Blustering in Astoria

Wow! A whole two-day reprieve from gale force winds! I was actually able to walk outside without grabbing onto telephone poles or other deeply-embedded stable objects. So I took advantage of the calm to start cleaning out the store-room upstairs, which is an unspeakable abyss of clutter. I'm finding things in there that are antediluvian. Of course these "antiquities" are in cardboard boxes that are in various states of rather repulsive decomposition.

The task at hand was to save these family treasures (more because I don't know what the hell to do with them than any other reason) by transferring them to sturdy tupperware containers, labelling them, and moving them to the basement where they can once again be consigned to benign neglect, albeit neatly packed and stacked.
Which would then leave the problem of disposing of the fetid cardboard boxes that once contained all these white elephants, and that is where the lack of wind comes into the picture.

If I had tried to stack all those empty festering boxes on the porch before crushing them into the garbage can, the wind would have whisked them to Alaska, Japan, and who the hell knows where, and I would probably wind up under indictment for international toxic waste-dumping. However, since it was a nice calm day, I was able to stack and crush with impunity, and was not attacked, even once, by rollerblading garbage cans with attack-lids.

In the midst of this purge, the handy-dandy window-installer guy called. I'm finally having some thermapane windows put in the lower part of the house, mostly because I am tired of my hands turning blue and going numb when I sit in my coma-chair by the one of the windows. When he did the window estimate, I asked him if he knew anyone who could jack up the back end of the house, which is sinking into oblivion in the tar-pit equivalent of what passes for a back yard. The upstairs ceilings are cracking as the house tilts more north towards the river, and unless I want to wind up with my kitchen in the Columbia River, I need to get the house back on an even keel.

Window-guy called this morning to tell me that yes, indeed, he has found a experienced contractor who can jack up the house, which is very good news. I have asked and asked for a whole year, and everyone tells me how it's done, but nobody wants to do it. So to have an actual live body say they will undertake this task is amazing. And maybe scary. But what the hell, it has to be done. I just hope to hell this guy knows how to do it right. Since everyone SAYS they know how to do it, but nobody WANTS to do it, I don't have a lot of choices. And it really needs to be done soon ... the Maytag guy can't jack up the washing machine any higher to compensate for the slope in the kitchen.

Just to add to the sanity of my day ... my so-called coup of having one of my enhanced photos of Astoria's Liberty Theatre used on the cover of the Astoria Review is a complete debacle. Oh, it's on the cover all right, WITH NO PHOTO CREDIT. Let's just say I am pissed beyond belief. I let the singer who wanted to use my image to promote her concert at the Liberty have it for the cover as a one-time thing as a freebie ... all in the interest of supporting other artists, and all that good-will crap. My ONLY stipulation in our contract was that I get photo credit for however she used my image. So there she is, an image of her super-imposed over my image, right smack on the cover, and not one teeny tiny word of credit for me. She's lucky I'm not a lawyer.

If I wanted to play hardball, I could demand they pull every single edition of the Astoria Review out of circulation for breach of contract. However, I'd rather let the owners of the Shanahan Gallery handle it, as they also got screwed on the photo credit. I know they will make every effort to come to a resolution with the Astoria Review that will stop me from gnashing my teeth. At my age, I can't waste what teeth I have left on gnashing.

The truly inexplicable part of all this, at least in my view, is that there are posters of this same image all over town, and the photo credit is there. So why did the Astoria Review NOT give the credit where credit was due? What the hell were they thinking? ARGH!

Okay, I'm getting too wound up. I'm going to move to my coma-chair by the as-yet-unthermapaned window, let my hands turn blue again, and watch trash TV ... which is soothing enough to make me almost forget that my hands are getting numb.

Astoria Photografpix

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