Adventures In The Hundreds
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While trying to think up a “clever” title for this blog post, I searched for synonyms of “200th,” now that my posts can be counted in multiple hundreds! Bicentennial and bicentenary were the only words I could find, and since both of those refer to years as units of time rather than a quantity of something else, I gave up and went with the title you see. But this is the 200th post of this blog, which is something I am personally celebrating. As a way of sharing the celebration, I present the following random list:
How (not) to set a good example:
When I was a kid (probably in my early teens), my middle brother and I had been set the task of prying dandelions out of our lawn, using an old-school weed digger. We both dug for awhile and then I decided to be stupid and started hurling my weed digger at the ground, vastly entertained when I could get it to stick upright. My younger brother, still in the stage of thinking I was cool (oh, how I miss those days!) and copying most everything I did, also made an attempt to throw his weed digger point first into the turf. He ended up sticking it point first into his foot.
There was a lot of wailing and bleeding. Not yet having undergone first aid training of any kind, I promptly yanked the dirty weed digger out of his foot, grabbed him by the waist, and sort of half-dragged/half-carried him into the house, shouting at him all the while about how stupid he was. No, I did not see the hypocrisy of calling him stupid for doing what I’d just done until much later.
When we got into the house, I hauled the poor bleeding lad into my mom’s bedroom, where the hard-working lady was attempting a nap. I gave some garbled explanation about what had happened but my mother immediately latched onto the important point, and issued a clear instruction:
“Go into the bathroom and stand on the linoleum. Don’t bleed on the carpet.”
I admire her so much.
The never-ending quest:
Car mounts for cell phones: you can get ones that hang from your rear-view mirror, but if your mirror is just glued to the window rather than set into the roof frame, then you are asking for trouble (by which I mean, your mirror will fall off). You can get those ones with suction cups that stick to glass or the dashboard , but there is no glass in any car I’ve driven that I’d be willing to have obscured by a cell phone mount. And I don’t care what the advertisements say, those suction cups do not reliably stick to a dashboard. You could glue a mount to your dashboard, but that’s a permanent alteration to your car, and I don’t want to do that either. Those mounts that attach to your air vents tend to destroy the relatively fragile plastic of the vents; those vents were made to direct air, not support weight.
In my last car, which was a Toyota Prius, I ended up buying a mount which installed in the CD slot of the car. This worked extremely well but rendered the CD slot unusable, alas. So when my Prius died her final death recently and I had to get a new car, I decided not to buy another CD slot mount.
My new car, a Subaru Impreza, now has a new style of mount I got off Amazon. This mount is essentially a spring-loaded clamp, where the inside surfaces of the clamp have a rubber lining which both protects whatever surface it’s attached to and also adds extra “grippy-ness” so that the clamp doesn’t slide around. It does take me two hands to get the phone into the holder, but I can live with that. The phone can be pushed to lay flat over the top of the clamp or rotated 360° in all axes. And the clamp is versatile and can be attached to any number of places in one’s car. It’s amazing! And inexpensive. I highly recommend it.
Nerd gallery:
Over the years, in addition to making my various art projects from nothing, I’ve also framed a fair amount of premade art that appeals to my various literary interests. As I mentioned in a previous article, I’ve loved the Chronicles of Narnia since I was a child. I purchased this map a number of years ago, then aged it up a bit by tearing it and applying ink to the edges and one spot in the middle that was intended to look like a burn mark. I also creased it, then inked the creases. Then I mounted it in a frame. I will say up front that with all of these pictures, I opted to keep the cheap glass that came with the frame instead of buying non-glare glass, which would have looked much better on the wall and also photographed much better. (I just could not figure out how to take a picture that didn’t have reflections of me and my kitchen in the glass. Oh well…) I might still replace the glass someday…
I also love the Lord of the Rings stories; Tolkien was a genius. When I was putting together the “nerd gallery” I have in my bedroom, I searched for awhile for appropriate LOTR artwork. I ended up buying a poster (I can’t remember where I got it) which is a stylized picture of the White Tree of Gondor, where the tree is drawn with tiny pieces of text from the second LOTR book, The Two Towers. It’s quite beautiful and striking…and you have to get right up close to it to see that particular detail.
And as I’ve mentioned in previous posts about The Goblet of Fire and The Deathly Hallows, I love Harry Potter. I have two pieces of art which I more or less acquired for free off the internet and then had professionally printed into a larger size for framing. I’m not certain of the legality of this, so I can’t freely recommend this method of acquisition, but it is what I did. One picture is a stylized design of part of Diagon Alley and the other is a composite picture of the silhouette of our three heroes against a backdrop that includes an open book, a bit of Hogwarts Castle, owls, and Harry’s stag Patronus.
What’s black and white and read all over?
Yeah, I know, that old joke only works when it’s spoken aloud, as it depends on the homonyms “red/read.” Never mind. It was just a way of bringing me around to a conversation about the printed newspaper I receive once a month called Knit Nation. My knitting friend and former co-worker Joan introduced me to this delight. She subscribed almost as soon as the periodical came into existence, and at some point, mailed me all the copies she had. What a friend! I loved them and immediately subscribed myself.
In addition to having lots of lovely content and no advertising, Knit Nation is a bit of an anomaly in an era when the printed periodical is going the way of the dinosaurs. It’s difficult to describe the tactile delight of holding newsprint in your hand, but it takes me right back to childhood. People who did not grow up with newspapers of all kinds all over the place in almost every house don’t know what they’re missing. The company that publishes this also publishes Crochet Nation, Baking Nation, Garden Nation, and History Nation. You can find all their offerings here.
Things aren’t always what they appear:
A couple months ago, I pulled up to a neighbor’s house to drop off a parcel. The neighbors weren’t home, but their genial golden retriever was as happy to see me as ever. She bounded up to me in the rain, wet and dirty, and seemed keen to transfer a large quantity of her mud to me. When I made clear I was uninterested in getting jumped on, she ran off to get a toy and brought it back to me.
This game I understand. Dog brings toy and expects one of two games: tug-of-war or retrieval. Sometimes, the game is keep-away but I refuse to play that one. I dropped the parcel off on the neighbor’s porch and turned to see what the dog had in her mouth. It looked like one of those big knotted ropes that dogs love to toss around and chew on and fight over. She brought it to me and I reached down to grab it. My hand slid right off it. Ugh…covered in dog spit, clearly. But the dog seemed keen to play and playing with her was preferable to being jumped on, so I tried another grab, and again, my hand slid right off.
I finally took a careful look at what the dog was holding in her mouth. It was the biggest dead rat I’ve ever seen. Like…New York subway Pizza Rat big. I couldn’t stop myself from making a girly squeal as I ran back toward my car, shaking my hands the whole way like I could shake off the dead rat cooties. At my car, I grabbed my bottle of hand sanitizer and dumped quite a large quantity of the stuff on my hands.
As I was drowning my hands in sanitizer, my neighbor pulled up in her car and her young daughter got out of the passenger seat. The dog bounded over, still carrying the rat, and I hollered over at the girl not to touch it, ‘cuz “It’s a big ol’ rat!” Her girly squeal put mine to shame, and she ran for the house, with the dog bouncing along happily behind her.
I decided I’d had quite enough indignities for one day and just left. What did I learn from this? Look at what’s being offered before you take it, especially if the one doing the offering is a dog.
