September 2005

September 2, 2005: Sorry for being gone for so long, folks. Some of our delay had to do with just us being really lazy about doing anything around the house, but some of it was completely beyond our control, and that part's much more important.

What most of you probably don’t know is that our site is hosted by DirectNic, a huge ISP with headquarters on Poydras Street, in the heart of New Orleans’ Central Business District. Understandably, they’ve been dealing with some incredible issues down there, and our access to servers has been the absolute best it can be, but is still problematic.

Amazingly, though, the story that has evolved around DirectNic over the last few days is not to be believed.

The company obviously had a state-of-the-art disaster plan, because there's a cadre of staff, including its former military Security Chief, camped out in the company's headquarters on the 10th floor of their office building on Poydras, and those there are claiming they've got what they need to stay as long as it takes-- days, weeks, months, whatever. DirectNic staff have been working around the clock to keep its services running, but most incredibly, one of its co-founders has been blogging since before Katrina blew in.

His LiveJournal has been picked up around the world, and has become widely regarded as one of the most accurate sources for on the spot information available on the net. His commentators have been monitoring police and National Guard scanners, and posting updates within minutes of broadcast. These guys have done, and continue to do, an incredible service to the City of New Orleans and to the public.

We have an incredible ISP-- we're in complete awe of you guys!

Changing focus, we must admit our hearts are breaking more than a little here at Brickman House tonight.

New Orleans is, hands down, one of our favorite cities in the whole world. The Kilted One and I have spent a lot of time there, and the city is special to us-- in fact, we'd just started talking about making our love affair with the city a bit more permanent, and buying a second house in the Garden District. We were planning to head down in February to take a break from the mid-winter doldrums up here and do some preliminary scouting.

Yup-- you gotta know a place is pretty incredible if it could possibly lure us from here for any amount of time.

New Orleans is an amazing place to be, and it's almost otherworldly to see how it suffers now. We are keeping the city and its residents in our prayers, and will actively contribute to the relief efforts of the Red Cross. We hope you all will, too.

We mourn more than a bit for what New Orleans was, and especially what it was to us. There's no way to know what's in store for that beautiful city, but you can bet we'll be back, just as soon as we can.

The late, great Louis Armstrong said it better than we ever could...

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
And miss it each night and day
I know I'm not wrong...
This feeling's getting stronger the longer I stay away

Miss them moss covered vines, the tall sugar pines
Where mockin' birds used to sing
And I'd like to see that lazy Mississippi hurryin' into Spring...

The moonlight on the bayou... a Creole tune that fills the air
I dream about Magnolias in bloom...

And I'm wishin' I was there...

September 14, 2005: It's been hard to tear ourselves away from the minute-by-minute reports of what's going on down on the Gulf Coast. Seems like every free minute of our recent days has been spent flipping between the New Orleans Times Picayune website, the local tv feed WWLTV, and of course, the LiveJournal of Mike Barnett from our own hosting service, Direct Nic. We've been tied to these sites, insistently banging on the re-load button every time we pass the computer, and taking every break we have to surf the forums and message boards on the sites for any fragment of information on the level of water, destruction, and aid relief in each parish. It's absolutely astounding how quickly the 'net community got together and established communications to those in the disaster zone (no matter how primitive) and disseminated information-- be it emergency, personal, or political.

But the minute-by-minute reports are starting to come fewer and farther between, which we suppose is a good thing, because it appears to signal a change from a constant stream of reports of horrific tragedies to the beginning of a long, but steady, accounting and re-building process.

There's not much more we can do right now, though once Habitat for Humanity is permitted in the city, we'll try to take some time off, pack our toolbelts and head down for as many weeks as our offices will allow to hump materials and swing hammers. We've volunteered for Habitat locally, and we know it's a first-rate organization-- we'd work with them anywhere, and especially New Orleans. We'll also be encouraging our offices to book conferences and meetings in New Orleans just as soon as the city gives the green light that it's able to support them-- please think about encouraging your corporations and agencies to do the same. New Orleans is a incredible city, and the history, culture, music, food, fun and atmosphere of the French Quarter, Riverfront, Garden District, Uptown, Faubourg Marigny have barely been touched. A huge part of the local economy is tourism and visitors, and we can guarantee that, very shortly, they'll be looking for all the support they can get.

And as an aside, after an initial interruption of 18 hours, Direct Nic has managed to keep our sites up and operational with only very brief interruptions. Amazing. We said it before and we'll say it again... we love these guys!

We've just finished a major project, and are working on getting the pictures posted -- check back soon!

September 28, 2005: Necessity dictated that we turn our attention, at least for now, back to more local concerns, or about as local as we can get-- our own house.

Sing Hallelujah, folks... the exterior of the house is painted! Well, mostly painted. Well, more painted than it's been in the last three years. Yeah. Definitely.

We decided that picking away at it on occasional weekends was just not going to get it done (after all, it hadn't actually gotten it done in the last three years), and so we bit the bullet, took a week's vacation from our day jobs, sent our regrets for all social invites for a couple of weekends, and got to painting.

The Kilted One laid out the game plan. One side at a time-- sand, caulk, prime and paint, then we move on to the next side, and so on, until it's done. I thought this was an insanely stupid plan.

