Tag: Life

Weatherproofing the new exterior came next

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We now faced some related decisions, beginning with the kind of roofing.

Our preference was for standing seam metal, but we were concerned about the price. It would, however, allow for a lesser roof pitch, and that would give us more headroom, and that was in addition to its added durability.

Asphalt shingles may be less expensive, but we live in a heavy winds-prone town. The forecast seems to have gale warnings every other day, at least for small craft out on the water. After a strong storm, the streets and yards are littered with blown-away shingles, even from new houses.

As I said, living beside the sea exposes us to a lot of wind.

~*~

The next decision involved the color. There were more standard color options than I’d thought from casual observation.

We liked bright red and the bold cobalt, at least for homes out in the country, but ours is tucked into a tight neighborhood and we wanted to continue to blend in. Our goal was something subtle but still classy. The color of the metal would also determine the shade of trim we would be applying later, maybe around the foundation, too.

We settled on a pale blue, which we find is common around the neighborhood.

There was far more to do up there than we could see from the street, and far more steps than simply putting the metal sheets down.

With condensation as a consideration, a vapor barrier went up. Strapping and rigid-foam insulation boards were fitted and secured. A weather-resistant fascia went around the trim. As did flashing.

And finally, we had the metal roofing itself.

After several setbacks from bad weather, Adam and Keith worked like maniacs over the weekend to have it securely in place before a hurricane-force storm – and then Christmas, a storm of a whole other nature.

~*~

As for the exterior walls, new cedar shake shingles were a given.

Haunted by a big bad Wolfe in a white suit

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

“You’ll be the next Tom Wolfe,” one creative writing prof promised me. I loved the guy’s flashy writing and, for the most part, his subject matter.

Where he eventually rubbed me wrong was his consternation that no big novel of the hippie era had appeared. There, he kept ringing as a prompt for me.

Part of his hook for me was the fact that my dream job in the newspaper world would have been as a columnist, especially one like Hub Meeker’s State of the Arts in the Dayton Journal Herald. Arts journalism was, alas, a shrinking field, along with the more general community columnist, like that paper’s Marj Heydock or Binghamton’s Tom Cawley.

Wolfe had briefly been one of those, at the New York Herald Tribune.

The bigger part, of course, was about that novel. He was dismissing Richard Brautigan’s unique voice altogether and others, like Gurney Norman, John Nichols, Tom Robbins, who rode the vibe.

Wolfe was also snidely suggesting that he had been the one exception, with his Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, which really wasn’t a novel and predated the blossoming of the hippie movement.

His idea of the Big Hippie Novel reeked of the misguided quest for a Great American Novel.

Quite simply, there were too many strands of the movement to fit into a single book. Political or social action, anti-war witness, civil rights, gender equality, environmental awareness, organic and vegetarian foods, intentional community, group housing, alternative education were all part of it, even before the sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, hair, fashion, or slang.

These other factors would come more fully into play when I revised Daffodil Sunrise into Daffodil Uprising, and Hippie Drum and Hippie Love into Pit-a-Pat High Jinks.

I’d like to think of those books as nominees for the Big Hippie Novel distinction.

Wolfe’s charge also overlooks the outstanding nonfiction books that reflected the experience, such as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Moreover, I still feel that many of the difficulties in the current political scene arise from a failure to clearly understand the demons raging from the Vietnam conflict, both for those who fought in the army and those who fought the unjustified war itself.

So here we were, struggling through disco without having faced the lessons of either the hippie outbreak or the Vietnam disease. Hippie had become a dirty word, and many who had been happy to be one were no in psychological denial. It was something nobody wanted to relive either, apart from maybe Woodstock.

As others have observed, an ignorance of history carries a heavy price.

Extending the back wall, at last

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Week 7 brought the dramatic steps that would be seen from the street. This is a small town, after all, and people would talk. Fortunately, all we heard was approval and admiration.

As another plus, the weather turned in our favor, a week without rain.

As an added blessing, Adam, our exacting contractor, was joined by Keith, a simpatico master carpenter (even mediocre ones are hard to find around here). Fortuitously, they melded into a relentless team that raised the back wall, crafted new rafters, and encased the roof like clockwork.

Doing that precisely to an old freeform house like ours required many adjustments akin to sculpting, which these two performed with great understanding and patience.

The new wall would be sitting atop an old wall that was serpentine in length and height. It required a lot of precise correction.

The week ended with the thrill of seeing back half of our greatly expanded upstairs actually buttoned up days before Thanksgiving and the wintry weather to follow.

