Get ready for a blockbuster Photo Friday, kids!

I popped into one of my favourite local businesses the other day, and noted that the flowerboxes and bench which normally sat outside were gone, leaving ugly scars behind on the sidewalk. When my business was complete and I was chatting with one of the staff, I said “hey, by the way, what happened with the bench?”

It turns out that herein lies a tale, a tale with lots of gesticulation and cries of rage. City Hall, in its infinite wisdom, just sent some sort of notice out informing people that if they want to have flowerboxes and benches, they need to pay a permit fee. Which is fine and all well and good, except that according to my source, it was $200 a year, plus a $100 renewal fee (another source on a different street quoted me $150/year). PLUS, if you want a bench or flowerbox, you need to buy from an “approved vendor,” and buy insurance.

Do I really need to spell out why this is insane? A lot of businesses are going to do what my friends at [redacted] did, and just take their flowerboxes out, thereby making downtown more ugly. One of my sources said she was seriously considering putting a chamberpot on the sidewalk, and I proposed “The Piss-Pot Revolt of 2008.” Downtown already looks awful, what with the hideous fake wood sidewalk and the dying trees and the fake cast-iron lampposts. Now, all of the character is going to be leached from it.

This is dumb. It is totally reasonable for the city to ask for a small permit fee, and to set up size limits so that the sidewalk is free and clear. It is not reasonable to charge through the roof and oblige people to buy standardized stuff. This is not Healdsburg, people, and I like it that way. I LIKE the random flowerpots and benches scattered around town. I like that they are all different. And I notice that they are starting to vanish in the wake of this announcement.

I propose a revolt. It doesn’t have to be a Piss-Pot Revolt, but it should be a revolt. I think that everyone who got one of those notices should just quietly take their benches and planters away, and decline to replace them. The city needs to learn that greed doesn’t pay.

I admit, I have been slacking on the Photo Friday material, and I apologize, my friends. I just haven’t felt up to adventures lately, which made it hard to take pictures of anything new and exciting. I’ve also been feeling tremendously lazy. Fortunately, last weekend, Baxt and I felt up for adventure, and adventure we did, right on into an abandoned house in an undisclosed location. After which we adventured on over to Second Saturday, but that is a story for another day.

We zoomed along to the undisclosed location, battled some underbrush, and came across this:

The house had been abandoned due to storm damage some time ago. The storm damage, incidentally, took the form of a tree falling through the middle of the house:

The middle of the house was basically crunched into a pancake, with the walls and roof on either side tilting inwards.

On the South side of the house, however, several rooms remained intact, although things were looking a little perilous inside. We were obviously not the first to explore the house, as some previous adventurers had left their own marks:

Some were more whimsical:

Much of the furniture had been left in the house, according to Baxt, and over time it had slowly disintegrated or been relocated, as often happens in these situations. This bedframe ended up in the living room:

Blue walls or blue primer, I’m not sure.

And I’ll leave you with my favourite shot of the day. As I was taking this picture, Baxt cried out “I have that exact same picture!” I’ll have to see if she can track hers down so we can have a compare and contrast.

If you’d like to see more photos from our weekend adventure, you can check out my Abandoned House set on Flickr.

It is back.

Which means that it is time, once again, to wish horrible maulings upon my neighbors. Seriously. Why is there not a law against using chainsaws in town? I can barely hear myself think, let alone work. Maybe I should start billing the chainsawer for lost work hours.

<rant>I’m sorry, but I must take a moment to rant about the pathetic excuse for a birdcage liner which passes as a ‘newspaper’ in this town, because to my shock when I was looking for news of note this morning, I found this article crowing about no less than THREE national awards for the Advocate-News. My gut response to this news was to send the link to Tristan, followed with the comment: “WTF?!!?! HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?!”

Seriously, people. I’ve been seething over the horror that is the local ‘newspaper’ for months now, and I just can’t contain it anymore. While I am well aware that a small local paper is never going to be the New York Times, or even the Los Angeles Times, it would be nice if there was at least a pretense of journalistic standards. Some sort of vague attempt to actually report news. And hey, I understand that top-notch journalists are not exactly flocking to write for small town papers, but seriously, my dead grandmother could write better than most of these clowns. They should consider hiring zombies, or maybe middle schoolers; either would be a step up.

