See ad

Patagonia.

... take the pledge ...

Black Friday savings

We avoided Lemming Stampede Day (aka, Black Friday) and saved a ton of money ... the old fashioned way ... by neither shopping or spending. Peace out.

Driving in rainstorms, Seattle area

For the past 3-4 days we've been searching for products and sources for our bathroom remodeling project. This was a rewarding few days ...we discovered fresh info on materials and their installation.  A few decisions were reached and we hope to begin sometime soon.

However, the point of this blog is not remodeling, it's about driving hundreds of miles during very heavy rain storms... and using the freeways (405 and 5) to visit far afield suppliers: Lynnwood -- Seattle -- Puyallup. (roughly a 60 mile one-way trip)

After many hours in the car, I now want to enact two new laws, effective immediately:

1.  Large, multi-wheel trucks are NOT allowed to drive on the freeways during rain storms.  The amount of water these trucks spray into the air is massive and, at times, makes car windshield wipers useless.

2.  Police are forbidden from giving tickets.  In fact, only if there's an accident, a wildly erratic driver screwing up traffic flow or if there's some other out of the ordinary event, are the police permitted to stop their patrol cars.  The new function of police is simple: Keep traffic moving and to not interfere with traffic flow.*

*No, I did not get a ticket nor was I stopped by a cop. 

You've seen it, how traffic flow gets messed up everytime cops are seen with their nasty radar guns or they've pulled someone over for a ticky-tacky ticket.  Your drive home gets longer everytime cop patrol cars are working on their ticket book quotas.

note to self

Yesterday's highlights while it poured rained all day:

• Toast, tea, juice breakfast.
• Bought a Hilti cordless circular saw to use for wood floor installation.
• Quick stops at grocery, pharmacy and 2nd hardware store.
• Made appointment with guy who makes floor to ceiling glass shower wall panels.
• Made appointment with guy who makes custom bath counters using concrete.

• Played around on the intertube.
• Launched new blog that's about old black and white photos (Say cheese).
• Lentil soup, French bread and white wine dinner.
• Via Netflix and iPad watched a documentary about 1920s Paris and Berlin.

.... A very low key day.

A day for questing

Saturday was a good-busy day.

First a visit to Velocity to see if they had a George Nelson "Marshmallow Sofa" on display ... they didn't.''  Boo.

The only good part of no-Nelson sofa stop was now we had time to walk across the street to the downtown REI store, which was crowded due to a big sale but it was still a pleasant experience.  (Now's where's my What-I-Want-For-Christmas-List?)

LUNCH TIME!  We drove across town, thru the SODO district, to a fav barbecue place, Jones Barbeque ... nothing fancy at this place, just a really good spicy BBQ pork sandwich. Here's their menu ... .

Next, a one minute walk from Jones BBQ to Tiles For Less.  (The real reason for the day's tripping.) Success! Floor tile for the bathroom remodel has been chosen! It's NovoBell Emporio.

We still wanted to sit in a Nelson Marshmallow sofa so we went back downtown, just north of the Pike Street Market to DWR (Design Within Reach) hoping they had the sofa.  No they didn't.

Sidetracked, we picked out an awesome 9' x'12' rug designed by Gunta Stölzl, of Bauhaus fame.

We must have spent an hour revisiting favorites things ... Cherner Chairs, van der Rohe's Barcelona Chair, Nelson's Bubble lamps, Risom Arm Lounge Chair, Eero Saarinen's Womb Chair, Le Corbusier's LC3 Grand Modele Armchair ... but the parking meter was ticking and we had one more place to visit:

Urban Hardwoods. Here, you can see tables of unbelievable beauty.

from their web page:
"Each piece of slab furniture you see on our site is in stock. The diversity of our material demands we only present current inventory. Made in Seattle from trees that would have been discarded, each piece is unique. The color and figure of the wood, the touch of the craftsman's hand, the shape and size can never be duplicated. We know where the tree grew. We take responsibility for its second life and are proud of our work"

(Another plus, Urban Hardwoods is across the street from Patagonia  ... and I'm a real fan of their outdoor clothing but we were running out of time so no Patagonia during this trip.)

Then home.

