Our Rockin' New Years Eve

Tonight for New Year's Eve, Zoe and I thought it would be fun to go with the Sacramento Walking Sticks on their New Year's Eve walk. They do a 6K and a 12K. We got there and there were a lot of people lined up to sign in. Took us about 15 minutes in line, and then they sent us off with a map with a ton of directions. We immediately started off in the wrong direction.
The folks who were doing the 10K were supposed to go down to Southside park and around it, while the ones doing the 6K were supposed to go west to 10th Street. So we walked back to the starting point, and since we were now "late" we took our first shortcut of the night, and walked directly up 6th St. to the mall, instead of going to 10th Street and walking about 8 blocks. We did need to pace ourselves, after all. From there the route went through the K Street tunnel and into Old Sac, which was decorated and filled with people and lights. There were the ubiquitous vendors selling various light sticks, which I, of course, had to buy.
Of course we weren't exactly the poster children for this walk. Some people did six miles, some did three. We did slightly less than two, including a stop at Macy's, where I checked out exciting underwear and Zoe bought a flannel nightgown. How hot are we? After Zoe and I finished our "walk" I came back home to the fantastic new year's eve which is like every night of the year here, where we just sit and watch television. Of course, there is a difference on New Year's Eve. We have a glass of wine and midnight. The nightlife doesn't get more exciting than that.

Actually, there was one sort of different thing. Not different enough. That was that at about 10:30 the guy who's been cleaning our gutters showed up and wanted to borrow money. Since the first time he cleaned the gutters about two months ago, this is the third time he's shown up. The other two times, he was going to do work for us the next day and John gave him an advance. This time, that wasn't true. John told him not to come back again, but then he gave him $5 anyway. He's very aggressive when he comes to the door, and I think this is a problem. I know he just shows up because he's off to buy some meth.
And of course, at the end, they drag out poor old Dick Clark, who used to be the youngest looking old guy on tv, and then he had a stroke, and this year looks like maybe he had a relapse. This is hard work for someone who really has difficulty handling his mouth, and it
seemed really obvious this year. I think they keep trucking him out because the people who watch New Year's eve on TV are all old farts like us who actually remember him from the 50's.

RAFTER TAILS

Given my previous two posts, you might think that rafter tails are meant to be raft tales, something interesting about how our raft did or didn't float down to the Pacific ocean where it is even now being harvested by Japanese fishing boats or something. But no. This is much more mundane, and much more expensive. For those who don't know -- rafter tails are a an important decorative feature of Craftsman houses. They are underneath the eaves and they typically stick out past the eaves, somtimes to support the rain gutters, but almost always with a decorative ending on them. On our house, the rafter tails were mostly intact on the second story, but the ends of the lower ones had apparently been sawed off by a previous owner, possibly to install rain gutters, or maybe because they had dry rot. They've been that way for the 25 years we've lived here, but we decided it was finally time to get them back to what they were, as part of the housepainting job which will be the topic of a later post.

To backtrack just a bit, a couple of years ago we saw a guy standing outside our house paying a lot of attention to it, and paranoid as we are, we went out to ask him what he was doing. His name was Jeremy Boosey, and he was replacing rafter tails on a house that Herb Caen used to live in. So now it's two years later, and we're getting ready to do some big house projects (window replacement and painting) and we decide that maybe while we're doing that, we should get the rafter tails replaced. So we called Jeremy.
When you talk about replacing stuff on old houses, one of the things you run into is that lumber a hundred years ago was actually the size it said it was. So if you had a 2x4 it was two inches by four inches, instead of what it is now, which is 1-3/4 by 3-3/4 -- or maybe less. This means that you can't just put a new end piece on, and you definitely can't replace the whole thing. So Jeremy came up with the idea for a sandwich.


