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Damage Control

Sep 8th, 2010 by

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Joel built me a shelf across the windows in my sewing room so that the “Swiss Cheese Plant) (pictured at right) and the Madagascar Dragon Trees (at left) have a safe and secure home in my sewing room.

Now, they’re above the level where I might accidentally crash into them and bruise their leaves and they’re well out of the reach of Minnie, who LOVES to chow down on the Dragon Tree’s fronds and then barf them up in other areas of the house.

Fucking cat!

Two variations on the theme of Madagascar Dragon Tree
I really like the dragon trees. They’ve grown a lot since I took this picture, which to be fair was about two and a half years ago. Despite the cat’s depredations, they’ve grown up and filled out quite a bit, though a lot of the fronds have ragged ends thanks to Minnie.

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It is her good fortune that she is so pretty, as she can also be a total pill.

Though to be fair, she’s been a LOT better lately. She’s not half as deliberately aggravating as she used to be. She’s actually quite affectionate and cuddly fairly often and quite a lot less destructive. In part because we’ve Minnie-Proofed the house more effectively, in part because there are some things she couldn’t possibly destroy any further, and in part (and this may be wishful thinking) because she’s just being less bastardy these days.

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Ruint: my beautiful armchair and sofa. Fucking cat!

The cats are, as I may have mentioned, banned from my sewing room, partially because they eject loose fur all over hell and creation, and mostly because one or both of them pissed in the milk crate I’d been using to store my mending projects in. You just can’t trust the demented little fur-loaves.

Caught in the act of close proximity.
Deceptively cute, devastatingly destructive.

Joel and I regularly and vehemently aver that after these two catbeasts finally die, we will never, ever, not-even-if-you-threatened-us-with-grievous-bodily-harm, ever have cats again. Never!

They’re cute, and sometimes they can be affectionate and/or kind of amusing, but the reward versus trouble ratio isn’t tallying up well from our perspective.

Given the vitality and overall strenuous evil of these two, they’ll probably live for 22 years apiece, meaning I’ve got at least 12-14 more years of cat hair all over the house and 6:00 a.m. yowling wakeup calls.

Wheee.

Posted in Cats, Gratuitous Cussing, grumbles gripes and pointless bitching, Houseplants, Photo entries | 1 Comment »

Jazzy trails to you

Sep 7th, 2010 by

Apropos of pretty much nothing, Perez Prado’s “Patricia” popped into my head and stayed for the day while I was out riding the trails at Smithville yesterday.

It’s a surprisingly good song to mountain bike to, actually.

Posted in Mountain Biking, Super-Short Entries, videos | No Comments »

Crystals are just fancy dirt

Sep 5th, 2010 by

Sometimes, I think I go out of my own way to annoy myself. This is called being a masochist, and there’s no good excuse for it other than maybe I’m not so right in my headmeats.

Anyway, I went to a friend’s show at the Honeytree Gallery on First Friday (this past Friday), and that was awesome and excellent and fun. Her wall of art was charming and showed to its best advantage, and I got to meet a couple of other really great women there, with whom I’m probably going to be doing some craft-crap swapping. So that part of the evening was actually fabulous and entirely annoyance-free.

But I had a bit of time to kill before the open house opened, so I decided to mosey around the Crossroads district and look at things.

Sadly, ACME Bicycle Company closed its doors last November, so as is the way of things, a new business has opened in the building that formerly housed my erstwhile favorite LBS. The new tenant of 414 E. 18th St., is a bizarre bazaar dedicated to fortune telling, dream interpretation, aura-cleansing, crystals and semiprecious stones, big flowy cheesecloth skirts, and batik handbags. The place was teeming with vague, diaphanously clad women, so I figured it might also do a brisk sideline in essential oils, which despite my fundamental mistrust of all things woo-woo, are relevant to my interests (perfume making).

So, I locked up my bike and decided to have a look and see what their tenant finish looked like and whether they had anything good smelling on offer.

  • 1. The tenant finish is very PURPLE. The floor is dark purple. The walls are a lighter purple. There are a series of little closets framed out around three fourths of the perimeter of the show-room. These cubicles are, by my inference, booths into which you can abscond with the paranormalist of your choice for whatever sort of hokum they profess to provide. The door frames of these cubicles are gaily painted in the colors of the rainbow. There is glitter on the floor; there are a number of low-slung sofas parked here and there about the main room. There’s a rack of sheer and flowing cotton garments, mostly batik printed. Spaced out in between the doors of the cubicles are some attractive old-fashioned china hutches displaying crystals, semiprecious stones, herb wands, and other such paraphernalia.
    2. No, they weren’t selling any perfume ingredients. They had some clear Christmas balls filled with dubious potpourri, and the aforementioned herbal wands, but no oils or extracts.