One last place. I needed a 'check assembly' to fix a leaky outdoor faucet.

The Seattle area is blessed with a really good hardware store (I don't consider Home Depot or Lowes as hardware stores, those are Big Box places with minimal variety relating to hardware).  Anyway, if you ever need something only a real hardware store would have, by all means go to McLendon Hardware... the mothership in Renton is hardware store heaven.

BTW, if you ever visit Seattle ... these are some of the places I would take you.

Pretty pretty

photos by Bill Stankus

.

next year I'm gluing 'em in place

Like, ah, I've been raking leaves for 8 hours (over several days) and they just keep coming.

How can this be?

Wealth gap grows between young, old

Puget Sound Business Journal

Date: Monday, November 7, 2011, 6:39am PST

 

The wealth gap between young and older Americans has grown to its widest since the U.S. Census Bureau began tracking the data 25 years ago.

The Associated Press reports the median net worth of households headed by someone 65 or older was $170,494 while the the median net worth for a household headed by someone younger than 35 was $3,662.

... click on links for full story.

wondering

• Do Russians shoot pool using body English?
• Do serial killers eat Special K?

• Does anyone really say the word, "automobile"?
• What exactly are chicken nuggets?

• Wouldn't New Spice smell better than Old Spice?

• Are you a wee bit curious about moth balls?
• Do comedians eat rye bread?

• Would a purple boat clash with the Yellow River?
• Do you regret buying single-ply toilet paper?

Seafaring ways

Remembering the real.

However, in dreams and memories there's no noise or curses or the smells of diesel and the galley ... there's none of the exhausting diligence, the difficult repairs to equipment and none of the unexpected.

Regarding the day to day, it's difficult to describe the anxious vigilance and tedium while waiting for the dredge to reach the ocean’s floor ... or how really hot it is to work under a tropical sun reflected off the ship’s metal deck ... or how bright a full moon is at 3 AM or the awesomeness of whales and sharks circling our slow moving ship.

This was an amazing experience, possibly a unique one in the annals of ocean mining history.  Dredging manganese nodules from extreme water depths was considered, by others, to be overly difficult, even improbable.

A few details -

The purpose - determining the feasibility of mining deep water manganese nodules.

The location - somewhere in the Mid-Pacific.

This photo - nodules spilled on the deck, hauled up from the ocean's floor.

Water depth - approximately 20,000 ft. (over 3 miles to the bottom).

Lowering and raising the dredge at those depths took many hours. We worked 24/7 for a month, sleep was occasional and something to do when back on land.

The man on the right is the boss. The others are ship's crew.

I took this photo while standing amidship. 

Once the dredge was raised and secured, the nodules (looking like burnt hamburgers) were washed with a fire hose then shoveled into large sacks.  We repeated the dredging cycle until a certain tonnage was secured.

This is an enduring memory because it was my last job as an oceanographer.


photo by Bill Stankus

I went there

and found

 then

 and

afterwards, home.


the end.



photos by BIll Stankus

almost

I considered writing something important but after further thought I realized the errors of my ways.

11 11 11

Absolutely nothing important happened today. Then again I wasn't paying much attention. Wait a minute ... I had a bagel for breakfast, a chicken sandwich for lunch and I answered my cell phone when I was standing atop an eight foot ladder.

There was the deal about Skyrim, the kid dancing with a box on her head and the stuff prepped for eBay ... and I do recall something about cork flooring and a cordless circular saw.

No, nothing happened on 11.11.11 as I recall.

But tomorrow, there will be Top Pot doughnuts and a gallery full of post modern furniture and stuff.

Yeah, 11/12/11 will be good.

No, no ... I'm not talking about me. (Yes I am.)

Once upon a time there was a boy, reasonably handsome, tall, thin and a decent athlete. He was also polite and earnest and he mostly got B’s in grade school. He also did what most boys did - school, home chores, sports and adventures.

One day, while riding his bike, he realized extra effort was necessary to ride up a steep hill. While this may not seem a big deal, the fact that he questioned the situation was a big deal. He went home and asked his parents why riding up a hill was more difficult than on flat ground. His parents couldn’t tell him anything that made sense. He asked his friends and they just threw hats, french fries and soda cans at him. So he asked his church’s priest and again the answer didn’t mean anything. His grade school teachers didn’t offer satisfying or understandable answers, but he did realize that most of his teachers didn’t want questions which were difficult to answer.