Er... why yes, of course I told him so. Why do you ask?

I wanted to paint the entire house as far as we could easily reach with ladders, all the way around (roughly to the top of the second story) and then rent a lift for a couple of days to get the third story peaks. He thought this was an insanely stupid plan.

Er... why yes, of course he told me so. Why do you ask?

So after an hour or so in which we engaged in a frank and open exchange of ideas, he effectively won the argu... errr, exchange when I got fed up and retreated to a corner of the room with a bottle of wine and the evening newspaper. Which, along with the strategic consumption of cheesecake, most of you longtime readers will recognize is my way of coping with the Kilted One and/or this house without having to resort to medieval weaponry. Of course, the last time I did this, I ended up with a Parallam beam crashed on my knee. You'd think I'd learn.

The first day, therefore, opened with us jockeying four ladders and two palm sanders, as we hand-sanded every inch of clapboard and trim on the front of the house:

Thank heaven for the Kilted One and his insanely long reach-- while I'm dragging and adjusting ladders of various heights all over to reach what I can, he took the 30-footer and I think sanded the whole upper half of the house in about three passes, moving the ladder exactly twice. Iif it were up to me, we'd still be up there.

To the Kilted One's credit, his plan for the front went easy-- we spent the first day sanding all the clapboards and trim and caulking all the seams, the second day priming, and the third day painting. They were three looooong days, to be sure, but they went like clockwork, and we collapsed into bed at the end of the third day, elated with our progress. Well, I was a bit less than "elated," seeing as how I was going to have to eat crow for months over my wrong-headed opposition to his plan. Apparently, in terms of project vision, I have zero game.

So we woke up on the fourth day, all bright and sunny and optimistic, and motored right around the corner to start the west side of the house, totally up for spending the next three days doing the same thing right over again: a day to sand and caulk, a day to prime, and a day to paint.

Unfortunately, once we started to sand and caulk, we discovered that we failed to take into account the time needed to replace the missing window trim pieces we'd apparently forgot to replace last year... aaaaaand the leaking roof where the bay meets the house that we hadn't managed to get around to fixing last year... aaaaaaand the four rows of rotting clapboards that, well, yeah, apparently we'd kind of forgotten to replace them, too. And they all had wicked tricky angles where they met the bay, the attic window trim, and the house trim.

And as if this wasn't enough to derail our schedule, we then discovered that freakin' Joey had worked on one of the windows on this side of the house. Sigh. We didn't get any photos of Joey's latest work (hard to do standing six inches from it on a 20-foot ladder) and we can't even describe it, because as usual, we ourselves aren't really clear on just what he did. Be assured though, that Joey did not disappoint, and true to form, every encounter with his work remains a fresh descent into a whole new world of crazy.

There went our entire timetable, right out Joey's window.

Making all the repairs took us about a day and a half, and doing our best to salvage the window Joey had installed took us another half day. Well, not quite a half day. But almost. Jeez, there was nothing that man couldn't @#%& up.

Delayed though we were, we motored on, sanding, priming, and painting our way through the rest of our week. We finished up the west side right at sunset on our last day.

Wow... what a week. The house looks amazing, if we do say so ourselves, and although it was a lot of hard work, we had an absolute blast. It's been waaaaaay too long since our last "renovation blitz"-- cancelling everything for days at a time and concentrating on nothing but a renovation project. We must do this more often. The sunny, breezy weather couldn't have been more perfect to spend 14 hours a day outside, we had entirely too much fun working together for eight uninterrupted days, and the rush of seeing a project come so far in such a short amount of time can't be beat.

Here are the results.

From this... to this...

To this:

And from this... to this...

To this (roll your mouse over any of the three photos below for before and afters):

After working on it in bits and pieces for the last few years, we can hardly believe that suddenly, such a big chunk of it is done, just like that.

On the other hand, we still have so much to do: We still have to paint the upper third of the north and east sides of the house. We've ordered replacements for the picture windows on the front, as well as for the master bedroom windows, and we'll have to spend a couple of weekends getting them installed, trimmed and painted. The trim and sidelights around the front door still need a ton of work (scraping, sanding, epoxy repairs, glass repairs and caulk), and now that the house is one solid color, we realize how badly it needs its shutters back (it looks stoopidly out of proportion without them). The soffits and eaves still need repairs and painting, and the gutters need to be re-installed.

Ehh... I guess it proves the old adage that improving one thing in a house just makes everything around it look shabby.

But more importantly, it proves that my game, at least as it applies to project vision, may still be viable. I am quite sure that none of you have failed to notice that the vast majority of the tasks on the to-do list involve a lot of fussy detail work, veryveryvery high off the ground. So, the motorized lift? Is still an Option.

And every day, as I turn onto our driveway and catch sight of the house that, for the first time in 60 years, is one, solid, attractive color, I visualize the coming day in which the Kilted One retreats behind the newspaper with his glass of wine, and I come flying fiercely up the driveway in my rented motor-lift, a determined look on my suntanned face, hair whipped back in the wind, hammer in one hand, paintbrush in the other.

What? What! A girl can dream... can't she?

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