Angie Trigg's Site Featured Content

It's Copper, Who Knew?!

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 08:04:00 PST

In the last 5% of things left to do before I can paint (which always takes 95% of the time), I'm prepping the trim in Grandy's Room. Yesterday I started washing them down, including the doors and windows, baseboards, etc. Today I continued that upper-arm-toning exercise and had reached the door that opens into the main hall which contains a transom window. Since this house has no CH/A, I want to utilize all the old methods of keeping a house cool in the South and so wanted to get my transom window working again.

Of course layers of paint had caked the hinges to the non-budging stage, and there was an accumulation of paint drippings around the rod mechanism that opens it, so off to Universal Hardware (Mobile's independent hardware store that has been in business since 1949!) to get some Strip-Eze stuff. My desire was simply to get it free of enough paint that it would open again, and also be smooth enough to re-paint.

Imagine my surprise (actually I think my exact quote was "Oh my f*&^%^% God!) when after I had dabbed a little on the rod mechanism where the paint was thickest and had started to scrape it off and spied copper gleaming through!! Why in the world did my ancestors paint copper???! Of course I immediately hopped off the ladder and ran over to The Wing (where my aunt lives) to tell her the exciting news (It's the little things, you know). Naturally, the washing-down-the-trim job was abandoned for the afternoon and on went dabs of goo onto the rod mechanism, plus any other door hardware in the room. It's proving hard to really get it nice and clean, so I may have to get enough off around the screws of the rod and remove it to really get it clean. Or maybe I'll hunt around for a wire brush; there's bound to be one around here somewhere...

I just can't believe it's copper and am so excited by this accidental find. It will look really nice, especially with the green I plan to paint the walls. I'm now also dying to know if the rest of them in the house are copper!

Beating Back the Jungle

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:03:00 PST

Before

After

This past Saturday after attending the Chili Cook-Off in Bienville Square I came back and took a stab at clearing up some of the beds in the front of the house. This section was full of volunteer Cherry Laurels and a few Japenese Plums (which I saved to plant elsewhere). Hopefully the monkey grass where I dug the saplings out will grow back soon. There's so much yard maintenance to do, that I think I'm going to work on the yard during the weekends and not Grandy's Room. Sunday I wore myself out trying to clear an overgown bed in the sideyard: first I weed-whacked it, then turned the dirt using The Claw, and then trowel-sifted to get out the pernicious weeds.

Oh Plaster Where Art Thou?

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 07:02:00 PST

I've now moved on to the western wall of Grandy's Room and have removed all the paneling off of it and discovered several interesting things. One - there's some stenciling on a portion of the wall, and Two - about half of the wall is covered in a rough kind of surface that doesn't feel like plaster! And the stenciling is on part of it, and beneath the wallpaper. The rough part actually feels like cement, and seems a lot stronger than the plaster.

Could the rough part just be where the plaster has had its top coat come off to expose the scratch coat? Or is it some kind of early 20th century repair?

Since the paneling was put in about 40 years ago, that makes the wallpaper below it probably about 50 years old, and then below that is the stencil, which is on both the finished plaster and the rough part. That seems to indicate that the stenciling was done to try and disguise the rough areas? Pictured above is a section that shows the stenciling on both the rough and smooth areas. It also shows where the rough and smooth areas meet and some of the rough part seems to "spill" over onto the smooth area, which makes me think it's a repair job. Does anyone know what plaster repair was like back about 60+ years ago?

Some other interesting things I detected. The lower picture railing was there before the wallpaper, as there is a ghost outline on the plaster, and I discovered nail holes for it underneath the wallpaper. There's a ghost outline at the higher height on the plaster too, but I can't tell if it was also on top of the wallpaper. Hopefully the last wall will reveal that part of the story.

Grandy's Room: An Update

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 08:02:00 PST

Been back in Mobile since Feb 2, and have been working on the room in the afternoons. Basically it's a lot of caulking, scraping, and mudding! I'm really struggling with not getting distracted, or discouraged. One trick I've been using for that is just focusing on one wall at a time and just getting really into it and doing whatever needs to be done to get that wall paint-ready.

Each wall has decorative paneling on top, a layer of wallpaper, and then the original plaster. So far the worst plaster was the first area I tackled; the walls on either side of the fireplace. The rest so far has just been bad cracks with some occasional holes. Hopefully the trend will continue as I remove more paneling around the room. Yesterday I discovered the ghost marks of where picture railing was attached that was lower than the latest height for it in the room. I think I might go with this line when I re-attach the molding (which I saved).

