Lost a Friend Today

Billy Taylor is the reason I came back to Austin from Omaha. Not for personal reasons but because he hired me to handle the web portion of a company he was a co-founder of. The only obvious thing we had in common was our age, in nearly every other area we were most unlike each other. But we both liked solving problems and the challenges of a startup in a new industry. I’m proud to say we pioneered digital publishing.

Under his mentoring I went from lonely web guy in 2000 to Director of Development in 2006. I’ll always appreciate the things I learned from him.

Rest well friend.

More Weaving

I’ve finished two projects and am working on a set of placemats now. This first thing I did was a scarf seen here.

Approximately 79" long and 9" wide

It took about six hours to do the whole thing from warping it to tying off the last bit of fringe. Both ends are beaten down because I didn’t understand the instructions at first so I started out beating it down instead of making it more open and “balanced.” Since I goofed up the beginning I had to match it at the end.

My second project is officially a table runner although we are now using it as a wall hanging since the apartment is almost completely devoid of art at the moment.

Approximately 39" tall and 18" wide

This took a little longer because of the open work and the extra color. The large open work in the middle is called “Brooks Bouquet” and the smaller bits at each end are a series of different “Lenos.” They are a progression of 1/1, 2/2, 3/3, 2/2, and 1/1 which indicates the number of warp threads used in making the pattern. The swirly blue shape is a “Spanish Lace” design which would have benefited from heavier yarn.

The placemats I am working on now are a green and red design for Christmas, nothing fancy, just some red stripes down the sides. Pictures of them to come when complete.

There are a few more pictures of these two projects here The Lost Artisan.

Yet another change

November 4th, 2011. The last day of my first week of officially telecommuting. Granted I did this after the fire and when my truck was in the shop but this is the first week of “my rules.” I am at my desk by 6:00 AM thanks to Liz having to be out of the house before then for her job. I make myself available until 6:00 PM. You are going “What the heck, a 12 hour work day, are you crazy?” Well no I’m not. Depending on what is going on I could work 12 or more hours, this is high-tech after all, but that schedule allows me up to a four hour stretch of my own time in the middle of the day. On Tuesday I went to a friends studio and threw some pots and spent a lot of time talking to people. It was great. I’ve dealt with potential builders, the team clearing our property, gone in to town to just look around. It is really cool. I plan on not letting it happen but I made it clear to my boss to not let things fester if he thinks I’m not holding up my end of the bargain. He told me that he liked me and my work too much to let it get to the point of festering. That is a hard thing to live up to. Most of my hardware is cooperating and I need to do some rearrangement in the office but I’m digging this.

This, for once, is an expected change. Back in May I started a job at AT&T which is documented here. which lead to another job which lead to a part-time job working for my direct boss at the current job. Yeah, only slightly confusing. W (no not GWB) and I hit it off really well at AT&T and when he quickly moved on to a regular full-time job he asked me to join him. I gave him one condition. I had to be able to work from home starting in November when my lease in Dallas was up. Didn’t know that “home” would be a new address at the time but that is how life works. Frankly the place we are working doesn’t have the potential we thought it did but W has his own company on the side which has much greater potential. So I am working part time there as well for a cash/stock combination of compensation and we plan on it being fairly big within a year. The first goal is 1,000 customers at $10 a month (do the math). More details to come.

New Hobby

I’m sure that seem like a strange title to be associated with the fire but this is a little vignette about how life flows. First the back story.

The Sunday after the fire started we were well aware that the house and everything else was gone. I suggested to Liz we go out to Yarnorama in Paige to see about getting her some new needles and some yarn for knitting. When we got there Susan came out and told us they were closed because she and her husband were living there as they had been evacuated because of the fire. Liz said “we were burned out” and Susan said “come on in.” We had a very nice conversation with her about our experience and Liz losing all her knitting, quilting, sewing stuff and what things had been like for them and other people. Liz bought some stuff and we went on our way.

Now the rest of the story.

Over the past couple of weeks Liz and I had both heard that Yarnorama had been collecting supplies for textile artisans and that we should go out there so Liz could get some supplies.

