New Orleans - An American City Unlike Any Other

I just returned from a some-expenses paid work trip to New Orleans, a city I hadn't been to since my bachelor party in 2015, but a city that I really enjoy visiting.

The main thing I love about New Orleans is that it holds a uniqueness that is sadly missing in many American cities. Most American cities are everchanging landscapes following the latest in value-engineered building trends. Most big cities start to look generally the same. But not New Orleans. 

I've always posited that if I fell asleep and work up in New Orleans that I would instantly know exactly what city I was in (San Francisco would also fare well in this exercise). It has held onto its history better than nearly every other city I've visited, and that historic architecture is generally unique for American cities. The number of pre-revolutionary war buildings and pre-civil war buildings in New Orleans must be unmatched in the USA.

This trip I was able to spend some time in the Garden District and it was such a delight to walk around that neighborhood. From the mansions to the shotgun shacks, some beautifully restored some in a more dilapidated state, but all held beauty and charm, with nary a modern McMansion in sight. I also quite enjoyed hanging out in Igor's on St. Charles street drinking $2 Miller High Life and watching the Olympics on a steamy Louisiana afternoon.

A house in the garden district

That leads to the other reason I like New Orleans, it's a great drinking town. Of course things get skewed with Bourbon St. which is a fun time unto itself, but there are many great bars all around the town. Most of those bars are in old buildings, which I love. I spent a long time chatting with the owner of one of my favorite Bourbon St. Bars, Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, and he told me about the history of the building going back to the 1720s - and they still don't have lights!

I'm not sure the next time I'll be making it back to New Orleans. I'd still really like to go to the WWII museum, and explore a few other areas outside of downtown/garden district. Unfortunately nearly every local I talked to said unsolicitedly that the city seems to be going in the wrong direction. This was confirmed for me when I looked up the population losses and crime rate. I felt that a little bit from the last few times I visited, but chalked some of that up to being there midweek during the summer. It felt a little dirtier, and a little rougher around the edges, and the sidewalks were atrocious. I'm amazed the city isn't getting sued every day by people being injured on the sidewalks. Hopefully the city will continue to attract visitors to enjoy one of my favorite places to walk around with a beer in the US.

Time

Lately I've been more pre-occupied with the concept of time and my own aging. In many ways having kids makes you think about your own mortality. It's not something I enjoy thinking about, realizing that life is passing me by and that I very well may be halfway through it. This is a very unpleasant thought and my body gets very tense at the mere notion that the blip of my existence is whizzing by so quickly. It is so unpleasant to consider that I think I will not continue to expound on it.

Time also comes into play often with the ranch. Carly and I have a really great vision of what the property can become. We've done so much in the 3.5 years that we've been here, and have accomplished so many things, but the list of projects that lies ahead and continues to grow in way that at times seems daunting. The property boasts so many great assets, but they hadn't been properly cared for in the 15 years before we moved onto the ranch. For example, the chicken coop was a really well built structure, but it needed a total refurbishment that took me a year to complete. And there are a bunch of other structures that need the same. It's about an even split between trying to keep the existing things in good condition and trying to add new aspects to the property.

At the beginning of the year we renovated the ancillary house which was way overdue for some upgrades. I did a majority of work on that myself with the help of some tradesmen we know. We're now living there while we renovate the main ranch house. That work is being done by a GC, but it still is generating projects for me like building the outdoor kitchen for the beer fridge and flattop. Once the house is done then it'll be time to focus on the landscaping, where we have big plans for a garden, bike grotto, greenhouse and tool shed. Those alone are a few years worth of projects.

But the truth is that I love doing it, and I love seeing it come together as part of our vision. I have no problem investing my time, sweat and money into this ranch. I'm building on the progress made by Carly's father and grandfather. If I can make progress on making this ranch a better place for my kids, I think that would make my blip of an existence might be worth it.

The Three Most Useful Tools to Have on the Ranch

This is my 4th year living on our ranch, and being on acreage definitely has it's perks and challenges. There is always work to be done on a ranch and the scale of things along with the ample storage opportunities make owning the right tools a must. In the last 4 years I've found these three tools to be absolutely essential to maintaining our ranch.

The tractor in all her glory.

1) The Tractor. Simply put, I don't think we could maintain the ranch without a utility tractor with a front-end loader. I don't even use the tractor to work our ag land, but it's just so useful for so many jobs. Just this last week I've used the tractor to: haul branches to the burn pile, move concrete pavers to a spot where I'm putting a path in, remove the sod/dirt where said path would go. Combine that with the implements like the box blade and the auger, the tractor is the most expensive but also the most necessary piece of equipment on the ranch.