To remove the wallpaper, I'd read a handy tip in the Family Handyman magazine that white vinegar will help. So, where it was no longer loose (some patches peeled away easily), I soaked it with vinegar, and sure enough, off it came! Where the plaster is pulling away from the lathe, I'm anchoring it back with some washers screwed in:

At this point, I now have two walls in pretty good shape, though some areas still need more layers of 'mud' and some caulking. That leaves two more walls! But before I can tackle that, I'll need to move the furniture out of the way; no small feat with the four-poster bed, as it weighs a ton!

See more photos

Biggest Damn Democrat in Mobile

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:02:00 PST

There's a lot of family history here, and one of my fondest memories as a kid was listening to the stories my great-grandmother, known as "Grandy", told us! She lived to the venerable age of 94, sharp as a tack. It was her mother that had bought Termite Hall back in 1919, and Grandy was a suffragette when she was young, and according to my grandmother, she never missed an election. My family has always been Democratic, but unlike many Southerners, they never went the Dixiecrat route-- they were FDR fans, and then huge JFK fans. My aunts remember volunteering for Johnson. Progressive politics is always the main topic of conversation at the dinner table, and I loved hearing my grandmother (Ma-Ma) rant about what a "damn fool" W was. I thought it only fitting to recount here a transcription of a story Grandy used to tell. I've told it since to friends, but this is an actual transcription from a tape recording made by my cousin Pascal Rapier in 1973.

Pascal: Uh, Aunt Gina, could you tell us again about the little boy, uh, the Demouy boy that was lost and that all he knew was that he was a Democrat?
Grandy: uh huh. Said tell you again?
Pascal: Yeah.
Grandy: Why?
Pascal: Uh, for the tape recorder.
Grandy: Oh, you want to hear on the...
Pascal: Yeah, I want to get it on tape.
Grandy: Well, there was this boy and his name was Demouy
Female voice: Who was it? Who was it that was lost?
Grandy: It was Mama's brother
Ma-Ma: Augustus Demouy?
Grandy: His name was Gus, Uncle Gus. And he was, uh, have you got the thing on? [the tape recorder]
Pascal: Yeah. It's on.
Grandy: And he was playin' out in the yard. He was jus' 'bout two years old, well, maybe not, well he was two. And somebody came through an' left the gate open. And he walked out of it and walked on down the street. And then after he'd walked some distance, he wanted to go back home, an' he didn't know how to get home. So he started cryin'. And a policeman heard and came up there and says "What's the matter little boy?" An' he says, "Lost." And the policeman says, "Well, that's nothin' to cry about, I'll take ya home. You tell me where you live." He says, "What's your name?" An' Uncle Gus says, "Democrat". He said, "I didn't ask you what you ... uh, [laughter] what you were, I asked you what your name was." An' he says, "Democrat". And so the policeman says, "Well, where do ya live?" An' Uncle Gus says, "Democrat". An' so that's all the policeman could get out of him. An' so he took him down to the guard house where there were other policemen thinking that maybe some of them could get somethin' out of the boy. Well, the same thing happened, they asked him all sorts of questions an' everythin' they asked him, he said, "Democrat". [Laughter] So then they, one of 'em said, "Well, I bet he's old man Demouy's son because he's the biggest damn Democrat in Mobile!" And so, uh, on the chance, they took him down to Grandfather's store an' Grandfather asked the policeman, "What's all this? What's happenin'?" So the policeman told him the whole story.

Hillary Launches Facebook Call Center

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 05:10:00 PST

This time it's Hillary's team that has been innovative online. Unless I missed it, there's not an equivalent for Obama or McCain/Palin. HillPAC today sent out an update to their list on how their Hillary Sent Me program is doing and also announced this new Facebook application.

I added the app and I liked how easy it was to use. Extra points for making the interface similar in layout to the one on her website that I was familiar with using during the primary. You just click a link to start making calls, and like the online version, you are presented with a tailored script for the person you are calling. My main quibble is that I can't pick the state for which to make calls. It had me calling Maine, whose politics I'm not familiar with. I'd rather be making calls to help Jim Martin here in Georgia, who has a decent shot at ousting Sen. Saxby Chambliss.

Since I hadn't used Obama's application in awhile, I cruised back by there to see if they were doing anything more interactive than posting news stories and rating them. I really liked the "Ask Your Friends to Vote Early" addition-- it pulls up friends of yours in battleground states and asks you to remind them to vote early. Cool. He also had a "Call Center" link, but it wasn't integrated with Facebook; it was just a link to his online call center.

