Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

Technically, this graffiti was not on my property. This is the retaining wall of the neighboring property. But it’s right by our staircase, so when I first saw this back at the beginning of December, I was furious. Then I was instantly paranoid that my house was going to be tagged next. Mostly, though, I just wanted to shoot whoever did this, because I’ve become this cliche of a territorial bourgeois property owner, but also because this tag is pathetic. I mean, could it be more dated/generic/phoned in?
Jeremy called me out on being a big hypocrite because in NY I was really into graffiti. This is not true, though. I liked the stickers people put up in Brooklyn and downtown. I especially liked this one artist named Swoon who made these very delicate tissue paper cutout full-body portraits. I liked the stickers because they were pictures instead of un-readable words. Plus they’re ephemeral and easy to remove if you wanted to/if the weather didn’t do it first. And mainly the people who put them up are pretty clever/talented.
So my first thought was to get rid of it immediately before it became a breeding ground for more graffiti. I called the city and it got complicated since it wasn’t on my property and therefore not my responsibility. They send out volunteers to remove it if they owner hasn’t removed it in a certain amount of time. I bought some Jasco graffiti remover, but never got around to using it cause I was afraid it would kill the flowers in the dirt at the base of the wall. So it just kind of sat there for two months (in which time, a second jerk came along and added an even more pathetic tag, featured in red).
Anway, I was really surprised to come home last week and see it gone. Thanks, City of Portland. And taggers, watch your back.

Click here and here if you like obsessive people.

Some of the art at The Golden Dragon. I think it was a dog and cat motif entirely, with one or two pictures of sailboats.

My car has started making this horrible high pitched screeching noise whenever I shift. My mechanic said it’s the ball bearings inside the clutch. And they can’t be fixed without ripping out the whole system. It was nice and honest of him to tell me my clutch isn’t altogehter shot, but I swear the sound it makes now is almost unbearable. It’s only been one day since I’ve been back on the road in my screaming banshee car and I’m a wreck.

Even though it doesn’t effect me anymore, I have to admit I’ve become fascinated/horrified by the subway fire in NYC. I can’t believe one homeless person can light a fire to stay warm in a tunnel and it knocks out the A train (the A train, for pete’s sake!) for five years.
Hang on: The Times just updated the estimate of when it would be back to normal. Still, it came back to me when I was reading about people waiting on a platform forever and then when the train finally pulls into the station, it’s physically impossible to climb aboard cause it’s just so jammed with people. I would be on the verge of hyperventilating when that one determined person decided they could wedge themselves inside.

My sister is a photographer for the newspaper in New Orleans and gets this amazing access to strange inside events like Mardi Gras balls.

These masks always frightened me.

I don’t know if I could stand having this level of access. Like I don’t think I’d be able to complete a simple assignment in these contexts. I don’t know how she does it.

On Saturday night we had our first dinner in the dining room of this house. It was pretty exciting.

I messed up on following Sally’s email dare to spend no money on inauguration day. The lure of cheap Fred Meyer ice cream was too strong. Actually, I just forgot about it until I was driving home and listening to NPR. It was so depressing listening to the sound bites from various morons on the street talking about how this ‘christian’ man is going to make us ’safer’. And is it me, have I been listening to too much Randi Rhodes, or does NPR seem about as far right at the Fox Network? Still, if I could change my cell phone ring, I’d want it to sound like that little music cue that comes in and out of All Things Considered… which is my clever segway into the next thing I want to mention, which is the best movie ever made: Cellular. Has anyone seen this? Kim Bassinger gets kidnapped and Macgyver’s a broken phone to randomly call a stranger and enlist his help in rescuing her. The guy ends up zig-zigging all over LA with all kinds of wackiness ensuing before it’s over. It got me thinking about those pre-recorded walking tours that I was so obsessed with in NY, which are based off those museum walking tours, except your tour is overlaid onto the randomness of the city streets, which can turn a familiar neighborhood into a whole new landscape (or just be an annoying waste of time — some tours were better than others). I think this idea is pretty cool and I wish someone would come up with the cellular tour of the city, in which a disembodied voice makes you go to a bunch of crazy places and you get to see all this cool stuff. Plus, it’s key that this be a suspenseful mystery. I don’t know how this idea would work in real life, since I can’t think any cellular phone service that works as good as it did in Ms. Bassinger’s film. And aside from that the logistics of planning it would be really difficult even if you scaled it down to exclude all the explosions and shootings. I’m sure bored rich people, like the Michael Douglas character in The Game, get to do stuff like this every day. Still, I won’t rest until I come up with something comparable that takes the participant to The Grotto, The Pink Feather and maybe even those scary Shanghai Tunnels (though I doubt a cell phone would work down there).

