Floor to Ceiling Bookshelves

When I said I wanted floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a carpenter was recommended by both his wife and a satisfied customer—honest, reliable, skilled, no cigarette butts or loud music--and I hired him on the spot, the spot being my dining room.  I didn’t bother to check with the place where I’d gotten bookcases in the past, 99 Sanchez Street, SF (621-3761) until the honest, reliable, skilled, no cigarette butts or loud music carpenter started building something that came up in my study:  A book case just for binders.  He would stain the pine wood the same dark color I had stained the ones I bought to get them to match the walnut-finish particle board one I was giving away.  (One bad deed leads to another.) 

Then, when his wife said something about $400.00, I checked into the 99 Sanchez place to find out what I’d paid for a slightly shorter bookcase.  I couldn’t find out about the ones bought in 2005, but now a pine book shelf 6 ½ feet tall, 36” across and 9” deep would be $275.  If I wanted it 11” deep, it would be $319.  I realized then that this carpenter’s talent and time had been wasted on my bookshelf.  I should have paid him to help me pick up a ready-made one and then let him spend his time and apply his skill to something more intricate, but I was happy with what he did and his charming manner.

This time, though, I decided to check on the more intricate bookshelf in advance and called 99 Sanchez about an oak bookcase.  They missed the oak part and gave me an estimate for 12 feet across, 7 feet tall, and 9 inches deep.  (Did I ever tell them how tall I wanted each shelf?)  They said they could make three 48” wide bookshelves for $398 each if I wanted fixed shelves and $700 each if I wanted adjustable.  But that’s when the oak versus pine question came up.  They would call me back.  Unfortunately, I kept my phone pretty busy after that, calling a gardener to get the number for an electrician to fix my non-functioning doorbell and being referred to a handyman who had the electrician’s number.

In the end no one came.  Geary had meant next Sunday, not this Sunday.  Linda and Edwin had to get ready for a few weeks in China, where they’re going tomorrow evening, and then need to get rid of their van.  Dixon simply didn’t come, which is unfortunate because I was going to get his help with the furnace, too, and possibly with the toilet as well as with the non-functioning doorbell.

But, getting back to bookshelves…Jeff told me that a solid oak floor-to-ceiling bookshelf would cost thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars instead of just thousands and thousands, so he plans to put an edge on the plywood (not particle board—much better than particle board).  I’m not sure edge is the right word.  A “finish.”  Something that will make the bookcase look like solid oak even though it won’t be.  I found myself saying, “The trouble with getting one thing that’s quality is that then you have to get another thing of quality, and pretty soon you’re just surrounded by things of quality!  I said this with an agonized grimace.  Or did I grimace as I said this in agony?  Whatever the case, I made the point that I wouldn’t want such a thing to happen to me and MY home!

Jean Tepperman and California's Budget Crisis

I’ve used Jean Tepperman’s four-page graphic “California Budget Gridlock: Grandma Tells the Story” with my students at City College of San Francisco and think it’s wonderfully informative and accessible–except that now it’s getting harder to download that final page. (Earlier copies were supplied by our Union AFT 2121.) We need to educate our students, not just get them to chant. I’m saying this on my way to the Sacramento March in March.  Actually I'm getting a ride with a wonderful colleague whom I plan to reward with gas money, a print out of Jean Tepperman's educational graphic, and a good hunk of the Spanish tortilla de patatas tat I made for Suzy and Kathy yesterday.

I'll report on the March later today, but I should probably mention that last time I went to Sacramento was with Beat It for Education, which can still be found (and heard much to our amusement) online

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzRlfiXIfBg

The idea is NOT to listen to us but to SING ALONG and drown us out.

Here's a picture I took at the rally we had at Civic Center--a whole family holding our signs.

Books as Friends, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves

Some of Mom's books 

Yesterday Jon Carroll wrote a column "My cool Kindle, my warm book."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/28/DD0K1ND2J5.DTL

He expressed so many of my sentiments towards "book books" that I decided to write him a letter.  I'd like to include it here, too.

