you might say that construction is FUN, or that putting giant beams in place is COOL, and reusing redwood to make nice furniture is AWESOME, and having extra space to do stuff in is AMAZING, but sooner or later things are going to come down to money. that’s when things get weird and the garage starts spelling things out, like it says “ATM” right now.
you might say that the garage is now a great place to play 3-dimensional PONG…
and you might say that i played such a fierce game of pong i kicked the pants off of my opponent…
the giant hole in the roof’s been cut, so the moonlight can stream in. the insulation is also in place, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference today. i know we’re not buried under ten feet of snow, but it’s been sweater-shirt-fleece-wool hat inside the house kind of weather. in fact its cold and its sunny, but there isn’t enough wind to make the famous “wind chicken.” maybe when the garage is finished we can ask the guys to put up hook in the eave.
as anyone will tell you, construction is hard work, and after handling a compound miter saw all day, there’s nothing like a bottle of chateauneuf du pup to warm your nose.
i came home the other day to a rainbow in the kitchen, which must have been unlucky, as i received a pair of shoes i ordered and found out they sent me two right feet. i asked the company if they could send me two left feets, but they said they didn’t have any more of those shoes at all, rights or lefts. bleh.
my luck turned when i ate a chip in the shape of underwear—the tighty-superhero kind—with the negative space of a rainbow, if rainbows were a cookie cutter type of thing. instead of buying something, i was able to get rid of the crap that had been in the garage by combining all my piles (the “so-and-so might want this” pile, the infamous “maybe” pile, the “aw – i made that by hand” pile, and so on) into just two: the trash and the goodwill pile. phew.
but really, what to do with stuff that you can’t get rid of. like the top of the washing machine, which we don’t need because right now the dryer sits on the washer, but what if we ever needed the washer/dryer to be side by side (!)
with everything out of the way the new beam in the garage sticks out like a sore thumb – it’s the only thing that is straight and level in the whole place. we’ve already scavenged the concrete for pieces to go in our reclaimed concrete project, but then again, that beam seems like a nice place to hang a horseshoe…
in just a short time the weather’s gone from “maybe we can own wool clothes in LA” to the usual 80 degrees and sunny. for a hike we went wandering in a lovely canyon in the Palisades (where locked gates aren’t too locked) and saw several thousand feet of wild and rampant nasturtiums. they weren’t flowering (or sporting seeds, which are good for making faux-capers when you pickle them) but we could see the spread going wide and deep into the distance. (and unstoppable, if you’ve ever tried getting rid of nasturtiums.)
our little home renovation project is a budding little weed too. it started as a small concrete job in which some Samoans (drinking cases of Hawaiian Punch) poured us a new set of front steps and removed our old flooding concrete deck (more Punch).
we then had a slowly eroding dirt mound in the shape of a deck, so we went ahead and got a new deck (built by a tea-drinking Brit, who was not impressed by the new steps, saying “you either pour smooth, or you pour rough, you don’t do both,”) a new gate (replacing the old crappy unswinging gate), and decided to seal the garage so that the outside world would no longer visible from the inside.
first things first. the old gate with redwood posts gets reclaimed and sent back to modernism:
then, we had to turn the garage inside out.
(the dog’s in there for scale, and looking at all that old art is sort of fun, though anyone who’s interested in how NOT to store paintings can contact me for lots of info. if anything looks pilfered in the photo-i’m sorry)
next comes the diverting of a stream so we can grow real Japanese wasabi and wild mushrooms (and nasturtiums i suppose) and really call it a day. i wish.
last week we went for a hike in the “Big Wild,” the 20,000 acre wilderness in the Santa Monica Wilderness and came home and immediately put on shorts and ate frozen persimmons. it seemed a little weird to wear shorts in December, but it made sense when we took our lunch outside to eat on the deck (99% completed).
this week we went for a hike in the “Big Wild,” and came home and immediately took hot showers and drank mugfuls of even hotter tea. on top of the 30 degree drop in temperature in the space of seven days, it’s been raining like crazy, (on the 99% completed deck) and we’ve got some voodoo happening where one of our rain gutters acts as if someone is on the roof running a hose a full blast, while the other one (just twenty-five feet away, on the same side of the house) comes down in a dainty trickle. even when the rain stops for a little bit, and it’s just spitting on your face in that nice southern California way, the gutter with the light output slows down, but the gushing one still rages on.
last week there was also an accident a couple streets away, and a double bus thought they could get fancy and take our street as a shortcut. news flash – our street has been gated* for the last several months, and it says “No Outlet” in bright yellow signs, before you get to it—the end—that is. our street is also incredibly narrow, and there’s an unwritten agreement for everyone to only park on the east side of the street so traffic can sort of get by.
since the gate was installed, one of our neighbors decided it was okay for him to start parking his truck in front of his house (on the west side of the street), which forces everyone, like the USPS and the trash pickup, to take a meandering path down the road. you’d think this was an a-hole thing to do, but given the fact that he had just months before “mistakenly” took all the money we had collected from the neighbors to build the gate, it didn’t seem so bad.
in any case, the double bus was there, at the bottom of the hill, stuck. we told the bus driver we could open the gate for her, but she wasn’t going to get anywhere without getting the neighbor to move his truck. so she banged on the door and he came flying out with his yenkel askew and bathrobe untied saying f-you-this and f-you-that. he threw his truck into a manly reverse, screeched to a halt on the east side of the street and stormed into his house. within seconds he was back, snapping pictures with his cell phone of the bus going by (empty of passengers!) the bus driver, the bus driver’s supervisor, us opening the gate. etc.
so here’s a picture of the “Big Wild.” one with a border collie and one with angry neighbor. dog and neighbor are curiously in the exact same place in their respective photographs.
every once in awhile we take a bullet and agree to work (gratis) for certain non-profits of a spiritual persuasion. we do this, despite what a friend of mine—a non-profit consultant by choice—says about dealing with those kind of non-profits: “RUN!”
this year for their fundraiser they wanted to make t-shirts, and suggested putting a yoga sutra (in Sanskrit) on the front. the one they decided on was 1.33,
which pretty much says: “By cultivating friendliness towards happiness and compassion towards misery, gladness towards virtue and indifference towards vice, the mind becomes pure.”
we suggested that it also pretty much says: “See yourself in others,” and that perhaps that snippet could be a nice English counterpart to go on the back of the t-shirt. like most philosophical texts written in old languages, there’s a lot of room for translation and interpretation, but our little idea got taken down hard by the tight-ass end (fundraising chair), who didn’t want people to think that was what it meant. i guess pretty much is pretty much only some of the time.
to compromise, i’ve decided to see myself in pretty much anything.
in turkey wraps (friendliness):
in traffic (compassion):
in coffee ice cream (gladness): (how can you not see the entire universe in this?)
