The week started right with an early morning rike west and circumscribed nearly the entire municipal golf course; on which I likely trespassed greeting a potential freezer full of the town deer herd. Four Point Buck Only.

All the homes in this section of PG Eden are mid-century, some still the 1,000 ft sq box containing littler boxes they were built as, other much maligned, some improved with age and do-re-me.

All spawned in the halcyon days just after WWII.  You can feel the presence of guys who made it through the War in the Pacific, remembered a few golden moments on leave from Fort Ord and so they came with their new brides from Tennessee and Texas, from Chicago and Coeur d’Alene and built themselves a future with a peek of the Monterey Bay.

The men and women from WWII don’t live there anymore.  In The Home, or in the grave, their dreams and lives wiped aside by younger families.

But maybe in one or two shuttered and sheltered houses there still breathes a man who survived Tarawa, a WASP who used to ferry B-24’s from San Diego to Fort Lauderdale and a faded copy of Time Magazine with Harry Truman on the cover.

Along the old railway right-of-way stand a set of shacks – once were and some still are – somewhat older than the dreams up the hill by the golf course and these have the feel of summer rentals.  You and three college buddies for three months working construction between your sophomore and junior year at UC Santa Cruz. In 1959.  And maybe still today.

OFFDAY –

Un-standard Tuesday off from the rike and I’m glad I did: knee geechy, shoulder achy.  Und zo, it being an off day from the hike, its hike out to Trader Beer’s for the early week bevutainment replenishment, thence The Dump.

As Monday’s are now Dump-Free, the hordes descend on Tuesday.  Remote parking and a shuttle to the pile of crap.  Nice pallets of sod, though, though nothing for JohnsonArts this day.

Grocery Cheaplet continues to surprise: heirloom tomatoes.  Looking all green and mottled and funky like monster turds and you know tasty.  Not as cheap as a stroll in your garden, but good enough for this mutt.

Slob-Hill Market serves up the jalapeno-cheddar gracknoids highly prized here and elsewhere; significant quantities are procured as a bank against the lean times, lean being antithetical to sacks of fried heart attack.

Once more out to Asilomar to try to shop the Western Red Cedar to Tom Long and I’m Oh For Three.

THREEDAY –

Third rike of the calendar week, a noble 45 minute jaunt taking the week’s time tally to 130.  70 to go.

More to go on the Cedar Squared Project.  In spite of misgivings about how the thin aromatic cedar will join at the 45, I cannot just let the parts rot.  Press forward.

Cut the 45’s, only ruined one of the top slats which necessitated 30 minutes re-work.  Bad.

Glue-up was bad, meaning that the wander in the glue up of the two forms of cedar was enough to make the square and sound meeting of the joints insalubrious.  But glue it up I did and I’ll suffer the consequences.

CONSEQUENCEDAY –

It was the rike that almost didn’t happen.  Annoying ache in the right hip socket, just where you don’t want anything annoying.  A prudent fellow would have postponed the go – not shown here.  40 minutes of the local hills program.  Going forward, suspect I should take two in stead of the mandated one day off, if I were a prudent fellow.

Following, no crutches required, was the empty beer bowser run to Trader Crowded for the weekend psychotherapy tinnies; thence to Colton Hall.

Why?  I’ve volunteered to bounce the Sunday, 10:00 lecture for Art In The Adobes (AITA).  This qualified me for a free pass to all the events, most significantly a brace of historic adobes the insides of which I’ve never seen.

Witness:

Colton Hall was/is the first non-adobe and Yankee-inspired structure built in Monterey – it dates from 1840’s.

Casa Amesi

Casa Serrano

Casa Gutierrez

The House of the Four Winds

The French Hotel, and wait for ….

The Larkin Place.

And so I’m at Colton Hall, the AITA Command Center, where I hope that I can get the sekret handshake and password to allow for Saturday’s adobe penetration.

Yes, and no.

Yes, I can have my credentials, but no, the passes have not yet arrived, but should be available 0930 Saturday morning.

Once more out to Asilomar to try to shop the 24.4 bf of western red cedar to Tom Long.  I’m Oh for Four.

After lunch, there is, on the foot of the castle drawbridge, a suspicious package from Grizzly Tools.  Packing slip indicates that it is a miter trimmer.

You know what it is without knowing what it is.  Every picture frame shop in the world has one.  It’s a sort of dangerous guillotine affair by which the rough 44.8 degree angle you just cut on the bandsaw is sliced into a precise 45.

