booker street: 7/1/05

7.28.2005

public emily!

thanks e, the sidebar looks fantastic!

dahlias and zinnias oh my

i have been thinking alot about gardening lately, although abstaining from the act itself. mostly i'm just wishfully thinking and planning. i thought i would share images of the two flowers with which i am currently obsessed: the zinnia and the dahlia. enjoy!

this last bunch is a brilliant group of zinnias, the other images are of the wide variety of dahlias! btw: i love the new upload images feature in blogger!

7.27.2005

what i'm listening to

i tried to make a sidebar feature to illustrate what i'm listening to (like the one at petitepomme) but i really struggle to bend html to my will and it usually wins the battle. so i figured i'd just make a short list of what i like right now.

the bees free the bees on virgin
controller.controller history on paper bag records
orange juice the glasgow school on domino
oranges band the world & everything in it on lookout!
we ragazzi the ache on self-starter

right now, though, i'm listening to "pure easy listening" on wtju.net.

four square and many years ago

recently, i have been searching for stylistic information on the american foursquare building type. you know...what style of interior trim was commonly used, what kind of finishes, etc.

mostly i have been googling because there seem to be few published books pertaining to the style itself. even google turns up few results on the building type.

you can, however, find numerous sites dedicated to the game of four square. i'm not sure i ever played it. have any of you? i played a lot of hopscotch in my youth - this seems loosely related, although much more competitive.

like the game, the building type is named for the arrangement of four small rectangles grouped together to make one large square. in foursquare houses, this manifests in four rooms on the first floor and four rooms on the second. in grand center hall four squares, these four rooms are arranged around a central hall and stair, making it more like foursquare and then some. in a more modest foursquare like ours, with the entry hall off the side, the arrangement of the shapes becomes asymmetrical. still four rectangles are grouped together to make a larger single square, but the entry hall and stair become one of the "rooms."

the american foursquare building type is loosely drawn from the prairie style houses built in the early twentieth century. seems the only published sources i find on the prairie style focus on frank lloyd wright. he was great and all, but his work had little impact on the modest foursquare at sixthirtyone booker street. it was built as cheaply as possible and fitted with mass-produced, albeit lovely, interior details. flw's houses were most often dressed with custom made furniture and glass of his own design. our house certainly exhibits none of those niceties.

so far, this website is the best i've found, showing a variety of foursquares and interior details. as the old house web points out, the foursquare was a very common building type in the first third of the twentieth century and is found across the entire united states, modified for each climate and site. [i think it's funny that this website, while containing decent info, states that the "foursquare is what most people think of as 'the all-American family home' on Main Street USA." typically, the all american family did not live on main street, where most commercial activity occured.]

in any case, i'm on the look out for any info i can find on this building type. sadly there is little to be found. perhaps i should write a book?

7.26.2005

friends indeed

you guys are such good friends. thanks for still checking in to see if i'm alive and posting. sorry i haven't been keeping up lately. i've been feeling a bit down in the dumps and figured you all should be tired of my whining by now. but i guess you're not!
i wish that i had photos of the work that we've been doing over the last week or so. we have successfully ripped up floor, sistered floor joists, and installed the plywood subfloor - in one room...downstairs.
now, to be perfectly honest, this only took two full days of work, but we had to spread it out over a week because my ever graceful husband fell during the first days' work and sprained his ankle quite badly. he is improving steadily, but hasn't been able to do much. as a result we had open crawlspace in our dining room for a week.
the crawlspace, for those of you not intimately familiar with guts of houses, is the dirt cavity lurking under your floor. i know e&c's brownstone doesn't have one, nor is there one in e&t's loft. david's house may have one - or it may have a basement. in any case, our house has a crawlspace and it was completely exposed to the whole house for one week. that is - there was no floor. only joists and dirt. i was very unsure that i would come through the week a sane person, but i did. thank you to my parents for coming up to help me finish the room. now there is no more exposed dirt and joists - until we commence work on the living room. holy shit, what have i gotten us into? (i will try to post photos this evening.)
in other news, dj husband has had another gig at the atomic burrito. i hear it was better attended than the first night. he is still trying to come up with a clever dj name (i guess he doesn't like dj husband!). have any suggestions?
career developments are progressing slowly, which is better than not at all, i suppose. i know for sure that i want to work at the center, and i am, at least, a contributing volunteer, having sequenced a few manuscripts, reviewed one and copy edited another. now, if they would just hire me...
thanks for being loyal readers, guys. it's nice to know you're out there.