2) The chainsaw. We have about 50 trees on the ranch, which means a large amount of tree trimming and deadfall. We also have a wood fireplace so I spend considerable time cutting up wood for firewood, and it simply wouldn't be possible with our chainsaw. When we first moved here we had a very old electric chainsaw and a crappy Poulon Pro that barely ran. I quickly went out and bought a 50cc Stihl Farm Boss that is a fantastic tool for the ranch and a smaller polesaw that can pretty much do everything I need.

3) The utility trailer. Our first few years on the ranch we relied on just having our ranch truck to haul things. But like most trucks you can't fit a 4x8 sheet or other large items in the bed, and getting things up into the bed can be a pain. After a year it became clear that we needed something bigger. I got a 10x5 utility trailer with a fold down ramp and have use it so much more than I imagined. At first I thought it would be used just to haul materials and take dump runs (which happens at least one a month). But it's been super useful for a variety of other tasks as well. I've used it to pick up furniture and vanities saving myself big money in delivery fees. When I needed to get some sand from the local rock yard for the paver project, the trailer made it super easy to haul and then unload. 

Honorable mention tools:
1) Zero Turn Mower - A must for mowing around the trees in the orchard
2) Paint sprayer
3) Power Washer
4) Pit in the garage - a must have for doing your own oil changes and general vehicle maintenance
5) Wagons - I use wagons all the time to move tools and materials between the buildings. I'm not hauling around 5 gallon buckets of paint!

Tools I'd like to have:
1) Trencher. I'm often thinking about running water or power to various part of the ranch but without a trencher it's a bit of a pain. I think I could get an implement for the tractor to make this job much easier. In the long run I think a trencher would be a worthwhile investment.
2) Wood splitter - I currently rent one which means I need to process and stack 2 cords in one day which is an absolute killer of a day. With a splitter I could spread that job out across a few months, but they're so expensive compared to how often I'd use it.
3) Bucket truck - It'd be nice to have a cherry picker, boom lift or bucket truck to do high work in. It'd be nice to be able to trim tall branches, string lights, repair barn rafters, or literally pick cherries in a bucket. I see these come up at auctions all the time, but they are still pretty expensive. Someday though it could be a really useful tool.

Milestones

17 years ago (and a week) I started this blog.

10 years ago today I moved from Seattle to San Diego. I packed whatever I could fit in the back of my Camaro, drove down I-5 and stayed with Jello in SF. The next day we drove down the Pacific Coast Highway, stopping in Santa Barbara for the night. After making our way through LA we arrived in San Diego and celebrated by having a beer at the bar inside the Hillcrest Whole Foods.

Jello and I at the grocery store bar

0 years ago Michigan won the National Championship. Their first since 1997, when I was 9. At the time I was young enough to think it would be a somewhat regular occurrence. But it was a long arduous road to get back to the top of the mountain. Many better writers have waxed poetic on this journey and what it means. For me it's sheer joy and elation, having stood in the Big House and watched us lose to Toledo in 2008. All those low moments and having to watch all the players who graduated without ever sniffing a Championship, or worse, a win against Ohio State. Those lows make this high feel even higher.

I'd love nothing more than a Michigan dynasty. But it's a rapidly diminishing marginal return. That feeling of the first win against Ohio State after losing 8 in a row doesn't compare with their feelings if they had won a 9th. Just getting back here, even once is enough for me. As Blake Corum said "Business is Finished". I will still be a huge fan forever and watch every game, but that weight of them desperately needing to win each game feels like it's been lifted. Maybe not against our rivals who we need to beat to keep talking trash, but if we lose to USC or Texas next year, I think I'd be immediately at peace with it. I don't want to wait another 26 years, but I'm content to ride this championship for at least the next 10.

Laziness

I'm sure I was the source of much frustration for my parents. Beyond being a total spazzoid, I was an extremely lazy child. I would try to do as little as possible, and probably wasn't a very helpful kid. 

I remember when I was in 7th or 8th grade I had to mow the lawn each week. Our backyard had two wide beds with narrow strips of grass behind them. I was so lazy that I realized I could skip mowing the grass behind the beds and no one would notice. Of course eventually my dad did notice, and he wasn't happy with how I had half-assed my job, and warned me about half-assing life. But whenever I mowed the lawn I was always thinking about how to make that unenjoyable chore a bit easier or faster. I'd be listening to my walkman and thinking about the optimal mowing pattern to reduce the time lost to turns.

In many ways that sort of thinking is what led me to become an industrial engineer, where I could work to make processes more efficient reduce waste. Industrial engineering is really engineering for lazy people. It taught me that if the objective is to look out of your house on a nicely trimmed yard, that mowing behind those beds wasn't value added, but rather was waste that could be removed from the process.

My laziness has followed me into adulthood, but I noticed - especially once I started having things I cared about - that there is a certain pride of going the extra mile or doing the little things that only I would ever notice and I do them in spite of my laziness. 

