To survive a 6+ Richter Scale earthquake first you have to make sure you don’t fall down. Keep your balance. Once the initial earthquake is over make sure to run out of the structure you were in and get to a safe place. In an ideal situation the staff of the resort at which you are staying will direct you to a safe and covered place, triage, and distribute food and water to everyone.

If you are at a resort in Costa Rica you may have to do just a little more to make it through because the resort staff may just decide to say something to the effect of “screw those tourists”; things like scavenging through the wreckage of restaurants and rooms for food and water — and toilet paper — in the dark, carrying firewood to make your own fire, and using as much charm as possible to convince some other tourists to let you sleep in their rented van. That evening you should then try to make arrangements for a helicopter transport — at any price — with virtually no levels of cellular service. When that doesn’t work you should then try to sleep in the van parked on the side of the cliff while it rocks back and forth quite regularly from aftershocks.

Eventually the next day, after not sleeping and sitting in relative terror the entire night before, you should then wait patiently for your $850 helicopter to show up for half of the day. While you wait you should eat the pineapples you scrounged, drink the remaining water and Coca-Cola, enjoy a cold Hershey’s bar (kept cool in the small cooler you picked up in the destroyed restaurant), and watch as the helicopters continually take out other people and leave you at the defunct resort. By some stroke of luck or through sheer force of will you will find another resort-owner-provided helicopter that can seat three out of the four people in your group and you take advantage.

The remaining person in your group should then get taken by four-wheeler across the ravaged countryside to meet up with the rest of the party.

The Red Cross should be in place by now, providing transportation for your party, sitting with luggage by the roadside, to a nearby refugee center. If your eyesight is good you should then accidentally bump into your travel agent’s driver and wrangle a ride back to San Jose where you then hook up with another driver to take you three hours to your next hotel on the Pacific coast. At that hotel you should immediately take a shower, eat, and crash on a comfortable bed.

When you return to the States you should then swear off eco-travel for at least a few years and stick to locations with minimal seismic activity.

Here’s where we were:

MAP

Here are some news articles about the earthquake:

Reuters
China Post
CNN

And here’s the room we were supposed to stay in (before the earthquake made that all moot):

Agnes’ sister was still recovering so we couldn’t get any pictures of her, but Sam just couldn’t get enough of his son!

Congratulations to Lee & Sam!

Let’s get to it!

0. World Peace

1. The Black & Decker Gecko Grip Level ($24.99)

2. Nordstrom Smartcare dress shirts, 16 1/2 – 33 (sale-priced only, please)

3. Westin Heavenly Bed (~$1500)

4. Red Ryder BB Gun

That’s all for now, I guess.

The home-building blog I love to hate, The New York Times‘ Dream Home Diaries, is in full swing. Ms. Davis and Mr. Brown’s home is framed, sheeted, and moving on to the next stages.

Some of the most recent posts have been pandering, bowing to past comments about their home’s lack of any green sensibility in their build. The latest post is the most hilarious and at the same time severely frustrating.

Here’s the situation:

The authors are building a custom home on a barrier island near St. Petersburg, Florida, and make this big deal at the beginning about finding the right architect for them. After some false starts they end up hiring a firm in South Carolina to design their Florida beach home. Skipping over the massive size of the house relative to their supposed initial budget of $350K and the roof deck fiasco involving the scared-of-heights husband to today, now there is this.

The authors just got a call from their builder that they’ll need to have a third A/C in their home with two floors of living space because of the way it was designed.

Two floors. Three A/C units.

And the best part — the architect didn’t even plan out a closet for the air handler!

They even had the nerve to try and pass off their new unit as some kind of green plus:

“The good news is that John is a closet environmentalist. He recommended an American Standard Heat Pump System that both cools and heats — believe it or not, there are nights in Anna Maria when heating is needed — that is both energy efficient and environmentally friendly. It has a Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio of 14, which means we can save up to 43 percent on our energy bills while doing our part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Um, the minimum SEER on new A/C units is 13, and since when did building a three-story 3500+ square-foot home for two people on a barrier island with three A/C units constitute “doing [y]our part” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions???

Here’s where the chop-busting comes in. Back in July when the Davis-Browns made their first panderpost about green building — after they already had plans and a builder — I asked the following question:

Have you had your architect design the home with air flow in mind so that you won’t need three massive Trane units humming full time to cool the place? Right-sizing of your HVAC system should be a major focus since AC makes up most of your electricity bill down here in Florida.

Normally I save “I told you so” for my younger sister, but in this case I just couldn’t let it stand.