Dear Jon Carroll,

            Your column on your cool Kindle and warm book came at a very good time:  just when my floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are being built.  For years I’ve had towers of books in my living room because there was no more space for bookshelves, so I tried to give some books away as my son did when he moved from Berkeley to New York City a few years ago.  But he said that of all the things he gave away or sold—his car, furniture, stereo, appliances—the only thing he missed were his books.  I think we feel the way you do.  They feel like old friends. 

            I grew up with a family that moved from place to place, and even though my parents read a lot, our books always seemed to be in boxes.  I felt that once I had a place with books on shelves, I’d really be home.  I do have books on shelves as well as perching in towers, so I feel I’m home now.

            It’s true that, like you, I don’t go back to those books for quotes.  I can find quotes more quickly by Googling.  But I do go back to them.  I shared a book about Tonga with my best friend from Peace Corps days there and asked her to highlight and write in the margin the way I do.  Now, two years after her death from pancreatic cancer, I can re-read the passages she marked and the comments she made. 

            Have you read Anne Fadiman’s collection of essays on books, Ex Libris?  She writes about how she and her husband had to decide whose copy of the same book would go on their shelves when they decided to let their books “mingle” instead of keeping them on separate shelves.  She, too, comments on books as old friends but puts it a bit differently, that she and her husband invest in their books the kind of emotion most people reserve for their old love letters.  (I still have all my old love letters too!)  She also writes about her carnal relationship with her books.  She says that in her family, they didn’t treat books like items too precious to touch but rather as something with which to have a complete relationship.  She wouldn’t frown on your folding down the corner of books.  She’d urge you to go further!

            Now I have an iPod, and I listen to some really good actors reading books I buy from Audible.com.  But even though I know I’m contributing to the destruction of forests, I wind up buying many of these books I’ve heard on Audible because I want to underline favorite passages and SEE what I’ve heard…on paper, with pages I can turn.  Back in 2008 my son Jonathan and I formed the Jo-Mama Book Club, which meets online once-a-month for discussions that go on for about 15 pages of Chat.  He now has a Kindle, but he can tell me the page numbers of the passages I’d like to mark as we discuss each book. 

            My son won’t need floor-to-ceiling shelves for his Kindle.  But to make room for my shelves I have already given away my old Oak desk and taken down my tapa cloth (which I can now have handy for welcoming friends at the airport—the Polynesian red carpet).

            When my mother died, I walked through the rooms with all her books.  (She too finally got her books out of boxes.)  In what is now the computer room but was earlier the sewing room after being my little sister’s bedroom, I looked at the shelves with books and framed photos on all walls.  I looked in her bedroom with her piles of books on her nightstand and on every other surface except her bed.  It made me feel warm and connected.  It made her feel warm—still there! 

            Now it occurs to me that I have the book Shooting the Boh by Tracy Johnston, your very own wife, but to my astonishment, the yellow highlight I used when I was reading it back in 2002 (I put the date—like a diary entry) has faded.  Still, the print lives on in this volume soon to be put on my floor-to-ceiling bookshelves!

            Tina Martin

Oscar Menu 2012

Menu for Oscar Night Sunday, February 26, 2012

Beverages

Bordeaux for “Midnight in Paris,” which has a pretentious wine snob who might not fully appreciate this Bordeaux

Tropical juice (spritzed) for “The Descendants”

Sweetened Southern Style Ice Tea for “The Help”

Appetizers

Soft pretzels inspired by “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”

Cracker Jacks representing “Moneyball” (“Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks!”)

Carrots with bean dip for “War Horse”

Salad

Butter lettuce and vinaigrette for basic French salad

Entrees

Quiche for all three movies that took place in France

Persian lentil/raisin/rice dish with yogurt-cucumber sauce for “A Separation”

Desserts

The not-for-human-consumption Hostess Cupcakes for black-and-white film “The Artist” also represented by the white and black top of the chocolate pie

Petit Écolier for “Hugo,” our French boy in Paris and in memory of my grandparents who were there in 1920, the era “Midnight in Paris” goes back to

Banana cupcakes with lilikoi (passion fruit) frosting for “The Descendants”

Chocolate pie (without the secret ingredient) for “The Help”

Live Entertainment

The 84^th Oscar Telecast, Billy Crystal hosting

A sing-along with Whitney Houston following the telecast

A ukulele performance by Judy Winn-Bell and Steve Hayashi

Oscar Food Feb 2012

What's missing from the Oscar food table is the sickeningly sweet Southern style iced tea.  More about the meaning of things after I finish responding to essays.

