Sporting my canvas

Quick personal update as I scrounge for source materials on 1914 reconnaissance.

The divorce proceedings move on, with the "settlement" (the draft of the final decree) being in process. Nothing dramatic, just the slow dissolution of twenty-two years. Sad. I already miss my wife, and to a great extent, my kids. Even the cat.

And, to a surprisingly great extent, my old house. Where, in one of those "what the fuck..?" things, I ended up back working, taking down the old fence we built decades ago. Here's what the front of the house looked like in April 2003, several years after we moved in:

That's the left front of the house looking northwest. The former owner had planted tulips all along the top of the retaining wall that the cats are inspecting. Here's the opposite corner:

Some time in the next couple of years we built a picket fence along the wall, both to keep The Boy and Quinn the dog from catapulting off the edge. Here's the same corner as in the second photo above in March 2007:

We're already working to change up the suburban dream; the bulbs are still there, but we've planted a couple of natives. Pacific wax myrtle in the corner and the vinca at the base of the dogwood is already beginning to crowd out the non-native stuff. 

The fence outlasted Quinn and the Boy's random running days, but not time and the Northwest weather. It was a good fence. But it was time for it to go.

So...

Wednesday while Mojo was at work and the grown children doing...something, I drove around with wrecking bar and power drill and sawsall.

The panels came off and took a one-way trip to the Metro dump...

The Girl asked me to save the posts; she says she wants to run espalier wires or a trellis. So I took only the two interior posts, and replaced the rotting bannister on the lower steps, then painted everything with that thick "Kilz" anti-mildew paint.

 Panels off, pre-paint:

And post-paint:

Drachma, the idiot, insisted on sleeping in the work area. Of course, he got painted (a bit) too...

Thursday afternoon it was all done, painted and pretty:

And then I took my soon-to-be-ex-wife out for a beer.

It's...very weird. I really LIKE her. A lot. More and more I'm missing Mojo the friend, the good companion, the funny one, the salty, smart, wisecracking long time sharer of confidences, hopes, fears, and dreams.

Lovers? Those come and go.

But friends? Real good, solid, dependable, heartfelt friends like her?

Goddamn it, they're beyond price.

Well.

Last weekend I had my first political ground-game work; canvassing in the spendy Southwest Lake Oswego district. Hours of pounding pavement and ringing doorbells. Nice houses, polite people.

But.

My first encounter with The Portland Voter In The Wild was...not reassuring.

Lots of "well, I'm not really sure..." and "I'm pretty much an independent..." as if this November wasn't a black-and-white choice between a bog-standard corporaDem and a raving headcase of a lunatic egotistical madman and his pack of loony little fascist running dogs intent on a New Gilded Age.

What the fuck, over?

I'm back at it this coming weekend, too. Plus writing postcards (?) to hesitant voters.

Which is nice. But I'm getting to the point where I want to be throwing fucking bombs, not writing fucking postcards. I can barely open the news without losing my composure. It's not enough to "beat" these goddamn people. The GOP needs to be destroyed, root and branch, burnt hull and sticks, plowed under and the ground sown with fucking salt.

Oh.

And as a reminder that I'm Old, between all the canvas walking and being a good lad and riding the stationary bike once I got back in my legs thanked me by spasming and cramping so badly I was up half Saturday night and slept through kendo practice Sunday morning.

Ugh.

The only thing worse than aging is the alternative.

Remodel Army

 I just peeked into this joint and realized I've been a baaaaad blogger; over a month with no new content.

Frankly, it's mostly because of this:

That's the kitchen. Well, that's where the kitchen used to be. 

The Little House has always been, well, little. It's barely 1,000sf, and it's poorly designed, with small rooms and a cluttered floor plan. I wrote about it back in 2020; the original wasn't great and the remodel the 1970s-80s owners did didn't make it much better. We wanted to open the place up a bit.

Here's what we started with:

And here's where we're going with that:

That's still the plan. But as Clausewitz (drink!) reminds us, between plan and execution is friction. And there's been...a LOT of friction.

Subcontractors not showing up.

