Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

My youngest brother, who turned 50 this year, called me Wednesday and said, “Old man, we’re getting to the age where you might have to start changing my diapers again!”

As many of you know, I passed one of those auspicious “0″ birthdays on Wednesday (or as KathyR called it, “uh-oh”).  I made a little run at developing something lofty and philosophical to blurt here, but just couldn’t get that worked up.  Not that it doesn’t affect me at all, and that I blithely cruised through the week; the sound of “in his 60s”, while not profound in the sense that “dying of cancer” or “symptoms of Alzheimer’s” would be, nevertheless has implications for my self-image.

And maybe that’s it: that I’m simply sort of ashamed of turning 60, in a way that I wasn’t at turning 50. At 50, I rented the back of a restaurant and invited most of the people that I knew or had known, defiant and devil-may-care.  This week, it’s more a feeling like I’ve screwed up and gotten fired from my 50s, and I’m trying to hide it from the neighbors.

I’m just musing here, not looking for sympathy, just screwing around with words.  I’m healthy, happy, reasonably secure.  I’m engaged all of a sudden in new ventures (adult band and the rental house).  I could lose a few pounds. All in all, though, I think I miss last summer more intensely than I miss six decades.

Thanks to all of you in my life who helped get me here.

Another gem from band practice tonight, as our director exhorted us to blend and be aware of each other (with a sly grin):

“I want you to listen closely as you insert yourselves into each other’s parts.”

Mouthpiece is still lodged somewhere south of my duodenum.

Also, as a sort of maturation of the metaphor our director used in this post, notes that people have that are particularly exposed have come to be referred to by the shorthand “bikini notes”.

“I think we’re on the cusp of a plumbing disaster.”

The voice on the phone wasn’t FEMA (they wouldn’t have been in on the front end); nor was it the Corps of Engineers warning about imminent flooding in the Green River valley;  it was my son and anchor tenant, calling last Sunday morning from my new rental house

Turned out that sewage had backed up into the downstairs shower and was recalcitrant about leaving.  I went right over, and we used a plunger and discussed various middling measures involving Drano and a rented snake, but I knew that the real solution was going to involve more sweeping action.

That this was happening on the very day that our last tenant was moving in was particularly inauspicious; that it was happening on a Sunday seemed downright mean. Amid a small army of people moving enough stuff in that I wondered if our new tenant was downsizing from something the size of the Biltmore estate, I was dialing around unsuccessfully trying to find a plumber who worked on Sunday.  This was also the day I’d selected to bring everyone’s leases over to be signed.  My mention of a “plumbing surcharge” did not immediately elicit chuckles.

Finally, one of the three companies that had promised to get back to me called and said he’d be there within the hour.   Upfront, he said the weekend rate was $225 for the first hour,  $185 for each hour thereafter.  I was thinking that we were in for 4 hours at a minimum, and I was indeed regretting that I hadn’t squeezed every last dollar out of the monthly rents.

Our savior arrived as promised.  We located the main cleanout to the side sewer (since we’d only owned the place for a month, I only had a vague idea where it was), and he went to work, lowering an infrared camera into the murk to try to disclose the problem.  As I had suspected, the culprit was roots pushing into the seams between pipe segments in the side sewer.  I helped our guy heave a 300-lb piece of equipment down the narrow stairs, and he started hacking his way  through the side sewer towards the street.

Upstairs, meanwhile, the moving party had finished unloading the several vehicles they’d arrived in, and begun to actually party, procuring beer and pizza.  This, as it turns out, is a circumstance that is inherently incompatible with plumbing that cannot be used.

Happily, our friend finished his task in an hour and a half, and left me with a thrilling VHS tape of a trip down my side sewer and a bill for $350.  I felt fortunate, both for the size of the bill and that the facilities became operational just as the revelers were reaching their various capacities.  It shot the day, but it gave me an opportunity to show that I was going to be a responsive landlord.

At band practice last night, perhaps the best music teacher metaphor, male band director division: the flutes and oboes reached a spot in a piece where they were in unison (playing the same note), and exposed (not many other parts playing), and they were, well, a bit out of tune.

Our conductor stops the band and says, “Well, that spot at measure ## sounded kind of like when you wear your bikini for the first time in the summer, and you don’t have your baseline tan yet.”

