I don't rightly know

Yeah, I uploaded those roof pictures to my iPod Touch and showed them to a couple people. I was asked a couple times, "Where'd you learn how to do that?"

When I was first asked, I replied, "I've been around."

I don't remember where I learned it. Doesn't everyone know how to frame out a new roof deck and then install a finished roof?

Isn't that something that most kids pick up on the streets?

...

I found out where he was working on my first guess. The clues I had where: Downtown Crossing and "at the end of some street, or something."

I knew of only one place that fit the description so I went in. The entrance was two or three stairs above street level, which I liked because it keeps those pesky handicapped people out.

I stepped in and was just about on top of the two girls standing at the front, acting like hostesses. I was hoping to step in, look around and come up with a plan but with the two of them there, I just had to wing it.

I wasn't even certain if it was the right place or if he was even working a Friday night shift. I didn't have many options, so I just asked if my friend was working.

I was told that indeed he was working and that he was upstairs and possibly there was even room at the bar. I walked upstairs to a crowded room. It took him awhile to notice me but when he did he poured a shot of premium tequila for me.

I would have been right at home, if I were a phony, self absorbed, young, vapid profession.

I think I remember changing seats or places at least twice and I remember being served some sort of Miller beer a couple times. I remember joining in on the conversation some lady was having with my friend. I don't remember paying but there was enough of my money missing to indicate that I did. I remember thinking that I was functional when I had left, and I wouldn't leave the bar without settling the bill so I didn't worry about it. I know I took the subway home but I don't know which station I got on at.

I've known Dave for years and years. I met him at my regular place, he would often come in before his bartender shift would start at some high price place. I heard he was a rock star behind the bar. He was good friends with most of the bartenders at my regular place, so pretty much by default that made us friends.

Most everyone, works in different places since the glory days. I'm the only one that still gets a paycheck from the same employer. Dave reminds me that things were different and that for me: things aren't so bad.

Thanks, Dave.

Bows

I'm out of half and half so I'm drinking a damn latte

When people ask me what I'm doing to do on vacation, I usually say, "Some stuff around the house."

Sometimes, I say, "Work on the roof."

There are six sections of roofs and one section has six dormers which each has their own roof, so I have twelve separate roofs.

That roof above, used to be flat. Flat roofs suck, so I added a pitch to it but where I live you aren't supposed to change the roof line without a building permit so I pitched it just a little so the change cannot be seen from ground level.

My house is the highest so the neighbors cannot see the change either.

The pitch is 2" for every foot, which is the minimum pitch for a shingled roof even though most roofers will tell you that it needs to be steeper, at least 3" per foot; contrary to what the manufacturer says.



The roof above, is a nearly flat roof, in parts, which I had been patching since I got the house over ten years ago. The life span of a rolled roof is 5 to 15 years. Patching was getting to be too much so I tore up the roof, put down plywood and installed a rolled roof.

Rolled roofing is ugly and cheap and involves a lot of roofing adhesive. Nobody can see this roof, so I wasn't terribly careful with not getting the adhesive where it shouldn't be. I would rather have too much adhesive than not enough.



I hate flat roofs. I know sometimes they cannot be avoided but I had two dormers with flat roofs that were always giving me trouble. The first one is the one in the first picture and it is in a place where if I were to tumble off the roof, I would slid down a different roof fall a foot and a half and land on another roof.

The second flat roofed dormer was in a section that if I were to tumble off the roof, I would slide down a different roof, fall twenty feet to a different roof if I were lucky. If I were lucky the fall after the slide would be thirty feet.

I don't like hieghts so I have been putting off fixing this section properly until emptying the buckets under the leaks was too much.

There is absolutely no reason in the world why these two dormer had flat roofs other than the person that installed them was a jackass.



When it comes to construction related things, I'm not a jackass so everything had to go.

That's my shadow on the lawn.



With everything gone, I had more choices on what to do, so I pitched the roof at a greater angle than the other dormer. I would say that I pitched it at a ratio of 3" for every foot but I actually pitched it at 11" over 3.5 feet, which just cannot be seen from street level.



I hated the builder ever greater when I got to see inside of things, fortunately there wasn't too much rot from water damage.



I got the felt paper down before the rain came. Now I just need to get the shingles down.

It Came from Green Valley Station

I think anything that you get in the mail that actually came from a person is at least a small treasure.

Unless, it's hate mail.

What I got wasn't hate mail. It was mailed from the far side of the country on October 1st. It was shoved through my mail slot on Tuesday the 5th.

