New Orleans 2011

A short retrospective on the New Orleans trip; we've been traveling a lot lately and I'm behind on travelogues.  GO!

We got to New Orleans late on a Tuesday.  Bright and early on Wednesday we went to our Habitat for Humanity site in midtown.  With all my experience in renovations, I was pretty confident I could do whatever came along.  I've done painting, plumbing, electrical, tiling, and flooring.  So of course the order of the day was drywalling.  I didn't get any pictures, but there was a lot of dust, and I learned that I am a truly terrible drywaller.  Our leader, Erin, is doing the work as part of Americorps, and she was very patient with us.   



preparing for the running of the bull



We went out to the Jazz Fest Thursday and Friday.  Arcade Fire was really good but I'm afraid I really get more excited about the food out there than the music (hello, cochon du lait poboys!).  One evening I went to the Bourbon House with Erin Jeff and Kent.  We had our oysters and spinach salads, along with some other seafood, and finished up with little bourbon milkshakes, which in retrospect may not have been the best idea. 

There was a mishap with the camp chair on Friday.  Kent had packed it back into its bag, but there are pieces of PVC that hang out the top of the bag.  Kent made a sudden turn at one point and I put my hand up to protect my head, and got a cut on the base of my thumb.  Grrrrrr.  I was a little worried about it, since there was racetrack schmutz in the cut, but let me tell you, CVS makes a medicated waterproof  bandage that works like a magic trick.  I didn't get them till the day after, and the cut was completely closed after only 2 days and didn't have any trouble.



pate!



We attended a crawfish boil at the hotel on Friday night.  Joe from LA met us there and he and I were fortunate enough to get the last two boxes of crawfish.  The people behind us in line were none too pleased about this and chased us away from a couple of tables (sore losers), but we had our crawfish and were happy.  The crawfish were delicious, although spicy crawfish water is not good in a cut, please make a note for waterproof bandages BEFORE eating crawfish if this should happen to you.  After the crawfish, we had too many drinkies.  As a result, we had a slow day on Saturday.  I went out with the girls for brunch and a wander and a tarot reading (I didn't get one, I think the bandaid would have interfered with the palm reading anyway).  After that we met others at Felix, where they were serving up big fat glistening oysters.

On Mother's day, Kent and I had a late breakfast.  It was more difficult than we'd expected to find a place to eat; with the holiday, it took us 5 tries before we settled in a bar/restaurant by Jackson Square.  After breakfast, Kent went to the Fest and I wandered around the city.  I saw a "Before, During and After Katrina" exhibit, then realized I missed the chance for a river tour, so sat on the banks of the Mississippi for a while and watched the people and river traffic.  I came across the Smoke Time Jazz Club outside the Circuit Court building, and listened for a while.  It's very fine New Orleans style music, but the only video I got was only part of a song and very grainy.  One of these days I'll remember to bring my tripod so viewers won't have motion sickness while trying to watch the clips.  Click on the link above to see more of them and keep your ears open for them if you're wandering around the French Quarter.



a little hair of the dog



On Monday, I went to the airport with Jess and Kent at 5:15 am, and surrendered to the shop that sold fresh hot beignets.  I got my rental car and drove to Lafayette for work. I got to Lafayette, ate at Blue Dog Cafe twice (who knew so many places were closed on Mondays?), found the plant for work the next day, and watched a turtle marching along at the road side.  I worked on Tuesday, drove back to NOLA, and got the 7 am flight out on Wednesday.

dude was trucking along in the gutter

We were home for a couple of weeks before our next trip, taking the Mazda Protege to Denver.