My mouthpiece is still somewhere in my small intestine.

This burst of text messages I received a couple weeks ago had me going for a while. Maybe it was because I was up to no good - I don’t remember.  For my own peace of mind, and because I received no subsequent corporal harm around the domicile, I concluded it was a wrong-number text message:

10:09 pm Saturday: I know ur up to no good

12:54 am Sunday: Where the fuck r u at now

1:06 am Sunday: If u pull any bullshit with me tonight abt being late why the fuck can’t u answer me no excuse william call me

1:07 am Sunday: I am already hm where r u at

It ended there, and I never received another.  I hope William had a good story - a head wound, a totaled automobile, a dead grandmother.  I don’t remember reading anything in the papers.

So I spent Labor Day weekend in Ohio performing with my OSU alumni marching band at the OSU-Navy game.  Since I don’t like to have the Friday evening music rehearsal in Columbus be the first time my mouthpiece has touched my lips in a year, I spend an August week or two prior to the reunion down in the basement blatting away just to develop some muscle tone in my lips.

This year, I added a bit of a wrinkle.  Each year when the OSU reunion weekend is over, I lament a bit that, having built up to a playing level relatively devoid of pain, I then park my trumpet in the closet for another year.  So a few weeks ago I Googled around for community bands.

I received an email that a band was starting up its fall concert band schedule, and it seemed a very opportune time to  recall how it felt to play music that wasn’t a fight song.  So I showed up for practice and I’m impressed with the size of the group (75+), the instrumentation and the friendly enthusiasm.

As rehearsal begins, I’m even more deeply impressed with their musicianship and overall sound.  We play for about an hour, and then there’s a break.  They go through a set of announcements, blah blah, and my ears prick up a bit when the word “community” arises more than once.  Then there’s mention of the Pride Parade in a tone more proprietary than merely participative; and finally, when they begin to discuss a Labor Day weekend trip by many of them to something called the LGBA convention in New Orleans, the nickel finally drops.

I don’t know why the name Rainbow City Band didn’t clue me in.  Probably because we refer to Seattle in so many different ways: The Emerald City, The Jet City, Queen City (no hint of suspicion there, either).  “Rainbow” simply suggested something inclusive, maybe a little Jesse Jackson-ish.  And I must not have perused the web site, relying instead on my email communication with this fellow.

So there I was, enjoying playing with a fine group of musicians, directed by two terrific folks whose day jobs are as middle school band directors, harboring a guilty secret, feeling like an impostor.  I played through the rehearsal anyway, since I was enjoying myself musically in a way that I hadn’t in decades.

Then, at the end, I outed myself to the membership chairman and was prepared for a “nice-knowin’-ya”.  Instead, he assured me that there were a few other straight folks in the band, and that I was welcome to participate as long as I supported their mission.

I paid my dues and went to their rehearsal the next week, on the heels of my weekend playing frenzy in Columbus, and it clicked right into place - I’m playing well enough not to destroy their ensemble and it’s very satisfying.  And since, in high school, the jocks all thought we band geeks were gay anyway, the ambiance doesn’t represent all that much of a paradigm shift.

We have a concert at the end of October, and I understand my gay friends are looking forward to the spectacle.

click to enlarge

Our kid has a cameo in an article about climbing at Index, WA in the October issue of Climbing Magazine.  He gets his abs from his mom.  But not the chest hair, so much:

So the “other” bit of personal business that I mentioned in my previous post is, we bought a rental house.  I’d been thinking about it ever since house prices started to decline, thinking that we’re due for some heavy inflation, and rising interest rates, and the stock market looked like a particularly hostile environment for any extra cash.

I’d been looking at listings online, but hadn’t really started pounding the pavement going to open houses, etc.  Then this property a couple of blocks from our house came on the market, and everything just sort of fell into place.  The price was a little higher than the range I’d been considering, but it was a good value, and I was feeling that the market was starting to bottom out.

The weird thing is, a friend of ours used to own this place back in the late 70’s/early 80’s, and we’ve been there for many social occasions.  It was really weird to walk through the place after some 25+ years.  Our friend was single when he lived there and, while not a wild & crazy wastrel, was still a single man in the 7os.  So, since I just finished The Widows of Eastwick, and was reminded of their ringleader in The Witches of Eastwick, Darryl Van Horne, we’ve been telling ourselves that we’ve purchased the Van Horne mansion.

