A ghost's fingerprint.

Last week I worked in the studio in DC, restoring stuff. Two of the things I worked on were from the Titanic!

One of them is part of the "telegraph" system, it might even be called the "messenger," I think. Anyway, it's the drum that is next to the Captain's steering wheel. He cranks it up to "full ahead," or back to "full reverse oh god there’s a freakin’ iceberg!" which sends the signal to the engine room, and then the steam room follows the orders. You know the thing I mean. Anyway, I spent about half a day cleaning one of them from the Titanic! (Every ship had more than one. We have two in our studio right now.) I know this is going to sound super corny, and it felt corny to think it, but while cleaning, I kept thinking that I was touching history. It was so weird. The thing itself is made of bronze, and so I had to scrape and poke away any weak areas—which were really corroded—with dental tools, so that after we coat the thing with wax to protect it, it won't keep corroding from the inside. I kept looking at it, thinking about the people who designed and made it in the first place, thinking about the Captain who used it... once... and then about all the years it spent at the bottom of the ocean, slowly crumbling away. Then some robot grabbed it and brought it up out of the ocean, and here it was, in my hands! So weird. And that damn movie was so overblown!

The second thing I worked on was a stock pot from the galley—the kitchen. It wasn't very special, just a pot for cooking soup or something. It's not even that big. Anyway, it's a metal pot, with enamel over it, then it was painted blue. Some areas still have the paint on, some have exposed enamel, some show bare metal, and some areas are rotted through, leaving rusty, crumbly holes.

I was supposed to take some close-up pictures before rinsing it off with treated water. I started taking the pictures, and I got closer, and closer. I lowered the camera, and leaned in, and you’ll never believe what I saw. There was a fingerprint corroded into the pot! Right there, on the border between where there was and wasn’t paint, a fingerprint was etched into the pot! I don’t know if the grease from some food protected the paint, or the oil from a cook’s hand corroded away the paint, but I could clearly see three fingerprint patterns burned through the paint on the side of the pot.

It has to be the fingerprint from a cook, doesn’t it? Not only from the Titanic, but from, like, an hour before it sank? Maybe the meal was all done, but the dishes hadn’t been washed yet? Or they were in the middle of cooking? I don’t know, but it’s giving me shivers again just thinking about it. “Touching history” was one thing, but seeing this fingerprint was totally wild. I wonder what happened to that person.

***

Crap! It's a few weeks later now, and I just found out the fingerprint isn't from the ship! Read THIS entry for the sad truth.

“What an incredible smell you’ve discovered!”

If you know that the above quote is from the original Star Wars movie, spoken by Han Solo—in frustration—to Princess Leia after she leads them into the trash compactor, then you’re just about as big a geek as I am! I thought a lot about that movie scene yesterday. Here’s why:

I got a job! I’m really excited about it too. I got a job with a company that does historic monument restoration. I accepted a three-week position so we could suss each other out, but hopefully the official job offer is going to entail restoration work in the shop as well as project management in their office. It is also going to involve a fair amount of travel—since they work on large pieces around the country—but if I’m managing projects I hope to travel to check stuff out, but then come back home to coordinate from the DC office.

Today, I spent a lot of the day cleaning calcite deposits off a marble column. When the faceted column was originally attached to it’s capital, which is the name for the decorative cap that sits on the column, and yes, it's spelled -tal, (you didn’t think you’d get thru an entry like this without a quick lesson, did you?) they used lime mortar as the connecting goo. Nowadays folks use Portland cement in construction, but originally they used lime mortar. Portland cement is harder, cures way faster, and is stronger. You don’t necessarily want those properties when connecting marble columns to capitals though! If anything moves, you want the mortar joint to crack, not the marble column. And not only does the mortar cure slowly… it never really cures completely. When it gets wet, it reacts with carbon dioxide in the air to harden. So if you mix up a batch, when it dries a hard shell forms on the outside, but the inside gets sealed away from contact with the air and just dries out. As the years go by, if the hard shell cracks for any reason—like, if something shifts—the newly exposed fresh inside hardens. It heals!

Now for the downside. If the joint is kept dry, all is well. But if the joint is exposed to water, like a slow wet drip, then the mortar will dissolve and run down the column. On it’s way down, as it drips along the surface of the marble, it reacts with the air and hardens, forming ugly gray crunchy rocky deposits along the water trail.

“How do you clean it off?”

Good question, imaginary question asker!

