid that if I worked it when wet it would mix readily with the decomposed granite below it, thus making it necessary to remove a lot of the DG to get rid of all the silt.

That was when I remembered a procedure I had learned in the Doll House days, at our Culver City home, during the time when I first heard the ancestral call of the family green thumb. The soil there is black adobe, which is even harder than the soil here at the Farm House. The adobe, when it was completely dry, was extremely resistant to wetting; I would pour water on it, and the water would just bead up and sit on top as if the soil were tar.

I soon discovered that the only good way to get that soil to take water was to wet it evenly with water in which I had put a little dish detergent, sprinkled gently from a watering can. The detergent lowered the surface tension of the water, defeating its tendency to bead, and it would sink right into the adobe. After this treatment, the soil would then take water readily.

It occurred to me that I might use this same method to soften the silt enough to remove it without getting the DG wet. I filled up the watering can, mixed in a little Joy, and wet a six-foot square area evenly. As I had hoped, the water sunk right in. I waited a few minutes, then started scraping. An eighth of an inch of silt came off, and the rest was still completely dry. I filled the can with hot water this time, and put in a whole ounce of detergent. More or less the same result. Next time I used the same mixture but put down twice as much water, with only slightly better results.

I kept increasing the amount of detergent-spiked water and applying increasing amounts of elbow-grease, and I did manage to get down to the DG, working dry once I got down close to it. It took me several days to work my way stubbornly about a third of the way up the turnout until I finally admitted to myself that what I was doing obviously wasn't working well enough. I needed something that would break up the silt so the water would penetrate further.

I ditched the scraper and got out the dethatching rake, which has very thin, narrowly-spaced semi-circular tines. It's designed to pull thatch out of lawns, but its tines can be pivoted so that they act as tiny little soil-tillers. I didn't use it in leveling the rise because it's too aggressive, but that's just what I needed here.

It wasn't aggressive enough. It just slid back and forth on top of the silt. And with that, I tossed out the cautious, incremental approach. I could no longer afford it. By this time, another big storm had begun to loom in the forecast, and I had to start working more quickly. I realized that I'd have to get this silt good and muddy, and then just scrape it off the DG as carefully as I could. So I flooded the area with water from the hose and started raking vigorously.

After a bit of muddy drama, the water and silt suddenly resolved themselves into crumbly, dark, slightly moist soil, sitting on top of almost completely dry DG.

I had flooded that area, but some unseen force had kept all that water from moving out of the silt layer into the area directly below it—a force stronger than gravity.

Sounds like the Italian kicking up in me again, I know, but that was precisely what was happening. That, or some sort of ancient curse.

I swept all the soil up and got down on my knees for a closer look. Here's what I saw:

I said to myself, "IT BAFFLES SCIENCE!!" I could see that the moistened areas were where I had physically broken into the DG layer slightly; the bone-dry areas seemed to be right at the interface between the two areas. The interface between the two areas. . . .

A voice within me replied contemptuously, "No. No, it doesn't. It doesn't baffle science. It only baffles you."

It was another callback to the Doll House days, when I really had gotten in touch with my inner Oliver Wendell Douglas, when I lived for nurturing young growing things, when my workbench was usually covered with hundreds of tiny little pots full of little seedlings illuminated by grow lights on pulleys so I could adjust their height to account for growth. Back then, everything that I planted in our garden I had raised from seed.

Except for the roses. I tried, but I didn't have the skill to grow roses from seed. Roses I grew either bare-root or from pots. One thing that I learned early on about planting roses in that adobe was that you couldn't just dig a hole and plop the plant in.

Sure, you could do everything to ensure that the soil in the planting hole was perfectly blended, full of good things and well-drained; but once the roots had grown to the extent of that hole and hit that solid adobe, the roots would stop. Moreover, whatever water you put on the plant would stop at the extent of the hole. It was as if you'd planted the rose in a pot in the ground, a pot with no drainage holes.

When I first observed this situation, I consulted my gardening books and learned that this was called texture interface. As they explained it, when you put two types of soil with significantly different textures next to each other, a barrier to water passage occurs where the two soils meet.

I learned that to avoid this situation, you had to dig a hole much larger than the plant needed, and fill the excess with a 50/50 mixture of your prepared soil and the unamended soil from the hole in order to provide a more gradual transition between the two soils.

I was baffled by texture interface, and the gardening books really didn’t help much. They told me what it was and how to avoid it, but they gave no explanation of the science involved. I assumed it had something to do with fluid mechanics, but in what way I had no idea. I just figured that water was very skeptical of change.

What had been happening in the turnout was undeniably texture interface. As it turned out, the dirt on top of it was not all silt, but I'd say it was about 60% silt, and most of the rest was clay. So the dirt was extremely fine-textured, and DG is 100% sand, uniformly coarse-textured, and the result--well, the DG might as well have been concrete.

Here is a perfect illustration of the difference between rote learning and experiential learning, between learning by reading and learning by doing. Previously, I knew of texture interface because I had read about it and seen its effects indirectly, but I didn't really know what it was until I saw it happening with my own eyes.

Not that I'm knocking rote learning. It's how I’ve learned a lot of things like the times tables, the lyrics to the Roger Ramjet theme song, and lots of other useful, fun things like that. Rote learning is how the past prepares the present to face the future.

I was prepared for the hearty face-smack of epiphany by that bit of rote knowledge regarding texture interface that had been languishing in my brain, just waiting to be activated by experience. As Pasteur said, chance favors the prepared mind.

By chance, the very last big caper I had pulled was the installing of the bird feeder. Do you recall how I was able to re-use the sand I removed from the hole before I dug it deeper? I marveled at the time how cleanly that sand came out of the hole.

Down on my knees there in the turnout, bathing in the warm bright light of revelation, I looked over at the feeder, not more than a dozen feet away, and realized that texture interface had a big role in that job as well.

The sand came out of that hole so cleanly because texture interface works horizontally as well as vertically. It keeps the sand in the hole packed firmly together, holding the pole right in its place. Texture interface is in fact the reason why sand works nearly as effectively as concrete when setting poles in the ground. In our soil and climate, it arguably works more effectively than concrete, because it does not allow moisture to become trapped next to the pole, as concrete can.

It was but a small mental hop from that to understanding precisely why one puts a layer of small rocks at the bottom of the hole for the pole: to eliminate texture interface at the bottom. The rocks initially act as a buffer; the relatively large voids between them allow the water to fall out of the sand and then get absorbed by the soil. Soon, the soil and sand mix together in a gradual transition from one to the other to fill the large voids, thus eliminating texture interface.

This was all a great deal of fun, but it wasn’t enough. I was on a roll. I at last knew exactly what happens at a texture interface, but I still didn’t know how it happened. The mystery of how the silt layer could keep all that water captive until the sun finally set it free had not yet been solved. I got off my knees, went inside to my computer, and looked up a proper scientific explanation of texture interface, expecting it to be perplexingly counter-intuitive to match the actual physical event I had witnessed.

In fact, the explanation is perfectly intuitive and easy to understand. There are two forces involved, cohesion and adhesion, and while the names may be unfamiliar, the phenomena they represent are quite commonplace.

Cohesion is a force that attracts molecules of a liquid to each other. Water has high cohesion, which is what causes its relatively high surface tension.

Picture an icicle hanging off the eave of a house, just starting to melt in the sun. You know how a drop will start to form at the tip of the icicle, but it just hangs on until it finally gets too big, and then the drop falls off all at once, staying together until it hits the ground? That’s cohesion. The cohesion of water is strong enough to put up a good fight against gravity. Cohesion is why water beads up on the dry adobe soil of the Doll House.

Adhesion is the force that occurs when the molecules of two unlike materials have an attraction to each other. Liquids are strongly attracted to solid materials that contain very small voids. The combination of a liquid’s cohesion and its adhesion to such materials is called capillary action.

Picture what happens when you put a paper towel down on some spilled water on a countertop. The water goes upwards into the towel and spreads out until the water is completely absorbed. The water is attracted to the narrow voids between the many small fibers in the towel. Pick up the towel, and the water stays in it, held there by surface tension and capillary action, products of cohesion and adhesion, against the force of gravity.