    • Determining that they, in fact, had nothing I was interested in, I made for the door but was intercepted by a sonsy, purple-haired matron who pressed into my hand a pamphlet explaining all of their services. She jovially and earnestly recommended that I look into their dream interpretation, aura-manipulation, or fortune telling services. I thanked her for her time and brochure and thanked whatever gods may be that mind reading isn’t really real, otherwise I would have deafened many a third ear with my mental exclamation of “give me a fucking break!”

    Posted in Distractions, Gratuitous Cussing, Oh, for fuck's sake | No Comments »

    It’s not got much gruts in it

    Sep 5th, 2010 by

    About a month ago, a couple of different friends of mine recommended that I should check out Antonia Cornwell’s blog, “Whoopee, Yet Another Blooming Blog” or “Whoopee,” for short.

    Boy, oh boy, am I glad I did, and I’ll expand on that theme another time (I’ve got to head for work in about 10 minutes) but today I’m just going to say that Ms. Cornwell recently wrote up an entry wherein she posted some pictures of a magnetic chalkboard and its accouterments that she’d devised for the amusement for her three-year-old daughter. This included “magnetic poetry,” magnetic facial features and accessories for jazzing up hand-drawn monsters a la Mr Potato Head, and a lewd statement pinned to the wall by her equally witty husband Ian.

    Anyway, to the point, she was mocking herself for amusing her child with such an old-fashioned contrivance as a chalkboard, and claimed that she also only fed her daughter “gruts for tea,” and helpfully included the following video, for those of us who did not have the pleasure of growing up with Ivor Cutler as a pop cultural reference:

    I was immediately taken with the word “gruts,” and have determined that if I ever have children to annoy, this is what I will tell them is for dinner if they ask and I don’t feel like discussing it because we’re having leftovers, I haven’t figured out what to make, or I am making something they don’t much like, but that Joel and I do.

    My mom did the same with “fried parsnips.” If she didn’t feel like discussing dinner for one of the above reasons or some other undisclosed reason, we were told that it would be “fried parsnips,” and that was the end of that.

    And apparently, when I was a little twerp, I was asked what I’d like for dinner on my birthday, and I quite decidedly and distinctly informed my mom that “ba-gah-ghistie” was my choice dish. Now, of course, there’s no such thing as ba-gah-ghistie, so I’m sure Mom just made something that she’d noticed me eating with gusto and called it such. It doesn’t take much to fool a four-year-old.

    But, because she and Dad thought the “ba-gah-gistie” thing was really funny, they turned this one around on me, and I was offered “ba-gah-ghistie” as a birthday dinner for years, and also sometimes when I asked what was for dinner, and Mom didn’t feel like discussing it.

    I also, in the course of seeking gruts on the Internet, came across this fellow’s blog and have been getting myself acquainted with it. I think he’s going to become one of my regular reads, and will probably soon appear on the ol’ blogroll. He writes passionately about science, beer, poots, silly music, puns, British travel, and silly videos. Evidently a kindred soul, across the pond.

    Posted in Distractions, Utter Silliness | 1 Comment »

    Sparkly Things

    Sep 4th, 2010 by

    I’ve been gluing stuff to other stuff lately.

    For example:
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    Sequins + button + hairpin

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    More sequins, a button, a bead, and a hairpin.

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    La, la, laaaaa…more of the same, but in a more subtle and refined color scheme. Kind of elegant for being a bunch of crap glued together.

    I was going for a peacock feather effect
    This is meant to be sort of a peacock feather effect in pearlescent sequins and beads. It isn’t actually cockeyed, I just couldn’t get it to not sit cockeyed on the table and I couldn’t get a decent picture of it on my own head!

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    Yaaay! Garish!

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    Yoicks! Even more garishererer!

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    Ultra pink and flowery and leafy.

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    This here’s a big, purple, pansie-ish spangly thing.

    Super Glue Control Gel is AWESOME
    A daisy/pinwheel sort of thing made of old buttons.