Now this laziness does come with a few downsides. First, being lazy takes a tremendous amount of effort. Having to spend 10 minutes contemplating which route would be most efficient to run my errands far outweighs the time savings. Second, it's hard to achieve greatness in this life without putting in hard work. But what is greatness, and what makes it so great? The more I see of it, having a powerful career, or a bunch of money isn't always as great as it seems. 

I'd like to think I've stumbled on a system of optimized laziness. I've learned to pick the things that I really care about like being a good dad and building chicken coops and give my best effort on those. But when it comes to wrapping gifts, I'm as lazy as they come, and I will half-ass that job every Christmas Eve. Before having kids, my career was a bigger part of my identity. But I've come to realize that having a bigger job just comes with more stress and more work that's not always worth the ego boost or additional pay. I've found my way into a job that optimizes my effort:pay ratio. I could work twice as hard to make 20% more money, but that's not optimized laziness. 

Laziness has been a big driver in my life, but honestly, it's turned out pretty good. I might never be on the cover of a magazine, but I'm happy to float through life taking the easy route wherever possible. It's not a terrible way to live.

The best prank I've pulled

Yesterday I was driving my kids around in my wife's car. Her car is older so I get to enjoy the radio, and as I was driving a little ditty called I Want To Know What Love Is by Foreigner came on. I was immediately reminded of a great prank I pulled.

You might want to go ahead and play it while you read the rest. It'll only make things better.

Back in our college house we played a lot of Age of Empires. Many an hour were spent LANing, and AOE has been mentioned on the blog several times. The great thing about AOE was that there were taunts that you could type into the chat that would play a short audio snippet. Some of the bests were "I NEED WOOD" and "WOOLOLO". I eventually discovered that these taunts were just saved in the game files as MP3 with a naming convention corresponding to the number you entered into the chat. This spawned a great idea for a fun prank.

Over the next week or so, whenever a roommate's computer was unattended I would quickly and quietly plug in a flash drive and save the MP3 of Foreigner's I Want To Know What Love Is in their taunts folder. Once everything was set up I wanted until a game where I was winning big and as I went into my final death blow assault I hit the magic numbers, and a cascade of opening notes of one of the best power ballads of all time start playing through everyone's speakers over the sounds of me slaughtering their armies and townspeople. The combination of that 5 minute slow jam and being in their base killing their dudes was such a hilarious paring that I laugh just writing about it.

From that day on, I Want To Know What Love Is was played every time someone was about to win a game of AOE. The best thing is that you could have multiple iterations of I Want To Know What Love Is playing at the same time, so during some games there would be 4 or more I Want To Know What Love Is's playing. Now that's gaming!

Saying Goodbye to my Childhood Home

My parents sold my childhood home and moved to North Carolina. Granted, they've been talking about moving to the mid-south or Carolinas for about 10 years. And for the past year they've been building a house in Charlotte to move into. So I've had time to process this, but still, they've gone and sold my childhood home. The bastards.

This is the only home I've ever known, having lived there from the age of 1 to 18, and then coming home to visit for the next 17 years.  This is the place where all my childhood memories are most associated. Where countless hours were spent, tears shed, grasshoppers captured and sleepovers held. Every Christmas morning for 25 years was at that house. And now some stranger lives in it.

It's now a house I can only drive by and view from the outside. Never again will I enter her warm bosom of nostalgia and be reminded of the joy and agony that accompanies childhood. Frankly, I'm not sure I ever will drive by. My parents moving likely means I will have no reason to visit my hometown. Why would I go, and if I did, I'd have no place to stay. My youth is now a fleeting memory, and I, a middle aged man.

My parents however seem to have no qualms about departing the house they have inhabited for the past 35 years. Perhaps they've spent the past 10 years processing the impending change. They bemoan the loss of good friends, but friends are always transitory. How can they not grieve a house they have nurtured, and the memories contained within?

As a child I was always in awe of my grandfathers house. It was built immediately after the civil war. A stately home built for a county judge with 10 foot ceilings, a large porch and a sun-room. My grandfather lived there for 50 years, and my uncle has lived there for 25 more. But someday that house, a house that is the centerpiece of my father's family, will pass on to a new family. I've thought about this a lot over the past 20 years, and for some reason it always saddens me. Even though I was just a visitor, it's the place where most of the memories of my grandparents are tied to.

I wish I knew why I (and I suppose most people) tie so many memories to the physical houses. I certainly still hold an emotional attachment to our house in San Diego where we lived, even if only for 7 years. Perhaps it's because we put so much work into fixing up that house, perhaps because that's a house where our family sprouted, perhaps it's the pride of the first house I owned and cared for. I really don't know, but the song The Old Apartment by BNL always hits me in the feels.

I'm excited for my parents new chapter. I always knew my childhood home wouldn't be there for me to visit forever. I think knowing that it's gone is just the close of a chapter in my own life that I wasn't quite prepared to have end.