Deceptively busy

I haven't posted anything in a while - it just seemed like there hasn't been anything really going on to write about.  And then I think about what has happened recently.  Within the last three weeks:

• Lynn (Kent's sister) was on a big road trip with her daughter Brooklyn and two of Brooklyn's softball teammates, and came through over two weekends.  We walked around SF with them a couple of times, had Indian food, cooked big meals at the house, went to the zoo, and had a good time. 
• We went to Outside Lands music festival in Golden Gate Park both days last weekend.  In the fog.  Lots of good music, some fun events, and some old crank moments (ARGH YOU DAMN KIDS!  STOP SHOVING!).
• We saw the Reverend Horton Heat (awesome) at the Fillmore (double awesome), but it was on a school night and I had to pull the plug at 11:30 pm.  And I was proud of myself that I'd even made it that long!
• I spent two days in Los Angeles meeting with precious metals reclaimers.  At one site I got to hold about $300,000 worth of platinum (a bit over 10 lb), and saw a platinum-wire-weaving machine (the resulting pads are used for nitric acid production).  So cool.  The only downside was in hanging out with sales guys for six solid hours.  That is exhausting.
• I have taken three classes in poi spinning (no, I cannot do what's in that video.  yet.).  I won the class in a raffle and have been having fun in the class and am very grateful that I have done a little of it before.  Despite that, I have been beaning myself with my tennis ball poi. The circles behind the back are really killing me; I need shin pads and a helmet until I can get the plane of the spin stabilized.  I have three more classes in regular poi spinning, and then I MOVE ON TO FIRE POI.
• An old childhood friend, Cathy (I've known her since I was in kindergarten), was in town last week and we had dinner with them and with our Vancouver friends who were down for Outside Lands.  We had ribs for days.  No, literally - we were eating ribs for days in a row.  They were good, but man.  That was a lot of ribs.  Cathy's doing really well, and looks great; we got caught up on each other's families, and I pressured her to get on facebook.  Heh heh.
• I have been continuing the "drink from the fire hydrant" approach to trying to learn my new job.  The guys I'm getting turnover from are leaving after next week.  GAH!!  My main goal is to avoid making mistakes that are too expensive. 

Tomorrow is all about errands, and I am doing some things on Saturday that I will write about later.

But yeah, as you can see, it's been quiet around here.  How are things with you?

Raccoon Rumpus Room

We've spent the holiday weekend at home.  Our main objective for the weekend was to clean up the mess in the crawl space. 

Not our raccoon, but an image from the web.  Little rotter.

We have one crawl space under the addition which was put on the house in 1976.  When the inspector was here, he opened the door and all we could see was plumbing and swaths of pink insulation.  Some of it was hanging from the joists, and it looked like the space had a pink carpet down.  "Yep," said Mr. Inspector, "Looks like you got some visitors, here,"  Great.

A few months back, Kent had opened the door to the crawl space in the garage and was confronted by a raccoon butt.  He made a lot of noise (I wondered was what going on down there when I suddenly heard a lot of yelling and banging), and two raccoons left via the space under the laundry room.  We immediately went out and blocked their entry point with cinder blocks.  We saw evidence that they tried to get back in, but they couldn't move the blocks far enough.  We've been talking for months about needing to go down to the crawl space to clean up after them.

We finally decided a couple of weeks ago that we were going to do the job this weekend.   We got ourselves outfitted with personal protective equipment (PPE): respirators with dust cartridges (just like in my profile photo!), safety glasses, yellow gloves, headlamps, hats, kneepads, and paper coveralls.  This was more for minimizing contact with the fiberglass, but also because we didn't know what we would find down there. 

We'd originally intended to do the job on Friday and just couldn't get ourselves to do it.  Saturday, we promised ourselves.  We would definitely do it on Saturday.

Saturday morning, we got up, and still managed to procrastinate for two hours before dragging ourselves unwillingly down to the garage, and getting suited up.  Opening the door let a dank breeze out, and our first look in at what we were dealing with.

