Spring cleaning

Today seemed like a good day to try to get rid of some stuff.

This is a project that has been at least slightly complicated by the work crew filling up my recycling bin with pine needles and branches and other scrap that's not going to make the boys at the garbage company too happy, so I decided to start with the bike.

I've dubbed this one, "The Lead Banana." It's the only bike I've ever actually named, but then, it's the only bike I've ever had that weighed a good 50 pounds and was bright yellow. For the last many months, The Lead Banana has lay on my porch in a state of disassemblage. I'm not sure what I planned to do with it when I started taking it apart, but nonetheless, apart it has remained for quite some time.

So this afternoon, I dug up what tools I could find, wandered over to the bike consignment shop and bought an inner tube, and picked up a couple bottles of beer and set to work.

I got this bike in maybe 2003, when a friend of mine from the Lake Oswego pub took mercy on me upon learning my beloved Bontrager had been stolen. The promise of a free bike got my hopes up more than they probably should have been, because when this was what he delivered, I was pretty disappointed. At the time it had no brake pads and no seat, but I managed to take care of that and it served me well for a few short trips around town.

Today was the right day to pass the generosity along. I got the bike put back together, and spent a few hours pedalling in circles in front of the house, trying to figure out if there was any way to make these rusty cables shift smoothly and brake crisply. Concluding there was not, I put together a sign. Since it's probably not visible in the picture, I'll repeat it here:

Free Inner Tube
a $4 value, bike included
- It mostly shifts
- It brakes enough
- The rear tire may have a slow leak
- That's why you get a free tube
- High visibility yellow
- Faster than walking
- The ultimate fashion statement
- Free

I hooked the sign to the bike and leaned it up against a tree on the main street. Not 30 seconds later, a couple folks wandered up to check it out. Kevin, a chunky blond kid with a can of High Life in his hand who turns out to be a nearby neighbor, wanted extra clarification to be sure it was indeed free, but he was happy to roll it away.

Kinda bummed I didn't get to hang out on the porch longer watching to see who came by to check it out, but The Lead Banana is now someone else's problem. It's about time.

Doing it the Max Power way

I've heard there are small children out there who have a deathly fear of being sucked down the drain in the bathtub. I wasn't one of those kids, but lately, I've sorta understood where they're coming from.

One of the many pleasures of living in my little shack has been the bathroom. When I first viewed this house a little over three years ago, the tub was filthy and cracked, and the ceiling above the tub was a mass of dark colored sludge, held in place by a visquine and duct tape assembly of sorts. The landlords replaced the ceiling with something more appropriate and patched the cracks in the tub with a generous application of caulk.

The caulk began failing some time ago, and recently, I've noticed new cracks. A small stream of water was slipping through the cracks while I showered, leading me to speculate that the under-the-tub water was the source of the water that seems to trickle out onto the bathroom floor to soak my bathmat.

So with a day off today, I figured it was a good time for another home repair project: put a layer of fiberglass on the bottom of the tub, ideally waterproofing it and giving it some degree of structural stability.

This project has its origins close to 10 years ago, when I was living on Puget Sound up in Washington. One fine summer day I was sitting out on the back deck when I heard one of the neighbors scream "Boat!" Looking up, I saw a small rowboat floating by unoccupied, headed out for the Pacific on the ebb tide. Jumping into action, roommate Ian and I hopped in our own rowboat and paddled out to snag it.

After we got it to shore, we realized its potential. All of about six feet long, this boat was small enough to get up to speed if we could ever get one of our outboards running again. Ian set up a sawhorse and got to tinkering with the outboards, and I hiked up the hill to buy a fiberglass repair kit.

Before the story gets too far off track, I'll just skip ahead and say I learned a fair bit about working with fiberglass, Ian learned a bit about motors, and we eventually got the boat fitted out to cruise across the shipping lanes and go drink beer at the Tides Tavern in Gig Harbor.

So today, I headed into the Home Depot pretty well sure of what I was looking for. Finding the fiberglass matting and the resin and the hardener, I went home ready to get to work.

The result, as seen above, looks as though I let an incontinent pig loose in my tub. The brown is obviously the fiberglass, and the purplish stuff is where the sanding block I bought rubbed off on the high spots, leaving its colorful residue behind. The nasty stuff everywhere else is just evidence that I either need to scrub my tub harder and more often, or refrain from taking flash photos of it.

Tomorrow during the shower hour, we find out how well this worked.

The closed loop

I'm a late adopter, as a lot of things go. 

I resisted the idea of getting a mountain bike with a front shock, I resisted switching over from cassettes to CDs, and I resisted getting a cell phone for quite a while as well. 

Within the last week, I have capitulated. After hearing facebook-facebook-facebook from people at work, people outside of work, on the radio, stuff I read online, etc., I decided to give in. I am now a member in good standing of this still mighty foreign online community, and while I don't expect it to change my life, I'm pretty pleased with it thus far. 

This is the curious part, and the genesis of the title of this posting: despite a limited number of facebook friends, I have already discovered a closed loop of sorts. 

