See the House Addition Journal. Also see this lovely map.

The plum tree is emitting plums like one of those pastry cones. We keep eating and eating.

The upstairs quarter where we'll re-roof soon is almost empty. The cabin is stuffed to the gills. We moved lumber from hither to yon (while eating plums); the rafters to next to the addition, the plywood flooring off of the other, thinner plywood sheathing, the 2 x 6's onto the floor itself. The Spink finished Harry Potter and went back to Tamora Pierce. Tycho thought about cleaning his room. We ate plums.

Yesterday, four of us lifted the beam that will hold our ceiling up. Today, I painted it with sealant. Finished yesterday's painting and another one of the road up from the dock. Some days are like that.

A neighbor came by and we discussed excellence. According to a recent New Yorker article, ball players once were pot bellied fellows who used mojo to play well. In the 60's they tried pot or speed to get through the game. More recently, steroids were used, which actually have a measurable effect. They may have become illegal, but their use set a standard. Another article says that musicians a hundred years ago were not as well versed as contemporary ones in technique; in speed, tonality and rhythm. They might not have played precisely in tune but they had mojo.

Okay, nowadays we do have to have our houses up to code and we expect our cars to keep running and we want our books to be interesting and factually correct. But we shouldn't let the pursuit of technique push aside sheer human exuberance and style.

A satisfying day that included Spanish homework, lunch with a toddler and his mother, moving windows from the job site to one of those Costco sheds, and the beginning of a painting of David under a bunch of restaurant umbrellas.

As for toddlers, it's not that I don't enjoy them (see yesterday's remarks). It's that I don't like forced associations. I totally loved interacting with today's kid because it was on his terms. He could go to Mom any time he'd had enough of me.

Off to Friday Harbor to get Tycho's bike overhauled, The Gospel of Mary photocopied for a friend, and some contact with my dear husband, who does not relax during his busy summer months.

Came home to a delivery of materials for our addition. I asked the carpenter if I could help. "Babysit," he said. David asked the carpenter if he could help. "Undo these straps and help carry windows," he said. I used to get really defensive when people were sexist at me. My attitude has shifted a bit, and now I just feel impatient. "Get with the program, buddy," I think, roll my mental eyeballs, and move on. And, by the way, I'm not all that interested in babysitting, however cute my little victim may be. Kids don't get fun to be around until they are about 10 or so, when they don't have to be kept from accidentally damaging themselves and they can hold a decent conversation. David, on the other hand, loves 'em young.

In the process of moving the upstairs studio to the cabin, found some old paintings. Spent the late afternoon fussing a bit with them and putting them in the "done" stack. Satisfying.

A conversation with young Tycho led to this: http://www.travistea.com/.

Speaking of sadness, I've been haunted by the conversation I reported Friday 7/15. I spent the morning doing bookkeeping; recording changes in the value of our IRA's and checking accounts, deciding how to invest the IRA contributions we just made (ah, summer!). Bookkeeping is so satisfying. Yes, the numbers are unforgiving. Yeah, so what. You pays your money, you makes your choice, and then the market goes up or down. If you get it all right, you end up with lots of choices because you are rich. If you get it all wrong, you end up broke.

There are worse things than poverty, though. Human despair. Listening to a person I care for very much linking her feelings of betrayal and despair to every event that has ever happened in her life, and proving it, was bad enough. But being drawn into that drama, simply by having an interest in one of the things that orbits the black hole of her feelings, was worse. Being a nerd makes me more comfortable with numbers than with people. They're not as interesting, sure, but they don't spiral into death moods either. We put that overlay on them.

Speaking of sadness, watched Miller's Crossing a couple days ago, another superb Coen Brothers movie. Sadness is built in to noir movies, but this one had hats, and a sort of goofiness that never quite made it to the surface but kept trying. Like, the psychopathic Jewish kid brother that you had to love even as you hoped that he'd get blown off the planet. Or the bloated Italian who kept wanting to explain stuff. Or the thug whose feelings got really hurt when the guy fought back. Neither limp nor insufficiently nuanced.

