NOV-A-12

THE WINDY WEEKEND OF NOVEMBER 14--16, 2003,

AS THINGS ARE JUMPING IN DERWOOD

AND DETAILS ARE FALLING INTO PLACE—

EVEN INCLUDING THE YEAR-END LETTER 2003—

AS I GO OFF TO ANOTHER ELDP FULL DAY SEMINAR

November 14--16, 2003

There has been so much wind that the tree branches not sheared off by Hurricane Isabel are falling, even without a full-leafed canopy to constitute a “sail” area. That has kept the roofers from shingling the Derwood additions, but the driveway was crowded with eight trucks and three more had tried to get in. All the contractors were busy, with the HVAC people leaving having completed most of the duct work, and three electricians running wiring through wall spaces since the recessed lighting fixtures have been installed throughout and now they take out the fuse box and put in all new circuit breakers. Three carpenters were present, including Jodie and Dale, who were the superb craftsmen who did the deck and the completion of the Breakfast Room and the Great Room—not a square corner in sight in the hexagonal vaulted ceilings. They did such a good job that Dale Kramer took them out to lunch for lobster on Friday.

I went to see Dale for the first time since his operation. He was, of course, delighted with the unexpected outcome of a benign lesion and no thoracotomy or removal of a lung for cancer—the almost certain pre-op diagnosis. He was supervising three masons who had torn down the ivy from the front of the house and had punched out the brick façade and broken through for the ornamental window that will let light into the stairwell. They were also working on the kitchen window, which will be a big bay window and herb garden in the all-natural stone set around the brick window that is being removed. The only laggards are the plumbers, and they have held up some of the dry wall and installations like the whirlpool and tubs upstairs. But they are on their way effective next week. I gave Glenn a substantial pair of presents to carry to the “Production Meeting” that was scheduled this afternoon.

There remain many small details that I went over with Glenn, including some that are not so small. One of these involves removing the arch wall dividing the living room from a wasted space foyer at the front door. Others involve resiting the mailbox which I had so carefully worked on replacing and planting well after the Hecht truck destroyed the old one and the Petro oil truck then wiped out the new one—now it has been taken out again by the cement trucks. I will get the hammock repaired and the boat trailer moved and fixed, and the entire drive from the groove worn by all the heavy trucks near the mailboxes to the “pad” around the curved wall to the garage door entrance all covered and graded with “crush and run” after the major trucks have chewed it up as much as the damages from the amount of traffic seen today.

A new schedule has bee drawn up, given the rather unrealistic goal of Christmas as the target, but it is not too far back from then with walk through on January 8, shooting for the second week of the New Year. The rooms are all sealed in with plastic over the exterior openings to the Great Room and Library until the insulation is installed, now and the furnace has been turned on to heat the whole house—relieving the electricians of their complaint of handling lighting fixtures in a cold house. This will mean that most of the work is now turning to interior work. This includes a quarter-inch dry wall being applied to all of the dining room walls since the scraping of the wall covering has gouged the previous dry wall. A big question I had was that I saw the roughed in door to the storage room was framed in to be bricked up. I thought it was going to communicate with the furnished basement (being called the “exercise room” because of the weight bench that was there, but my concept remains that of a Grandkids Room) rather than just having an outside door to put things in a cold storage room. Since what will probably go there may be file cases with papers and pictures, we may have to keep that open.

The guest bathroom window is so much reduced that it would be a six inch window given the new roof line of the Great Room, and only a very expensive custom window could be fitted there to open it with some kind of crank. Since the fan there would ventilate it, and all that is wanted is some light from outside—not an escape route—the mason suggested putting glass bricks there, which would also have the advantage of being double walled insulated. The garage/basement window will be bricked up, and the smaller windows in the smaller guest room/office will also be bricked since the Great Room has risen to above it with its roofline.

I will meet with Dale Kramer on Tuesday to go over some new cost sheets he has for several options, such as the stained oak bookcases to be built in the library. I thought it would be neat to have one of those little rolling library ladders, until I heard that the cost is about $3,000 for this custom ladder. I would rather stand on a Chippendale Chair! We will go over other items in the list of options, since he had talked with Sandy Sheilor (with whom we will meet as a favor from her on the weekend to go over any additional furnishing items that will be ordered. She had vetoed any cabinetry in the den, since there are plans for furnishings there that will go right up to the walls, and the additional shelves I am still looking for for books would over crowd it.

