I am mourning the loss of a really good hat.

It’s been a month… maybe a few days more, since I lost The hat… it was a good hat, a great hat… a green fedora…

At least the story is good… I bought it in a market in the Sacred Valley in Peru, I lost it in a cab in Buenos Aries…

I really liked that hat…

I had no plan to buy a hat on that March day… It was a Tuesday, March 20th… I was on vacation… I was in Peru. We started our day in Cusco… then by van over the pass to the ruins above Cusco at Sacsayhuaman (sounds like “Sexy woman…”) then down towards Pisac, across the Urubanba River, then up to the Inca ruins above the town… We walked among the ruins, our first experience with Inca ruins… scattered along the high ground, large stones… the terraces, clearly a great culture… along the way we met “local” Quechua ladies… The women I was traveling with turned back, but I forged on along a bit of the Inca trail, through a gate, through a tunnel… then rushed back to catch up with the group.

Having visited the ruins, we re-boarded the van and drove down the switchback to the river, a river in flood… water overflowed the bank… one bridge was threatened.

Into town… “New” Pisac, down a narrow street, our small van seemingly too large to fit… an intruder… Off into the market… It was market day… of course we had a guide…We had arraigned for our guide before we ever left home… our guides met us at each airport, with the van, to take us to our hotel, to take us on our tours…

Down a narrow street into the market… Along the street Quechua ladies sit, with piles of grass, hay, food for the cuy, guinea pig, the local delicacy… further in we reach the stalls with fruits and vegetables and cuts of raw meat… nearby a woman is selling dyes… dry powders… they are bright. I buy two sets of the colors. I confuse our guide and surprise the vendor… most westerners don’t buy dyes…

Further into the market… we are now in the tourist area, silver jewelry, rugs and weavings, tee shirts and hand crafts… to one side is a outdoor bakery with wood burning ovens and a cuy house in one corner… we try the empanadas… They are delicious… the meat inside is not easily identified… but, yes, cuy… Tina buys a silver necklace. We buy a small tapestry with hangs on our wall today above the computer… As we walk out of the market I see it… the hat… a green fedora… Here it is a ladies hat… Quechua women wear hats to identify the village they are from… purple bowlers are typical… the fedora, made in Cusco should identify me as from some specific village… I don’t care… the price is reasonable and I like it… It looks good on me…

We continue down river to near Huayilabamba, where we have lunch in a tourist restaurant with outdoor seating and parrots in the garden… then on to through the town of Urubanba to the town of Ollantaymbo… more ruins, we climb the steps in the ruins to the where the Inca trail is… From there it is back to Cusco, over the high plane… over 12,000’ through Chinchero and Poroy… back down to Cusco

The next day we take the train back, via Chichero and Poroy, to Urubanba then down river to Agua Calientes … Agua Calientes is commonly called Machu Pichu Village… We arrive in early afternoon, and immediately take the bus up the hills and switchbacks to the ruins… The ruins are more than expected… much more… we explore… we hike… we have lunch at the Machu Pichu Sanctuary hotel… It’s a high end resort hotel… we aren’t staying, just having lunch, but a backpacker on a downhill bus flips us the bird while we eat… we laugh… It starts to rain… we retreat down hill to Agua Calientes…

The next morning T and I get up and head back to the bus station to head back up to the ruins to see the sunrise… Its raining, and we realize its likely we won’t see the sun, but we go anyway… I wear the hat… (this post is all about the hat, but you have probably forgotten that by now)

Up the switchbacks again… we arrive in rain and fog and limited visibility… we embrace the weather and charge into the ruins… and discover our foul weather gear isn’t as weather proof as expected…we get wet… the hat (its all about the hat) gets soggy…limp…

Back down the hill we change out of wet clothing in the hotel restrooms (we had checked out before we left) I play with the hat… wet felt hats are interesting things… when wet, really wet they can be molded… I spent the rest of the day on the train back to Cusco playing with the hat, molding it, shaping it… making it mine… It was a little large after getting wet… I stuffed the rim with Peru Rail napkins… I continued to play with the hat, to mold the brim to the perfect shape… We established a relationship…

I wore it the rest of the trip through Peru, to Puno and Lake Titicaca, to Lima, to Ica and the Nasca lines… and on the plane back home… It made three trips to Washington DC with me… a trip down the west coast of Mexico, one to Belize, Guatemala, and Quintana Roo… It went to Yellowstone twice… I took it to Chicago… and I wore it while climbing through the ruins at Mesa Verde, there I had to take it off once and toss it ahead of me as I squirmed through a narrow passage at Balcony house ruin… I wore it while riding the White Pass & Yukon Railroad… It went to Yosemite several times… to Carson City three or four or five times… I wore it to Rio, but while in a crowded cab in Buenos Aries I took it off and set it on the shelf behind the back seat… when we got off in San Telmo I left it there… it was gone… I miss it… I still have my bowlers, my boater, a Stetson, more than one cap… but that was The hat…

I really liked that hat, but I have said that before... and now its gone...