Well, the calcite is chemically identical to the marble, so you can’t use a solvent, it would dissolve the marble too. And the deposit is harder than the actual marble, so you can’t sand blast it off, you’d erode the marble around it quicker than the ugly deposit. So you have to patiently, and carefully, scrape it off with a razor blade or x-acto knife. This column is about twelve feet long, and about a foot in diameter. That’s a lot of surface to clean! Like I said though, the deposits are in streaks, not all over. And this column is faceted, so the sides are actually flat, not round, which helped too.

I know—even if you’ve forgotten by now—that this entry started with a Star Wars quote, so let me bring it back around for you. When I wasn’t carefully scraping the column clean, I welded up a couple of tables for the shop. (I learned to stick-weld in the process! I’m not very good yet, but it was cool!) Anyway, they keep all their scrap metal outside, leaning in a rack against the building. The problem is that back there the property, and the neighboring property, and the one behind us, all flood when it rains. It floods a lot. So I’m out there, in rubber boots, carefully walking around in muddy water which is very close to being too deep for rubber boots, and it’s cold and drizzly, and the ground is uneven, and I don’t know what I’m stepping on, and I’m trying to get this 16 foot long heavy square pipe out of the rack, and everything is sortof slippery, when one of the folks hollers out from inside the shop.
“How’s it going out there?”
I looked around and yelled back, “I’m like Han Solo in the freakin’ trash compactor out here!”
To which he replied, “Ok, well don’t let that snake monster get around your neck, and you’ll be fine!”

I had to laugh, because man, that was a good comeback!

For the rest of the day, I had Jason Kleinberg’s song “Princess Leia” in my head, which made me smile. If you haven’t heard it, you should buy his CD. He’s a great friend of mine, and his really nice website is RIGHT HERE.

Have a good week! I think I’ll post about once per week, just so you know.

Rejected.

In other news: it's 2am and I just checked my email. I just got rejected by NASA. Oh well, if you're going to have someone say they aren't interested, it may as well be NASA, right?

Our pulse is being taken...

...and I'll tell you why.

Today was Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday holiday. We celebrated by getting free tickets, from MoveOn, to go see/hear Al Gore speak about the dangers of unchecked executive power. It was no coincidence that the speech happened on a day meant to reflect on the dreams of Dr. King, as he is a very famous victim of systematic illegal surveillance by the FBI. All this has, of course, been brought into sharp focus in recent days by the current administration’s brazen admission that they have, for four years, conducted extensive electronic monitoring of US citizens without adhering to any of the established rules on doing so, and they have no intention of stopping now. I’m sure this entry does nothing to help keep me off those lists. I can hear them beaming the message into my brain using radio waves and satellites, “You just made the list buddy.”

I thought it was a good speech, and I see it got mentioned on the Chronicle’s website, SFGate. Here is their article. It was cool to see it in person here in DC! It was over an hour long, he quoted George Orwell, I stood up and clapped when he talked about the Bush administration’s obsession with consolidating power into the executive branch, and I got choked up when he suggested that one of the groups which needed to be taken to task was the American people. That’s us, folks. He hammered the Judicial Branch and Congress for not fighting to properly check and balance the Executive recently, which they should do, but then he said it’s also time to take the pulse of the American people. It’s not someone else’s job to make sure “they” don’t fuck with “us.” When Thomas Jefferson said “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance” he was talking to me, and I suspect that, when you aren’t feeling too overwhelmed, you know he was talking to you too.

“Can’t we just put someone we like in charge and let them do the work?” Nope, and here’s why: because you can’t even trust the nuns! I saw a preview for the movie “The Magdalene Sisters” tonight and I said to myself, “Dear god! We can’t even trust the nuns!” (Which I thought was a pretty funny thing to think.) Even if we like that one with the wing-a-ling hat who can fly, the ones who run the refuge for girls who “need to be saved”? No sir, can’t trust ‘em. Sorry. Here’s the sad part, you can’t trust me either! You can’t trust anyone to be in charge if their power is unchecked. It can’t be done. I’m not saying we all have to live in paranoid fear of each other, never trusting anyone; it’s all about trusting unchecked power and secrecy. Don’t do it. Nobody has ever had all the power and used it benevolently. Work together, debate, discuss, think. We’re the only one’s who can save us from each other and from ourselves.

*sigh*

Boy, look at me! One week in DC and I’m already all political and shit! Sometime soon, ask me about how I think eating yummy international food will save the world.

Ps: I’m sorry for the small amount of potty language. At least I’m using capital letters properly, instead of my traditional e-mail typography!

You changed the name?

Yep. But a blog by any other name can still stink. It was suggested to me that a mellower title for my blog might not hurt during this time while I shop myself around for a job with the government. Yes, it’s true, I’m looking for another government job. I listened to Joseph Campbell, and while I still believe he speaks the truth in the value of pursuing your fondest goals—“follow your bliss!” he cries from beyond the grave—it hasn’t turned out to serve me, at this time, as well as I would have hoped. I leaped, I fell, there was a soggy *splat!*, and I have been trying to get back up ever since.

