Tuesday, September 23, 2014

The Latest on Lanikai

Lanikai Elementary School has a stage!

When last we spoke about the Lanikai Elementary School stage project (in this post), I was daydreaming about little kids performing the hula on that stage, under that beautiful banyan tree, a short walk away from the picturesque beaches of Lanikai and Kailua.

But, I needed to get my head out of the clouds. We had work to do! Kat managed to hook up with Shawn McKay. He's another parent at the school, a husband to one of the school's teachers, AND an actual contractor! With this video fly-through that Kat made of my sketchup model, and what I am sure was a kick-ass speech she gave at the fundraiser, the school got enough in donations to fund the project.


I'd given them the overall design of the stage, but the school couldn't start building until everything was approved by professional engineers. Enter our new friend Jon, the structural engineer, working pro-bono (on occasion) for the school system. He was immeasurably helpful. I gave Jon this layout plan:


and he turned that into engineered construction drawings:

I took Jon's construction drawings, which indicated but didn't show how the framing would work, and I made this plan to help visualize the framing. That's a lot of lumber!

And I made this model to indicate how the Trex decking should be laid out:

We had some fits and starts with scheduling the construction. We thought for a minute that we'd be able to do the work during the school's Spring break (back in April)- a slender window of time that would have allowed me to fly out to Hawaii to participate in the construction before flying back to NYC and then down to Barbados with Cindy, our friend Kendra, and the Castro's (Bernadette, Arsenio, and Axel) for our dear friends' the Spangler's wedding. But that didn't work out. There were a number of complications, not the least of which was the fact that Shawn-the-Contractor's wife was 9 months pregnant and due to give birth.

Then, one day during the Spangler wedding trip, this picture popped up on my Facebook feed. It documents the arrival of the first pile of lumber. I don't believe I've ever been so delighted by a pile of lumber in my life.

A few days later, Kat posted a time-lapse video of the initial framing of the stage. I was elated to see things coming together! But I'll save that video for later; it's now included in a time-lapse video of the entire build process.

In the meanwhile, here are a few still-shots of the stage framing. I understand that the construction was done both by Shawn McKay's construction team as well as parent volunteers.

I wonder if they bought the stair stringers pre-cut or if some poor soul had to cut them all out individually with a circular saw...

And here's the decking, staged to go on the stage. (You see what I did there? You like?)

And now for the complete construction in under 3 minutes (apologies for the abrupt ending of the music):

Here's Kat's rig for her GoPro camera. I'm thrilled she took the trouble to make that video, because not being able to participate and help really bothered me. Getting to watch the process (even after the fact) helped me not feel so terribly far away.

And here's the best part! Blessing the stage and the kids dancing the hula on it!!


And another best part: everyone uses the stage during recess. Some kids use it to sit and chat, some are dancing, some adults are supervising the kids, and a couple of girls had plunked themselves in the middle to color and draw. That's Kat in the pink dress on the left.

By the way, if I forgot to mention it earlier, I chose to wrap the stairs all the way around the stage this way so that the sides could be used as a small stage or lecture podium if any teachers wanted to bring their classes outside and stay in the shade.

The school is currently working on arrangements to make the hand rails and a safety railing that will go along the back of the stage where the wooden barricades (leftover from the May Day Celebration) are currently standing. I provided the school with 3 hand-drawn sketches when the rest of the drawings were submitted, and we chatted about it a bit today.  The project is down to punch-list items.  I'll post again when they get the railings and stuff up, but other than that, Lanikai Elementary has a stage, and we're all thrilled!!

Friday, September 19, 2014

Arnold Cabin Project Part 3 - The Real Story

I can hardly believe it as I write this.

Cindy and I have been back from our 2 week California Cabin Restoration Odyssey for three weeks now, and it has been a little hard to make sense of the trip.  These things, after all, never seem to quite turn out the way one expects, do they?

As we packed our suitcases, and as we sat aboard the airplane on our way, I kept having these wonderful, "I can't believe this is my real life" moments.  I was excited to commune with the decisions of my great-great grandfather and mother.  As I had photographed, measured, and modeled the cabin, I came into contact with the remnants of thoughts and actions done by my ancestors.  In other words, the cabin is 21' long and 21' wide.  Clearly, because of it's two different roof pitch lines, you can see that it was once a smaller cabin - with only one room.  I happen to know that Henry and Sarah Arnold had 6 children (3 girls and 3 boys), and they also raised some of Sarah's brother's children and some of their own grandchildren in that cabin.  It stands to reason that they would expand, and they did so in two directions - they lengthened the cabin along the original ridge line, adding a 6' room facing down the hillside.  And, either at that time or later, they added a 9' section (divided into two more rooms) along the back of the cabin like a lean-to, adding that second slope to the roof.

That's a bunch of deduction - detective work, if you will.  And I expected to be working with a cabin that was (apart from having been re-roofed at least once before and having some additional support added to the foundation) largely original.  What I found was somewhat the opposite.  In the entire time of climbing all over that cabin, I only remember seeing one original square or "cut" nail.  The rest had been pulled out and replaced by more modern, round-headed or "wire" nails.  And when we started talking with Vince, the Hastings Director, he told us that he had recently come across some photographs of people re-building the Arnold Cabin in the 1970's.  He said they had almost taken the entire thing apart and re-built it at that time.