This is just what was happening with the water in the silt layer. As with the paper towel, the voids between the tiny particles in the silt layer generated adhesion with the water that entered it, and it spread throughout the silt via capillary action until it was saturated.

Where the silt met the DG, at the texture interface, the water stopped moving because the voids in the DG are so much wider than those in the silt that capillary action stopped pulling the water forward at that point, and surface tension held it there. The water in the silt layer was held together by the combination of cohesion and adhesion so strongly that the force of gravity could not overcome it: the water in the silt did not weigh enough for gravity to pull it down.

It was as simple as that.

So I guess I had been right: water really is skeptical of change!

And with this, my spell of smartening-up was complete. It seemed as if I could feel my mind get suddenly less cluttered, as I threw out all the old, dusty, unconnected bits of soil lore that had been lying around in there. I didn’t need them any more, because now I know what texture interface is and why it happens. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, dispatched it with my own hands, made it do my bidding. I’ll recognize this perpetrator when I see it again in some new disguise. And I’m sure I will see it again.

Rote learning is a wonderful preparation for, and enhancement of, living. Experiential learning is living.

* * *

It was now a simple matter to remove the soil from the rest of the turnout, although I did have to remove some of the DG as well, to ensure I had removed all traces of any ancient curse, just in case. By that point I could see that there was a thin layer of soil on the driveway all the way across to the opposite curb and continuing down below the turnout for five feet or so, but I didn't have the time to take care of it, for the rain was coming in two days, and I had to do something about the big rise below the turnout before that.

Happily, by then I had a good plan for this: I dug a trench between the rise and the turnout. I tried to construct it so that water would flow into the trench from both the turnout and the rise, and the overflow from the trench would, if the rain was not coming down too fast, run out the side and down to the low spot on the other side of the yard.

With this, I put all my tools away and waited for the rain to come.

It came on schedule, and it didn't take too long before the turnout was backed up nearly as much as it had been the last time. I went out to watch how the water was flowing. Here's what it looked like:

Yep, I was right about having disturbed that area with all the rocks too much. As I feared, the water sank in there and oversaturated the area. And between this area and the tree well, I hadn’t established quite enough downward slope to move the water across the yard; my hoped-for erosion down to the low area did not occur. Instead, it mostly flowed into the tree well.

It was a mess, but I was happy with it. Sure, the water wasn’t going just where I wanted it to go, but it also wasn’t going where I didn’t want it to go. It wasn’t going from the soil onto the turnout, and that was the important part.

I can tell this is so by the fact that the water in the turnout is a lighter color than the water on the soil, as you can see clearly on the soil side of the drainage notch. Note the small finger of turnout-colored water flowing into the soil-colored water. This makes the distinction between the two colors clear, and confirms that no water is flowing the other way anywhere along the curb.

The swampy patch in the middle is a bit of an annoyance, but at least it is easily avoided, and in any event I can't really fix it until after the rainy season.

24 hours after the rain stopped, the turnout was free of standing water and was well on its way to being dry.

I was happy with this result, because it did allow me safely to postpone further measures until I had the time for them, but I was troubled by the apparent fact that despite my having accomplished essentially what I had set out to do, I had nonetheless failed to decrease the amount of water backing up in the turnout when it rained. This didn’t seem to make sense.

This time, it didn’t take more than about half a pipeful to come up with an answer: when I removed the silt from the turnout, I lowered the level of the turnout surface by over an inch. This caused the curb to act as a dam, holding the water back so that it had nowhere to go but down.

This restored my peace of mind for the other half-pipeful, but then a question popped up to disturb the peace: if I had stopped the flow of water from the soil into the turnout, then where did all that water in the turnout come from? It doesn’t rain more on the turnout than it does in the areas immediately surrounding it. Moreover, under the DG in the turnout, and in all the driveway, is four inches of coarse gravel. The turnout should thus have considerably better drainage than the surrounding soil.

True, Rudy did tell me that the soil under the turnout area was especially slow-draining, but I had finally dismissed this idea weeks earlier as highly implausible. What, was there a giant, turnout-sized boulder that just happened to be in that precise location, eight inches down? I figured the actual answer must be something else.

I looked back over the photos I had taken during the last rain and came upon a short video I took that I’d forgotten about. It showed me just where all that water in the turnout was coming from. I can show that to you here in another photo of the flooding in the last storm:

Look at the turnout below where the curb enters the photo from the right, and then follow along the curb to the left in the turnout. That is a flow of water from further back in the driveway. I didn’t record how far back this flow started, but the driveway continues to slope upwards from the turnout to the front of the house. This naturally creates a small but steady flow of water down that slope into the turnout.

This is why the turnout is a flood-prone area, and Rudy knew it. It was a direct result of errors in the way the contractor had built the driveway. Rudy lied to me because if he had told me the truth, we would have insisted the contractor install the drainage basin himself. It was his responsibility, because his work created the flooding problem. By planting the idea that the flooding problem was not the contractor’s fault in my head, keeping me swamped with work, and digging that big trench to mask how bad the problem really was, Rudy conned me into giving them a pass on it.

Yes, I was a chump. Don’t take my word for it. You could look it up.

Rudy was able to make me a chump because at that point I had not yet learned what a good liar he was. Over the remainder of our interaction with the contractor, I learned this all too well. During this time, it came to light that Rudy had been lying to me all along about crucial matters, and he had gotten the City inspectors and even our own independent inspector to go along with him. A bit of a sociopath, that Rudy.

It’s not as if I had not been paying close attention to the proceedings. I was here almost every day, working alongside Rudy and his men, asking questions, conducting my own inspections, bringing errors to Rudy’s attention. But I could not be here all the time, and I did not know everything about every aspect of the work.

I now know that whenever I was not here, and in every aspect of the work I did not know, Rudy was busy cutting corners and co-opting the very people whom I relied upon to keep him honest. When I caught him dead to rights, he managed to make it look like an honest error when he had no choice but to fix it, but otherwise he just flat-out lied.

It was a thorough and unforgettable lesson in the importance of maintaining a polite but unflagging skepticism in any business relationship. Rudy and water have taught me the power of skepticism.

Experiential learning. It’s the most effective way to learn, if you’re prepared for the lesson.

But it isn’t always pleasant.

* * *

A truly irresistible force.

For The Birds, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 10:31:00 -0800

To recap the story so far, our old feeder and pole had been damaged irreparably by an onslaught of corpulent doves, and after an inordinate amount of difficulty, I managed to assemble a new feeder and locate a stronger pole that needed some modification before I could use it.

The new pole was ten feet long, which meant I had to dig the existing hole two feet deeper in order to mount the feeder the required six feet above ground—four and a half feet deep in all.

The added depth was a bit of a concern. Our soil is riddled with boulders, some of them quite large. I was lucky the first time around in that I encountered no obstacles, but I was really pushing my luck going two feet further down. I hoped I didn't have to blast.

Of course, I could simply have cut two feet off the new pole and made the job a whole lot easier. I didn't do that because rigid electrical conduit is heavy, and as I mentioned last time, it has a certain amount of flex in it. With the feeder at its top, it will have a tendency to flex back and forth in heavy winds, and the flection could conceivably extend down below ground level, increasing the risk that the pole will work itself loose and start to lean. The deeper footing should prevent that.

I pulled the old pole up, and was very happy to see that there was no rust on it to speak of. This was a nice verification that six inches of rocks in the bottom of the hole was sufficient drainage, even in our slow-draining soil.

Then, I started to dig. The first two and a half feet of the hole was easy, because all I was doing was emptying the hole I'd already made. I saved the sand from the first two feet in one pile, and the rocks and dirt from next six inches in another, so that I could re-use the fill.

At the Farm House, we even recycle dirt and rocks.

From that point on, the work was considerably more tiring. I haven't done any really hard physical work since my last bout of tendinitis in January, and on top of that I had had that spell of pneumonia. My arms and lungs were thus in need of a good workout, and boy, did they get it now.