Watched I Heart Huckabee's last night. It's about what would happen if you had the usual existential thoughts without basing them as much in daily events as we usually do. The characters have their "but what does it all mean?" thoughts right in the middle of human drama, but the h.d. takes the back seat in favor of the thoughts. Very funny.

Tried to watch Sideways today but it just didn't click for me. I want my sadness either to be more nuanced or less limp. Either way.

I've spent the day moving stuff around. One of the reasons we've decided to build a house addition is because our roof leaks and the house wasn't braced well when it was built. We'll take the roof off as part of building the addition.

This was supposed to happen in spring, but our carpenter is sort of laughably unable to make accurate timelines. Now, he is talking about taking the roof off in August. I am supposed to slice the sheetrock off of the area along the roof beam so he can see how the rafters are set into the beam, and so we can see how nasty the rafters look. Are they rotten? Or can we get by with just replacing the vapor barrier and the insulation?

Well, when I slice though sheetrock, it dribbles gypsum. So I'm looking at moving everything upstairs somewhere else. But the reason we want an addition is because we're kind of cramped as we are. So there is the logistical problem of where to put the stuff.

And, I'm finding, there is a big emotional problem. I do not want to slice pieces off of my house. I do not want to take my bedroom apart. I do not want to put everything in boxes and stuff them under the house. I do not want to live with exposed insulation and rotting rafters until August ... or whenever "August" may be in carpenter-talk.

Cleanliness is next to Godliness.

I spent some time listening to a person who was VERY LOUDLY linking washing the dishes correctly and keeping the floor swept with sexual responsibility and general goodness of character.

Of course there were a lot of subtexts going on. However, I think it might be fruitful to look at the statement itself.

Keeping your living space clean, apparantly, has never been a neutral topic. Slaves, wives, or unmarried sisters have historically been supposed to keep things clean. Their character and worth were measured according to how well they kept house; not only in the eyes of the man of the house, but also in the eyes of the neighbors and other housecleaners. Small towns are notorious for gossip about how clean the neighbors are. The gossip does not extend to people who are not expected to do the work of keeping clean; children, men, or women with servants.

It seems as though pretty much everything that was once the only stuff of life is subject to these extreme judgements. Childrearing (and yes, the person who made those statements about cleanliness also said that my childrearing is bad), clothes choice, farming techniques, and spending habits are all subject to moral scrutiny.

Logically, you would think that anything that does not cause a health problem or does not injure other people would be neutral, but of course, none of us are logical. We are embedded in our culture and we have attitudes and philosophies that act as colored lenses through which we peer at reality.

I do think that at heart we are metaphorical creatures. The more unconscious our impulses, that is, the less we have examined them, the more likely they are to be expressed metaphorically. So when somebody attaches radioactive significance to cleanliness, I look at the metaphorical meaning because I can't really find much logic in that attitude, my culture no longer finds cleanliness that overwhelmingly interesting, and my attitude seems sort of irrelevant when I'm trying to understand somebody else.

Most people, I think, link cleaning house with cleaning out the cobwebs in their own minds. Someone who contemplates making a life change would do well to clean out all their files and shelves and clothes. Someone who has had a change imposed on them is likely to do this deep cleaning without analyzing why it's happening. And, because if we're not careful we project, a person who cannot seem to clean their internal mess will look to people around them and make them clean up, too.

Why are kids so notoriously messy? I think it has to do with skill for small ones and metaphor for teens. It's almost impossible to teach small children cleanliness. You have to clean with them or they seize up. As they get older, they're better able to handle the logic of cleaning (books go with books, dirty clothes get separated by wash load) but have trouble with categories. Do they sort books by size or by author or by how much they are loved? From what I've observed, it's pretty easy to clean stuff that you don't care much about, or that you have worked with for years. You do it logically or according to some idiosyncratic personal logic substitute. But if you're a teen, and you are really invested in something, you have too many choices to decide what form of logic to use. Do your clothes get sorted by color or by hipness? Do your papers get sorted by recency or by subject?

Until you know who you are, you won't be able to clean up well.

