On a train heading North, mackin’ on salami. Just spent a week helping ma pull up roots, getting ready for the next phase of her life. Looking out the window into people’s backyards, thinking about all the useless crap we accumulate over the years. The longer you stay put, the worse it gets.

To be fair, mom has great taste. But on some level, all useless stuff is junk – great taste just makes it harder to divest yourself of the past.

Letting go is hard. New circumstances mean you don’t get to look to the garage as a catch-basin for every shiny thing that catches your eye. Native American artifacts, antique furniture, classic LPs, rare fabrics… all beautiful, all meaningful, all lacking much in the way of practical value.

Formats expire – cassettes and their players, VHS tapes and decks, records and their tuntables… all superceded now. School drawings and papers by my brother and me, and photos? My dad was (is) a master archivist. The drawers of snapshots go deep as you wanna go. That’s history you can’t dispose of.. but neither can you just flip through a few albums and make a judgment. So amazing that it all exists, all those honeycomb-encased moments. But all a burden too. Weird to see how different the print quality of various development houses was over the years – some shots over 40 years old look like they were shot yesterday, others half that old have gone yellow or purple, or have been virtually lost to the fade of time.

I was five in 1969, when Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Armstrong took his walk. Our family sat on the bed and watched in awe, knowing it was one of history’s great moments, unfolding in our lifetimes. What I didn’t know at the time was that my folks clipped newspapers for days around the event, and put them in a time capsule for my brother and me. Discovered the musty manila envelope last night and was moved, knowing that they had had that foresight.

I have a deep connection to Morro Bay and always will. It’s where I became self-aware as a teen, where I learned to surf and dive and build. It’s where I spent countless hours on the beach and in the woods, boy becoming man. My first experience of a sense of awe in the face of nature was on top of Black Mountain, where I often hiked (and did again a few nights ago, possibly for the last time).

Morro Bay is where I became a punk and a hippie, where I had my first jobs, where I made the circle of friends I was to keep for life.

It was an amazing place to grow up, large enough to not be podunk, small enough to be innocent and funky. Big enough to have a post office and a headshop and a sheet music store, too small for a mall.

A big part of me would love to move back one day – can’t imagine a better place to raise the squirt. We’re pretty entrenched in the Bay Area now, and would have to move some pretty big mountains to make a move like that. So it’s been comforting to have mom there, so we can visit a few times a year. But now, homeplate is gone, at least for the forseeable future. Trips to see ma will not include Morro Bay, a hard pill to swallow. But chapters have to close, and mom will be much better off (no, we’re not putting her in a home :)

Deep down, something in me knows I haven’t seen the last of this place. It’s got a magnetic grip on me – a grip I don’t expect will lessen with time.

Goodbye, boyhood home. It’s been awesome.

We’re engaged in pitched battle with a double invasion — raccoons and gophers. Discovered last weekend that the roof of our metal shed was blanketed in raccoon crap, though we have garden hose fights with them a couple times a week now.

As for the gophers, we heard recently that, as vegetarians, they hate the smell of meat, as well as that of feces. So stuffed cat poop and old hamburger into some of their holes. The technique has been amazingly effective (more so than the vibrating gopher stakes we’ve traditionally used), but the neighbors look at us funny. And we’re still seeing some new evidence of their presence. I had thought Amy felt squeamish about the idea of killing them, but that “delicate flower” of mine is full of surprises. From an email I got from her yesterday:

I saw the ground moving in the backyard today, something pulling on the grass from down below. Gophers. First, I clobbered the thing with shovel when the ground moved, but it came up again in a new spot, so the second time, I stabbed it with a pitchfork, and the pitchfork went right into the ground! I think I may have killed it. A very Bill Murray moment for me, minus the explosives.

Maybe nuclear deterrents aren’t off the list after all.

The humming of the home RAID under my desk has been getting on my nerves – enjoyment of music is diminished. Finally won approval to stick it in a closet. Which left the dilemma: Run ethernet across the floor, or drill the floor and run more cable under the house? The simplest jobs turn complex.

First, had to deal with the crawlspace of death — the dusty, low-vertical, lung-compressing passage into the secondary foundation beneath our office. Obtained a 16″ monster boring bit, then faced the question of whether to drill from the top down, risking the possibility of hitting a joist, or to try and calculate the position of joists mathematically, with multiple trips into the hell-hole and back. Decided on the former and got lucky – hole landed neatly a few inches from the foundation. Then the push-pull fun of trying to get enough cable lead on either end, carefully stapling cable to sub-floor under the house.