Old ski buddy from middle school through college, Ty, is friends with a woman who is also friends with Tom, a guy I met while in college though he did not attend with Ty and myself. As far as I know, Tom and Ty have never met. Yet, there it is, and even more curiously, it's actually two closed loops -- Tom and Ty via the woman with the complicated, consonant-rich Eastern European name, and Tom and Ty via me. 

This is a puzzling thing. While on some level I suppose I resist the idea of establishing an online "friend" relationship with everyone you even slightly know, it opens up quite a range of curious relationships. 

I'm sure there are any number of people I've known who knew someone I knew through totally different channels, being on the opposite side of their social universe in a sense. 

If I don't know you know, say, Jody Jennings -- a name I'm making up for purposes of illustration, apologies to the real Jody Jennings, I'm sure you exist -- I'm not going to tell you, "hey, didja know Jody Jennings crapped her pants at the D&D last Wednesday night and had to be dragged out to the sidewalk by the bouncers?" And you're not gonna tell me, "That Jody Jennings I work with, she was a real bitch on Thursday, crabby as anything. I think she was hung over or something."

The facebook future makes this all quite possible. We're all screwed. 

Sledge McBeef

A couple weeks after my break-in episode and my brief stint as a private eye working only on my own behalf, I have found my latest alter-ego.

Det. Sledge McBeef.

This began, as most primetime crime serials do, with a nasty eye infection of some sort. All seemed to be going well wearing the contacts, and then I stepped on my glasses, and then the contacts went south on me and suddenly I was Amsterdam coffee shop bloodshot pretty much all the time. So the easiest thing to do was to wear my sunglasses to work.

I picked these glasses up in Vietnam, after a similar episode involving a lens falling out of my regular glasses and contacts difficulties. It's an advanced country in many ways, but the typical small town optician has the State Trooper model and the Buddy Holly model and not much else in between. As the sun had been burning the bejeezus out of my unshielded eyes while I was in regular-glasses mode, I decided to go for the State Trooper, with a light enough tint that I could still navigate my way through the dark alleyways and distinguish between potted plants, prostitutes, motorcycles and those looking to do me harm.

Fun fact: Up close, the temples have the word "Police" in tiny raised letters.

In any event, wearing retro dark glasses to work was a source of much amusement for some of the co-workers. The editor decided I was "Starsky," and one of the other reporters simply giggled without end. Being a good sport, I brought in the leather coat on Monday to better live up to the part.

But then, Tuesday was a day off. Slept in, washed a few dishes. Took a nice bike ride. Unsure of what to do late in the afternoon, I broke out the lights and the tripod. Only took about 15 or 20 shots to get one I liked, though it is a tad out of focus on the front end. Then it was poster making time.

Getting into work today, giggling reporter was disappointed I didn't have the glasses. She had a present for me, so I figured I'd toss in a poster of myself in full-flower in trade.

I got a fake mustache in our little gift exchange. It itches like hell, but makes me want to do a few more shots. Photo editor has suggested I wear it for the official press ID, which at least on the surface sounds like a fantastic idea.

Scott Hammers, Private Detective

The upside of Wednesday's burglary episode is that it has given me a chance to play detective. Anyone who tells you they never wanted to be a detective is most likely lying to you -- I know this, because of my keenly-honed detective senses. 

In any event, the day began early, because I was too jacked up to sleep. It had been a sleepless night, spent with my dirty chef's knife sitting on the nightstand, because when you've been burgled, you kinda take leave of your senses. Every time the furnace or water heater popped or grunted or groaned, I snapped upright, which made for a pretty unsatisfying night's rest. That, and the better part of a bottle of wine I finished off after the cops left around 12:30. 

The sleuthing began around 8. I went for a coffee, then walked the alley behind my house for two or three blocks, looking for clues. Mostly my watch, which had been in the coin jar, and with a broken band, I figured it wasn't of much use to the asshole who broke into my house. 

Step two was the hair salon that backs up against the crapshack. Just for fun, we're gonna lapse into character here, to try to get a better feel for what unfolded. Trust me, it'll be fun. 

"Hey sweetie, investigating a little situation here, hopin' you can help me out. Seems some no-good punk broke into my place last night. You know anything about that?"

You could see her heart jump underneath the Mylar stylists apron, not unlike some kind of jumping thing, maybe a kangaroo, maybe a kangaroo trapped under a sheet of Mylar. She was troubled by this. She cared. This was a dame with a lotta soul. 

"Oh, that's awful, just awful," she said, her scissors still snipping away at nothing in paticular. "What did they take."

"Change baby, just change. You know, they say it's the only thing that's constant."

She swallowed hard. This was a dame I could get along with, she noticed things. She'd noticed I'd walked around the building twice before coming in. People who don't notice things don't notice those kinds of things, I've noticed. 

"What about, those people, you know, up the alley?"

"I know. Oh, do I ever know. But here's the real question darlin': What do you know?"