The first thing we did - primarily because it was easier - was to clear the spot directly under the staircase.  We found a very surprising amount of pane glass there; we think it was courtesy of the former owners and some project they did.  Thanks!  Oh, and have we thanked you again lately for ripping up carpet when you moved out?  So thoughtful!  We took the glass out and then cleared out a bunch of ripped up insulation.  Apparently this was the loft of the raccoon halfway house.  It turns out that the bathroom fan is venting directly into this space, but we will have to deal with that later (at least this bathroom is primarily used when we have guests so it's not a constant moisture problem).

As luck would have it, the design of the crawl space is not that good.  the entry is blocked by drain lines and water supply lines, so you have to crawl over and under those to get into the space.  The floor of the crawl space is concrete.  At first, I thought that was a good thing - my last house had a dirt floor - but I quickly changed my mind when we found out that the surface had never been smoothed.  We'd be working on a rough surface full of rocks.  Grand!  Fortunately we had some large pieces of cardboard to lay on which helped some.

I went in first since I'm smaller and fit into confined spaces easier.  The first thing I did before going all the way in was to do a sweep with the light to make sure that nothing was moving around in there.  I didn't see anything, so I started by clearing out the entry, pulling down loose bits, picking insulation off the floor, and using wires to put mostly intact insulation pieces back up into the joist spaces.  The work was slow and tedious.  In some spaces, the insulation was just tamped down a little, and would come up in a big mat.  In some, though, it was tamped down and torn up and tamped down some more and possibly peed on, and it was really difficult to get off the floor.  In those cases, tweezing the stuff out of the floor while wearing rubber gloves was the only way to get it out (and we would get to a point of "good enough" before moving on since it was impossible to get it all).  I did one swath and realized that the builders had put up concrete walls without openings, and completely blocked access to two sections of the crawl space, at least one of which was definitely infiltrated by raccoons.  I haven't checked but we may be able to get in there if we remove part of the wall in the garage.

By the way, if you want to protect yourself from fiberglass, don't bother with the paper coveralls from the paint section of the hardware store.  If you can, find Tyvek instead, which is lined with plastic.  And wear long sleeves!  I found that applying duct tape to my arms and peeling it off helped some, but I'd rather have avoided getting poked up in the first place.  But back to the action!

I had to get out and take a break after a while - moving around in a narrow space like that is hard on the neck and shoulders.  Kent was in at the time and when I went back in he told me that he'd discovered the raccoon latrine.  AWESOME.  I spent about an hour trying to make some progress back there.  The raccoon poops were dried out and not really a problem, but the insulation back there was a nightmare of trying to tweeze up off the floor.  Grrrrr.  I was getting more tired and moving more and more slowly, and by the time we finished and got out, I was physically exhausted. 

We'd been down for five hours altogether.  We filled four large contractor bags with insulation, poops, and assorted treasures.  One that really threw me was something that looked an awful lot like a turkey drumstick.  What the what??  I slowly worked towards it and when it was close enough I gave it a cautious poke.  It turned out to be a dog's squeaky toy, with one end chewed off.  Huh.  At least it wasn't a buried pair of tidy whities, like at my old house. 

so, the nastiest part of the crawl space work is done, but we still have a few things to do down there:
1) re-insulate the joist spaces where the raccoons tore insulation out (this goes surprisingly quickly - use totally encased insulation for best results!)
2) replace corroded screens to keep the beasties out
3) run coax cable to the back part of the house (should be fast)
4) route the bathroom vent to the outside
5) put down a thick layer of plastic.  This would act as a vapor barrier, but also make the rocks a little easier to move on, and would cover the remaining fiberglass on the floor.

All in all, probably another two full days of work (not counting getting under the laundry room), and we shouldn't have to go back under the house again for a long, long time.  I look forward to that day.  In the mean time, I'm off to nurse my sore muscles and bruises.

No routine.

I'm a bad blogger.  BAD!  Everything has seemed to be taking up lots of time lately, but I have to admit that a lot of time has been spent sleeping and hanging out with friends.  However, blogging has not been far up on my list.  I'll get better.