Now that I was finally at Hastings and able to spend (nearly) as much time as I pleased combing over the Arnold Cabin, I saw more and more things that weren't original, which is to say they weren't made of redwood either.  Redwood is very rot and insect-resistant.  Pine and Douglass Fir are not (unless you treat them with chemicals).  Many of the original redwood parts that make up the roof system had been replaced with pine at some point in the past.

I won't sugar coat it.  This disappointed me.

In the span of time that cabin had existed since it was built, interlopers had (rightfully) put their hands on it.  It had been naive of me to think the cabin had stood all this time in its original condition without any restoration or shoring-up.  And yet, I had so hoped to be able to get close to Henry and Sarah through this strange form of contact - touching things left exactly where they had been put.  All those little round nail heads slightly dampened my enthusiasm on the very first day.

I didn't talk about it much, because there were bigger challenges afoot.  First, Cindy is very allergic to poison oak, and while Jaime, the Hastings Steward had cleared most of it from around the cabin, we were constantly walking on a bed of dried leaves, many of which were dried poison oak leaves.  Also, the cabin was somewhat entangled in poison oak vines - both inside and out, both living and long-since dead.  And thirdly, there were face flies.

If you haven't heard about face flies, you might be able to guess what they are by the name.  But in case you imagine them less of a nuisance than they are, I'll get into it a little bit.  They are small flies, and they constantly hover, buzz, and attempt to land in the orafices of your face.  Barring the ability to do so, they find their way to your exposed skin, alight wherever they can, and if they aren't shaken immediately off, they bite you.  They are weaker fliers than your typical house flies, so you can blow them out of your face by puffing out little bursts of air, but within seconds, they come back for further attempts at landing in your nose, mouth, eyes, and ears.

While working on the cabin, my hands were constantly in motion.  And my head was constantly filled with calculations of angles, force, whether this would need to be cut or how to get that up on the roof. There were assessments to make with every move whether the cabin was sturdy and I was stable enough to maintain my position without falling or breaking through and then falling.  The motion of my hands kept the flies off my arms for the most part.  The flies did, however, manage to get under my shirt and bite my stomach and my lower back.  But the thoughts in my head kept the noise of their buzzing in my ears from bothering me too much.  I blew the flies away from my face with my breath, and when I had a free hand, I swatted them away with my gloves.  

When the day was hot, the flies were thicker, and one's relationship was suddenly with a small cloud of flies rather than 5 or 10.

Cindy, on the other hand, was at the ready to be helpful.  She moved slowly, for fear of slipping and for fear of touching poison oak.  She spent a fair amount of time watching over me - fulfilling her usual role of Safety Captain - cautioning me against falling or otherwise hurting myself.  Sometimes, she was paralyzed with fear for herself or me.  She was not in charge of making sure all the pieces fit and were solidly attached, so she didn't have the luxury and chore of doing as much figuring as I did.  As best she could, she learned the names of things, but ever cautious of making a mistake, when asked to hand me a thing, she would double check: do you want this thing?  Or this other thing?  She was bathed in fear.

And yet, she kept going.  As I worked, she worked.  Or, if she couldn't do anything to help, she stood and actively worried.  Some tasks she could handle on her own - asking me to check them over once she had gone a certain way, to make sure she was doing it correctly.  But, again, there were long moments where circumstances prevented her from moving quickly.  And the nature of her role as assistant meant that she had more space in her head to hear the buzzing of the flies.

Little Cindy Keiter - Actress, history buff, entertainer, mench, tour guide - picking her way through the poison oak, afraid for our lives and limbs, fighting against the urge to panic in the face of danger, struggled with the full force of her concentration to get the hang of which screws were required for which operation, or the names of the tools, or the names of the parts of the roof... stuff she only cared about because she cares about me - that Little Cindy Keiter - persevered through it all.  

But the buzzing of the face flies nearly broke her.

And while I expected to spend the two weeks communing with my ancestors, wallowing in thoughts of what their lives were like when they lived in that cabin, and going deep into the restoration of the place as an heir to its genetics,  I found my time at Hastings wasn't about that stuff very much.  I dealt with the problems that presented themselves - how to get those big, square metal panels aligned to that old crooked cabin, how to get redwood when the salvage redwood supplier I'd counted on flaked out, how to avoid sliding off a slick new metal roof when you still need to work up there, how to avoid making extra trips down the mountain to get more tools...

I figure that's what all us romantic, book-learned fools discover once we throw ourselves into the fray: a project may be grand and all, but work is still work.  In that regard, I can't imagine my experience was any different from that of my ancestors'.  More than once, I thought of the brilliant French films, Jean de Fleurette and Manon de la Source, and how that guy moves to Provence to become a peaceful and successful farmer, only to be forced to recon with the realities of life in the country (and his own inner demons).  Have you seen them?

