Communication Break Down

Hey, girl, stop what youre doin!
Hey, girl, you'll drive me to ruin.
I dont know what it is that I like about you,
But I like it a lot.
Wont let me hold you,
Let me feel your lovin charms.

Communication breakdown,
Its always the same,
Im having a nervous breakdown,
Drive me insane!

Words of wisdom brought to us by the kings of classic rock: Led Zeppelin. No, Robert Plant (who wrote most of the words) wasn't really much of a poet -- although I must begrudgingly admit I had lyrics to "Stairway to Heaven" on my yearbook page. The band was built on its heavy guitar riffs which in many ways inspired what came to be known as Heavy Metal in the 80s. I am sure Jimmy Page is more chagrined about that than I am about that yearbook quote. A classic example of how their style worked: "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" is a folk song recorded by Joan Baez in 1962. According to one version of the story (and of course as with any rock legends, there are more than one version) when forming the band Jimmy Page played the other members the Baez version and said "That is what I want to do." Raised eyebrows all around. "Only Heavy."

I thought about putting the Hindenburg on the last blog, but decided last minute to go with the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse instead. Good thing as that left the album cover for the first Led Zeppelin album available for this week, the album which brought the world the classic hit, Communication Breakdown. Which is what happened with our contractor this week. We had said from day one: Give us a schedule of what you need when. Feel free to be aggressive with the schedule. We don't want to hold up the project because you don't have something that we were supposed to provide. Apparently forewarned is not forearmed.



It is not entirely our contractor's fault. We also suffer from Hydra-syndrome: The beast running this project has just too many heads. There is the contractor, the architect, and the owner. There are the subcontractors that are not always upfront with the contractor as to what they need when. The architects split into at least three different entities, each with a different priority. And of course we the owners are two separate people who work different days at different places and it can often be confusing as to who needs to be contacted on what days regarding what issues.



Even so: Apparently on Monday the contractor found out from his subcontractor (the plumber) that he needed the tub and shower fixtures to be able to do the rough plumbing. Rough plumbing is all the pipes that run in the walls and under the house, so this was not immediately obvious, but rough plumbing can't be finished without the various valves that go with the fixtures (and by fixture I mean the actually spouts and knobs). These are not standard and change depending on exactly what you are putting into your shower/tub.

On Monday, the contractor contacted the architect about this issue. Late Thursday is the first we heard about it, in an e-mail from the architect that went something like: "As you know Ely (the contractor) really needs these fixtures right away..."




Oops. Communication Breakdown. So now Candice is running around trying to get the perfect fixtures today before our trip. The latest reports do not look too good, so it looks like we may have a delay on the plumbing front. Not horrific, but just another hydrogen-filled aero-glider igniting in the evening sky... The Hindenburg and Tacoma Narrows bridge are good examples of our "disasters" so far. Lots of motion and flame, but no one has really gotten hurt.

Yet.

As I am trying to get some work done and deal with contractor stuff and trying to get out of town this weekend, I don't have time to get my latest set of pictures resized or formatted for the web. That will have to wait until next week -- sorry. The pictures included in this post are therefore a few weeks old. The first one shows my new den ceiling, or lack thereof. You can also see my contractor and his able assistant. The second set are a before and after of my patio that didn't make it into the earlier before and after post. Before: Patio. After: Pile of shattered bricks. Finally I show the front of my lovely abode, which is presently dominated by a gi-normous green dumpster into which most of my previous home went. What goes in there does not return.

And of course, as always, I leave you with pictures of the girls. Or in this case a triptych of Kalya Mackenzie. These photos come from our Memorial weekend at the beach. Where Rylie was laughing it up with the in-crowd (see previous post), Kayla was determined to revitalize herself with a blast of Gatorade refreshment (belonging to the ever-charming Dawn Merkel). Silly Dawn, babies don't need to replace their electrolytes! Or do they...?

Hey, girl, stop what youre doin!
Hey, girl, you'll drive me to ruin.

Is it in you?

Catastrophes

Well, the start of my week could have gone better.

After starting the softball season 3 for 3 with a home run and error-less play at second base, I was feeling fairly good about the upcoming season. Then there was this Monday, where our team Ether Binge -- Don't ask -- was playing the Steamers. Started off ok. I swung at a bad pitch and weakly grounded to short (maybe third, I was concentrating on running to 1st), but made some good plays at 2nd, including snagging a relatively well hit ball to my left.

