A Tempest in a Long Island Iced Tea Pot

I'm taking this post off the beaten track. But before I do, a quick update.

Yes, I still want to kill our architect, or at least kick him in the shins until he cries like a little girl. He neglected to put something on the second round of plans the city told him he needed after the first round; when Chuck told him he needed to get his act together, put a rush on it and that we wouldn't be paying for him to correct his own mistakes, he responded: "I don't work for you, I work for your contractor."

Oh yes he did.

Here's the thing: the city, the architect, the civil engineer and even Al the Contractor seem to exist in this alternate universe where time has no real meaning. What should take a week in the real world takes three weeks in Bizarro Building World. Chuck and I, on the other hand, live in Deadline World. He writes and implements code. If his code isn't perfect and the implementation flawless, portions of a Fortune 100 company stop functioning. I write news. If I don't, I lose my job.

Which leads me to the point of today's post, construction, the Blue Goose Bar & Grill and the Montessori Learning Center. Our youngest son is a student at Montessori. He's a 7th grader, a foot-and-a-half taller than his teacher, he's rocking the beginnings of a mustache and I know for certain he is the only student who walks to and from school. Shrug. When he lived in Berkeley, he took BART by himself and that was almost two years ago.

Montessori is kind of special snowflake land, but it works for us and has for 11 years. Both boys are Montessori kids.

The Montessori building, along with a former restaurant around the corner, are owned by the same guy, Chris Evans. I wouldn't know him if he stepped out in front of my Mini as I went screaming out of the parking lot at a high rate of speed. I don't know if he's a good guy, a bad guy or a neutral guy. No clue. But I know he is trying to open a new restaurant around the corner from the school and this means one thing for certain: he's got a masochistic streak a mile wide. Anyone who tries to get anything done in the city has a masochistic streak, but it's especially true if you're going into the food business.

Evans and his partners (I guy I do know and like quite a bit, Todd Fisher) are seeking a full liquor license for the place, which shares a parking lot with Montessori. The school is freaked out because they have visions of Blue Goose customers running down the little Sams and McKenzies and Ashleys and McKennas at Montessori. The Blue Goose is freaked out because they've already invested a shitload of money in trying to get this place open (tip: never, ever buy your equipment first) and Montessori is standing directly between the restaurant and those 300 percent markups on liquor sales.

The local newspapers have gone out of their way to get the story wrong, or at least forgotten a small thing like fact checking. The students aren't gone by 3 p.m., for example. Evans may have put $1 million into tenant improvements of the Montessori building, but that comes back to him in a little thing called rent, as another example. And neither story noted the stop work/permit violation notice plastered to the future Blue Goose door. For more on that, read on.

The school had to battle to get a restriction placed on the liquor license that says no hard liquor sales until 5:30 p.m. And don't let anyone fool you--it was a battle. I seriously doubt any of our kids are going to get run over by a produce salesman on an afternoon bender, and Chuck thinks this is mostly a tempest in a tea pot. But given that Evans already has a stop work/permit violation notice on his door, a sign he's willing to ignore the law when it suits him, I feel better having the restriction in writing. He owns both buildings, he has a right to run a business and the school has the right, in accordance to its lease and generally accepted practices of running a school, to keep its students alive.

It could be a win-win situation. With booze.

The way the city works, though, the poor shmoes might never get open. But if they do, I plan on being there on opening day, ordering one of Todd's burgers and a martini.

But only after 5:30 p.m.

Meetcha in the Morning

Chuck's going to meet with the planning people in the morning and explain to them why it's no longer necessary for them to justify their jobs by making our lives more difficult. And then he's probably going to need to drink. I'll be at work writing a third ROP story because I move on to a piece on Prop. 23 for Thursday and a focus on the Irish Innovation Center on Friday. I also need to blog about alternative forms of payment -- I interviewed two great CEOs last week that work in the payment space but on very different models. Wences Casares of Bling Nation is working on mobile payments via a simple cell phone tag. Danny Shader wants to make it easier for the unbanked and underbanked to pay for goods and services with cash by facilitating the transactions at 7-11.

This weekend will be serious theater weekend at night and serious yardwork weekend by day. I'm ordering bulbs to plant in the bed along the front of the fence, where we also will plant rosemary bushes. I'm getting tulips to go along the retaining wall. I'd like to get one or two of these to hang on the wall, but they're fairly spendy and at 20-by-20, I'd need a lot of them to make any impact on the ugliness of that wall. I'm sure Perfectly Tasteful Grady has a better solution and will let me know when he reads this.

It's theater weekend because my son's show premiers at the Paper Wing Theater in Monterey. He's in the ensemble, but has a couple of great fight scenes and he dies beautifully after being shanked in the final scene. The play is "Repo, The Genetic Opera.' We'll be working the house at night this weekend ... come by and say hello if you read this.

La Ciudad

Dear City of Salinas,

Between you, me and the flagpole, I think you could be doing better. How many construction projects do you actually have going on right now? And I'm not talking the illegal ones that you occasionally ferret out and red tag. I'm talking actual projects. With contractors. And homeowners willing to pay the permit fees.

It shouldn't take me a week to get a meeting to discuss your asinine water consumption and discharge issues with our landscaping. Is our permaculture consultant a little too hippy for you? I have to calculate down to the last tomato how much water I'm going to consume? Are you kidding me?

