Feeling Blank

This mural that looks perpetually unfinished (like ads or pictures might appear in the boxes) is on North Lamar just south of the Tavern. Where you, my faithful few readers know, I was on Tuesday.

On Tuesday I thought maybe I'd finish 'tricking out' the condo. Oh, I knew something would probably be missing or wrong and need fixing. Big projects are like that. I knew a hurricane was coming and was vaguely worried about how bad the offshoot weather would be in Austin and how our building and our houses would fare. I'd become increasingly disgusted with how our brand new high rise operates, how poor elevator service is and such and so was vaguely worried about getting everything up to the tenth floor on Thursday.

Thursday didn't go too badly. After FFP got the concierge to open the door to the loading dock door and figured out how to operate the freight elevator himself we got the stuff up here.

Then, of course, the unexpected happened. The thing about the flood (or leak as I call it or as the building management calls it an 'incident' or 'water flow' problem) is this: while I escaped damage (apparently) in my condo, many people did not. The water was, quite literally, about ten feet away. The elevators got flooded. They are operating haphazardly still (which, frankly, they also did before). There are dirty streaks inside them where water flowed. Frankly, one is put in mind of an ancient and subsidized apartment. Remediation equipment is all over the place. There are harried residents fighting a battle between the developer and the management with their insurance companies and lawyers at their side.

I feel helpless, of course. I love my condo and except for the unfinished shades (which also need some adjustment) things are just the way I want them. But it all seems ephemeral. I will never feel like it will last. I see water coursing down the walls, damaging the book cases and the books I've so carefully assembled. I see it damaging my art, my electronics. Nothing seems safe.

Of course, people say that we don't want to let this get out (that we have these problems a mere four months after the building is occupied) or we can never sell or lease our property. But, you know, you are required to disclosed anything you know about such problems. Can't escape it.

As time goes by, if they get the elevators working and assure us that they have inspected and re-inspected whatever systems failed and all remediation is done, then I'll become more comfortable and complacent. Probably I won't get flooded by a leak. Something else will happen. It will come out of left field when I'm comfortable. On Shoal Creek I fought water. Water came in the garage in the '81 flood (from the street not Shoal Creek) and we fought it back with a French drain and sealants. (In that flood, water reached into our yard on the bluff and knocked down fences, too.) Water main breaks happened in our front yard three different times. Our pressure step down valve failed and water erupted in the garage where the service entered the house. We had sprinkler system leaks, roof leaks, condensation line leaks and toward the end a leak in the service from meter to house and had to rebuild that. I thought that I'd worry less about water on the tenth floor of a brand new building developed by a company experienced in high rise construction.

Time will pass. I'll worry about something else. Meanwhile I'm going to revel in living where I want to live. Being urban. But I won't forget water. Beside the building is a creek. It is, in fact, Shoal Creek. Of course, it won't rise to the tenth floor (or if it does, you know, goodbye Austin) but it could rise up and lap around the building stranding us here. The lake could come up here. Tom Miller Dam could fail.

After the Northridge Earthquake in '94 my friend who had lived there moved to Austin. She said that for a long time she would look at glass objects on shelves and think 'that is going to break in the next earthquake.' Even though the objects were here in Austin where the earth doesn't move that often.

So I'm seeing water damage. But my future disaster is probably something else.

The Less Said the Better

It's that time of year when we recap, review, reconsider and, most of all, write a holiday letter that sums up our year. Actually, we very rarely do that without tongue firmly inserted in cheek (something I've been doing a lot the last four months with some dental problems). Actually, we already sent our holiday cards and they have a decided lack of information...just a picture that might puzzle some people and a simple greeting.

For the sake of Holidailies and Jette's excellent writing prompt of the day ("Write your own version of those holiday newsletters that people send to friends and relatives at this time of year.") I'm going to pixel out here what we could have printed and sent.