Then came the play, which was embarassingly routine: Ball hit into right field with men on base. I am the cut-off man. The throw back in is slightly offline, so I have to run left to get to it, but really not a big deal. I want to make sure I get the ball back into the infield quickly to keep the runners from getting any more bases, or possibly scoring, so I plant my leg to pivot quickly and toss the ball back in. I am not sure exactly what happened, but I can tell you I didn't do it right. My foot caught on the surface and my weight came over it all wrong with a twisting motion. I felt a great deal of pain and went down in a heap, although I did manage to weakly toss the ball back in (that's focus people).

It looked bad from the outside as well, as a good hunk of the team immediately ran over to check on me. Nothing popped as far as I know, but it was fairly clear my day was over. To make matters worse, this was the game I finally got Candy and the girls to come out and see. Sigh.

So now I am trying to take it easy and let the swelling go down. I am not in a lot of pain (almost none, really) but I am trying to be very cautious as my family has a history of tearing knee ligaments. And my knees have never been great to begin with. For now I am using a cane, which again I don't really need except to play it as safe as possible and keep strain off the knee for my walk from the car garage. I have an appointment to see a doctor in 10 days, the delay for tedious insurance reasons I don't want to get into. I could hit an urgent care sooner and pay out a little more cash, but I am hesitant because of how dubious I am that a doctor will be able to do much for me until the swelling is gone down. The knee works fine, so the question is just whether anything is partially damaged that might need repair long term. For that, I don't see why the doctor trip can't wait a little.



Of course the title of this post is plural. My second catastrophe this week was our first inspection-related work stoppage. Our contractor had laid out all the forms and rebar for the footings of the addition, porch, and new support beams. Here are a series of pictures of guys working on the main forms, which are wooden frames designed to hold poured concrete that will be the base of all the new walls. Basically they are molds that form the concrete into the shapes you want (i.e., walls or pillars bases for support beams). There was nothing wrong with the way the forms were made, but it turns out that the set of plans describing them was missing the proper approval stamp.



Now my architects handled most of the city approval stuff, but for multiple reasons, not the least of which is an attempt to save money by not sending a contractor to wait in line at city hall, I was the one who actually went into the Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) to pull the permits for the job. This was a very uncomfortable errand, as I had no prior experience doing this and every time I asked for a detailed description of what to do, I was told "You go down and pull the permit."

Uh-huh. Yeah...



So I went down with a pile of plans and forms in my hands and repeated the mantra that "I wanted to get an Owner-Builder permit". This usually led to further questions, none of which I had answers to. My fall back position was to mumble something incomprehensible and shove the forms and plans in their faces. Surprisingly enough, after studying the things I gave them they always seemed satisfied and pushed me to the next person down the line. Eventually one of them unrolled my big wad of blueprints and began stamping APPROVED on them.



To back up one step, every plan I have from my architect has been signed and stamped by the city. Specifically, I believe a city engineer has looked over the plans and made sure that nothing dangerous or not to code was being proposed. The final issuing of the permit tells the city who is doing the project (me) and starts a clock on the official permit. Most importantly, it makes sure that the city is being paid. No check and the city does not stamp your plans. The final permit issuing does not appear to be a high level transaction, being something two highly trained chimps could have pulled off, one with a suitcase of cash and the other with a rubber stamp. This is why my contractor and architect just threw me to these proverbial lions. It really is a mindless event.

Which only makes this failure all the more infuriating. In addition to the 2x4 feet of big blueprints, it turns out I also had a small set of 4 sheets of little blueprints. These were basically blow-ups or cut-outs of areas of the project that needed a bit more detail. These had been examined and signed off by the same city engineer on the same day as the big plans. But they were missed by the rubber stamping monkey at the LADBS and the inspector refused to sign off on our concrete forms without these approval stamps. Remember this is not a safety issue, the engineer signature is clear. The inspector was just making sure the city had got paid (even though obviously from the receipt it had been). And, of course, covering his own ass.

So now it is 3:30 on Tuesday and I get a panicked call from Ely (the contractor) that we failed the inspection and our architect should have gotten ahold of me hours ago. The whole project is now on hold and we are going to start hemorrhaging money as people that are lined up are just being sent home. So I need to go RIGHT NOW, traveling from my mom's (near Pasadena) to our house (near Van Nuys), pick up the plans, and get to the LADBS before is closes at 4:30 to get this straightened out. Mind you, on Monday I tore up my knee so I was sitting at home in bed with an ice pack on my leg at the time.

So I do just that. I hop in my car (ouch, knee did not like bending), drive like a maniac to my house, get the plans from Ely (who is properly chagrined at my severe limp), and then on to the City Hall. Of course, in many ways nothing has changed since the last time I went there. I still have only the vaguest clue as to what I am doing, only now my mantra is "I need approval stamps on these pages". I am eventually directed to an odd little fellow who seemed to talk to himself more than he was talking to me. He repeatedly asked questions that seemed rhetorical, but then he waited for an answer. I grunted. Eventually he found my receipt, deduced that these the small plans had just been missed the first time, and stamped them.

