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I wouldn’t yet assign blame for the total structural failure to Chudo’s (nee Buster’s) hiding place to this morning’s 4.4 earthquake, but of course I would stop everything I’m doing and use whatever I have available — in this case a  pair of small hinges — to put it back together so she can get back to napping and to avoid the city unnecessarily red-tagging her residence:

I knew upon leaving the house yesterday morning the high winds would undoubtedly bring down a substantial measure of the fronds from the smaller of our two backyard palms, which has been long overdue the attentions of a tree trimmer.

Sure enough when I got home last night I found that the blustery day-long blowings conspired with gravity to bring a decent load of the ungainly things to ground, and I spent a chunk of this morning corralling them off the walkway to the side of the yard, where they will then await me and my desire to break them down and dispose of them, probably this weekend.

In an epic duel with the last frond, stuck up in a neighboring tree, I first valiantly attempted to dislodge it with about 20 tosses of a broom. When that finally proved futile, instead of giving up, I tied a long length of old coaxial cable to a rock that I then launched in a trajectory that took it up and over the top of the trapped frond’s shaft and I was able to pull it down where it joined its brethren.

And yes, in triumph I did a fist-pump. I may have even made “crowd goes wild” noises.

But trust me, that won’t be the last time. There are literally scores upon scores more waiting the chance to fall:

In the small bathroom off our second bedroom, is a window. It’s about, I dunno… maybe a foot, foot-and-a-half wide; two, three feet tall. It opens outward, so the screen’s on the inside.

At some point in the 104-year-old house’s history when the sketchiness of the neighborhood may have been the factor that led to the decision to bar all the windows on the first floor it was decided to bar this second floor window, too. This, despite its small size and inaccessible position about 15 feet up the south side of the house making it rank most likely last on a burglar’s list of entry options, probably below axing a hole in a wall.

My theory is that there was a tenant there with a child and it wasn’t done so much to keep criminals from coming in as it was to keep a kid or kids from falling out. But it’s just a theory, an attempt to explain such an inanity.

But regardless of the reason barred like a prison it was and barred like a prison it’s been, until this morning when the bars removal became one more item I was able to check off my never-ending To Do list:

Here’s the before and after:

I hate bars. The only ones that remain are the three that hang off the louvre windows on the first floor because, well… they’re louvre windows which we’ll one day replace and then those bars will be gone too.

And yeah, I took that silly sliding latch on the bottom off too. Totally unnecessary.

Haiti’s got me dwelling and waking up. The quake, it’s terrifying devastation and its chaotic aftermath have all served  to show me how ill-equipped our household is and will be when an epic disaster strikes Los Angeles.

When. Not if.

Sure, we’ve got emergency food/supply backpacks in each of our cars. Plus there’s an emergency container in the backyard. We’ve got sturdy shoes and flashlights and a transistor radio and spare batteries and about five gallons of drinking water. But we are so seriously lacking in other essential aspects and a comprehensive emergency plan that for the first time in my life as an L.A. native who’s been through every temblor since the 1971 Sylmar quake, I am just now finally recognizing how such an abject lack of planning and preparation can make a bad situation worse and a catastrophic situation potentially devastating.

So now it’s time to go full-stop and reverse that trend. It’s time to quit allowing all that negative potential the opportunity to be realized, and instead go about covering all the bases as best I can. Not so much for any peace of mind beforehand, but for the chance at a better ability to cope and survive in the inevitable nightmarish aftermath.

UPDATED (01.17): On this the 16th anniversary of the Northridge Earthquake, I secured our first bookcase — the one that stands inside the front entrance. My original intent was simply to dust it and its contents for the first time in waaaaay too long, but in the course of doing that I realized attaching it to the wall to be a simple matter of driving three long screws through a crosspiece supporting one of its shelves into the plaster behind it. Voila! One down, maaaaany more to go.

For as long as I’ve known Susan she’s had a wonderfully oversized classic London Market  clock hanging on the dining room wall, but for the past year or so it’s becoming increasingly inconsistent in its time-keeping capabilities, finally quitting for good in November.

Thinking it was done for, I went ahead and got her a new clock for Christmas, only afterward investigating to see if a replacement movement was available for the old one.

