11/29/2004 Thanksgiving is over and we are definitely getting winter weather in the Bay Area. I was so cold at work on Sunday even with a shirt, sweater and windbreaker on that I could only stay outside for a minute at a time. Still, it's really only fall. My elm trees are still stubbornly holding onto their leaves...although I am starting to see some fall color on some of them. My orchid is blooming at the moment. I don't really understand much about orchids. It seems to bloom at a time when no other flowers are blooming...
I spent today doing little chores and errands that I have been putting off. I got a replacement garage door opener remote...which I've been meaning to do for about two years now...when we bought the house they didn't give us one, even though the opener has a receiver built in. I cleaned the pine needles out of the gutters on the side of the building in yet another attempt to keep water out of my basement; I don't think we have gone through a single storm since we moved into the house without at least a little water down there. I wrote my monthly column for the Bonsai Society of San Francisco newsletter...we had a workshop a couple weeks ago during which I restyled the pine tree you see below (with the help and instruction of Marco Invernizzi, an Italian born, Japanese trained bonsai master.) And Dory and I bought a crib for the baby from a couple who listed it on the ever-useful craigslist.org. I had a heck of a time getting it up the stairs onto the landing...and then found that I would have to dismantle it and reassemble it to get it into the bedroom anyway.
Yesterday morning before I went to work I disconnected one of the heater ducts sections in the hope that I would find what I suspected was plugging up the air flow. When I originally installed the heater the building department required me to put in "fire dampers" which in the event of a fire in the garage are supposed to provide an hour rating on the "firewall" which is our floor. Unfortunately these ingeniously designed devices are malfunctioning (two of the six so far) the result of which is a stopage of air flow into the room the duct supplies. The first victim was the upstairs front bedroom which got really cold only a couple months after I finished the installation...I couldn't figure out what had happened to stop the airflow...and since I had already walled up some of the ducts I just gave up. Then recently the bathroom one stopped putting out air; so one morning last week I got down on my hands and knees and stuck my arm down the duct to see if I could feel anything blocking it...lo and behold the fire damper was doing a fine job of damping the duct. I was a little annoyed as I sat there on the cold tile scratching my head and wondering how this had happened to something that wasn't supposed to do anything below about 200 degrees. I wedged a piece of plastic in the one in the bathroom to keep it open and then completely removed the one that malfunctioned in the other duct. I'm left to wonder if my heater is getting too hot...or if these things are defective.
Winter is a beautiful time in the Bay Area. There is no fog to speak of in San Francisco or around the bay...it all moves into the central valley for the winter. Today and for the last couple days it has been so clear that I can see the peak of Mt Diablo clearly from the top of our hill...it's about 40 miles away. Today Dory and I went to lunch with our neighbor Shane at Burger Joint on Valencia Street. About a year ago I saw "Rivers and Tides" at the Roxie cinema down there. It's a documentary about a Scottish artist, Andy Goldsworthy, who uses elements of nature to create his mostly fleeting works. About half a block away from the burger joint was a closed gas station with a temporary chain link fence around it. On that fence someone had tied leaves in a pattern with different colored leaves grouped together and fading into each other. Shane and Dory and I speculated that it could have been done by Goldsworthy who is supposed to be doing an installation for the new Deyoung museum in Golden Gate Park. Cool beans.
11/29/2004 Thanksgiving is over and we are definitely getting winter weather in the Bay Area. I was so cold at work on Sunday even with a shirt, sweater and windbreaker on that I could only stay outside for a minute at a time. Still, it's really only fall. My elm trees are still stubbornly holding onto their leaves...although I am starting to see some fall color on some of them. My orchid is blooming at the moment. I don't really understand much about orchids. It seems to bloom at a time when no other flowers are blooming...