He had, without realizing it, developed the habit of asking questions about most everything. He also noticed most of his school mates didn’t ask questions. Mostly they punched each other’s arm or doodled or were staring at the girl with a bra strap showing.

As he grew older, he decided he enjoyed learning. He found the world to be an exciting place and he wanted to know about everything. He suffered through high school and felt beat-up and confused by those four years.

He went to college and discovered a place which had some answers, but most importantly, he discovered  a few teachers who enjoyed answering questions. He also discovered there were other students who loved questioning stuff. Smiling to himself, he knew he belonged. 

Suddenly there were more questions than he previously thought possible. His head was spinning as he thumbed through the catalog of classes. But he was also saddened by the impossibly of majoring in all that was offered, especially since they were tantalizing with hints to answers of unasked questions.

He decided college was akin to an artist’s palette with a ton of colors or a skyscraper with thousands of rooms. Because there were so many classes, he thought, “why not sample everything?” 

Mathematics proved to be a new language. History was better than the simplistic stuff in a 3-D movie. English Lit was a bottomless well of possibilities. Art was like leaves in the wind, pushed about by personal expression. Philosophy offered a peek into the struggles for rational thought. Business classes offered capitalism. Social sciences held mirrors to human diversity and experiences.  Science used systematic study to explain the physical world.  It was in a science class where he finally learned why extra effort is necessary to ride a bike up hill. 

He also enjoyed lunchtimes and the breaks between classes. Unlike high school with it’s rigid pretend social order, college had exuberant people filled with ideas and willing to share their daily discoveries. It was during these moments he found new friends.

The boy, now a young man, met zealots, radicals, reactionaries, revolutionaries, god people, godless people, free thinkers, not so free thinkers, party people, comics, beatniks, hippies, grungees, dopers, freaks, techies, gamers and an assortment of sex-first types. 

The young man didn’t care about people’s proclivities, skin or hair colors, their places of birth or any of the ordinary flags waved as identity markers. He was attracted to people because of their thoughts, their questions and their efforts to find answers.

My Tipping Points

Experiences, people, books, music, art and other things which changed my life.

Husserl
Vonnegut
Mailer
Vidal

Eric Sloane
Colin Fletcher
Ansel Adams
Sam Maloof

Expressionist art
California music
Pop art
Jazz

The Shakers
Bauhaus
Mid-Century Modern
Building furniture

California and Wisconsin
Seeing the Milky Way from the desert

Gold panning
Mountain climbing w/out ropes
Rowing in 8-man crew
Swimming with whales

Surviving religion
Surviving an armed robbery
Having someone die in my arms
Love

and not in that order.

Leaf leaves left

About 120 feet from my front door ... one final splash, Big Leaf Maple leaves, going out in glory ... as seen during a brief sunny moment November 9, 2011.

Raking begins.


photo by Bill Stankus

One way to use a tree

Nothing subtle about this, we call it the Woodpecker Tree. 

During the past dozen years Pileated Woodpeckers* have been feasting on bugs within this dying alder.  Whenever we hear a tree fall we look to see if this one is finally down.  Thankfully it's located on the edge of a slope so when it does fall it will thud into a ravine and I won't need to do a clean-up on aisle 7.

* there are three different woodpecker species living in our woods.

Photo by Bill Stankus

Can't find the TV remote

So ... A bunch of thoughts popped up.


• Why is Life impermanent?

• Besides construction and destruction what else are we good at?

• Two beautiful skills, music and teaching, rarely receive fair compensation.

• If you need a bucket list you're doing something wrong.

Seattle Car Show

One of Life's annoyances is the difficuly of shopping for a new car. It's a process a bit like laser tag ... you walk into a showroom, and zap, you're tagged, marked, separated from the herd, engaged in conversation ... and declaring, "I'm here just to look", means nothing to the hunters who live within the glass cubicles.

