Crazy Stable

A Friday wrap-up!

* It is still raining...and raining in the laundry room too; the string, however, (see below), has begun to channel a feeble drip. It is not diverting the robust drippage into the windowframe, however; we now empty several cups a day of "roof tea" from the foil roasting pans.

* Winter must be on the way--I'm calling guys. Can't call Roof Guy until we dry out. But called Tree Guy, a smart and sensitive arborist, so that the Ent could have its physical before ice-storm season. And called Vinnie the Noble and Indispensible Plumber, so the boiler could get its check-up before the first cold snap--Vinnie himself is in Alaska hunting, but one of his guys will come next week to fire up the terrifying Firebeast in the basement. (Next week I'll tell you the blood-curdling backstory of the Firebeast and the CrazyStable Museum of Heating Technology.) Winter is when Guys with trucks arrive, peer at various high-ticket items around the property, and say things like, "Well, ma'am, you got a problem..."

* WE GOT OUR CLOSE-UP! Law & Order on Wednesday night was a blast...there was the porch, the garage, the interior of our tenant's apartment! The fire stunt in the garage was amazing, much bigger and scarier than I'd thought. (Spouse and Child watched it on the monitor, but all I saw was the orange flash of light outside the garage itself.) Amazing that they spent the day dressing that garage interior with perfectly aged, detailed props to look like a workshop/shed; you could hardly see anything but a few seconds of cluttered shelves in silhouette. And the "faux" shabby fencing they carefully wired over our new lattice-top? Never showed up in the shot. Spouse took pride in seeing the kitchen alcove he'd painted (with I say, taxi-cab yellow, he says, sunshiney yellow) in the background; I got a kick out of seeing the pink-and-white striped curtains my mother made for what was then her apartment. (Particularly since she had a tantrum over making them and always insisted they weren't up to her usual standards.) Wish I could have seen the first scene, shot nearby at the erstwhile Caledonian Hospital, wherein they fireballed a Jaguar--that was pretty cool too. (I asked the crew last month where you get a Jaguar to blow up. "It wasn't a very good Jaguar," I was told.)

* FLATBUSH MOVIE STAR FATIGUE ALERT--NOW IT'S UMA THURMAN! I told you this neighborhood was filthy with film crews. This morning, two blocks away in the Prospect Park South historic district, yea even in the dismal rain, it's lights-camera-action time again...and the guy on the catering truck says it's Uma Thurman in some flick called Super Ex-Girlfriend. In fact, he says Uma will be on set today, if you feel like zipping over to the intersection of Rugby and Albemarle Roads. As befits a movie with an architect hero, it's being filmed at one of my two favorite mansions, the "Spiderweb House," a white wedding-cake fantasy with columns, balconies, and (no kidding) web-like muntins. Hey--live in Flatbush and you just start tossing around terms like "muntins" and "Uma Thurman" and "fire stunt." You get used to it--almost bored with it. Now, I will confess to a momentary stab of A-list envy--we got Dennis Farina, they got Uma Thurman. But they have muntins and we have leaking shingles, after all. And hey, we got Jesse Martin, which was more fun for the StableMistress than oodles of Umas.

* CAT-BLOGGING FRIDAY, YEAH! Finally, it's time for cat-blogging. Here he is, the second of the CrazyStable 3: 

CocoBop, seen here humming "57 channels and nothin' on." Also known as: GreyBoy, Sporran Man, Aye-Aye, Jackass, Mr. Softie, and the Silver-Tipped Bandicoot. He is the Child's alter ego (together they are a.k.a. Lilo and Stitch). Coco is a "wool-sucker"--an actual term for displaced nursing behavior in cats. He derives "imaginary milk" from several sources, most notably a black stuffed cat and my neck. But the neck-nursing can only be done while I sit at my computer or lie in bed, preferably with no one else looking. Of course  we think he is part Russian Blue (head is wedgier, eyes are gold, otherwise he's a breed standard par excellence.)

He's doing it as I type this...the sucking isn't so bad, it's the kneading my collarbone with his claws that gets uncomfortable. Yet I feel strangely honored--and it's chilly in here, and he's nice and warm. 

Just tried something I read somewhere--put a string up against the leak in the roof, and the water will travel straight down the string instead of into the plaster walls. This was especially easy since a piece of the ceiling has been removed under the leak. The idea, however, is as stupid as it sounds; the string is bone-dry. Just about the only thing in that laundry room that is. I have expanded the emergency management technology to include a second foil roasting pan propped up with a window screen between the sill and the top of the clothes dryer. If the grounding wire from the dryer is wet, is that, like, bad?