Finally, the challenge of stripping, arranging, and crimping ethernet cables. Which is tricky enough without a 3-yr-old offering to “help” and climbing your shoulders for a better view. Ended up wasting a pair of terminators, but finally success. Office is both quiet and cable-free.

So we’re thinking of installing ventilation fans in the bathrooms — the window just doesn’t cut it for steam nor stank. Electrician can cut a hole in the ceiling, but says we should hire a roofer to cut the roof hole. Does it take a Ph.D to cut a hole in a roof? We can’t get one person qualified/willing to cut both holes and wire it up?

If we want to be able to control the fan independent of the light, need to run wiring down through the wall – a tedious job, and Electrician Dude says it’ll take all day to do both. There’s got to be a better way. Gave Berkeley Solar a call (the guy I talked to was really helpful, BTW), to see if there might be a way to power the fan from a PV cell and switch it on from a pull-chain. You’d think a unit like this would be available pre-fab, but no dice. Will have to assemble a kit from scratch.

$35 – 300W inverter
$35 – charge coupler
$50 – motorcycle battery
$300 – 50W photovoltaic cell
$100 – consulting fee to work out the whole kit, make sure everything plays nicely together
$20 – mounting brackets, switches, etc.

In other words, no savings over paying Electrician Dude to wire the wall. Except that it would be a fun project and have some geek cred. But we’re talking about a circuit that runs, what, 30 minutes a day?

If any entrepreneur wants to put together a self-contained solar unit like this, with integrated fan, for a fraction of the cost, I’d think you’d find a sizable market.

Reasons Why I Love My Wife #213:

Deep in the code when an urgent message arrives from the home front:

I noticed that you threw away a shampoo bottle the other day. Are you anti-reduce, reuse, recycle? I didn’t know this about you when I married you.

I am jarred out of my complacency, forced to shift gears. Pleasantly lolly-gagging in a garden of functions and arrays when I’m suddenly slammed into another reality, F2F with the 3Rs. It stings. But in a good way.

This winter has been an ongoing battle against under-house moisture and in-house mildew, in part due to the previous owner allowing gutters at a corner of the house to spill their load next to the foundation for years. We’ve been jamming on the beast, installing vapor barriers under the house, caulking baseboards and floor cracks, repainting closets with mildew-resistant paint, ripping out the strange 1940s built-in shoe racks that had warped and were letting in-wall air into the house… a brutal seek and destroy mission.

Fixed the corner gutter a long time ago, but gutters in general are slip-shod — four mismatched systems assembled over the years, held together with bailing wire and chewing gum. Finally decided it was time for new ones.

Gutter Dude claimed that his gutters were “seamless.” I wondered, since one length of the house is almost 60 ft., could they have a truck long enough to bring in seamless gutters? “We make them on the spot,” he claimed, “With your choice of paint already baked in.” Huh? Today it all made sense — they arrive with a trailer rig bearing a big roll of colored aluminum ribbon, and press it through a creasing machine to exact lengths. Simple and brilliant.

Over Thanksgiving, mom finally asked brother and me to get all of our remaining stuff out of her basement and garage. Felt like a character in a Tom Waits song going through all the things I, for whatever reason, felt sure 25 years ago that I would want to see again one day. Haven’t yet finished wading, but a quick laundry list of dusty relics, circa 1978-1983:

• Bag full of punk rock, new wave, and dada buttons and badges (I actually owned a badge-a-matic badge maker for a while), though only about half the stuff in this bag is homemade.
• Brutally embarassing daily journals from my year in Australia, 1983. Hardly seems like these words came from my own mouth. Am I still me? Equally embarassing box of love notes to and from random girls.
• Boxes and boxes of sealed-but-dusty MAD Magazines, plus comics: Howard the Duck, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Flakey Foont, Mr. Natural…
• Reams of output from a junior high mechanical drawing class, including this worshipful rendering of the Pioneer SX-450 stereo amplifier, mysteriously dated 5/18/20 rather than 5/18/80. Probably an early example of the same kind of inexplicable screw-up I’m famous for today.
• Box of Boy Scouts and Indian Guides merit badges, medallions, belt buckles, headbands, and wood-burning experiments.
• Piles of early 80s Surfer, Surfing, and Thrasher magazines (yesterday hauled these down to the surf shop I used to work at and gave them to the current employees, who were “way stoked”).
• Boxes of class papers from high school with mortifying titles like “Toe jam through the years, or the rise and fall of communism” (Got an A on that one, which says more about my teachers than about me).
• Hand-made ceramic tennis shoe in black & white, with real shoelace. Hand-made ceramic “anarchy A” glazed in bright orange.

The task now is to trim the pile to just a couple of boxes, which guarantees an entire weekend shot. Such a sentimental fool.