The plan was to make a pattern from the top rafters and glue it on to the cut off end of the rafter. Since the part of the rafter tail to be replaced is only about 5 or six inches, but it needs to be seamless, the idea is to make a sort of a sandwich. You could imagine this sandwich as the bread being a baguette, with fresh meat being at one end, and old meat being in the rest of it. The first plan was what I'd call the fat sandwich. He thought he would use some fence slats of redwood (the original wood on the house) but they ended up making the tails look too fat.
Next he tried the more American sandwich version (thin sliced white bread) which used plywood. This worked much better, because it had to be glued and bent because, remember, the new end is 1-3/4 inch thick, while the original is actually 2 inches thick. In the pictures, you see the samples of how the ends will look. But in the pictures, the "sandwich" is on the end. In the final version, the "bread" of the sandwich is about 3 feet long (going all the way back to the edge of the house) and the "meat" is about 5 inches long. Although the lower, replaced rafter tails are all a little bit thicker (about 1/4 inch) than the ones on the second story, it's so high up there that you can't really see the difference. Probably no one but us will ever even notice that these were replaced, but we think it makes a big difference. And all the rafter tails on the bottom part of the house (44, I think) are the new size. If we ever get a few days without rain, or fog, or dampness, or weather that's too cold, we will get the painting finished. Our relatively mild weather in Sacramento means you can paint a house any time of the year more or less, but a job that takes a month in the spring or early fall tends to stretch out to (as of now) about three months in the winter, with what seems to be no end in sight. But we're eventually going from a gray and white house to a Craftsman-inspired four color house, which will probably henceforth be known in the neighborhood as "the gypsy house."

LAUNCH DAY

We arrived at the park for the traditional boat launch and the park was closed because of high water. That's a first. I got out and walked up and there were people there fishing, so I figured we wouldn't get arrested, but we did have to walk in instead of driving down there to park. The water on the south side of the river is about 25 feet wider than it was last year. In one way, this made it easier to get the boat into the water -- since it was in the parking lot -- but more difficult to actually get the boat into the current.

Zoe and I have a tradition that we've done for at least four years with this boat. We write our hopes and dreams -- like, say, world peace -- and also things we want to get rid of in our lives -- like, say, fat -- and send them out to the universe. Hopefully the universe will take the fat and send back the world peace, though for the past few years it seems to just send back the fat and keep the world peace somewhere else. But I digress. Every year the boat has a different seaworthiness rating, and while this one is probably the best, the candle malfunction took away points.
We got the little boat out of the box -- I prefer to describe it as a mini-Rose Bowl float, only mine really floats, but it does meet the other requirements, totally decorated with flowers and natural materials -- and tried to light the candle. First of all the lighter didn't work very well because it's probably out of fluid, and secondly, as soon as we took down the box barrier, the flame went out because there was a breeze.
Well we finally decided to actually put the damn thing in the water, even though we couldn't keep the candle lit. Though, frankly, since the glue had already come off it, it probably didn't matter all that much as it would have fallen off in the raging water.
Does this picture make my butt look big? Okay, then let's cut some of it off. Thanks, Zoe. You're a true friend.

I did wish I'd shaved my legs though, because getting in that cold water made me feel like I was walking next to a cactus plant only the cactus plant was my spiky legs. The place I'm standing with the rake to put the boat in the water is where the parking lot was last year. Those barriers are the things you pull the front of your car up to.

And then the damn thing got caught in a sort of a backwater, and I couldn't get it to go back out, even though I was throwing sticks in the water and small rocks, trying to make some waves to move it out. Of course, to say I throw like a girl is an insult to girls everywhere, but it's the best excuse I can come up with for the fact that the boat was about 15 feet away and I couldn't land a stick or a rock near enough to it that the water ripples weren't on the far reaches by the time they got to the boat. Finally it came so near the shore that I was able to capture it and relaunch it totally.

Eventually, it did go out.

Postscript: Our SIS group was planning on going out to dinner tonight, so I had brought a decent pair of jeans and my old-lady dress up shoes to wear (dress up shoes means they are sensible leather shoes instead of sensivle athletic shoes) after I got my other clothes wet in the river. Except I forgot them while I was busy dragging rakes, boats, and backpacks out to the car this afternoon. So I ended up going to my birthday dinner (Gail was in Vietnam on my real birthday) in my sweatpants. We ate at Gonul's which is a sort of Turkish, sort of Mediterranean place in east Sacramento. Dinner was wonderful. We had a pris fixe dinner which included a great pear salad, a sort of sweet sort of spicy pumpkin soup, and turlu or Moroccan lamb stew, and dessert. We also had extremely large quantities of wine with our dinner, but it was something that must be favored more in other parts of the world than California. Zoe and I (since Gail & Karen don't drink) could have each had two glasses and a carafe of wine, but we only had one apiece. But the dessert made up for it. IT was a wonderful dinner.

