The Blog With No Name

For some strange reason, I began to attack the boxes now in my basement that came from my dad’s genealogy room. There are two filing cabinets in my basement to accomodate the stuff from these boxes, but frankly I had a fond hope that I’d be able to dispose of most of it. I don’t think that will be the case, so sad for me.

The first thing that I’m going to have trouble with is the photographs. Lots and lots of photographs, some of them quite old. When I say “trouble,” I mean that I don’t really want to keep them (I’m definitely not a scrapbooker) but they are of enough interest that I feel bad just pitching them. This is when a scanner comes in handy; I had some old photo albums belonging to a cousin of mine; she kindly let me disassemble the album (it was sort of disassembling itself, from age, anyway) and scan everything before I gave it back to her (it had been under the dining room couch in my parents’ house for twenty years or so, of course). So now I have the images, but she has to decide what to do with the physical objects. The added benefit of course is that I can distribute the images via CD to an infinite number of relatives quite cheaply. Yay technology!

Some of the items I have found might be of some small historical interest to the plethora of “hysterical” societies in the area – such as a big bundle of OPA (Office of Price Administration) paperwork and what appear to be ration coupons from WWII that my grandfather had at his gas station in Andover. Strangely enough, I find myself wanting to keep some of that stuff rather than scanning and pitching – there is something, some innate “historicity” in that sort of document, that I find attractive. (I once spent a summer in Washington, D.C., as a research assistant for a visiting Israeli scholar, which is a fancy way of saying that I photocopied about 10,000 pages of books/magazines/what-have-you for him. After a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing with Pamela Harriman herself, this Israeli guy managed to gain access to the Harriman papers at the Library of Congress, and had me photocopy a lot of those. One document was a short message, just one or two paragraphs, in Russian, signed by Josef Stalin. I must have sat there for fifteen minutes just holding that piece of paper in my hands, imagining its journey from Stalin’s hands to mine. Very very weird.)

And then there are my grandmother’s scrapbooks, some of which, I’m fairly sure, date from before her marriage. Newspaper clippings, photographs, invitations, postcards. Oy. All falling apart, of course. Here again, I think the scanner will come in handy – I can recreate the book page by page, for the most part.

This was all one box, mind you. I have about eight more to go. Sigh.

I’ve just given my daughter all of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon books from the basement.

We finally saw THE MOVIE. No way IN HELL the kids are seeing it. They are quite upset about this decision, as you can imagine. The boy, however, appears to be on his way to recreating the film entirely from LEGO. Who needs a movie when you have STAR WARS LEGO?!

It’s been a while – busy week. I just realized that I’ve never put any photos here of the more-or-less done, just-needs-to-be-stained back porch. So here is one:

Here is another, similar to one I’ve already posted but this one has COFFEE!

The one thing that I’ve noticed is that the sink is in a fairly stupid place, right beneath the corner cabinet. A regulation-height person has to lean sideways to use the sink. A kid doesn’t. So, all in all, I can live with it.

Here is a portent of things to come in the kitchen:

I’ve got to put a second coat on most of the wall, then Charles can get to the floor. Hooray! Maybe I can spend Memorial Day painting…

Here I am on a nice Sunday morning, taking a break from vacuuming dog hair. The kidlets and their father have gone off to Sunday School (the last one before summer). I must leave soon too, so that I can sit in the narthex and sell baseball tickets to members of my church.

I hope the previous week is indeed OVER – it was full of small stupidities and accidents. But I have a new pedometer, and have altered my morning walk to add a few hundred more steps, so that has to be good. I will miss the ear-ring I lost, but at least it wasn’t the one my husband gave me as an engagement gift (I am wearing it now, and am just a leeeeeetle bit paranoid, as you could tell if you could see me check my earlobe 15 times per hour). So I shouldn’t complain. And in fact I’ll stop now, and continue dusting.

Yesterday, I lost my pedometer. And I was working up to a pretty good day, step-wise. DAMN!

Just a few moments ago, I was fiddling with my earlobe, and it suddenly dawned on me – “there should be an earring here, eh? What the HELL!” (a stud, actually – a nice silver yin/yang symbol). I’m sure the freaking dog has eaten it by now. DAMN! DOUBLE DAMN!

I’m just having one of those weeks – I drop something, bend down to pick it up, and drop two more things. So anyway.

(On a more positive note, I marinaded some salmon fillets and grilled them for supper, and by GOD they were good! I LOVE salmon!)

