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Cubanola

West 7th and Bainbridge Streets
Just south of the river off Hull Street

Layers and layers of old signs, but the only word I can read is "Cubanola." One word is all you need when you have Google. Though the rest of the sign remains a mystery, I found out a lot about Cubanola.

Cubanola is a flower, a song, and a five cent Havana cigar (smoked by Australia's War Cabinet at the Victoria Barracks).

The Cubanola Glide (listen) was referenced by T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland.

Cubanola ghost signs have turned up all over. A woman found one beneath a plaster wall when she was restoring her old house in Baltimore. Another Cubanola sign was found on an interior wall in South Boston, Virginia. A sign as faded as this one is on a structure in Phillipsburg, New Jersey.

And, of course, I'm listening to Cuban music as I collect all these links. I had been planning to write something completely different …

Extra, extra

Read all about it.

Washington Post reporters visit Richmond, drink alcohol.

Occasionally the Post sends reporters down here to remark upon our quaint ways. The last time they sent someone, he didn't want to come and the tone of his article was all "so we went here, and ate this, and it didn't totally suck." The reporters on this most recent visit have a much better attitude, even if it is mostly "Woo! Alcohol is so much cheaper here!"

Baby's first drive-by

Things I learned today:

Guns are very, very loud. (Okay, I knew this, but it's always a shock.)
The police do come very quickly when you call. Lots of them.
I have no tolerance for bullets being fired in my general direction.

So, yeah, some of my neighbors' associates delivered them a warning in the form of lead today. At lunchtime, a green car (I saw it from my window. Where I was sitting. Yes, I could see the open window of the drive-by car from where I was sitting. Excuse me while I freak out again.) pulls up in front of the neighbors' house and five or so shots are fired at the neighbors' cars. Here is a picture.

I called 911. (The neighbors whose car got shot didn't. Hmm.) Then I called the neighbors' landlord, who said he's been told what's going on with his property, but when he confronted his tenants about how everyone says they're drug dealers, they swore they weren't involved in nothing like that. Yeah, and he seems to have believed them. However, they are behind on their rent, so he'll tell them to pay up or get out. Everyone else on the block will do the happy dance when they get evicted. Or if. It had better be "when."

All afternoon people kept driving by to look, which did wonders for my nerves. (Were they there to look? Or to shoot guns?) Cars would slow down and people would hang out the window. One car went around the block a couple times to take extra looks. A couple guys came to ride their bikes in circles by the cars while they talked and laughed on their cell phones (because this is so entertaining).

Nobody is parking anywhere near their cars.

Day of snacking

Pucca Chocolate, University Potato Flavor

Way too much snacking today. We ran by the Tan-A market because Oz wouldn't listen to me when I said that all the Pocky was stale. (They have a habit there of marking out the sell-by dates on food items whose sell-by date has long gone.) Stale Pocky is not worth the trip, but he bought some anyway and I picked up these Pucca biscuits, some matcha (green tea) Melty Kiss, and Matcha Softo (chewy green tea candy).

What, you may ask, are university potatoes? I had the same question, because I'd never heard of them, and google replied with sort of an answer and a recipe. University potatoes are fried sweet potatoes with a sweet glaze and black sesame seed sprinkled on. These sweet potatoes are really yams, and not exactly what are generally sold in U.S. grocery stores under the name of sweet potatoes. (Sweet potatoes in name only! Tubers: By their true name you shall know them! Death to the yam hegemony! Some sweet potatoes are more equal than others!)

The Pucca biscuit version of the university potato does have a nice, mild sweet potato flavor, but that's it. The "chocolate" filling is white chocolate cream with sweet potato powder mixed in and the pretzel outside doesn't have much flavor. The black sesame flecks in the pretzel have no flavor whatsoever. This absence of flavor (anti-flavor?) is characteristic of Pucca biscuits. Once I had some black sesame flavor Pucca and I swear the only way you'd know you were eating them was from the texture.

Matcha Melty Kiss, on the other hand, are very tasty. The combination of the bitter cocoa outside melting away to the bitter green tea inside works surprisingly well. Also, the reason why they're so melty is the super-high fat content. Mmm.

Other snacks consumed today include Sugar Cane Lime cookies, dim sum treats, and Pocky (not stale).

I feel a little bit ill.