On the way down the hole, I needed frequent rest stops in order to catch my breath, and so to keep things moving I decided to alternate the hole-digging with the task of reducing the diameter of the top of the pole so that the receptacle on the bottom of the feeder would fit. I have very little experience working with steel, but I figured a file would be the right tool for the job.

I have an extensive collection of files inherited from my uncle, so I picked out the most appropriate-looking one, cleaned its teeth with a brass brush, and started filing away. I went slowly and methodically around the circumference of the pipe as far in from one end as would be necessary to accommodate the receptacle. Once I came back around to the starting point, I slipped the receptacle over the end to check the fit. It slipped readily along as far down as the pipe threads went, and then stopped. I filed around the pipe again where it was still too big, and when I checked the fit again, the receptacle progressed about a sixty-fourth of an inch further down. It seemed as if I were taking off a lot of material, but apparently I wasn't.

So I worked around the pipe once again, more aggressively this time. This yielded another sixty-fourth of an inch of progress. Something seemed wrong. I did a little research on the Internet, and learned that I was using the right kind of file, and I was using the proper technique, more or less. So I abandoned the hole-digging for the time being, and worked on that pipe for the rest of the day and well into the evening. While my arms benefited from the exercise, I didn't make much progress. Still, the project up to that point had been so full of mishaps and complications that I just accepted the situation. I was happy that I was making any progress at all. I was a hostage to fate, and the Helsinki syndrome had set in.

Wifey suggested that perhaps the file I was using was dull. That had not occurred to me. The file looked perfectly fine. There were no broken teeth, and there was no evident wear. Still, she had something there. After all, my uncle had inherited his father's tools. There was a very good chance that the file I was using was older than I was, and had been used a lot. Moreover, it had been kicking around in a tool box with a number of other files for a long while.

The next day, I got a new file of the same type and went back to work. In an hour I was done, and the receptacle slid down fully without binding or wobbling. I primed and painted the filed area to prevent rust.

While I may not be the sharpest tool in the box, with Wifey's help I feel as if I can do anything. We make a good team.

With the pole now all ready to meet its destiny, I went out and finished the hole. There are tools made specifically for this purpose that make the job simple: the post-hole digger, and the digging bar.

I use a post-hole digger of a unique design, called The Hole Deal, and I highly recommend it over the traditional design. All post-hole diggers comprise a pair of shovels joined with a pivot so that when the shovels are brought together, they capture soil between them that is then lifted out of the hole. The traditional design joins them with a simple pivot, so that the handles must be separated to bring the shovels together. This gets progressively more difficult as the hole gets deeper, because it is hard to keep the soil in the digger when the sides of the hole are limiting how much the handles can be separated.

The Hole Deal uses a two-pivot design so that the handles and shovels move in parallel; its handles are brought together to bring the shovels together. The sides of the hole and its depth are thus not limiting factors, and it is very easy to keep the dirt captured between the shovels as the digger is lifted up. This allows one to dig holes that are plumb and uniform all the way down. Although the digger is only five feet long, I had no difficulty in taking the hole down to four and a half feet without my having to widen the top of the hole.

The other tool is called a digging bar. It is a six-foot-long iron bar with a chisel end and a tamper end. The chisel end is used to loosen the dirt at the bottom of the hole to make it easier to remove with the post-hole digger; the tamper end is used to settle and compact material at the bottom of a hole. The digging bar is also used to dislodge and break up rocks, or cut roots, as necessary.

Happily, I encountered absolutely no obstacles on the way down, so while the work went slowly, it also went steadily. I got so enthusiastic at the end that I actually went an inch farther than I needed to. Then I had lunch.

You may be wondering why I set the pole in sand, rather than concrete. While there are several advantages to the use of sand as a base, the reason I used it here is that we have no overall plan for the yard design, and until we do I don't want to build anything that I can't easily remove. If you think a concrete footing would have kept the old pole from leaning, take a look at it:

Clearly, the sand held the pole so firmly that it bent at ground level; it did not shift in the hole. If I had set the pole in concrete, I would have had to excavate and lift out a hundred-pound cylinder of it, and then I would have had to dispose of that.

It occurred to me when contemplating the pole with the socket that I could have sunk the socket in concrete in order to give it some measure of stability, but without drain holes at the bottom it would have rusted out in short order, causing the pole to move back and forth in the hole more or less constantly. This movement would dislodge the concrete plug soon enough, and the pole would fall over.

I could have put down two feet of concrete to prevent its being easily dislodged, but then I'd have that hundred pounds of concrete to remove someday. This was altogether too much work for a setup that would never have been satisfactory.

The best material to use for setting poles in sand is actually not sand, strictly speaking, but crushed granite (usually called "decomposed granite", or "DG" for short). DG is the best because its individual granules are jagged, and tend to interlock pretty firmly when the material is compacted, making it quite stable and resistant to movement. This is why it is used for baseball diamonds and "gravel" driveways; as I've mentioned, we use it for our own driveway.

Unfortunately, DG is generally not available in smaller than half-truckload lots, at least not hereabouts, so instead I use paver-base sand, which is readily available in 50- to 70-pound bags. Paver-base sand is silica sand of a uniform fine grain; it interlocks to a lesser degree than DG, but it is more than stable enough to serve nicely for setting poles. Building sand will work if necessary, but not playground sand, which has no silica and offers insufficient resistance to movement.

A word of caution: never handle any silica-containing sand when it is dry without breathing protection, because silica dust acts like sandpaper in the respiratory tract. It is best and most convenient to work with it moistened enough to prevent dust from kicking up.

After lunch, I screened the two piles of the material I'd removed from the original hole in order to remove debris and reclaim the stones that were in them.

I put a layer of larger stones down as evenly as I could at the bottom of the hole, put the rest of the stones back in, and tamped them down with the tamper end of my digging bar to minimize any settling when the hole was filled. I ended up 3/4 of an inch higher than I wanted, but that is close enough for my purpose, and the extra drainage won't hurt. I put in water to just above the level of the rocks, and let things settle overnight.

As I mentioned, our soil drains very slowly.

But I was not yet done for the evening. I drove four three-foot wood stakes into the ground, each about two feet away from the center of the hole, two of them situated roughly parallel to the back wall of the house, and two perpendicular to it.

When tomorrow came, I lowered the pole into the hole slowly, taking care to land the pole somewhere in the center. Precise positioning is not crucial, but a position near the center ensures that the pole is supported evenly around its circumference, thus increasing its tendency to remain plumb as the sand settles. As it happened, the pole found a nice little niche within a half-inch of dead center. This positioning is ideal, for it locks the bottom of the pole firmly in place, further enhancing its tendency to remain true to the earth.

Having achieved this, I carefully moved the pole over to rest against the side without knocking it out of its niche. I took a length of sash cord (any rope will do), tied one end to one of the wood posts, looped the other end around the pole and tied a taut-line hitch around the cord. This is a knot that I learned back in Cub Scouts, very useful when you need to adjust the length of a rope under tension. I use the knot shown on Wikipedia as #1857 (the third one listed at the link).

I did this for all four posts, all the while moving the pole gently to avoid dislodging its bottom end. Then, I attached a post level to the pole at eye level, oriented it so one side was parallel to the rear wall of the house, then I adjusted the length of each rope by sliding the taut-line hitch towards or away from the pole until the bubbles in both horizontal vials were centered. indicating that the pole was plumb (i.e., perpendicular to the ground). I tightened the cords just enough to ensure that the pole stayed plumb, and no tighter.

This reminds me that I have forgotten to tell you about the post level, one more specialized tool used in this job. It has two spirit vials positioned horizontally at right angles to each other to check for plumb, and one positioned at a right angle to the other vials vertically to check the top of a post or beam for level with the ground.

This gag with the ropes and wood posts was something I whipped up this time around, so I would be free to work with both hands without undue worry about keeping the pole plumb. I've put poles up several times before without doing this, and it was quite awkward filling the hole with one hand while trying to keep the pole plumb with the other.