Between this and the news about natural gas prices (basically, this winter we will pay our heating bills a la Weimar Republic with wheelbarrows full of currency pushed up to Keyspan, and will carve each other little Christmas presents like the Waltons would), I am awfully glad for this cheering news:

TONIGHT IS OUR 'LAW & ORDER' EPISODE! Yes, 10 p.m. Eastern time, NBC...that's our front door when the 2 intrepid detectives ask the little girl, "Is your father home?"...and our garage in which the guy sets his arm on fire when cornered by Jesse saying "Come out! I know you're in there!"...and our tenants' apartment, in which they interview the brother of a Terry Schiavo-like character about a car bombing. If you're new to CrazyStable, page down to the first few 'journal' entries for the whole story.

...just as it did when we first moved in 19 years ago, and in precisely the same place--inside the second-floor laundry room, below the gorge formed by two roof peaks, both pitched too steeply for any gutter to hold the runoff from a hard rain. It's not as bad now--a foil turkey pan will suffice, instead of a gallon bucket. But there 's something about a leaking roof that goes beyond depressing. It's a tangible sign of vulnerability. The very concept of a home is summed up as "a roof over one's head," even the walls taking lesser priority. And it comes just as the first cold has begun to penetrate (effortlessly, of course) our big, drafty, leaky, only-partly-insulated wooden house.

Not that I'm not grateful to the roof--it has outlasted its predicted lifespan by more than a decade. It's the third layer, laid down over the first two (cheaper than a tear-off), by a crew of half-wits who came in with the lowest bid in the chaotic first weeks of our occupancy back in 1986. They drove up in a ramshackle truck and tumbled out like circus clowns, bearing buckets of gunk and rickety extension ladders. Incredibly, none of them were killed scrambling up the peaks and valleys, but one of them did managed to fall through an old window, full of ancient pigeon nests, that had been covered by a swath of roofing shingles. We figured this out when we came home from work after the "crew" had already left; the victim had left a spectacular trail of blood and pigeon guano from the attic all through the house. He was fine, we were assured; we then faced the task of cleaning out decades of pigeon droppings from the attic crawlspace. Having ascertained from OSHA that this job bore a substantial risk of contracting ghastly lung fungi, I invested in some dandy Darth-Vader masks and disposable coveralls, and lots of bleach.

One of our Nadirs occurred during the post-roofer-pigeon-guano cleanout, actually. It was a day much like today--dismal, grey, drizzly--and we were skibbling up and down the plank that served for a front steps, a horrifying sight in our respirator masks and work gloves, with black lawn'n'leaf bags full of guano and debris headed curbside. I slipped on a wet leaf and lay like Charlie Brown after Lucy whips away the football, just staring up at the autumn rain, on our plank, a bag of pigeon dung in each hand. There were other Nadirs, but this one was one of the more ludicrously spectacular.

And yet the roof has hung on, even though it appeared to have been installed by a troop of gibbons. Countless other, saner roofers have tried to patch the leaky spot and failed to find it; the area is a sort of free-form sculpture of flashing cement or whatever the stuff is called. Inside, we cut out a foot-square piece of ceiling sheetrock to try to pinpoint the leak. No luck; it trickles through some mysterious capillary action down to the windowsill and plops sadly into its turkey pan. We'll try another roofer when I can stand to think about it. But I think we should patch the ceiling with a piece of acrylic, a sort of glass-bottom-boat in reverse to keep an eye on Bagel if he decides to live indoors again. (His entryway to Squirrel Nirvana between our joists falls right into this vector of leakage; perhaps he feels that a moist environment is good for his fur.)

After this week, this month, what does one do with one's primal bit of misery over a leaking roof, when primal misery of an apocalyptic scale has been visited on New Orleans, and Guatamala, and Pakistan and Kashmir? Maybe I should be cheerfully counting my blessings instead of the drips in the foil turkey pan. Maybe just allow myself a tiny filament of fellowship, a thought sent out to someone else mopping up somewhere, feeling exposed to the mercy of some other piece of sky. Just one person, somewhere--here's hoping you find a roof over your head soon.

It has come to my attention that cat-loving bloggers (and the blogosphere is apparently purring with them) have an infant tradition known as "Catblogging Fridays." These entries, which mostly consist of cute/wacky pix of their kitties (and who can ever get enough of those? --I am serious), are rounded up weekly in a "Carnival of the Cats".  May I join? Please? Here is Lexi...

one of the CrazyStable 3...the 15-lb. Ragdoll...a.k.a. "Raggie," "Raglet," "Diva," "Floater-Bloater," "Killer Triller," "Love Sponge," and "Bloomer Girl." This photo is entitled "Why I absolutely cannot work sometimes." (Note that the critical "enter" and "backspace" keys are unavailable, and the Diva does not take kindly to tail interventions.)

In coming weeks: Raffles, (who, if we observed seniority, should have gone first), and Cocobop, the magnificent Greyboy...