Bye, Randy

At some point I will post the photos of the trip through Pisac and the market and Machu Pichu... The photos behind the story… just not now…I am still working through the photos from our recent trip…

The fuse is where? Exercises in caring for a Victorian Home…

I run a museum house… It’s old (most museum houses are)

We have been having fun with the fire system again… It seems that this is a regular exercise… As a public building fire sprinklers are a good idea… As a Victorian House they are a good idea (The National Trust for Historic Preservation published an article several years ago about how many Victorians are lost to fire)

But the fire system is a pain… Our system was installed in 1991. It is a plastic pipe residential system, installed in part as a demonstration project with a mix of donated parts, labor and staff time. As a residential system it wasn’t required to have regular inspections and certification… or maybe it was… but we were not having it inspected or certified… Until the fire inspection four years ago… We generally did OK on the inspection… But the inspector wrote us up for not having the system inspected (and certified)…

Soon after the inspection had our sprinkler contractor come inspect the system so it could receive its 5 year certification… There were issues (of course there were issues, there are always issues.) Because it was a residential system it lacked some valves used during the inspection, further the exposed pipe in the attic needed to be wrapped to protect it from UV light, and finally many of the sprinkler heads were subject to a recall.

Valves were installed… volunteers wrapped the pipes… and we filled out the recall paperwork for the sprinkler heads… and waited…

There were phone calls, appointments were made to have a technician come and replace the recalled heads… appointments were canceled… after several tries all parties gave up… We tried again that winter… and failed again… the sprinkler installer decided that they couldn’t be liable for damage to a historic house and contents, the company wanted a release, they wanted more money… all parties went away frustrated… no progress was made…

We made a couple of additional phone calls… every month or two… with little result…

Until July 2009 when…

We had another visit from a different fire inspector… She was here at the park to look around… we had suffered a dumpster fire, and the fire department had responded, so eventually the fire inspector comes to look around… She was making the park’s operation manager really nervous and miserable… I don’t believe she intended to make her nervous and miserable, but fire inspections can do that… She (the fire inspector) saw my fire connection and asked to see the sprinkler riser… I showed it to her… she asked where the 5 year inspection sticker was… Things deteriorated from there…

Luckily I had documented the issues with the fire system quarterly… but alarms were raised, and we were put on fire watch… for nearly nearly 2 months as people were called, plans made, contracts signed… We finally replaced the recalled sprinkler heads, worked on the alarm, and received our 5 year sticker… which expires in a year or so…

During the 2 months we had to stand fire watch… one employee had to physically check the house every 15 minutes when ever the house was open… it isn’t fun and made us really unproductive… But with the sticker we were released from fire watch… for a while…

Fast forward to January 1010… I leave on vacation (there is a blog about the vacation) the day after I leave the water main serving the house fails… (it has failed a dozen times in the last 8 years) the house loses its water… the park makes a decision to replace the water line rather than patching the patches (again). They run a 5/8” garden hose to supply the house with water… It leaks, it gets disconnected, it gets shut off… it is the water for the house (including the fire system) for the next 23 days or so… the Park’s plumbers and their bosses don’t have a sense of urgency about the situation… They expected local park staff to call to have the utilities marked before trenching, local staff thought the plumbers would call, there is a whole bunch of he said she said going on but not any digging or plumbing, after all they rigged a hose and everybody has water, or do they

I return to the house from a really good vacation (did I tell you there is a blog about the vacation???) to find the 5/8” garden hose in place, the water off, and no information about when anything might happen to fix it… Having learned about fire watches and the rules which trigger them, I call our fire folks, who place us on fire watch… I call my boss who calls park people, who call other people…

The park’s plumbers arrive bright and early Tuesday morning… They replace the garden hose with a fire hose… while it increases water flow to the house it’s still a hose, and in the fire codes a hose is a hose and it’s temporary, and the fire watch continues…

Discussion continues… the parks plumbers return and plan the repair on Thursday… they dig out (by hand) the ends where the connections will be made… they trench by hand where a gas line runs to the house (the gas line is deep, deeper than the water line so there is no problem…) but the plumbers won’t be working Friday (they work 9 hours a day and take every other Friday off) or Monday (it’s a holiday).

