This time we’re having a stair in the main staircase repaired; it tilted forward and caused guest to slip and fall on the stairs. We were used to it, but it was a problem when we had people over. To fix the stair, Carl had to pull out out pull it out and build up the space under it.
We had air conditioner repairman in today to work on our condenser unit – he replaced the fan motor and did some cleaning so the central air runs better. Since I was going to be home anyway for that, I scheduled a carpenter named Carl Lenk to come and rebuild the top two basement stairs for us – they were both soft and in danger of breaking, and it always made us a bit nervous going up and down the stairs. Stephanie’s dad has been nagging us to get them repaired for months.
Carl did a wonderful job, and pictures of the work will be forthcoming soon.
As he was working on the stairs, I was reading Neal Taflinger’s blog about Homespun – the new store in Irvington that features work by local artists and crafts folks. The Taflingers are the folks who created INDIEhandicraft Exchange that we’ve attended several times – lots of great local artists making cool stuff.
So I’m reading a recent post on Neal’s blog about an artist they worked with to create the painted logo above the register in their shop, and it turns out that it was Carl Lenk – the very same dude who was rebuilding our basement stairs. Turns out that in addition to being a handy handyman, he’s a mural artist and sculptor doing work around town – very gorgeous stuff. Cool. We know a popular local artist and stuff.
90 years ago today, The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing women’s suffrage in the United States of America.
Well done, Sister Suffragettes.
Women have been able to vote throughout the US for less than 100 years. We still have a long way to go before women enjoy true equality. Some Schoolhouse Rock for those of you who grew up in the 1970’s.
Tim O’Brian In The Atlantic – discussing the sources of creativity and how to tell a well-imagined story:
My sons, Timmy and Tad–both fans of Winnie the Pooh–have taken lately to wearing tails. At our local Wal-Mart, and occasionally at church, the boys sport lengths of clothesline dangling from their trousers. They prowl the neighborhood trailing an assortment of ribbons, coat hangers, telephone cords, fishing line, belts, blankets, drapery tassels, and electrical extension cords. People notice. Things have gotten out of hand. Alas, we have become a family of tails, and, though I’m embarrassed to make this confession, even my wife and I have been persuaded to spruce up our fashion acts. Meredith jogs in a tail. I write in a tail. Yesterday, in a most undignified moment, I answered the doorbell having forgotten the Slinky jiggling restlessly at my buttocks. Imagine the judgments taking shape in the eyes of the UPS man.
Our household seems caught up in a kind of reverse evolution, tumbling backward through the millennia, alighting in an age in which the ancestral tail was both common and quietly useful. Like our tree-dwelling relatives, the O’Brien tribe has grown comfortable with its tails. We groom them. We miss them at bath time. We view their absence in our fellow man with pity and suspicion.
Now, as I sit here with my coffee at the kitchen table, I find myself wondering if something about this tail business might smack of the unwholesome, even of the aberrant and fanatical.
I know – still no photos from the great organizing adventure – but it’s continuing. We now have our new china cabinet, and the boxes of china and various other breakable items made their way into it. All of the packing materials for those went into the recycling bin. I also cleaned out the pantry closet (packed with old shopping and plastic bags that also went into the recycling bin) and put the tools we use regularly with it. I hung a clock in the dining room and a print that Stephanie had. My next steps – taking the remaining tools to the basement, taking an old wire shelving unit to it’s new home, and purging the tox-drop items and aluminum can collections this weekend.
I also need to go through my closet and assess my hanging clothes. Lots of them could find a new place to live. I also have some board games that I collected but will actually never play (as opposed to the ones we will) that will find a new home soon, too.
Courtesy of Wikipedia:
Laver’s Law was an attempt to compress the complex cycle of fashion change and the general attitude towards any certain style or period into a simple timeline. It first appeared in Taste and Fashion (1937)
| Indecent | 10 years before its time |
| Shameless | 5 years before its time |
| Outré (Daring) | 1 year before its time |
| Smart | ‘Current Fashion’ |
| Dowdy | 1 year after its time |
| Hideous | 10 years after its time |
| Ridiculous | 20 years after its time |
| Amusing | 30 years after its time |
| Quaint | 50 years after its time |
| Charming | 70 years after its time |
| Romantic | 100 years after its time |
| Beautiful | 150 years after its time |
Again cleaning out some old notes and writing, I came across some thoughts I had about the book “Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets” and the subsequent discussion we had about it in book club. I started to write this, but felt I needed to do some additional research to back up some of my ideas, and shelved it. Dunno if I’ll ever get around to doing the research, but the ideas I had are interesting, at least.
We were talking about the architecture of the Robert Taylor Homes, and how it was, to some extent ill-suited to Chicago and the climate, and about the galleries being built outside, etc. and I was thinking about that and what I have skimmed from the Christopher Alexander book “A Pattern Language” about how profoundly architectural components can affect us and how we interact as a family, a neighborhood and a community, etc., and it made me wonder if they had, when they had decided to build the projects, taken an entirely different approach to building for low-income families, whether there would have been an different outcome.
For example, the way the buildings were constructed had a lot of influence on how the people interacted as a community. People were required to live in a fashion that was more intimate than other communities might have been, and it forced dependencies on people like Mrs. Bailey that wouldn’t have existed in other settings.
Architecture also had a powerful effect on how the gangs were able to seize control of the buildings and use them – controlling halls and stairwells, using empty apartments, etc. I wondered if that wasn’t part of the difficulty the gangs had with establishing other places, like Iowa. They didn’t have as much control over their members because they didn’t have as much control over their locations.
That caused me to wonder whether the architecture of the projects actually contributed to the rise of the gangs and the influence of drugs throughout the community. Jane Jacobs in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series)” talks a extensively about how the city can curb criminal activity by sculpting the streetscapes so that people can see the street from their windows and keep an eye on what is going on.
Separately from those ideas, I was thinking about how easy it is for me to judge Mrs. Bailey and JT – because I have the freedom to be an ethical person because I have enough money to be moral. When the economic system you’re trapped in gives you absolutely no incentive to be moral when being moral can get you killed, and when there are additional powerful reasons — like survival — for you to engage in unethical and immoral behavior, you’re going to do what you need to. The odds are stacked against moral behavior and right conduct.
Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang
Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson
You Lost Me There by Rosecrans Baldwin
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
UPDATE: I never acquired the first and second. I read the third book, and own the fourth but haven’t read it yet.