We spent 2007 firmly entrenched in our role as the grown children of very elderly parents (three, average age 91.6) who miraculously live on their own but not without a bit of help. LB's dad sputtered along at the beginning of the year with an infection and complications from a surgical procedure but miraculously recovered, got back into the pool for water aerobics and back to driving himself and doing things for himself with minimal assistance. His back began bothering him again recently and compromising his mobility toward the end of the year, but he still manages a lot of his own errands. At 91, not bad. LB took him to West Texas and Colorado to visit relatives in his van. FFP's parents settled into a system whereby FFP shops for them and drives them to any appointments. With one good eye between the two of them, that good eye needed a cataract surgery this year. LB likes that she almost never has to shop unless her dad doesn't feel like it. As long as FFP is shopping for his parents....he might as well shop for this house, too.

Friends died. The dog died. Well, we 'put her down.' We never had a dog that just died. We are now, for the first time in twenty-some years, dogless.

We took a trip together, too. We just sort of randomly decided to go to Santa Fe and Scottsdale. Mostly to break in a new car and smugly listen to XM radio in the middle of nowhere.

Books. We got rid of hundreds, acquired an exceptionally small number (for us) and didn't get nearly as many read as we'd like. LB did attack James Joyce's Ulysses which never fails to elicit rolled eyes when she tells someone. She has read 550/933 of it as of this writing.

Weather. As I write this it is warm and humid outside. We had a 'big ice storm' (it's all relative in Austin) in January and all our households survived fine but the reflecting ball in the garden was destroyed by falling ice during the melt.

People asked us all year the same old question: "What do you do now that you are retired." We answered that we are now dilettantes. But, really, FFP wrote a weekly column and worked hard on the boards of two non-profits and on special projects for a couple more. LB rocked along avoiding much beyond tennis, workouts and Dad duty except for a few volunteer things at the country club.

We tried to downsize. We gave away furniture, books, knickknacks, clothes, kitchen things. We gave away fine wine. We tossed worn out clothes and shoes. We recycled magazines and papers we'd kept too long and shredded things that needed shredding long ago. We tossed VCR tapes, cassette tapes. I gave away old cameras, toys, stuff I'd saved to make found-object collages, literary journals. I transcribed paper journals to the computer to save them without taking up space.

LB rode a couple of Austin's Capital Metro's buses to meet friends. This had been a goal of hers. She has no idea why she set that goal. She also signed up to post a blog entry every day in November through NaBloPoMo and throughout the holidays in Holidailies. She probably sets these goals because they aren't too challenging and allow her to displace from, say, downsizing.

Everything in our front yard leaked this year. The water main, the sprinkler system and the water service to our house. Short of christening it Lake Preece-Ball we couldn't think of anything to do but badger the city and pay workmen hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

We went to many charity affairs or parties precipitating multiple fashion emergencies for LB. We gave a dinner for charity and had a reading of a play at our house. We did a 'white tie and ball gowns' party for the first time ever. People treated us. We treated them. We drank some fine wine from our own cellar and happily helped people winnow down their collections.

LB admitted she will never be a cook and we ate out more than ever.

We got serious about moving downtown by signing a contract on a condo in a downtown high rise that should be finished by the middle of next year. We saw a building open to house the Ballet Austin Butler Dance Education Center after working on the capital campaign for several years. This building is next to our condo.

We watched downtown Austin change in other ways. The Intel shell got more or less imploded. The 44-story building that will one day shelter our (tenth floor) condo rose and rose and topped. Other buildings changed the skyline and the Long Center neared completion.

LB continued to live up to the notation on her personal blog (The Visible Woman): "Pretending to write but really just blogging." She helped a friend start a screenplay project and she started two more blogs(The Journal of Unintended Consequences and Austin, Texas Daily Photo), but there are no manuscripts of novels or the self-help books she intends to write.

We didn't see a lot of movies in the regular theater runs this year but we saw a lot on DVD through Netflix and also saw a pile in Austin Film Festival and SXSW Film. We were volunteer screeners for AFF, too, and we watched 192 films. Most of them shorts, of course. Two involved men with relationships with dolls and were not pornographic. Neither film was Lars and the Real Girl. But the coincidence so freaked out LB that she refuses to see that one.