The kitchen floor will now match the Breakfast Room floor covered in Mexican Tile; and the kitchen will have the special splash tile put up along it—each at additional costs that Dale will present to me on Tuesday. There will be a total of TWO tandem truck loads of “Crush and Run” ordered to cover the whole driveway, especially down at the mailboxes where the big trucks have heavily rutted it, and the whole of the driveway and around the wall to the new garage opening, with a “vehicle pad” between the shed and garage graveled as well. The hammock will be repaired, as will the boat trailer, which needs to be moved after it had the direct hits from Hurricane Isabel’s downfalls, and we will have to see about a place for these items. There are lots of downed trees still over on the other side of the creek which Ernie Shifflett crew will get to in the coming weeks, so as to open access to the garden.

The glories of the Derwood woods has largely been rained and wind-whipped way, but each sub-contractor who comes still remarks about how stunning the property is and unique in their experience of the Montgomery County. They add, in some consolation, “I can see why you are investing a fortune in this property!” “Thanks!”

Glenn pointed out that the most recent big truck to come up to haul away the SIXTH dumpster load of demolition trash, is probably not yet finished carrying away trash since there will be much more in the interior construction phase. I know that Ernie Shifflett had said there were twelve truckloads of tree-debris hauled out of Derwood, so there should be some doubt about whether anything is still left here?

THE GRIZZLY BEAR RUG ARRIVES FROM KNIGHT’S TAXIDERMY

AND A NEARLY FULL-TIME JOB IN PRODUCTION

OF THE YEAR-END LETTER 2003

The people at Knight’s Taxidermy in Anchorage Alaska, who had promised me delivery of the Kamchatka’s brown bear rug and skull in six months, had not yet delivered so I gave them a call. It seems that I had to pre-pay the full amount of the taxidermy upfront, which is a considerable disincentive to efficiency. I called and found out that the operator informed me that the full standing bear was ready for delivery and all they needed to do was touch up the base a bit. “That’s odd, since mine is a bearskin rug!” “Oh, yes, of course. Now if you will just send us a credit card number for the Fed Ex shipping, it will be on its way.” “Didn’t I already pre-pay all costs over a year ago.” “No, that was just for boxing up the specimen, now you can add the Fed Ex payment for shipping.” It did arrive, and I recall the rich chocolate long haired pelt, but remembered this interior grizzly as being bigger—probably since I had been looking at coastal brown bears as the big one we got in Spring when Craig and I had done that trip in the Millennium Year. But, I did not find the bear skull in the shipping carton so, once again, I am on the phone to Knight’s Taxidermy for the Russian Bear.

I am almost embarrassed to confess how many man-hours have gone into the major production of the year-end letter this year. Each of the component parts—such as those that rely upon an intact series of Photo Albums (now numbering 14 for the year 2003—not yet completed!) and the copying and reduction of the pictures, their cutouts, editing, and printing out the text for which the photojournalism is the substrate of the year’s activities—it is as much a job to record the events of the year as to live it! The critical component comes down to the dependence upon unreliable machines. I made a round the clock effort to get the primary cut and paste number put together—then carried it to the notoriously unreliable Xerox and watched it like a hawk, copying the single pages of the single sided originals, which I got through with multiple glitches on the part of the machine which I could re-do. I then triumphantly put in the original to begin making the complete black and white copy for which color covers are also being generated at some considerable investment. But, the Xerox machine failed in a spectacular collapse, which was final and irreparable. So, that process has come to a halt and I will work on the other component parts to get the final product into the mail by year’s end.

SATURDAY DERWOOD WOODS CLEANUP

AND MEET ETHIOPIAN NEIGHBORS

I had planned to go to Derwood to store the bearskin rug and to collect the mail, and then go off to the Public Hearing on the proposed ICC (InterCounty Connector) a big noisy and atrociously expensive highway to cut across the county East to West threatening my woods---which I have just constructed a magnificent addition with floor to ceiling windows looking out into the woods, which I would not like to have overlooking the endless taillights of a highway through the culverted woods over the streams where deer and fox belong.

All week long there have been ferocious windstorms, which delayed the roofers from installing the shingles, which are perched in their packs on the roof of the Great Room awaiting a clear day. I thought that the woods of mine has been already subject to about as much damage as it could stand, and has had a very thorough cleanup at an as yet undisclosed hugely expensive cost. Ernie Shifflett came over last weekend and I pointed out to him the large expanse of my property not yet cleaned up with another half dozen trees down on the other side of the stream and over near the garden. He had not known that my place extends so far, and he had been very pleased with the progress his large crew of Guatemalans had made in clearing the hillside of downfalls. I was humored to see that one of the items of downed trees they had “cleared away” was the stack of cut firewood that Dave VanderHart had been hoping to come and collect in the near future—now blown through the chipper, “The Intimidator.” He will come to do the far side of the creek, or, more accurately, will send his team through that part of the woods and clear the area of the garden, but because of the difficulty getting the bigger trees out, he suggests cutting them down to ground level and letting them rot.