Freelance work--indeed, any work--involves so many soul-destroying trade-offs! Spend the morning slaving over lucrative assignment for client...and that morning can never be spent doing any of the following:

--stripping paint off the front-door stained-glass lights (considerately covered with white house paint inside and out by Mr. Chang, The Former Owner, for reasons unfathomable)

--putting in the perennials that have sulked in pots through the drought all summer, melodramatically wilting to get my attention

--get this blasted office/study spackled and painted

--re-do split and cruddy bathtub caulk so it's not a sickening Moldy Orifice of Creeping Wall Destruction

--Call Tree Man to give annual physical to the Ent, the monstrous silver maple that grows out from under the porch to tower (some say menacingly, I say protectively) over the CrazyStable

--Whip out the little power sander and sand everything in sight, since everything in sight is still coated, after 19 years, with Chang's signature coat of "lucky" red paint (a color my mother accurately described as "dried blood").

Or...(if I did not have to work for Big Pharma)...I could just blog about not doing it.

Or better yet...read about those who are doing it. (This is starting to sound like porn.)

Actually, I have been dipping a toe into the world of House Blogs lately, with the intention of finally building my links, which are a vital aspect of belonging to the Blogosphere. My links have been barely sketched in, and I apologize. But as I've begun nosing into House Blogs, I've started getting blue. So many of them are by Cute Young Couples in the first infatuated flush of renovation...reminds me of the Spouse and me before we had the stuffing knocked out of us. They are winsome, exasperated at times but always hopeful: "Trevor is out with the contractor right now matching the tiger-eye maple for the nook, leaving me to cope with stripping the acanthus-leaf detail around the mantle! Big excitement today--the original leaded-glass entry chandelier is coming back, all rewired and ready to hang. And if that weren't enough, we found a plasterer who specializes in restoring medallions as ornate as ours!"

Even in our unimaginably distant late 20s, when we and the CrazyStable had just begun our strange journey together, we never had the Winsome thing going. There are some semi-winsome pictures of me stripping paint, it is true:

but the "emotional truth" (to use Al Sharpton's handy phrase) was always more like the gob-smacked look that people have standing around after natural disasters. The Crazy Stable resisted cute and winsome tale-telling with a vengeance. Especially in the early years, (well, the first decade), it specialized in ghastly discoveries: dead animals, toxins, effluvia, parasites, rot. Let others rip down a cheesy partition and discover the original woodwork--we would discover centipedes and a Rheingold can. We found an intriguing steamer trunk in the garage, and our hearts swelled with hope--finally, the Hallmark moment of romantic discovery! The trunk was full of Chinese take-out menus. Hundreds of them, from all over the country. (Everybody makes General Tso's chicken, but the General has a lot of different spelling variations.)

So with its "gonna git you, sucka" attitude still intact, the CrazyStable is an unlikely candidate to join the ranks of Eliza Doolittle houses whose heartwarming buff-ups are lovingly chronicled in some of these delightful houseblogs. And we, mired in financial stasis and fatalism so long that our renovation makes a Robert Wilson opera look like a 30-second TV spot, make for unlikely members of this energetic fraternity.

But that is the karma--the charism, if you will--of the CrazyStable: What happens to a dream deferred? (Sags like a heavy load--check. Explode--not yet, but stay tuned.) And like a three-hour minimalist performance artwork, it has achieved a certain depth and meaning just from achieving so little over such a staggering length of time. By now, our story--and this blog--is about what happens to house, heart and soul when reality comes to town, blows away your expectations, and delivers all sorts of things you never dreamed of, glorious things as well as ghastly things, but never the things you anticipated.

And yes, there are house blogs that visit some of these darker (and funnier) places. We are not alone; there are others who have discovered that renovation can reveal the fault lines in your character and your marriage as well as your poured-concrete foundation. There are others who are sitting around laughing maniacally as their doorknobs fall back off for the umpteenth time, wondering what in hell they were thinking of when they bought this place, loving it anyway even though it will never be done, or even half done, because it is theirs and because it is home.

Here's one for starters. I totally love The Devil Queen ("How my wife and I sold our souls to the Queen Anne Victorian we tried to save"). This Arkansas guy is right on my wavelength:

“So, today my wife and I are going to try to borrow even more money for the Queen. It's a lunch "meeting," and I hope that I'll be calm enough to eat & not be sick at the table. If we don't get the money, we are screwed, and, if we do get it, we may be screwed.”

Ahahahaha. Now that's life as we know it. This too:

“This whole experience is becoming more and more like a bad, made-for-TV movie. Monty Python meets the Money Pit maybe. It just struck me how odd it all is. I have never talked to anyone that has had their financier stalk them by airplane. A lot of the day to day stuff with the Queen is your typical home renovation fare. In hind sight, a lot of it isn't.”

The story of the financier and the airplane is delicious; check it out. And look for more links TK.

Which is journalist slang for "to come" (why not "TC"?--I forget), which reminds me I have work to do. And it isn't sanding.

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-Well...How did I get here?

--"Once in a Lifetime," Talking Heads