Those people up the alley, whatta bunch. Seems like there's barely a week goes by, it's not something. Sometimes it's one boozehound shouting at another, sometimes it's all about who knifed who, and why. Sometimes, it's a 24-foot motorhome engulfed in flames, but even then, it's either that crazy broad lighting the whole thing on fire for no good reason at all, or maybe it's that skinny fellow with the three day beard, just dropping his cigarette in his bed and pushing off to the store for another case of Busch. You never know with those people, you never, never know.

The dame, she knew more than she was letting on at first. She'd seen the kid, those people's kid, the kid with the long greasy hair and the hooded sweatshirt. Just that morning, even. He'd been a couple blocks over, kinda holdling his right hand up like it was hurt. She thought maybe it was a stomach problem, maybe a burst appendix even. But now. Now, she thought maybe it was one of those hurts you can only get from putting your fist through a single pane window a couple feet from a doorknob. Maybe my doorknob. We were getting somewhere. 

Part 2 of this excercise in True Crime writing coming tomorrow. Who loves ya, baby?

Post-Scripts

In reviewing some of the back blog entries, I've realized my much-anticipated photo opportunity was never properly explained here. Suffice it to say, it came through -- damn, probably five months ago now -- and it was a good experience.

I got a call one day from the weekly editor asking if I wanted to shoot some photos of a Redmond woman for a British tabloid. As I learned, she was half-famous as the former host of one of the largest tumors ever recorded, which was extracted from her abdomen in a series of surgeries earlier in the spring.

After a few phone calls back and forth with an exceedingly friendly woman with an English accent, we struck a deal. I shoot photos, I get $250. Given the paygrade in the world of print journalism these days, I jumped right on it.

Linda, the tumorwoman, her daughter Katie (I think) and the dog were all quite fun to work with, and never once did I feel as exploitive as I expected I would. At its root, a story about a woman with a tumor the size of a toilet bowl is an exercise in exploitation, an opportunity for all of us to point and stare and grimace uncomfortably.

I suppose it doesn't have to be, but I've never seen anything all that heroic in facing one's health problems, much less so when it's something like this. Maybe I should walk back my musings on this subject a few paces -- if nothing else, Linda's case does serve as an extreme-case reminder of why people should make a point of visiting the doctor on a somewhat regular basis. Yes, a lot of people are overweight, but when you've got a solid lump jutting out from beneath your ribcage that you rest your dinner plate on -- true story -- you probably ought to have that checked out.

Either way, I did the shoot. It wasn't as successful as I'd hoped, but I eventually got a handful of shots I couldr, be mostly happy with. And a few weeks later, I got my check. I'd really like to get a copy of the magazine the story was supposed to have run in, or at least find an online version of the story. But no luck yet.

Too many Mutha Uckers

Since I apparently can't embed a youtube video, I'll open the day with a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqxnm6t3QMw

You'd think a house that all but screams poverty would fly under the radar of the criminally-minded. From the peeling paint to the trash in the yard to the unkempt weeds, there's nothing to suggest a rich or even modestly-average person lives here. 

But that would be wrong. Tonight, I celebrate being burglarized for the first time. 

It was an average enough night. I got home around 9:45 as ususal, sat down at the computer and had a couple glasses of wine, when out of nowhere I had the urge to empty my pockets. I had about five quarters in the front pocket of my jeans, but oddly, my change jar was nowhere to be found. After a brief wander through the house, I found that the back door was unlocked. 

Further wandering revealed a nightstand drawer ajar, a drawer that is not opened unless I have, eh, "visitors." And I really don't have visitors. Finally, I found that one of the little glass panels in my rearmost room had been busted clean out, providing a clear path for someone with slightly longer arms than me to unlock the very door that was found unlocked.

Too many mutha uckers, uckin' with my sheee...

The strangest and yet most satisfying aspect of all of this is that nothing of any real value seems to have been taken. Just the change, which is of course the part most easily put to use. I'm happy about that, but less happy about the idea that I will feel compelled to pack up my valuable items and sock them away in a safer location whenever I leave. 

Mutha Ucker, you ain't outta the woods yet. Tomorrow, we begin the task of tracking your worthless ass down. And I've got a few ideas on just how to do that. 

Vaya con Dios, dickface. 

I've tried this before

Modern technology is a wonderous thing. Not only does it allow me to choke out my beer-tinged thoughts at midnight on a Thursday evening for all the world to see, it allows me to peek in and see who bothers to drop in and enjoy my mostly-pointless observations.

One of these treasured guests used to come from Jamaica, NY. I don't feel like I've seen them so much these days. I put out the all-points bulletin for whoever it was to contact me, and nothing came of it. Oh well...

The one that's coasted across my radar more recently is from Oakland, Calif., and I'd really love to know who you are. There's no shame in checking out someone's blog, even if it is primarily about plumbing issues and the like. We're all voyeurs online. 

As they say here on the tubes, email in profile. Give me a holler, whoever you are. I'm sure I'll be happy to hear from you.