I worked with the posts and the level oriented to the house's footprint because the feeder would most often be viewed from the house. Theoretically it doesn't really matter how one orients the posts or the level, but a post level is not a terribly precise instrument, and orienting things the way I did maximized its precision along the most-used sight lines.

With the pole thus secured, I filled the hole back up, starting with the screened sand I took out of the old hole and continuing with some new sand. I put it in a trowelful at a time evenly around the pole, stopping every six inches or so to wet the sand evenly, putting just enough water in to cover the sand and then letting it drain in order to eliminate any little air pockets and to get the sand to settle evenly and firmly.

At eight inches below ground, I switched from sand to decomposed granite, which I stole from my supply that I have for filling divots in the driveway. I put in six inches of it just to help keep the pole on the straight and narrow path. I topped up the last two inches of the hole with screened dirt to give the installation a finished appearance, then let the whole hole settle overnight before I put a load on the pole.

Early the next morning, I put the feeder in place, and Wifey set a table of tasty comestibles for our little pals. As is always the case with a new feeder, it was greeted with great skepticism at first; the little creatures of the forest are rightly skeptical of change. By mid-afternoon, however, we had our first hungry customer.

This reminds me that my next job is to clean the gutters.

Our feeder is open to all our little woodland friends. But as for the company that sold us the feeder with its crappy screws and instructions as well as that pathetic excuse for a mounting pole, the company with the buncombe-laden product descriptions, the company that through its malfeasance turned a simple task into a major project—well, that company is strictly for the birds.

* * *

"My client is prepared to plead to one count of PC 481(a)(2), Knocking Non-Glass Ornament Off Christmas Tree, if the count of PC 666(e), Grand Theft Bird Ornament, is dropped."

For The Birds, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 04:17:00 -0800

We have more than our share of wildlife here at the Farm House. While this can occasionally be troublesome, our pups do a great job of keeping the predators at bay. Nature is a fine thing, but we want our yard to be Daktari, not Wild Kingdom.

The first summer here, I put up a big platform feeder on a 8-foot galvanized-steel pole that came with it. It was a simple feeder, just a wood frame with a perforated-metal insert to hold the food and provide drainage, but it served our needs quite well.

June 2007, about a year after I installed the feeder.

I set the pole in a sand base two feet into the ground. It did just fine for nearly a decade, serving all comers with no problems. I had to tighten up the joints of the feeder occasionally, and eventually replaced all the screws with better ones, but the pole remained serenely unchanged by the passing years.

Then, a few years ago a new species began to appear, some sort of dove or pigeon that is larger than a rock dove (the common street pigeon), with a generally pearl-gray body and a dark collar on the back of the neck. As nearly as I have been able to determine, it is the Eurasian collared dove, although our birds are larger and of a more substantial build than the breed description.

For a long time, there was only one pair of the collared doves. Eventually, another pair appeared, then a third. Then, before we knew it, the feeder was covered with them. It was much like that sequence in The Birds wherein one bird lands on a jungle gym, then after a while the scene cuts back briefly to show a half-dozen, and after a while the scene cuts back to the same shot a third time, only this time you can't see the jungle gym for all the birds on it. Soon thereafter, the birds start breaking things.

So it went with us. The collared dove population kept increasing until by the start of this past summer, they had become a genuine nuisance. Scores of them would appear each day, occupying every square inch of the feeder. When they'd eaten all the food, they'd just hang out on the feeder like a street gang, blocking all other customers. We'd shoo them away, but they'd return in short order.

After a month or so of this, we looked out one day to find that the pole had actually bent under the weight of all those doves. Not only that, but they'd bent the feeder's mounting plate and the metal insert, and loosened all the joints badly. As a result, the feeder was pretty much useless.

Great, another unscheduled job. Well, at least it would be a quick, simple one. The hole was already dug. All I had to do was get a new feeder and a stronger pole, take out the old pole, empty the hole, put in the new pole, fill the hole up again, and put up the new feeder. It was a day's work at most, once I found a new feeder and a stouter pole.

I surveyed our usual online sources. I found a half-dozen or so feeders that would serve, but no poles long enough to suit me. I needed eight feet at least; we'd learned from experience that this pole length was necessary to place the feeder high enough to keep our invited dinner guests safe from our canine security detail when the pole was sunk to the proper depth. Anything less than 8 feet, and either the feeder would not be high enough, or the pole would not be stable enough.

At that point, I came down with a pretty bad case of pneumonia, and was out of commission for about six weeks. When I recovered, I was wholly occupied with the task of catching up on all the general maintenance that had gone undone during my illness. I was desperate to get back to my raison d'etre, finishing the exterior restoration.

In order to defer replacement until I had the time to find a suitable new feeder and pole, I reset the old pole in its sand to counteract the bend somewhat and did what I could to fix the other damage. This made the feeder marginally usable. To discourage Las Palomas Gordas from wreaking further damage, we put out only peanuts, which are too big for them to eat. This would at least take care of the squirrels, jays and crows.

After resetting. The feeder was pretty wobbly on the pole.

November rolled around, and with the Christmas season fast approaching, I abandoned hope of getting back to the restoration anytime soon and began my usual seasonal preparations. Then, the weather turned decidedly colder, and Wifey, concerned for the winter welfare of the little birds such as finches, nuthatches, and sparrows who needed actual seeds to eat, took matters in her own hands. She selected a rather pretty new feeder with a roof, and brought her choice to my attention.

This brought the feeder project suddenly front and center once again, and so I put everything else aside in order to resolve the situation as quickly as possible. I liked her choice; it was somewhat smaller than the old feeder, which would lessen the load on the pole, and the roof would, I hoped, make the feeder less accessible to the collared doves, who were too big to fit easily under it.

I wasn't so sure about the pole that was intended to go with the feeder. It was one of those that I had rejected earlier. I didn't like its base: a foot-long socket that was to be buried in the soil. The socket was just a length of pipe with one end squashed. The pole itself was probably okay as far as it went; it was 80 inches long in three segments, and it looked like it could stand up under a load. I figured that at most 10 inches would slip down into the socket, putting the feeder at the absolute minimum height, which was fine. But that would put only one-eighth of the pole in the ground, which is not nearly enough. Good building practice dictates that at least a quarter of a pole or post's length should be in the ground, so that it can carry the load and still remain securely in place.

At this point, however, I was beginning to get desperate. As skeptical as I was about this pole's suitability, it was the only possibly suitable one I had found. Moreover, the company selling the pole is reputable and has been around for longer than I have. The pole's description specifically promised "super stability in any soil."

We've had a pleasant relationship with this company for over twenty years, and in all that time we'd never received a product that did not live up to its description. So I ordered the feeder and the pole. I wished, rather than believed, that the pole would come with a way to embed the socket securely enough in the earth to support the pole, feeder, food and birds.

In due course the order was delivered, but when I unpacked the pole I saw to my great dismay but utter lack of surprise that it came with no instructions, no revelation about its installation that would somehow render it usable. The pole was stout enough, but it was too heavy to be supported by that short socket once the feeder was mounted upon it. In any soil.

Self-evidently inadequate.

Perhaps the most irksome thing about the socket was that it had no drain holes in the bottom, and although the pole was advertised as being powder-coated, it appeared from the thinness of the coating to be merely painted. Thus, even if it were somehow possible to arrive at a stable mounting for this pole, the socket was doomed to rust fairly quickly from the unavoidable accumulation of moisture sitting in it constantly.

Not willing to give up just yet, I thought it might get us at least through the winter if I could drive it directly into the soil, but I had to give up on the attempt before I'd managed to get the socket more than two inches in; our ground is so dense that at that point the top of the socket was already beginning to flatten. It would be unusable before I got it halfway in. If I had tried to sink it in sand, it would slip to one side as soon as I put the feeder on it.

The pole purchase was nonetheless necessary, because I needed the feeder mounting plate that it came with; it has a nice, sturdy socket on the bottom that slips onto the top of a pole and tightens securely with a thumbscrew. I could work with it, if I could find a suitable pole it would fit upon.