Fulton Gas Works

East Main and Williamsburg Avenue

The city thinks it wants to put a baseball stadium in my neighborhood, but they're not thinking about it very clearly. The thinking, or lack thereof, has been going on for a while and the ideas aren't getting any better. The site they're looking at now is the old Fulton Gas Works, snuggled up by the river on the far side of Church Hill from downtown.

Richmond actually has a baseball stadium in a great site for a baseball stadium, or at least the site where there's been a baseball stadium for decades, so we're all used to it, for God's sakes, why change? This is Richmond. We don't do change. If they must have a new stadium, I wish they'd put it there. Unfortunately, the president of VCU has said he wants the Diamond for VCU. Trani's talks with the city tend to go along these lines:

Trani: "I want to knock down all those art deco buildings downtown and replace them with bland glass and concrete boxes."

City: "Okay! Go for it."

Thus there is now some concern in the neighborhood.

The Fulton Gas Works site lies in the V-shaped stretch of land between East Main and Williamsburg Avenue, separated from the nearest interstate by a couple railroad crossings and many two-lane city streets. Here's a handy map. Something not readily obvious from the map is that the site is in a flood plain, along with a park and residential development. (Why is there a housing project in the flood plain?) Also, since this was a coal-burning facility, there's some concern about how toxic the dirt is. But wait, there's more! The combined sewer overflow drains out through Gillies Creek, which runs right through the site. This means that when there's a heavy rain, the sanitary sewage (e.g. poop and pee) ends up in the storm sewers and the whole mess drains out into the river right here. Yummy.

The baseball people seem to be aware of all these issues and more. I'm glad somebody is.

There's yet another problem with the site, the mysterious nasty smell which often wells up from the river, through Shockoe Bottom and up into Church Hill. Okay, it mostly only happens on days when a low pressure system is passing through. We get so few of those. Hah. Are they going to hand out noseclips at the gate when people come to watch their baseball game or concert? (This is supposedly going to be a multi-use facility. But these concerts won't be noisy or bother the local residents in any way. No siree!) Will the baseball team have to use the opposite of Breathe-Rite strips?

One of the days when I was down taking pictures at the site was a stench day. I saw these guys with briefcases walking around down there. Developers? I hope so, and that they were saying, "What's that smell?"

I hope they find a better place for the stadium. I'd like to see the city stick to city stuff. How about environmental cleanup? Elimination of the nasty smell? Improving the roads and public safety problems? Maintaining the neighborhood parks?

I'm dreaming.

Took long enough

Yesterday afternoon I finished the first draft of Unmentionable Things. Go me! It came in at 50,599 words, not a bad length for a Young Adult novel. I cleverly decided to knock a few years off my protagonists' ages, thereby changing the market so that the shortness of the story wouldn't be a problem. But it took over two months to get those words. Okay, I had some time in there when I was sick and not writing. But still, the 700 words/day output? Very lame.

I felt like I really didn't hit my stride with this story until the last third or so. Now I'm going through withdrawal because I managed to end on the upswing of the writer's pendulum (the "Hey, this is pretty good!" as opposed to the "Wow, this really sucks!"). Even so I'm not sure how well it will hold up when I go back to edit and revise. Will I have to rewrite the whole first half again? Probably.

But I don't need to think about that now. It's time to pick up The Egyptian Building again, which I haven't looked at since I finished the first draft in early January. I know the first ten thousand words will need rewriting. I'm hoping to be pleasantly surprised by the other eighty thousand words.

Things I see

Seen on a visit to the secret bathtub graveyard. (If I tell you where it is, it won't be a secret.)

We went out and took pictures of things today. The bathtub graveyard was a side trip on our way to lunch from Rockett's Landing, where we went to get pictures of the ghost signs on the warehouses before they disappear altogether. The Richmond Cedar Works are being turned into a big retail/residential thing and the ghost signs will not likely survive the process. I made up a photo set which includes the one "before" picture I've got.

While the development is probably a Good Thing, I'll miss the signs. I always liked that stretch of Route 5. I can hop in my car, or just walk, and in just a few minutes be in a semi-rural industrial area with a view of the downtown skyline. With all the development around the city, this is (or was) one of the few places where you could pass from city to country instantly and without having to drive through suburb/exurb/shopping mall hell.

Many things

The other night when we drove home from the grocery store, a big, fat, butter-yellow moon was hanging low over the city. Astronomy, up close and personal.

Art Boy across the street finally got a new tire for his truck. (Several art students live across the street, we refer to each of them individually as Art Boy since we don't know their names.) For weeks he's had this flat tire that he's had to pump up every time he wants to drive somewhere. Up and down the block, black smudges on the pavement show where he's run his compressor. We were just starting to formulate a plan to offer a new tire in exchange for some art.