Subcontractors showing up and then FUCKING up.

Ice Storms.

It's all been very stressful. I hate not having a kitchen. Cooking on a hotplate on the old dining room table sucks major ass.

That's my excuse, but it doesn't excuse me. I'll try to be better.

In my defense, I'm plugging sway on the promised "Frontiers 1914" post. It's going to be complicated. I've got two major sources right now; Terence Zuber's Battle of the Frontiers Ardennes 1914, and Dennis Showalter's The German Failure in Belgium, August 1914.

Remember that to try and make the post less insanely huge I decided to focus on the reconnaissance/counter-reconnaissance part of the fight. Well, the two sources are diametrically opposed on the subject.

The Showalter book focuses on what the German Army termed "Higher Cavalry Commands" (Höhere Kavallerie-Kommando), HKK, strategic assets directly under the Imperial Army HQ but assigned (sorta) to the Army commanders of the right wing (1st and 2nd) armies.

Their task was more-or-less purely strategic; find the left end of the Allied forces so the big Schlieffen Sweep could turn it. As you can tell from the title, Showalter doesn't think the Germans succeeded there.

The Zuber book, on the other hand, is tightly focused on - also as the title makes clear- the fight between the German 4th and 5th Armies and the French 3rd and 4th Armies in the Ardennes.

The general tone of the two is utterly dissimilar.

Showalter is zoomed in on the failure of the German Oberste Heeresleitung, the overall German Army HQ, to appreciate the criticality of the strategic mission and the degree to which the top brass either permitted (or encouraged) the right-wing HKK to faff about rather then go do what they were supposed to and the utter lack of urgency in applying the air assets.

This was supercharged by the organizational and logistical arrangements made to set up the HKKs (as well as the aerial recon elements, both fixed-wing and lighter-than-air) which helped make them less responsive and thus less useful in the right-wing fight.

Zuber, on the other hand, luuuurves him some German Army tactical training. His thesis is, so far as I can tell, to debunk the post-war French narratives of why the Ardennes sector was such a completely nutty cluster of fuck. He seldom deals with reconnaissance other than to point out the vast superiority of German tactical recon/conter-recon. Zuber seldom, if ever, deals with strategic reconnaissance at all.

(As an aside, Zuber also throws in a - to my mind - highly questionable defense of the German Army reprisals against Belgian civilians. These executions appear in the Showalter text as well, and are largely condemned as excessive responses to German friendly-fire incidents. There's actually a good discussion on the degree of 1) Belgian irregular resistance and the 2) German reprisals for it in the Wikipedia page covering the "rape of Belgium" - loaded term, but that was the most common one used for it...)

It's been a fun research project, but it's rapidly becoming obvious that discussing the subject is too massive for a single post. I'm leaning towards dividing it into three parts; a "Frontiers 1" dealing with the largely-strategic recon/counter-recon of HKK1 and HKK2 and air assets on the German right, "Frontiers 2" discussing the German center and left (including HKK 3 and HKK4 but more closely examining the divisional tactical cavalry, since the lack of open maneuver space tightly constrained the HKK's (and the terrain and foliage greatly limited the aerial recon), and a final "Frontiers 3" summarizing the main concepts of the first two.

So that's the plan, anyway.

Hopefully it goes better than the kitchen.

Men At Work

 So the Little House turned 100 last year. Yep. 1922-2022 and still going.

That said, there's a LOT not to like about the Fire Direction Center.

The single bathroom, increasingly constraining for four adults.

The cheap fittings and appliances, many of them courtesy of former owners, that are a constant, low-grade nuisance. The - as my Bride call them - "ugly bones" of the house itself, a legacy of the pre-mid-century spec-house throw-it-up-quick-sell-it-cheap pedigree of this joint.

This year we finally had enough. Time to gut some of the interior and rebuild.

Specifically, the kitchen and bathroom.

The vanity was perfectly representative of the way this place was furnished.

The countertop was painted over linoleum, and the paint continually peeled and chipped. The sink was a gimcrack Home Depot-grade porcelain-over-cast-iron thing which had a big chip over on the left that had never been repaired and was rusted out, spreading red runoff whenever it got wet.

