Hurray!!

Personal Post Alert: This blog post contains elements of uncertain interest to any but a select few. Unlike standard Meow posts, which try to bring something of interest to a broad range of tastes and enthusiasms, this post is strictly a giant sigh of personal relief. Reader boredom may follow. If you experience such boredom, please contact your local search engine and find something else to read. This is for your own protection. Any proceeding beyond this point is strictly the responsibility of the reader, and the fact that this post is available on a publicly accessible website in no way obligates the blog ownership to ensure that any certain level of amusement be associated with said post.

Having said all that... Celebrate with us! The garage just passed inspection! The garage just passed inspection! Of course, the guy from the City of Portland had to give me one last spasm of anxiety, because that's what the City Charter demands, but now that it's over I can look at all the bureaucracy-induced trauma with a sort of mild amusement--or at least I will be able to after the Prozac kicks in.

How, you might ask, did the inspector manage to punch my panic buttons? Well, he showed up at the door this morning, clipboard in hand, to announce that there was a problem--HE HAD NO RECORD THAT WE HAD PASSED ANY OF OUR PREVIOUS INSPECTIONS, clear on back to the framing stage of the project. This guy didn't have any of the paperwork from any of the myriad inspections we had sweated our way through all last year, no record of corrections made and previous inspector appeasements achieved. Yes, my heart did start to beat rather quickly at this point, while simultaneously dropping a few inches in my chest. As far as I know, the City is supposed to keep a paper trail which lets new inspectors know what old inspectors have proclaimed in all their infinite wisdom. Now, I knew we had passed the previous stages, and that we had the paperwork to prove it, but that didn't stop the initial moment of bureaucratic nightmare scenarios flashing before my eyes like a horror video on fast forward.

I pulled it together enough to point him in the direction of the evidentiary packet of inspection sheets that we had hung on the outside of the garage in a big plastic bag (thank you, Lord, for the invention of the Ziploc), and prayed fervently that none of the papers were missing. Inspector-man had me open the garage door, so that he could check that, yes, there were walls inside, and then started in on all his paper perusing. I was on the phone when the man with the power arrived, and fifteen or so minutes later, when I finished my call, he had still not finished his examination of the exculpatory evidence. So, I called my beloved to jibber at him while we waited for the verdict. I couldn't face the rest of the wait alone--not when the entire proceeding started with, "There's a problem." About ten minutes later, I looked out to see that the inconsiderate inspector had simply left, without telling me the verdict, or even letting me know I could close the garage door, leaving all of our wonderful power tools--the housing of which is the very reason for which we had gone through all the past year of self-inflicted, Alliance-pleasing hoops of pain--exposed to the avarice of any unethical pedestrian who happened to be passing by. How rude is that?

I've just one more grumble at the way the City does things. I'll share it now, and then hopefully put the whole episode mentally to rest. The most silly thing about the whole City hoops thing occurred this week. We had another inspection yesterday, which, according to the City had to happen before the "final." You might not believe that this is actually true, but I assure you, it did indeed transpire. The City required that they send another person--an entirely separate human being, making an utterly redundant trip to our house--just to make sure that we had grown grass in the yard. They couldn't send out the final inspector until this very important point was established. Now, I ask you, why couldn't the same guy who came to do the final inspection put a check-mark beside the "grass" column just as easily as the other guy? Is there some technique, know only to "erosion specialists" that enables them to determine that the green stuff growing out of the ground is, in fact, grass, which would justify a separate trip, with all the time, trouble and money that entails? That's just goofy thinking, and only a mindless bureaucracy would see any sense in it.

Okay, I think that takes care of the venting portion of this personal post. I now return you to its original point. Celebrate with us! The garage just passed inspection! The garage just passed inspection! Believe it or not, I'm awfully pleased, cynical and slightly contemptuous, but very, very pleased.

The Alliance, And Iran Too

Home ownership can be a blessing and a curse. My husband and I are dealing with an ongoing ripple effect, a cascade of new labors springing from the garage that we had built over the summer. Much of the list is composed of hoops we must jump through to satisfy the city of Portland. It can be frustrating. Every contractor we've had working on the project has said how much the city over-regulates and forces people to over-build. We got a new list of "must-do" projects from the city inspector who came to make sure that no soil was going to find its way out from behind the retaining-wall barriers we have surrounding our back yard on all sides. It seems this is not enough. She tacked on a few more Herculean tasks to the considerable list we were already wading our way through.

Ked and I have decided that the city we live in is very comparable to the Alliance, from the sci fi movie Serenity. The Alliance is a core government in a vast solar system, with the central planets wielding control over all the outlying planets and moons. Although the outer planets fought for independence, they lost, and the Alliance controls just about everything. One of the main characters, River, is asked at one point why the outer planets objected to Alliance control, since the Alliance brought with it civilization, prosperity and technological advancement. River's response was, "They meddle." That so sums up our experience with the recent building project. It's not that we don't think there should be reasonable building codes, but for pity's sake, the city required that the garage have hurricane strapping!!--to keep it from blowing away with all those hurricanes we get here in Portland no doubt. Aargh.

So, we've been buried under a mountain of work the last few weeks, and the mountain seems to be growing, rather than shrinking. I think internal pressure is pushing it up from within, like when a volcano is about to blow. (Here in the Pacific Northwest we have lots of experience with volcanoes blowing. Ked and I can see Mount St. Helens from our front porch. We still miss the top. However, an eruption makes for some spectacular photographs.) Always an optimist, I'm hoping we can keep things contained and avoid a project-related eruption, but I fear the pressure will continue unabated for a while. All these time-consuming projects have been interfering with my blogging lately, though, so something really has to give. A girl really must keep her priorities in order.

Therefore, despite the growing "to do" list, I'm taking a little time this morning to snatch a few precious hours of reading, which I have been missing desperately of late. I turned to Instapundit to catch me up with the world, and he led me to this post at Confederate Yankee, about an ongoing low-intensity Iranian insurgency, supported by neighboring state's and some European connections, which is largely being ignored by the media. Apparently there have been several attempts on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's life in the past year, and there is more than one group resisting the Iranian government. CY has some speculation about the media's motivations for the downplaying of the situation which I think are pretty sound. It's likely the media wants to keep some access to Iran, just as various media organizations ignored stories of atrocities in Iraq before the war, so that they could keep "reporting" from Baghdad. Anyway, it's an interesting post, so check it out if you've got a minute. Actually, reading about Iran is a good reminder for me that, even though Portland still has Alliance written all over it, at least it's not being run by a gaggle of crazy apocalyptic mullahs. Counting my blessings now.