Today we went because I wanted to get information on weaving since I won’t be able to pot for awhile plus it give Liz a chance to get some yarn. Liz got a huge bag full of yarn, I bought a loom and have a class next Sunday to teach me the basics of using it and Susan told us about the outpouring of support she received from all over the country, as far away as Alaska, in support of textile artists in Bastrop. Half her shop had been filled twice to overflowing with donations including things like spinning wheels and looms. A teacher in Giddings organized a group of students to knit blankets and Susan shipped two truck loads of yarn and supplies to them. At one point she had so much stuff in the shop she was at a standstill because she just didn’t know how to deal with the amount of stuff she had. Another group of people have been knitting things like towels and wash clothes. One group is doing sweaters and hats, winter is coming.

So what sparked her in to doing this? Well I’m sure it would have happened anyway because sooner or later someone else would have come along and told her about being burned out but she told us today it was our visit that made her realize she needed to do something to help.

I love this community.

Lessons Learned

Most of you will not pay attention. I’m not telling you anything you haven’t heard before but you’ll go on with the typical “It won’t happen to me” attitude that we had. We were drinking beer and watching the fire when we should have been loading the car.

All those important documents that you never need like social security card and passport and birth certificate, car title, house deed, etc. Need to be offsite in a safe deposit box. Maybe you listened to FEMA and you have an emergency folder ready to grab when you head out the front door. What happens when the disaster comes while you are at church or grandma’s or on vacation? I have met to many people who all they had left were the clothes they were wearing and their car because they were out when the roads were closed.

Create a list of everything you own. I mean everything. Five columns on the spreadsheet. Quantity, description (the more detail the better including model and serial numbers where appropriate), unit price, extension (quantity times unit) and year purchased. That way when the disaster happens you just need to add a column that subtracts year purchased from now to get age. The way our insurance works and I assume others that have “replacement cost” is that they pay you the depreciated value first and then when you submit a receipt for the replacement they make up the difference. I’m sure there is some sort of checking since we way upgraded our TV and I don’t expect the difference between the cost of the old TV and the new but I do expect the un-depriciated value to be covered. That video of what you owned is pretty useless. They don’t seem to really request proof of ownership, only proof of re-purchase. Now if you have an expensive collections you better have let the insurance company know about them ahead of time so they can schedule them.

If you rent get renters insurance. Pretty significant coverage is cheap, less than $150 a year for an apartment. I know, I’ve done it twice in the past six months.

Do have a plan. We didn’t get out nearly as much as we could have and not the all of the personally important stuff. But having evacuated once before we were not at a total loss. A large chunk of our pictures where in a file cabinet and we grabbed that. I got the computer backups that are on an external drives. Liz’s computer was lost but we recovered everything on to her new one. Randomly I grabbed our SCUBA log book that happened to be on the counter and I had Liz grab the quilt she has been working on for our oldest son and his wife. Ian grabbed some personal possessions that I would not have thought about. You almost certainly won’t be able to get every memento but you can get lots if you are home and have thought through what you want to save.

Now, all those things you keep saying you are going to give to someone. Do it now! I had a couple of stacks of collectible CD’s that were going to go out to people. There were a couple of things that belonged to my great grandfather that needed to go to a museum dedicated to his military outfit. I had some genealogical information to send to my brother. All ashes now. Pack it up and send it out. Doesn’t guarantee that a disaster at that persons home won’t cause it to be destroyed but at least you will have done the best you can.

Bastrop county is pulling together and will come back. We will have our pine forest again, before I die. If you want to help come out here and spend money in Bastrop and Smithville in particular but anywhere in the county helps. That also helps fight “corporate greed” if you are in to that since nobody on Main street in either town is anything like corporate.

I’ve had people comment on my attitude and “resiliency.” I’ll say it again you can either let this eat you up or you can move on. I’ll always kick myself for not taking advantage of the extra time we had but that is over. All we can do is move on. The stuff is gone. A lot of it we will replace but there is also a lot of stuff out of our lives. Things we kept because we had the space or because we might use it some day. A bit of irony is that I’ve been collecting old computer CDs for years to make mobiles with. That Sunday morning I finally went to the hardware store and bought some metal rods to begin making mobiles with…

Life is what happens while we are busy making plans.

Update

Fires of various sizes continue to pop up. Most are small and quickly contained but a several hundred acre fire ignited yesterday and with light winds blowing north it created a small panic because it was going into unburned territory. It seems to be mostly under control at this point.

Driving out 71 to the property, can’t call it “the house” anymore, is weird. The electric COOP is clearing their right of way in a a big way. A few houses along the highway have been cleared away. A large batch of dead trees has been cleared on the south side of the highway and a surveyor was working. That one really scares me. I am afraid that developers might take advantage of loosened rules to stick in subdivisions.