Most of my energy has been spent at work lately.  The project I've been working on for the last few weeks is partly done, but the last four weeks are really going to be hectic.  I have my Can't-Apparently-Live-Without-Drama co-worker to thank for that.  His intentions are fine but he doesn't seem to realize how he can get everyone riled up when it's really not necessary.  We really should have worked out who was in charge of the effort, him or me.  It would also have helped if I had insisted that one of these guys get trained to do the analysis themselves, but I couldn't get that going, and now am the only person doing the number crunching. On Thursday, CALWD just announced he's taking vacation for two of the last four weeks of the effort.  Although I'm seeing the silver lining now (less drama than usual for two weeks), my main response is still:  GAH!!!

It's a short-term problem.  The project has a hard stop in four weeks. So there's that.

Mom's been home from the hospital for about a week and it sounds like she and dad are settling into quiet routines, which is the best thing.  She'll have her next round of chemo in about three weeks, so please keep her in your thoughts!  She likes getting little notes, too, so if you're so inclined, please drop her a few words of encouragement.

In other news, our friend Lisa was in town for a couple of weeks for work.  She's currently based in Perth so we only get to see her a couple of times a year.  We were treated to an evening at AsiaSF (followed by an unusually nasty hangover), and on Friday we had a little gathering at our house so people could hang out with her.  We had about 20 people, Thai food, and cocktails, and a good time was had by all. 

Kent and I spent much of yesterday running errands in the East Bay, before meeting our friends Bruce and Rebecca for dinner (slow cooked lemon olive chicken, yum!).  Kent's already off for a few days in Bakersfield and New Mexico, and I'll see him when we go to visit mom and dad in Denver next weekend.  So far married life has been pretty solitary, but that's fine too - I know how it is to travel for work and at least I can call him since the trips are domestic.

In movie news, we've recently watched "The Station Agent" (rather nice) and "Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision".  The Maya Lin movie (she was the designer of the Vietnam Veteran's memorial in DC) is very interesting in its discussion of artistic visions, and includes some fascinating commentary by Maya about what was behind the works, and the issues that come up with installation.  This, along with "Rivers and Tides" (the Andy Goldsworthy documentary), are two of the most interesting descriptions of the artistic process I've seen.  (sigh)  I'll get back to doing art again some day, too.

The last days in summary (getting too old for this, part 2)

Cake, party, paper, hair, party, nap, party, sleep in, laundry, party.

Yowza.

We had the first cake tasting on Tuesday and it was really, really good. One of the cupcakes was really unusual - vanilla cake filled with coconut caramel and topped with a slice of roasted sweet potato - and they were all delicious, along with the baker's suggestions of other flavors we hadn't tried at all. We have another tasting tomorrow at another bakery, but the first place is going to be hard to top.

After the tasting we went to a party post-rehearsal-dinner for Liz and Grady's wedding. Everyone came in with the intention of having a single drink and doing an early night, since it's not fun to try and rally for a new year's eve party when you're already hung over. As you might guess, however, most everyone went big. Ouch.

I was a little light headed but not at death's door when I went out to check out papers at the stationery store, with the intent of ordering invitations (however, we hadn't done our wording yet, so I was limited to buying blank envelopes and choosing colors). I went to Bittersweet with Lani, a place that specializes in hot chocolates. It was good, but after all the cake and cocktails the night before, my stomach wasn't happy with more sugar. While we sipped, we were throwing ideas around for the wording on the invitation. Lani asked if there were any song lyrics that really spoke to us, and that got me to thinking.

I've been looking through my ipod, and found some lyrics which would be good for an engagement announcement, or better yet for a breakup announcement ("Where in the hell did you go with my toothbrush?"), but there're only a couple that may be suitable for a wedding invitation. In the mean time, I've been howling with laughter considering some of the others ("these things take time", "we're two people way past their prime and how it shows").