Once it’s set up properly.

The two wicked blades slide back and forth neatly slicking pine, oak, bone.

And this one wasn’t set up out the factory.

Nor were the factory marks for 45 incised on the dingus at 45.

And so some trial and error – with which we here at JohnsonArts are intimately comfortable – ensued.

In the end, I now possess the ability to cut dead-on 45’s, thanks to some kind benefactor.

I’d never really contemplated owning one, they’re for pussies and faggots.  Real Men miter their crown moldings with chain saws, don’t they?

Pussy or not, I’m damn glad to have the thing.

Amid this joy, there is joy-minus as I regard the horror of the post glue-up Cedar Squared Box.  It’s hellish, but nothing for it but to sand away in a miserable attempt to ameliorate the discombobulated abortion.

The post-clamp wreckage of the Cedar Squared Box, that gidge is the dryed exudate of the Gorilla Glue which hardens like foam and is relatively easy to remove.

In retrospect, I should have NOT glued up the three lower sections as one, and then mitered and glued to a box.  I SHOULD have glued up each four part section starting at the bottom and working up.  Will do if ever I make such a case again.

Onward – sure we have regrets here at JohnsonArts, but they have nothing to do with love, hate, anger, bitterness or drugs.  Finesse the box top, kerf for a thin ply lid and glue it up.

Up to the castle walls grinds a glaring lime yellow figure on a Kawasaki dirt bike.  It’s The Prof come to have me admire his handsome scooter, and envy him a little, which I did.

No one with a Y chromosome cannot regard it but with envy.

FUNDAY –

It was supposed to be fun; but building expectation sets is chimerical at best and crushingly disappointing at worst.

Though the fifth rike of the week was scheduled, opted for two days off.  That swollen toe had nothing whatever to do with a broken distal phalange, but an inflammation in the joint between the metatarsal and the proximal phalange, or a bruise to both.  Two consecutive days off will do us all good.

Good to drive into town and not visit Trader Joe’s for once.

Collected my AITA Volunteer Credentials at City Hall and was vibrating with excitement to visit the adobes.

But all is not what it seems.  Although The Larkin House is listed as a venue on the Art In The Adobes website, it is NOT open for tours.  Neither were any of the other adobes available until 11, which was no where indicated on the AITA website.  Except that the House of the Four Winds WAS open at 10.  Nor was the fact that Casa Amesti was open, but only on Sunday.

My sense of the AITA is that it’s run like a small-town church fair: a set of well-meaning but discombobulated committees whose communication and integration are akin to a game of Postman where every other player speaks only Esperanto.  Or the United Nations.

Just then, Michael Green, the chief of the local State Park office comes out of Casa Gutierrez, recognizes me, somehow, and bids me have a quick look around.

Casa Gutierrez is perhaps emblematic of all that can ruin a surviving Mexican Period adobe.  It has seen half a dozen incarnations from its origins as a rude, dirt-floor hovel to slightly improved rude hovel to flop house, to chop house, to stable, to derelict warehouse to nearly a parking lot until saved and ‘preserved.’

Casa Guiterrez is the best (worst?) example in my experience of destroying a thing to save a thing.

These adobes have been renovated, brought up to code, sanitized and made wheel-chair friendly such that you have to rap on the two-foot thick walls to realize the place is built up from mud bricks.  Typically, it’s only the walls that remain from the original structures, and the occasional door or window transom.  Still, that any vestige of 1830 remains standing is almost a miracle.

Two doors down Polk Street The House of the Four Winds is ready to receive guests.  It gets its name from a wind vane that once adorned the roof peak; conditions in 1830’s Monterey were so primitive – this in spite of being the Capital of All Alta California – something as simple as a wind vane was noted with astonishment and wonder.

The Monterey Women’s Civic Club have re-created the 1890’s vibe.

The original two rooms, and most of the older adobes were built with only two, is decked out by the Women’s Civic Club, which has owned the shed since 1914, in a mélange of mid-19^th to early 20^th Century antiques and bric-a-brac.

As I’m still early on adobe opening, I wander back to Colton Hall and chat up Dennis Copeland.  Turns out that he isn’t a member of E. Clampus Vitus, but knows someone who is and vows to ask the member if he sponsors new initiates.

In foreground was once a titanic cypress tree only recently removed – while better for baking the adobe, less better for linking to Mexican times.

North on Pierce Street to the Lara-Soto Adobe, which has a spotty provenance and was in and off the tax register until about 1890.

