dan

2016 didn’t go the way I thought it would, or wished it would. But it’s over, and it’s time to look ahead.

I see adversity coming up.

I feel protected from the worst of it. I was way less protected back in 1981, when Reagan took office, and somewhat less in 2001, when it was George W. Bush, God help us.

In ’81, I was living above a pawnshop in downtown Brooklyn, young and broke. My friends were few and distant. I soon moved to a mostly abandoned building in a mostly burned-out block on the Upper West Side, sharing government cheese with my neighbors, and sleeping with one eye open and watching for the landlord’s thugs. In ’01, when Bush Jr. was the president-elect, I quit my consulting job and traveled most of the year, returning to find a worsening desperation in my South Berkeley neighborhood.

When they get into power, Republicans make hell for Americans who are struggling. The suffering is going to be really awful. It will be worst among those already most desperate. If you’ve never lived in a low-income neighborhood, you have no idea.

As for me, I thrived during those times. In the early ‘80s, I made a quixotic decision to go to engineering school, and spent my mid-20s setting type on the swing shift, and sometimes the lobster shift, still fighting the landlord, and making my way up through Harlem to City College for daytime classes. In the early ‘00s, I started my consulting business, stretching my limited expertise and even-more-limited social skills, often working late in my home office until even the dealers outside had gone home.

I’ll turn 59 this year, if the fates allow. I live in a quiet suburb and an even more quiet exurb. I’m more relaxed. I’m less likely to jump into a new challenge. When I get together with friends, we’re already sharing our catalogs of where our bodies hurt and don’t work the way they used to. I don’t really want to be working hard at something new.

But I’m going to be doing exactly that, I think. Maybe a lot of new things, or maybe a lot of new angles on old things, or maybe a renewed focus and vigor on things I’ve picked up and set aside, at various times, over a lifetime.

Because the times demand it, and also because of this. Continue reading…

USGS operates a stream gauge at the Hacienda Bridge, which is just downstream from here. The data is posted on the web in real time.

Taking the final difference in elevation, between a mark on the stairs down to the river and the slab inside the basement door.

However, I didn’t know what gauge elevation corresponds to the waters reaching my house.

Now I do know, I think, fairly accurately. That will help next time, especially if I’m looking at the stream gauge data remotely, or at night.

Here’s how I calibrated the gauge to my house: I found the high water mark from the most recent event (an obvious mark on the path down to the river), and used a construction level to measure the difference in elevation to my basement slab. This took two setups of the instrument. I make a crude sketch as I went along.

The flood crest at the Hacienda gauge was 29.77 feet, and the basement slab is 9.7 feet above the high water mark. Adding those together, I get 39.5 feet, a number I hope I won’t be watching for anytime soon. That 9.7 feet might seem like a lot–except that in this relatively minor event, the river rose more than 20 feet, at a rate of about a foot an hour.

A crude sketch, good enough notes for my purpose.

1986 flood at Forest Hills market, a block away from me, and on higher ground.

Fortunately, the house’s first floor elevation is a little more than 12 feet above the basement slab–higher than the floodwaters reached in 1986.

But you never know.

There are a number of joys here, beginning with being comfortably nested at my table by the window, a warm drink and electronic devices close at hand. There is a gauge by the bridge just downriver, and I’ve found the link where I can view real-time data corresponding to what I’m seeing out my window. Cool. I’ve got some interesting work that I’ll be getting back to in a moment. Great.

And then there’s that metaphor of imminent deluge. Oh well.

Real time data from the gauge at near Hacienda Bridge

With some help, I’ll be preparing and serving Thanksgiving dinner for 12.

Personally, I have a lot to be thankful for.

Still, I’m searching for something, the right thing, to say to my guests as we sit down. The youngest is seven, the oldest 84. Two are struggling with cancer.

And we all face a struggle we didn’t want, but must accept. There is something in there to appreciate, and be thankful for, and I’m sure that by Thursday I’ll be able to articulate it.

It was a long day. I picked up coffee and pastries for the volunteers at 7:00 am. Just before 5:00 pm, I found myself walking away from the schoolyard, wonderfully unburdened. The last of the games had been dismantled, and the pieces stored away, and the 21st Annual Cornell Elementary School Silly Olympics was done.
The forces of entropy worked hard on this one: The event was rained out last Sunday, and rescheduled for today, a Saturday. We needed about 200 volunteer hours today, and many of the parent volunteers couldn’t reschedule. The new coordinator–that’s me–had never even attended a Silly Olympics, and the old coordinator was out of town for the weekend. The documentation for most of the activities was from 2010. We needed about 400 white powdered mini donuts for one of the games, and when we went to pick up the order yesterday, it had come in with donut holes instead of donuts, and this wouldn’t have worked because you can’t string donut holes and hang them from a clothesline.
The school district scheduled a custodian, but when he arrived at 8:00 this morning it wasn’t the regular custodian, and he didn’t know where anything was, let alone where and how it was to be set up.
That last caused my faith to waver. An hour later, more volunteers showed up. I was busy organizing on the fly and answering questions. (My answer to about every third question was: “I have no idea.”)
At 10:00, an hour before the gates opened, I began to see the miracle of order emerging from chaos. The volunteers were working together, finding their own resources, solving their own problems. No one just stopped and waited for help. People shared their knowledge, remembering from past years how the games were arranged and put together.
Preparation paid off, too. During the previous month, we’d had three work parties to fix up and refurbish some of the games. The old coordinator had, as it turned out, warned me about just about everything I needed to be warned about, and had organized and restocked bins of materials needed for the games. The volunteer in charge of the pizzas and hot dogs and drinks and cotton candy was flawless and unflappable.
About 10:45, it got kind of quiet, volunteers aware they had only a few minutes left.
And then the gates opened, and we had a lot of parents and kids walking in and checking out the cupcake walk and lining up to get faces painted, or running straight for the cardboard maze.
And at the Super Splash, when the first kid hit the target with the beanbag, and that swung the beam hard enough that the nail on the other end punched through the water balloon hanging in the basketball hoop, and the balloon broke and the water drenched the other kid sitting in the chair below, and wet kid laughed uproariously, I knew everything was going to work out OK. Before long, even the school principal got in on the action.