Turns out it was, and it and when it arrived this past week I managed to install it without breaking anything. But since she liked the new dining room clock where it was the question became: where to put the old one?

And the answer to both of us was obvious; the stairway:

In the big scheme this ain’t much. But in the annals of making lemonade outta lemons when it comes to improv’d bike repairs, it’s worth mentioning.

It all started the week before last when one side of my left pedal malfuntioned while on the way to work. Now these aren’t your normal every-day platform pedals like the kind you grew up with. Nor are they the old school road bike pedals with the straps you cinch around your shoe. These are “clipless” pedals — a bargain basement variety purchased from Nashbar.com… emphasis on bargain basement.

Whereas a higher-quality pedal would incorporate a more durable metal for the flange that the front of the cleat on the bottom of my bike shoe snaps into, these Nashbar pedals use either a hardened play-doh, or perhaps a lowest-grade alloy, and as such after not much more than 1,000 miles of punching the cleat in and pulling it out, the flange essentially snapped off like a Lee press-on nail in a Nevada cathouse rendering that side of the pedal unclippable. Talk about putting the metal to the pedal.

Normally I’d swap that fail out post hasty, but I didn’t because the other side of the pedal was still intact, that is, until yesterday when that flange broke about halfway through my morning commute, leaving me pedaling somewhat awkwardly the rest of the way in and dreading the ride home that evening.

Then just as I was about to leave the office, it dawned on me that the right pedal had both sides intact, so wouldn’t it theoretically be cool if I could dismantle the unbroken flange from one side of the right pedal and move it over to the left pedal thus restoring full clippability.

It didn’t take long for theory to become reality and I was able to pedal home with both feet firmly clamped in.

But for how long…? Hopefully only as long as it takes for the sturdier Shimano pedals to arrive.

I have no patience with holiday lights. Especially the kind that are fully functioning when I take them down January 1 only to find them fouled up after 11.5 months of doing nothing but sitting in the basement. When I haul them out If they work, great! But if all or part of a string is dark? I don’t mess around checking bulbs and crap: out they go.

And so it was this year with all of last years lights. Every single string had either all or some of it burned out. Grrrrr. So while at Costco last week I decided to pay a little bit more in the short term to go a little itty bit greener in the long term by getting some energy-effecicient LED icicle lights. They were comparitively pricey — even for Costco. Let’s hope they’re also a bit more able to withstand the next 11.5 months of doing nothing, so I’m not recycling them gruffly this time next year.

And in the meantime I give you what they look like all put up and fully functioning:

For our first four Christmases together, we were content just to run lights along the rain gutter and the bannister up the front steps, with a wreath hanging from the railing by the front door over our family of illuminated animated deer (of which the baby’s lights were all burned out but miraculously came on Friday). Last year was our first time adding lights to the upstairs dormer, and it’s a good thing I’m not afraid of heights, because awkwardly dangling over the edge is involved. This year since I had a couple extra strings, I added them to the garage as well, but that just involved a slightly rickety ladder.

Merry Christmas!

Yesterday in the midst of my recollections of right-hooking drivers, I made mention of a couple instances where I was pedaling and from out of nowhere a pretty violent slippage and thunk of the bike’s drivetrain would occur.

What I failed to mention was that the drivetrain was in its second day of use. Over the weekend I’d replaced the maddeningly creaky 108mm TruVativ bottom bracket with a far quieter 107-mm one by Shimano; installed new 170mm cranks to replace the 165mm TruVativs; and also opted to drop in a new 48-tooth chainring, down from the 52-toother I’d been using.

So I knew the thunks were being generated from that part of the bike. Trouble was examination was somewhat exasperating because I found nothing remiss. Everything was tight. Nothing was warped or bent or kinked.

Then on the way home last night as I was cranking hard up an incline along the Ballona Creek Bikeway, the chain jumped off the rear sprocket, and the cause began to manifest itself.

(more…)

The floor-level outlet that has provided the power to our entertainment unit has long needed upgrading. It’s old two-pronger (as evidenced by  the interesting decorative detail around the plugs, as shown above) that has been an overloaded trooper in steadily supplying the needed juice through an eight-outlet powerstrip to all our audio/visual stuff. But it wasn’t until I was back there this weekend trying to make heads and tails of the massive tangle of cables and cords coming and going from the stereo, Playstation, VCR, TV, turntable, DVD, speakers, TiVo and satellite receiver  in order to get the DVD player and TiVo working with the TV and the TiVo working with our new DirecTV receiver that I found out how old when I opted to replace it for a more modern three-prong plug — and one without a metal faceplate.

