Well… Now that I have more time, or actually maybe less time but am stuck at home anyway, I thought maybe I would post some more entries in the Detroit adventure.
So opening this back up after?… A bunch of years I notice that I had some posts started that I never posted so I will finish those also, unless they just seem stupid which is a possibility.
It looks like my last post was in 2014, so OK a lot has happened. We lost our huge old elm tree. The trunk was 5 feet in diameter and it was over 100 years old and Dutch Elm disease took it out in less than a month. We tried a bunch of things but there isn’t really a treatment and while it did cling to a slight vitality for a year or so it finally gave up. Really sad. It was taller than the house (three stories) when the house was built, there are photos. We did refuse to go with the “grind it up and burn it” plan that the first tree place wanted to do and got a place that works with an outfit that planks the wood and sells it to furniture makers. And we got a bunch of the smaller boards and I will make some furniture for the homestead from that wood.
I don’t think I had been brewing a lot by 2014. That changed and I brewed close to 200 gallons a couple of years since. There is a big home and garden tour in the neighborhood and I brew for the after party. And neighbors are good at drinking down the stash so I don’t get too backlogged. We started doing floats/ costumes for the Marche du Nain Rouge. That is postponed/ canceled this year because of the virus But we did everyone but the first two? I think. In a kind of scary foreshadowing this year I was doing a “zombie” running for president and riding a tricycle. I was thinking Mad Max but someone who saw early pictures though more Tim Burton. If you are seeing this you probably get either my Instagram or Facebook feeds so you can see a shot of “Vector the Super Spreader”. I will put up some shots of the final creation. He is just about finished so maybe I will post on the day of the parade (well when it would have been).
We had a monumental fight with the city over street lights, and won! Oh I should jump back a second. I got talked into joining the board of directors of the homeowners association. It was crazy because of a huge mess that I had no idea I was stepping into but the association was in bad shape and just realizing it. That got fixed, I am not taking credit, it took a lot of people doing a LOT of work and I only did a small part of that. We were just about out of the woods when the city decided to lie and then try and cheat their way out RE: our street lights. It’s way too long a topic to deal with in this post but it went on for a year plus and involved lawyers and a bunch of money and threats of RICO violations and well a LOT of trauma. BUT in the end (everyone needs some positives about now) we prevailed. Not as smoothly as we hoped but we did win in the end. It took a HUGE community effort but in the end it worked. This I will take a tiny bit of credit for. There have been at least one other big neighborhood projects that have also worked out and I think a lot has to do with the lighting working out, but I had basically nothing to do with them.
Aislinn is doing a TON of pottery. That also started after my last post. There is a local place Pewabic Pottery, that in certain circles is kind of a Ford of Pottery, though MUCH smaller. Well know and high quality, but in Detroit. So she started taking some classes and has been doing a lot of work there and at home since we have a potters wheel downstairs now!
There is a lot to the pottery story, but maybe later.
The shops have been “expended”. Expanded is really more a capability than space reference. Because I have been doing a lot more building than sound work the shops have expanded there capabilities to match. I did a lot of wood work but limited metal work because I was a “subtractive” only shop. I have a small mill and a small lathe, but I had no ability to weld. Not strictly true but no ability to quality weld. With the bigger Nain Rouge projects welding became a must so the whole metal working part of the shops has become MUCH more capable.
AND food. When we arrived there was really no restaurant I would have brought a guest to in Detroit. Harsh maybe but pretty accurate. So I added to my normal cooking to doing a lot more. I started baking bread pretty regularly. I was already roasting coffee but that ticked up some and brewing went way up. But I also started cooking a lot more meals, and not just your OK meals but meals that reminded us of the kind of places we would have gone to in SF.
Now Detroit has become a foodie location and, before the Virus, there were a ton of places with amazing food you could go to. But I got over the hump and we still eat in well regularly.
Now that everyone is hunkering down (You Fing better be!!!) all of these skills are working out well. We are heading into spring and if I finish up a couple of projects we may be almost self sufficient for a fair amount of time.
Here is hopping anyway.
Stay healthy and keep safe.
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