We have a quote from a company to clear the lot. It seems like a lot of work and it comes in under what the insurance company will pay. The company is recommended by a friend which is good. Although in the “it’s a small world” department the guy who did the estimate is the nephew of people who used to live near us. Hopefully he didn’t pick up any of the weird genes.

On the 15th we are going to Italy, TX to an open house from The Monolithic Dome Institute to see about a concrete dome for a home. At first reading that sounds ugly but a lot of cool things can be done with this including an partial torus (horseshoe) shape that we are interested in.

We got the keys to the apartment on Tuesday and Liz and Ian moved all the stuff from the car to the apartment. We spent the weekend shopping for “stuff” so there was a couple of thousand dollars worth of stuff in the Tahoe and I had this vision of it being stolen or wrecked. Friday the beds and living room furniture arrive and they will officially move in. I’ll be there on Saturday with the first shipment of stuff coming back from Dallas. We have a dining room table and a table for the office plus the key parts of my pottery gear. A big save was our digital SLR. I haven’t used it but I did bring it up here.

Life goes on. We have puppies for anyone interested.

Haiku

I saw this in a message from another fire survivor.

My house burned down.
Now I have a clearer view
of the rising moon.

Just What We Need, Not!

As if things weren’t crazy enough we have these.

Liz was driving her route and saw seven mangy, starving puppies on the roadside. She finished the route, drove the scooter home, got Ian and the car and went back to get the pups. She then drove to our normal vet but they were closed because of a family emergency. Off to another vet. Shots, baths, food but fortunately a vet tech adopted two puppies. They also gave her a bunch of food.

So if you are interested in a puppy you can have one now. You will need to bathe it (them) twice a week and they need a dose of medication a week for five more weeks.

Sifting the Rubble

We’ve done some sifting. As I mentioned before we found some rings that were important to Liz. They were just in a little jewelry box laying in the ashes. Liz also found a Madonna that had been her mother’s, again, just laying there. We did find one of the fire proof boxes. Unfortunately they are not crush proof and once crushed the stuff inside burns anyway.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Clearly brass/bronze and ceramics can survive. Almost all of the damaged to the ceramics came from things falling on them. Other interesting things were puddles of aluminum that I finally figured out were the window frames. The recognizable 35mm camera is a Minolta from the mid-80’s. On it’s right is the image screen from an early 2000’s Nikon 35mm SLR, all that survived from the primarily plastic camera. We also had lots of metal rings from late model lenses where the plastic bits are gone. The big glob of green glass is from the fish tank. Poor rufus our 15 year old spotted raphael catfish. He moved from Texas to Nebraska and back. He was in my office at work for several years too.

I am back in Dallas for work and this weekend is a party weekend for Liz and I. Although we are going to different parties. Liz will be at the Austin Scooter Club Riff Raff rally but she won’t have her shirt from the first rally. I’ll be at the Sherwood Forest Celtic Festival .

We are beginning to look for builders and hoping that our neighbors will rebuild as well. We got the number from a sign that said “We build homes that don’t burn.”

First View

We got to see what is left of our house today. Not much as you can see. The before picture is a little dated in that the shrubs and grass were gone from in front of the house and we had a garden there. You can tell from the trees and the front porch pillar that the angle is roughly the same.

A little dated. Shrubs and grass had been converted to a garden.

Pretty much the same angle as the original.

None of our sheds remain standing, it was a neighbors chicken coop that the other neighbor had seen.

Some pottery survived. Of the 10 pieces I had glazed Sunday morning three remained unbroken and will one day be kiln fired instead of house fired. We found a jewelry box with Liz’ mother’s wedding band and grandmother’s engagement ring.

I’m not entirely sure what I want to say, my mind is a little numb right now.

Well Fired

Slightly melted but still useable

We saw birds using it

The remains of a garden hose

Our winged pig and door knocker.

Ceramic mushrooms from the garden

The sticker means search and rescue has been here and no bodies.

These clearly opened after the fire went past. One of the survival mechanisms for the Loblolly Pine.

Going to need a new mower soon.

Tomorrow we go back with a sifter and shovel to see if we can find a few more things but I am pretty sure the “fireproof” boxes burned.

Except for the first two all of these pictures were taken by Liz McKee.