Unending

[rejectomorph]

This comes close to qualifying as a monsoon. The rain falls, seldom easing, and the sky remains darkened even by day. Wet squirrels scamper about, birds alight on branches and flick the rain from their feathers every few seconds, and even the stray cats no longer remain sheltered, but are forced to go out seeking food however wet they may become. All the beasts grow accustomed to the new state of things. The frogs, of course, continue to sound delighted. If they kept histories, they would likely remember this as their best year ever. I, however, would like just a bit more variety. If there can't be sunlight, I'd settle for as little as a thunderstorm. Just, please, an end to the monotony. It's water torture.

Comments

[whiteboyhalf.livejournal.com]

wow. i read up about the north wing renovation on Mr. Acosta's "A History of MKHS:" http://www.mkhs.org/MKHSWebsite/Information/General/History/history.html

the renovation that they did was terrible. the entire school closed for a year? how inefficient! triple glazed windows and a new ceiling sound MUCH better than what they did. the north wing looks like a space station now! gah!

my dad is a CPA, and he was on a committee for the AUSD for some bond projects a few years back. he was astounded at how they handled business: voting to pass bonds and budgets without checking how much money was being thrown around--or WHERE it was going. as he put it to them, "You don't know what you're spending money on."

Alhambra High's new buildings look like, as one of my ex-Marine Substitute teachers put it, a Barracks. i remember when those three-story cracker boxes went up, my parents tsk-tsked at the millions pouring in. At the same time, my fellow elementary schoolers and i quailed at the thought of going to under-funded Mark Keppel: with it's decaying gym roof, run-down hallways, and bathrooms with doorless-stalls.

You are absolutely right about bad maintainence. I've seen the mountains of bird-crap on the AHS staircases, as well as the broken asphalt, unkept trees, broken lockers, and missing stall doors at MKHS. Even at Monterey Highlands, pipes are backing up and flooding classrooms. Maybe some draino a few years back could have helped? (not that I'm very well informed on the problems at highlands, but pipes aren't exactly "high maintainence")

Oh man, you are NOT going to like this; it made me sick to my stomach:
They took out the brass banisters in all the staircases, and all but one or two of the mahogony ones, and replaced them with higher rounded-steel ones.
again, instead of simply raising the existing, NICE handrails with fifty-cents worth of steel brackets and adding a handle at the bottom to meet ADA codes, they elected to tear out the entire thing and kill some more of the school.

the murals on the auditorium are starting to decay as well. those things are valuable art pieces by Millard Sheets--he did the murals at the Home Savings of America in Hollywood. those are historic!

the next meeting i go to, i'll be sure to invite you. get all of your Alumni in the loop--tell them about the whole $55 million renovation plan. maybe you can all come out and tell the district your perspective on their misapportionment of funds, projects, and especially now your take on this one.

i think they'll get a real kick out of it...

[rejectomorph]

Though I'd like to be able to get to the meetings, it would be a long trip, as I now live in Butte County, in northern California (about a 500 mile trip.) But what I can do is post the dates of any upcoming meetings to the message board at classmates, where there are a few active members who still live in the area. I could also post something there pointing to your journal entry with the plans, if that's OK with you (I can't post a hyperlink there, though, or even a link that can be directly copied and pasted, as Classmates is a very controlling web site and doesn't allow them- I guess they're deathly afraid that someone will find it too easy to leave their site to look at something that the site isn't being paid to advertise.)

I wonder what was done with the brass and mahogany stair railings that were removed? There's a market for such things, and I'm wondering if the district was dumb enough to just let whatever contractor installed the new railings keep them. If so, the contractor has probably sold them (very profitably) to an architect or designer for installation in a project somewhere else.

I noticed the damage to the murals as shown in your photos at Wikipedia. A couple of them look as though they might have been shot at.

[whiteboyhalf.livejournal.com]

i asked a construction worker what they did with the banisters.
he said he wasn't sure, but they probably scrapped them.

(tsk. tsk.)

Same goes (probably) for the marble stalls, laid tile, porcelin toilets, sinks, and brass fixtures from all the student and faculty restrooms.

real smart, huh?


there is a rather large hole on the mural above the auditorium. that one is in the worst shape. the other two have only minor paint scrapes and rust in a couple spots. Strange, because they're enamel on stainless steel. (i found that Mural Conservancy website a while back, too!)



BUTTE COUNTY?!!! that's where Dr. Keppel was from!

...how weird...

[rejectomorph]

I've looked around on the Internet to see if I could find the exact birthplace of Mark Keppel, but no luck so far. In 1867, the only town of considerable size in Butte County was Oroville, but there were also a few smaller gold rush towns still hanging on. But Butte County may have been larger in 1867 than it is now. It was one of the state's original counties and, as were many of them, it was divided over the years, but I've been unable to find exactly when the various pieces were broken off. Parts of its original territory are now in Plumas and Tehama Counties, and some of it may be in other counties as well, so it's possible that Dr. Keppel was actually born in one of those areas.

I did just find this interesting used book for sale, though.