Every time I open the thin sheaves of the paper, I discover an illiterate and incomprehensible morass which causes me to shudder in the depths of my soul, not just as a writer, but as someone who is literate, and as someone who cares about what happens in my community. Fully half of the articles in that ‘paper’ are so poorly edited that I can’t figure out what they are even supposed to be about, let alone why they are supposed to be relevant or of interest. I almost considered writing the editor and offering to copyedit for free.

Most of the articles read like illiterate blog-rantings on some crazed site run by someone with too  many dogs. This leads me to wonder if the National Newspaper Association is even reading the same newspaper that I am. That Korbel series they praise? Those articles were seriously so hard to understand that I wondered if they had just transcribed Korbel’s notes. In one of them, there was a series of crazed emails from the Mendocino County listserv. That is not reporting, that’s reprinting. OF LUNACY.

I won’t even dignify the Hartzell and Reed stories with denigrating commentary, because this whole thing already has me seeing purple.

I am forced to conclude that either the judges on the National Newspaper Association never graduated grammar school, or that newspapers in this country are so dead that someone could seriously think the Advocate is worthy of awards.

I tell you what, it makes me want to start up a rival paper: The Fort Bragg Call: The Newspaper That Doesn’t Suck!</rant>

With the broken trees, already, people! I like trees. Trees are pretty, and trees are neat. While I hate what they are doing to downtown, the solution is not the mutilation of the trees. What did the trees ever do to you, for Pete’s sake?!

(Sorry about the poor image quality; that’s my cellphone, since I didn’t have my camera handy.)

This is yesterday’s sunrise. See how the light is all creepy, red, and polarized? It would have been even more amazing with a really monstrous digital SLR, but this picture is still pretty damn awesome. The sun literally looked like a ruby in the smoke, and the light was bright red. For several hours. And again almost all day today. I really cannot describe the light; if you’re been near epic fires, you’ll know the kind of light I am talking about, it’s so orangey-red that you almost feel like everything is on fire.

And now, this from the National Weather Service:

“A RED FLAG WARNING MEANS THAT CRITICAL FIRE WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE EITHER OCCURRING NOW…OR WILL SHORTLY. A COMBINATION OF STRONG WINDS…LOW RELATIVE HUMIDITY…AND WARM TEMPERATURES WILL CREATE EXPLOSIVE FIRE GROWTH POTENTIAL.”

I think this means that more epic sunrises can be expected. The red flag warning is not projected to be lifted until Sunday.

Last Friday, Baxt and I went to the Guest House Museum, which for residents of Fort Bragg is known as the big brown building on the hill. I hadn’t been there since kindergarten, and she hadn’t been there since high school, so we were very excited to explore this megalithic figure in the Fort Bragg landscape. Plus, it only costs $2, and it’s a whole lot more fun than a miniature ice cream cone, which is pretty much the only other thing you can get for $2 in this town.

See, here’s a picture. I didn’t actually take that on Friday, it’s from a while ago, but I promise you it hasn’t changed that much.

Small town museums are really interesting because they are basically just collections of old pictures and weird junk that people donated because they thought it was interesting, or because they couldn’t bear to throw it away. So the Guest House Museum has everything from beautiful examples of antique harness:

To things I didn’t take pictures of, because they were not very exciting, like a military uniform from Iraq and old lard pails. The Guest House has an interesting collection of photographs, which I also didn’t photograph because, well, I hope that’s obvious. But they are well worth checking out, because it’s really fun to try and orient yourself in perspective to old pictures, and I love looking at the clothes people wore in times of yore.

I really loved this saddlemaker’s bench:

Which, uhm, yeah. I think my more kinky readers can come up with uses for this bench which go beyond saddlemaking. But it’s awfully pretty, and very cool.

I was also surprised to learn that the whistle they used at the mill was actually an antique steam whistle which had been in service for a very long time:

I guess if it’s not broken, don’t replace it, right? The sound of that whistle is indelibly etched into my mind, and I’m sure I’m not the only one; it’s a pretty iconic noise, and I still miss it every day at noon.

This is in a room dedicated to the history of the train. There’s also a very cool antique bed, but the picture didn’t come out at all well, so you’ll have to take my word from it when I say it’s cool. And lots of pictures of trains, as you can probably gather.

