Crazy Stable

Oh, no...just when we were about to pick up the heat gun like an Olympic torch and have another bash at the front-door woodwork, here comes the annual Gowanus Artists Studio Tour this Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 21 and 22...an irresistible ramble through all sorts of fascinating grubby lofts and garrets, where some wonderful stuff is being created within sniffing distance of the famous industrial-effluvia canal.  ('The Venice of the North,' as we like to snicker--although it will be only a very short time before some developer of 'luxury' condos will undoubtedly say this with a straight face.)  Of course, the studio tour is frustrating on one level, because in past years we have seen art we'd actually like to own, art that is theoretically "affordable," but not (sniff) for us...but what the hell. Just looking and chatting with the artists is great fun. I'd also love to do the Bedford-Stuyvesant House Tour on Saturday, too, to meet some fellow brave renovators (Brownstoner entry for October 17 has details). Spouse tends to mutter anxiously about going to Bed-Stuy, which is pretty amusing, considering that we had friends and family who didn't want to come here to the Flatbush frontier.

That heat gun may have to wait for another weekend...we are nothing but undisciplined thrill-seekers. Meanwhile, I have found an apparently sane guy who says, sure, he can patch the Valley of Death on the roof...and our Tree Maven is scheduled to come for  an elder-care planning visit for Rootbeard, the mighty Ent. Now if we could just get our poor senile renal-failure boy Raffles to stop making whimsical feline excretions in the hallway, life would be Looking Up around here.