The Reserve at SeaTac job has been keeping me on the past few weeks. I have lost Don, who just never showed up one day, and then gained and lost a Vaughn. Now I'm working alone as a TLC laborer at this location.
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| The pool room exposed. |
For a couple of days, my cleaning was paired with uncovering the pool and hot tub that had been sealed up since the building still lacked a roof. Rainwater from last winter that was sealed beneath a layer of MDF turned into a black mold. As it would eat away at sections of the MDF, creating large soft holes, another layer would be tacked on top of it to prevent anyone from falling in. One of the carpenters told me that it is black mold, but not the deadly black mold. I wish I had a respirator for this task, but a dust mask is better than nothing. The other workers use their "not wearing a mask" as a means of stating their strength, or perhaps a sense of masculinity. I still keep my dust mask on as a means of any barrier to keep mold spores out of my lungs. The next day my dust mask smells strongly of mold and I exchange it for another. Currently, I have two dust masks hiding in the gap between the webbing the shell of my helmet. The "pool guy" called in to work on the exposed pool continually belittled my dust mask wearing. His helmet is covered in images of Mexican tattoo pinup style ladies.
A few months back my father told me about his experiences of how helmet colors used to relate to professions; yellow was for day laborers, blue was electricians, etc. All his helmets that I remember growing up were white. White hat architects. My helmet is dark blue.
The only other day laborer I have met with a yellow helmet was when I was working at a remodel of a Fred Myers in Bellevue. He was an older man who told me of his past getting his Ph.D. in sociology from a research University somewhere in Massachusetts. He was living off of social security and maintaining a precise record of how many hours he works to avoid working too much and decreasing how much money he would get from social security. Don said that he worked that site when he first arrived and caught the Professor at lunch drinking vodka behind the building but was not given a return ticket because the Professor told the foreman that Don wasn't a good enough worker.
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| Sunrise at The Reserve at SeaTac as the light rail goes by. |
The Angle Lake Station has finally opened, but I have yet to use it. The week it opened I was house and cat sitting in Lake City and the comparison of two hours by transit to thirty minutes by car was hard to compete with. I keep looking at the empty used car lot next to the Reserve at SeaTac and thinking about how it could be developed to serve the area in relation to the opening of the Angle Lake Station. If it is built as mixed use and has the retail not face the International Boulevard but instead the quieter road behind and the station there could be more foot traffic from the station. I overheard a conversation with the foreman and other Exxel employees working the job saying that the area between the Reserve at SeaTac and the used car lot is going to become a road and therefore the parking garage is going to have art put onto it to decorate along the road. I'm not sure why they need this road put in.
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