I used to go through phases. I'd have rubble everywhere for a while, and then would suddenly realize that my thinking was full of metaphorical rubble. So, I'd re-categorize everything, move all my furniture around, and have some kind of slick system that I'd live with for a season before it devolved into rubble again.

As an adult, this has continued. My creative life seems to need sterile tidiness to catch its breath. Once it's up and running again, though, piles accumulate everywhere, each with its significance and contribution to the end product. When the project is done, everything gets run through the washing machine, the wood stove, or Goodwill, and we're back to fresh slate time.

And as far as that conversation, I think that when this person cleans up their own act, they'll be much less interested in the external cleanliness of other people.

Here's a quote from my aunt's 80th birthday gift to my mom in 2001, a memoire of their childhood years. She's talking about the summers they spent on their uncle's estate in Kneden, two hours north of Berlin:

The busy days passed so quickly there and we enjoyed the fine meals every day on the huge glass enclosed dining veranda, out towards the yard. Since we were the guests in the big house, we were allowed to eat breakfast later than the employees of the laboratory and our uncle. We had the huge table to ourselves and were seated at the far end always. Soft boiled eggs waited at our place settings under knitted caps, and rolls, jam, cold cuts were ample at the table for us. If we needed something we only had to call down from the dumb waiter shaft, in the adjacent dining room to the kitchen below and the ever present servants there would send up what we wanted. This contraption was amazing. It was operated by a big rope on either side to be raised or lowered and had two shelves for dishes, about three feet wide and one foot deep.

For lunch and supper it was a different story. A big gong was operated to sound so loud that no one could miss it anywhere. It looked Chinese, a huge metal disk hanging in the hallway. We all had to appear in time for these meals, where everyone was assembled at this long table. Our uncle sat at the top with his assistants, then the different grown up guests were seated and we kids made up the lower end of the table and were to be seen, but not heard during these meals. I still remember the adorable pottery plates and cups with large painted flowers on a white background, similar to Italian designs.

Bikram yoga. Then off to OMSI with Vruba, Julieclipse, and Platypus. It's a wonderful and disturbing place, with a sleazy uncle air of forcing you to be interested in science by displaying it as noisy and colorful. A street busker with funding.

After yoga went to Kinko's to copy some documents from Mom's archives. The most interesting is her Ahnenpass. During the Nazi years, you had to research your ancestors and their religion and keep it in this book. At the time it was expensive, onerous, and frightening. Mom says when she found a "Sussman" great-grand, her heart dropped because it was a Jewish name, and perhaps the bar would someday be raised and she'd be called a Jew. But luckily Karoline Sophie Franzisca Sussmann was Protestant, just like everyone else in her family tree. Mom had to marry into Jewishness instead.

Interviewing an elderly multilingual woman is fascinating. At one point, amongst the German documents, we had a memoire written in French by one of Mom's father's art students, a Jew who had escaped to France. Arnold's parents had gone with him but one day his mother answered a German occupation soldier in German instead of French, and so she and her husband died in the ovens of Auschwitz. The memoire to his parents had a chapter devoted to my grandparents. Re-reading it makes Mom cry. She reads the French to me and says, "And I remember that, too," and goes on about it either in English, German, or French, but I can't understand spoken French and am not fluent in German and don't want to interrupt such an emotional memory. The more interesting the events, the more disjointed her ability to speak about them becomes.

In a way, it's not my business. I wasn't there and don't know the people (although I did meet Arnold once). But I have this crusader's zeal about it; to preserve everything about the Nazi era as a warning. The main thing I get from Mom's remeniscences is that demonizing Germans, even demonizing Nazis, is misguided. (Arnold writes that after he got drafted in the French army he had to fight German soldiers, knowing that he must have grown up with some of them.) As soon as we draw a line between ourselves and Bad Nazis, we lose the opportunity to recognize the Nazis in our own hearts. And if we do that, then we can act like Nazis without even noticing that we are doing it.

