Roof!

Well, we’re on to the promised blogging about the roof.  With lots of photos.

Here’s Hubby waving to the camera (note roof behind him):

Here’s Candy Cat at the back door watching Hubby and Snakelady and Bethesda all outside. She may go outside when she’s too arthritic to jump over the fence.

Here’s the algae growing on the garage roof in the worst possible light. Normally it doesn’t look quite so “dude! have you had someone look at your roof?” Yeah, the shingles were originally flat black. Above it is the honey locust tree that provides the shade etc. that fosters the algae growth.

Here’s a second view because I had a few good ones and I’m in a Flickr kinda mood:

Here’s the crappy flashing that allows water to leak down the chimney. The wet spot on the living room ceiling has dried now, as has the wet spot in the attic, so there’s nothing there to show. I couldn’t really get a shot of the widespread curling shingles, but they are there.

Here’s Candy wiping her face against the front screen door as I came around. No, she can’t come out this door either.

They don’t so much do arty roofs here with multi-colored shingles (like interspersed blue and green) like I saw in Portland when I was there 2 1/2 years ago. And I’m not so much a decorator. I looked at a lot of roofs and finally just went with flat black. They talked to me about a “pewter” roof that’s mainly gray. It looked nice on the blue houses we saw, but we’ve got red brick, white siding and black shingles. Standard, standard, standard. I’m going with a standard, flat-black roof (“charcoal”). Snakelady striking out on her own to start a neighborhood trend of interesting roofing is really not a good idea for aesthetic reasons.

The current roof was a 20-year roof. It lasted 17 years. We’ve gone with 30-year shingles. Hell, we might be here that long. We really like this house. Normally it takes me years to get used to a new place to live. I never did get used to our last place despite the fact that it was a “nice” apartment with cathedral ceilings, an enormous kitchen and a first floor laundry, etc., etc. I just never fit in there. This place is my home. Right down to the questionably sponge painted guest room, the loose tiles in the kitchen floor, the veritable sea of cream carpeting in the family room and the leaky basement.

In the freezer are fudge brownies I made from scratch (from that Brownie Cookbook I got with Mom on our spa day two years ago). Very good brownies. For the crew. So they’ll think, “Wow, a great family lives here. We’ll want to do our best on their roof. Do this one right, y’all!” Roof construction starts later this week.

Serendipity Socks

These socks are from my best friend Seafarer, who made them. No kidding, she knitted socks. I have been knitting since I was 6 and I believe that socks are impossible to knit and that only machines make socks. But K has never lied to me, so now I simply worship her abilities.

She included the above Serendipity Socks gift card which now lives atop my desk beside my sacred Festi dirt jar. This card is really awesome and there’s a section for “About the Knitter” and “About the owner of these socks” and it says things like K learned to knit from a book and makes yummy vegan food and I collect Penzey’s spices and watch Star Trek and that I’m the only person she knows who has a knitting instructor. Because if I had to learn something about knitting from a book I would dissolve into frustrated tears and stomp my little feet and if I tried the book method a second time it would probably end with me screeching obscenities.

What K doesn’t know – wouldn’t know because we’ve never lived together which feels kinda odd to realize considering how many times we’ve helped one another move and how many roommates we’ve each had since we met at the ages of 18 and 19 – is that every day when I get home from work I change my socks. Just one of those things about Snakelady that you’d never know unless lived with me or up and made me perfect socks. Me and these socks are going to have some serious quality time together.

Thanks, Seafarer. You rock.

Also, she just sent me this site about the new eco-roof of the Central library of the Multnoma County library system. Now is that serendipitous or what?

Traveling

We spent this weekend hanging out with friends in Traverse City. They actually live here, as opposed to just visiting here. I’ve mostly lived in college towns, where summer is the relaxed season – the season where you can get a burger and fries at sidewalk seating at a bar you’d normally not approach 9 months out of the year. The other 9 months you have lots of free awesome speakers and events and all kinds of stuff. Here, of course, summer is the season where you try not to leave the house so much. Vacation cities have some distinct advantages over college towns, at least, this vacation city does. Many vacation cities just feel dirty and seedy. In any case, this place has a lot of great independent restaurants. Also, some serious wines due to the location. You also have over-priced trinket shops here, lots of them, bummer. But the city is also inviting. The city and its residents put their attention to living in a place that looks and feels well cared for. Flowers, roads, trash collection, even new home construction. And of course the reason all of this is here, the water, and the peninsula. Pretty, pretty.