I drove in the driveway over the two deep holes from where the impact of the falling giant the Tricentennial Oak had dropped, and decided I should fill that in before the trucks churned it up any more and the crush and run gravel tandem, trucks dump their heavy loads in paving the area after the major construction work is done. I looked around and all over the area that had been cleaned were fallen branches, once again. I was dressed to go to the meeting, but I decided it was now or never. I got out into the woods and started picking up branches everywhere I could reach them in the previously cleared woods. Fortunately, the big dumpster that had already been hauled out of seven loads of what once was my household—ducts, and walls and bathtubs and plumbing and the scrap lumber of the reconstruction—had been emptied on Thursday. I worked hard, tugging and dragging and tossing the branches into the empty twelve tone dumpster. The dumpster was put here for the construction trash, but it is mine in the sense that I am surely paying for it. I kept on working on the fallen branches and tugged almost all that were in reach up the hill and filled the dumpster to overflowing.

On my last trips, I saw a man carrying a big tarp filled with leaves he had raked from his yard, and carrying them down to my driveway, he dumped them over my limited lawn above the stream. I said something about “I hope we have had our last big blow” and he looked at me, at first unsure of who I was never having met me. He said, “Yes, I wanted to drag all my yard debris down here to dump it in this vacant lot.”

I have watched people from as far away as three blocks carting their leaf litter down to casually dump it here, so I said: “Oh, that ‘vacant lot’ is my home!” He said, “Really? Where do you live?” I pointed up the drive, and he aske3d “I don’t see any house there!” I said, “Well, come along and have a look!”

He was astounded, first that there was a house there, then the size of the reconstruction project and the very large tract of woods that it preserves, and then that I was the owner talking with him. “I never knew anyone was back here!” I said, well, right now, I am not, since there is no power, kitchen or plumbing—except for the port-a-john you see there for the construction workers.”

His name is Asfao, and his son’s name is Scott, a Montgomery College student, who had graduated from Magruder, as Michael had before him. I took them through the house, apologizing for it being a gutted cave, but saying that it would be soon back up and in better shape than ever. I apologized in the kitchen that I could not furnish him a cup of tea—and showed him the breakfast room, and the lack of any fixtures, the whole of it having been stripped to bare rafters and flooring—where just this week, the Mexican tile was ordered that will cover the surface of this pair of rooms.

He and his family of three daughters and two sons, one of whom is an Electrical Engineering senior at George Tech in Atlanta and will graduate this December, but the other four are all at home. Home turns out to be next to Art and Anita Rubins where the Columbian family used to live. They were astounded that they had never met me, and I asked if they had seen a Chestnut Brown Bronco going back and forth “It does not drive itself!” Before long, I was in their house having the cup of coffee I could not offer them in my house, and I was introduced to his wife and three daughters, one of whom is an ecologist formerly at the EPA and now at the USGS geologic service. Asfao himself had written a thesis on remote sensing and triangulation and we compared GPS marks and I told him what he had not realized that the Derwood manse is the highest point in Montgomery County at about 450 feet. The daughters are Addis, Mona and Vega as well as Scott, and they were all curious about me, since they had not met me since they moved in four years ago. I told them that I had been traveling a good deal of that time, but since they were curious and it was a sunny day, and I had finished my chores—and it was too late to get to the ICC hearing—we all went up the drive to the Derwood housing and construction site. They were astounded at the depth of the woods, and the huge effort at conserving it and maintaining it “And what is the economic yield of all this property?” He had told his family on introducing them to me that my woods were forty times larger than what they had thought was a very spacious yard and lot. We walked around it, now that it had all been cleaned up and the tree debris was filing the dumpster, the woods looked good. For the purposes of contrast, I took them into the house, promising them that they would see quite a change next visit.

That visit may be soon, since they immediately invited me for an Ethiopian Dinner—since what I did not yet say is that they are all from Ethiopia, by way of Nairobi Kenya seven years ago. He works for the Maryland National Park and Planning Commission—which is my neighbor on four sides (the park made from the estate originally) and they were each delighted to know that I was very familiar with Africa, and especially the beautiful highlands from which they come. I even tried to pull out of my memory a few words of Amharic but broke into Ki-Swahili when I ran out of Amharic words. I told them of my ambition to get up to the Lake Tana Highlands of the origin of the Blue Nile. The daughters are going to look up my home page and they will look into the further references I had made to some African adventures, since they were not sure at first I would even know where in Africa they had originated, and learned to their surprise that I was an Africanist.