The drawers were fabricated from the cheapest three-ply with junky hardware. The outlet behind the sink never worked (which is why it has a blank cover over it.

Just around the corner...

...is the tub/shower and toilet. Both leak. The tub is interesting because it appeared to be a stock model that was about three inches too short for the space it was shoved into. The "solution" the architectural genius devised was not to find a larger tub but to fabricate a weird little stub-wall on the right side of the tub as you see it.

The whole setup was cheap and felt cheap, and my Bride hated it.

So...

...the vanity went first.

Note the long stick of white PVC pipe where the sink drain used to be. The plumber noted that it was utterly outside any close relationship to a sink drain per City of Portland code. Which fits with the rest of this house, which seems to have been remodeled and altered repeatedly without bothering with details like that.

Then the shower:

Note the faint pattern on the floor underneath the former tub location. That's very old - as in probably 1940s or earlier - linoleum. My guess is that the original bathroom had a standing claw-foot-type tub with a linoleum floor underneath which was left in place when the fitted-tub was built in the 1950s-1960s.

The real revelation, though, was underneath.

I mentioned that the tub leaked, right?

Okay, well, that leak began just days before the demo crew was scheduled. Well, fuckadoo, I figured it wouldn't kill us if we were without a shower one extras day or two, so I went downstairs to find and close the shutoff to the bathroom.

No such thing.

Not only that, but I looked at the plumbing - really looked at it - for the first time since we moved in more than twenty years ago. Guess what?

It's as fucked up as everything else around here.

Pipes going every which way. Random stretches of copper spliced directly into the original galvanized (which, BTW, is a big plumbing no-no; the iron and copper are incompatible and the solder (or clamp) will eventually fail and leak...). Lack of shut-off valves everywhere (except for the dishwasher, weirdly, but probably because it's a very late installation).

The sanitary stack is the original 1920s ductile iron, which I shudder to think looks like inside after a century of literal shit going down the drain. If the house next door - which is an exact mirror image of ours and was built by the same outfir - is an example the connection to the sewer main is old-school precast concrete, notorious for being invaded by roots (as the next-door house's was..).

I talked the plumber into looking at this literal plumber's-nightmare to give me a guesstimate on unfucking it. We'll see how that comes in.

And then there was this.

The kitchen remodel is going to include knocking out part of the wall to open the kitchen up to the front room. To do that we need to add additional support to the remaining wall, meaning a pair of new posts extending from the first floor to the ground.

This is the first attempt at one of them.

What's funny in a not-funny way is that, footings?

That's what I do. What I did, anyway, for thirty years. If I'd bothered to look at this fucker when they were building it I'd have screeched like a wounded eagle. That's so not-right it's not funny. Either the footing or the post are in the wrong place, seeing as how the one is supposed to be centered on the other.

The City inspector came in, peeked at it, and said "You fail". THAT's when I looked and was like "Ohfuckyeah".

The earthwork crew came and redid the work pro bono. Then it passed.

Oh. And the other thing.

The general contractor employs designers to work on, well, the interior design. We had one early who left, and were working with her replacement all the way up to the start of construction.

When we found out she'd been canned. Because, among other things, she failed to order parts and materials we needed. Among other jobs she'd fucked up the same way.

So we're two weeks behind on the shower tile.

That's...not great.

So if you'll excuse me, I gotta run to the gym.

To use the shower.

Home Improvement, the series...

 I don't really have a topic today.

Retirement is interesting in a sort of not-very-interesting way. You tend to find yourself puttering about doing lots of little things that you put off in your previous life that, while often useful and entertaining (ir irking), aren't such of a muchness in terms of "hey, wow, how about this cool thing I did!"

Case in point: downspouts.

This is the south - back - side of the Little House.

FWIW, it's a sort of real oddity.

Back in 1922 when this crib was tossed together I think it was an open porch. There's signs that the back stairs to the then-half-basement were a sort of "storm cellar" kind of hatchway, and my guess is that the area next to that was not enclosed.