In general, we spent a lot of the year wearily answering questions about our future home in the condo, how we like retirement (and how we spend our time...see above), when we are going to sell the house (and what happens to the found object band in the backyard) and how we are doing at downsizing. Occasionally people would ask if we 'had any big trips planned.' And we'd have to say, no, not really. Now that our desire to sell a house after buying a condo has been made known and caused something called the subprime credit crisis and housing downturn, we are tired of being asked why we didn't sell earlier and how we plan to deal with that. It makes me sigh. It makes me boring. Let's just talk about something else.

Happy Holidays to You and Yours. Catch you next year for another boring recap. And I'm glad that your kids did well in (1) school; (2) scouts; (3) soccer and/or (4) whatever and that you had all those family vacations!

I Could Be Everywhere at Once

...if only I had the time! Time, space, motion, memory. I spent about thirty minutes searching for this picture, taken in 2001, yesterday. I am putting in my blog because it feels so valuable now that I searched and searched for it. (Remember how I said yesterday that my pictures never get properly labeled? This one was called 104-0454_IMG.JPG.) I gave it a better name but now it's in my blog, too, so I can refer to it. Now that we have our water main problem fixed, we have a leak in our own service. Since we have a cutoff in the house we have determined that it is between the meter and the house. The sprinkler guy asserts that he has fixed all his bits and stuff in the area, checked other stations and he has uncovered all his lines near the service. We have this suspicious wet area between two driveway surfaces, too.

So what is the significance of this picture? Well, when we built our pervious Eco-Crete driveway (which we were doing when this picture was shot) they broke a line in the water service to the house. We remembered it being in a certain place (see pink paint) but we couldn't for the life of us think why the pipe was there. To get to the garage and enter the house where the service enters the house it would have to make a hard turn to the north. Why would anyone do that? This is the original house on the lot.

Later in the evening I had a water detective Eureka moment. I remembered that there was a closet that used to house the hot water heater before it was moved to the garage. So, of course, the original angle of the line went under the house to that closet! Now, of course, another question is where does the thing turn? But I feel much better than I have any right to feel just because I figured that out. Hey, this house was built in 1951. We've lived here 30 years. There were things the people we bought it from didn't tell us. We have made all these discoveries and repaired things. We are trying to simplify our lives by selling this sprawling complicated property. But I'm going to tell the new owners everything I can think of about the place. With pictures. Seriously, you are supposed to do that according to some real estate things or the other. But after 30 years I'm still making discoveries. Or rediscoveries. Like the fact that the outlets in one room that is the original living room have one plug that is switched (by three different switches) and one that isn't.

So how have I simplified my life in this sprawling entry? Well, I've saved the picture, for what it's worth on the Internet so I can find it again. And, I might add, labeled it properly on my computer. And the seemingly slightly off topic title and subtitle record a phrase I wrote on a piece of scrap paper that I could otherwise discard as it has notes from me taking care of budget and financial stuff. But I didn't want to lose track of that phrase. It is so twisted. Because you can only be one place at a time no matter how long you have. There is a enormous missed opportunity if you are mortal.

All these little pieces of paper are chaos. They help me remember stuff and yet I have to carefully review them before I can stick them in recycling. I really need to keep all my 'to do' stuff in an electronic file. But I've given up on using a PDA. And my phone is old school and just phones. So when I'm not at the computer, I use scraps of paper.

Nothing But Blue Skies

I am basically an optimistic person. But I'm realistic, too. This picture shows a cloudy sky reflected in the water at the bottom of the hole after the water main fix.

I don't expect everything to go wrong. Some things, yeah. And my world pretty much tracks those expectations. I read the papers. (As a lot of you know I spend too much time reading the papers.) I know that my life is charmed compared to many around the world. And in my own community.

I'm about 50-50 on whether the water main will leak again in my yard while I own the place. I think it will eventually leak out there again. Probably though something somewhere else will unexpectedly go wrong.

I expect most things to work. Luckily, in our world, most things do, most of the time. It does seem with three houses to look after that something is amiss a lot of the time. So it goes. Maintenance.