If. This put me back at square one. It didn't matter that I had a swell new feeder, because I had no suitable pole for it, and my muse had thus far failed to guide me in the proper direction.

Getting increasingly anxious to put this task behind me, I decided to put the feeder together while I awaited divine inspiration regarding the pole. It was a very pretty feeder, made of solid unfinished cedar with iron roof supports. The stock used was even 7/8 of an inch thick, just like the 4/4 S1S stock used throughout the Farm House. Wifey had chosen well, it seemed.

My job was to screw the supports to the base, then the roof to the supports. It seemed simple enough. They had even put little dents were the screws were supposed to go. The instructions said to line up the holes in the supports with the dents in the wood and start screwing away. They even said it was "OK" if some of the screws didn't go in straight.

Well, skewed screws may be okay with them, but certainly not with me. Furthermore, as I've pointed out more than once, it's never good practice to drive screws into wood without pre-drilling the hole first; either the wood will split or the screw will break.

I became rather annoyed when I looked at the provided screws; they bore a thin yellowish finish that was unsuitable for outdoor use in any event, and especially unsuitable for use in cedar, which is readily and deeply stained by such screws. I briefly considered going out to get the proper stainless steel screws, but at that point I just wanted to get the job done as quickly as possible. Besides, no one else would likely ever see the screws, or the ugly black stains they would make. So, I forged ahead.

Before pre-drilling the holes, I checked the alignment of the guide dents. Fully half of them were way off the mark. I was beginning to suspect that these people just didn't take their business seriously. This was a very expensive feeder, and these blackguards couldn't even be bothered to put their dents in the right place. No wonder it was OK with them if the screws didn't go in straight; once you reject pre-drilling, it's a slippery slope.

I made proper guide marks where they belonged, then drilled pilot holes. Then, I grabbed a screwdriver of the appropriate size and slowly drove the first screw most of the way in, at which point the still-protruding part of the screw, with no warning, twisted right off, despite my having pre-drilled the hole. One of the most expensive feeders on God's green earth, furnished with the cheapest screws I've ever seen. What were they made of, gutta-percha? At this point, I really wanted to drive these screws into my temples and have done with this whole mess. The walls were seriously closing in on me.

Not enough of the screw was left above the wood to back it out with pliers, so I went out to get one of those doodads that allow one to back out a damaged screw, as well as the stainless steel screws that should have been provided in the first place. I had to go to a few places to find these items, only to discover upon returning home that the diameter of the screw shaft was too small for the screw-extractor doodad to work. So I just left the broken screw in place and put the blasted thing together with no further trauma nor offense to my bleeding sensibilities.

I then turned back to the problem of finding a suitable mounting for the feeder. I hit upon the idea of using a 4x4 wood post; I knew the company that sold the feeder had feeder mounting plates for such posts, and this would definitely be strong enough to carry the load. They also mentioned in the feeder's description that it could be mounted on a 4x4 post.

This idea ran aground when I discovered that, in fact, the feeder couldn't be mounted on a 4x4 post, at least not with the only mounting plate the company sold for that purpose; the bottom joist of the feeder wasn't wide enough to accommodate it. I could have modified the feeder to address this problem, but I decided to look for a simpler solution.

As I mentioned, the receptacle provided with the pole that came with the feeder was sturdy enough, so I resolved to try to find a pole that would fit it that would also provide a solid mooring for the feeder. I figured Ganahl Lumber was a promising place to start, because they have an admirable selection of building materials, and they always make me feel at home there.

As usual, Ganahl came through for me.

Thar be poles here!

I found a nearly perfect solution: a 10-foot length of 3/4-inch (inside diameter) rigid electrical conduit. Despite its name, it's flexible enough to withstand stress and snap back to straightness without staying bent permanently. It's sturdy enough to carry the weight of a hundred collared doves, made of galvanized steel to resist corrosion, and it has an outside diameter of just over one inch. I say "nearly" perfect because I would have to reduce the diameter of the pole's top down to an inch in order to accept the receptacle.

But I didn't think that would be very hard.

Stay tuned for Part 2, in which I actually get to the point.

* * *

The Wily Forest Cat lies in wait for his prey, after having hidden all the remotes.

CSI: House

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Mon, 4 May 2015 11:00:00 -0700

I haven't written here for some time because I haven't been working on the exterior restoration. I've been taking some time to catch up on all the things I have neglected for the past several years while I concentrated on the restoration work.

In the process of doing these other things, the garage, my base of operations, fell into such disarray that when I was ready to return to the restoration work, I found that my workshop had assumed the character of an archaeological dig. It is only this past week that I have at last dug down to the stratum containing all the tools and materials I use in the restoration work, so I expect that I shall be back out on the veranda roof soon.

Of course, along the way unexpected things cropped up, as they always do with any house. One happened just last week that bears retelling here, for it touches upon a subject I have visited many times in this blog.

It was late afternoon, and I had just come back into the house from a long day out in the garage. I ran upstairs to put something in the bathroom, and when I got there I heard a noise coming from the vicinity of the toilet. It was an odd, mechanical noise, hard to describe, but it sounded something like this: whirrrrrr TIC. . . whirrrr TIC. . . whirrrrrrrr TIC, over and over, with the length of the whirr varying randomly.

As I got closer to the noise, it sounded as if it were coming from the toilet tank, but a quick check inside revealed that the noise was in fact coming from inside the wall.

This immediately put me in mind of something I wrote way back in the early days of this blog, in the post "The Farm House Speaks:"

We've all heard it a million times: "If these walls could talk. . . ." Well, walls do talk, especially in an old house like the Farm House. They tell many stories of the events they have been through and the people who have lived within them. If you take the time to understand what they are saying, you can learn a lot about the house's history; more importantly, you may learn important things about its condition.

This particular wall, at this particular time, had an important thing to tell me about its condition: "I have a leaky pipe in here!"

While the noise sounded more like there was a time bomb in there, I knew it had to be a leak, because I knew that the only thing in the wall in that area was the water supply pipe for the toilet. I knew this because I was familiar with a photograph I took of this area from the adjoining room back when the walls were still open.

The picture is pretty fuzzy, because it was one of the first I took with the digital camera my friend Nik kindly lent me, and I still didn't know how to operate it properly, but it is nonetheless plenty clear enough to see the curved copper pipe heading over to the left and disappearing back into the wall; this is right where the noise was coming from, so whatever it sounded like, it had to be a leak.

Also clearly visible is a piece of wood that appears to have been wedged in under this pipe, and right above this piece of wood, barely discernible, is a copper strap (indicated by the red arrow) of the kind customarily used to keep a pipe in place.

That piece of wood bothered me: why, precisely, was it there? I could not help but conclude that the plumber who installed the pipe had stuck it under there, because he had reason to believe that the strap alone would not be sufficient to support the pipe. Moreover, the only reason he could have for this belief was the knowledge that he had not installed the strap correctly.

If this sounds unduly harsh or paranoid, please understand that I was merely drawing upon my long experience with this plumber's workmanship. He had a perfect record with all the fixtures he installed: he did every one of them incorrectly.

There is not one of them I did not have to fix myself or have fixed by a plumber. Every one of them developed leaks at every joint and connection, because he had failed to tighten them all the way. Every handle was loose, because he had not tightened the attachment screws. Every one of the aerators was clogged with plumbing debris, because he had not bothered to remove them and flush the debris out after installing the fixtures. The man seemed to have a psychopathic compulsion to cut every corner he could find to cut in his work.

I had hoped that his in-wall work would prove to be better, especially because it had been subject to inspection and testing, but that aberrant piece of wood said otherwise. It had consciousness of guilt written all over it.

Of course, I did all this sleuthing and deduction later in the evening. The minute I realized there was a leak I called our plumber—or rather, I called Wifey and she called the plumber, because I'd just gotten a new phone and hadn't yet typed my contacts back in (for some reason, they never seem to transfer over from my old phone as they are supposed to). Unfortunately, it was past the end of the workday, and the plumber was not immediately available, so Wifey had to leave a message.