The fire system has another problem… we have had a reoccurring leak in the sprinkler riser… where the valves, alarm sensors and other neat stuff is… we have repaired the leaks a couple of times but the sprinkler contractor (the good one, the one who does inspections, not the one who replaces recalled heads) wants fix it right and replace the whole thing… so, since we are on fire watch anyway, we plan to take the system down and replace it on Friday…

Friday comes… the plumber is here bright and early as planned… He takes it apart… he needs to disconnect the alarm, and to do that he should shut off the power to the circuit, but none of the breakers seem to do that… the house’s electrical system is Byzantine… There is a modern electrical service with a breaker panel… it feeds three different fuse boxes… one of the fuse boxes feeds a fourth fuse box… One of the fuse box is in the house, a second in the attic, the other two in the crawl space under the house… which is how I end up on my stomach in the mud and shrubbery trying to inspect the fuses and scribbles on asbestos sheets (sans paragraphs and arrows) which tell us what each fuse and circuit powers… but first, the plumber decides to disconnect the alarm “hot”, then replaces the stack, then while reconnecting the alarm… there is an ark… an electrical flash, and the lights in the elevator room die… dead…

I go in search of the blown fuse… The panels in the house and attic have glass fuses… in theory you can see which fuse has failed… the theory requires that you have a flashlight and good eyesight… I have a flashlight but my eyes can occasionally fail me… I deduce the problem is found in neither of the inside panels… I make my way to the panels under the crawl space… they use cartridge fuses that look the same when working or blown… You need meters and other electrical stuff that I don’t have at work… I fail in my quest… I call building maintenance…

Its not an emergency… what are they going to do, put us on fire watch… we are already on fire watch… Building maintenance shows up on Tuesday (the park plumbers are also here trenching… ) I unlock the house and start this day’s fire watch log. Together we check the breaker box… we check the fuse box in the house, we check the fuse box in the attic… we check the other two… The ones under the house… I lay on my stomach in the bushes and get muddy…

We don’t find any blown fuses…

Confused (at least I am) we decide to try tracing the wiring… (or I should say our electrician tries to trace the wiring… He finds no power where I thought we had no power… he finds that those now unpowered wires run to the elevator controls… (the elevator was installed in 1940… experts tell me it’s really a big dumb waiter with a brake… it is cut into the house wiring in interesting ways…) He finds the elevator and its controls have power… He starts to open various electrical devices which look like they should be powering Dr. Frankenstein’s lab looking for loose electricity… He finds a screw in fuse… a blown screw in fuse… after much effort we determine it’s a 15 amp screw in fuse… It is likely I have spares in my boxes of “stuff” in the house… after a short search I locate them… we install it… the power is restored…

Who in their right mind puts a fuse for the house wiring in the elevator controls???

The alarm restored, the electrician leaves… I knock off as much of the mud as possible lock the house, log it on the fire watch and go back to work… We should have water again on Thursday… I can hope…

On other issues… I have been posting more photos to Picasa… the most recent are of Antarctica… http://picasaweb.google.com/RandyHees/Antartica?feat=directlink I am still adding so haven’t changed the slide show yet… I did update the previous post… Next up will be Valparaiso (maybe… if it gets complicated I will do something else…)

South America, the photos…

Now home, one of the projects is to organize the photos I took… Early in the trip I posted some to Picasa and had them playing as a slide show. Uploading photos is slow with a good connection and the internet aboard ship was not good, it was slow, very, very slow… and expensive… making uploading photos frustrating at best… I soon gave up on the slide shows and just included an occasional photo in blog posts…

I took a lot of photos… probably too many photos… while on the ship I downloaded them daily to my laptop… I flipped them, and deleted about a third of them… immediately… I still ended up with about three and a half gigs of photos… neatly (or not so neatly) sorted into 15 files containing 2671 images…

Now home I am working with the photos… I will better sort them, delete a bunch, edit a few (mostly cropping) and generally get them in some kind of order… So far I have kept them in the order shot… but eventually I will break some out by subject… There are some train photos… there are penguins, penguins, and yes, more penguins… I took a lot of photos of graffiti… lots of doors and windows… I owe the Sig and the sister’s CD’s.