All my mail gets delivered with the sound of "Here's your damn mail," as it crashes to the floor. It's mostly, always junk so I can't blame the mail carrier. Mostly, I just drop it into the recycle bin: unopened, unseen.

But Tuesday was a little different.

There was a birthday card size envelope, that wasn't sitting flat.



Inside the envelope was a card of the non-birthday type even though it was just six days before my birthday. Anyone else who had seen the mail that day would have wondered who was sending my a birthday card.

Inside the card was a sandwich size zip-lock bag. Inside the bag were eighteen items.



The items were double sided disks made by affixing two paper circle framed in metal back to back with tiny adhesive circles of plastic foam.



Each side of each disk had a lower case 'r'.



Most disks, if flipped on the horizontal, would show the corresponding letter upside right, but a couple didn't.



The lower case letter came in six different colors.



Yellow was suspiciously absent.



Also in the card was a note.

I know the note writer has been extremely busy but she took some time out of her day to make these little things and then send them off in the mail.

So far, I haven't failed to smile when I've looked at them.

Show & Tell(ing) what I saw

She was printing a large scale plan on the large scale plotter and it ran out of paper with three inches of plan left to print.

There was some mild PG cursing.

The plotter sits adjacent to my cube which somehow makes me its caregiver.

Instead of asking me to replace the paper, she asked where the paper was located. The paper is located in an out of the way place, so I walked her to its location. I pulled out a roll and she took it from me, even though my plan was to carry it back to the printer myself.

She opened the box and pulled out the 36 inch x 150’ roll and then pulled the spindle, that holds the paper, from the printer. That’s when things weren’t as transparent as to what to do next.

I told her what the next steps were as I was performing them, at one point she squatted down to guide the paper onto the spindle which I had standing on its end.

She’s one of the only people that will try to learn how to do things instead of just asking someone else to do it.

Her head was at crotch level as she was looking down but instead of fantasizing about oral sex, I peaked as far down her low cut top as possible. What I was able to see looked smooth and supple but then I felt a little like a cad, and like I was betraying a certain amount of trust that she had in me so I looked away.


...

I'm not the lady's biggest fan. I think she sucks as a receptionist and I think that she is a phony but that doesn't stop me from helping her out in some of her small requests.

She asked for a table tent and told me what it was to say. "Oh, he's always saying that so I think that it would be nice to give him a sign."

Whatever.

this post is for you

I was avoiding him until I couldn't wait any longer and I had to force the issue. Actually, that's not true, I didn't have to force the issue but I needed his input and him seeing me would force the issue.

He asked, "Are we okay?"

I thought "Fuck, yeah as long as you're okay with me," but what I said was, "Yeah."

,,,

He called me on Friday at about 7PM and he wasn't happy. Someone didn't get their thing approved before the deadline and parts of the event had to be modified. We weren't involved in any disapprovals because the paperwork got hung up prior to getting to us, so I wasn't too worried about it.

When he called I gave him a brief summary. He asked, "Yeah, but who's going to wear this."

I replied by naming two groups of people, the organizers and the folks that didn't approve the event. He was unconvinced and told me to keep my phone on.

About an hour later, he told me things should be all set but I could hear he wasn't happy but at least I think he was more unhappy with the situation than with me.

,,,

"You're incredibly smart and a hard worker, so I was surprised you didn't let me know."

"Yeah, I try not to bother you with everything but with this I should have at least sent you an email."

,,,

I'm not incredibly smart, I'm only surprisingly smart.

,,,

I'm usually left to myself, which is what I prefer but I do need some face time every once in awhile.

There is not one person who sees everything thing I do, there are only people who see parts and I often wonder if people know how busy I am. The only reason I want people to know how busy I am is because sometime things get delayed.

"No really. It's not that I suck at my job or that I think your request can wait, it's just that I have a lot of deadlines that are due now and your thing is only due at the end of the day."

I have a direct supervisor but he's got his own worries, although he does see the 'numbers' but the number 38 under some column doesn't always tell the story.

Click

Dude, what are you going to do? Jostle her neck and punch me for taking photos?




The guy without the bear suit charged and got clocked by the guy with the bear suit.




I only notice September was spelled wrong once I posted this photo to the internet. I had kept forgetting when what race was when so I took a photo.




Geometric.




It's like Friday night.

Creaming Method

Yeah, I use "Creaming Method" with the hope that something other than baking cums to mind.



They're better muffins than the last batch but they took three times as long to make. They did dome nicely.

They are good muffins. I think five are left.

...

It's 8PM and it's nearly 80 degrees.

...

I'll be working on Sunday for the 9to5 job. I would rather not but I need to see stuff. I've been making decisions blind and I need to stop pressing my luck; so I will go to see.