When she buzzed me back with this information, I filled up some buckets with enough water to get us through the night, then turned off the water supply to the house. I then went to the basement faucet, the lowest one in the house, and opened both taps. This relieved the pressure in the pipes, which stopped the leak immediately. Soon thereafter, the plumber returned our call; after I explained the situation to him, he said he'd be here first thing in the morning.

True to his word, he was. His dependability is one of the reasons why he is a valued member of the Farm House maintenance team; another is that he really knows his stuff.

We turned the water supply back on. Once the pressure built back up in the pipe, the noise returned. He was as baffled by its mechanical sound as I was, but he agreed that it had to be a leak, so he opened up the wall from the adjoining room to expose the area where the noise was coming from.

Sure enough, there was water bubbling out from under the strap. And just as I had suspected, the strap was not installed correctly. It should have been attached firmly to the wall with screws driven in all the way. This strap was only loosely attached, with the screws driven in only partway and at an angle. This is contrary to code, but I have already described how curiously tolerant the City inspector could be of our contractor's distinctive mode of operation at the darndest times.

It was easy to see why the plumber did it that way, because he screwed directly into the beadboard wainscoting of the bathroom, and if he'd driven the screws in snug they would have broken through the other side. What he should have done was to affix a small 3/4" thick piece of wood to the back of the wainscoting and then attach the strap onto that; that way, he could have secured the pipe properly without breaking through the beadboard. But that would have taken more time, and time is money, the kind that bites into a contractor's profit.

Having found the problem, the plumber was able to fix it in short order. After shutting off the water and draining the line, he removed the strap and the block of wood, cut out the damaged length of pipe, and spliced in a new piece of rigid copper pipe with soldered joints at each end. This gave the pipe enough structural rigidity that it no longer needed to be strapped to the wall.

It may be odd to consider any leak a fortunate one, but if there ever was such a thing, this was it: a mere pinhole, covered by the strap so that it did not spray onto the walls. Instead, it just bubbled out and dripped down onto the end grain of the wood underneath. The wood acted as a sponge, absorbing all but a very small amount of the leaked water and preventing any water damage. So that wood performed an essential function after all, although certainly not one the original plumber intended.

Why did the leak occur? The answer to this was immediately obvious to the plumber. It had to do with the incorrect way the strap was attached. The reason a strap must be securely attached to the wall is to prevent the natural movement that occurs in a pipe when it expands and contracts in response to temperature changes caused by the passage of water through it. The fact that this strap was loosely attached caused the copper supply pipe to move constantly with every variation in temperature over the eleven intervening years, eventually to come into contact with one of the steel strap screws.

One of the cardinal rules of proper plumbing procedure, and the reason why a loose strap is a code violation, is that copper-containing metals should never be allowed to come into contact with any ferrous (iron-based) metal such as steel. When this happens, corrosion occurs at the point of contact, which weakens both metals and eventually results in a leak. That is just what happened in this case.

All in all, this was a happy ending to what could have been a disaster. Of course, now I have yet another unexpected task, that of patching up the hole in the study wall.

I've taped plastic screen material over it to discourage feline exploration while the residual moisture evaporates.

But I'm certainly not complaining. This could have been a major disaster if the leak had been worse, or if I had not taken immediate action to stop it.

So, with this little incident in mind, always remember that the stories a house tells are not always historical in nature. Sometimes, they are breaking news flashes. Or, as I put it way back when:

Listen to your house, and it will keep you snug and safe for a lifetime. Ignore it, and it will surely find a way to get your attention.

For my part, I am now going to look back at all the other pictures I took when the walls were still open, to see if I can find any advance tips on breaking news flashes yet to come.

* * *

There are some stories only cats can hear.

Victorians And Their Grand Schemes

noreply@blogger.com (Otis Criblecoblis) — Sun, 7 Dec 2014 14:42:00 -0800

I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving. Wifey and I certainly did. We spent ours in the company of some very good friends, at their lovely home in Windsor Square. Windsor Square is one of L.A.'s oldest, most well-preserved neighborhoods, but its name is not familiar even to most native Angelenos, because it is usually lumped in with its neighbor to the west, Hancock Park.

Windsor Square was established in 1911, when the area was at the western extent of the developed city. It was designed from the first as a top-drawer development, with large lots, private streets, underground utilities (the first in L.A. to have them), and a deed requirement that each lot contain a single-family home valued at a minimum of $12,500, a significant amount for the time.

The residents soon learned how expensive street maintenance was, deeding the streets to the city in 1920, but otherwise steadfastly maintained the original character of the neighborhood in the face of rapid urbanization and ever-increasing population density. Their successful efforts to this end blazed a trail followed decades later by the Farm House's own neighborhood, Bungalow Heaven.

After dinner, we took a walk around the neighborhood, and our friend pointed out some of its most lovely homes. The one that really fired my imagination was a massive old Victorian mansion, a Colonial Revival that, while less ornamented than a Queen Anne, still looks plenty fancy. It has the familiar late-Victorian asymmetric massing, shingled siding over a masonry foundation that extends up through half of the first story, dozens of lovely leaded windows, and a big round tower at one corner.

The only sour note for me was the painfully inappropriate color scheme the house bears: brick-red paint on the foundation, cream yellow on the shingles, and white on all the trim. I fell in love with the place nonetheless, but I couldn't help but think that the house would be even lovelier in proper livery.

When I got home, I looked the house up, and learned that it was built in either 1890 or 1898 (my guess is the earlier date) much closer to downtown, and it was moved to its present location in 1915. This was a common procedure in those days, moving mansions westward as the city expanded.

When I saw a picture of the house from 1910, in its original location, I was satisfied to see that back then the masonry foundation was unpainted, and the shingles were dark—apparently also unpainted, as was often the custom then (the Farm House's own shingle-sided areas were also originally unpainted). The trim color was very light, as was fairly typical of Colonial Revival Victorians back in the day. It was the same house, all right, but it looked a lot different with that scheme. It looked a lot better.

I knew my brother Jon would be interested, so I told him a little about the house and sent him the 1910 picture. When he responded favorably, I followed up with more information and a current picture of the house. When he saw the second picture, he was quite disappointed. He saw a house in poor repair, one that desperately needed extensive restoration of missing elements.

This reaction baffled me at first, because the house is in great physical shape. Indeed, in that neighborhood it would have to be. Then I looked at the current picture again, and compared it with the 1910 picture, and I realized how he had gotten that impression. The house in the current photo looked truncated and washed-out compared to the house in the old photo. If I had just seen the photos, and not the house itself in person, I likely would have come to the same conclusion as Jon.

The thing is, Jon was fundamentally correct. The house as it stands now is lacking something essential. It is lacking the proper paint scheme, the kind of scheme the house was designed to bear. I know this to be true because I've seen this phenomenon at work before, right here at the Farm House.

In the post "An Instructive Transformation," I presented a rather dramatic before-after comparison of the middle front dormer, showing how the application of the four paint colors put the dormer in the proper context, both within itself and with the entire house. That has been the most commented-upon post, both on the blog and off, in the blog's history.

The transformation that the pictures revealed was so startling that it seemed to defy rational explanation. Nevertheless, as with most things Victorian, there in fact is a rational explanation.

* * *

My intention from the very beginning was to give the Farm House the proper livery for its vintage. Since I had no clues back in the early planning stages what the original house colors were, I undertook to formulate a paint scheme for the house that I might have chosen had I been the one to give it its first painting, one that was tasteful and appropriate for 1885 Pasadena.

I had no idea what that might entail, so I began to research the matter. I soon found the definitive book on the subject: Moss, Roger W. and Winkler, Gail Caskey, Victorian Exterior Decoration: How to Paint Your Nineteenth-Century American House Historically (1987: Henry Holt & Co., New York). It's out of print, but it's available used at Amazon.

This book is a thorough tutorial on the way Victorians painted their buildings, as well as the reasons behind their choices of color and placement. Most of the following information comes from this book, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Even if you are not planning to paint a Victorian yourself, it will greatly enhance your appreciation of Victorian architecture, and give you some insight into the Victorian mind as well.

