Oh look! More boxes…
March 7, 2009 — 7:11 pm
Comments: 16
Things that are ugly…
Isn’t this lovely? Why no, it is not. This is the ugliest scrap of ancient Weasel family legacy kitsch I own (and that’s saying a Very Great Deal). My heart clenched when I opened this box tonight. It’s bumblebee yellow and black…did I mention?
This handsome item was hand painted by my cousin Nan, who — as far as I know — was neither epileptic nor had a metal plate in her head of any kind. She was actually my grandmother’s first cousin, which makes me related to her only below the Mason Dixon line. Grandmother was a great friend to Cousin Nan, despite the terrible dark blotch on her past. How disappointed I was to learn Nan’s dark secret was a youthful d-i-v-o-r-c-e.
Cousin Nan was hot shit.
For most of her life, she was a seamstress nine months of the year, sewing fine gowns for rich ladies and saving her pennies. Then in the Summers, she would hop a banana boat for points South. That was back when freight boats always carried a few passengers (do they still?). She loved South America.
By the time I remember her, she had retired to California, very old and very deaf and unprepared to accept either. When she came to visit, she was a total liability in public. She would lean over in a movie theater and shout in your ear, “oh my god, would you look at that big fat woman in the next row?” Eh. Bless her.
By an odd coincidence, my dad and stepmother were in her home town for some kind of function and dropped by to visit her one day in the mid 1980s. First time ever, I think. My stepmother swears she looked up as they left and saw the curtain twitch.
At any rate, Cousin Nan was raped and murdered by a stranger later that day. It would be flattery to call her attacker a serial killer. He was an animal who had himself a brief, nasty spree…savaged a few women and got caught within the week. My dad was called to testify about the timing. Murderous asshole’s probably out by now.
Anyhow, we all took turns sticking each other with examples of Cousin Nan’s art. Because it’s horrible, but what are you going to do?
March 6, 2009 — 8:23 pm
Comments: 18
Got jammed up unpacking today…
So please enjoy this perfectly flipping enormous spider that sat down beside her and frightened Miss Weasel away when I was in the garden this afternoon.
Spiders. Brrrr.
March 5, 2009 — 9:55 pm
Comments: 22
Bring me more junk!
Britain would be a fabulous country to be rich in. I mean, rich is good everywhere, but here your coin will buy things that look like Harry Potter picked them up at Voldemort’s dad’s yard sale. For the same cost as pricey but ordinary new furniture, you can snag antiques that be a-blowin’ of the mind.
Well. Not that rich, me.
But even better, maybe, is the ancient household stuff you can get for not very much in junk shops and boot sales. There is SO MUCH old crap here, it’s simply not at a premium.
I particularly love ancient tools: turned wood screwdrivers, rosewood planes, ivory rulers scribed in ink, cut glass graduated cylinders. Geek pr0n.
I bought this old nutcracker in a junk shop over the weekend, partly to thank the nice old dear who let me use her telephone — and mostly because I thought it was fucking crackerjack. She had dozens of them. I paid a pound and a half for this one; about two bucks.
It’s iron with a dark, velvety, chocolate brown patina. Heavy. Smooth. There’s an ornamental floral motif hand-gouged in the top with a scribe, and the same tool has been used to cut dozens of cuneiform flecks in the inner surfaces. To improve the grip, one assumes.
Pure sex, this thing.
I can’t help thinking I’m not the only callow Yank who gets weak in the knees over these old hand tools. I bet Old Limey Gadgets would be an excellent idea for an eBay store.
And then I realize I’d have to let go whenever somebody bought one. So, that’s a deal breaker, right there.
March 4, 2009 — 9:32 pm
Comments: 12
Stuff…
Hey, lookit! My favorite limbless, decapitated torso made it from Rhode Island!
Yep, the last of my stuff was delivered today. That means no storage unit to pay for. It also means half the rooms in Badger House are stacked floor-to-ceiling with boxes.
It isn’t as bad as it looks (please god). An awful lot of it is packaging and padding. And stuff that can go. And stuff that can go on e-Bay. But right now, the whole house is like one of those little slidey puzzles with the tiles that you shift around to get the numbers in the right order.
Slidey puzzle. Yeah. You know what I’m talking.
Anyhow, it’s taken me the whole day to make a clear path to the stairs, the front door and the pissoir. I am, how you say, pooped. Pardon the lameness of today’s offering.
Much more of this heavy lifting and I’ll develop the scary man-arms of Michelle Obama.
March 3, 2009 — 8:24 pm
Comments: 17
DING DONG!
When we first looked at Badger House, the front doorbell was one of these big pull-chain dealies. It somehow vanished after the sale. Not complaining; the seller left plenty of other useful things behind (including a kitchen table and chairs). But we have been bereft of doorbell since we moved in.
You can still get this style of bell pull. The question is, what sort of bell do you connect it to on the inside? Turns out, they’re all electronical and previewable online now. Oh, how we laughed!
Uncle B sort of liked this one, but thought it should end with “just a minute!” followed by a flushing sound. I was partial to this one, but he insists I’d have to answer the door in my Tinkerbell costume.
