Time enough at last
(which is the title of the famous Twilight Zone where Burgess Meredith survives nuclear destruction with all the books and then breaks his glasses.)
But I digress.
Already.
My wife and son have departed for more northerly climes, leaving me holding down the fort. It's actually quite a heavy fort, very good at holding itself down without too much complaint, and so in the remaining time I am at long last fulfilling my promise to blog.
Let's start with the bathroom. We designed it. Richard built it. It's beautiful. And Sarah has already covered it a bit in her Letters Home page. To refresh your memory, here's the slideshow she included:
So. What Sarah's magnificent images don't really capture is the finest level of detail of the place. I shall try to rectify this deficiency forthwith.
Here's the floor of the toilet, those same old reclaimed junkyard tiles:
It took many days, but I meticulously dremmeled and sanded all the old glue and grout off of every tile one at a time, and then sarah washed and treated them with oil. They look great. But because they're old and a bit worn, and there should be as little as 0mm of grout between them, it was an ordeal to get them all perfectly laid. Sorry, Richard.
Speaking of floors, check out the floor in the main bathroom:
They're terracotta, but look at their texture... all the flecks of mineral in the clay. it turns out that the darker ones in the checkerboard are just cooked a little longer, which also means that they're a tiny bit smaller than the lighter tiles, which practically means that they were trickier to set in an even pattern. Sorry, Richard. But to his credit, Richard laid all the light ones with horizontal grain, and the dark ones vertical. Nice touch.
Between these two beautifully-floored rooms is a wall, and up in that wall are some windows. These come from our friend Helen, who found a stack of these empty windowframes in her house when she moved in. Richard had already done the wall when we decided to put these in up top. Sorry, Richard.
We have a nice big junkyard sink, and more mirrors will come as we find them at car boot sales.
The countertop is solid ash, made by a very cool woodsmith nearby, and conceals its support beneath it, so that it hovers above the floor. After we had such a nice floor, it seemed a shame to cover it.
But to stand looking at the sink, you miss the real view behind you:
What was once a dingy dark little cave is now gloriously light. Next to the junkyard bathtub (which Sarah painted up real good), the stone wall is gone, and rehabbed junkyard windows take its place. They were a square pane taller; Richard cut them down to size. They open and everything. And of course he had to put up the steel girder to take the load of the building as well. Notice how structurally sound it all is:
I reckon literature is quite heavy, And sturdy.
In the corner next to the tub will go this ebay dental sink:
So that I can shave in the tub. Always wanted one of these. The plumbing is all set up for it, I just need to figure out how to support it.
And did you notice the putty job on those french windows?
Not only did I have to make cardboard templates to get all the glass cut, I then had to putty all that glass in. 24 panes, nearly all of them with curved sides. It was a labor of meticulous, finger-numbing love, shaping the putty and smoothing it one tiny glass pane at a time.
In the bathroom entryway, we have a moroccan lamp:
Which casts nice shadows about. We wanted a chandelier over the bathtub, but apparently that's against electrical safety code. And you can also see the shower window. At the moment, it's empty, which is quite nice, but when the steam machine gets installed in the shower, of course we're going to have to glass it in. But never fear: we got a cool ceramic temple window in Burma, and the window is made to hold it perfectly.
So the shower window will still be cool, even if glassed on the inside.
Here is a picture of the shower through its door:
Besides the glorious overhead rainshower, we have a hand shower and a bathtub tap as well. Because Sarah likes mandy, which is the Indonesian shower: you dump coconuts-full of water over your head out of a bucket. The door (which you can't see here, but which you wouldn't see even if it were closed) is a big juicy sheet of safetyglass. So chunky and transparent. The doorframe is acacia, to withstand the rigors of the steamroom this will someday be. The grout, and the ceiling, is epoxy cement, also steam-resistant. The walls themselves are made of hi-tech cement-backed foam panels, followed by a further layer of normal rockwool. A hotbox of steamy insulation. The ceiling slants, because as a steam room, we want the droplets of scalding hot water to run down to the wall, not drip onto our tender tender flesh.