Unfortunately at this point it doesn’t matter. The design is pretty bad, the builder is having to make changes on the fly to make up for the holes, and the authors are still trying to pass themselves off as everyday pennywise Yankees with a blog about their home building process.

With this couple’s budget and time their house could have been a green masterpiece without sacrificing at all. They have a garage at the base of the house that would have been perfect for a grey water system and the structure could have easily been SIPs.

Oh well. I wouldn’t be surprised if the authors turned out to be scientists running an experiment on how quickly they can exasperate genuinely helpful people.

Sometimes I convince Agnes to do nerdy things with me, like see the latest comic book-derived movie, and I suspect it’s more of a spousal support thing.

Well tonight she’ll be with me as we wait in line to get our copy of the newest operating system for our Macs, OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Hey, the first 500 people get a free t-shirt.

And I thought this was hilarious. Here’s what shows up when you browse Windows PC shares on your network…

…the non-sexy beige CRT monitor and Blue Screen Of Death.

I’ll have to see about getting a better price than $400.

Hiring a crew to rip out virtually everything old, bad, or in need of a little work would have been a lot faster and easier — with the right budget — but would have been the wrong thing to do. It also would have been a mistake.
One of the great things about our project is that we were able to reuse so much of the wood from areas we cleared in other areas of the house. A wall in the studio originally had some termite damage, so we grabbed a bound-for-the-Dumpster baseboard from one of the rooms, ripped it, and installed it as a new plate. The old 2×4s are incredibly dense, old growth pine and after 86 years in the house are still straighter than any piece of lumber you can buy at Lowes!
Link to the original article

IF the idiosyncratic, ’40s-era cottage Alice Keller bought in Shoreline, a small city just north of Seattle, had a style, it might be called classic teardown. The ceiling in one room was so low she couldn’t stand up under it. A downstairs bathroom was so narrow she had to wiggle sideways to get to the toilet. None of the windows matched.

“It was livable, and quirky,” Ms. Keller said, “but in ways I didn’t find amusing.”

The place was crying out for a wrecking ball, but Ms. Keller, a 63-year-old retired teacher of English as a second language, who has an environmentally aware conscience, didn’t want to scrap the building materials only to buy new ones. Instead of having her 1,300-square-foot house bulldozed, she hired Jon Alexander, a contractor who shared her environmentalism and was willing to dismantle the home shingle by beam, and build a replacement with the same two-by-fours.

The crew left the garage and a portion of the subfloor intact and broke the concrete driveway into chunks for a back patio. A gas water heater, fiberglass insulation and windows landed at the RE Store, a local nonprofit shop that sells used or excess construction materials. The drywall, shingles and extra concrete went to a recycling center.

Ms. Keller was able to reuse around 90 percent of the original house. “I just like reusing things,” she said. “You can end up with something with more character.”

Due to rising landfill costs, tighter recycling guidelines and the growing trend toward ecologically sound building methods, this sort of home “deconstruction,” as the practice is called, is starting to catch on. About 1,000 homes a year are disassembled this way, according to the Building Materials Reuse Association, a nonprofit educational group in State College, Pa., which reports growing interest in the practice.

Fueling that interest are efforts by cities and states across the country to stanch the flow of demolition rubble into landfills. Some 245,000 houses in the United States are razed each year, generating nearly 20 million tons of debris, according to a 1996 report from the Environmental Protection Agency, the most recent data available.

Confronted with mounting waste, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection has banned brick, concrete, metal, wood and asphalt from landfills.

In San Jose, Calif. — where construction and demolition refuse accounts for 30 percent of landfill waste, according to official estimates — homeowners who apply for a city permit to demolish, remodel or build an addition have to pay a deposit based on the size and type of project. To get the money back, they must show that 90 percent of the material generated has been reused or sent to a certified recycling or reuse center. Cities including Seattle, and Chicago have also introduced measures to reduce construction and demolition waste.

Using old materials for new buildings isn’t a new idea. The Coliseum in Rome was used as a quarry to build St. Peter’s Basilica and other Roman landmarks. In the United States, families often reused building materials to save money in the early part of the 20th century, a custom that fell out of favor as the country grew wealthier in the 1950s.

Today, according to the Building Materials Reuse Association, up to 85 percent of the average house can be recycled or reused; the hard part is harvesting the materials in a way that preserves their integrity.

Unbuilding a home takes longer than leveling it the usual way and often costs more, at least initially. While almost anyone who’s watched a TLC rehab show can rip out a kitchen cabinet, unpiecing an entire house without having the roof collapse isn’t a job for the uninitiated. The Building Materials Reuse Association, which introduced a deconstruction training program in May, has certified 60 builders so far.