Some time in the next hundred years the owners enclosed it...in a very weird way. We think that it was as the same time that the goofy bastards ripped out all the interior closets and built what was a "room of closets" which is the most useless thing I (but, obviously, not they) could imagine.

We ripped open the thing to make the Girl's room, the account of which is at the link above, and very strange we found it.

Anyway...

Years ago we bought a couple of rain barrels at the Portland Nursery down on SE Glisan and installed them at the front and back east corners.

The front barrel still works just fine.

The back one? Not so much. It overflows, and the stormwater has an annoying habit of washing out the soil near the back corner of the house. So after a couple of bad winters it was time to replace the barrel with a downspout.

Off to the local hardware store I went to pick up the various bits needed for the upgrade...only to find that the local store had nothing like what I needed. C'mon, local hardware store! You want me to Shop Local, you gotta make it so I can Get What I Need Local!

Off to the not-local Home Depot, then, to feed the corporate beast and pick up all the pieces so I could slap the sucker up in fifteen minutes like any half-ass decent roofing crew.

And hour later, in the midst of my third full-on profane rant, it occurred to me that the reason that the roofers could slap these suckers up in fifteen minutes is because they're a crew, and have one guy who can hold the pieces in place while another guy nails the straps in.

Well...it's up now; not a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but it should work to keep the dirt around the foundation, which is the point. Yay, retired me.

I then took advantage of the cool morning and did some serious landscaping, largely whacking away at the annoying gardening efforts of our birds and squirrels whose passion it is to scurry across the street with nuts off the big black walnut tree and bury the fuckers over here. They're everywhere, and that reminds me someone buried a nut behind the air conditioning unit that I need to clamber over and dig out.

Bastards.

 Oh. This is the other "home improvement project" thing from this past week. Fencepost along the east side, between us and the nice gal who moved in this past year.

The original fence builder didn't bring the concrete footings high enough to protect the posts from damp rot, so after twenty or thirty years or so they're falling over. We really need to replace the whole thing but, barring that, have to swap out the ones that are actually rotted through and here you are.

As for the Rest of The World..?

Just like we've been for the past half-dozen years, We the non-insane People sit here, mesmerized like a mouse before a cobra, watching the Worst People in the Nation Fuck Around, desperately hoping that our "fellow citizens" don't make us Find Out whilst knowing full well that most of those gomers are clueless, credulous nitwits who eat up the public press' Both Sides Bullshit. 

Half of them believe that the GQP's culture war nonsense has some validity, or, at least, doesn't reveal them as the shrieking lunatics they are.

And what more can I say about that?

Other than is anyone surprised by any of this GQP fucktardry?

The “conservative” ideal has always been dictatorship. Whether it’s the dictatorship of a king, or of a mullah or pope or some other heirophant, or of a party as it was in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia or as in our current problem, the only way you’re going to get We the People to go along is with one hand on the whip. Propaganda only gets you so far.

And the only way you can get these sorts of people off your neck is…well, do the math. If they’re willing to rule you with force, how willing will they be to respect your miserable little “vote”?

I know I keep banging this drum. But all these Tales of Trump Terror have a moral, and it’s not “let’s debate whether gay people should exist”.

It’s the same one that ended in a pillar of fire over Dresden.

I don’t like that. I don’t want that. But if it has to be that or a New Gilded Age?

Then fiat justitia ruat caelum.

But that's enough of that.

I've got to go off and find something to finish off the downspout. So let's just hope that Empty G doesn't manage to seize the Department of the Interior in the meantime, right?

Tings Bruk Down

 

This is a bathroom ceiling fan.

Specifically, this is the ceiling fan that has been sucking clouds of shower steam out of MY bathroom since long before it was mine (or my Bride's, whose mortgage the Little House was in, and whose name is on the ownership document...). Our guess is that it dates from somewhere around the Eighties; that would be consistent with the provenance of a LOT of the post-Twenties work done on this house.

(Which, I should remind you, was massively fucked with after the house fire sometime around then, when the occupants took the insurance money, spent it all on hookers and blow, or Vegas, or any other damn thing than making halfway-decent repairs on the poor little house...)