The system works, I guess. It is now Thursday and the inspection has succeeded, so I should be getting concrete soon. Stay tuned. And for God's sake be careful with your limbs.

Now for our regularly featured baby. We went to the beach over Memorial Day weekend and I took this one of Rylie after she stole my hat. As you can see, she is the life of the Beach Party, a veritable Annette Funicello of the baby set. Beach blanket bingo indeed.

Plastic, Heal Thyself

Pictured above is a polymer designed with capillaries like that present in human skin. The capillaries are filled with low-viscosity, monomeric dicyclopentadiene, which to us non-materials scientists could be referred to simply as the healing agent. That's right, this is self-healing plastic. The moisture you can see on its surface is its "blood", which will coagulate into a solid epoxy, filling in the cracks in the plastic like a scab. The possible uses for this cool stuff are many, from car finishes that repair their own scratches to spaceships that repair all their stress fractures as they happen. And of course it will be key for the development of the Terminators and other soulless runaway robots who will eliminate the then-superfluous human race. Probably to make us into batteries or something equally lame.

Another application could be walls in your home, so one could pound their fist into them with impunity. Of course bleeding walls are nothing new, but generally it requires at least one gruesome murder, a soul trapped between worlds, and a malicious, bile-spitting demon. However, neither futuristic plastic nor all the proverbial king’s horses and men could get my house back together right now.

Not for under 100K anyway.

We have reached stage one of what shall be referred to from now on as “The Project.” Not to be confused with The Projects, which are kind of a different thing altogether, although we may take some time to watch the asphalt grow.*


Stage one is demolition, which is exactly what it sounds like. They destroy everything. Well, everything that they are supposed to destroy. In theory, large sections of the house are supposed to survive this construction maelstrom. I think my contractor really likes smashing things, as he keeps calling me up to ask if he can smash something else. Now I love to break things as much as the next guy, but everything he tears out I have to replace with something brand new. Since I do not relish the thought of building my new house only to sell it because I can’t afford to live there, we will have to stop smashing eventually.



I’ve included a series of before and after pictures. If I haven’t screwed up the formatting, the pre-demo is first and the post-demo is second. Generally I hope it is quite obvious which is which, although the house was a bit of a mess by the time we got completely moved out. I did my best to take pictures from the same angle where possible.You might also notice that the pre photos were done in daylight, while the post photos were done at night. It is standard to pull these kind of shenanigans with before and after pictures, this being the architectural equivalent of taking the fat photo in bad lighting and a filthy, ill-fitting bra.



Running from top to bottom we are looking at a) the back of my house from where the tri-trunked tree stands toward the previous main bathroom, b) the kitchen counter and sink, complete with cabinetry and dish washer in mid-removal, c) the corner of my den, beyond which a closet and small guest bathroom once stood, d) the main bathroom from inside the house, and e) the whole expanse of my kitchen running down to the laundry room.



It is more than slightly discomforting to see the place you have made your home for 8+ years completely gutted and presently unlivable. Since I first visited at night, I felt more than a little bit like a spirit returning to haunt the ruins of what was once my abode. Go to the light! Into the light... No, the street light, dummy. It is just too damned dark in there with the power turned off. I am likely to bust an ankle.




In other news it turns out I still have two baby twin daughters, which, despite the balance of info on the blog of late, still take up the majority of my time. The monsters are crawling, requiring baby-proofing and crib height adjustments and generally being a lot more "on-my-toes". They can go from 0 to stuck under the couch in 6 seconds flat. Rylie, who has been slightly (one weekish) developmentally behind Kayla all along has suddenly pulled into the lead, at least when it comes to crawling and climbing. While also quite mobile, Kayla seems more interested in studying stuff near her, like books or balls, than moving on to the next thing as fast as possible. We have decided that she is the scholar and Rylie is the athlete. Done. End of story. Glad we got that figured out so we can treat them differently from now on...

Well, maybe I will let them continue to develop on their own. If Rylie surprised us once by overtaking Kayla, who knows what will happen when we get to talking. But I still plan on having their whole lives mapped out by age 2. In the meantime, here are the two in their crib, undoubtedly up to something.



* Die-No-Mite!

Mars Has a Gigantic Hole

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recently snapped this photo of the bright dusty lava plain to the northeast of Arsia Mons, one of the four giant Tharsis volcanoes of Mars. The most famous Tharsis volcano is Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the entire solar system, with an area the size of Texas and a height of three Mt. Everests. This hole does not appear to be a crater as it has no crater rim and no ejecta (stuff that got kicked out from an erupting volcano or smashing meteorite). It is just a hole in the planet with a diameter roughly the size of a football field. The only other thing scientists can say for sure about this hole is that it must be extremely deep for them not to be able to see the bottom. Several hundred feet or several hundred miles, no one can presently say. At last we know where they are hiding the invasion fleet.