When Carolyn Bronstein and John Tapper wanted to dismantle a 2,500-square-foot Victorian adjacent to their house in the Southport section of Chicago, they could not find a local deconstruction contractor. They recruited Ted Reiff, a contractor and the president of a group called the Reuse People of America, based in Oakland, Calif. The couple bought the house for about $800,000, intending to knock it down so their children could have more space to play, and to make sure a developer didn’t snap up it up.

While the standard demolition quotes were around $25,000, the couple spent $38,000 to have a contractor trained by Mr. Reiff unpiece it over six weeks last summer. They expect to come out even or better after selling door hardware, windows, appliances and other components at a salvage auction and reaping a tax deduction by donating the rest to a reuse store.

“It was cleaner and quieter than demolition,” said Ms. Bronstein, an assistant professor of communication at DePaul University in Chicago. “We didn’t have dust flying everywhere.”

Usually, the real savings comes in the reconstruction phase. Paul Pedini, the owner of the Big Dig House in Lexington, Mass., possibly the country’s most celebrated recycled dwelling, estimates he shaved at least $200,000 from his materials costs by using concrete on-ramps and steel beams recovered from the Big Dig highway project in Boston for his modernist structure.

“There were these materials and we wanted to build a house. We just put two and two together,” said Mr. Pedini, a civil engineer who was a contractor on the Big Dig. “I told them, why not keep the money you’d pay in disposal costs and give the materials to us to reuse?”

Although few home builders have access to the remains of a $14.6 billion highway project, many cities now have “reuse” stores, which sell salvaged goods — from wall sockets to vintage redwood floorboards — for 50 to 75 percent off what similar products would cost if purchased new.

There are about 1,000 such stores nationwide according to the Reuse Association, most of them nonprofits that offer tax deductions in exchange for donations of used housing materials. Habitat for Humanity International, the affordable housing organization, runs 500 such shops in 45 states, mostly selling easily recoverable accessories like cabinets, doors and flooring. Unlike architectural salvage stores, which sell marble fireplace mantels, stained glass and spiral staircases, reuse stores generally traffic in mundane items like light switches and insulation.

As with buying secondhand clothes, the challenge — and potential charm — of reuse shopping is its unpredictability. Build it Green! NYC, a reuse shop in Astoria, sells sets from nearby film studios alongside items rescued from residential demolitions. Recently, $25 diner stools from “The Knights of Prosperity,” a short-lived ABC show, were for sale alongside $40 doors from “The Sopranos” and a set of cherry-finish kitchen cabinets removed from an Upper East Side apartment. The original owners paid $18,000 to buy and install the cabinets, according to Justin Green, a founder of the store, who was asking $1,200 for the set — top and bottom cabinets as well as counters.

“I love shopping there,” said Timothy Etienne of Garden City, N.Y. “You never know what you’re going to find.”

He has purchased windows, doors and paint at the store for a second home upstate, along with a six-foot-tall wooden tepee ($30) that is now a backyard playhouse for his four daughters.

Ms. Keller, meanwhile, has been combing the RE Store in Seattle for months, trying to find secondhand glass blocks for the master bath in her new 1,600-square-foot home. She recently scavenged a double-pane glass door for her balcony and a cast-iron double sink for a craft room.

To outfit a home this way, it helps to have a retiree’s schedule.

“You have to be patient,” Ms. Keller said. “It’s the thrill of the hunt that keeps me going back.”

It will also save us around $200 per appliance. So that’s another plus.

For example, the Fridgidaire GLGF389G range below has five burners, a griddle attachment (hello pancakes!), convection oven, and can be had for ~$800.

And with refrigerators, the non-stainless versions seem to have a lot of the cleanliness and price advantages as well.

Today I sent my pre-order in to Amazon.com for Argentine Federico Aubele’s Panamericana album, scheduled to be released September 18.

Here’s a blurb from his record label, Eighteenth Street Lounge Music’s (think Thievery Corporation) website:

“The highly anticipated follow up to Federico Aubele’s critically acclaimed debut, Gran Hotel Buenos Aires. Aubele delves deeper into rich latin sounds with virtuoso guitar playing, hypnotic rhythms, smoky dub atmospherics, and the sensual vocals of Amparanoia, newcomer Natalia Clavier, and a collaboration with Calexico.”

From the few tracks I’ve heard on MySpace, I’m 100% convinced that this album purchase won’t let me down.

My days as a music reviewer are over, so I won’t try to write a whole article on this. I’ll just say that “Postales”, “Esta Noche”, and “Contigo”, are all superb songs and that Aubele’s 2004 debut, was a slick, Latin guitar-over-beats magnum opus.

Go buy it!