I was challenged by the work, to be sure, but what I never dreamed Hastings would illustrate for me in the way that it did was the measure of Cindy's love.  So before I get to any talk of angles and methods of construction and such, I just wanted you to know: the real story of our time working on the Arnold Cabin was Cindy's strength in facing so many fears and the love she showed for me by doing so.


Wednesday, August 6, 2014

The Arnold Cabin Project Part 2: Planning

Hi there!  Cindy and I are getting ready to fly to California for two weeks to work on the Arnold Cabin.   If you missed Part 1 of the Arnold Cabin Project, click the link to read all about it.

 Now, before all you mashers and thieves out there in Internet Land get excited about pilfering our television while we're out of town, settle down.  The upstairs tenants will still be home, and we have additional people cat sitting and looking after the green roof.

With the home front in good hands, I'm getting nerdy-excited about our trip.

Here's the plan:  We're going to fly into LAX, rent a car, drive up and spend a night visiting Cindy's twin sister, Jodi in Lancaster.  We can't wait to see the school where she teaches and the new house where she lives. The next day, we're going to drive a bit further up and spend the night visiting Daron and his wife Marianne in California City.  Daron is one of my three fathers, and if you don't know what I mean when I say that, check out this previous blog post: Three Fathers. One Me.  Cindy hasn't met Daron and Marianne yet, and I'm very excited to introduce them!  The following day, we'll head up to Carmel Valley and settle into our housing at Hastings Natural History Reservation.
The Barn at Hastings
I spent this past Thursday night, and all day Friday and Sunday researching metal roofing systems and suppliers for the cabin.  I think I found the right thing - corrugated sheet metal.  It'll stop the rain, last a long time, give the cabin a few more minutes of time if a wildfire comes through, and it'll be in keeping with the style of the cabin.  I have the heart of a loyal restorationist and preservationist, so I really thought hard before moving away from a shingled roof (which is what is currently on the cabin), but I've seen photos of other family cabins with sheet metal on them, so I think my ancestors would approve.

Another thing to consider is the delicate nature of the land and the fact that it's used for natural history research.  Most metal roofing systems these days, it seems, come either coated in paint or a polyvinyl fluoride stuff.  I didn't want to risk all that paint cracking off or the PVCF chemicals leeching or peeling off the roof and getting into the environment over time.  So I chose a product that's as safe and environmentally inert as I could find: 7/8" corrugated sheet metal coated in "galvalume".

From the manufacturer's web site:
The Living Building Challenge (LBC) certification program, administered by the International Living Future Institute, takes a broad view of sustainability and embraces the philosophy of a restorative future by looking at a building’s performance over time.  In fact, certification is not granted until the building has been occupied and its performance documented for one year.
The Institute’s Declare Label is an ingredients-based eco-label around the Red List of “chemicals of concern” that have human health and toxicity impacts.  Declare aims to provide transparency and open communication by allowing manufacturers to voluntarily share their product sources, materials and manufacturing locations.
Metal Sales™ is the first metal panel manufacturer to be included in the rigorous and exclusive Declare™ program. Metal Sales has fully disclosed all of the ingredients in the Acrylic Coated Galvalume® roof and wall panels through Declare, and they are designated as being Red List Free on the Declare Label. 
For more information, please visit www.declareproducts.com
Are you still with me?  I know.  Corporate writing is snoozeville.  I could hardly get through that stuff myself, but I googled around, and it doesn't seem like greenwashing.  Here's hoping I'm making a good choice!
Since I've never built a metal roof, I had a lot of questions in my mind about how to deal with the corners, the roof ridge, the line along the roof where there's a change in slope (which I now know is called a "pitch break"), how the flashing and the roofing panels go together, how to deal with the little gaps under the corrugation, how to cut corrugated sheet metal... 
The internet is a marvel and a wealth of free education if you take the time to poke around and always verify things across multiple sources.  It seems us Americans cut sheet metal with power tools - nibblers and grinders.  In the Phillippines, Australia, and New Zealand, they just snip a nick in the panels and rip them by hand.  Since we won't have electricity (or water, for that matter) at the cabin, I'm excited to give the snip-and-rip method a try.
Well, the metal manufacturer had a bunch of installation diagrams and stuff on their web site, so I downloaded and read almost all of them.  If anyone ever wanted to prove that I'm not normal, they need only point out that I really loved spending three days reading about how metal roofs go together.  
But, before I could order the roofing materials, I had to know the pitch angles of the roof.  There are 3 roof sections on this cabin.  Clearly, the original 12'x21' cabin got too small for my two great-great-grand parents and their 5 children, so they added a section onto one side to make a 21' square cabin.  The new addition - let's call it the West wing - created a second pitch angle.  I took some rudimentary measurements of the cabin when we were out in July of 2013, but there were a couple of critical measurements I didn't think to take.  In order to find the slopes of the roof, I had to trace them off photographs I had taken.  But then I wanted to double check my tracings, so I ended up making a model of the cabin in SketchUp and matching some photos (taken on two different days) to my measurements.  If I did the photo-matching correctly, my measurements were pretty close.  If I didn't, I hope my metal order included more (rather than less) than I'll need - there's a week's lead time for orders, and we'll have to drive to Watsonville for the pickup! 
Arnold Cabin in SketchUp
Arnold Cabin in real life - July 2013
While I think the cabin is pretty square, it's clear from matching the model to the photos that the walls aren't perfectly plumb.  For a roof, square is pretty important so your eaves and gables - the parts that overhang the walls - aren't all crooked.  I'm hoping plumb won't mess me up too much, since I won't have time to starting fiddling with the cabin's foundation.  Someone else worked on that back in (I'm guessing) the '80's, around the last time the roof was replaced.  Want a picture of the foundation?  I'm sure you do:
Family lore has it that the boys slept down here - under the floor of the cabin.  The girls, I gather, slept up in the West wing.
And while I'm trying to impress you with this little cabin, here's a shot of the interior.  That's the front door on the left.  I'm guessing this would have been the living room:

Here's what the ceiling in that room looks like - just shingles on purlins on rafters.  Like my nifty new roofing lingo?  You can see the spot where the wood stove chimney used to be.

And last-but-not-least-ly, this is the West wing with the back door.
So, the plan is to strip off the shingles, sweep out the wood rat poop, nail tin over the rat and wood pecker holes, put the metal roofing system on the house, and replace the missing redwood batons and a couple of broken floorboards.  
Speaking of redwood, I found a guy who salvages old growth redwood logs down in Big Sur.  He's going to be our redwood supplier.  Here's his web site: http://bigsuroldgrowth.com/
Oh, and if there's time, we'll replace the broken window panes and re-glaze the rest.  My Aunt Trish is flying in from Phoenix, my Aunt Lynda is coming down from San Francisco, and a handful of cousins will gather at Hastings for a little family reunion and visit to the cabin on our last weekend.  And for our last night, we'll be heading up to San Francisco to take Lynda home and have a nice visit with my cousin Robert.
I'm looking forward to a great trip.  New roof or bust!!

Sunday, July 13, 2014

Roof Railing Update - July 2014

This summer, I've been working on installing the wooden handrail along the tops of the steel railings I made for the green roof.  It's been semi-slow going, though, because my attention has been pretty divided between getting soil and fabric pots set up with vegetables for the growing season, installing drip irrigation for all the container plants, dealing with the plumbing and washing machine issues we've had (more plumbing is in my future for this weekend, in fact - there's a water hammer and a shower faucet leak to solve), and babysitting our godson, Axel.

Oh, and I had a good meeting with a roofing guy about the parapet wall and roof hatch leak problems.  He happens to be a Certified Green Roof Professional in addition to being an experienced roofer, and I had a great time chatting with him.  Here's hoping all of that works out.  I'll give you his name if it does.

But back to the railing project!  As I wrote on the PHL page describing how I made the roof railings (found here or on the left hand side of the PHL web site), I bought a bunch of lumber reclaimed from the rubble of the Rockaway Beach Boardwalk after Super Storm Sandy by Sawkill Lumber.  It's a mix of tropical hardwood species that do very well outdoors in the elements, so I won't have to worry about replacing it any time soon.

I started in April.  The first step was to pull all of the old boardwalk nails out of the lumber.  Alan from Sawkill told me that the "P" stamped on the heads of each nail stands for the NYC Parks Department.

Then, I had to work out the angle of the miters for the ends of the boards.  I laid pieces out on the railing tops and marked the intersections where the boards meet to find the angles. 


For cutting the miters, I could choose between two evils: climbing up and down the ladder and stairs between the basement and roof as I refined the fit of each piece, or I could use a hand saw.  I chose the hand saw for most pieces and went downstairs to my electric compound miter saw for the cuts that needed to be done at precise-yet-unknown compound angles.  That reminds me, I need to learn how to sharpen my handsaws.


And here are the first two pieces laid out.


As I worked my way along the railing, I discovered one spot in particular where one of the boards is sloping into the corner, and one is more or less level.  That's a problem I'll have to figure out how to solve later.  


And here's one of the uprights with the short boards roughed in. 


Now I'm starting to see how the finished railing is going to look.


 And a couple of wide shots of the whole back railing.  FYI - I still haven't started on the front.


By the way, I attached the wood with self-tapping screws from the hardware store.  I drilled holes through the steel slightly wider than the screws, and I ended up needing to drill pilot holes up through the railing lumber, because the self-tapping screws couldn't handle the hardwood.  The whole thing was rather finicky and took longer than I had hoped.  But it's nice to see the complete form of the steel and wood railing together for the first time.


I bought an Arbortech Turboplane for my grinder to do the shaping.  I had been concerned it would dull quickly with this tropical hardwood, but I wrote to the manufacturer and they pointed me to a youtube video of a guy grinding epoxy off a concrete floor without the blade getting dull, so I gave the Turboplane a try.  It worked very well.  I discovered the undersides of the boards and the corners were particularly difficult to shape without getting a lot of chipping and tear-out, so I'm doing a certain amount of shaping with a rasp by hand.  Here are some shots of what I did initially:




I was feeling pretty good about how things were going until I went up to the roof in May and discovered that the screws had snapped on some of the smaller pieces.  We had had some rain, so the best I can figure is that the wood expanded and sheered off the screws.  BUMMER!


