You Can't Kill the Rooster

To paraphrase David Sedaris, when shit (like a snail-slow architect who shows you nothing but disdain and a schadenfreude-ridden city building department that loves not giving you a building permit) brings you down, sometimes you just gotta say "fuck it" and sand yourself some motherfucking floors.

(The swearing quotient on this blog is about to go up. As of Oct. 27, I will no longer be working for the American City Business Journals chain, where I was once pulled into my editor's office and scolded for calling Pat Robertson a douchebag on Twitter after this guy read the tweet and ratted me out. I'm not sure what the "E" in his name stands for. I'm thinking "exceedingly earnest." Just so we're clear: anyone who says that Haiti got what it deserved when the 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit because the country once "made a pact with the devil" is a douchebag. And a journalist who rats out another journalist for saying so? Well I guess he's just a company man.)

But I digress.

About ten days ago we got the comments back on our second building plan submittal. There was a list of 30 things that needed to be re-done on the plans before we could resubmit. I'd say about 70 percent of this falls squarely on the building department, because they were decidedly unclear when they gave comments on the first round. But the other 30 percent, I'm laying at the feet of the architect. There were things that should have been done on the second round that he knew about, that were spelled out and that he still didn't do.

Chuck emails him and says the following: "Since these comments were all there the first round and you did not address them properly, I expect you to make the changes and overnight the plans to me at no cost."

The architect shoots back this: "As for my fees, my contract is with (the contractor) and they will be billed in accordance with my contract with them."

And this is the point where Chuck loses his mind. Because Chuck? He's the guy who does his job. And right now? Everyone else is pretty much the other guy.

As a result of us still not having a permit for the main house, it's safe to say Thanksgiving is fucked. I'm hoping that Christmas is not fucked as well. But having a new job at a paper where journalism still means something is reason to celebrate and damnit, I want to have people over for a soup party before I start.

We got some of our furniture out of storage and set up the dining room. Hung some lights, hung some art and polished up the dining room table, but the floor looks like hell. Underneath layers of grime and some type of paper-backing (because at some point apparently some idiot thought it would be a good idea to lay down linoleum on top of the pristine, clear redwood planking), there is beauty to be found. But it's going to take more than a wet mop to make it happen.

So yesterday, we rented a sander.

(to be continued ...)

The Miracle of the Freecycle

Got this off of Freecycle:



So after we get it restuffed, what kind of fabric? Crushed velvet? Blue and white ticking?

Advice, please.

ETA: Blogger seems to give people problems commenting. So here's what some of the Facebook gang has to say:

Matt Hanner I like the red velvet idea but you'd have to have the little hanging gold dingleberries to pull it off.
On a serious note it's got a fantastic shape. I love the lines of the arms and the back.
10 hours ago · Like

Matt Hanner I bet a high quality zebra stripe would look good on it.
10 hours ago · Like

Patti Rosenberg I was going to suggest a leopard skin pattern, but zebra would be nice, too. Either way, in crushed velvet. Make sure it doesn't have bedbugs, though.
9 hours ago · Like

Joseph Divar Purple zebra or cheetah stripe.
9 hours ago · Like

Smadar Lieberman Meer Your big items should always be neutral. Accessories are where you bring in pops of color, like rug, side chairs, etc. Save the zebra/cheetah/leopard/giraffe for something smaller and less expensive cuz you will get sick of it
9 hours ago · Like

Michelle McGurk I can't see the ticking with those lines, needs to be a fabric with a little shine or softness.
4 hours ago · Like

Smadar Lieberman Meer i vote for a tone on tone cut velvet, with a modern pattern (not your grandmother's cut velvet)
3 hours ago · Like

Godzi Linda I'm kinda voting for the the OliverHair, could be velvet...
about an hour ago · Like

Pam Valentine sort of depends on what the rest of the room is like. You can bring home sample swatches and see how they look in your room. Would suggest doing that before deciding. However, the sofa is beautiful! Dont get someting that is dryclean only if possible. Velvet is very difficult to clean.
24 minutes ago · Like

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.