The front half will have to wait till spring, but there’s plenty to do before then. Much more, actually, than I wanted to consider.

Everybody should get a sabbatical

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Shortly before finding myself officially unemployed, I engaged a typist to prepare a clean draft of Subway Hitchhikers for submission to literary agents or book editors. At least that would be moving forward.

And then, when the ax fell, I was surprised to find that after arriving in Baltimore, in debt from divorce and selling a house at a loss in a recession, I had saved up a bundle in just two years. Having a company car and an expense account covering my meals during the week added up. Rather than return immediately to the workforce, I decided to give myself some time off, a sabbatical, as it were, to concentrate on the writing I had always wanted to do. The kind that would put my name on the cover and the spine. Something more lasting than a byline on a daily paper or even, more prestigiously, a magazine.

Watching a colleague who was waiting till retirement before he could tackle the children’s book he always wanted to write nagged at me. I had heard a few similar dreams – wait for retirement. Except that a heart attack felled Russ shortly after he got that farewell cake.

In my job-free spree, I hunkered down to hard writing, up to 12 hours a day. By this point, I was pretty proficient with my personal computer and its dot-matrix printer. And so, while she was typing up Hitchhikers, I turned to keyboarding other material.

What I see as I look back on my sabbatical was that I entered the year more prepared than I’ve assumed. It wasn’t like I was sitting down and staring at a blank page and waiting for inspiration to strike. Besides, I had journal notes, correspondence, even maps and photos to draw on.

Every writer works differently, as interviews in the Paris Review demonstrated. The one with Jack Kerouac had inspired to use the end rolls of teletype paper for drafting, freeing me from having to keep inserting new sheets into the typewriter. Using a PC was like that, only instead of having to replace paper I had a 5¼-inch flopping disk that filled up. If only I had an editor waiting, like he had.

As I awaited word on my query letters to agents and publishers, I began examining my life from college to the present through the eyes of fiction. Keyboarding large sections from my journals gave me a foundation for following my moves from the East Coast back to Ohio, on to Indiana, again, and finally the Pacific Northwest, events that included my first marriage. Making it work as fiction, though, was the challenge.

My primitive PC was still a huge advance over typewriters, in my case, an Olivetti Editor 2. And here I had been seeing the ubiquitous IBM Selectric as an enviable sign of a successful writer? The thought is rather amusing today. Gee, and there was no Internet yet, hard as that is to believe now.

In my sabbatical I concentrated on a single manuscript and then put it aside as I awaited feedback from potential agents or publishers or maybe just for a space to season until I could come back to it afresh. That opened a window to start drafting another. I was a fiend, having waited years for this opportunity.

My hunkered down life? I got the deepest tan of my life by taking a midday break at the pool, at least through the summer. And did get out for hikes, especially in nearby pine barrens that had lead mine remains and a waterfall. Spiritually, I was connecting with Plain Quakers, liberal Mennonites, former Amish, and a small circle from the Church of the Brethren – all in the pacifist tradition. There was even a writers’ group that Tom Clancy addressed just as he was on the cusp of celebrity.

What I see now when I look at my earlier writing is that I could never have created those pages later in my life. Too many details would have vanished, along with the urgency and originality and even the voice.

The sabbatical was also a period of heavy reading for me, including the brat pack being edited by Gary Fisketjon at Vintage Contemporaries, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

As my savings ran out, I still hadn’t found an agent or publisher. Realizing I’d need at least another year clear to achieve that, I reluctantly headed back to my career in newspaper journalism, this time in New Hampshire. There was a crucial shift, though. The archconservative Union Leader had a unionized newsroom where I could go back into the ranks as an editor and still earn more than most small paper managing editors across the country. I even had job security and a 35-hour workweek that allowed me time for a real life.

I packed up with the first rambling draft of what would become Promise, released via Smashwords in 2013, and two related novels, plus Hometown News and all of the outtakes from the subway project. I could continue to revise those drafts in my free time, but the book publishing world was changing in ways that baffled even the most celebrated literary agents.

Looking back, I must admit how much risk I took in my year off. I had no health insurance, for one thing, and no guarantee I could return to the shrinking ranks of journalism. I was also perceiving the pace I was working at could not be sustained.

I had been appalled in reading interviews with famed authors who boasted that they worked four hours a day – what slackers, I thought. Now I see that as a rather lavish amount of time, considering the additional hours of research, related correspondence, submissions, reading, and basic home-business demands (yes, writing is a business). Gee, how did I overlook all those hours of lunch conferences or cocktail hours in the lives of the literati, which were essentially business? Or even their hours in psychotherapy?