Car Shows offer the terrific opportunity to freely look and touch and to satisfy one's curiosity.  For me, the first thing I want to experience is simple: "Will I, with my 6' 1" height, be comfortable."  Will my head bump the car's ceiling? Can I straighten by legs for comfortable operation of the accelerator and brake pedal? Are my arms nicely extended to the steering wheel or am I a contorted origami?

Another car show benefit ... the car companies actually provide easy to find technical information ... stuff like gas milage, where the car was made (for example 60% U.S., 40% Japan), the car's green value and smog factor.

We looked at many cars, some awesome, most ordinary but there were a few which stood out.

First, here's the silliest, most annoying dashboard we saw ... The Mini Cooper dashboard with the giant MPH gauge ... It's so big everyone in the car can easily see it and so can cops hiding on the side of the road!  It looked as if it belonged in a Roger Rabbit movie. and, would, at any moment, go "Boing boing!"

The car that surprised me (read that: I'd never seen one before) offers a nice alternative to more expensive 2 door coupes.  The Hyundai Genesis Coupe is affordable, comfortable and would be a lot of fun drive.

The GMC Terrain was basic but it does get good gas milage for the type of vehicle it is.  Of course the upgrades (leather seats, moon roof, etc.) bring the price up but it is a nice vehicle.

My favorite, the one I tried to hot wire and drive out of the show, is the Audi TT-S.  I want this car.  I need this car and as soon as I collect enough money working the local off-ramp with my pitiful sign, I will have this car.

Worth mentioning.
(tho I doubt I'd ever buy either one)

Toyota teamed up with Tesla Motor Co. and they're releasing the Scion iQ ... a cute little thing suited for the urban environment, suburban errands or slow 5 o'c'ock traffic. I just can't imagine driving the iQ at 75 mph on the freeway.

It has an instrument panel to satisfy the geekiest computer freaks and its gas milage means you'll drive a long way between recharging stations.

And the 2012 VW Beetle was on display. The noticeable changes are a flatter roof line and a wider stance.  The plain version had hints (especially the glove box) of 1960 Vdubs. The turbo version is a tad fancier and seems a better choice.

Questing without a sword

Diogenes, yeah, I’m certain I have a few DNA molecules from him. His gig, so they say, was his search for uninhibited behavior regardless of social conventions. He emphasized self-sufficiency and said virtue was better revealed in actions than in theory. He also had distain for pretense, vanity, self-deception and phony human conduct.

While I don’t agree with his practice of poverty, begging and grossing out people who offended him, his stunt of walking around in daylight and looking for an honest person does has a certain style.

What part of his DNA do I think I have?  From my earliest actions and the jig-saw of memory pieces, I’ve always been on a quest.  As a kid, I didn’t understand what was going on in my brain but I somehow knew when people were dishing out hyperbole, pretension and hypocrisy.

I spent four years in Catholic grade school and two in a Catholic high school, not by choice, my parents were of the opinion parochial schools provided a better education compared to public schools.  As if they really checked.

Everything taught in these parochial classrooms was laced, dipped and hard baked with Catholicism. For example, I remember in history class we studied the Protestant Reformation, when heretics made moves to bust out and bust up the Catholic Way. Illustrations of Martin Luther in the history text books showed him to be a twisted, gnarly, devilish and loony looking man. And, in geography class, when we studied the Amazon jungle, brutalized and murdered Catholics were part of the lesson. Corruption and genocide of native cultures was never mentioned.

My Diogenes DNA must have kicked in during those grade school years because I simply couldn’t accept their teaching methods or their message. Basically, I rejected the teachers and their religion. The rote memorization of religious rules and regulations was not spiritual or intellectual, it was dictatorial, fascist and required blind obedience.

More importantly, the entire premise of religion is based on speculation and acceptance of fables and myths. Real evidence and proof of divine existence does not exist. Nor could I accept the Church’s self-defined importance, especially since they've had a questionable authority responsible for countless crimes against humanity. 

At some point during my high school years I sensed there were purer forms of learning and discovery, that is, science and art offered an array of thought processes and techniques which were the anthesis of my religion conditioning.

Science classes were windows being opened with fresh air flowing into a stuffy room.  The scientific method provided a tangible pathway to understand what our world is and how it works. Science is not one large brush stroke, it is a process by which we can study galaxies and sub-atomic particles, plankton and eagles, mountains and moss, all the while doing so without hearsay, rote memorization and threats (that immortal soul business).