Whereas, it could be argued that both accomplish the same thing, I like that I don't have to do the extra step of logging in to a website. Quicker access to tools is key. It could also be argued that the Hillary Sent Me Facebook Call Center isn't harnessing Facebook's social networking (other than being an app on there), there's not much more it could do, since phone numbers are not exposed to developers in APIs.

Google Maps Debuts Polling Place Maps!

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 10:10:00 PST

Very cool! This can really help Get Out The Vote! Google, always looking to push technology further, has released today a Poll Location Map! You just type in your polling location, and presto, it shows your polling location, along with election appropriate graphics. You can also plop this handy widget into your CampaignWindow website:

I can see this as a must-add widget to any political website.

How to Extract a Comma-Separated List of Emails from an Excel Spreadsheet

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:09:00 PST

For those non-Excel gurus out there, I thought I'd post this handy tip. Have you ever wanted to get a list of emails separated by commas, i.e. john@yahoo.com,joe@yahoo.com,sue@yahoo.com, from an Excel spreadsheet? This comes in handy if you are wanting to import just emails using Option 2 in Add Users in Bulk in CampaignWindow but have a big mailing list file with full names, addresses, etc in an Excel file. Well, here's how you do it.

1. Open up your Excel spreadsheet and delete every column except the email column

2. Now click on the cell in the first row just to the right of the email address column (i.e. first row, second column)

3. Type a comma in it.

4. Now select that cell and hit Copy

5. Now click on the column top so that it selects the whole column and hit Paste. If you did this right, you should now have a comma in the second column all the way down.

6. Now click in the first cell, first row (which would be the first email address); hold down your Shift Key on your keyboard and then scroll down to the last email address and click on the comma just after it. If you did this right, you should now have 2 columns highlighted.

7. Hit Copy.

8. Now go to CampaignWindow's Add Users in Bulk area (or wherever you are wanting to input comma-separated emails) and hit Paste. Voila!

A Delegate in Denver - A Video Recap of my week in Denver

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:09:00 PST

Thought I'd encapsulate my week in Denver via video!

DNC Convention - Day One

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:08:00 PST

Yesterday was amazing! I can't do justice to the myriad of feelings, emotions and events that happened yesterday. We had our state delegation breakfast, which ended up taking waaaay too long to get our credentials. Most folks missed the morning caucuses and it meant I found no time to contact everyone who wanted to get campaignwindow training. My fellow Clinton Floor Whip, Will Fowlkes, and I caught the shuttle to the convention center, rushing to make the Clinton Floor Whip meeting at 11 a.m. Since we had no time to go back to our room, we had to lug the two huge heavy convention bags we just received with us...

On the way we saw Terry McAuliffe signing his book, so we snagged one, along with a signature and a pic. The floor whip meeting was informative and helped us understand how things would play out on Wednesday. We then took a shuttle back to drop off all our new goodies. We had just enough time to do this before we had to catch the next shuttle back to the Pepsi Center where the actual convention proceedings would be taking place. We heard that the security was pretty strict, but we didn't run into much of a crowd, so it went smoothly. We had quite a hike from the bus to the entrance but it was cool having the anticipation build as we approached.

We found our section and had a few minutes before the the gavel was to drop, and thinking it would operate on Democratic Standard Time, we went to a kiosk to get some pizza. But alas, we found that we were not allowed to go on the floor with food or drink, so we scarfed it down, but then heard the gavel drop and we left our food on the table and ran in... We then went back out shortly after to finish scarfing it down...

Walking onto the floor was breathtaking-- the lights and stage backdrop literally made my jaw drop. There were not a lot of folks around, so it gave us time to wander around and explore.

As a floor whip, things were pretty hectic handing out signs that sometimes wouldn't get there until the last minute. The appearance of Ted Kennedy literally electrified the crowd as we didn't expect him to appear. I was crying. The strength it must have taken for him to appear was awe inspiring and emotional for me.

I didn't get a chance to really enjoy Michelle's speech because we were running around trying to find the signs that were supposed to go up when she said "And that's why we love America" and then we heard that line, and we threw up our hands and I said "and that's when we were supposed to do our signs."

Everyone exited very enthused and energized and as we filed out one of the side exits, it got quite crowded and I worked my way through, only to find out the congestion was due to the fact that Joe Biden was filing out with us right there!

We were loaded down with signs, and were exhausted, so instead of heading straight to the parties (which we'd dressed for), we went back to the hotel to unload, freshen up, and eat dinner. We then headed to the Planned Parenthood party, which was off the chain!

See photos!