Sincerely,

Mary

P.S. I'm having urban chickens. You can come by and red tag the coop.

Anthony Bourdain on Gordon Ramsey

Taken at a talk Bourdain gave in Santa Cruz a few years ago. Amuse yourselves with this while I figure out how to take a hit out on our architect without spending the rest of my life incarcerated. And also how to talk my husband out of one of the dumbest ideas in the history of dumb or ideas.

I Like Living Here. What's Your Excuse?

"You live where?" I get that question a lot.

Salinas. I live in Salinas.

I like it here. I just can't help myself.

It is hot here for precisely four days a year. Almost every afternoon, the marine layer rolls in off the Monterey Bay. We're seven miles from the coast, but there is nothing between us and the ocean--no hills--to keep the cold from coming in. I come home from work and drive through what we call "Chill Hill," that grove of eucalyptus on 101, and the temperature will drop 20-degrees in less than a mile. This means my cashmere and I stay connected throughout the year. That's the kind of weather I can get behind.

I like it here because although John Steinbeck was born and raised here, he saw all of its deep flaws and wrote about it accordingly. (According to stories from my husband's family, Steinbeck really only liked one person in Salinas, the Rev. Kemper, late pastor of First Presbyterian Church. When the government was sending Japanese-Americans to internment camps during WWII, the rev bought all of the farms owned by local Japanese Americans for $1 each and held on to them, selling them back when the insanity of those camps ended. That was an establishment guy Steinbeck could get behind.)

I don't know if the church would do the same this time around. They seem to be more of a 'round up the usual supects' group. But I hear they have a rather lively rock band on Sundays.

And while the establishment didn't love John Steinbeck in his life, they love him in his death, enough to realize when you have a Nobel Prize-winning author on your hands--bad attitude or not-- you capitalize it by building a museum and holding an annual festival in his honor. This year's events featured a dress-your-dog-like-Steinbeck (or a Steinbeck character) contest. My friend Carmela made her German Shepherds tuxedos, a la Steinbeck at the Nobel Prize Ceremony.



They're kind of cute in a, "hey, is that a German Shepherd in a tux?" kind of way. Carmela is the dog whisperer of Salinas. If you have a pooch with issues, she will tell you that your dog is fine, it's most likely you, the owner, who is the problem.

I like it here because you can buy potted orchids for a few bucks at the farmer's market, because the guy who thought, "Why not pot the orchids before selling them?" is from here. And now that he's made a fortune from his idea, he sends poor, smart kids to college.





I like that there is now a Sausage King of Salinas. Butch Francis, an upstate New Yorker who came here who knows when and now makes about 400-pounds of sausage each week. He also makes the world's best chili. Every Saturday, by the end of the Old Town Salinas Farmer's market, two crockpots of it have been emptied.

We've been doing a lot of trekking back and forth to Berkeley this summer, because Bobby is attending theater school at the Berkeley Rep, and Sam went to computer camp at Cal. We'll get off the 980 and head down MLK, past all of the fabulous Berkeley things--the yarn bombed signs and sculptures, the Arnieville tent city set up to protest Schwarzenegger's proposed cuts to Medi-Cal. The restaurants and stores we used to visit. Life's rich pageant. And I'll think to myself, "Why? Why didn't you like it here?"

And then some Trustafarian on a $4,000 bike will ride out in front of my car, flipping me off while doing it, and I remember. That's why.

Salinas is delusional in its own way. Right now the city is searching for a national agency to help it re-brand itself--there's no money involved, but the city is willing to share the proceeds of t-shirt and mug sales. I don't know how you rebrand something that wallows in self-loathing, but it's going to be fun to watch.

Before, After and Enduring

At one point, Roger the Painter got stuck on the roof.

Everyone was gone. He was working alone, and was moving between peaks when somehow his ladder slipped. He had his cellphone, but he didn't want to call 911. (I guess it would have been kind of embarrassing? but better than sitting up there for hours wondering how the hell to get down?) A guy riding a bicycle through the alley heard him call out for help and repositioned the ladder for him.


So for three days straight, after all of the sanding and prep work, they painted. Cream base, white trim and black accents. 15 gallons of trim paint alone. For an extra $100, Roger prepped and painted the stairs and porch a dark grey. The concrete bottom step is still there, but we eventually will build out the stairs and landing.

The painting is mostly done. Roger the Painter is coming back on Tuesday to sharpen the edges, razor blade the windows and finish some of the highest trim. Al is sending along one of his Oaxacan Faithful to install the water main, so it will feel a little bit less Clampettish. Right now we're getting all of our water from a hose.



The city finally approved our SPR-site plan review-the document that determines if we're complying with Salinas zoning regulations. This means we can now submit the for the building permit for the main house, which will be another month of my life that's never, ever coming back.

I'm a little grumpy right now.

Just This

Neither time nor energy for anything full blown right now. B and I are up at 5:45 every weekday morning so he can make the three-hour shlep to the Berkeley Rep School of Theater. I don't know where my SD card reader is, thus I can't post pictures of the fabulously painted house.

So until the weekend, I leave you with this:

We are living like the Clampetts, pre-oil strike.