Wednesday, April 30, 2003

This Old House, again

A very long list of things to do suddenly materialized out of nowhere. Case in point is the recurring nightmare of the burst pipe. Last winter despite observing protocol to bleed the outdoor water lines as preventive maintenance, a leak sprung anyway, gushing forth a frozen pond. It seems to happen biannually without fail. Luckily this time no flood damage to speak of. The ice rink finally did thaw and eddied down the drainpipe harmlessly enough. Only the snapped-off spigot remains to bear witness. Galvanized steel is surely suseptible to something so innocuous as cold weather.

So this old house is under repair again.

First order of business then involves rerouting. Careful analysis of the problem reveals a flaw in Kansei engineering. Extraneous and highly vulnerable pipes extend extraneously from point of egress to an unimpeded corner in typical westernized design. To rectify poor interior architecture, simply realigning existing elbows to allow for direct access eliminates the need altogether of the exposed plumbing. Hopefully this ten-cent solution will solve future headaches.

Naturally all this work just for the sake of sprinkling the reseeded lawn because green matters. One day raking dead grass and leaves, pruning dead branches and aerating dead topsoil only reinforces this suburban fixation. Speaking of which, if the grass up front fails to grow, removing the hardened limestone-mixed dirt might soften the turf to permit the seed to take.

Then comes the garage, a bane hexing form following function. Completely gutterless with holes in the roof, this affront to backyard aesthetics is off-plumb by three inches. A temporary fix is to patch or reshingle the top and attach a front rail with flanking downspouts for proper drainage. Maybe even a new coat of paint. Inside requires additional shelving and hooks to increase the storage space and free up the floor which could also be repainted.

And that is only the outside.

Wednesday, April 23, 2003

Things to do, again

Next comes reorganization and documentation. Perhaps even an unanticipated return to fiction. All those loose, incomplete stories require an ending or at the very least another paragraph or two. Then after that is renovating the look of what now exists online. It needs to function according to Hoyle in keeping with a certain aesthetic that bespeaks a signature design sense. Finally replant the lawn. Repair those sickly brown patches and gaping bare spots.

Wednesday, April 16, 2003

A day that will live in infamy.

So it ends, wiped completely out. And those left standing do so quite shell-shocked, stunned by the perfunctory speed of the action. Well-planned but coarsely executed, the chain of command broke ranks and surrendered. With nary the token last stand. See the white of their eyes, sound retreat and turn tail real fast helter skelter. Led straight into an ambush, one by one, the comrades-in-arms fall, mowed down like sacrificial lambs. Suddenly white flags aflutter, held high by the mighty officers-in-charge trailing behind.

The spineless often survive at the luxury of the true and brave.

Friday, April 11, 2003

Notes straight out of right field descriptively

Straight out of right field encased and alternately striped. A wall of flood lights blindly illuminate twin vertical bands repeated times twelve. Enter an interior world meant to exist outside, a metaphorical place not unlike the secret garden. What magical things might lie ahead, if not behind, entrances the curiosity...

Tuesday, April 01, 2003

Notes straight out of right field

An expanse of woven greenery ripples concentrically outward like a pixelated sea of diamonds or squares abutted in tiled pattern. Or dark olive waves alternated with lime leaves of grass. But unnaturally as if CAD-drawn and chemically sprayed.

Dread Scott on the floor sits a platformed structure, a Jasper Johns ziggurat if you will in memoriam of Old Glory. Off the wall and four times the actual scale, its height stands maybe waist level allowing for right-angled circumnavigation. Outside a sign conceptually warns to keep off the lawn.

Underneath rises the rising sun.