Papa’s got a brand new vice — and this time, it’s legal! Swivel-head, 5″ jaws, 3″ pipe grip, anvil surface. Bolted to the workbench today, a Gibraltar for the garage. Early birthday present from beautiful wife. Enjoyed being at Home Despot, seeing a mountain of these stacked on the shelves so high you have to get an employee with ladder privileges to get one down for you, imagining The Big One striking at just that moment, dying poetically beneath an avalanche of vices.

Now I just need something to crush. One tool at a time, I’m becoming my father.

Setbacks.

The light we selected for the bathroom originally arrived scratched, and had to be sent back. The lighting store promptly lost the order, and it took weeks to get a replacement. Finally got that installed, only to discover it was too dim, even with max wattage fluorescent bulbs. I had had reservations about its brightness when we first saw it near the beginning of summer, but was assured that our senses were being thrown by all the other lights in the store. Nope. Should have trusted first instinct. I also hadn’t had a good feeling about the color temperature of fluorescents. Even with warmest available tube type, the light feels cold. So after everything, the “Forecast” went back to the store and we went back to the drawing board, focused on glass and halogen this time.

Yesterday finally cleared time to install the tub/shower fixture set. Halfway through reading the directions, the “should have been obvious” dawned on me – you can’t install a full shower fixture set without ripping existing tile and backer board off the wall — there’s no way to connect supply pipes to the pressure regulator unless you can get your hands inside the wall. I think I had approached this problem like most plumbing — thought that I could just install new handle, spout, and showerhead over some kind of standard valve. But it doesn’t work that way. If you don’t want to rip up the wall, you can buy just a “trim kit” to change the look of an existing set (thanks baald), but of course the range of trim kits available for your existing valve is much more limited. Now grappling with whether to go for it and rip out some shower wall, or live with a lesser choice. At this point, very eager to just have the job over and done with. But it would also suck to spend all summer on a project like this and have such a visible detail stuck in the 80s.

Toilet installed last week and in use, tackled the sink today. Used a grout saw to remove a hex tile to make way for the pedestal’s lag-bolt. A bit of caulk to the base and it went into place neatly. Drilled bracing holes in new wall, test-mounted basin. Perfect level, looking good.

Installed most of plumbing into basin last weekend, thought it would be a simple matter to plop it on top of the pedestal, bolt it to the wall, and walk away. Spent most of the day wrestling with atrocious installation instructions. Sample sentence:

Unscrew the nut from the pop up body and take off the spring clip from the ball rod (please note: retain the white packing ring on the ball rod), and place the nut in the ball rod. Insert the ball rod into the side hole of drain, slide the nut on and tighten securely).

This might not sound unapproachable, except for the fact that there were three different parts that could accurately be called the “pop up body,” and that they used the word “in” wherever they mean “over” or “on.” In other places, the directions were completely muddled by attempting to cover six different fixture models in one set of text. “Let’s see… if I don’t have the white washer then I need to apply plumber’s putty between the black gasket and the porcelain. Wait, they must mean the other white washer. In that case…” And so on. All compounded by the impossibly cramped working quarters behind a pedestal sink – had to use a mirror to check my work, check for leaks, etc. Getting the drain lever assembly installed took 90 minutes alone. Finally got it all watertight and working. Not done yet, but the bathroom is actually usable again for the first time in two months! And looking great.

Miles was a great help, too. Pictured: learning all about vice grips, then turning them on me — “Bite! Bite! Cheetah chomps!”

Next up: Install shower/bath fixtures, locate source for ball-bearing cabinet rails, build sliding drawers, install lighting (assuming it ever arrives).

After midnight, hear strange rumblings coming from the side of the house, outside Miles’ window. From my office window, I see the large acacia bush moving, as if in a strong wind, but there is no wind. A bit freaked, thinking maybe some kids are setting up shop in the bushes, grab a flashlight and head outside. Sneak around the corner, throw a beam, and out pads a young buck, looking brave but a bit frightened. His antlers (substantial) had probably become entangled in the dense bushes while foraging, and now he was looking for a way out — but a human was blocking the only route.

I crouched, snapped off the torch, tried not to project a threatening vibe. His big black eyes were illuminated by a nearby streetlight, tranquil but a little bit scared. From a distance of about eight feet, we stared at each other for the longest time, equal parts curiosity and fear flowing in either direction.

