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Just a victim of circumstance

January 9, 2007 – 11:40 am

The other night we were enjoying a lovely evening out at the Wreck Room, which is pretty much the bar closest to our house. This kind of sucks, since I'm used to years of strolling over to the Alibi whenever I felt like it (and more recently, to Sputnik which was even closer). But southern Bushwick has a dearth of boozing establishments (though no shortage of boozers, to be sure). Are there other bars in that area? I'll have to investigate more thoroughly soon.

Anyway, we were sitting outside smoking, when this small, older Latino guy walked by. I could see him out of the corner of my eye and knew he was gonna creep up on us, you can always tell when somebody has to make the decision to brace a fellow human, even the seasoned panhandlers.

"Happy new year, Papi," he said to me, extending a hand. I shook it and he didn't let it go. He made some more small talk and then said grimly, "I don't wanna have to rob nobody … could you help me get some Chinese food?" The guy was totally nonthreatening in a paternal sort of way. Of course, he already had me at "Papi." I gave him a dollar and he immediately said, "Chinese food … it's $2.50." So I gave him another buck. Somehow not giving him that last 50 cents allowed me to feel like I hadn't been taken (some complicated personal rationale on my part).

Now of course we're wringing our hands over whether crime is too high in Brooklyn, and whether or not we should flee to the suburbs. Oh, what has become of this city? Alas!

By Jimmy Legs | Comments Off

Pegboy

January 8, 2007 – 4:13 pm

Kitchen Floor Sealed
Originally uploaded by Jimmy Legs.

We've got our kitchen back, more or less. The varnish is supposed to cure for a long while before you can really treat it like a floor, but at least we're not all crowded into the living room. This project has been a good learning experience, I would have liked to done things differently, but eventually we'll redo the kitchen entirely on a, shall we say, more professional level.

Now that the lower floors are getting squared away, we can focus on getting some stuff done upstairs. This weekend we'll be refinishing the top floor. Looks like we'll paint the remaining floors for the time being, anything that's not an actual wood floor is covered with this atrocious linoleum tile. I've seen good uses of this stuff, but this looks like somebody dropped a hospital floor into the middle of a house. A disreputable hospital.

I got several power tools over the holidays, they're all piled up around the house, forcing me to run up and down many flights of stairs to complete even the simplest job. I need better organization; in short, I need some pegboard! God I should panel the house in pegboard. It's so very handy.

By Jimmy Legs | Comments Off

This diamond ring doesn't shine for me anymore

January 3, 2007 – 1:54 pm

I'm trying to dig up some info about my house, specifically when it was built. See, there was some kind of fire or something that destroyed most of the property records in Brooklyn around the turn of the 19th century, so many houses have estimated construction dates. My house was supposedly built in 1915, which may be late enough that it is actually correct. But I have yet to figure out which houses exactly are affected by this.

Anyway I found out that the entire archive of the old Brooklyn Eagle newspaper is available online at the Brooklyn Public Library site. So far I've only found a couple of references to my property, but of course these articles only reference the address; there's no way of knowing if it's my house or a previous house on the same plot. Anyway, it seems the criminal element of my place dates back to at least 1899:

And also from 1899, I'm sure the family who posted the below want ad will be pleased to know that there's finally a young German girl upstairs:

I've been looking up other stuff about the street in general, I've found there was a rollicking "social club" across the street in the 1880's, and the place next door used to be a boarding house that once housed a couple of guys (one named Frankenstein!) who got scammed into buying a neighborhood bar and a hotel in Jamaica. Suckers.

I found a description of Bushwick when it was mostly farmland, which compared Bushwick Avenue then to its contemporary version in 1894. I think it's still pretty accurate, no?

Bushwick avenue is a broad and beautiful drive, and is, in some respects, like the highway of life. Its birth is at a church, from which it gets its christening; it wanders among the breweries and then becomes a broad and beautiful thoroughfare shaded by trees and bordered by flowers and shrubs, and finally ends at the cemetery.

By Jimmy Legs | Comments Off

The sound of time is talking

January 2, 2007 – 3:57 pm

Bob Vila, eat your heart out

At the risk of sounding like a one-note blog, I'm getting frustrated with my kitchen floor. We set about painting it a few days ago (patch, prime, paint, poly) and I thought we'd be all done by now. However, I neglected to read the full set of instructions in which it states we have to wait up to 3 days for the paint to dry before laying down the protective polyurethane. Grrrr, I want my kitchen back! All the cabinet and stuff are in the living room. I'm using a door as a counter top. But now I gotta wait until at least tomorrow to get it over with. I don't mind the work of it, it's all this waiting around I can't stand. It's hard to shift gears and work on other projects when your brain is all set for something in particular. And for me, for now, it's turning my uneven, sloppily-patched plywood floor into a marvel of red paint and shiny coating stuff. Why, it'll look like a Pizza Hut! A glorious Pizza Hut!

Hmm, maybe we shoulda just left it "Primer Gray"

New Year's Eve found us sticking around the neighborhood, at the 11th hour we realized ToddP was having a show right down the street from us, so we went to that. Considering we've spent pretty much every New Year's at some kind of show, it would have been odd if we hadn't followed suit this time around. We haven't spent much time on the Wycoff side of the neighborhood so it was a good opportunity to get acquainted. It's a pretty fun area, or maybe it was just the exuberance of the season. The show was in a single-story commercial space, repurposed as a living space and performance room. Nice place, but whoa was it hot in there. If I ever open such a place, I'm gonna tack up coat hooks all over the place before I open my doors. Then again, that might lead to lawsuits after some kid slamdances into the wall and impales himself.

Ugh, now we gotta wait 36 hours.

When the makeshift bar ran out of booze, there was a conveniently-located Exxon Station down the street, which had not only beer, but Corn Nuts, a product that has always eluded me in the Big Apple. The climate became much more tolerable after the bands finished (The Fugue, Japanther, The Black Lips), as most of the people skipped out. Did everyone go home or was there some other place everybody to be? We walked home, which probably took a long time but I wasn't really paying attention. It was nice to be able to walk home from a ToddP show, hope there will be more down on our end of the neighborhood.

So with the holidays over, it's time to resume the drudgery of home improvement. Next up, how to secure the 3rd floor so Mr Bones can't get down into our part of the house and eat our cats' food. He's one evil feline.

By Jimmy Legs | Comments Off

Put 'em on the glass

December 28, 2006 – 11:16 am

This week is kind of a shame, I am totally getting away with working from home, but there's so few people on the subways, I kind of wish it was a regular work week. Well, not really. I'm getting absolutely no new work in, no emails, no phone calls. I've been coming into the office, but leaving early and doing some stuff at home. Today it's a bit of a sticky situation, as the few people who are here in the office are ordering in pizza and I have to beg off because I am planning to sneak out at noon and never return. My only hope is they think I'm in the bathroom every single time they walk by. Oh well. As long as they don't rat me out I'll be fine. Many of my coworkers will be out next week too for some reason, so let the good times roll.

Bannister a la Vodka Sauce

We've made it through the Christmas season without incident, now it's time to rush to fix up the house before it is overrun with Germans next month. We've still got lots of painting to do, plus refinishing some floors (!) upstairs. Then there are the other less glamorous jobs, like cutting down the bathroom door so it actually closes and figuring out a way to keep the birds off the windows so they don't poop on the glass.