In Lansing, I get all excited about the Allen Street Farmer’s Market. I actually considered taking a picture of it the other week. That’s about as progressively pretty as our geography and culture gets. Sorry to complain but its hard not to compare. We still pass the empty hole that was the abandoned factory every day.

Our friend’s place is up on a hill and we’re not close enough to the water to have a view of it but we do have a view of the surrounding area. Right now it’s sunrise and there’s a gentle fog. Lovely, and calm.

Last night we met up with some more people and went to “the cottage.” I have an interest in this phenomenon of cottages. It seems that so many people in Michigan have “a place up North.” It feels so Michigan to say “we were at the cottage this weekend.” The cottage is a place that our host’s father built with their cottage neighbor at Bass Lake 50 years ago. Each year the families had a construction goal that they would accomplish for each residence. They’re still close with their neighbors.

In any case, one the guys we were hanging out with last night rushed back into the cottage after having taken the dessert I made out on the porth to announce in an excited and, dare I say, breathless tone that “this is the best German chocolate cake I’ve ever eaten!!!!!” so it’s been all good here.

When I borrowed hubby’s laptop to blog hubby noted they don’t have a wireless network in the house. “So?” I asked. Surely a neighbor does. Sure enough, neighbors do have wide-open networks. I’ve heard such use referred to as theft. I think of it more like putting a plate of warm chocolate chip cookies on your front porch. As someone who delivers cookies to her neighbors I operate easily on this comparison. And what? Someone has enough expertise to set up a wireless network but not lock it down? No, I don’t think so, but maybe I’m just not realistic. In case, when someone offers me a warm chocolate chip cookie I say thanks, and pour a glass of milk. In my current circumstance, milk with a great deal of coffee in it.

Also, I came up here all aflutter with some concerns and now I have some perspective, and some calm, and a plan of action for the next week, which is all the planning I need for this particular situation.

Librarian Song Forwarded by Uncle T

My uncle sent along this librarian song (Make sure to click on “Play Song Now”

Transgendered at the Library of Congress – It Didn’t Go So Well

A former Army Special Forces commander passed over for a job as a terrorism analyst at the Library of Congress because he was changing genders won a discrimination lawsuit.

Well, My Boss Said So

I was giving a presentation to a group of librarians the other day on a few standard 2.0 tools – RSS, wikis, blogs… Now when I give these presentations more hands are raised when I ask, “Who already has a blog?” That’s comforting, the good word is getting out there.

There’s a question I’ve gotten a couple of times now and I answer it with a story. The question is: “How do you find time in your life for this?” By the time I’m done summarizing just the folders in my RSS reader newbies are a little stunned with the possible time sucking qualities of such a tool.

Well, I say, it started for me when I started my current job in June of 2006. My boss’s boss came into my cube and asked if I could do some training for library staff.

Of course, I answered, on what topic?

RSS, she replied.

Sure thing, I said.  What time would be convenient?

In early August, says she.

Thanks for the opportunity, I’m looking forward to it, I said.

When she left, I turned around and Googled “RSS.” I didn’t have any idea what it was despite a few years of my own blogging.

That was the day RSS entered my life and I find I still have enough time for it.

What Ike Wrought in the Wee Garden

Bethesda surveys the damage after three days of Hurricane Ike’s northern rains swept through Michigan.

The roof was rained on for three days, also. Know that roof we priced but planned to buy next year? Yeah, that’s going to be happening NOW. RIGHT NOW. Blogging of the event to come (but of course).

It’s Not Your Mother’s Pole Dancing

Pole dancing sporting competition in Amsterdam.

Greenpeace

As long as we’re on the topic of my early employment with posts one and two about my time with Burger King, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, I thought I’d wax a bit about my time with Greenpeace. I’ve mentioned this before, with how I was when Clean Water Action came a knockin’.

I started in January of my junior year of high school. My school, Community High School in Ann Arbor, had a Community Resource (CR) program where you worked or did a supervised project in town and got high school credit for it. My work at Greenpeace qualified.

I wasn’t very comfortable with raising money, talking to strangers, or knocking on doors so I made a conscious decision to throw myself to the wolves by canvassing for Greenpeace.