I mail-ordered some stainless steel lag screws and spent a couple of days in June taking everything apart and replacing all the initial screws with the lag screws.  All of the broken ones had to be extracted from the wood.  I tried drilling them out, but it didn't work (the screws were too hard to be drilled through), so I stumbled upon this method.  First, chip out some wood around the screw.


Then, grab the end with vice grips and back it out of the hole.


After doing that for all the broken screws, and re-drilling all the holes in the steel and the pilot holes in the wood, I realized I should take the opportunity to do the initial power-shaping on all the pieces before I screwed them back down (to prevent the tear-out on the corners I had experienced back in April).  So, I held the pieces to the top of the railing with clamps and shaped the edges before lag screwing them onto the railing.  Here's the finished product.


After seeing this picture, I decided that's the best place I've found for the home-made digital antenna, so I've since gone up and secured it in place and run the coaxial cable in such a way that it is hardly visible.  After this one dies of rust, I think I'll make one that looks more integral to the fence - like a bug, but hopefully not in a cheezy way.

I've still got the hand-shaping and sanding to do on this railing, and of course, I still have to do the whole front railing, but I'm pretty pleased with how it's turning out so far.  What do you think?

P.S. Happy Birthday to Axel, who turned 1 year old last Sunday.  Cindy and I went to his party to celebrate.  Here he is with his mom and a fiendish face full of ice cream cake and zeppole (or "fried dough" for you non-Italians):


Thursday, July 10, 2014

Black And White Makes Grey: What If You're Biased Against Yourself?

When I was in my late teens and early 20's, I didn't know how to figure out whether I was gay or not.  The only sex I knew about (straight sex) sounded to me like pretty much the most awful thing two people could do together.  I knew girls were supposed to like boys... my cousin Samantha was basically boy-crazy, so I watched her and tried to make myself feel the way it looked like she felt about boys.

It didn't work, but I didn't know it wasn't working.  I kept trying, and I aimed squarely at "doing what I was supposed to do."  I had this white-picket-fence vision of where I was supposed to be in my life.  I don't know where it came from - TV, my grandmother, talk at school... I was definitely one of those perfectionist kids who equated doing well with the path to receiving love.

Shortly after high school and not wanting to fall behind in life's schedule, I lost my virginity to a guy I was dating named Dave.  I don't know what it was like for him, but for me it was uncomfortable... painful at worst and boring at best.  A day or two later, after a conversation about whether he would promise to put the toilet seat down when he finished peeing (something I knew nothing about, other than it seemed an important thing to establish, since it had been a source of tension on many TV sit coms), I set to work convincing Dave that we should move in together.  I was 18.  He was 23 or 24, divorced, and a Corporal in the 761st Chemical Company, stationed at Fort Ord, California.

Portrait of an Army dude with a teenager...
We rented an apartment together in a grey, cookie-cutter townhouse-style apartment building in Marina, California.  We bought a huge sectional sofa, a gaudy brass floor lamp, a Sega Genesis, and cable TV.  If I had to guess, I'd say we had been together for about 3 months at that point.  Did you ever hear the one about what a lesbian brings to the second date?  A U-Haul!  Normally, however, the lesbian in the joke knows she's a lesbian... but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

I went through the motions of being in a relationship with Dave for a few months, and while I felt love for him as a person, I certainly never felt anything even close to a crush or romantic love for him.  But, at the time, I didn't know the difference.

I did, however, love to hang out with my friend Stacy.  We were both working on SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE at Monterey Peninsula College.  She was doing props, if I remember correctly, and I was on the fly rail and run crew.  She was funny in her own right, flirty, sharp, charming... but together, we were absolutely hysterical.  We were a dynamic duo and fast friends.

Stacy and Lory, such as they were then.
I admired Stacy's confidence.  She was bold and talented, tortured and unafraid.  I drove her home one night after the show, and while waiting for two men to finish crossing in the crosswalk so that I could turn left, with an air of bravado, I made a joke.  I said something to the effect of, "Move it, faggots!"

Stacy didn't laugh.  She didn't cheer me on.  She said, "Oh, no, Lory.  Don't say things like that.  It makes me sad to hear you say things like that."

I was confused.  Flashes of feelings and questions raced through my mind: fags were like monsters, right?  Or like the devil?  There was nothing good about them, so hating them was fair game, wasn't it?  Good versus Evil.  Wasn't seeing a fag just an opportunity for a decent person to flex their muscles and show their strength a little bit.  The gays deserved it... right?

Embarrassed and perplexed, I back-pedaled, I did my best to underplay my failed attempt to impress, and I moved on.

