Cleaning Other People's Houses [Man and Bits of Paper]

It's a good feeling to clean a friend's house. To see order emerge from seeming chaos. It's good for the friend for you to be there, both for moral support, and to shed some fresh perspective on the situation.

It's good to be able to look at a disaster area and say "Oh, we can fix this. Go get that empty bookshelf."

It's good to have the right tools from having cleaned your own house.

Me: "Why are all these shirts everywhere?"
Him: "I... I don't really have that many hangers."
Me: "Oh, well, I just cleaned out S------- (the name of another house). We now have a couple hundred plastic ones at my house. You can have, say, 50?"
Him: "Oh, I guess that would work."
Me: "Also, I'm bringing 409, Goo Gone, Windex, and Pledge. And my vacuum."
Him: "Ok.... *looks around* Oh my God, yes."

It's good to rediscover a floor.

Pittsburgh knows Kung Fu! Or so I though. [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

I thought Pittsburgh had a Black Belt, until I talked to our other contributor, Edward.

Let me explain.

Having just moved back to Pittsburgh from California exile, I am, well, excited. My fiancee and I are madly scrambling to furnish our new apartment, and so we have been driving all over the city, which has lead us down some interesting roads.

We did a lot of driving, and we passed a lot of Belt signs. The belt system is an innovation Pittsburgh made in the 1940s, developed by local traffic engineer Joseph White. They are collections of connected roads which, when followed in sequence, form long circular ring-roads, or belts, around Pittsburgh, in leiu of and then as alternatives to interstate highways.

The system looks something like this:


(image credit: http://www.routemarkers.com/usa/Pennsylvania/Belt_System/)

And the belt signs look something like this:
(image credit: http://www.routemarkers.com/usa/Pennsylvania/Belt_System/)

A few interesting points about the Belt system:
Roads that are belts retain their origional names. So, for example, there are signs on Shady Ave in Squirell Hill that it is Shady Ave, but also that part of it is the "Blue Belt"

The Highland Park Bridge is the only double-belted road, being for its span the carrier of both Blue and Green

The Green, Orange and Red belts are not complete circles- the Red Belt especially, as it is only that northern arc from Leetsdale to Tarentum. The Red and Orange belts cut off at the edges of the county (though Orange does continue unofficially, twelve miles of it being decomissioned in the 1970s, which gives me some exploratory notions), while the Green belt runs into a number of geographic issues (The western hills in Robinson township, for the most part), which make continuing its arcing curve prohibitive and/or trite.

The belts are arranged concentrically, and labeled after the colors of the light spectrum- Red at the edge, down through Orange, Yellow, Green, and Blue to Purple (Purple was of course added in 1995 to try to help lost tourists in our lovely double-gridded downtown).

Imagine my surprise, then, when on Penn Ave headed north through Wilkinsburgh, well inside the yellow belt's purview, I came upon these signs:
The first time I came upon them I did not really notice them, save for the abstract notions which wiggled into my brain that a) some tiny extra piece of the Red Belt ran through Wilkinsburgh, and had its own detour and b) the Black Belt existed, and also had a small detour on Penn.

This lead to some confusion, when I mentioned a week later to Edmund that I had traveled along the Black Belt while picking up furniture, to which he replied "What? There is no Black Belt. Though if there was, Paper Street would be part of it."

And so just this morning I googled "Pittsburgh black detour" and found that others had been confused as well.

According to this March 2008 article in the Trib, the detours are color-coded designatory overlays (just like the Belt System) designed to route traffic away and around really bad accidents on the various parkways (just like the Belt System), and that the detours are colored Red, Orange, Green, Blue, Black, and Brown (the first four of which are also colors represented in the Belt System).

More confusingly, according to the Emergency Detour Routes For Limited Access Freeways document revised and rereleased by Penn-Dot in 2008, there is not just one Black Detour, but thirty-eight, and not just one Red Detour, but twenty.

I am not sure if any same-color detours actually intersect each other, as the document is 210 pages long (it can be found as an 8 MB pdf here), but I am tempted to try to find out.

At the very least, I did find the two detours that the specific signs we found (On Penn near Ardmore) actually reference
RED DETOUR:
(image credit: Emergency Detour Routes For Limited Access Freeways page 116)
BLACK DETOUR:
(image credit: Emergency Detour Routes For Limited Access Freeways page 124)
They detours, then, split at Penn and Swissvale, Black heading further down Penn, and Red turning right on Swissvale.

Adding to the confusion, though (and perhaps explaining part of why two clearly different road systems managed to get mostly the same color scheme), is that in the above maps, pulled straight from the EDRFLAF document, RED is colored BLUE, and BLACK is colored RED.

Looks like Penn-Dot could use some better in-house graphic designers. They might want to take a cue from the brilliant Pittsburgh Wayfinder System, which... was also a Penn-Dot project, as far as I can tell.

Oh well.

How to get rid of (more) books (and other things) [Man and Bits of Paper]

The short answer- be persistent.