I've really got nothing to say. I just dropped by to brag about homemade muffins.

Winners Win But So Do Losers

The kid won. I should be happy. I was involved with a lot of what people saw.

It was good work but it came at a price.

Winning is better than losing, mostly.

It's been five days since the primary. I haven't spoken to anyone about it yet.

I read a quote of his in the paper. A quote he gave at his victory party. He said something like "It's a new organization, guided by some wise folks, but what really energized the campaign was the young people that got involved."

I checked his webpage every day after the win. It didn't get updated until three days later. I thought, "Too bad one of your young people couldn't find the energy to update the webpage."

I wonder if I could have guess correctly sober

I had more important things that I could have been doing but I hadn't been around for awhile so I dropped by after work and had a few and maybe a few extras. I left before 9PM. I know this because Starbucks was still open and my favorite barista was working.

She saw me, then looked away and smiled like she most always does. The customer in front of me was having trouble placing his order using English so he switched over to Spanish.

I could make out that in addition to what he ordered he also wanted water. I guessed that she explained that they had bottled water and noticed that she made a slight gesture to the display case in front of me. I waited a brief moment before I reached out a bottle of water and proffered it.

She looked at me and asked if I spoke Spanish in Spanish.

"Pequeño," I replied which was my guess at the word small.

I wonder if I could have guessed correctly sober.

I'm a sucker

I've been helping out but I have conditions. Basically, I tell them that I want all the elements and that I don't want to have to go looking for stuff. I think that my conditions are reasonable.

A lot of what they ask me to do involves photographs.

It seems that very few of them can take a photo and when they do get a good shot, it's only at a resolution that's fit for the internet and not for print media. When this first happened, I told them what I need for print but still rarely do I get what I want.

Not all pictures are worth a thousand words.

After, I climbed down from the roof, I was emptying my pockets and pulled out from my back pocket a carpenter's pencil. I don't use carpenter's pencils too often because the line they draw is often thicker than I like. The line can be close to 1/8 inch and frequently I prefer something more precise but, with roofing, a regular No. 2 just can't handle the ruinous nature of stone encrusted roofing material.

As I tossed it onto the dresser, I thought, "That tells a story."



The candidate is not yet thirty years old and most of the people helping him are as young or younger. I figured that they would all have the ability to take all sorts of photos but it appears that they are all too self-centered to take pictures of things other than what they are going to post to their own Facebook page.

It drives me nuts.

Learn to take a freak'n photo.

I've stated out loud to anyone that would listen that everyone should be taking photos of everything. We don't have to use everything but when we do need something, it's unfathomable to not have anything.

I was asked on more than one occasion to take a head from one photo and stick it onto the person's body in a different photo.

"How about you get me decent photos?"

I only swapped heads once. Fuckers.

"His eyes are kinda closed in this one. Can you open them up?"

"No."

I complained about it later to the friend that got me involved.

So they wanted me to spend about two hours digitally altering that photo when whoever was taking it could have merely asked, "Wait, could I take just one more?" They had me waiting most of the day for this picture and then they want to waste more of my time by having me drawing in eyes? Do you know the skill level involved in drawing new eyes onto someone? It's more skill than I have. Not with a deadline for tomorrow.

I used the photo unaltered except for cropping and color correction and when they saw the final product they said, "Oh, you got the eyes open" which made me even more furious.

About two weeks ago, after a lot of frustration in trying to get material from the campaign when they kept me waiting and then still didn't give me everything I needed. My friend called me and said she wouldn't have everything until after 11PM. I had been waiting since 10AM.

"I don't think I can work for you folks anymore," I calmly stated.

"I know," she replied

The next day I walked in and we started talking about the jobs I knew weren't completed and then she started talking about new jobs.

"I'm only committed to the senior piece, the shadow piece and possibly the City Hall piece."

"Oh."

"Yeah, remember? I quit."

"When was that?"

"When I was on the phone with you last night."

"You said that, "You think"-."

"Well, today I'm pretty sure. Actually, I'm positive."

But before I left I had some on the new jobs started because I'm a sucker.

...

If you're wonder what that 100% is about on the pencil, it refers to the wood used in making the pencil. FSC is the Forest Stewardship Council. I had to google it.

I sometimes sort my emails into folders

I named the folder 'Bane'

I'm not a fan of politics but some of my friends are and because I'm a good friend, I get involved in politics.

I think that you should have your friend's back; that's one of my most self hated virtues.

I noticed a competitor's mailer on her desk so I picked it up. I think it's important to see what the competition is doing and also I like to see what other designers are doing with political pieces. I'm not ashamed of stealing ideas.