I am (slowly) uploading them to the web… For now I will rotate the slide show shown just over to the right… you can click on it to see the photos in a more reasonable size… eventually I will grow bored of South America and put up something else… but the photos will still be available on my Picasa page… http://picasaweb.google.com/RandyHees

As I write this there are three albums up…

Photos of the Journey there including Atlanta, along with photos from Rio are found at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/RandyHees/SouthAmerica#

Buenos Aires can be found at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/RandyHees/BuenosAires#

The Falklands, including Stanley, the penguins at Volunteer Point, Land mines, wrecked sailing ships and signs of the 1982 war are found at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/RandyHees/FaulklandIslands#

As I add more I will edit this post… and add them to the list… there are other photos there… from other trips, from projects, and occasionally family pictures.

As of February 9, the Antarctic Album is up... (but not done, there are 22 photos from the last day there to add) It's located at http://picasaweb.google.com/RandyHees/Antartica?feat=directlink

As of February 17, the photos from Valpariso Chile are up at http://picasaweb.google.com/RandyHees/ValparisoChile# (and Antarctica is done)

Bye, Randy

Home

Saturday, January 30, 2010,

Our last morning of the cruise started as most mornings do, with the sunrise. We were supposed to dock in Valparaiso about 7:30, but the bad weather exiting the strait of Magellan conspired to slow our progress, with us finally reaching the dock about 8:30.

We were scheduled to disembark about 9:30, but 9:30 went, 10:30 went, 11:30 went and we were still aboard. We could watch then unload luggage, receive produce and supplies for the next cruise, and receive a special local crew to clean and sterilize the ship. We noted that no one seemed to have a sense of urgency to move the luggage...

The ship began to shut down services, first the coffee bar, then most of the service on the Lido. as scheduled, a schedule that assumed the passengers had left, which of course, they hadn't. This was not HAL’s best moment…

Finally, about 11:45 our number was called and we disembarked. The port of Valparaiso is a bit weird. we were docked at a container port. customs and immigration was about a mile away in a remote building, so it was a bus ride to the building to claim bags and clear immigration.

We had made arraignments with a local guide, Christian, the Van Man, for a tour and transport to the airport in Santiago. He was waiting patiently for us. we loaded up and left for a tour of Valparaiso.

Valparaiso was special, maybe my new favorite city… It is old (by new world standards) it is elegant as only a now semi abandoned Victorian city can be… It is artistic… It is colorful… It is a weird artist colony, not yet discovered… It has the formality of the Chilean Navy (the Armada, local heroes to this day) It is a one time capital city now in decline… which it of course it denies….

Christian took us to local streets, to walk about.. past buildings, past churches, past hostels and hotels… This is a city I could spend a week or more just exploring….

We took a drive north to Vina Del Mar… the beach city to the north… then inland towards Santiago… via Chile’s wine country…

We stopped at Emiliana Vineyards… an organic and biodynamic winery… Anyone who has tasted at a California Winery would have felt at home… It was beautiful… the wine was really good… we bought some…

We stopped for lunch… It was a traditional restaurant which used small clay ovens… Tina had Lomo, I had pork, others had a corn pie… all was good… really good… Christian and Alex his driver dined with us… The conversation was interesting… I was trying to understand the Salvador Allende overthrow… and the Pinochet Military government which followed… For Christian Pinochet was not the evil man we have been told he was… Nothing is as we have been told it was… Nothing is simple…

We gave up on Santiago… we had lost hours leaving the ship… there was a 30’ tall puppet walking downtown streets… a grand celebration… as the sun set we went to the airport…

The Airport… Lines, long lines… very long lines… just to check in… then another line to pass through immigration… then a shorter line for security… Then lines while boarding to check our carry-ons and pat us down… Security was significant…

Seated aboard… I slept much of the way to Atlanta… Again Delta did well… I was asleep as we landed…

We (all 6 of us) walked from to terminal 1 or A or whatever… instead of taking the tram… time wasn’t an issue…We said our goodbyes and went to our gates…. There was a Starbucks near ours… we had our “special” coffees…. T & I boarded our flight and were off. We slept (again)

We landed a bit early at SFO… about 11:00 am… now Sunday, January 31… We reclaimed bags, our alternate daughter arrived to pick us up…

Home… The dog was excited… some of the cats were excited… others hid… Home…
Piles of mail to be sorted… bags to be unpacked… piles of stuff… Home…

February 1st…

To work… both of us… Tina took Emma (the dog…) I arrived to find we didn’t have water… so no fire sprinklers… we haven’t have sprinklers since soon after I left… we have rules about this… We are on fire watch… I hate fire watch…My budget is due… There are other deadlines… I want to go no vacation….