Category: Fun Stuff

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A Teensy-Tiny Piece of History

Back in 1959, in observance of Alaska’s new statehood (1958), the Southern Baptist Convention sponsored an evangelistic effort, partnering with existing SBC churches in Alaska. My dad obtained sponsorship from the baptist church in Seward, Alaska, along with its partnering churches in the lower 48, and spent a month as part of evangelistic meetings, clinics on church music and church education, and in personal evangelism.

I have copies of letters between him and the sponsoring church, copies of various agendas for meetings, and a very special “cookbook” compiled by students of Shishmaref Day School, Shishmaref, Alaska.It’s a little ~4”x5” typewritten booklet with a hand lettered cover that includes such “recipes” (descriptions of preparation, no amounts given; kinda like my “Not a recipe” recipes I post here now and then *heh* like

Eskimo Ice Cream

  • grate reindeer tallow into small pieces
  • Add seal oil slowly while beating with hand
  • After some seal oil has been used, then add a little water while whipping
  • Continue adding seal oil and water until white and fluffy
  • Some berries can be added to it

It might be difficult to come by reindeer tallow and seal oil, here in America’s Third World County™, but it’d certainly be “keto friendly.” 🙂

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I Blame Keto

An old box of my dad’s WWII memorabilia came my way, recently. One of the real keepers was his uniform web belt. The brass was in need of serious TLC, but the webbing was in great shape. Strangely, unlike his Boy Scout uniform belt, I can actually wear this one. Surprise: my waistline is a close approximation of my dad’s when he was in the best condition of his life. Oh, I’m not in a similar conditioning, but shape? Close. I’m a bit taller than he was (and still a wee bit “puffier” *heh*), but in the ballpark.

Interesting.

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No Names (In Order to “Shield” the Guilty)

. . .but either someone(s?) in the turnpike authority of a certain state (again, no names, but the relevant initials are O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A) has a macabre sense of humor, or the turnpike authority needs a literate adult on staff, because signs in construction zones read:

“Don’t hit our workers
Pay $10,000 fine”

I tell ya, I don’t have the $10,000 to spare. I started thinking I should look for a worker to hit so I could avoid the fine. . . *heh*

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“Teach Your Children Well. . . “

Lovely Daughter commented today after Mother’s funeral, graveside service, and the funeral dinner at the church (at which neither she not I found anything to eat, though there was some palatable–just!–coffee) regarding my (successful!) efforts when she was a small girl (a talkative three year old? About that) to teach her to say to my mom, “Grandma, please take me to Chik-Fil-A.”

So, in honor of her grandmother, she had her lunch at. . . Chik-Fil-A.

🙂

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Happy Discovery: Issues and Answers

So, a while back I began installing new laminate flooring on one floor of the house. It was planned (and purchased for) to cover the living room (where we really do “live”–spend most of our time), dining room, kitchen (with precautions against water damage), and two bedrooms. When I got to the hallway to the two bedrooms on this floor and pulled the carpet and padding, I discovered oak flooring underneath. Sadly, it would take too much work to reclaim it because the moron who installed the carpet glued down the padding! (In addition to stapling it to the oak flooring.)

#gagamaggot

But. . . when I got to the bedrooms, I discovered that the padding was apparently NOT glued down there. *shrugs* I dunno. Maybe the moron thought traffic in the hallway would cause the padding to move. Oh, the carpet pad is still stapled, which means a LOT of fiddly bits to carefully remove, but the flooring itself looks to be in really nice condition. So, removing the carpet and padding a bit at a time (makes removing it from the house easier, anyway) and getting the staples dealt with looks like it will give us back some nice hardwoood flooring we didn’t even know was there.

Oh, transition from the “bronzed acacia” look laminate to the oak flooring will be. . . interesting, but we decided we can live with that pretty easily. I’m using actual oak baseboard trim to make transition from the hallway to the bedrooms, and I decided to stain it “red oak”–different from both the laminate and the oak in the bedrooms. Why? Because the laminate is 3/8” “taller” than the oak floor. The trim I’m using to make transition with tapers down from 3/8”. The different oak stain will provide an almost subliminal cue to the transition in height, hopefully making the (very small) height differential marginally safer to navigate, kind of like those yellow/black warning strips for stairs and shallow ramps. *shrugs* We’ll see.

But then there’s the fact that we’ll be stuck with several hundred square feet of extra laminate. Oh, well. Maybe I will eventually end up doing a garage conversion. Really nice laminate on a workshop/crafts room. *heh*

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Dewey Was a Great Man (No, Not That One. Not That One Either. *heh*)

The Dewey Decimal System is an extremely useful method of categorizing knowledge for cataloging a library, but it is also a very useful system to use when searching out and exploring a topic of knowledge. An understanding of its classifications can yield some few advantages over computer catalogs of libraries for card catalog users, too. And then, just browsing a section, grazing the pages of books from one end of a class to another, can sometimes yield great benefits.

I once spent time “living” any available spare moment in a large state university library as an undergrad (and it wasn’t even the school I was attending *heh*) making such discoveries–especially during one semester when I was taking a course so far off my majors that I had almost NO background, and none of the prerequisite courses (yeh, talked my way ito it because it seemed interesting) in the subject. Result: The professor found my “insights” refreshingly stimulating, much to the disgust of the other seven members of the class who were restricted by having all the prerequisite boundaries instilled in their thinking.

Ah, but of course all classifications of knowledge, especially those which–like the DDS–comprise relatively rigid, detailed classifications, have the basic flaw of placing artificial boundaries between fields of knowledge. But then, it seems to be a basic human trait to connect disparate elements into a whole, even when that “whole” is wholly artificial and even nonsensical. So, the DDS is, in my use at least, most like a box of building blocks divided into compartments by shape, color, size, etc. It can make it useful when searching for just that right building block.