Speaking of bottomless pits, I have finally started the remodel of my house which is also the reason for the abysmal and inexcusable lack of posting for the past month. We moved ourselves and every valuable item we own clear across town and into my mother's manse over several weeks that were rather all-consuming. In addition to exhaustion, our internet connectivity was spotty at best for this period. This is not an excuse, but an explanation. I hope you accept my sincere apologies.

Like any good fairy tale/home improvement project I should probably begin at the beginning: Once Upon a Time there was a family that wanted a house, so they gathered up their wedding money and a gift from the Mighty and Powerful Barrister and bought a lovely cottage in a valley glen. Many years passed blissfully where the young couple became more prosperous and started to want fleeting luxuries, like Jacuzzi tubs and stone countertops. They searched high and low for a new abode, but all the wondrous places of the land still seemed far beyond their humble grasp, especially when one took Prop 13 and its effect on stabilizing property taxes into account. So they decided to turn their sweet, little cottage into a castle.

Then they had twin baby girls and everything went kinda squirrely. The dream project was delayed. And what happens to a dream house deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore -- And then run?... Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?*


Turns out none of the above. A dream house deferred makes one do foolish things, like attempt to move a lemon tree without any professional arboreal expertise. The planned corner of the new house was going to take out this top notch citrus producer, so I, hole digger extraordinaire, decided it would be a snap to move it.

I may have been a bit hasty.



Here is the hole I dug to which I would eventually transplant the lemon tree. It was quite easy to dig and at this stage in the process I was quite pleased with myself.



This close-up gives a good idea of the massive trench we dug around this lemon tree. It took me and Candice three weekends to dig it down 28 inches. The diameter is roughly three feet. These numbers were not pulled from the Ether, but actually came from a calculation I found online regarding root ball size vs. diameter of the tree trunk. You may notice that the trunk actually splits into two mere inches off the ground. In my cleverness I deduced that the root ball size was probably directly related to the volume of water the tree like to pull up its trunk. Since there were no branches before the Y-split (to take water), I could just take the numbers for each trunk diameter and add them together to find the total volume of root ball needed.


Whether or not this calculation worked I will never know, as the bottom line is that the subsequent root ball was so absurdly heavy I had approximately 0.00001% chance of moving it. This number is greater than zero to account for the possibility than in a rage I might transform into a jade-skinned, musclebound Hulk because of gamma rays I absorbed during a college lab trip to a Nuclear accelerator.

So after all that time digging and scooping and measuring and planning, I finally managed to push the tree over with something like 4-5 inches of root ball attached. Oops.


With my handy sidekick and female progenitor (i.e., mom) to help we pruned the poor tree back to a shrub, because we knew if it were to have any chance to survive we had to cut its foliage back to match its now drastically reduced root system. Soon after this photo we literally rolled the tree across my yard and into the prepared hole. Then I made the prepared hole actually big enough to fit the tree in. So much for preparation.


Finally the tree was moved and replanted. Here I am enjoying the spoils of another excellent hole digging adventure. As of this photo I gave the mutilated lemon tree about a 5% chance at survival. At least the lemon flower is sweet. Unfortunately the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat. Because I killed the tree before it could make any more**. More updates on the tree (will it live or die? Your phone call will decide) in a later blog entry.

This whole fiasco actually went down almost two months ago, but it is really the first stage of this redo everything project. I promise future entries, appearing much more often than once a month, will record it all in excruciating detail.

My market research shows me that 45% of my audience are here for the Holes and related Hole-issues, while another 45% are here for baby stuff***. Babies will continue to appear here amidst the remodel craziness, never-you-fear. To tide you over, here is Kayla lost in a fantastical land of pillows. I believe she eventually escaped by singing a song to the lollipop king, who carried her away to his hide-away in the mysterious caverns of Mars...



* Could someone please dig up Langston Hughes and stop him from his incessant spinning? Thank you.
** To the best of my knowledge Peter, Paul & Mary are all still alive. Hopefully this travesty will not alter that. Stay strong Travers.
*** The remaining 10% are serial killers. Their high viewership has been previously noted in these pages. Why this is I have prudently decided not to ask.

IMPORTANT ADDENDUM: Candice heavily participated in the hole digging, a fact I originally neglected in the blog. For this I thoroughly apologize and offer to dig her next hole without taking any credit.

Stop giggling. It wasn't meant to be dirty...

Ok maybe a little bit.