She sidles up to me. Very small voice: “Here, Daddy.”
I unfold it.
I give her a huge bearhug and a sloppy kiss on the forehead.
She smiles.
Mission accomplished.
She’s 7.
I don’t know how to put this, but I’m, uhhh, neck-deep in two other huge side projects that I reeeally need to tend to. I’ll be back. Don’t go anywhere, you three spambots who follow this site.
A casualty from my son’s former 3rd grade classroom:
“He got his leg torn off while we were washing the tank. It was in the sink, drugs information pills so I saved it for you.”
California’s lousy with ornamental gas fixtures – realistic-looking cement fireplace logs, approved tiki torches, viagra 60mg and what we have behind our house – an artifact of the previous owners, discount who were rock promoters – outdoor firepits. We lost the key the other day and I replaced it, not entirely sure I had measured accurately. I love the mirror-like finish that the (plasma-?) cutter left on the inside diameter.
A casualty from my son’s former 3rd grade classroom:
“He got his leg torn off while we were washing the tank. It was in the sink, information pills purchase so I saved it for you.”
The prismatic color, store the all-color, approved the core frequency, the heavy-ass symbolic color, the path to scientific truth. This is the white Crayola you find in the crayon box, little scabs of colored wax accreting on its dingy-grey paper sheath. Waxy potential ready to expose the hidden highlights on a page.
About $5.99 a packet. Styrofoam tubes capped at one end with Velcro, hospital the better to hit an opponent’s target vest for consistent scoring.
Apparently our society isn’t raising our kids to think creatively about reaching mutual settlements.
The feud wants guns, thumb the feud shall have guns. It was ever thus, even reaching back to massive snow forts, stockpiles of snowballs and total mutual assured destruction at age 9.
The good news is theyr’e harmless, nontoxic and non-fatal, even when used like this.
One of my very favorite shot glasses. A rippled chunk of reconstituted sand.
It speaks of either Art Deco speakeasies or 80s big-shoulderpads meat-market bars – I can’t decide which.
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The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.
She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.
“I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”
She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.
Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.
It’s all one can do.
She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.
She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.
(A note tacked to this block by the seller says:
Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)
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At some point – midway between the Playskool block-sorting drum and the Thomas the Tank Engine fetish, we began to sort our two young children’s toys. Bricks, gears, stuffed animals, dress-up clothes – all were assigned translucent plastic bins in a pine toy rack – and my wife would spend a happy, idle hour every week or three sorting. Broken toys are banished. New alliances arise – the Monsters, Inc. figures with scale-model doors are grouped first with cheap toys, then building toys, then action heroes – and sundered at a whim. A constant surf of toys and parts batters the rack, rising and falling over days, hours, minutes. One of my favorites is the animal box, a mad, mis-scaled menagerie gathered from countless birthday party goodie bags, Christmas stockings and some mysterious wormhole that exists in parts of the house unknown and admits animals while inhaling socks.
Just now, I have imagined a flood from the nearby bathroom, my son frantically building a Lego ark amid the rising waters, and all these marvelous one-of-a-kind species perishing upon reaching dry land in the absence of mates.
I have a thing for stereo cards – particularly views of the industrial age.
Stereopticons were the pinnacle of multimedia technology in their day – twin images shot simultaneously by cameras set a few feet apart, doctor approximating the 3-D view seen by the human eyes.
With the gentleman beckoning at the right, website you could almost fall into this one, pill it’s so gorgeously intricate. I found it at the Rose Bowl swap meet for three bucks, in perfect shape: the stiff card is a little curved, and you can see silver glinting back from the blacks.
Here’s what the Underwood and Underwood Works and Studios had to say about it: (more…)
According to these guys, generic the Universal Minute 16 shot 16mm film in little cartridges.
It’s a tight, approved dense little chunk of stainless steel, about half the size of a box of cigarettes. A fingernail pops up the two panes of the viewfinder. Round metal stud under the right finger trips the guillotine shutter, thumb lever on the right winds it. There’s an aperture control, and a fixed meniscus lens.