It was purchased and renovated about the time of the War To End All Wars, and was briefly owned 1944-45, by John Steinbeck and his second wife, Gwyn, and it was here were he wrote “The Pearl.”

Barbara, the docent-on-duty shows me over the two rooms and some interesting antiques.  She asks me my opinion on a smallish trunk that clear is 200 years old and shows Oriental influences.  My guess was that it was the personal baggage of a supercargo

Sometimes you really wish a piece could speak a little louder.

on trading voyages between Valparaiso, Acapulco, the Sandwich Islands and whatever the Middle Kingdom entrepot was in 1810.  Just a guess.  But then again, it’s so small – about 20 x 18 x 16 inches it makes you wonder wasn’t it designed to pack on a mule….

I pack it across Pierce to Casa Serrano, the only one of today’s adobes in which I had previously seen, yet the real treasure wasn’t the handsome furnishings, some of which are original to the house and date from the Lincoln Administration, but John Burk the docent.

John Burk and his wife are world travelers.  When asked, he said, “Well, we’ve not spent much time in Italy, or Portugal, and we’ve never been to Andorra, but we’ve pretty much covered Europe.”

Yes, Lichtenstein, too.

This including Eastern Europe and Western Asia as far as Kazakhstan (Tuva – no)  and have barged from the Black Sea to the Baltic up and down the Volga.  As if that wasn’t interesting enough, John clearly has about a three-PhD equivalent in world history.  And he’s one of those cranks who once you get him wound up and talking his voice takes over his entire body and whose physical being would starve and rot long before he remembered to shut up and eat.

Says he can trace one segment of his lineage to the Norman crew who came over The Channel just after the Conquest.  His wife’s great-great-great grandfather was a ship captain who arrived in ’49 in San Francisco with a hold full of lumber and glass which he sold for his grubstake.  He’s not making this up.

I’m dazzled.  Even if he was making it up, I’d be even more impressed….

This turned out to the day’s high point, even though I expected that The French Hotel would be.

The French Hotel is otherwise known as The Stephenson House which is the preferred appellation by its denizens and so-called because Robert Louis slept there on a seedy flea-eaten straw mat for six weeks in late 1879 while he was chasing a married woman ten years ahead of him and well before his literary gifts became known.

Maybe the guy had three of these jackets made up for him a year after the royalties started flowing….

I was not a little cheezed off when I couldn’t tour the upstairs cribs, but this disappointment was somewhat reduced by the sterling collection of Stephensia, an impressive array of personal artifacts.  Here’s his multiplex knife, here’s an 1884 picture of the guy wearing a deep blue-black velvet jacket and right next to it IS the jacket.  Wisht I could have opened the glass doors and touched back in time.

Time I headed back to today and lunch, and slack, and readying for what is about to come.

If I’m lucky.

SUNDAY –

I’m on station at the Monterey City Council Chambers well ahead of the 10 AM scheduled lecture: Architect Julia Morgan and the Monterey Connection given by Victoria Kastner.

Julia Morgan is best known for her work with William Randolph Hearst in building Hearst Castle at San Simion, but she had over 700 other commissions.  And was a woman excelling in what was a man’s province for half of the 20th Century.  And so the talk was invigorating and inspirational, although mis-titled as the “Monterey Connection” was about a minute and a half of her spending the odd weekend in a bungalow somewhere up Franklin Street.

Free from my doorman duties, I headed across Pacific Street to Casa Amesti, open only one day a year to the unwashed gawkers such as myself.

It was a total yawn.

I have subsequently asked this question to a number of people whose opinion I value: Before you visit an historic Monterey Adobe, what are your expectation?”

Replies: Period rooms, antique furniture, feeling of history were the typical responses.  Me too, although expectations lead to dashment.

And so it was with Casa Amesti.  Barriers here, can’t go in there, nope, not upstairs.  The rooms, such as I saw amid the press of the unwashed would have made Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt feel right to home.  Feh.

Retired to my casa for work on the new bookshelf edge banding – want a slightly extended shelf for one the drawing room bookcases that will be front to back enough for one of the larger glass display cases, and practice with the router..

A router the fence of hasn’t yet been idiot proofed as if not secured, it will slide right off the table top and shatter on the shop floor.  Which it did.  Delay in the program.

Arrives into the Castle The Prof with birthday beers, 57 of the them.

Arrives Skifflington of The South to help drink them.

Age is unconfined.