The Guest House used to be, you know, a guest house. So the museum staff have kept a lot of the original fixtures:

Check out those taps! Bet those saved a lot of water back in the day.

That’s the main stairwell, complete with awesome stained glass. Alas, the picture is too dark for you to tell, but on the right there, you can see some original redwood water pipes; we had redwood pipes through the 1950s! How cool is that?!

I really enjoyed our little expedition, and I think Baxt did as well. You, in turn, can also visit your very own personal local museum, because chances are good that there probably is one, and there might be something interesting to be found there. Every community has a history, and it’s neat to meet the people who are trying to preserve it; unfortunately, chances are also very high that your local history museum, just like the Guest House, needs some financial help or volunteer effort to keep going. So why not support your community by helping to preserve the past?

Walking Fort Bragg happens to be on hiatus at the moment, and while I am apparently not cool enough to be listed in Blabberon’s blogroll, I can still take up some of the slack. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Walking Fort Bragg, it’s a very neat site written by a guy who walks around Fort Bragg pretty much every day, taking interesting pictures and writing about the things that he sees.

In the course of wandering around Fort Bragg, there are all sorts of fascinating things to see, for those who choose to look for them, and last week, I wandered around one of my favourite sections of town. It’s in the Northeast corner, bounded by East Bush Street and North Harrison Street, and I call it “the garden district” because it has a bunch of lovely old homes with beautiful gardens. I love the garden district because it’s very quiet, and peaceful, and because I can tell that the homes there are lived in, and loved. Someday, I would love to live in one of them.

There are all sorts of awesome hidden surprises, like this spectacular gate on Winifred Street. And this is just a side gate. Here’s the main gate:

This is the kind of gate I want to have, a gate that looks like it’s going into another, hidden world. There’s this beautiful lush garden beyond it, with piles of mature plants every which way, and then a low, simple Craftsman bungalow which embodies my plain, clean aesthetic. Not for me the epic mansion, please.

Here’s a fence with a riot of roses on a cul-de-sac.

A magical glimpse across a lawn.

Not all sidewalks are made of cold, hard concrete. While this isn’t very disability-friendly, it looks so charming and awesome that I can’t help but love it.

Here’s some snazzy low-water landscaping. Alas, this house is right next to a for-sale house that is just monstrous and ugly and everything wrong with the world. I’ll bet it used to be a quiet bungalow, and they tore it down to build a HUGE house that took up almost the entire lot, since that’s what people seem to want these days, and it stands out on the street like a sore thumb.

Here’s a man painting his trim. I wanted to ask him if it was his house, but I was too shy, so instead I surreptitiously photographed him from across the street. It’s a beautiful house.

Another awesome Craftsman bungalow with a beautiful and oh-so-inviting gate.

A glimpse through the foliage to another wonderful house.

More rambling vines on an old fence.

One of the things that makes the garden district so excellent is the big lots, and relatively modest homes. Sure, there are a few houses that are pretty big; one of my favourite houses here is way too big for my needs. But even the big houses look graceful in the landscape, because they don’t overwhelm their lots. As someone who firmly advocates density, of course, I should be pointing out that huge lots with single family dwellings aren’t very sustainable, but they are so very beautiful, with their gorgeous landscaping and lovingly maintained decorative elements, that I don’t have the heart to condemn them.

The garden district is like a living illustration of my internal conflict over personal desires and utilitarian function. I would love, love, love, love to live in one of these houses, to putter around the yard painting the trim and pruning the flowers, even though they go against my stated beliefs about sustainability. This little corner of town is like a magical wonderland which seems so abstracted from the rest of this blighted, tired, sad-looking town; I hope it stays this way forever.

So, I went to the Neighborhood Watch meeting tonight, mainly because Tristan said that I should, and because I figure if I want to get the rest of the neighborhood to band together to start a violent revolution, I’d better meet them all.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten how much I loathe meetings. My friend David was there for the first half, and we entertained each other, but then he fled, using meatloaf as an excuse, and I suffered alone through the agony.

I was going to give an entertaining and pithy blow-by-blow of the madness, but, honestly, I think I will let my notebook speak for itself:

Click through for the full version, including explanatory notes.