When we move in a week or two, Rigel and I are taking a single car-load with us, and so to prepare we have been cutting down on even more of our possessions.

Clothing was the easiest- for a few months now I've been using to hanger trick and so it was immediately clear what I hadn't been wearing. I also finally gave up on some of my old t-shirts, many of which have stretched or warped and just fit strangely.

DVDs were a little harder- I had to call not just used video stores but used music stores as well. For some reason, Los Angeles seems to have a dearth of used-whatever stores- we had to drive twenty miles to the DVD-buying place I finally found, and got $40 cash for our troubles, which was cool.

Comics were also easy- we went to Pulp Fiction and traded 15 or 16 used comics (half trade paperbacks, half manga) for 3 new trade paperbacks, which was sweet, though a little counter-productive (but totally worth it! DMZ: Blood in the Game FTW!)

Books, though. Oh my.

It really started with a lot of thinking and reading and writing. Only after talking over the issue in my head for a couple of hours could I really bring myself to make book-decisions and begin to cull things off my shelves.

I found two thoughts to guide me:
- "If there was a fire and this was all destroyed, would I replace this specific book?"
- "Five years down the road, is this book something Awesome Happy Future Me would own?"

I found, for maybe the first time in my life, that for a majority of my books, the answers were both NO.

I think that for a long time books were my security- I knew that if I forgot something, I could always go back to the source and look it up. They let me hang pieces of my brain on the outside.

But I'm not at that place any more. As I mentioned in my previous post, when I was culling books there were whole shelves devoted to subjects that just don't hold my interest any more- I've moved on. Most of what remains are: fiction series that I have read and re-read and plan to read and re-read again- old friends that always show me something new; books on urbanism (but not the ones I found un-instructive or boring or not worth reading twice); a few comics (also old friends); and just five Dungeons and Dragons books (I sold thirty such ones last year). It's about a quarter of the high-water-mark, and less than half of what Rigel and I brought to the condo.

We took them one place, which took two of our three boxes. They had a pretty sketchy store credit policy- you could only used credit for up to half of your transaction. As they were offering us $52 in store credit, I'd have to... buy $104 worth of used books? That seemed pretty much counter to my intention to get rid of books. I haggled with the owner, and got him to just trade for two barely-opened Dungeons and Dragons sourcebooks, $40 to him but $70 retail! It was good.

The last box we took to another store the next day, and they bought five books for $6 cash, which was cool, but sort of a waste of time, as they took an hour to get around to us. Frustrated, we took the leavings (which were, weirdly, the nicest, least crappy-paperback-y of all the ones we were selling- urbanism textbooks, a few literary journals, some $14 paper-but-bigger-and-nicer-back sci fi, etc) to OPEN , just down the street from us, where they took everything and gave us store credit, which we plan on selling to someone on Craigslist for cash. OPEN was so plesant and such a well-lit, beautiful store, that I was almost happy just to give them the last few books- I knew it was a good home, or at least a pretty train station from which they would travel to good homes.

Weirdness pervaded the two days it took. What was most difficult was how long selling everything took- the whole process stretched out and gave me long periods of time to torture myself about how callous I was to push away so many words, and at such crappy prices.

It was also heart-breaking to enter so many used book stores- most of them seemed over-full and under-staffed. Apparently the recession is hitting the whole industry really hard- half of the places I called to ask were dead numbers of out-of-business stores, and another third weren't currently buying anything. All the open places were depressingly selective- they only seemed to want quick-selling paperbacks, while nicer-but-slower-selling tomes were shunned as short-term losses, even if they might be long-term gains.

But it's done, and despite the messiness of the operation, another weight has been lifted from my heart.

"Stuff" [Man and Bits of Paper]

The few weeks mentioned in the last post became a few months. Rigeland I moved in to the condo at the beginning of May. We are moving out at the end of June, headed back to Pittsburgh.

The Condo, though, is clean and painted and carpeted and beautiful. We made it ready to be used again, just not, apparently, by us.

I have learned many things in the past few months, and would like to relate a few of them:

1. You cannot change your stuff until it really is your stuff.

The biggest issue we had moving things around in the condo wasn’t actually deciding what to do with it. We had a good sense of what to keep, discard, donate, etc. The hardest part was having to convince other members of the extended family that that was the right move, that no, they didn’t need an extra coffee table, nor did anyone else in the family, and that a lot of this stuff could just be let go in some appropriate manner.

2. It is much easier to make decisions about stuff when you can see all of your stuff at once.

I never knew how many of my books I didn’t really want to own anymore until I sorted them into four giant book cases and said “Hmm. This is too many books.” Now that they are on the big shelves, I’ve organized them by subject, and as such the keep/donate decisions can be made in big batches- there are subjects I don’t really care for anymore, books I don’t really need around. Also, being able to see, say, all of the books on writing, all together, makes it much easier for me to pick the best one (to keep) and purge the rest.