For the sake of clarity, I am going to simplify this discussion by focusing it upon the way Victorian views acted upon the decoration of Queen Anne Victorians in the Pasadena area. Rules have always been made to be broken, but the rules I set forth in the following were broken less often here than in many other areas.

The authors divide the body of observed Victorian paint schemes into three types: Scientific, Historical and Boutique. Scientific schemes are the result of a thorough forensic analysis of all available evidence to construct a complete history of the colors a structure has worn; this is typically done with other people's money, and is thus obscenely expensive. The book tells you how to do a rough approximation of this analysis yourself, but at the time I could find no evidence of any previous colors (as it turned out, I was looking in the wrong places).

Boutique schemes are more commonly known as "painted lady" schemes, the wild, multi-colored schemes that reached their zenith of popularity in '60s San Francisco. This was definitely not what I was after.

That left us with a historical scheme, which the book defines by the observance of two simple rules:

"1. The colors applied to any building should be selected from those that were available and considered appropriate for the date, type, and style of the building at the time of its design and construction.

"2. Those colors—whatever they may be—should be applied to the structure to enhance the design in the manner intended by the original designer, builder, and owners." (Ibid., pp. 7–8)."

This described my original intention precisely; the rest of the book gave me the information I needed to carry it out.

I am no expert in architectural history, but I know enough about Victorian styles to be confident in stating that the Farm House is decidedly a Queen Anne Eastlake, even if its symmetrical layout makes it rather a distinctive one. I believe the completeness of its ornamentation raises it well above the level of a merely vernacular structure, especially now that we know the front dormers originally had bargeboards. That and its 1885 vintage mean that a High Victorian paint scheme is by far the most appropriate.

As the name suggests, the High Victorian era was the ultimate flowering of Victorian aesthetics, a time when all the various theories advanced during the era reached their widest acceptance.

As I wrote in the Journal, the Victorians had a complex definition of architectural beauty: "Victorians viewed architecture as above all an expression of beauty. Andrew Jackson Downing, perhaps the single most influential American Victorian architect, separated this expression of beauty into three aspects: beauty of utility, or fitness; beauty of propriety, or expression of purpose; and beauty of form and sentiment, or expression of style.

"Fitness in a dwelling refers to its primary function, that is, to provide shelter from the elements. Beauty is found in this regard in the utility and comfort a dwelling affords its inhabitants. . . .

"The Victorians found a certain beauty in a home that by its outward appearance expresses its purpose as a habitation for humans, as opposed to one for animals. It does this by its chimneys, its verandas, and the number and size of its windows, features that declare to the world, 'This is a proper place for humans to live.'

"While the beauty of a house's fitness and propriety may be said to appeal to one's mind, the beauty of its appearance should appeal to one's soul. Victorians saw beauty in a house that conveys a sense of unity, of consistency in its form, style and ornamentation. They derived this concept from the forms of nature. A tree is composed of a trunk, branches, foliage, and (depending upon the season) flowers or fruits, yet one naturally views these various parts as a single entity, an organic whole, because its parts have a relationship that to the eye is innately appropriate. A house should present itself in the same manner, with a logic and consistency to its various parts that induce the beholder to view it, too, as an organic whole. Moreover, just as different trees may by their natural design radiate majesty, or friendliness, or whimsy, so may a house by its design and details radiate a certain personality. It is these qualities of organic wholeness and personality that appealed to the Victorian soul."

The High Victorian practice regarding color selection and placement completely incorporated this tripartite definition of beauty, as I shall soon strive to make clear. First, however, I need to discuss the particular way in which Victorians viewed color during this period.

High Victorian color theory was based upon physiological perceptions of color. No doubt as a child you did the old experiment of staring at a color on a printed page for a while and then quickly looking at a white wall, discovering that what you saw through your eyes on that wall was a completely different color. The color you saw on the page and the afterimage you saw on the wall are complimentary colors; based upon this observation, they arrived at a color wheel based upon red, yellow and blue as the three primary colors, with their respective compliments green, purple and orange as secondary colors and the various pairings of secondary colors as tertiary colors.

Victorians knew, because of the afterimage in the eyes, that complimentary colors placed next to each other would increase the perceived intensity of both. Also because of the afterimage, colors placed adjacent to each other that are not complimentary will be perceived differently. For example, when red is placed next to orange, the red will appear more purplish and the orange more yellowish.

Thus, Victorians understood that for a house to appear as an organic whole, as dictated by beauty of form, the choice of colors was crucial. No longer was color selection considered purely a matter of personal preference; it was to a certain degree dictated by human physiology. In other words, the house's color palette had to be considered not as a mere collection of pleasing colors, but rather as an inter-dependent system of colors that played nicely with each other.

There were two ways to approach the issue of color harmony. One was harmony by analogy, employing colors adjacent to each other on the color wheel; the other was harmony by contrast, employing colors opposite (complimentary) to each other. In this way, one would ensure that the afterimage effect would enhance the colors rather than cause them to clash.

Of course, this only describes the relationships among the colors used; it says nothing about which colors to use. Ah, but the Victorians had something to say on that subject as well.

At the beginning of the Victorian era, people typically used white for a house's body color, using whatever contrasting color they desired for the one trim color that was used. This was due in some measure to the fact that at that time painters had to mix paint on the premises, and white was the easiest color to mix while avoiding color variations between batches. Even so, white was a popular color then as now because it is bright and it goes with everything.

Then, along came our old friend Andrew Jackson Downing, whom I quoted at length in the first volume of the Journal. He was the preeminent tastemaker of the Victorian era. In his 1842 book Cottage Residences, he assailed the practice of painting a house white as being "entirely unsuitable, and in bad taste" (Andrew Jackson Downing, Cottage Residences (New York, 1842), p. 22). He held that a white house stood out in glaring disharmony with its surroundings. He mounted a crusade, in his books and in magazine articles, to stop the practice; with his considerable influence, his effort was eventually quite successful.

He in fact discouraged the use of any pure hues. He believed that a building should be in harmony with nature, and as such he promoted a palette of muted shades reflecting in a subtle way the colors found in nature. For a time his prescriptions were followed faithfully; but the color genie was out of the bottle, and while his concept of keeping the colors harmonious with nature was maintained, the specific colors used grew ever more assertive as the years passed.

The ebullience of the post-Civil War reconstruction period, combined with the integration of contemporary color theory and the advent of ready-made paints, brought on the rich colors and complex color schemes of the High Victorian era by the late 1870s. These schemes were an integral part of the Queen Anne style that was predominant in Pasadena during its first few decades of existence.

As I mentioned above, High Victorian color schemes were devised so as to reflect the tripartite Victorian definition of beauty. Beauty of utility, of a house fulfilling its primary function of providing safe harbor, is emphasized by the trim color and the way it is applied. More often than not, the trim color is darker than the body color, and it is applied so as to outline the structural elements and provide a visual indication of the way load is transferred to the foundation. The body color of the foundation, if not unpainted stone or masonry, is always dark to emphasize the structure's firm anchorage. Quite often the color used is dark brown, suggesting a connection with the soil.

Beauty of propriety, of a house's fitness as a human habitation, is also conveyed largely by the first trim color, which outlines and thus emphasizes the windows, verandas, and other such features that make the structure a fit place for humans to live. The second trim color, generally applied exclusively to the sash (the parts of the window holding the glass) and the doors, further emphasizes these features; proper ventilation was a crucial feature to the Victorian mind, because before that these features were considered luxury items in numbers beyond the bare minimum, and were often insufficiently provided in more modest homes.

Beauty of form and sentiment, of the style expressed by the house, is analogous to what we would call today aesthetic or artistic beauty. This is conveyed in the color scheme by the body colors used, how they are deployed, and how they harmonize with each other, the trim colors, and the surrounding environment. The body color is always lighter than that of the foundation (unless the foundation is unpainted masonry or stone), and shingled tympana (the triangular areas under gables) bear a lighter version of the body color if not simply left unpainted. This upward progression in body colors from dark to light is intended to reflect the transition from earthly darkness to heavenly light.