As I was considering science, I did something else, something that only time and distance has provided me with reasons why I did what I did. During my freshman and sophomore years, I must have taken a half dozen or more philosophy classes. I think I was attempting to find logic and reason, in a parallel and opposing sort of way with the religious brainwashings from grade school.  

I say this because so much of philosophy is about “Man and God”, often specifically and sometimes indirectly, but there have been scores of thinkers wrestling with the notion of how humans fit into the scheme of things and how they should process the world and the unknown.

My first college science classes included Ecology, Geology and Marine Biology.  I immersed myself in these, deciding to major in Marine Geology (Oceanography).  The quest was on ... to understand the how’s and why’s of earth and oceans.  I specialized in the study of offshore sediments, that is, the sands, silts and clays found in coastal bays and on the Continental Shelf.

But there was something else tugging at the back of my brain, something I had experienced in high school, something which hinted at another avenue of personal growth.  It was art.

As I moved away from a career in science, art became my focus, my new quest.  Basically I’ve occupied myself with looking at art, studying art, attempting to understand art and doing art.  In so many ways art is the physical manifestation of wordy philosophies. 

Good art transcends both the artist and viewer and becomes something more ... a conduit of transcendence and often giving feint clues to understanding ... both of ourselves and and the time and place in which we exist.

I spend my days thinking. It’s said, architects build more cardboard houses than real buildings ... my thoughts are akin to that. I lay in bed and think about creating new paintings and sculptures.  I sit at my desk and think about building new tables and chairs.  For inspiration I look forward to our visits to art galleries or walking downtown streets observing life. I always anticipate discussions about art trends or about someone who did something special, from context new ideas arise.

I consider all of these things and then make art for simple reasons ... to make things of beauty, to enrich our life, to give my art to my wife and to be myself. 

When I stand at my easel I stress, in a good way, about shades of color and my technique, all the while hoping to not be derivative.  I think about subtle things within my art, hidden things which delight and humor my questing self. 

Controlling parents and deranged Christian Brothers are in the past, today is about a thought, a bush filled with ultramarine and a painting of things that I alone see... until the canvas is finished, that is.

the other night

... while out hammering stakes through random vampires I stopped long enough to snap this photo (which has nothing to do with vampires or werewolves).

It’s mostly over. 2011, that is.

I figure, with the kick-off of Halloween, the annual holiday season has begun. At first, there’s the steady release of must-have video games and movie teasers.  These continue but fade a bit as the really serious pre-Christmas hype n sales erupts.

Comet-like, there will be a gush of super sales from both brick and mortar stores and internet businesses ... all leading up to Thanksgiving, a momentary pause in competitive consumerism so that everyone can give-in to gluttony, in essence swelling a person’s body fat for the rigors of a month-long shopping spree.

The post-Thanksgiving period is the important half of the holiday marathon. Cuteness with an understructure of hammers and tongs, sappiness intertwined with greed, all fueled by compulsions and guilt spreads like mold in a petri glass. Credit cards (there is no more cash) will be ubiquitous, merchant will get their once a year tingling jones and Hallmark will gush like a teenage boy finding himself with a real live porn star.  Yippee! Consumer Paradise is but a car ride or mouse click away!

Oh, all those truck and beer commercials interrupted by lingerie and perfume ads will transform into holiday morality plays.  And, how can anyone resist TV land’s singing and dancing elves and happy middle class parents and darling Leave It To Beaver children and animated pandas (and assorted Disney, Pixar gee-whizz smart critters)? 

The sugar sweet must-have stuff of post-Thanksgiving, gives way to forces equal to colliding nebulas. The employed and the unemployed, both tweaked by guilt and unspoken social pressures, charge forth and the real, really serious pre-Christmas push begins ... all the way to the Boomtown of post-Christmas sales utopia.

Quickly it’s January 1, a day of reckoning and AA type promises because within days, tax season begins and the junked-up highs from the holiday season come crashing down and all the world’s a tired old junkie. Thus we have 2012 and only 9 or 10 months to the next holiday binge.