Building a Boat, but don't call me Noah

It's not even raining today, and yet, I've been building a boat. Well, not exactly a boat, more of a raft, and for the purpose of floating our hopes and dreams down the river.

This is an event Zoe and I do every year, and we plan on doing it tomorrow if the weather is okay. This year, I'm making it out of wine corks. I had saved a nice palm frond that was a perfect shape from the summer, but when I went looking for it tonight, I couldn't find it. So I looked in the junk drawer in the kitchen. There were about 100 wine corks in the drawer, most of them from two-buck chuck, so I had plenty to work with. I drilled two holes in each cork and put them together in a brick pattern with string. I think this will work. I think i look just like Martha Stewart while I'm working. I also realize that this is a good way to put the corks together to make a hotplate. I tried to make one once before, but I tried to glue them together and it was a disaster.


I floated it in the sink, even with sample flowers on it, and it appears that it's not going to turn over -- a problem with some of my previous unseaworthy crafts. I'm guessing there will be more water and more current tomorrow than on previous launches, because they've been letting quite a bit of water out of Folsom dam because of expectations of rain. Or maybe that's over with. Not sure whether the sink is good enough to determine the floatability -- or the possibility of waves putting out the candle. I'm experimenting with some camellia flower, some marguerites, and some rosemary for remembrance.

Merry Christmas

From birthday to Christmas, it's been a pretty nice time for me. My harp finally arrived a day late, due to some glitch at Fed Ex, but not it's here, and if I can ever get those two pins to stop slipping, it will be great.

We had a great dinner at Gail's today (though it's late as I write this, so the date will probably show as December 26.) It was a really good time with good friends. Gail goes to a lot of work to make sure we all have Christmas dinner together, and all most of us do is show up and eat. Today we had ham, asparagus, squash, sweet potatoes, potatoes, salad, and hors d'oeuvres. Zoe brought some egg nog which was quite enjoyable, too.

Last night we went to the 7 p.m. service at St. John's Lutheran church. As a Christmas eve church shopper, I have to say this is one of the better services. Of course, mostly what I want to do is listen to some nice music and sing a bunch of carols. We realized after we got there that at this church the big service is at 11 p.m., so we may go to that one next year. But the 7 p.m. was very nice. I usually hate Silent Night because people get all emotional and weepy, and it's often the song where they light the candles during a candlelight service. And I think all those things were true last night, but in addition, they also sing it in German -- possibly a sort of Lutheran homeland thing or whatever -- and that was pretty cool, because you could see that lots of people in the congregation actually knew it in German and weren't looking at the words. St John's is a beautiful Craftsman inspired church which recently underwent a very long renovation of the church and also the organ. This is the only picture I could find of the interior of the church, which is from somebody's wedding, and doesn't really show how pretty it is inside.

The Roseville Galleria Flash Mob Hallelujah chorus

We've seen these flash mob videos on YouTube where people just show up somewhere and start singing or dancing or whatever. They are a lot of fun. So we heard about one that was happening in Roseville at the Galleria tonight, and Carol and I thought we'd go. They were going to be singing the Hallelujah chorus. It was supposed to start at 7:30. Carol's husband Cliff and her grandson Michael came along for the ride, as did John. We left here at 4 p.m., so we got there a little after 5. Not all that crowded. We sat down in the food court and had dinner. Seating was a bit crowded, but then again, it was more or less dinnertime. Then we decided to walk around the mall a bit, and finally around 10 to 7 we decided to make our way back to the food court. I had to go to the bathroom, after having about a quart of coke with my dinner. It was really crowded around the escalator and by the time we started pushing through the crowd we got separated, but they told John they'd meet us downstairs.

