27 May 2010
 
Jiggity Jig


 
The day spent coming back from the Desert went as well as could be expected.
 
The airplanes do not fit the people any more, that is a given, and the aluminum tube was fully packed. But the schedule worked as advertised, and the agony was not acute. I had a wonderful book to read that got my blood boiling at the savagery of an ancient war, and the Boys were there to collect me from Reagan National when the bags eventually showed up on the conveyor belt.
 
So, that all worked, however improbable the whole enterprise appears. I dumped the bags atop assorted flotsam that had floated up from the condo in my absence. I am selling it today, I think, though on arrival I could not .
 
The morning brought additional complexity, since as you know, when you live in small places, small dislocations magnify themselves.
 
There is stuff that needs to go down to the Farm piled in the living room of the larger unit where I hang my hat, and I needed to scramble around and find keys and stuff from the other unit to take to the closing.
 
There is more than a little sadness in that, and the aggregation of the time zones over the last week magnifies the impact. There was a lot of thought that went into fitting out the little efficiency apartment. I know now that I should have bought a place then that was big enough to handle another vision, or rented, but I did what I did with what I had at the time.
 
I have not quite given up kicking myself over that, but selling the little place may solve the problem, or at least dull it.
 
God, I am such an idiot sometimes- small things by stages shaping a vector and then overcoming the larger vision that actually means something.
 
Each minor project fit into an integrated program, which in the end combined to deliver me to a place I did not want to be. It was like  the famous Trip to Abilene case-study everyone does at the War College on how small decisions- or none decisions- make a car filled with people arrive in a dusty Texas town that no one wanted to visit.
 
The project had many parts. The plantation shutters were intended to harmonize with those of the Union International President who lives part time next door, though mine of course incorporated lessons-learned by having a Dutch feature that permitted me to open the top for light while keeping the lower tier closed for modesty.
 
Except, of course, I discovered to my horror that Mardy 2 was able to see in through the angle of the shutters from her second floor balcony. She was not sleeping that summer I moved in, and saw all sorts of things until she revealed the efficacy of her surveillance to me down by the pool on languid summer day.
 
I figured out that I could reverse the angle of the upper shutters to block the line of sight, but by then there were no surprises for her.
 
The patio was exactly three steps from the black wire of the pool gate, so for two years the glittering blue water of the Big Pink pool was just as close as the bathtub

Everything in the little unit was intended to fold, and I built the room out in the style of a Navy officer’s stateroom. You were there on the coldest day in recorded Arlington History when the Murphy bed and its thirty boxes arrived by truck.
 
When that project was complete, the bed folded into a bookcase on one end of the room; a small couch folded out into a modest double bed for guests; the bathroom gained storage space. Ultimately I gutted the 1964-era kitchen and blew out a breakfast bar with diner-style retro stools at the curved marble serving space. Stainless appliances, microwave and reefer, of course, and a dishwasher, which fifty years ago was a luxury, not a necessity.
 

 
Nice job, if I do say so myself, but off it goes.
 
Having taken on the farm, and not being able to rent the condo for what the note costs, it is time to move on.
 
I am dreading the last walk-through, but will steel myself. I made a couple dozen thousand on it, though of course I poured that and much more down the rat-hole of the imploding housing market. Timing is everything.
 
The current unit turned into a similar project, though I bought someone else's refurbishment in progress and completed it to my own liking.
 
God, I feel disoriented this morning. There is laundry from Germany to be done, layered under the stuff from Arizona, and I need a haircut badly. One step at a time. That is how these projects work
 
Home again, Jiggity-jig.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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