My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

This is the vision Sean has of the completed playhouse. He’s missed a few daily photo submissions, I have no idea how far along he is. I think he’s turning the wheels on the tricycle right now.

Lucas B came by and grabbed my bass, which clamped together nicely, if not perfectly. Lucas quit his terrible office job a few months ago and is trying to make a living building effects pedals and as a recording engineer. He’s gonna try to get the constant hum out of my bass. Lucas grew up here in Northern California, perhaps Redding or some other little town with a large meth problem. He told me as a boy he and his brother would be in the yard with baseball gloves on, throwing fastballs to each other, trying out curves, missing and chasing balls through the grass. The neighbor would come out and start a bonfire and burn all the chemical containers and detritus of his amphetamine lab – the black smoke would drive the young brothers back inside. I picture that innocent childhood game of racing through the house closing windows, trying to beat the first plumes of carcinogens through the screens.

they’ll probably steal my sign

My neighbor Kal gives me old water heaters when he pulls them out of a house for a remodel. Two or three a month, sometimes more if his friend drops some off. Saves them the dump fee and I stick them in the bushes alongside my house that is the scrap pile. When enough builds up I take it to the metal yard and cash it in. Problem is, lately someone’s been stealing my metal.

After my latest victory with taggers, I’ve decided instead of electrifying the pile of junk in the bushes with 220v, I’ll do it legal. I’m posting the “No Trespassing” sign, and I am monitoring the area with a CCTV. I’ll turn the VHS tape of the thief over to the Police and sue the guy in civil court. They took four water heaters from me this month! I am working towards justice.



let’s hope they steal in the day when I can see their faces

Of course it’s hard to tell without snow, but we’re heading into winter here in SF. I hope that’s why the bees aren’t so active, otherwise they may be dying off. This is a photo from the back yard taken a few months ago: yellow-jacket vs. honey bee. The honey bee in this case is a drone (male) who had his legs chewed off so he couldn’t fight back, then the yellow jacket bit his head off and flew away with the body to feed to it’s young.

In other news, they discovered water on the moon. It won’t be long before we open a bar up there.

The Flagpoles played a house party at Rajeeves for Halloween and I let someone use my bass to “jam”. The stranger dropped my bass, cracked the wood body and broke a string, along with putting a bunch of scuffs on the finish. I’m glueing it back together, and hopefully my rock career is not over.

A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur.

I put a divider up to store some bins of junk while the truck is on the move. Two panels I’d hid behind the bushes alongside the house and an old door leaning against the shed for years. Makes it look like I have a basement door inside the truck that leads to a magical storeroom in the transmission.

Glenn the educated carpenter tells me my work aesthetic is not so much construction, but bricolage.

“You take bits and pieces of what ever’s on hand to build something.”

Then, work boats on my dashboard, cigarette in his hand, he tells me about Claude Levi-Strauss’s seminal work of the early sixties, “The Savage Mind”. Claude was an ethnologist and an anthropologist and used bricolage* “to describe any spontaneous action, further extending this to include the characteristic patterns of mythological thought.” – wikipedia

It happens to be a book Google has scanned, so I read the first page, my small attempt to keep up with Glenn’s educational level. I pulled out this fun sentence and moved on to Craigslist’s free section:

“The proposition, “The bad man killed the poor child,” is rendered in Chinook: “The man’s badness killed the child’s poverty.”"

I’d like to speak English like a bricoleur as well, taking thought patterns of the Chinook Indians of Northwestern U.S. and applying them to my next conversation with Glenn. This is how we learn from each other simply through friendship. Go make a new friend today.

*”The term is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoleur – the core meaning in French being, “fiddle, tinker” and, by extension, “make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are to hand (regardless of their original purpose)”; in contemporary French the word is the equivalent of the English do it yourself, and seen on large shed retail outlets all over France.” From wikipedia as well

Sean-O brings it together on day 5. This is gonna be a major player in the playhouse circuit.

starting to look creepy

I’m turning the blue-cloud box truck into a rolling junk shop. Putting down old siding for a floor, quarter inch douglas fir from the old days. They were painted on one side, so I flipflopped them for a more beautiful effect. Hung a bunch of wooden boxes on one wall, the other wall will be blank so I can hang pictures on it.

just getting started

Sean’s plugging away at the unglamorous part of construction – framework.

1980 two I guess. Maybe eighty three. We were still riding our bikes to Jr. High and Jeremy Fletcher had a waterbed with white sheets – they had an orange circle for the sun, a mono-chromatic sun, completely round, and palm tree silhouettes in brown. Loren Pokorny wore underwear with antique cars on them. My parents let me put holes in the wall with push pins to hang my posters. They didn’t care how many poster I hung up. I bought one at the poster shop in the mall. It had a Porsche, a bottle of wine and a woman in a bikini. I didn’t know anything about Porsches, wine, or women. I don’t care about Porsches and wine now. The image of the woman still has my interest. My parents let me cover my door with red and white WHEB stickers. The whole thing. Probably 120 stickers. It was the rock station. A whole stack from where ever promoters left them. I can’t remember now. The mall? Gas stations? Dad wouldn’t let me cover the Ford Granada station wagon sitting in the driveway. Said it would hurt the trade-in value.

Those are the good old days as far as I remember them.

Doug brought over this note. He texted Jenny at her work, and another woman answered the phone. It’s a landline. It can’t accept text, right? Apparently a robotic voice turns the text into speech. This is the message the woman handed to Jenny. All that research and development so we can pass on this kind of nonsense. His hair looked great. Didn’t need fixing at all.

My question is, how is btw read by the robot voice? As “by the way” or just b t w? How many acronyms does it know?

I see a 4 X 4…that make me a turkey gobbler?

Day two of Sean-O’s playhouse. He’s doing it by himself.

I was in drugs and alcohol. I couldn’t walk and my husband had to carry me. I am sorry for the bad things I did. I had in my heart a song I never knew before. Stationed in France and my elderly Mother. Please don’t be concerned about my liquid diet.

photo posted from my iPhone

I got hired to transport these giant canvases. A woman used photographs as inspiration and sewed portraits out of fabric and painted them with fabric dye. It was a nice job.