    Pom-Puff Daisies
    Puffball daisies

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    More of the same, in different colors

    I was awfully happy with how this one came out
    A big, pearlescent flowery thing with a little rosette in the center.

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    Barrette featuring picot flowers and a pinwheel bead

    Part of my sister's birthday present
    A selection of the above being boxed up for my sister’s birthday.

    My first attempt at an origami flower hairpin
    She also got my first ever tsumami kanzashi because she liked it and I really do think it looks like her style.

    I’m also getting ready to make some new hats. Some more cycling caps, ’cause I’ve been selling those again, plus some girly-style winter hats. I have a design in mind for a gathered cloche that has a kind of yin-yang colorblock effect that will be rather dramatic if I can get it to turn out.

    Posted in Art Projects & Making Things, Photo entries | No Comments »

    I am why I can’t have nice things!

    Aug 31st, 2010 by

    A squillion years ago, more or less, I graduated from highschool and my grandparents gave me a really, really, really, really nice set of pens (one ballpoint, one fountain).

    I, being the hamfisted mutant that I am, managed to break the ballpoint pen within a year. Moreover, being an ignorant cluck, I tried to “fix” it via the “miracle” of Super Glue.

    That didn’t work so well.

    A good 12 years or more after breaking said pen, it occurred to me to look up that particular brand of pen (Pelikan) online and see if I could maybe replace the broken one because I really liked that pen. I soon realized how very posh those pens were and that replacing it was not likely to happen. I thought, just for kicks, I’d see if, since these pens were so very grand, they might have a repair service.

    As it turns out, they do, and as it turns out, they were willing to take my pen, which had been broken for over a decade and repair it. Even more amazingly, they did so and didn’t charge me anything besides shipping! This is the sort of thing that should pull in a few more exclamation points, but I try to hold myself to Terry Pratchett’s aphorism about exclamation points these days.

    Better than new!

    So now, I have a really fancy pen once again, and I’m just tickled to bits and pieces. My grandparents who gave me these pens died two years ago, and I miss them like crazy. From time to time, I’ll think of something I’d like to tell Grandma, or think of one of Grandpa’s pranks or inventions and just want to see them both and hang out some more.

    I guess they were pretty pleased with my educational attainments and aspirations (although I regularly feel bad that I haven’t been able to do more with all of that schooling) and whenever I pull out my fancypants pen, I can think of that.

    Some folks are total fountain pen nerds, so I am including this close-up of the nib in my fountain pen. I think I might eventually have it changed out for a finer tip, but it does work quite nicely.

    Posted in dumb things I have done, Family, Photo entries, Recommendations | 2 Comments »

    Woodchuck Day

    Aug 30th, 2010 by

    Now, if I had any sense of the fitness of things, I’d save this story for February 2, which is not only Groundhog Day, it is also the birthday of the Grandma involved.

    Alas, I am not that organized, and so, you get a story about hibernating groundhogs on the second-to-last day of August.

    In the 1950s, when my mom and her siblings were little kids, my grandparents lived with Grandpa’s family on a farm in Ohio. The house was a pretty standard rural farmhouse from all indications. A bit primitive, but solid and capable of more or less squeezing everybody in. Sure, you had to chase hens out of the outhouse before you took a whizz, but if you kept your sense of humor about things, it worked reasonably well.

    This farmhouse had a cellar which was dug deep into the clay soil, and kept a steady temperature, the better to store potatoes, carrots, and the like. It had an outside door, one of those slanted things sheathed in tin that children like to try to slide down.

    One fall, when Grandpa was stowing that year’s crop of root vegetables, an enterprising woodchuck sneaked in while the door was open. Later, Grandma went down for some vegetables and spotted the woodchuck bumbling around the perimeter of the room. She decided to try to capture it in a bucket and then take it back outside, but the wily woodchuck would have none of that. In an unexpected burst of speed, the woodchuck rocketed across the cellar floor and dove for cover beneath the Furnace.

    The Furnace was one of those turn-of-the-century coal-fired behemoths that made more noise than heat. It took up half of the cellar and presided over its domain as a capricious and inefficient dictator.

    Grandma, being a woman of intelligence and resourcefulness, used a broom to try to prod the woodchuck out into the open. Nothing doing. The woodchuck was so well sequestered beneath the furnace that he was either inaccessible or else he had gotten cocky and knew there was no reason to dislodge himself other than personal preference.

    Grandma gave up for the night, assuming the woodchuck would come out the next day, when the commotion was passed and he got hungry. Then, she’d have another go with the bucket.