And now, I look around, and I find that I am three thousand miles away… three hours ahead.

SPM

Ok, this is just, wow:
http://www.squished.com/
These folks run a Squished Penny Museum out of their living room, and they live right by a Metro stop. Since we also live right by a Metro stop, I want to see this while we're here. Come on, who doesn't love those squished pennies? They're the best part of most of the overblown tourist stops!

Chim-Chimeney...

If Mary Poppins was right--and sweeps are as lucky as lucky can be--then my luck should be looking up now. Today I had my arm stuffed up our chimney all the way up to my shoulder. I grunted and groaned for about a half an hour trying to clean out the damn thing and get our flue damper to seat properly. See, yesterday I bought some firewood--one "rack," which is a four foot tall by eight foot long stack of logs. If the logs are a length that is a whole fraction of four feet: 24", 12", or even 16", then one "rack" is more properly known as a "face-cord." Our logs vary from 14-15", and so it's just a "rack." For the record--and just because I know you want to know--a "cord" of wood is 4'x4'x8' of stacked logs; for example, four "face-cords" of 12" logs.

Anyway, where was I? Oh right, in the fireplace with my arm up to my shoulder up the chimney humming a Mary Poppins tune to myself as the soot drifted down, making a mess everywhere--including on me--and generally stinking the place up and making me cough. Well, it had to be done, because it was all sitting up in the on the fire shelf, and whenever the wind blows just right, it comes down the chimney and stinks up our apartment even if there's no fire going! The people who used to live here didn't use it very much, and when they did they used those prefab logs, and so I think the smell might go away over time as we cook the hell out of it with hot oak fires.

While we're having this little fireplace tutorial, let me tell you one other thing I learned about fireplaces:

Apparently, it's good form to build your pile of paper and kindling, but before you light it you wad/roll up a sheet of newspaper. If you light one end of this thing, like a big candle, you can stuff it up into the chimney. Let it burn almost all the way down--about 30 seconds--to get the air in the chimney hot and moving in the up direction. Just before your "candle" goes out, pull it down and use it to light your fire. This makes sure you get a good draw for the smoke right away, instead of having smoke fill your apartment, and the apartment of your new upstairs neighbor--like we did on our first night. OOPS!

Building fires is fun, and sitting in front of them is fun, but I have also been really enjoying splitting up the logs with a hatchet to make kindling. I know I'm odd, but it's really neat to see the different kinds of wood, and the different ways the logs have grown, and some of them split pretty easy while some are harder than shit! I mean, I was whacking away at this one today, and that sucker wouldn't budge! One swing to set the hatchet, *thunk*, and then I'm beating the hell out of the back of the axe head with a heavy forearm-sized log, trying to drive it in like a wedge. Most of the other logs split as the axe sinks in from three or so solid whacks from the club, but this one was having none of it. I'm down on one knee, back straight, head up, inhale, *whack!*, exhale, *whack!*, inhale, *whack!*, exhale, *whack!* I'm like yoga wood splitting over here, every hit a solid blow, and the axe is only creeping in about 1/8th of an inch with each shot! The log is square-ish, and there isn't a single knot in it. This is from a big tree, straight grain, reddish wood, and hard wood. A formidable foe, with beautiful grain. I wish Joe could have seen it. He might have known what it was, and would have marveled at it with me.

Bumpy landing.

I can hardly bring myself to officially start this blog. I was hoping it would be an archive of funny stories, but I just don't have anything funny to say yet. We (Amber, me, Saba, and Tobiko) flew in a few days ago, and are finally starting to mellow out a bit. The move was really crazy, and I'm faced with a dilemma:
1) I said I was going to write a DC blog, and I want to.
2) The move and first few days provided TOO much material to even THINK of putting up here.
2b) Nobody wants to read (and I don't want to write) a long-winded gripe.

So, in an effort to keep this short and somewhat uplifting, here is a list of things which kick ass since they saved our bacon during this transition period:
-Friends and family who stepped up at the eleventh hour (and at 11:30!) to help us move stuff, pack stuff, and get to the airport. Thank you!
-Cat tranquilizers for the plane ride.
-New neighbor who gave us wood when our gas had been shut off by the dorks at Washington Gas.
-New landlady's boyfriend who drove us to the hardware store so we could buy a space heater. While on the way there/back, he also gave us a quick car tour of our new neighborhood.
-Granny Cart: purchased from the hardware store (some assembly required). A must-have for the carless shopper.
-Craigslist! Now we have furniture.