Sometimes, though, one wants to just dump the box out and scramble up the pieces to see what serendipitous connections one might make. That’s the Internet.

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Transitions: Strange Decos

Until we purchase paint tomorrow, and then do the painting, our living room will look a bit. . . weird, at least to my eye.

The new flooring is fine–looks great–but we still have the “Amaryllis Yellow” (over plaster) on three walls, with a “Stadium Red” accent wall (muted by a black glaze sponge treatment) behind the bookcases/entertainment center. It all looked well pulled together with the blond flooring we had before, but just doesn’t work with the new “bronzed acacia wood” flooring. Besides, I just put up our new drapes (anticipating the paint to come; they’ll come down easily during the paint job), and while they are a really pleasant blue, the blue-yellow-red combo is just too, too Hobbit-ish. *heh*

The new wall color will be better: a dove gray on all four walls, with a black sponge glaze treatment on the book/ec wall over the dove gray.

Still need to add the trim back–and add a bit more–as well as a new valence for the drapes. Methinks the trim will be a nice oyster color. *shrugs* Probably. Oh, but speaking of drapes, hung them on dual rods, so we can add sheers later. The new drapes are “blackout” drapes, and with sheers added, that will give us a lot of flexibility in window treatment. I do need to repair my faux “stained glass” treatment of the bay window where the cats have worn out a viewport. Maybe I’ll make a “porthole” for them; maybe not. 😉

A nice lil fillip: dove gray will pickup the mottled gray 1’x2′ tile at the entry door.

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It’s the Little Things #8,492

#sigh

*heh*

OK, now that that is out of my system. . .

Some of the absolutely stupid things some writers do baffle me, but at least I have found a way to be amused by them.

Recent “Dan Brown wannabe” book where the writer apparently felt even less desire to get anything right about any of his premises than Brown typically does went Brown even further by finding… unique ways to misuse plain English ( for example, misused “infallible” when groping for “unflappable”), have an “expert pilot” grab the “steering column”. . . on a helicopter whose propellers were making enough noise to keep the writer from thinking, “Maybe I ought to do my homework on helicopters before making a fool of myself in print.”

Hilarious.

Another? How about a fun-filled romp through a zombie apocalypse book filled with things like super-competent, manly-man hero filling up a late-model vehicle with gas and then “topping it off” after the pump clicks off. “Manly-men” know that can harm the vehicle’s evap system, cause the vehicle to run poorly, and even lead to hard starting or failure to start. In today’s world, it’s an easy fix (though sometimes complicated) to repair an evap system. . . IF one can narrow down the part or parts damaged by topping off, and costs can range from $10-$200, depending on several factors. In a zombie apocalypse scenario, having to repair the evap system on one’s go-to vehicle is sub-optimal.

But that’s OK, cos the book was chock full of this kind of stupid stuff, so reading it as a farce (OK, OK, skimming it, cos it wasn’t really worth reading *heh*) was. . . OK.

The problem with all these hilariously stupid books–not bad or “suckitudinous” books, just stupidly executed–is that the errors of logic, fact, grammar, punctuation, and usage they embody are just reinforced in whatever uncritical readers glom onto them. *sigh* There were once literate editorial staffs at tradpub houses to correct some of these problems, but even there, the quality of literacy in tradpub editorial staffs has waned.

Oh, well. At least I can laugh at and mock such things, and such amusement is worth something as the world generally goes to hell in a handbasket.

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Some of My Favorite Things/Cutting Remarks

I’m not much of a “gun guy,” though I like ’em and even have open and conceal-carried handguns, and gone for lovely “walks in the deer woods” with a Model 1895 Winchester, etc. No, I find myself more drawn to knives, and in fact, I don’t really know exactly how many knives I own. . .

I usually walk around with something like five to eight knives on my person, depending on where I’m heading and what I plan for my day. All of them serve slightly different purposes, though some do overlap a bit. Right now, the number is nine, because I just noticed an old K-Bar pen knife sitting in a coffee cup (with a bunch of other small folders) just within reach of my right hand. Now, I don’t find much need for a pen knife (I don’t do a lot of writing with a quill pen, and I usually use other knives to trim/sharpen carpenter and other pencils, etc.), picked it up and appreciated its feel in my hand, so. . .

Yeh, now and again, I dig through my collection for some of my favs. In front of me, above the keyboard drawer on my desk proper, for example is a 65-year-old Schreade-Walden H-15 “pilot’s survival knife” a great uncle of mine used as a hunting knife for about 35 years, before it was passed to me. Nice knife, shaped along the lines of a K-Bar my Estimable Son-in-Law gave me a few years ago, just a couple of inches shorter. And yes, that K-Bar is another fav knife, as is another gift from him, a sweet, very small Spyderco Elmax “Squeak Sprint”. VERY nice lil knife! Exquisitely engineered down to the finest detail of ergonomics, fitting my hand just perfectly. Very well thought out finger and thumb choils for example.

Ah, but I could go on all day cataloging “favorites,” because so many are, for different reasons. The three everyday carry knives from Son&Heir that are on my person right now, for example, are favs and find daily use, as does the belt folder from my Wonder Woman that now sits on my belt at my left side and the Swiss Army knife in my righthand pocket that is also from her (its scissors “blade” is its most-used feature), and on and on and on. . .

And then there are my “car knives” which collection includes a fancy-schmancy multi-tool. . .

Yeh, I like–and use!–knives a lot. Such nifty, multi-multi-multi-purpose tools.

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