And did you notice the gutter into which all the water flows?
It's copper. Richard folded it out of a big sheet, and then tiled it in. The floor comes from a Moroccan-stuff shop in bordeaux. They're all slightly different sizes. Richard was very happy about that, I can tell you.
And when you're basking under hot rain looking out at the swaying trees, all the sweating over details seems blissfully worth it.
It took a long time to make. And I love our bathroom.
(see? I blogged!)
See?
Told you I would blog more!
(actually I'm also waiting on a certain someone who is helping me completely redesign the blog (ahem) to get motivated to use it more. I realize that the commenting is severely uncomfortable in the current oh-so-2004 incarnation. Not that that's an excuse not to blog.
)
new toy
I'm not sitting in front of a computer right now... well not in the ordinary sense. This is my first-ever blog entry from my fun new phone. I still can't upload pictures from it, working on a solution for that, but although a picture says a thousand words, perhaps the thousand words says it better. So here we go: wait, how many words is that so far?
Speaking of words, there's a relatively new one. Moblogging. That's what I'm doing now.
OK maybe I won't get to a thousand words just now. It's not the world's biggest keyboard to type on. Still, it's fun!
Blast from the past
I graduated from high school 20 years ago this year. The reunion party was a few weeks ago, and I did not attend. But because of the event and the nostalgia surrounding it, I have been contacted by several old friends from whom I've not heard in years. One of these is Lara, a longtime friend in St. Louis, with whom I've had absolutely no communication since 1987. Funny that we should suddenly be emailing again after such a break. She lives in LA now as a writer.
When we were 14 she invited me to the Morp. When the girls invite the boys, "prom" gets palindromed, or at least it did that time. In a recent mail, I reminded her of that evening. I was young, and self conscious, and had been too shy to dance with her. And now 24 years later, I have finally had the opportunity to apologize for my bashfulness. Here's her reply:
I didn't realize you remembered going to the morp. What I remember about the evening is not that you didn't dance with me but that while we waited for my dad to pick us up (man, we were young!), you pulled a tiny, pewter penis out of your pocket and showed it to me. I have told that story many times, and it has made many people laugh. So good work.
I must say that it came as no small surprise that, after 24 years of feeling somehow slightly inadequate for not having danced, Lara did not even remember that facet of our evening. Chalk it up to adolescent sensitivity. (By the way, I do dance now. Easily and embarrassingly.) But I must set the record straight about this pewter penis deal. Hmph. Pewter penis indeed. Here's my response:
Um, excuse me, but that penis isn't pewter. It's silver. And It has a noble history.
In the 1950s my dad was in the army stationed in Ulm, Germany. He had been previously stationed in the States, where he continually failed his marksmanship tests. Just couldn't hit the target. In exasperation at his poor shooting, the proctor eventually wrote a very good, if fictional, score down on my dad's report card, just to get him out of there. But a few weeks later, due to his impressive marks, my dad was called up to represent his entire platoon at a national marksmanship tournament. He went to his superior and explained that he couldn't possibly participate, that he would embarrass his unit. "Do you speak any languages?" his officer asked. The next day he was transferred to Germany. But I digress.
During his time in Europe, he had the opportunity to travel. He hadn't been to Europe since he'd left as a child during the war. One place he went was Pompeii. Back then, sales of antiquities was not restricted as it is nowadays, and he bought himself a little silver 2000 year old trinket as a souvenir.
The winged penis was a common symbol in the Roman empire. Originally it was Apollo. God of fertility, dontcha know. Every year during the Apollonian festival, the barren women could go to the temple, where they would be stripped and blindfolded. And then, apparently mystically, the winged penis of the god would fly out from the alter and impregnate them. I guess priests, like the rest of us, take it where they can get it. Later, the significance of the symbol evolved, eventually serving as an icon for the Roman brothel industry. Which is odd, considering that, were I a prostitute, I wouldn't necessarily want so much fertility happening in the course of my work. But regardless, at the brothel gates, over the door in stone would be a carved winged penis indicating the type of trade that a discerning consumer could find within. Such pictographic markers were common then over all sorts of business doorways. And finally, the winged penis became the municipal symbol for the entire city of Pompeii. Whether it was well-known for its brothels, or else it had a simple affinity for Apollo, I don't know.
