A Delicious Helen Turley and More Construction

This is the first Labor Day in the last dozen years that the Plotniks are not hosting the Annual Noe Valley Voice Summer Party. But continuing construction canceled the idea this year. Next year we should be back, Jack, and do it again.



Yesterday, the Great Zinfandini family came over for a really good meal. Zinfandini brought a Tri-Tip to be bbq'd that he had rubbed with a coffee/chocolate/pepper spice rub and Plotnik made tabboule and homemade dill pickles and The Great Ducknik put together a blueberry/nectarine/ plum/apple crisp. Miss Fee picked cherry tomatoes from the deck.

Maybe the best part of dinner was a bottle of Helen Turley 2003 Zinfandel, one of those expensive bottles that for once really makes you understand why it costs so much. Man! Z brought the Turley along with a 2003 Raffanelli Zin, in all other situations the best wine you'll ever drink. Not last night. Compared to the Helen Turley, the Raffanelli tasted a little bit like Charles Shaw's fancy younger brother. It's not easy to do that to a Raffanelli.



Today is Labor Day, so it's a good day to labor. Handy Mike and his assistant Kevin will be over by 10 to finish up the carpentry they began the day before yesterday. It's one of those things that the better job these guys do the more invisible their work becomes.



By tomorrow, if all goes well today, the old siding that was in need of patches or greater repair, and the simple trim around the less important windows should be ready for J-Whack to paint. Of course, underneath all the paint and repair is all the hard stuff -- the protection against water and rain and rot that has to be done first.




The new white siding is cedar, not redwood like the old stuff, and the boards are, like all new lumber, thinner and narrower than the original. In the old days, when this house was built, 2 X 4s were 2" by 4". Now the '2' is an inch and a half and the '4' is 3 1/2" and sometimes 3 1/4". So nothing new is the same size as anything old and carpenters and renovators have to plan for all the corrections they have to make to make new stuff look as good as old stuff.