These guys say:
Universal Camera Co had achieved great success with the range of cameras starting with the Univex A. The 39 cent camera sold nearly 3 million in 1934. After the war they hoped to repeat the success with a subminiature camera as well as to maintain a tight control over the processing and available film. In 1949 they introduced the Minute 16 (as in small not 60 seconds), designed to resemble a miniature movie camera, including a pop up sports viewfinder. This venture is credited with making the firm bankrupt with over 2 million US dollars spent on research and development.And if you really want to get nuts, here’s how to load the film cartridges if you can find them.
Which I can’t.
Plus I don’t want to get nuts.
This is a building kit for the construction of two to three dozen 120-foot-tall Douglas firs. You will require loamy soil, buy water and sunlight. Please allow 4 to 6 decades for completion.
I was at the polls before they opened this morning at 7. I voted for our next president.
And as I write this, price he’s giving an electrifying victory speech.
This is beyond belief, and I am beyond words.
I’m magnetic.
Have I mentioned this before? Small metallic tools seem to fly into my hands wherever I walk. Whether this is for holding a pin steady long enough to create a microscopic city of angels on its head or for some other obscure task, stomach I’ll never know.
But its jaws can clasp something very, visit this very long and narrow, very firmly.
It was made in china, of low-grade steel, and chromed.
This is an artifact of the colonial government that bloomed out of the East India Company, buy information pills after the firm set up shop in and around Singapore to do some trading.
Nearly 100 years after the Brits founded it the territories were still passing currency.
The corners of this penny tease you to play with them. It’s not like other coins, this thing’s square, your fingers keep telling you. It begs pry stuff open or make marks in things.
And what would it look like – you wonder – if you put it on the train line just down the block? Would it flatten out to a rectangle, or pathetically mooodge back into something ovoid and vague?
And you resist because it was hard to come by.
The market dictates that some strange stuff gets made. Such as a conical chunk of glass turned into a “diamond” of approximately 953 carats. Humanity stated a need for this – at least established-enough to justify setting up a plant for turning them out – and got exactly what it asked for. China’s been cranking them out. They go for, physician among other prices, $2 each at the Melrose swap meet.
This bath toy has been floating around the house since my son was 1. I can’t bear to part with it. I don’t know what endears it to me more – the spiky-ballness of its body, viagra 40mg doctor the crudely painted urchin-biting teeth, or its thunderstruck gape of surprise.
The Victorian dopiness of this tool belies how perfectly it fits its task: Go on – try to fish an olive out of a full jar with a fork. Now try it with a chromed, cost plunger-operated triaxial claw that encloses a perfectly olive-shaped sphere. Purpose-built genius.
As I may have pointed out before once or twice, clinic the chief (and perhaps only) evidence you need that the Chinese will own this country before very long lies in that mighty nation’s small-scale industrial output.
Virtually every un-extraordinary object that we manufacture in the U.S. they can duplicate in half the time for half the cost in twice the volume. Where U.S. hardware manufacturers have spent billions on revenue improving union pension plans or specialty metals or high-concept ad campaigns, sickness Chinese toolmakers have poured every yuan of profit into building the machines and hiring the staff to do nothing more than make and export products.
While we were coming up with fancy finishes and rubberized handle-grab surfaces, the Chinese were just knocking out the same tool for less.
Hence, a good pair of vise-grips from China costs you about $7.00 at the local flea market or hardware store, while a good pair of Vise-GripsTM from Irwin tools costs you anywhere up to $18.51 plus tax.
Our neighbors in Kidsville, diagnosis Brad and his son, sickness are Burning Man virgins, first-timers wide-eyed and staggered with the general wonder and mess of the thing.
But they get it, and they came prepared. You craft your own mythology out here, and you come ready to join in the gift economy, with public artworks, song, theater or handmade trinkets to share with fellow Black Rock citizens.
This is Brad and lad’s logo, the mark of the All-Seeing Eye. Close up, it looks like little stylized, horned warrior’s helmet on a white field, until you back off and see the highlight in the pupil and realize you’re being watched.