I started in January and we worked for four hours in the field and took in a radius of one hour’s drive from Ann Arbor plus an hour to eat before we got to our neighborhoods so a shift could last up to seven hours and I did two or three a week. I was the only high-schooler on crew. We needed to rake in $100 a night – we had a word for making that minimum amount but I can’t remember it now. In any case, $100 was it. They said you performed best in the same economic demographics you came from so I did just fine at collecting modest amounts, but drop me some place fancy and I could bomb. One night, in a rich neighborhood, I netted three dollars. Three one dollar bills. Total.

I just couldn’t look someone in the face and ask for $100-$200, which is what Greenpeace recommended we ask for. $100? Are you kidding me? Who had an extra $100 lying around to give away at any random day in the pay period? So I didn’t ask for it. I asked for $25-$50, my usual, and wouldn’t even get that in the wealthier areas. It might have had something to do with the fact that I was completely intimidated by their neighborhoods and the occasional stately bars/front gate. “Uh, I’m with Greenpeace? We’re, omm, in your neighborhood to talk to people like you? About… OK, I’m here to talk about the environment? Y’know, we’re the whale people?”

My favorite town to canvas in Michigan is Berkley. At one house, a woman opened the door and then called up the stairs to her partner, “Greenpeace is here. Do you want to come down?” The classic pass-off. But I got a surprise “Yeah,” the other woman said. She came down, we talked, I walked away with a check and some petition signatures.

That same night in Berkley another woman answered her door. She didn’t speak English very well but said I should come back when her husband got home, he’d want to talk to me. A half hour after the time she said, I went back and he was just getting home. I introduced myself, he said he liked my name, I told him I was named after Dostoevsky’s character from Crime and Punishment. He was tickled. We spent the next half hour on his living room floor drinking Japanese beer and not talking about Greenpeace but he grabbed his checkbook before I left anyway.

My least favorite house in those 6 months was a guy who became incensed when I said I was with Greenpeace and announced he would shoot me if he ever caught me in the woods. I said Greenpeace did not have a position on hunting non-whale mammals. He got up in my face and repeated that he would shoot me. I walked away shaking and figured anyone in close proximity to him might be contaminated so I skipped his neighbor’s house.

I would also follow my gut on any house I got a bad vibe from. If I was approaching and it just didn’t feel right I wouldn’t knock on the door. It wasn’t the condition of the houses. It was like some houses just shouted bad juju and I didn’t want to get mixed up in it.

One guy came to the door yanking on a robe, hair disheveled, sweating, obviously just rolled away from something a lot more interesting than Greenpeace. I was like, “Dude, you answered the door?”

By the time I got used to knocking on stranger’s doors and asking them to give me money it was summer. The first night I had to take a canteen with me I quit. It was frickin’ hot. I prefer cold to hot if I have to choose and decided I’d rather work BK through another Art Fair then work every night (now that school was out) in the sun.

Greenpeace was a good job. I feel like I did something positive, and damnit I like whales. But knocking on doors asking for money totally sucks. I will always give money to good-cause canvassers. And offer them something to drink. And a bathroom.

Mirror Choices

This summer I made some bad choices. Not important bad choices. They only affect me when I look in the mirror.

When summer started I found I didn’t have lightweight non-work clothes that fit so I bought two pair of capris and two tops. The capris are great. The tops are the problem. They are, arguably, the ugliest things I have ever worn in public.

The tops were the cheapest cotton tops I could find. I wasn’t planning to fit into them beyond the one season. And they so look it. They are a disgusting lime green that bares only a passing resemblance to the popular greens going around these days, and a day-glo orange. And they add a good twenty pounds to my appearance.  Every time I put them on I think, Wow! great to have some new summer clothes. Then I glance in the mirror and think, Whoa, I look like crap.

But the shirts are SO COMFY. Loose and soft and yummy. I am drawn to them. I desire them. As long as I don’t look at them. Michigan’s weather is putting a damper on short sleeved shirt of any comfort level so now I’m just wearing them in PT – but they are also the only shirts I have right now that are good for PT – easy to move in, easy to work in, and I wear them with soft, easy-to-move-in pants that do not match either of the shirts cause while someone is apparently selling day-glo orange shirts, no one is selling pants that coordinate that particular shade.

I seek out my therapists in the hallway in my work clothes with my hair done. I have fantasies of working a comment like, “Yeah, I clean up good,” with a casual little, that-was-a-throw-away-comment smile. So far I haven’t seen any of them in the hallway. But I have hope.