Wednesday, September 5, 2018


Southwest Flight 3270 nonstop Austin/boston

Image Gallery of Deck

Another hour at least in this flight at least and thought I would try to chronicle my summer of 2018. I have to decide whether to break this memoir of the shortest summer ever into separate parts but I’ll see how far I get on this flight then decide. Next Monday is my first Berklee teaching day and I’m headed from Logan to Vermont to visit my brother after touchdown today. He lost his longtime partner Tracy Knights a couple of weeks ago and it was brutal, just heart wrenching. She was such a strong, giving person who enjoyed life to it’s fullest and Doug lost her way too soon.

I may get to that part of the summer later but right now I’m going back to May when I decided to replace a couple of planks of Ipe on my back deck that were deteriorating due to age and what I soon found to be problems with the joists supporting the hardwood. Whoever built the deck did a fucktastic job but the bamboo roots from the grove behind the fence, the huge Ligustrum tree that we had taken out in May, the one downspout from the roof gutter for the entire back of the house aimed right at the middle of the deck, this all contributed to a lot of damage to a big portion of the main deck support joists. Just lifting the old Ipe took a lot of work because the deck screws, while pretty high quality stainless 3” screws, used old style square bits that stripped very easily and the only way to remove the many stripped screws was to somehow pry the screw head high enough off the wood for me to get some vise grips locked on and hope the screw wouldn’t break while I was windmilling the vise grips counterclockwise until the screw cleared the joist underneath. When I couldn’t grab the screw head with the pliers I would either drill small holes around the screwhead so that it would just pass through the board or try get a crow bar under the board and rip the motherfucker out (with a running X rated commentary). Pain in the ass and I ended up with hundreds of old stainless screws that I will be trying to recycle for the next 5 years until I give up and throw them in the trash. I’ve recycled some of the old Ipe already – I’ve got about 200 ft of partially rotted planks now. It wasn’t a perfect job but I think it turned out pretty well and I got the water diverted and the deck substrate has a lot more integrity than it did before. There was more I could have done but the lack of time and more importantly lack of energy and desire put an end to the deck work for now and I’m concentrating on moving the load of gravel from the front driveway to the back area surrounding the deck and on the north side of the house which, like a lot of yards on houses in my neighborhood that have been leveled, is all white limestone gravel. I’ve got all the black gravel on the area around the deck and now just have to move a yard and a half of the limestone, one wheelbarrow at a time. I just checked and a yard of gravel is about 2,500 lbs. Good mindless exercise that, believe it or not, I don’t mind doing. I can listen to music and it’s so very simple: load wheelbarrow, wheel that fucking barrow from the front to back, dump gravel, repeat.

I’ve been hard at work on the deck - finished installing sister beams on the substrate, replaced the worst of the rotten Ipe (if you haven’t heard of it Ipe is a very heavy, dense, expensive, hardwood used often for decks), ordered the gravel and have been carting that from the front of the house to the rear one wheelbarrow at a time. About halfway done with that. Played some really fun gigs: a string of five or so with Andrew Bergmann, Natalio Sued and Gustavo Nandayapa, most of which were in San Antonio. We did play one nice concert at Monk’s in Austin. The AC was broken at Fast Folks where the concerts used to be held and it was about 95°F but we had a loyal and respectful crowd - it was a good night. We also played at Carmens in SA and JazzTX and the sound at JazzTX was pretty rough. Even a small crowd of talkers can be louder than the band and the sound onstage is awful. But…fun to play with those guys.