Anyhow, when I started Latin in 7th grade, my dad gave me his little gewgaw to bring to class. It was there that Mr Radford explained all this to me. That little penis is 20 centuries old.
And it remains on my keychain to this day.
Filling the gap
....one big gap in particular.
You see, One of the things I really like about my office is that I can sit at my desk, and look out the window, and see the vines just across our garden from the house. Particularly at this time of year, when the harvest is going on, and there's activity over there. It reminds me that we're in France, and that it's beautiful.
But one of the problems with my office is that, despite its view, it's dark in here. At the northeast corner of the house, I get good light while the sun is rising, but anyone reading this probably already knows that early mornings aren't really my thing. And the rest of the day I'm in shadow, tucked away in my little cave, tapping away on my keyboard, and no doubt suffering vitamin D deficiencies even as my body fights against the ravages of scurvy.
And so, a few months ago, we got Nicolas, our trusty and diligent local stone mason, to punch a hole in the side wall of the house, in order to let a little light pass through. ...And it's quite a hole he made, too.
It was fascinating to watch, how carefully he removed the stones one by one, making sure the house stayed standing, until he could start propping bits up along the way. First he carved through the sides, and built cement columns where the doorframe would someday be. Then he went to work on the remaining column of wall in the middle. He did it in layers, so that the outside 10" of the wall had full support before he started scratching away at the interior wall. Then he built forms, filled them with cement, and boom: a doorway.
That was back in August. If you're French, or have ever tried to do anything in France, you may recognize a problem there. Because August, round these parts, is holiday time. And that's not just for kids and teachers: nearly everyone goes on holiday at the same time. Something doctrinaire about the spirit of capitalism not interfering with family togetherness. Nicolas is Italian, you see. But the people who make doors: they're French. And they weren't anywhere to be found. So there we were, with a giant hole in the house, and no way of filling it.
The work ground to a halt, Nicolas boarded up his creation with some very nice plywood, and we had no choice but to put the rest of the project on hold.
August finally ended. The commercial world sprung back to life. I visited the carpenter, he visited the house, and we agreed on a price. His chef d'atelier came round and took minute and precise measurements of both the intra-mural hole and the doors we wished to copy. And they got to work.
And it took a while.
But today, not a minute too soon (since we need to be able to lock our house when we go to the States in 2 weeks), the doors have arrived. And even as I sit here typing, wearing a jacket because there's still a giant hole in the wall of my office, two guys are busily installing my new view.
This picture is a bit of a ways along; they actually started with the shutters. Which are not like the other shutters in the house. Which the boss, when I just called him, was not at all happy with. Which is not my problem. So they're installing the wrong ones ones temporarily, and they'll replace them when the correct ones are finished. The issue is the shutters they've made are lacking decorative holes in the tops, which are really very pretty, especially when the shutters are closed and the light shines through. Here's what they're supposed to look like:
But that aside, the new doors look great. The entire character of the room changes when the biggest view is looking in a totally different direction, up toward Kepler's Wood, so green and quiet. It also makes some difference that we've barely another window in the house with a northward view. All the northern windows are purely about light and aperture, not about looking, not about witnessing time passing among the oaks. It's really special.
The next step starts monday: Nicolas will return to conceal all the cement beneath a layer of stone, and to finish pointing the northern wall. Then the entire exterior surface of the house will be have been redone since we moved in (except for the verandah of course). After that, it's our turn: to move all the furniture out of the office, to steam off the remains of the wallpaper, to replaster, -paint, and -light, and then to move back in. And another room will be complete.
Slowly slowly, we get it done. But so slowly! Still, progress is progress, and my new view is a marvel.