It’s been an interesting and educational experience.  I’ve never before been through the whole real estate purchase cycle: offer, counter, accept, financing, inspection, contingencies, closing, escrow.  We bought our residence from our landlady in 1975 on a land contract.  Meaning, we didn’t deal with realtors, lenders, appraisers, etc.  We just kept paying our landlady every month, only it was principal & interest, not rent.

One of the highlights was having the Van Horne mansion inspected.  The inspector was a woman recommended by a realtor friend of ours, and turned out to be something of a character.  She was real energetic and talked to herself as much as she talked to us.  A refrain she repeated several times as she moved about the place was “I’m a raindrop.  I’m a raindrop.  Where am I going?” to figure out if we’d have flooding problems.  (It’s only rained a couple of times since we made our offer, so the jury’s still out on how the place handles water).

You expect a cold shower from a real estate inspection, but there weren’t that many deficiencies that our inspector called out.  A few things need to be fixed, but nothing that needs to be done before tenants move in.  We couldn’t really get our seller to fund anything, because he had received several offers higher than ours, so we’ll chip away at these things as we are able.

Also, the financing was a little bit of an adventure, since I’m self-employed.  Well, I’m an employee, but of a corporation that I own.  So, I had to educate the lending underwriters about how I couldn’t really say I earned $xx per month, because I only write myself a paycheck when I collect my receivables.  And that it’s actually safer to lend to me, because a client can fire me and I still have multiple sources of income, where if an employee’s employer fires him, he’s got bupkis.

So part of this process is a little social engineering.  Our son will be our anchor tenant, meaning that he no longer resides in our house.  This was another little angle - he was going to move out and rent somewhere this fall anyway.  Since I was considering a rental investment, why should he be paying rent to someone else?  Plus, we’ll now have an extra bedroom here.  And it gives me an opportunity to collaborate with him on any projects there, which resonates with me on many levels.

It’s a bit of a culture shock for us, since we’ve never really had a mortgage payment in our lives besides our 70s-era payments to our old landlady.  Rental cash flow will cover most of the payment, but it’s still gonna feel weird, opening my Quicken and seeing that lozenge of debt sitting there.

Oddly, as we’ve been over tweaking things, I’ve felt a couple times that I might like that place better than our current residence, that maybe we should move there and rent or sell our current residence.  Hafta see how it plays out.

Quickly, for a busy Monday…

I found a solid citizen on Craigslist selling a Macbook, and I bought it last Wednesday. Required a couple more Benjamins than the first guy, but this one had his receipt, a licensed copy of Windows Vista, the Mac OS disks, etc, and two years left on the Applecare warranty.  Needless to say, I’ve spent too many hours over the ensuing days porting programs & data over to the Macbook.

I got rid of the previous guy’s Windows partition and bought VMWare Fusion in order to create a Windows virtual machine and have the entire hard disk available to either operating system, rather than arbitrarily allocating the disk.  The home run was supposed to be this gambit where I could create an image of my entire Windows XP installation from my Dell, copy it back to the Mac and run it under VMWare.  Yes, that would have brought with it all the junk that has accumulated in my old installation, but it also would have obviated the grinding task of re-installing all my Windows programs.

Alas, that wasn’t to be.  Turns out that the XP license on the Dell can only be activated on the Dell.  I actually own an XP license that I bought at retail that’s not being used, but the onscreen activation wouldn’t accept it, and calling Microsoft for help got me nowhere (although it was an interesting update on the state of outsourced software support).

I took a run at iPhoto, since my Photoshop installation file from 2004 died in the sands of a hard disk 2 laptops back, and I’d have to purchase it again.  I think it might be ok, but damned if I can figure out how to do the simplest things that were second nature in Photoshop.  Might have to bite the bullet and buy it.

Momentous as the laptop purchase was, it was by no means the biggest bit of personal business I transacted last Wednesday.  More on that as events progress.

Tell you what, though.  The two-finger scrolling on the Mac trackpad is worth the purchase price in itself.