I expect to get better if I feel ill. I've been so lucky with my health my whole life. A problem went undiagnosed for a few years but once I had surgery for it 1970 I have avoided being in the hospital for an illness or accident since. I'm still not sure my problems with my mouth, face, head pain are getting better or if it will all culminate in the discovery of an abscess needing a root canal or some other problem. I have put off going to an endodontist even though a referral is lying here on my desk. Without a confirming x-ray (which the dentist didn't get on several tries) I understand that the endodontist will try to stimulate the pain with hot, cold or electrical stimulation. My own experiments don't trigger this reliably. But probably I should follow up. But I was hoping the discomfort would start occurring persistently and reliably enough that the source would be more obvious. That point may have been reached last night and early this morning. I have heard of people having a need for a root canal and being in extreme pain. And others being unaware of the nerve because it was dead. I'm some where in between. I haven't taken anything but Advil and the pain is not such that I would take a narcotic. But the thing is nagging away at me and I've got to see about stopping it.

Meanwhile it is rainy and cold. But I expect blue skies soon. Yep. I expect things to get better. And they usually do.

Down in a Hole

Since two weeks ago tomorrow, we knew in our heart of hearts that something like this lurked four or five feet below. The city fretted, argued that it was ground water, leaned on their shovels, destroyed a good swath of the yard (and lots of sprinkler pipe) looking in the wrong place with a backhoe. They chatted and leaned while waiting for backhoe repairs (first a tire and then "it just kept dying"). Then they went away and sent someone to take a sample to the lab to 'show it wasn't city water.' That guy (this was Monday) said, "By golly, it's a water main leak...I can't believe they couldn't hear it." He promised they'd come yesterday and fix a great swath of pipe so it wouldn't just happen again. So they came today (not yesterday) and what did they replace? The absolute minimum to stop the leak shown above. Now we have a mess, hundreds of dollars of sprinkler and lawn damage and a piece of our driveway knocked out.

Is that the only reason I'm down in the dumps? Not really. The holiday season has succeeded in depressing me before it began. Something about needing to buy gifts when I need to throw away most everything in the house. I tried to get a jump on the season (and get some birthday gifts off) but I arrived at my favorite pack and mail store at 3:30 and they closed at 3PM...until Monday.

And each time I think my mouth will quit its weird burning...back it comes. Maybe it's getting better and maybe not.

Other than that stuff? I had a great day, thanks. And I'm making a list of things to be thankful for. And it will be a long one, of course.

Water Feature

When we sell our house next year (hopefully) there will be mention in the blurb about the water features in the back yard: attractive gurgling ponds. We will spiff them up so people can imagine enjoying the yard, watching the water.

But right now we have a not so attractive water feature in the front yard. It isn't the one pictured above. No. That water main leak was 'fixed' in 2005. Fixed in such a way that it would "never happen again." (City worker's words, not mine.) Some of the details of that fun time are here.

Yesterday FFP noticed that the depressions in the yard containing the water meter and the main sprinkler system valve were full of water. I went out and cut off the water to our house. I tried to bail out the box for the sprinkler valve but it filled almost as fast as I could bail. Hmmm. A little exploration showed a river snaking around the driveway and under the Ecocrete. And the place just above the seam from the last repair was a sinkhole of mud. Now when you have a leak like the one above that is six feet underground it takes a while to fill the ground down to bedrock and start bubbling around at the surface. So this baby has already been leaking for a while. The city has had a look. They admit they have a leak. They gave it a priority three. (No threat to life or property.) They might fix it in two to three weeks. When they do the destruction to the yard will be considerable since it will be a swamp. They will eventually sort of fix their destruction. Maybe by Christmas. We will have to spend money to make the yard look decent again for buyers. Ain't it fun? Our city, by the way, chides us on water waste. Um, yeah. Can you imagine how much is being wasted every day from this leak? Maybe a gallon or two a minute. Every minute. Twenty-four hours a day. Fifteen hundred gallons a day. That's a bunch o' flushes! And I know from driving around that there are others like this, leaking away treated water for days on end.