So, it has taken four years for me to meet one other set of neighbors, as Lubers were out raking leaves and getting out the chain saw to get out one more big branch that the winds had blown out of my trees onto their yard. As soon as I am able to move back in, I will invite the friendly neighbors to come and see what all the truck traffic and the noise in the woods has been all about, and asked them to keep an eye on the property while I was perforce away from it.

MY NEXT FULL DAY SEMINAR IN THE VIRGINIA GW CAMPUS

I was early. So, being early, and interested in taking an alternative and prettier route that would have the added advantage of skipping the Toll Road along the Dulles access corridor, I went north on 270 and at Frederick turned south along Route 15 that sows on the map an intersection with Route 267 into Ashburn Virginia after going through Leesburg Virginia. There is no 267. So, after going through Leesburg, a quaint old pre-Civil War town, I looked again at the map and found Route 659 which went to something called Ashburn Farms—which is a new subdivision of pricey homes and a tangle of no-return lanes. So, starting early, I got hopelessly lost in Loudon County Virginia, with no way out except to page through my notes and find one phone number of a graduate student in the ELDP program whom I called—to have the cell phone cut out reception. I started early, and now the class has been going for twenty minutes already. I finally found my way to Route 7 by going back to Leesburg and got to the GWU campus which is not in Ashburn but only near enough that it takes its name, and stood----at the locked door. There are phone numbers on the door—but each connects to an answering machine “Your call is being answered by ‘Audix’….”

What went right? The countryside was beautiful! Lots of Horse Boarding stables and fox hunting fields with names like “Foxfield”—preparing the buyers for the outrageous development tony homes coming soon. But on every other corner were horse trailer places and a dozen deer lay along side the road, victims of the rut and the density of the deer and traffic. There are many quaint pre-Civil War buildings and a few George Washington historic markers. On the way back, I passed White’s Ferry Road and immediately thought of an ideal circuit ride, which would be to come down Route 28 to 107 to the Route 7 Leesburg Pike. It is an ideal ride in the country to see the Maryland side of the Potomac going to cross the river at Point of Rocks, and then to the genteel horse country of Loudon County, not yet all looking like a Fairfax County hyper development. My trip was 87 miles and two confused hours going out. I made it back in 55 miles and just over an hour along the Route 28, which I had previously driven at the times I went out to Poolesville, and it has not changed much from the horse country it was then.

The Class went very well. At the outset, during the introductions of the first session the week of Hurricane Isabel in September, the founder of the course, Dr. David Schwandt, ex-Physicist, said that he grades each paper and does so harshly, and for our group of 26 there might be one or two A’s, and the rest split between B’s and C’s with about four to five D’s. I had sent my papers by the electronic address they had indicated, which turned out to be the wrong address given to everybody—so I was not alone in getting them bounced. But, I then sent them in hard copy form by mail and did not know if they had been received.

We had a rigorous discussion in the remainder of the morning, after my late arrival, to which I could make pertinent contributions since they were right down the middle of my previous degree work, and broke for lunch. At lunch I heard of each of the participants nervousness about coming interviews, both group and individual, scheduled around December 16—17 to determine who is selected “anointed” for inclusion in the ELDP doctoral “Cohort” with a nearly guaranteed hard-won doctoral degree if hey stick through the vigorous effort needed in the program which I heard includes a full-time “Boot Camp” retreat in all of June—for which I still have not committed my calendar.

When I returned to my seat at the table for discussions, I saw a pile of papers on my folder, and Dr. Schwandt had returned my graded papers—I flipped over the first, then, turned it back over since my seatmates were curious as to what was written on them. I sneaked a peak, and found each had a comment and the neat letter “A” on top. So, I presume I am a most favored candidate in this program if I choose to pursue it further, which is the assumption of those who have processed my application in its entirety with the exception of the coming interviews which may be right in the thick of the hunts and holiday travel plans for the Christmas season. But, that is a rather good problem to have, a surfeit of riches in opportunities for many different things from which to make choices!

I CANNOT SAVE MONEY EVEN BY A DO-IT-YOURSELF!

I got a phone call at seven AM on Monday morning before I headed off to the dentist and the interview for which I had been scheduled. “Hello, Glenn, this is Glenn! Have you or any one else filled up the Dumpster to overflowing with branches and heavy tree litter? It was just emptied on Thursday of the seventh load of construction and demolition litter, and it costs $400 each time the dumpster is emptied and we will have to call it again today to continue the roofing and other work being done today!”

So, even when I put in a full day myself, and take advantage of the fixed costs of the dumpster I am paying for, it comes back to cost me as though I had hired it out to be done the way that the overall clean-up of the woods has been so expensive! I cannot win for losing on this cash drainage!

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