It was a glossy piece, full bleed, 11 inches tall by seventeen inches wide, folded in half. Inside was a layout I did a couple of months prior for the campaign we were working on. I said, "Looks familiar."

Someone laughed.

The premise and the layout were the same; it's one thing to steal one or the other but to steal both in one piece is too much, classless and unimaginative.

I was slightly flattered, though, before I was disappointed that there was nothing for me to steal.

(I learned the word bane from a Tony Curtis movie*)



*that's sort of true.

The Pros & Cons of Muffins

"How's the accent?"

"It comes and goes but I did bake con muffins."

Get it? I said Con muffin instead of Corn muffin because I'm from Boston and we don't pronounce our R's.

I do actually say con for corn when I'm not careful or not in mixed company. Mixed being outsiders.



And I actually did bake corn muffins that I added blueberries to. I don't think I'll be adding any blueberries to my corn muffins in the future though. It's not that I disliked them in the corn muffin but I like blueberry muffins and I like corn muffins and both together do not improve the muffins but distract from it.

I don't go to many ball games

She had said one of the things that she wanted to do after flying in from Vegas was to see a Red Sox game.

I don't go to many baseball games but she was getting the tickets and all I had to do was to show up; so I did.

The $12.50 seats weren't good or at least I don't think they were, we never actually saw them. When started off in standing room only almost directly behind home plate and then we moved down to some vacant seats. It turns out some folks don't like watching a team most likely out of the playoff picture and ten runs down.

They were good seats, at least $75 a piece and the some guy two rows down was being a douche bag to the elderly lady taking photos for the ball park; and we made mention of it frequently, to the point where the lady in front of us turn around to said "Enough already."

I usually don't go around calling people douche bags and I think the lady had I point, so I apologized but my friends really didn't agree with her concerns and after we drove her away, I was asked why I apologized.

"I think she had a valid point. She's at the game, the home town team isn't doing well and she's got a bunch of yahoo's saying douche bag every four seconds. I think that can bother some people."

"This is a ball game! There aren't any kids around. This isn't the 'no cursing section' you have to expect to hear that kind of language."

"I'm just saying that I see her point. I think it's valid."

"She's not your mother. She's not my mother. She's not his mother or his mother."

There was a good chance she was somebody's mother.


...

I know the power of language but I also know that most of the power comes from within the recipient. I've desensitized myself to a lot of language. You can call me a douche bag, a mother fucker, or any other assortment of hardcore obscenities and most likely, I will not care but I can see where some folks may not want to experience that.

I've said, "If it's not true: who cares? Why should it bother me? They're lies. I don't know that guy and he doesn't know me and if it is true, then why would I be upset? It's true, and either I'm okay with the truth or if the truth bothers me them I should change."

You shouldn't be bothered by the truth.

I should be on the roof but....

They will tell me the purpose of the piece. They will hand me the components or tell me of the components that are coming and then leave me along. They trust my design skills. I get free range to edit.

He was holding two versions; one, I think expressed more of his vision and one was more of what I thought looked good and still got the message across; the tie breaking voice sided with mine but he still wasn't convinced.

I did two designs because, even after a few questions, I still was uncertain of what was precisely wanted and either I wasn't getting what was being said or they were having difficulty explaining the vision; and I've found out that instead of searching for the right questions, it's better to give people choices and then go from there.

It's like going to the Optometrist: "Is this one better, or this one? One or two?"

I've known Charlie for years. I met him during a mayoral campaign. A friend volunteered to be Campaign Treasurer, so I got access to the inner workings. Charlie was a senior adviser or maybe even campaign manager.

Charlie's son and I have the same name.

He was still staring at the two versions when the third opinion walked away.

"Why?"

"What?" I asked because my mind was elsewhere.

"Why do you like this one?" he said as he waved my version only I couldn't see it was my version because I could only see the back and the backs were the same.

I think I smiled. I appreciated the question. I know sometimes it's hard to articulate but I think you should be able to explain how you feel about something when you have just expressed an opinion on it. I don't think, 'I don't know. I just do' cuts it. He was putting me to task but it was just so he just could know. He was hoping that my reason for liking it would convince him to like it too. I like the opportunity for discussion.

Charlie's visions are a bit hokie-er than my own person design choices but I can see how his style works in certain areas. Sometimes, hokie sells. I had already relented to his hard edged hokie vision for getting his message across. We were now working on getting something that had the most visual appeal.

"I think, it's a cleaner design," was my simple answer.

"Okay, we'll go with it."