Oak Desk

I loved that oak desk, but to make room for floor to ceiling bookshelves, Jeff told me I'd have to get rid of it, so I put an ad on Craigs list, and someone said she and her boyfriend could come for it on Thursday, a day that worked for Javier and me, so they got it.  I wanted them to know about Nicole Krauss' desk in Great House, but the printout on that stayed here with me.  I got a nice thank you e-mail from him yesterday and sent him the link to lots of references about how the desk connected stories and lives.  I didn't mean this as a link between us but rather as an item that affects lives.

One of the things we found at the very back of the desk was a Doonesbury cartoon from 2004.  Gary Trudeau has an "IN MEMORIAM" and lists all of the people (our soldiers, the ones who are counted) who have died in the war.  That was only 2004--just a year and a couple of months after our attack, invasion, and occupation of Iraq.  Now we want to do more of the same in Iran--once again an aggression  "justified" by those weapons of mass destruction which threaten our nation, the only nation in the world that has ever use nuclear weapons against civilians. 

News, Continued

In Sunday's paper there's a sad item in the News of the Day from Across the Nation.  It's about the Memorial service for the cousins of our friend Evelyn--her cousin and her cousin's husband.  They were the only ones not found after the capsizing of the Costa Concordia--among more than 4000 people.  No, wait.  I'm mistaken.  They're the only Americans missing.  That's a less staggering fact but still sad.  Jerry and Barb Heil.

"U.S. relations  (with Egypt) at 30-year low as 19 Americans head to trial."  At a 30-year low?  What happened in 1982? Is that a reference to Israel's returning the Sinai to Egypt?  The Camp David accords were signed in 1978 and the alliance with Egypt became "a cornerstone of the U.S.-backed regional order."  Now that the criminal proceedings are beginning against 19 Americans and others, our foreign aid to Egypt--$1.5 billion--will be in jeopardy, and what will the Egyptian military do without it?
These 19 American+ defendants have been charged with operating local offices  which the powers that be in Egypt thing are "handing out cash to sow chaos in the streets."

I always love Earthweek:  A Diary of the Planet.  This past Sunday reported on the bald eagle population in Florida, which was almost wiped out in the 190s because of DDT.  But now they're on the rebound, and there are so many that they're now facing danger from power lines and heavy traffic.  Imagine!  "Caution:  Eagles flying."  From this column I also learned that elephant seals can go to depths of up to 5600 feet, but now they're having to go deeper still in search of food because of higher ocean temperatures.  They need to reach cooler waters but are reaching their physiological limits in the southern Indian Ocean.  And what about whales?  Humpback whales in the southern Indian Ocean sing different tunes from their counterparts in other places.  They have "unique vocalization."  As for rabbits, there's a "hopping explosion" in Australia.  These cute rodents are "crop-ravaging."

Interracial marriages are now "a record 1 in 12" according to a Pew Research Center study. 

There's news about Whitney Houston's memorial service, and my students are including her on a contact assignment their doing interviewing a native English speaker on musical preferences.

"Iran prepares site to develop more enriched uranium"  Doesn't this sound like our "discourse" on Iraq in 2003? 

A restaurant Jonathan's aunt and uncle introduced us to, Thanh Long, was featured in the 49 mile S.F. Food Tour on Sunday.  That's where Javier and I walked one day, feeling very youthful and strong until we found out that Jonathan jogs that distance in the morning when he visits.    But I love that restaurant and I like the way the reporter Jon Bonne writes about its being at "the ocean's edge and the demilitarized zone."  He says that's just a false image.  It has "its own little misty version of Venice Beach.  I hadn't realized that this restaurant opened in 1975. 

I'm also really interested in the concept of taking our city a square mile at a time for food!  I wonder what square we're in.  I think I'll leave this blog and ask Jon Bonne at jbonne@sfchronicle.com