Well, about sometime this spring the old fan began making expensive squealing noises and shutting down. I suspected that the fan bearing had worn our, advised the rest of the Fire Direction crew not to use it, and contemplated having to replace it with no real enthusiasm.

After putting the distasteful chore off as long as possible (and long enough for some nasty mildew to build up on the bathroom ceiling) I finally went to the friendly Home Depot folks and bought a new fan.

 
Went to the 1920's attic stairs, pulled them down, and read, stamped on the upper section in 1920's ink:

"Maximum weight: 200 lbs".

I think I was below 200 some time back in 1988, right after I got out of the service all lean and hungry. And since then food and I have been better acquainted, and that weight is long since gone.

Luckily I have good friend who aren't so damn fat. And are also good people, and kindly, and pretty awesome handimen, too, so it was my friend Brent who came over with toolkit in hand and headlamp and power drill, and...

...yanked the old junker, checked the wiring (still good), put in the new fan, tested it to see if it worked (it did), fixed it to the joist, and there we had it; a new fan.

Thank you, Brent! I owe you something nice, really, and that's not even counting for snaking the nasty damn utility sink in the basement that was running slow because of the nasty washing machine lint!

Now I just have to spackle and paint the new L-angle piece of drywall and it'll be a thing of beauty and a joy...well, until the NEXT time it craps out. Hopefully some time in the 2060s long after I'm dead.

When I was with my ex, whose family were very "boat-y" people, they liked to say that a sailboat was a hole in the water into which you poured money.

Yeah, well, home ownership. Let's talk.

And speaking of fucked up things...

I see our new House Republican overlords finally got tired of pantsing Kevin Fucking McCarthy and let the poor stupid sod play Bang the Gavel.

The clusterfuckery was entertaining, yes, but let's not let it distract us from the plot of the story "The Cannibal Children Come To The Birthday Party".

The Traitor Twenty did what they did as much to extort their fap fanstasies of endless Hunter Biden and the other QANut nonsense we're now going to get 24/7/365 from these fucksticks.

But hidden in the pile of MAGAt shit is this tasty little raisin, noted by Kyle Cheney at Politico and emphasized by emptywheel:

Yep.

They're going to use their power to destroy the notes that the DoJ took on their criminal fuckin' conspiracy

So, even as we contemplate the goodness of new bathroom fans and good home improvement news, we need to remember that for at least the next two years we're going to be ruled - to the extent they can - by people who tried to betray the Constitutional requirement to peacefully transfer power to the winner of the general election.

That is, by traitors no different in fact from those guilty of Confederate treason 162 years ago.

And it's also a reminder that the thing that distinguished a criminal like Trump from a criminal like Nixon is that Nixon's crimes were, at bottom, political. 

Nixon had an agenda - loathsome, true - that he wanted to rule by. He had made his bones kneecapping his political enemies in California, and he grew to power with the same vicious political instincts until he finally went too far for even his political party to ignore.

Trump, on the other hand, was just a mobbed-up grifter, a real-estate crook with the instincts of a made guy. His crimes were the crimes of a streetcorner hood, a Mob guy, running his numbers and thumbbreaking his debtors (and stiffarming his creditors).

So it should be no surprise that the remoras that have fastened themselves to the Mob that is the Republican Party are not that much different. They know they're guilty of criminal conspiracy.

And, like their Orange Julius Caesar, they're now trying to use legal bullshit and lies to escape with their gains.

Well, the American people did, at least in this case, vote for these sonsofbitches.

And now, thanks to the people who voted for these sonsofbitches, all of us are gonna get it, good and hard.

But at least I'll have a nice new bathroom ceiling fan when they implode the debt ceiling this October.

Instead of grim politics, how about yardwork and some cats?

I had a post all set with dark ruminations about the State of our Nation on it's 244th birthday.

But, y'know what? You've heard it all before. We're fucked, the Plague is running wild, 40% of the American public is fucking batshit crazy. Welcome to 2020, yeah, well, shit.