Over the next couple of days, Stacy became distant.  I begged her to tell me what was wrong.  She was certain I wouldn't want to be her friend anymore if she told me.  After the show one night, we drove to Carmel and talked.  It took a lot of convincing, but finally, in the car headed back North over Highway 1, as we came over the crest of the hill between Carmel and Monterey, Stacy told me that she was gay and that her friend Nina, whom she had spoken about many times but who was studying abroad for the year, was actually her girlfriend.

My legs went numb.

First, is it possible to say that my legs went numb and not have you worry that I crashed the car?  I didn't.

Then, is it possible to tell you so that you understand: when Stacy came out to me and my legs went numb, I awoke to the Truth that people - people worth loving - can be gay.

And that,

Changed

Everything.

I don't know what the biological explanation might be for my numb legs.  It could have been shock.  It could also be that my body knew I was gay in that moment - even when my mind was still clinging to the ridiculous hope that I could carry on my straight-lived charade and have a "normal" life.

Within moments, as I clung to the white-picket-fence image I had in my mind of my life with Dave, I felt a fierce loyalty and desire to protect Stacy and Nina from anyone who might want to hurt them.  I fancied myself a Defender of The Gays.  I would be the ambassador of Gay Is Okay to the straights!

In the weeks that followed, Stacy and I became closer than ever.  She was living with Nina's family even though Nina was away, and I guess to get a break from them or so we could hang out longer, Stacy occasionally slept over at Dave's and my apartment.  One such morning, we got in my car and headed to Monterey.  I was taking Stacy to work and myself to school.

At the time, I was driving a hand-me-down from my Great Grandmother: a turquoise blue 1954 Ford Ranch Wagon.  I still own it.  Although it doesn't run now, my Aunt Trish in Phoenix keeps it for me.

"Elizabeth" - The 1954 Ford Ranch Wagon
I still remember the exact moment - the sun was crisp and low on the horizon to the East, and we were headed South, with the shining expanse of Monterey Bay to our right, and quiet Sand City to our left.  The hills of the Monterey Peninsula were waiting ahead of us.   I don't remember who said it first, but we pulled off the highway, Stacy called in sick to work (at a pay phone, see?), and we got back on the road - headed in the opposite direction.  We were playing hooky.  We were headed for San Francisco!

I've spent time in San Francisco with Stacy since that day, and now, 20+ years later, it's hard to be sure which memories go with which day.  I'm pretty sure we started on Haight Street with my first falafel sandwich (a tradition I still keep), we visited Chinatown, The Castro District, and I remember driving my tank-of-a-car (which had no power steering) down Lombard Street, which was hair-raising.
We talked and laughed and stumbled around the city together.  It was so much fun, I was high on that day for weeks afterwards.

Although I still couldn't imagine that I myself was gay, my relationship with Dave quickly fell apart, we broke up, and he moved out.  I had seen deep, primal joy on that stolen day in San Francisco.  On some level, I knew I wasn't going to see that kind of joy again if I spent my life with Dave.  But I was too ignorant about life and love, and I was still in hot pursuit of doing "the right thing."

I casually looked for another boyfriend.  The trouble was, I had no idea what a crush was, so I had no feelings of my own to go on.  I got in the habit of relying on other people to like me first in order to know whom to date.  And, when I was 20, a girl I had worked with on a production of WEST SIDE STORY gave me a mix tape, and after listening to it for days, it slowly dawned on me that all the songs were edgy, sexy... romantic.  I slipped into a 2-year relationship with that talented, hilarious, and fierce woman who is a dear friend to this day (also, I suppose, in stereotypical lesbians-stay-friends fashion).

It took me 7 years and a couple more girl friends before I finally found the confidence and self-assurance to know with certainty that I was unreservedly gay.  For those intervening years, it was as if I was a butterfly - flitting around labels like "gay," "queer," "dyke," and especially the oh-so clinical and stigmatized "lesbian" - trying to find a safe place to land.

My heart and my body knew who I was.  But all the rules I thought I was supposed to follow just confused me.  So many of the symbols surrounding "gay pride" were hyper-sexualized and, frankly, tacky.  I've never been interested in putting up phallic art, or driving around topless with leather chaps on a motorcycle, or getting in someone's face and shouting "Get used to it!"  In my naivety, I thought that in order to be gay, I had to identify with all of those symbols.  And while they've definitely helped break down barriers and give people a source of strength (even me, occasionally), it took me a long time to figure out that I don't have to go to parades.  I can be gay and quiet.  I can be gay and introverted.  I can be gay and stay home and garden on Pride Day.

I used to think there were a lot more rules than I now know there are.  Some people have some very strict rules against homosexuality.  The way I see it, those rules are like trying to outlaw the sky on a rainy day - people don't have to like it, but all their shouting and carrying-on can't make the rain stop being wet, so they might as well get used to it after all.

On The Occasion of Gay Pride Day NYC - 2014

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Black and White: Talk About Race

You might have already guessed this by observing my rugged self reliance, but to give your suspicions confirmation, I was a Girl Scout from before I started Kindergarden until I graduated from high school.  I didn't belong to a troupe when I was in Phoenix living with my mom for the school years; I only really participated in the summer time while I was living in Salinas with my grandmother, so for most of my childhood, I got to do all the fun summer camp stuff without all the meetings and uniforms and cookie peddling.  I think that's why I lasted so long.

