Making Hay
This is feeling like an unusual moment for me and while I’m not in the limbo that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris inhabit, it is a bit of a suspended animation moment for me as well. I can’t tell if it is all the build-up to the election and now waiting to find out what the mad man-child will try to do next, or something else. It probably doesn’t help that I am not on a new expert witness case yet, but the one that has had me testifying for eight weeks in a row continues to show up on my calendar for Wednesdays every week for who knows how much longer and I may or may not have to testify on any given week. I should be happy to clock four hours of well-paid work each week, but for some reason it is somewhat unsettling to have something just go on and on with a lack of clarity as to how long it will continue to do so. Right now I know that I have things on my schedule on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and occasionally Fridays. Even though these are only a few hours each at most, they somehow seem to vex me since my days are not completely free. I seem to have adopted somewhat of an attitude problem and I don’t like that feeling. I have so much to be grateful for that I don’t ever want to fall into the trap of thinking life’s not fair or I coulda been a contender.
What is occupying my time right now is a combination of two things: my three household projects (deck repair, outdoor lighting and my bison boulder sculpture), and two upcoming trips looped into my Missions Mission. Let’s start with the projects since, in theory, that it a necessary productive path…at least in part. The deck is giving me a big headache, less about the realization that it is likely to cost me a bundle and more because of the difficulties and vagaries of how best to do the fix. To begin with, my insurer is all-in trying to figure out the cost of the repair. The structural engineer who was here yesterday spent an hour studying the situation. Obviously I am hoping the damage is covered, but that will not alter the path I will take with regard to the fix. Taking off the existing deck and all that is attached to it (glass railings and the palapa mostly) is a massive and complex undertaking not only because it involves taking off heavy stucco and wire lathe, joists, sub-flooring and slate tile, but because the positioning of the house that makes this a very special hilltop view house, also makes it very inaccessible from the lower side, where the work would have to go on. I saw that clearly as the house-jack and demolition people calculated their costs involving moving materials back and forth around the north side of the house, which is more gently sloped than the south side. And the life disruption of that work would have us dealing with the constant stream of workmen through our recently renovated and completed patio and garden. With the deck and the patio out of commission, our outdoor lifestyle (largely spent here at home per the COVID needs) would be greatly hampered. Even the kitchen and living room, where 90% of our indoor living occurs has floor-to-ceiling windows onto the subject deck under repair and would likely need to be at least partially covered to protect them during work.
This is all very troubling and I am less inclined to take the radical amputation approach to the repair than the bandaging of the wound by repairing the damage. Again, while cost is certainly a factor, the big issue to me is the hassle-factor. Meanwhile I have finally teased one bid out of the lighting contractors. It was a fulsome proposal to which I have had to wield a 40% meat cleaver…and that’s still not cheap. The good news is that if I hit the bid, even at the reduced level, I believe they can do the installation quickly, which is not something I have confidence the deck contractors will be able to honor. That makes me predict that December will be outdoor lighting month and January/February will be deck repair months. I will wait for the second lighting bid, but I suspect that it will be lower and have more opportunity for DIY installation. I am unsure if that is a good or bad thing, but am sure it will have to be factored into the thinking.
Of course, right in the middle of those two large projects is my Bison Boulder project. I had contracted to take delivery of the metalwork by yearend. Since the lighting plan includes a feature lighting in the back to include the Bison Boulder, that should be perfect, but not if the deck is going to get ripped apart. There is no such thing as an independent project. All projects converge and for the next four months they seem to converge on the downslope side of this hilltop house whether I like it or not.
So what’s a DIYer like me that is stuck at home and has a hiatus in workflow to do? This is where Blutarsky would stand up in Animal House and yell, “Toga!” Well, my equivalent would be, “Road Trip!” The sun may shine a lot down here in San Diego, but that is no excuse for not making hay when it does. I have some time on my hands and I have a paucity of heavy lifting to do for the immediate future, so we are planning to fill out as much of our Mission dance card as we can while seeing important friends and family in California as we go.
For Thanksgiving we are expecting some local family for a quiet and subdued gathering that is well within the COVID limits and which will be safety-first in its orientation. Directly following that on the 29th/30th we are planning a two-day jaunt to tick off the San Gabriel, San Fernando and San Bonaventura Missions that surround LaLaLand. The first stop will be Pasadena for a visit with the Ferrell/Yazdiha clan. We will overnight at the hotel made famous in The Graduate in 1967, the Langham Huntington Hotel. We will bring our toothbrush for luggage. We will be joined for this Mission-Quest by Gary & Oswaldo who will sortie out from West Hollywood in between their renovation tasks. The second day on Ventura Highway in the Sunshine (thank you America from 1972), we will stop in Camarillo for lunch at the Ferrell Family mother ship. We will then have six missions down, fifteen to go.
Our next planned Road Trip is a longer one in early December. The target is the Heritage House Hotel in Little River, just south of Mendocino (Sir Douglas Quintet in 1969). That is the locale of Same Time Next Year fame and will give us a few says on the upper California coast to knock around with Frank & Lydia. We may even visit the Tippi Hedren Birds spot in Bodega Bay (Hitchcock, 1963). But on the way we will go up through the Pasa Robles area and catch the Missions in Solvang, Lompoc, San Miguel, Soledad, San Juan Bautista, Santa Clara, Fremont and Sonoma (phew!). That will chop down the fifteen to seven remaining to see. On the way down from Bodega Bay we will hit San Rafael, San Francisco de Asis, Santa Cruz, Carmel, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara. There we will spend the night and meet up with Kim’s old pals Cheryl and Tim.
If you are keeping count you will realize that we will be one shy of a full twenty-one deck of Missions by the end of that trip. That outlier is San Antonio in Jolon. You can be forgiven if you have never heard of Jolon since it is a town of 1,927 people in the middle of nowhere next to an Army fort. The Mission and its grounds are closed due to COVID, so we may not even be able to do a drive-by. It’s one thing to make hay while the sun shines and altogether another thing to drive fifty miles out of your way only to be barred from even visual confirmation of a visit to the last of the Missions in our Mission.