This would not be such a surprising event if we were in a more rural location, but we live on a fairly busy street in a thoroughly suburban neighborhood, the last place one would expect to encounter forest creatures. But this is not the first time I’ve seen deer stray this far down from the hill. On evening walks, sometimes see them venturing into neighborhood gardens, snacking on suburban gardens. “Deer are just rats with good P.R.,” or so they say. Have even seem them on occasion traveling in groups, bounding down the street, hooves clacking against the asphalt, oblivious to stop signs, worse than those packs of kids buzzing around on 2-stroke scooters.

Eventually he made his move. Slowly, cautiously, as he had to come even closer to get past me. I’m sure the bulk of fear in the equation was on his side, but can’t say it didn’t cross my mind that those antlers could do serious damage if he decided for some reason that it might be fun to disembowel a bi-ped. Not that that’s ever happened, just saying it crossed my mind. Briefly.

Suddenly he broke into leaps, and was gone, up the street in seconds, tail bobbing in the darkness, clacking his way toward another garden.

Related: Wonderful interview by Forum’s Michael Krasny with poet and naturist Diane Ackerman. Ackerman talks about her conflicted feelings about deer, why she gives necklaces to squirrels, why she plants weeds, and how it’s against the law in some cities to let your front yard become a meadow.

Making progress. Grouted the chicken wire a couple weekends ago. After taking so much care to protect tile from damage, almost painful to smear adhesive-laden mud all over the job. But a few hours sponging, swabbing, wiping and it came out nicely. Used the tile saw at a local shop (free!) to re-cut a few pieces of coving, then installed that last weekend and grouted it yesterday. The corners are a bitch (can’t believe they don’t make pre-fab corner coving pieces).

Today set out to install toilet and sink. The old toilet (excuse me, “closet”) was bolted to the floor through the sub-floor. New one didn’t have such holes, and is attached only to its own drainage flange. But surprise! Previous workers cut a big hole out of sub-floor around the drain, no place to screw down a new one. Ended up cutting a big donut out of 3/4″ ply with hole- and jig-saws. Screwed that in, which provided a platform for new flange. Worked out nicely, but knocked a big hole in the day.

Finally tracked down a source for chrome sink feed pipe covers (so you don’t see plain galvanized pipe when viewing from the side). Stupidly hard to find these, but they cut nicely and make a world of difference. Now if I could just find a source for ceramic toilet bolt covers; these are apparently officially extinct in favor of plastic. The modern world blows.

Assembled sink fixtures and prepared to install pedestal, when I discovered that the new sink has a 1 1/4″ drain, while we have a 1 1/2″ drain in the wall. Also needed more height for new drain assembly. And I’ll have to remove a hex from the floor to bolt down the pedestal, which meant I needed a grout saw. Fourth trip to hardware store.

The cable guy arrived (90 minutes late, we get a discount!), which meant it was time to drop everything and reprogram the Tivo. First night with cable learned how to change sprockets on a dirt bike to suit muddy conditions, watched the removal of immense face tumor from poor Malaysian boy, and was reminded of just what an ass Sean Hannity is. Sink will have to wait.

Took off work Friday to finish spackling/sanding (lather, rinse, repeat) the walls to baby-hiney perfection. Finished masking and priming, applied two coats of Rainwashed Mmmmm… creamy marine! (Compare to destructo image. Note, this bathroom is very difficult to photograph — hard to get a decent angle or lighting. Looks much better IRL!)

Dad arrived Saturday with tile saw, trowels, sponges. Intended to lay tile Saturday and grout Sunday, but took all day to measure and cut. Nooks and crannies are killers. Hex tile comes in 12″ x 18″ sheets, tiles bound lightly together with small rubber dots. Big areas easy, but spaces around tub, corners, heating register, etc. tedious. Tile saw too small for our sheet size, lots of jimmying to make things work. Once layed in, marked hexes for removal where accent tiles would go, then moved all to living room floor in exact layout. Removed marked hexes to make way for accent tiles.

Sunday started early arranging and cutting coving. Getting the corner cuts right super tricky (not mitered, just nicked corners off at 45 degrees, still very hard to get right, but think we nailed it). Started smearing mortar by early afternoon. One row at a time, replicating yesterday’s arrangement: smear even, comb, pound in with beater block, lay in accent tiles, last-minute adjustment cuts (no amount of planning accounts for the ragged reality of real life). Idea is to get angle of notched trowel just right so that no mortar oozes up between cracks but you still get 95% coverage on tile backs; took some practice. Dropped in the accents, dug extra mortar out with penny nail, sponged excess out to perfection. Finished up by 6:30, fried, back sore, knees cramped, but the results are gorgeous so far. In a couple of days, will be able to grout the gaps, install coving, and apply sealant. After weeks in stasis, it’s all starting to come together.

Closed my eyes on the couch and head filled with visions of oozing mortar, hex webs falling apart in my hands.