But, I started living in Salinas full time when I was 15, and I finished high school there.  So, around the time of my Junior year, I suddenly found myself trying to sell Girl Scout cookies (for the first time) with my new troupe at a booth in Northridge Mall.

Somewhere along the way, I had seen this old, silent, black & white Girl Scout movie.  I can't find it online, and I don't remember what it was called, but the moral of the story was that all Girl Scouts were sisters.  So when a black girl came up to our cookie booth in the mall and said she'd been a Girl Scout for a few years, I got excited and called her sister.  We chatted for a short while, and after the girl and her friends left, our troupe leader (who was white) scolded me - she was furious that I had called a black person "sister."  I was completely confused and tried to defend myself.  She hissed something at me about how black people call each other "sister" and "brother," and as a white girl, doing the same would look as if I was mocking them.  I was mortified.  I was embarrassed.  I felt like a fool.

After that day, I had a hard time going to Girl Scout meetings.  I felt like the troupe leader and I held each other in suspicion.  Whether it was true or not, it seemed as if she never got over being mad at me for calling a black girl my sister.  And I don't suppose I ever got over being embarrassed for my perceived mistake and angry at how unfair the whole situation was.  After being a Girl Scout for nearly my entire life, I stopped actively participating, and I walked away from the opportunity to earn the Girl Scout Gold Award (Girl Scouting's highest award) in my Senior year of high school.  That same troupe leader said I'd always regret it.  I was never too fussed about awards, so I can't say she was right.  But, I certainly never forgot it.  It's just that, until the moment of writing the above paragraphs, I never really recognized why I stopped going back.

Now I realize that experience left me irrationally afraid to talk about race.   But that's finally changing.  Whether or not that troupe leader saw my heart and knew my intentions were good, I know they were.  In fact, I now know that my innocent "mistake" was far more equalizing than her knee-jerk reaction.

There is a huge problem in the United States.  We never properly healed from the national trauma of slavery and all the other miserable stuff that has come with it over the centuries.  After reading the excellent article by Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The Case for Reparations" (you should read it too), I find myself energized to come out of the closet as a white lady who wants to talk about race relations.  I want to talk about it, and I want to do everything I can to help our country heal these national injuries.

I know from Buddhism, the only way I can do that is to start with myself.

It won't be easy - we're all trained by our society to have certain pre-judgements.  And by "we," I mean everyone - all of us.  In the academic world, these pre-judgements or prejudices are called "hidden biases."  We might think we treat people with equality, but when someone says "doctor," most of us likely assume the doctor is a man.  When you stop to think about it, that's not fair, is it?  That's an example of our hidden bias about doctors.

But I'm not just talking about professions and gender!  I'm sure we can think of all sorts of hidden biases we and our society hold along racial lines.  In fact, I was listening to a podcast last night and heard a great segment about the "Carefree Black Girl" movement - which aims to correct our hidden bias towards seeing black women as either over-sexualized or struggling through massive adversity.  Carefree Black Girl makes a space in our society for images of happy black women, possibly even wearing flowered dresses, riding bicycles, picking daisies...

You (and I) have hidden biases towards certain types of people and against others.  We were trained to have these hidden biases by living in our society, and we can un-train ourselves by understanding our own thought patterns and by being mindful of our own biases and those we observe in others.

If you want to get scientific about it (I know I do!), you can learn more about your own personal hidden biases by participating in Harvard University's Project Implicit study.  It's free.

So, here's my plan: I'm going to take a good look at my own hidden biases and prejudices so that I can root them out and learn to see each person as fairly and completely as I see myself.

This is the first post in what will become a series of posts, written to document my thoughts and experiences around hidden bias and race as a 43-year-old gay white Buddhist American woman living in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States of America, North America, Northern Hemisphere, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, The Universe.  Now you know where things stand.

Here are some flowers from the green roof:



Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Water Main Leak Repair

Two weekends ago, Ian came up from doing laundry (with our new used washing machine) in the basement and mentioned that there was water on one of the pipes down there.  I had just been running the cold water (trying to make wine bottle planters, but not having too much success), so I made the hopeful assumption that he was seeing condensation on one of the drain pipes down there.

But, as you will have already guessed, I was wrong.  When I went downstairs a couple of days later to start brewing our first batch of compost tea, I saw the long trickle of water that Ian had been talking about.  It was coming from a rusted plug nut on the top of the main water line coming into the house.  BIG BUMMER.  



First of all, someone had used a steel plug in a water system, which is incredibly lazy, stupid, or both, because water makes steel rust.  Second of all, that plug had started letting a slow trickle of water leak into the basement, which wasn't great for the basement floor, and it certainly wasn't great for water conservation.  And lastly, it wasn't hard to imagine that leak getting worse some day soon and essentially letting a geyser of full-pressure water erupt into the middle of the basement while we were all at work and unaware.  It was obvious that I had to embark upon another plumbing project ASAP.