These before pictures are truly ‘before’ in the sense that they were taken the first time I was ever inside the house. I’ll never hear the end of it from Jeremy for not taking enough before pictures. And I’ll concede that he’s right in this matter because I take pictures of everything and yet fumble when it comes to taking important pictures that I’ll actually care about. In my defense, we moved into this house in such a flurry. One minute it was empty and then the next thing I knew it was full of all our stuff. The remodeling of the back started even more spur of the moment. It began innocently enough by peeking to see what the floors looked like under the carpet in the back bedrooms and then three months of heavy work began.
I did take a TON of ‘mid’ pictures depicting the process in way too much detail. I’m going to upload all those pix with notes about how we proceeded in a separate album to spare the casual viewer.

Yes, that was a stenciled on ivy. It took four coats of primer to cover it.

This picture doesn’t do justice to just how crummy (and smelly) that old carpet was. We threw it out the window after we first removed it. Then it got rained on for two weeks in the yard, which created maximum misery when we finally got around to dragging it to the dump.

The floors in the back were full of dead heating vents. Each room had three, with only one being operational. At some point, someone spilled an entire gallon of white paint and never cleaned it up. Probably earlier than that, a previous owner had a rug in the center of the room and painted the wood floors brown around the edges. We removed all this paint ourselves with a heat gun.

This piece of plywood covered up a dead cold air intake. The people we used, C.Z. Becker were really incredible.

Here’s an ‘after’ of the above image. They laced in salvaged old growth Fir boards. Once they sanded it, the new stuff matched our floors pretty perfectly.

This is where we scraped away the brown paint near the baseboards.

Before we did the floors, all the woodwork, trim and doors were stripped and refinished and we painted all the walls and ceilings. This was the bedroom color, which seemed oppressively dark at the time. The paint we used, Miller Acro Satin, was super shiny for the first few weeks, but mellowed over time. Note to self: never use ‘Acro’ paint again.
We were going to go with this lighter shade of green, but the floors were so light after being refinished that it made the room not seem as claustrophobic.

This was the second day after the flooring guys were here and everything had been sanded.

And voila! Here’s the back study when the polyurethane had finally dried. The chemicals they used were so stinky that I had this hallucinating anxiety attack the first night I tried to go to bed after the work was done.

It’s really nuts how satisfying it all seemed once the floors were finished. The bulk of the work was done over three months, but it still felt depressing and crappy until the floors got sanded.

Now I just have nightmares about people in high heels cha-cha dancing on these floors.

This grocery store reminded me of a local chain that was in New Orleans when I was a kid called National Canal-Villere (though they were local, I think) that had giant two store high billboard pictures of eggs above the egg section, milk above the milk section, etc. And the one we went to was really dark and lit by spotlights. I think it closed down about ten years ago.

I’m just starting to get over my bitterness about the ice storm that surgically hit us on Friday night. It kept me perfectly trapped inside my house all day and regretting that I didn’t go out to see my friends on Friday night. The worst part was how I spent so much of the weekend watching TV. Jeremy and I tore through all our usual tivo reserves and got to the point of discussing watching Supernannies. I watched my first episode of Desperate Housewives and was really disturbed by those super-tight/disturbingly non-humanly tight jeans those fifty year old plastic surgery disaster actresses were wearing. I feel creeped out just thinking about it. Even before there was ice everywhere outside, I caught up on a bunch of last year’s new releases last week and I was annoyed by everything I saw. Napoleon Dynamite = puke. Coffee and Cigarettes = prententious puke. Yet Before Sunset and I, Robot were great. But imagine how great it would be if they were the same movie and Julie Delpy and that jerky guy only had one afternoon to hang out while Paris was being attacked by killer robots.

Is this a chain? If so, I really hope there’s a jingle. I’ve made up my own jingle, basically using The Buzzcocks Fiction Romance and then making the obvious substitutions.

On Christmas day we ate for about nine hours straight. Katherine made a bunch of delicious cookies and almond rocca.

Matt set up this rotating meat cooker for the prime rib.

We got to move back into the back of the house on Saturday. The refinished floors look pretty good. I’ll post pictures later in the week.

Whatever happened to my restaurant reviews? I don’t know. This Chinese restaurant in downtown encompasses everything I’m usually looking for: odd/rare architectural brick a brack, booths, bright colors and very strange art. The atmosphere is a cross between a high school cafeteria and the kind of restaurant that probably existed all over Times Square in the seventies.