After chocolate I hunted down a place with split pea soup, and then went off for a hairdo at a place recommended by a friend. I didn't have anything particular in mind, but was going to a black tie reception that night in a red dress, and let her go at my hair. It was backbrushed, clipped, sprayed, and pinned into submission. It went well with the white streaks - very dramatic - and was reminiscent of a Betty Draper kind of look. Riding the bus home in my jeans with that hairdo was also fun - lots of double takes on the street.

The wedding was gorgeous and lavish! I'd never been in the City Club before and it was all deco, including sculpted walls, walls covered with white leather, and a big Diego Rivera mural. Everyone was dressed to the nines, and Liz looked absolutely stunning in a simple, sleek gown. Dinner was delicious, and right after dinner, the favors started coming out. Blinky rings, fake moustaches, hats, noisemakers, feather boas - everyone was tricked out for the dance floor. I never suspected that so many people knew the lyrics to "A Little Respect".

Unfortunately for us, the city of San Francisco treats new year's like any other transit day. The last trains pick up at 12:45 am, and since the following day is a holiday, trains start around 8. So, if you miss the last trains, as we did, you are trapped, as we were. Getting a cab is next to impossible on New Year's, especially downtown, where the sidewalks crawl with people (including some "Jersey Shore"-like douches, but I guess that can't be helped. Yes, gentleman trying to pick a fight, I'm sure your dick swings down to your knees. Off you go, now). I was getting increasingly tired and cranky, and there was no way to walk home in the shoes I was in. We ended up staying in a friend's suite, crashed on the floor and couch. We had a brief walk of shame through the lobby in our rumpled finery in the morning, and got a cab home. We just had time to clean up and go back out for the open house at Liz and Grady's. That was brave - I don't think I could do a party at my house the day after a late wedding! They had cajun food brought in, and people were looking surprisingly alive. One guy showed up still in his tuxedo, although we haven't heard where he ended up the night before. This is how rumors get started...

There's another party today, but we're heading over a little later; in the mean time, I'm fixing up the guest room and doing some laundry. We'll have guests tonight, and tomorrow is the other cake tasting, and then seeing Cirque du Soleil and having dinner with Lani and Bob. After that, it's back to the grind (including calling the caterer first thing on Monday). Oog.

I hope everyone is having a happy new year!

Getting too old for this, part 1

It's been busy as usual lately - our group has a big presentation on the 14th, and in the lead-up time to this, we have been having daily meetings and pre-presentations to talk about the presentation, which cuts into the time needed to actually EDIT the presentation. I have four pages of notes on changes I need to make (or look into) for my part, but haven't made most of those yet. Because these meetings are scheduled for 60-90 minutes and end up taking 3-4 hours. Grrrrrr.

Anyway, it's also officially the Holiday Season. We are in the midst of back to back parties in the evenings; on Thursday I went to a girls' gift exchange party (where I lost a nice clutch, but scored some nice lip balm and lotion. I was happy that the handheld blender I brought was popular), last night we had a casual dinner party at the house with about 12 people including a very good friend in town from Perth Australia (Hi, Lisa, we miss you!) followed by meeting other friends at a bar and more time at the house after the bar closed and going to sleep at 4 am, and tonight we have a potluck to go to.

I went to breakfast at Home with Lisa today (I'll have to order the brisket hash next time over the cornflake-coated french toast, note to self), then came home and cleaned up the remaining bits from last night's party (including putting the 3-liter wine bottle in recycling), and then promptly napped on the couch. I slept for about 2 hours and now feel jet lagged.

I think we'll be pulling the plug early tonight after the potluck. I'm curious to see how a potluck with 70 people and one turkey is going to work out, though!

Kent gave me an early Christmas present today: a manual water cannon for flushing pigeons out of the tree from the little balcony. Oh pigeons, move somewhere else while you've got the chance.

At the party last night, a lot of discussion centered around people's past marital problems. Most everybody has had long term relationships (except me) and now I'm a little worried, since many of the problems seemed so difficult and common. Eek.