I managed to get all the parts I needed while on a break from work last Thursday.  The guy at the plumbing store very sweetly saved me some money by having me buy fittings that could be sweated (soldered) together, rather than threaded fittings.  Threaded fittings require thicker metal and more machining to produce, so they're much more expensive than sweat fittings.  He also took a guess at why a T fitting was used here where an elbow would have worked just as well: a place to drain the plumbing system for maintenance?

Since someone had used that steel plug, I doubt the T fitting had been used for any other reason than it's what the plumber had on hand.  But I did like the idea of a place to drain the system, so we kept the T fitting and added a spigot.

While waiting for Ian to finish showering and getting ready to depart on Sunday morning, I sweated all the pieces together that I could:


And after both upstairs tenants were gone for the day, I shut off the water, and went around the house, turning on a couple of faucets on each floor so that air could get into the pipes and allow the water to drain out the open garden hose spigot in the basement faster.

I cut the 3/4" horizontal pipe coming off the T fitting, and I disconnected the main pipe just above the water meter at a union fitting.  That allowed me to take that section of pipe with the rusty T fitting, put it in my work bench vise, and unscrew the T fitting with a plumber's wrench and my giant muscles.  Once I had it off, it was obvious that someone had tried to cover the steel plug with some putty from the inside to prevent rust.  There you have it: that plumber was too lazy to get a proper brass plug.  Jerk.



I cleaned up the threads of the pipe end.


And with some plumber's putty, I assembled all the pieces and put the pipe with the new T fitting into place.  I'm using a spare washing machine hose to guide water down to a bucket next time I have to drain the pipes.  This spigot is probably 7 feet off the floor.


It took some finagling and a little teflon tape to get the union joint to stop dripping.  In my experience, those union joints are always a little finicky.  But if I ever have problems with this section of plumbing again, I won't have to cut any pipes; I can just disconnect at the union.


After about an hour and a half, the water was turned on, I had chased down the one drip that was occurring with the new pieces, and a potential plumbing crisis was averted.  It cost me $55 in new parts and my own time.  If you think you always have to call a professional plumber, but you like taking on challenges and working with your hands, think again.  If I can do this, you can too.  Neat, right?

Monday, June 16, 2014

The Washing Machine Saga

In non-gardening-related news, our washing machine (a freebie from 2008, when Blue Man Group closed its costume shop in Red Hook, Brooklyn) committed hara-kiri.  See the huge hole in the outer drum?  That shouldn't be there...


I took the washer apart to try to fix it, but replacement parts would cost $750.  

Seven Hundred and Fifty American Dollars.

So I went down the rabbit hole of researching new washing machines, versus used washing machines, versus home made, pedal-powered washing machines, versus old fashioned electric and hand activated washing machines...  According to my own comparisons between amazon.com reviews and Consumer Reports reviews, it seems machines can be found these days that are quiet and work well, but it also seems no one is making good and quiet machines that are also built to last.  The same machines that got the highest Consumer Reports ratings also had high volumes of customer complaints about the machines quickly breaking down or never working well in the first place.

I took a house-hold survey.  I was starting to get excited about pedal powered and hand washers, but Cindy and our upstairs tenant and friend, Ian, brought my head out of the clouds and overruled my hippie washing machine dreams on the grounds of time management.  Fair enough.

Cindy and I bought a used washer from a guy on e-bay for $200 plus the cost of a zipcar to go get it.  It makes a knocking sound when it agitates, which seemed to get better when I leveled the washer, but the knocking has come back again.  I've opened the front cover and can't see anything actually wrong with things as it's operating, so I'm going to hope for the best.  Plus, I really like this washer.  It's a top loader.  The old kaput one was a front loader.  As my grandmother used to say, "We shall see..."

Still, you should check out this video of a home-made pedal powered washing machine.  The couple who made it seem sweet:

I also stumbled on this video, which basically got me all excited about the possibilities of life:


Inspired by the above video, and wanting to salvage what we can, I'm keeping the old washing machine motor (for unknown future projects), I've turned the stainless steel drum into a fire pit for the back yard (we haven't tried it yet), and I took the glass out of the door for a mixing bowl.  I think I'm going to dismantle and keep the metal sides of the washer, too.  You never know when you might need some sturdy sheet metal.  Good materials are expensive and hard to get.  The rest (computer controls, all the plastic bits, the pumps, etc) is getting recycled, because it doesn't seem like there's a market for used parts for this machine.

In case you're curious, we don't have an electric dryer.  We hang-dry everything in the basement on two racks I made with a bunch of dowels and some scrap wood a few years ago.  Here's one of them:


By the way, that's the old washer (in pieces) on the left, and the new washer (under Ian's laundry basket) on the right.  I keep a dehumidifier running in the basement, because I don't want my tools to get rusty.  It also helps the clothes dry faster in the humid, Summer months.  And, with the top-loading washer, I can use the dehumidifier water in the washing machine.  Neat, eh?

Special thanks to Ian for helping us bring the replacement washing machine down into the basement.  And when I say "helping," I mean he did most of the work.