Instead, I went out front to work on a project we've been thinking about for years.

Our little house was built on spec in 1922. It was built cheap, and it shows; as my Bride says, "Our house has ugly bones." Everything in and around it was built to turn a quick buck, which means spending as little a possible on any- and everything.

That includes the concrete pavement.

The original plan included a walkway from the curb to the front steps, from there around the east side of the house and out into the back yard to where the original garage stood.

Well, the garage has long-since burned, the only remnants fragments of glass and charcoal we turn up in the back garden from time to time. A tiny portion of the path around the side of the house remains, out by the back door, but the bulk is gone, demolished when we had the east side deck built.

The front walk, though?

Still there.

Broken, overgrown, ugly, crude...like I said - this was cheap, gimcrack Twenties concrete flatwork.

Well, we're cowering under the barrage of COVID-19, and what better time for some home improvement projects?

So we went out front, cleared the grass turf that had overgrown the concrete fragments and pried them up...

..and stacked them in a pile with the object of breaking them into smaller fragments to make a 4- to 6-inch recycled rock, what in the soils biz we call "stabilization rock", the bulk material you through over soft soil to make a dense base on which to build.

And that's when the Little Cat showed up.

This critter's name is "Nine", because she lived in the #9 storage unit in some trailer park or something where she got sick and was generally neglected until the nice people at a Cat Rescue organization took her in. She's desperately shaky on her feet, is a fragile little thing, and is very sweet and affectionate. She also looooves to be outside, and we don't let her roam nearly enough for her liking, so when she can get out she frolics around like a nut.

And this was pure joy for the little nut; outdoors, with these awesome piles of soft dirt to roll and dig in. And so she did...

...until even more fun ambled along, in the form of the Big Cat, Drachma, the senior housecat; black, comfortable, lazy, and plump. He's a solidly outdoors-cat, possessing enough physical eptitude that the Small One lacks that makes us confident he can take care of himself outside.

Full of the wildness she draws from her outdoor adventures, the Small One hunkered down in defilade of the dirt mount and waited for her victim to wander into the kill zone.

He did...and she went Over the Top:

Baruk Catzâd! Catzâd ai-mênu! The startled Drachma responded with a satisfying tail-bottle and crouch, and Little One was a Force of Nature...

...until he realized that it was just the annoying little spaz he shared his house with. Upon which he studiously ignored her, and she found something else intensely interesting in the manner of embarrassed cats since Ancient Egypt.

With the cat skirmish concluded, we could go back to work.

Okay, well, after that we got back to work.

Got the first lift of stab rock in place and the alignment cleared in order to begin digging out towards the street.

So, as you can tell, even yardwork is More Fun With Cats.

The Door Into Summer

You may not remember back in the day when we were turning the bizarre back hallway-closet-room into Missy's bedroom.

Well, Missy has her bedroom now, and thoroughly enjoys having her own space.

There's one thing she still doesn't have, though.

A bedroom door.

Here's where you see two imperatives collide. The Girl wants privacy. The Parents want the illusion that we don't live in a teeny tiny 1,000-square-foot house, which is why we took off the old exterior door that the Former People

(may the Black Curse of Sheleigh wither their genitalia!)

left in the hallway when they added the Bizarre Back Hallway Closet-Room.

Here's what it looked like after we took the door off the back room but before we took out the back wall and put in the window:

The overall effect what just what you'd think; very closed in and dark. We tried what we could; attractive paint schemes and lighting, replacing the dank old carpet with wood flooring.

But the back hallway window is what really made the difference.

With the door gone and a window opening directly on the hallway the entire house seems airier and brighter. On a sunny winter day you could almost think you were in some sort of mild, temperate climate instead of in the rainy Northwest in the midst of the Black Months.

But.

The Girl is rising eight, and with a big brother who at almost-eleven has discovered the joys of tormenting little sisters who are too young to resist rising to that teasing-bait, wants a way to shut out irritating brothers and paternal noise. And that involves a door to the hallway.

There are more problems with that that you'd think.

For one thing, the Girl's bedroom lies athwart the only inside avenue of approach to the basement.