    The woodchuck did not resurface the next day, nor the day after that. The woodchuck didn’t come back out for a week, then two. Grandma figured that the poor thing had starved and died beneath the furnace and was bracing herself for a powerful stench. The cellar continued to not smell of decaying woodchuck. Grandpa opined that that woodchuck had settled himself in for a damn comfortable hibernation, and Grandma resigned herself to waiting him out.

    Sure enough, the next spring, Grandma found the woodchuck, dazed and skinny, trying to excavate a tunnel to freedom in one corner of the cellar. In his post-hibernation torpor, the woodchuck was much easier to capture. Or perhaps he just sensibly realized that he had to be captured to be freed. In any event, the woodchuck was removed from the cellar and they all went along their separate, happy ways.

    The. End.

    Posted in Family | 2 Comments »

    There may be something to that aromatherapy business

    Aug 28th, 2010 by

    This summer, the thing that has done the best in my garden is the lavender. Most specifically, the lavender in the northwest garden box. So I’ve been drying sprigs of it in the bedroom. I’ve shared out some of my floral bounty with several friends, as well as made myself a couple of little sachets.

    I took one to work, to roll up in the towel I used for a pillow in my little lunchtime/naptime hidey-hole. I’m still not sure if this was a brilliant or a terrible idea; I actually do seem to be sleeping better. I only wake up once, about half way through my lunch break, when I check my watch and roll over so my ear doesn’t go numb. I used to wake up about every 10 minutes. However, when my alarm goes off, I’m finding it a whole lot harder to come back to consciousness.

    It seems like lavender really does have a soporific effect on me. This may be a total placebo thing, but whatever the cause, it seems to be working.

    Anyway, it beats the slightly sewagey smell that storage room usually has (one of the drains for the north side of the building vents just outside the loading dock door, and the stink tends to drift in through the cracks)

    Posted in Distractions, Garden, Work/career (vague as to avoid doocing) | 1 Comment »

    New perfume mixture

    Aug 26th, 2010 by

    5 drops of Rose Otto (in jojoba)
    1 drop of Patchouli
    scant .35 oz vodka infused with whole cloves (12 in a 1 oz bottle)

    I use these tiny perfume bottles that are .35 oz, so whatever liquid I put in besides the oils (usually vodka, either plain or infused) is just under .35 oz, minus a little so there’s room for the atomizer’s tube.

    Since my mom doesn’t read my blog (because she’s still an Internet holdout) I can write freely about my most recent project, which was mixing up several different perfume mixes for her birthday. I did my original three, plus the above-mentioned, plus one that consisted of:

    just under .35 oz vodka infused with cardamom (6 pods in a 1 oz bottle)
    2 drops patchouli oil, 3 drops Jasmine (in jojoba oil).

    It sounds really weird, but hear me out…it actually smells pretty suave.

    Posted in Art Projects & Making Things, Family | No Comments »

    Trash-treasure of the day

    Aug 26th, 2010 by

    Melissa and I were out riding around the other evening and I am so glad my friends are patient with me.

    “Dude, we’ve gotta stop,” I hollered out.

    U-turn was pulled, trash was picked.

    Someone down in Columbus Park was getting rid of some luggage. Most of it was lackluster and grubby, but not this little gem:

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    Dating probably to the late 1960s and in astoundingly pristine condition, this little suitcase (about 18″ tall and 24″ wide, and about 6″ deep) was just too gloriously ugly for me to leave behind. My CamelBack pack has just enough straps and clips that I was able to sling this from my pack and it was small and light enough that I hardly noticed it was back there. And as it turned out, the suitcase was also convenient for toting a container of leftover Vietnamese food back to Melissa’s car. It would have been squashed utterly in one or the other of our backpacks, but in the nice flat suitcase bottom, it rode quite nicely.

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    The inside is in nice shape, too. No stains or tears and the leatherette hold-down straps aren’t at all chewed up nor is the lingerie pouch stretched out. I don’t think this case saw much service.

    Best of all, it doesn’t smell bad in any way. Not basementy, not atticky, and not like the cat pissed on it. It smells a little plasticky and that’s about it. Understandable and completely acceptable.

    Plus, doesn’t it look cute with the little “Searsonite” toiletries case I found last summer?

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    Damn near a matched set of luggage.

    Posted in Adventures, biking, Dumpster Diving, Photo entries | No Comments »

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