7.11.2005

ladies and gentlemen

the booker street blog is poised to become what it was originally intended to be - a house blog. spr and i are on the verge of our very first home improvement project, not counting the two-month long toilet repair or the constant yard work. this weekend we will rip up the flooring in the dining room, sister the floor joists and lay new plywood subfloor. then, when our new 5", solid white oak planks arrive we will install that. holy shit, what are we thinking? well, we're certainly not thinking logically. but were gonna do it anyway.

we've been making big plans for our house. reflooring the first floor comes first, then we'll patch and repair the plaster walls. at some point we'll strip the layers and layers of paint off the trim and the french doors. we'll install a second set of french doors off the dining room. we'll rebuild the porch and wrap it around the south side of the house. we'll excavate and back fill the yard, install a patio and put up a fence. and, we'll remove the crappy alluminum siding and repair the originally stucco exterior. maybe we'll even raise the roof, so to speak, and break it up with a dormer window. we really like the look of this florida foursquare with a wrap-around porch and the classic foursquare dormer.

this is the photo from restoration on 7th (thank you). compare this foursquare with ours, which appears at the top, they're very similar narrow, side entry foursquares. ours is very modest and we think it would look snazzy with a wrap-around porch and dormer. and we could certainly use the space. work upstairs will involve a complete bathroom redo, flooring, closet building and office design. who knows how long all of this will take. we're not going anywhere for a while.

anyway, no more whining for me, except maybe about how many spiders live in the crawl space. i'm sure booker street won't be all renoblog from here on out, but i certainly intend to document our disasters!

7.08.2005

lame

no new job for me, and i have poison ivy again.

7.07.2005

tomorrow is another day...

in staunton for me. i'm feeling rather jammed up about this particular tomorrow in staunton because i am really hoping to cross back over the mountain on the way home to charlottesville having taken a new full-time job. i feel pretty strongly that i could be making the biggest mistake of my life taking this job, but i also feel a sense of promise that this could be my dream job (except that it's in staunton). the real kicker is that i will most certainly have to take a pay cut. you know, a pay cut wouldnt hurt so much if i made a bazillion dollars. but i make a mere pittance and really don't feel that i can make much of a sacrifice. but i keep hearing from you all and from that little troll voice in my head that i owe it to myself and to my career to take this chance. so if the conversation goes the way i'm hoping it will ("why yes we're prepared to offer you a starting salary of $900,000") then i will return home associate director of the center for american places. holy cow, what a title! then i shall flee and be free of word processing and cubicles.

in other news, at the end of the month, i will be volunteering at a spay/neuter clinic at the vet's office in our 'hood. i will also be attempting to trap all the millions of little kittens that have been born to our colony in the last 2 months for spaying/neutering. i hope to trap the mamas and toms too. it's out of of control.

7.01.2005

reading is fundamental, continued

so i am currently reading a number of books - i also recently completed two books while on vacation. those were both *easy* light reading, but were good nonetheless. first, i read 40 watts from nowhere which is the story of sue carpenter's pirate radio stations, KPBJ in San Francisco, and KBLT in LA. i was pleased to find 40 watts at t's house as i had left one of the in-progress books at home. my love of good radio has recently been renewed thanks to KEXP and WTJU and reading 40 watts really restored my energy to participate in community radio. carpenter started and ran both pirate radio stations from her home, allowing djs to broadcast for most, if not all, hours of the day. The story is fascinating, both for her personal experience and for the tremendous document of mid-90s indie music it provides. i highly reccomend it.
i also found how soon is never by marc spitz at t's house. (funny to find books there as he claims not to read.) this was essentially a downer, although humorous and easy to read. this is the story of a man who was obsessed with the smiths while they were still a band and whose life was drastically (negatively) affected by their breakup. the book centers around the main character, having just turned 30, a rock journalist for headphones magazine (what a horrible title), striving to reunite the smiths under the pretense of writing a feature for the mag. all in all the story is one of the classic sad-sack smiths fan who never grows up, but entertaining nonetheless. i also picked up, as a thank you gift for t a book called meat is murder by joe pernice. yes, that joe pernice. this little book is a part of a brilliant series called "33 1/3" published under the continuum impint in which musicians, artists, writes and the like recount a fictional or factual story centered around a "critically acclaimed and much-loved album of the past 40 years." i began to read meat is murder but unfortunately didn't get to finish it. what i got through was great though; that joe pernice is a word master.
so now i am reading a bio of margaret bourke-white, who is one of my heroes. living in the early 20th century, she was entralled by industry and made a career and name for herself photographing the beauty and artistry of industry and industrial landscapes. i am also still reading the bio of frederick law olmsted, and hip: the history.
my love of reading (and radio) have been restored. hooray for me!

booker street