I crossed the 40,000 word mark on Unmentionable Things last night. This is what I've been writing instead of journal entries. I haven't been able to recycle as many scenes from the earlier version of the story as I'd hoped. Whenever I do get to use one, it feels like Christmas: Free Words! Now I'm in the final stretch of this novel, the last 10,000 words or so when the plot all comes together and the writing is easy as riding a bicycle downhill with the wind at one's back. It makes the first stage, when the words have to be yanked out one by one from . wherever, worthwhile.

After being disappointed by photographs ruined by sunshine glare, I finally figured out that the "Auto" white balance setting does not, in fact, automatically give me the best white balance. I tested out the other white balance settings by photographing the same sunlight object with each different settings and discovered that the sunshine setting is best for sunlight things. Whaddya know? I guess the I'm going to have to be the smart one in this human-camera relationship.

I need to get junk cleared off the back porch. Then I have to find a contractor to replace the bad boards in the porch. Then I have to find a painter to paint the house and porch. I should get started on that today. Or maybe write.

Not a proper entry

(I try to avoid blogging about blogging.)

But this is kind of interesting.

In this entry, I linked to and wrote about a Washington Post article. Today my referral logs showed that someone came to me from that article.

Sure enough, through the magic of Technorati, that article now links to me:

Fame, fortune, and regular calls from the mainstream media whenever they need a quote from a blogger are sure to follow.

Right?

Out and about

J. P. Crowder's Virginia & Smithfield Hams
Brook Road and Broad Street

Too many reflections and crooked! But this is my favorite photo out of the umpteen I took this morning. Also, I went and signed up for Flickr so I can add an extra step to the whole photoblogging thing.

When I told Oz yesterday that I was going to haul the old computers and monitors out to the recycling center, he said, "Oh wait! I can take time off and come with you!" And so he did. He took a day off for a fun trip to the recycling center. And a doctor's appointment. And then I said, "I want to take some pictures of the storefronts on the south side of Broad Street. We have to do it before the leaves come out, and it has to be in the morning so the buildings won't be backlit." And things went on from there.

We were a little bit late to get the good light. We're going to try again on Saturday, instead of slugging around the house till brunchtime as we usually do.

The recycling center would be a great place for photography with a post-apocalyptic theme. Unfortunately, the whole place is a hard hat area so we didn't linger. I did see two guys using plastic wrap to bind together eight (ten?) foot high stacks of metal wheels on a pallet.

And another, not really related thing. A couple weeks ago we saw a No Smoking sign appear in the window of Country Style Donuts. We had to look twice because we couldn't believe it. "What will the old codgers do?" we cried. Whenever we go in, a minimum of two old codgers, cigarettes and coffee in hand, are seated at the counter and telling lies about lawnmower motors. We haven't done any followup because we've been trying to cut back on donuts, but we've noticed that there are always cars and trucks out front, so the sign doesn't seem to have deterred the regulars.

Today, for breakfast after our photography jaunt, we went to a Waffle House up the road from there. A sticker on the door announced that the Waffle House was now smoke free in accord with local ordinance; another, older sticker said that Waffle House provided a non-smoking section (which I don't recall they ever did). We said, "Woo!" because we are non-smokers. Then we went in, sat down, and noticed that a number of people were smoking. While we were eating, another guy came in, sat down by us, and started smoking. The waitress asked him if he'd like an ashtray.

I guess that all the diners on Williamsburg Road have posted these No Smoking signs to comply with an ordinance to … post No Smoking signs? Or maybe here in the East End, No Smoking means that you have to ask for an ashtray.

I'm curious about this ordinance, especially since I couldn't dig up anything online except articles about how the statewide smoking ban was defeated.

Implements

The crape myrtle is not entirely pruned. There are some remaining bits which are too fat for the loppers that we have. We are in Lowes.

"Okay, so we need the aisle for things to cut up other things," I say.

"They have an aisle marked that?" Oz asks.

I make for the lawnmower display and we walk down the aisle of lawnmowers, weed whackers, and accessories thereof. I say, "No. But that's what we need. What we really need is a chainsaw on a stick. Ha ha! Oh, look. They have one."

For a moment we contemplate the pole saw hanging above the chainsaws.

Oz says, "Sounded like a joke, didn't it?"

"Should we get it?"

"It looks like a really bad idea."