For most of us, it’s spring

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Or more properly, in the northern hemisphere, today is the vernal equinox, derived for the Latin vernal for “spring” and equinox for “equal night.” And that means it’s officially spring, even if there’s still snow on the ground or a blizzard in the forecast.

For folks south of the equator, today’s the beginning of autumn.

Either way, the date usually falls on March 20 or 21 – the 19th is more of a rarity, with the next one not until 2044. (Hmm, looking that far ahead, I’m not seeing any on the 21st. I’ll let the experts argue.) The problem arises in the fact the Earth doesn’t circle the sun in exactly 365 days – there’s that nagging quarter-day that gives us our Leap Year and its February 29, which we just passed.

That said, let’s allow ten other items spring up. Remember, in much of the world, we’re coming out of hibernation, of one sort or another.

  1. The spring and fall equinoxes are the only two times during the year when the sun rises due east and sets due west. As we’re discovering the ancients knew and celebrated.
  2. If you were standing at the North Pole today, you would see the sun skim across the horizon, beginning six months of uninterrupted daylight. At the South Pole, of course, it would mark the start of six months of darkness.
  3. Spring is definitely in the air. With the ability to carry more moisture than it had in winter, the air delivers more scents, such as cut grass, flowers, even the damp earth. That also means that airborne allergies resurface. Watch those pollen counts in the weather forecast!
  4. Springtime is the most popular time to buy or sell a house, pushing property prices to their highest. Winter cold dissuades most people from moving till the temperatures warm. For families with children, the end of the school year is a factor, too.
  5. By definition, Western Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, as early as March 22, though that won’t happen again until 2285. The calculations are a bit more complicated for the Eastern Orthodox, where Easter comes no earlier than April 4 or as late as May 8.
  6. Babies delivered in the springtime have the highest propensity of developing schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, and anorexia, according to at least one study. On the other hand, for kids in general, it’s the season when they grow the fastest.
  7. While springtime is usually portrayed as sunshine and roses, it has its dark sides. For example, Facebook found it’s the highest seasons for couples to break up their link, along with the two weeks before Christmas. The lowest breakup times were from August through October as well as Christmas Day.
  8. In North America, tornadoes and thunderstorms are most pronounced than through the rest of the year.
  9. Spring fever is more than a common phrase, for good reason. Its emotional and physiological symptoms include restlessness, daydreaming, appetite loss, and high heart rate. After cold winters, though, I’d say it beats cabin fever, for sure.
  10. Contrary to widespread impressions of suicide rates rising during the winter, especially around the holidays, self-inflicted deaths are highest in April, May, and June. are when suicide rates are highest. There’s also an increase in manic behaviors and worsening bipolar disorder symptoms.

So far, no lipstick. And then? Zip, zip, zip!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

After a week or more of finetuning the ridgepole and columns, Adam was ready for more drama. It was time for the old roof and rafters to go.

By now, much of the time the work was mostly loud reverberations punctuated by pounding and thuds within the top half of our house. Most of it mystified me. It often sounded like a war zone, especially when the air compressor kicked in. Not that I’m complaining.

Here we were, six weeks and thousands of dollars later and nothing we’d done was of the sort that would appear on a flip-this-house kind of a video streaming channel – the superficial changes that one local inspector we know dismisses as “lipstick.”

You do have to love an old house. Or, for perspective, an old lover.

Now we faced the decisive moment. Off with the back half of our upstairs!

A large, “rolling” dumpster was in place.

That saw appeared like the fin on a shark.

And then the roofing was removed in panels.

We got an idea of what a deck up there would be like.

The dumpster quickly filled.

 

Ten random questions

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment
  1. So what if it’s NOT historically true?
  2. Is there any egg in a Chinese egg roll?
  3. Who was Jack Russell?
  4. Has anyone used “Jack Russell Terrier” as a nom de plume?
  5. Can brilliance compensate for lack of depth?
  6. Enemies? Present within? Or without?
  7. How are you supposed to answer, “How ya doin’?”?
  8. What’s that noise?
  9. What do I have to do to get my books banned?
  10. Is it better to have no taste than bad taste?

Our home’s new backbone was surgically inserted

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

The last Saturday in October arrived clear and cool. We were now officially a month into the project, and Adam showed up with a crew of three for the dramatic operation of inserting a ridgepole. It was rather like laparoscopy, if you want to consider the small incision he made near the top of a street-facing gable.

Here’s how it went.

There was also the column to insert.

 

There was no anesthesia.