I object to “parties” such as Tastefully Simple, Avon, Tupperware, Mary Kay, candles/baskets/jewelry more and more because they ARE NOT PARTIES! Much as my sister-in-law portrayed her little gathering as some people sitting around drinking wine and eating, it was from start to finish a commercial proposition. That is not a party. That is a not-party. Her “hostess” was making money; she herself was getting free stuff, all because her friends and family members came to her house, checkbooks clutched in their hands. I have just decided that I shall avoid them in the future. I wish I could say why I am suddenly so annoyed by them. Perhaps it’s just that yet another private, social activity is being commercialized and manipulated and turned into an imitation of what it should be. Whatever it is, I promise that I will never ever invite you to my house and then try to sell you something.

Friday night a Russian sextet sang at my church (part of a larger group called “Lyra,” from St. Petersburg). The bass, Vladimir, stayed with us that night. Took him back to church the next morning, then off to soccer and softball. My brother Phil was in town too. Went to my sister-in-law’s EVIL TASTEFULLY SIMPLE PARTY. More on that later. Had pizza. Got up the next morning (hey, that’s today!), went to church, came home, went to church again as we were having an organ recital/choir concert/etc etc. I have no energy left whatsoever to post. And I do have an extended rant in me re: TASTEFULLY GOD-DAMNED SIMPLE, let me tell you…

I went over to Knilans in Davenport to drool over some furniture today (my boss called it a “staff retreat,” heh), Stickley furniture to be exact. If you know me at all you *know* how much I love that whole Arts & Crafts / Mission look, so you can imagine how excited I was to be wandering through room after room of utterly gorgeous, heavy, oak furniture. It was breathtakingly expensive, even after the 45% discount was taken out (discounted off the mfr’s price, it said in tiny print on the postcard); one of my companion window-shoppers [also my neighbor] pointed out that many of the larger items (desks, dressers, dining tables and so on) were the equivalent of a good used car. Yikes!

(No, I don’t know that this is really going anywhere, I’m just releasing some random thoughts that have been floating around in my head over the past few days.)

At one point the three of us were sitting in a room containing a huge leather couch and several comfy armchair/footstool combinations, talking about cleaning ladies, when a Stickley salesman himself came in to see how we were doing. My neighbor asked where the furniture was made, possibly expecting to be told, “Mexico” or someplace similar; but no, it’s still made in New York State somewhere (the upholstered pieces come from North Carolina, if I recall correctly). Same factory for the last 100 years, never laid anyone off, hiring more people every year, expanding the facilities, etc etc etc.

But. They’ve also opened a factory (“state of the art”) in Vietnam, and will soon be importing furniture to the US from that factory. No plans to reduce any production at the NY factory, no no no. Just slightly less expensive furniture, that’s all. Same high quality. Vietnamese workers getting same benefits (how?) as NY workers. Stickley even bought them all bicycle helmets, as most of them commute by bicycle or scooter.

I found the whole thing vaguely disappointing. “Another one bites the dust,” I guess. If an American factory makes a stupendously beautiful dining room table that costs $3,000, and a Vietnamese factory, using the same raw materials, makes a table that costs $2,500, why bother? Who is the audience for this less expensive stuff? Certainly not me.

Another interesting (at least to me) datum: my husband recently bought a new pair of Levis. A fairly significant period of time had elapsed between his previous purchase of Levis and this current purchase. He did not like the new pair; said it didn’t fit the same way, not as comfortable, and so on. Do you think it’s a coincidence that the new pair was not made in the US, and the previous pair was? I really wonder.

(I did warn you that there was really no point to this ramble, didn’t I?)

I’ve also, again, become overwhelmed by the mass of our possessions, most of which go unused. Why, for example, do I have a coffee percolator? I would sooner die than serve any guest of mine coffee from a percolator, I assure you. Yet there it sits in the basement, inherited from Charles’ grandmother. OUT IT GOES! Cookie tins that I’ll never use – OUT THEY GO! Books, again – I’m trying to be more and more brutal about them. Life anymore seems to be all about acquiring mass quantities of crap, regardless of need or quality. Maybe one beautifully-made $3,000 table (that will last *forever*) is all you need, instead of a roomful of $500 falling-apart crap. If the $3,000 can be accounted for as far as materials, labor and associated labor costs like health insurance, and a reasonable profit (heh heh heh…), and if the money you “saved” by buying cheap crap meant that someone toiled away in an unhealthy work environment, then which is better spent?

If only I had the $3,000.

I went to a wine-tasting blowout tonight at the local sports arena (not held on the football field, but in a conference room). I was doing research, yah, that’s it – our next party will feature Riesling, so I sampled many many Rieslings. And mead. It’s brewed from honey. (The Russian for honey is med [pronounced myot], by the way.) Just save yourself the trouble and drink some honey; that’s my considered opinion at this point.

The friend who accompanied me was solicited to join the board of the NPR radio station benefitting from this event.

My boss was there, together with a friend; she was happy that I hadn’t called her on her day off. Go me.