After removing it, I looked on the back and found a series of patent numbers listed, the first being the top one in this pic:

Using Google to put the pieces together I eventually found a series of websites that told me this particular outlet had been in service in the house going back as long ago as 94 years, maybe a year or two less. One can only imagine the variety of things it powered over all those years.

U.S. Patent No. 1, 146,938 for an Attachment Plug Receptacle was applied for by inventor Harvey Hubbell on July 23, 1914 and approved July 20, 1915.  Hubbell’s most famous creations were the pull chain electrical socket and his original 1904 plug, which eliminated the need to hardwire devices directly to their power source. This plug adapted any of the past attachment plugs to now standard or knife blade plugs common to that era.

In the most desperate days of my long stretch of unemployment — I mean freelancing — I drove all the way down to Dominguez Hills in the summer of 2007 and applied to be a dependent contractor for DirecTV, installing their satellite TV systems.

In fact, perhaps the only reason I didn’t take the $10-per-hour shit job when they called a couple weeks later and offered it to me is that even though I had gone out of my way on very short notice to wait in line for almost two hours without an appointment to pull my DMV record so that I showed up with it for the application/interview process, the young lady who’d called said the job was mine  as soon as I provided her with a current DMV printout.

“But you have the one I gave you two weeks ago,” I said.

“Yes, but a lot could have happened since then.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Unfortunately, no,” she said.

Well, the thought of waiting around at the DMV for another couple hours and paying for another driving record  just so I could have the privilege of driving around town in a van installing dishes and receivers for $80 a day proved too much for me to bear so I said to the young lady she could take that job and shove it and thus ended any opportunity to be professionally affiliated with that outfit.

This week when DirecTV showed to upgrade us to an HD dish and receiver, the better with which to take advantage of our new TVs high definition capacity, I realized I’d made the right choice. I wouldn’t have lasted a week on the job because I would’ve insisted on quality installations, not quantity.

When the DirecTV dude showed up, he was on time, affable and knowledgeable and in a few minutes was  at work installing the requisite new dish atop the rear dormer. Between then and a couple hours later I’d put a $20 in my pocket to tip him with, but later when he powered everything up and  we were in the living room admiring the crystal clear picture coming out of our Sony Bravia, my joy at the beautiful image was tempered by the absolute crap job he did laying the cable on the roof.

As a result, the $20 in my pocket wasn’t going anywhere near the guy, and I invited him into the backyard to see what he had to say about the wickedly unappealing display of thick blazing white cables running down the dormer wall and oozing along the roof where he then ridiculously wrapped it around the outside of the rain gutter, as shown at right (click for the bigger picture) before tucking it under the eave and nailing the excess to the wall.

He shrugged somewhat sheepishly.

“If this were your house, would you be happy with that?” I asked.

He said he understood my disappointment and gave me some song and dance about not having enough black cable with him and that with free installations it was pretty much the best he was allowed to do.

The reason I didn’t call bullshit is that I’d already figured out how to make practically all of it invisible and decided to DIY it where DirecTV was unwilling to tread. Sure I could have stomped my foot and demanded to talk to his supervisor and bitched and moaned until things got made right, but I hate doing that almost as much as I hate dealing with people who have to be harassed into doing anything more then the least amount of work, so I thanked him for his marginal efforts, bid him farewell and then suffered the shoddiness until this morning when I got busy undoing his deeds and redoing it right: by drilling a small hole through the wall under the eave, dropping the cables through that vent to the right of the dormer and moving it all under the roof to connect up inside into the crawlspace off the master bedroom. I’m sure you’ll agree the end result (at left, click for the bigger picture) is as it should and could have been in the first place.

In addition, as you are just able to see sticking into the right side of the picture at the roof line, the installer didn’t see it fit to remove our old dish, so I took that down too, along with all the old coaxial cabling that ran down the north side of the house. While I was up there I also removed the dish unseen on the south side of the roof formerly connected to our upstairs tenant’s TV.

Our roof hasn’t been so uncluttered in years.