We were naturally torn between this one and this one, so we decided this would be a good compromise. It doesn’t apply, but it seems like a fair halfway point. Plus, it would confuse the hell out of people. Bonus!
Oh, who am I kidding? There’s only one that would possibly do.
You know what? I think we’ll just get a bell on a string, after all.
March 2, 2009 — 7:50 pm
Comments: 18
These are not the newts you are looking for!
The crested newt is Britain’s largest and most protected amphibian. Reptile. Whatever. Neighbors told us under no circumstances to mention newts, if we were to find such at Badger House, for fear of bands of marauding hippies with legal superpowers. Utup-shay about the ewts-nay.
This, however — I swear to god — is a smooth newt. Ain’t nothing endangered about a smooth newt. Smooooooth noooooot.
I’m still repairing the brick edging around the garden. It’s going pretty well, but we haven’t had that many sunny days (it’s been in the mid-forties for weeks, though — I’m not complaining!). I dug up a brick and, in the gravel underneath — a good four inches down — was a pile of tiny dessicated newts. Seriously, little dudes were as stiff and dry as sticks.
It crossed my mind that they might have crawled down there and joined the Choir Eternal, but I had a feeling I was looking at a Circle of Life thing. I reburied most of them, and propped this guy up on a brick.
Sure enough, after five minutes in the sun, he blinked. And next time I looked over, I was newtless.
Cheer up, minions! Spring is coming…!
February 27, 2009 — 7:31 pm
Comments: 9
Retiring the practice ring
Have you ever seen a cat, unaccustomed to a collar, utterly flip out in a harness? (Poor old Pinky comes to mind). Well, I’m kind of funny about my hands, and I haven’t worn rings in a very long time and a couple of years ago — when it began to look as though Uncle B and I were really going to tie the knot, after all — I began to worry about the wedding band. What if I went all lose-my-shit Pinky wearing some thing on my finger allthedamn time?
Then I remembered the ring from my mother’s safety deposit box. It was a small platinum or white gold wedding band, just my size. Mother wrote on the envelope that it had been found in the hospital where she worked and turned in, but no one ever came to claim it.
Must be a sad story to go with, but as I didn’t know the details, there didn’t seem any harm in wearing the thing on my right hand for a while. A sort of training ring, as it were.
I did okay, too. I got a little fiddly with it, maybe, but it didn’t drive me screaming bughouse crackers.
After some months, though, the metal went oddly dull. Still, it would polish up okay, so I assumed I had just becrapped it. Then it developed a curiously rough edge along one side. Finally, I took it off and gave it a good, hard look.
It wasn’t precious metal at all. It was stainless steel over brass.
For two years, I have been wearing the missing O-ring from some poor bastard’s heart-lung machine.
February 26, 2009 — 7:50 pm
Comments: 19
Honey, the door-to-door funeral salesman’s been…
Yesterday was Shrove Tuesday. In sunny climes, they celibrate Mardi Gras with a great wicked bacchanalian festival. In Britain, they make pancakes.
But I don’t want you to think Brits lack all sense of fun; housewives traditionally make these pancakes while running a footrace.
Me? No. I didn’t make any pancakes. I assumed “wifely duties” had something to do with surprise sex. Running the hundred-yard dash while flipping flapjacks in a skillet? Day off to sulk.
Another Shrove Tuesday tradition is to strip the churches of all extraneous decoration, so that services during Lent are conducted with maximum austerity. That means all those leftover lilies from the Weasel/Badger wedding had to go somewhere. Very thoughtfully, someone left them on our front stoop this morning.
I went out to get the mail and, for one dizzy little moment of freefall, wondered if I’d made it through the night.
February 25, 2009 — 6:31 pm
Comments: 10
Moss!
I love moss. Flop down beside a trail anywhere (a thing I do often) and you’re sure to find a clump of moss. Which, on closer examination, is doing something spectacular. But really, really small.
The Audubon Society in New England is famous for building boardwalks all over their properties, so you can hike right out onto landscapes you couldn’t possibly reach on foot otherwise. Like great heaving waist-high landscapes of rolling primordial moss and fern, as far as the eye can see. Positively prehistorical. I loved those things. I would sit there for hours. It wouldn’t have surprised me a bit if a brontosaurus had come galumphing down the boardwalk.
I spent the nicer days last week relaying the low unmortared brick wall around the garden that had been knocked about when the new shit farm was installed. Some of those bricks have fine mosses on them. Fine mosses.
And I got to thinking how much I’d like to encourage mosses to grow in all the moss-appropriate places on Badger House. And I got to thinking how I’ve moved to the wettest, geekiest, gardeningest island on the whole planet (with the possible exception of Japan). So I wasn’t at all surprised Google turned up the British Bryological Society.
Mosses are simple souls, I gather. Keep them wet and keep them acid and they will…thrive, you hope. They are also unpredictable.
Anyhow, Project Moss is going to be fun! It’s sort of uncharted territory. Groups like the BBS are more about finding and identifying mosses in the wild. The few definitive books, like Fletcher‘s, are about keeping field-collected specimens alive in pots. Making existing mosses flourish with gay abandon is going to require original science.
Weasel science!
February 24, 2009 — 6:59 pm
Comments: 17