Well it was so crowded by the time I came out of the bathroom that it took about 15 minutes to go about 50 feet, and we couldn't see Carol, Cliff & Michael anywhere. We finally got to the lower floor, and were trying to look for them, when there was an announcement on the PA system that the fire marshall was saying they had to evacuate the mall. According to news reports, some people heard a loud crack-like sound and other people thought they felt the floor move.

We had given up finding them so we just left the mall and went back out to the car.


We waited about 10 minutes before they came out, and then sat in the car for about an hour with a slight pause for our ACTUAL PERFORMANCE.
The actual performance -- at least ours. Later we heard that some of the people had gone out into the courtyard and were singing. There was a helicopter overhead while we were waiting, making an announcement we couldn't quite understand. I could only understand the word courtyard and assumed people were being told to leave the courtyard. As I read the news reports, it seems that some of the singers went out to the courtyard and sang the Hallelujah chorus. We just did as we were told and left by the nearest exit. We had actually thought about the fact that it didn't seem like all that good an idea to have all those people up there on the second floor, but more because the crowd was so big and it was difficult to move around than because of thinking of any possible structural problems.




We spent a lot of time in the parking lot waiting for the traffic to clear up a bit, and we decided to have our own little performance. Two altos, a kazoo, and at one time a man from another car that came by and sang with us. We had brought a CD with us so you could actually hear the music over the car stereo.

So it was an event. Not the one we thought we were going to, but an event.

There was also another event tonight. There was a total lunar eclipse, the first one since sometime in the 1600s that took place on the winter solstice -- which also happens to be MY BIRTHDAY. So this was a really big celestial event celebrating me.

BABYSITTERS FROM HELL

Okay, here's the point of being a grandparent, sort of.
John and I went to babysit Rina tonight because Mike and Heather's band, Knock Knock, was playing a gig at the Press Club.
When we got there they were close to getting ready to go. Mike said Rina hadn't had a nap today, so he expected her to be a little bit fussy. He also told us there was a bottle of beer in the fridge.
So, of course, as soon as they left, we got into the beer. One bottle, yeah, but it was about a quart or so -- maybe a liter. Of course, pretty soon the babysitters are pretty tipsy, but no problem, because Rina is happy playing with the books John bought over -- in a plastic bag. Yeah, I know, don't let kids play with plastic bags. But we didn't let her put it over her head.
After awhile, she wa pretty bored with playing with the plastic bag, so I figured I might as well give her some dinner. Mike had made some pasta for her, and all I had to do was warm up some frozen peas. John was watching her while I did that, and the next thing I knew he said she tipped over and spilled the rest of the beer. Oh, no!! no more beer for the babysitters.
While he's cleaning up the beer, she climbs up on a stool and manages to fall off, but also gets a pen as a reward to make her stop crying. With the pen while the incompetent/tipsy babysitters are otherwise distracted, she draws on the wall with the pen.
Dinner goes pretty well, except I'm having a bit of trouble getting her to eat with the spoon, as she'd rather shove the food in her mouth a fistful at a time. But I'm the grandmother, so what do I care if she wants to be a barbarian?
While she's eating dinner, I'm noticing that she looks like she's about to fall asleep. As soon as I got her down from her chair and literally before I had finished wiping the pieces of pasta off the chair, she was down on the floor in the doorway, sound asleep.
Mike had said their performance was at 5 p.m. and it was now about 6:40, so I figured she could just lie there on the floor and sleep. After all, I'm just the grandma. About 7 or so, he called and said they hadn't gone on yet, but they were about to go on and they'd be home in about 45 minutes. Okay with me. About 15 minutes after that, though, she woke up and all hell broke loose because she had no idea where she was, and I didn't see her awake til she started crying, and then it was some pretty serious crying while I was holding her and trying to comfort her, until John came out with this toy guitar of the Fischer Price variety and danced around which seemed to calm her down.
She started to fall asleep in my arms, but I decided that in 20 minutes I was going to be real unhappy about that and we would both be a sweaty mess, so I took her and put her into her bed. That started the crying again, but Rocker John came back in and she kind of calmed down and went back to sleep. Mama and Papa came back pretty soon after that, and the babysitters from hell slunk back into their depths.
There are no pictures from this debacle.