Another element to consider here is that Victorians fancied windows as a house's eyes, which is why the sash (the frames bearing the window panes) are picked out in a second trim color. In pursuit of this fancy, one often sees the putty bevels around each pane painted scarlet, a bit of stage makeup that makes the "eyes" really pop!

Queen Anne homes are always ornamented, and while the ornamentation may be whimsical, it is, when properly executed, never arbitrary. There is a consistent logic to its use.

Think of a Queen Anne house's ornamentation as the accessorization of a well-dressed woman's outfit. She's not going to wear a necklace around her shoulders, or a brooch on her ear. Each accessory is designed to highlight and beautify a specific area, according to a logic that is self-evident when seen.

Similarly, the various spandrels and corbels and bargeboards—the "gingerbread"—of a Queen Anne are designed to highlight and beautify specific areas. The difference here is that the logic is not self-evident—unless rendered so by the proper selection and placement of colors. Queen Annes are specifically designed to bear a High Victorian paint scheme, and aesthetically they don't make sense without one.

Generally speaking, the gingerbread was painted the trim color to associate it with the house's structural framework and to set it off from the body of the house. And of course, the relationship between the trim and body colors was crucial. Based upon the two methods of insuring color harmony, the trim and body colors were either complimentary (e.g., red and green) or adjacent (e.g., red and gold).

Veranda floors and the tops of steps, when made of wood, are traditionally painted some shade of gray, usually in the medium range. This color is practical, because it hides dirt and it goes with everything.

There was one place on the Victorian exterior that was traditionally painted one particular color no matter what colors were used elsewhere: veranda ceilings, which more often than not were painted sky blue. This was done to emulate the sky, and was intended to heighten the feeling of spaciousness in the veranda and the interior rooms that looked out upon it. Sometimes, fluffy white clouds were added to carry the effect even further.

This may all seem far too complicated a regime to have gained such wide acceptance, but it is merely one example of how Americans of that time approached life.

The post-Civil War period was a time of rapid scientific and technological advancement. A steady increase in productivity meant that no longer did the vast majority of Americans have to spend most of their waking hours just to feed, clothe and house their families. Land was cheap and plentiful. A growing belief in the future led Americans to start exploring life's expanding possibilities.

It is no surprise that people of this time would put a high priority upon, as Andrew Jackson Downing put it,

. . . bestowing upon our homes something of grace and loveliness--in making the place dearest to our hearts a sunny spot, where the social sympathies take shelter securely under the shadowy eaves. . . . (Downing, Andrew Jackson, Victorian Cottage Residences (1981: Dover Publications, Inc., New York), pp. viii-ix.)

For the first time in our country's history, ownership of a stylish, comfortable home and some land did not require significant wealth, so it was only natural that this was the first of life's exciting new possibilities a great many Americans explored with great zeal and dedication.

* * *

Now, I'd like to use the example of the remarkable transformation of the Farm House's central front dormer to illustrate in a small way the logic of a High Victorian paint scheme in action.

Here are the before and after pictures from the earlier post:

Of course, merely repairing the dormer's skin and giving it a good coat of white paint would have been a considerable improvement in itself, but those improvements alone do not account for the transformation evidenced by a comparison of these pictures. While I believe these pictures speak for themselves, for the sake of discussion I'll put forth the general consensus opinion of the various commenters.

In the Before picture, the dormer appears to be an appendage plunked down upon an unsuspecting roof. The scalloped shingles and especially the lace-like appendage just beneath them look like silly, corny, pointless afterthoughts, like a vinyl roof on a Sixties land yacht.

In the After picture, the dormer appears to be an organic part of the structure. The shingles and "lace runner" (my own non-technical term for it) no longer seem de trop. The entire dormer now seems to be pulled together as a single unit, rather than a mere assemblage of house parts. The dormer looks warm and inviting, evocative of an earlier, more graceful time.

The reason the dormer now looks like an integral part of the house is because of the uniform, contrasting color of the trim. It pulls the dormer together visually and anchors it to the rest of the structure. The anchoring effect is strongest at the top, because the color highlights the fact that the house's roofing material is continued onto the roof of the dormer.

The trim color pulls the dormer together visually by dint of the relationship among the colors. The colors of the side shiplap and the scalloped shingles of the tympanum, as well of that of the sash (the window frames), are complimentary to the trim, a relationship that naturally makes sense to the eye on a physiological level. The fact that this is a physiological observation, requiring no conscious thought, is I believe what makes the transformation seem to have a bit of magic about it: the viewer already knows the color scheme suits the structure well before he even has a chance to ponder why this might be so.

The reasons why the paint scheme makes the scalloped shingles and lace runner relevant to the structure are considerably more complex, but here I'll just hit the high points.

The simple reason why the shingles are made relevant is that they are picked out in a different color from the rest of the dormer. This highlights the fact that they represent a different texture from the rest of the dormer. The texture is visually pleasing in itself, and doubly so because it spices up what would otherwise be a flat, boring front. The shingles provide visual interest, and the lighter body color intensifies that interest.

Similarly, the lace runner breaks up what would otherwise be a flat, featureless casing surrounding the windows, and adds a touch of grace. Yes, it self-evidently provides no function other than decoration, but that is why it is not picked out in a different color. In a much larger house with a great deal of this sort of decoration, it might well be picked out in the first body color, but to do this in a house built on the scale of the Farm House would just be the tarting-up of an already-lovely lady.

I almost forgot to discuss the windows! At first, I thought the practice of painting the sash a different color from the trim quite odd, but it makes perfect sense in a Victorian context. I've already mentioned the eyes angle, which goes to the beauty of form and sentiment. I've also mentioned that drawing attention to them in this manner goes to the beauty of fitness, because a house fit for human habitation must have plenty of light and ventilation.

What I had not previously considered is that the practice also goes to the beauty of utility. Recall that under that precept, the trim color is supposed to show the transfer of the house's load down to the foundation. Windows are self-evidently not a part of that. So it's a triple play for the windows' bearing a different color.

While I'm at it, allow me to present the long-promised Before And After of the north dormer:

I think the comparison here is even more dramatic, because the dormer is much larger and was in far worse condition than the middle dormer. Oh, and you can also see along the left half of the roofline that in the interim (just a few months ago, in fact) we had the damage from the Big Blow of November 30, 2011 repaired. That was when a massive windstorm brought a large branch of the oak tree crashing down upon the roof, damaging the shingles on this dormer and up near the north chimney. Mercifully, the house was otherwise spared.

As I said at the start of this discussion, Victorians believed that a house should present itself with a logic and consistency to its various parts that induce the beholder to view it as an organic whole. The above comparisons show how indispensable a proper paint scheme is in putting that across, and why such a scheme should be considered an inseparable element of a proper Victorian home.

* * *

As nice as the dormers look now, imagine how much prettier they would be with their original bargeboards in place! In case you don't recall what a bargeboard is, here's a picture of the one in the north gable:

The bargeboards in the front dormers were, without a doubt, scaled-down versions of this one. When I'm done painting the house, I hope to be able to convince the Cultural Heritage Commission to let me replace them. I may be biased, but the Farm House's bargeboards are the prettiest and most graceful I've ever seen. They suggest to me a fringe of curls peeking out of a pretty girl's bonnet over her forehead. I imagine that this effect was even more pronounced when the shingles were unpainted.

Before I sign off, let me pull the camera back and show you the effect of the proper paint scheme on the middle dormer in relation to the whole house:

Notice how more firmly attached to the house the middle dormer appears compared to the others. Notice also how the eye associates it with the completed south side. Also, note how nicely the new colors harmonize with the house's surroundings.

I guarantee that when the whole house is painted, the effect will be profoundly mind-blowing.

* * *

Red Wolf also harmonizes with his surrounding environment.

Meanwhile, the Wily Forest Cat and his protégé
formulate a grand scheme of their own.