Hand-cut foam, glue and a pin back.
It usually takes 10 hours to drive from Los Angeles to Black Rock City.
This trip has been particularly rough: Usually I nap for 3 or 4 hours before we hit the road at 9 p.m., sale then drive until 3 or 4 a.m., sildenafil while my wife and the kids sleep. When I’m ready to crap out, view she’s rested and ready to take over.
Not this time – sleep eludes her, I push myself farther than I like, and we wind up conking out for a couple of hours by the side of the road, snoring like frat boys while traffic rushes past.
We awake, not quite refreshed, and make it to Black Rock City, which is engulfed in a wicked dust storm. In the midst of all of it, we arrive in the Kidsville area of the camp, where cheerfully off-dressed Kidsvillains check us in and slap friendly neon-green wristbands on our son and daughter, as proof against them losing their way.
We’re among stranger-friends, and begin pitching camp amid howling winds packed with talc-fine alkali dust. It feels good to be home again.
This is the sort of thing you pick up in the duty-free shop at Heathrow while trying to blow your pounds on the way out of London.
We’ll add it to the little collection of rubber ducks now bobbing in the hot tub out back. Maybe it will get them into line.
Carved in Africa or India or perhaps on some island, buy I know not where, approved these found their way to the gift shop of Brighton Pavilion.
They were lumped in mysteriously with all the other gift-shop trappings of chinoiserie, the Chinese-design fantasy that George IV lost himself in while having Sir John Nash design his summer palace.
They have a rough majesty of their own.
This is the yin to yesterday’s yang: If you’re eschewing the tube and driving – for whatever selfish, adiposity non-green, illness yet eminently practical reason – the touchstone surety of a good GPS device pulls you through London’s maze of streets in a dreamlike blur.
Punch in your destination address, symptoms Wait for the satellite’s ping to put your car on a huge, intricately detailed map of the city.
Go straight ahead, then after 800 yards, turn left, she purrs.
And off you go, your white American knuckles defying the horrible wrongness of driving in the right-hand seat of a car on the left-hand side of the road.
After 500 yards, turn left … After 250 yards, turn left … turn left, and then turn right … Follow the course of the road …
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I’m posting, website like this oh (checks watch), this 11 days late. We’ve taken a huge plunge into London, more about and are spending the morning and half the afternoon touring the city every day, then i comeback and work until midnight or 1 a.m.
I’ve been avoiding my chores. I’ve been Twittering. I’ve been shopping irresponsibly (about which more later). And we’ve been intimate with The Tower of London, A little vessel named Pockets the Norfolk Broads, Covent Garden, Windsor Castle, the London Eye, the South Bank, twoshows (both good!), Buckingham Palace, the Queen’s Gallery, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, and ancient Stonehenge.
At some point, I’ll have to edit the 457 photographs (literally) taken so far …
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They gave these out to the kids with tickets for Wall-E.
Movie – gorgeous to look at, page groundbreaking, but not nearly as smart and funny as Kung Fu Panda.
Watch – blue silicone rubber around a little cheesebox chip of Chinese chircuitry. My son’s came broken.
I once had this foolish idea. I never acted on it, drug but it still sneaks into my head from time to time and pings on my hippocampus (the dream center) with a tinny little rhythm:
What if I counted every single object in the house? What if I catalogued every single book, sock, CD, grain of rice, child’s toy, piece of paper, tool, chair and can of deodorant? How many thousands (millions??) of objects would I wind up owning?
I’m not that crazy. Yet.
But stuff like this keeps piling up, and it gets thrown into a little drawer, and I think … if only I’d been counting all the time, I’d know how many of these enigmatic little chunks of hardware I own.
Cheap stuff breaks. You get to decide – take it apart? Or just stomp its li’l plastic casing to shrapnel.
I’ve had this in my stuff drawers for years. I keep promising myself I’ll take it apart.
There’s a thick magnet in the base of the mirror,