3. You cannot sort other people’s things for them- they have to want it.

While cleaning the condo, I also helped Beta’s father clean out his garage, or start to. But there is only so much one can do to help sort other people’s stuff. The most I could do was set up the right bins (SHRED, THROW OUT, DONATE, KEEP) for things to be sorted into, write new labels on boxes and folders for keepable stuff, and then sit with him and keep him working through various piles. Yes, there was some verbal encouragement along the lines of “ten years from now are you really going to want that around?” and “if it means so much to you, why was it buried in the garage?” but I really did very little beyond provide the time and the means for organization- it was Beta’s dad who actually made all the decisions.

4. Storage Units are a trap.

If there is any single thing that makes “stuff” grow that thing is the modern storage unit. It’s an entropy-creator for a couple of reasons: it lets you own more things that you actually have room for in your life proper; it lets you hide how much stuff you own from your psyche; it has sufficient distance as to become a sort of unknown, and untreatable, undoable black hole of “things that I regret not honoring through use.”

5. History is right about “stuff.”

There have been few times in history where overabundance has been such a problem. Such abundance used to be a dream, but with modern production, machine labor, etc, it is now a reality, and a bit of a nightmare. Some of the most prominent thinkers in history were also the most Spartan, starting with the Spartans themselves. It is only the last few generations of Americans who have had this issue with the owning of too many things in a broad, general way. Yes, there have always been eccentrics with vast collections of objects, but now it is the rule, not the exception.

And unlike historical “stuff”- hand crafted, expensive, well-loved stuff, our “stuff” is processed, identical, non-unique. And yet we treasure it as if it was. Why? If it is all replaceable (although whether that idea is one worth building a society on is a whole other article,) why not replace it? Why hold on?

I think, when it comes down to it, the happiest people I know are the ones who do not own a lot, but what they do own is a) beautiful, b) unique, and c) honored through use. Some of the unhappiest people I know own a lot of stuff, most of it non-unique, and none of it used as often as it deserves to be.

We are gearing up now to move back to Pittsburgh, with under a car-load worth of things (no furniture, etc), so expect more soon on the cleaning end of things.

Green Goddess [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

I just made Rigel and myself an excellent salad from Jesse Ziff Cool's "Simply Organic" cookbook using the wealth of organic produce one can find in San Francisco. It was her "Green Goddess Chicken and Asparagus Salad"

Green Goddess is actually a dressing. I had never heard of it, but before Ranch Dressing was invented it was supposedly the most popular salad dressing in the country.

From the Wikipedia article:

The dressing is named for its green tint. The most accepted theory regarding its origins points to the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in 1923, when the hotel's executive chef wanted something to pay tribute to actor George Arliss and his hit play, The Green Goddess.[1] He then concocted this dressing, which, like the play, became a hit. This dressing is a variation of a dressing originated in France by a Chef to Louis XIII who made a Sauce Au Vert (Green Sauce) which was traditionally served with 'Green Eel' - Refer to Larousse Gastronomique Page 1272.

Just yesterday we walked past the Palace Hotel. Turns out Andrew Carnegie actually stayed there. Here's his description:

A palace truly! Where shall we find its equal? Windsor Hotel, good-bye! you must yield the palm to your great Western rival, as far as structure goes, though in all other respects you may keep the foremost place. There is no other hotel building in the world equal to this. The court of the Grand at Paris is poor compared to that of the Palace. Its general effect at night, when brilliantly lighted, is superb; its furniture, rooms and appointments are all fine, but then it tells you all over it was built to "whip all creation," and the millions of its lucky owner enabled him to triumph.

Also, the salad was really good. Rigel hates plants, and she liked this salad.

San Francisco- Adorable Crustations, Typography [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Tanked with other crabs at one of the stores in the recently re-interiored Ferry Building.



Crazily kerned characters keep trolley cars from crushing the curious (if cues are continued upon).

A Long Month [Man and Bits of Paper]

The move was successful. The last couple of days before it were pretty stressful, although I didn't quite realize that until our flight out to LA. I spent the next couple of days sleeping twelve or thirteen hours a day.

Rigel's family in LA is pretty extensive, and also Mexican, so the holidays were one family gathering after another- I'm sure we managed to have every combination and permutation possible of branches from the family tree. Her family likes me pretty well- I think I'm the latest in a long line of helpful gringos. Or something like that.

The last week we finally started work on the condo. I might have spoken of it before. Maybe not. It... it is a mess. It was a mess. Rigel's dad and his uncle put two solid weeks of ten hour days in clearing it out of trash and creepy moldy things, although there was still mold on nearly every surface. The past few days we've boxed nearly every remaining thing, Goodwill'd a lot of it, thrown out the really moldy stuff. We've cleaned nearly all of the furniture left, and for the past couple of days we've been painting.

Things left to do-

resurface the tile in the hallway, alcove, and kitchen
replace the refrigerator and dish washer
paint the bedroom, the bathroom, and the front alcove
replace the carpet in the living room and bedroom
fix a few different things (a kitchen drawer or two need to be restapled, the cabinets might need new handles)

All that time furniture and boxes need to be shuffled around, which is frustrating and time consuming.

It's going to be a long couple of weeks.