For another, it blocks off Nitty Kitty's only way into the house (since her cat flap is in the back door that leads to the basement and the back entrance to Maxine's room.

But.

While not minimizing the irking drawbacks, the Girl does deserve some privacy.

So the other week we went down to our local Rebuilding Center and found a used door.

It was a real treasure; purple on one side, white on the other. One thing we wanted to ensure is that it would have a window so that we'd still get some light through from the back. The little sticker said that it might have some lead paint left on it, but the Girl has hopefully grown out of the days when she'd lick inanimate objects, so we're not as stressed as we might have been about that.

Sunday was cool but sunny and dry, so I dragged the door out onto the porch and slapped on the paint stripper. The orange stripping gel we use is less toxic than those gawdawful nerve-gas-based strippers that make your eyes tear up just looking at the can, but its still not a pleasant thing to use when all the doors and windows are closed.

Hoppy Belgian beer helps cut the aroma, too.

By the time the early-setting sun had fled the sky the purple was largely gone, and half the Girl's future door was ready for sanding.

Sadly, I think that she will find, as we all do, that having a door changes you life less than you think it will when you're wanting a door; no matter how many times you open it you will not find new seas and new skies, and no matter how often you close it you will not shut out troubles and grief.

But I'm afraid that she will have to learn that lesson - as we all did - for herself.

The Painters Depart

The hard bright skies and drought of summer are passing.

Mornings are turning cool.

The rains have returned, fitful late summer rains that bring with them the sullen bump and rumble of night thunder. The streets steam in the afternoons with the aftermath of the sunshowers.

The small urban animals have suddenly appeared in haste to find their winter's stores; the several species common to the city, the survivors and the scavengers and the scroungers willing or able to live close by Man. Starlings and scrub jays, squirrels and opossums and raccoons all reappear after their long summer loafing scrabbling for the late-summer fruits and the provender of the tray feeders as the closing of the Door into Summer warns them the long cold nights of winter are coming.

The schools reopen, the children, the adolescents, and the young men and women pulled back into them, disappearing from the streets like the lost children of Hamelin.

Somehow the rhythm of the workweek is changed by the absence of these smaller people, as if the knowledge that they, too, are back to their work makes my own workday different.

The house-painters finish their work, touch up the last of the thin spots, take up their dropcloths and their paint rags and depart. The clean whiteness of the siding shines brighter gemmed with raindrops, the trim crisp gold and greed standing out from the new coating.

On the front porch the old fir planking shines rich red-brown, released from ninety years of darkness under layer upon layer of paint.

The Befreiungskrieg Mojo and I waged with our stripping gel and sandpaper fought through the wire-belts and bunker-lines of the years, beginning with our own forest green down through the gray left by The Former People to colors of which we had no understanding. Who had thought that the gaudy Christmas-Time Green was a good idea? Or the fire-engine red? And more gray? How much gray does a house porch need? Light gray, dark gray, medium gray...fifty shades of gray or more.

At bottom the wood of douglas-firs long reaped, nicked and scarred and darkened by long wear and hard use. Wood for the working day, cull of the straight-grain Twenties but clearer and smoother than anything sold as prime lumber today. Wood that feels smooth and clean under the hand and glows with antique character as I sweep the coats of lacquer across it.

In the grass of the yard outside the summer-sere gives way to the first return of green. A scattering of leaves whirls down, the first of autumn's cascade. Spiderwebs banner bush and limb and trail across your face as you pass; the garden spiders seem to suddenly appear in late summer with the other urban wildlife in a final burst of energy before the cold.

All of this I observe in passing, because the other late-summer change has been the rude uprising in my workweek. For most of the last half of August and the first week of September I have risen, dressed, and departed in darkness and returned in darkness as well.

I have observed the changes I've described almost as a passerby, stopping to assess the changes in a place he often visits but does not dwell. Noting the gross differences in color and shape, the subtle alteration of habit and use.

Smiling the secret smile of knowledge shared with strangers, at the shared recognition of small details that only the familiarity of long acquaintance can lend.