Americans as a country have embraced the right of first strike. That is, we can start a war if there is a "good reason." The 2000 presidential election ended with a coup de etat. We can now torture, as long as there is no permanent tissue damage; this policy was made public by a person who most likely will become a Supreme Court Justice. We openly link government policy to fundamentalist Christian theology. We have an official unofficial prison at Guatanamo Bay, where people are kept in cages without charge or trial on suspicion. Librarians are supposed to inform on their patrons. Two days ago on the radio I listened to Michael Savage saying that democracy has failed and it's time we tried something better (I hope I'm quoting out of context, but that's kind of what radio is like, isn't it?).

What interests me is how similar this is to the Nazi years Mom talks about. The more she is able to bring her memories alive for me, the more I understand how it was human beings like us who commit atrocities. She had an uncle who visited their house and was the goofy life of the party as they sat at cards, and who was warm and beloved. He was also a general in the army, committed to serving his country even if it temporarily had a maniac at its head. At what point does that attitude become a crime? Are generals in the US army, who absolutely do know about Gitmo and torture in Iraq also criminals like we assume my great uncle was?

Up early to Bikram yoga. It's just right for me: hot, strenuous, and effective. The down side, though, is that once I stopped doing it on my own last year, it seemed too daunting to start again. A less extreme practice might have been easier to restart. After this morning, I went back to Mom's and had a several hours' nap.

Up early to boat off to the mainland. Went to the Szechuan Noodle Bowl in Seattle's International District with Vruba. Please, do not be put off by his expression of entitlement as he polishes off that final yummy pot sticker. Rather, try to share in his enjoyment.

I think everyone is hard wired for religion. Babies need to believe in what their parents tell them, and to be able to construct a useable world view out of not nearly enough data. Adults aren't as reasonable as we think we are; we still need to get through our days by relying on our beliefs; gravity always works, carrots are good for you, rudeness is inefficient.

Where would I like the human race to be in 1000 years? Well, still living on a lovely planet rich in biodiversity, for one. I'd want everyone to be able to achieve health, education, and emotional satisfaction. People should have a workable blueprint for decent interactions and a reasonable chance at enlightenment.

Religions attempt to address these issues, but in a seat-of-the-pants kind of way. It's clear to everyone that a few tweaks to our neighbors' religion would make them a better person. Few of us understand human psychology well enough to do the tweaking well, though. For instance, we all agree that badness is bad, but somehow, agreeing to stamp out badness only makes things worse, and agreeing to substitute goodness for badness doesn't seem to be workable either.

I think it's about time people looked at our religious impulses objectively. Not, "how can we make people live up to my religion?" but "how does the human psyche work and can we make a religion that will optimize its workings?" (In case you are a religious fanatic, please notice that your beliefs, being based on the only possible truth, will win out under this scheme. Obviously.)

Happy birthday America!

Up really early to lend moral support to David as he changed the oil on the boat. To bed really late after watching 4 episodes of Samurai Champloo with the kids.

Torrential rain in the early morning, crispy sun in the afternoon. In the morning, I fussed around with puddles on the worksite and a nail puller. Wayne called it a cat's paw but the sticker on it said it was a bear claw. I've eaten bear claw pastries.

In the afternoon, I nipped across the island to retrieve the razor blade that the blacksmith sharpened for me, and then cut mats to frame photos for the crafts fair.

And in the evening, watched How to Draw a Bunny, a documentary on Ray Johnson's life. He was a surrealist avant-garde collagist, with friends like John Cage and Andy Warhol.

Surrealism and Dada don't appeal to me, although I am very drawn to Chagall-like dreamscapes. There is some kind of a funny line between saying that nothing makes any sense and saying that the seemingly senseless things of the unconscious are actually rich with meaning.

One of the people interviewed in the documentary mentioned that both he and Johnson had very strict upbringings, and I thought, "Aha!" That's it. When you are raised sternly as a Finnish Lutheran as Johnson was, eventually you must come to a crisis of faith. Metaphorically, you might express it as "Nothing means anything." But I was raised by people who had been through the war years, who had already had their crisis of faith and managed to find meaning without a benevolent God looking over them. As a post-religious family, we never really needed to challenge meaning because we already knew we were making it up as we went along. So, to me, Ray Johnson's art and the statements he made with his life, while important for their time and audience, seem unneccessary.