renovationism

“I seem to be the benefactor of an occasional revelation.”
Colum McCann quoting Don Delillo on the Diane Rehm Show, June 29, 2009.

In a parking garage in Avignon, France.

Finishing the stairs starts with skirt boards. These are the trim pieces that run down each side of the stairs and to which the treads and risers abut. There are books with lots of fancy calculations for determining dimensions, which I used, but when I swung the ungainly pieces into place, they just didn’t fit [...]

Apparently Satan has moved to Germany and is now a proprietor of fine fruits and vegetables.

Model: Ducati Monster
Location: Orange, France
Date: June 6, 2009

I was sitting in a cute little cafe in Frankfurt Airport (I think the locals call it “Starbucks” or something, but Ich spreche kein Deutsch), doing some writing, waiting for a friend’s flight to arrive. When I stood up to go, the girl at the table behind me, sitting with a male companion, said, “What [...]

I’m having a little post-traumatic-stress just considering this post.
This was probably the most complicated planning effort required in the basement remodel. I knew that the basement would have a new hot water heater (HWH), new bathroom, new laundry area, and new wet bar. I also wanted to run water up for a future refrigerator upgrade [...]

Model: Ducati 1098 S
Location: The Trocadero, Paris
Date: June 13, 2009.

Data centers worldwide now consume more energy annually than Sweden. And the amount of energy required is growing, says Jonathan Koomey, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. From 2000 to 2005, the aggregate electricity use by data centers doubled. The cloud, he calculates, consumes 1 to 2 percent of the world’s electricity.
Data Center Overload [...]

The water main in my house enters in the basement roughly underneath the front door. Below is a picture I took of it in 2002. There’s a hose bib near the front door that, in 2002, had been leaking for a some time. Coincidentally, that’s exactly how long I’d been ignoring it. My thought process [...]