There's no legible postmark on this card, so I don't know which new year it celebrated, but it is addressed to Florence Williamson, and it says: We wish you many pleasures for the coming year. May you find the ---? Well, good luck and coma and see us. We are all well. Went to a lecture last night. Tell Jim the house is still here. J. M. W.
Children flying a zeppelin festooned with pink forget-me-not garlands and giant four-leafed clovers--I think this is the strangest post-card my grandma ever got, mailed by her friend Agnes Moore from Iowa City December 23, 1908. (I don't know if Grandma and Agnes found it odd or not.) Agnes wrote ""Hello Florence, How are you? I'm just fine. Excuse poor writing." (This because the card is so heavily embossed that there's almost no writable surface available.) Agnes includes her new address at "15 E. Washington St., Iowa City, Ia."
Another card from Florence Williamson's album: Dec. 22, 1909, "Wish you Merry Xmas and Happy New Year. E.V."
Most of the time, I think a cat's-eye view of the world is an advantage, but with her chin six inches from the ground and the snow 30 inches deep, it's no wonder Princess is ready to come back in the house after one short trip off the porch. Even a winter-wooly coat is no help with snow like this.
By mid-day on Saturday, we had hip-deep snow on the ground. Really pretty, provided you don't need to go out!
Postmark: St. Paul, MINN, 6 pm Nov. 19, 1910. Dear Florence, I wish you a very happy Thanksgiving. Did you get my letter? What are you folks going to do this Thanksgiving? We will all be at home. From your loving friend, Edna C.
My work life has, the last few months, involved quite a bit of directory planning and index-making. I hadn't thought of it as an avenue for humor until last week. Miffed that Sarah Palin's new book was published index-less, several people have posted their own indices. It's unlikely that Palin will thank them for their trouble, given that I laughed aloud at the first two listed below. At the risk of joining the ranks of the lonely and shallow people who don't admire poor Sarah, here are the indices I've seen so far.
Have you noticed that every time I mention William T. Price on here, I fall silent for a long time afterwards? No? It's true. Because I've spent so much time with Reverend Price in the last year, I've tried really hard to like him, or empathize with him, or admire him. For example, he was ready with a sermon for any occasion, complete with some appropriate but relatively obscure Bible verses. Always prepared; always professional--that's surely admirable. He faced many hardships--long days in the saddle, riding from church to church to deliver those professional and polished sermons; the hardships of the Civil War; the vague but looming career disappointment in the years following the war--surely I could conjure some sympathy.
But no. I can't turn my attention away from his apparent snobbery, his Jesus-free Calvinistic sermons, and his disdain for careful editing. It always leaves me in a funk. It's passages like this one (from his Civil War diary) that keep me cranky:
Upon resuming my journey...I saw a solitary person approaching at a brisk, headlong trot. He was mounted on a very ordinary looking horse. The saddle and saddlebags were old and much worn, his shoes were of some home tanned leather, coarse and heavy, very need of the attention of a cobbler, while his clothing was of plain homespun jeans. His loosely fitting coat was threadbare and out at the elbows, and his crumpled slouch hat nearly concealed his shaggy eyebrows beneath which blazed a pair of piercing and inquisitive eyes, such as are seldom seen in a life time and never to be forgotten. He rather abruptly stopped me in the road by a stentorian inquiry whether I was from Beverly.
"How is the vote?"
"I think Secession has the majority"
"Do you say the Secession candidate is ahead? I have the honor to be that candidate."
And this was really so: the successful candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates was before me, elected by the counties of Randolph and Tucker. What a comment upon the democratic tendencies of our political institutions when candidates to be popular should dress like the Biblical Gibeonites and behave accordingly. One of the blessings of this civil war, we may hope, will be to inaugurate a happier era by sweeping the depraved and vicious from the political arena, or teach them to prize their political privileges by choosing the best, not the worst looking of men for their rulers.
For the last few months I've been scanning documents from the Pocahontas County Historical Society's archives. I'm still working my way through the William T. Price family collection. The oldest material I've worked with is from the 1840's, and it does give a glimpse of our local area at that time--not an easy or comfortable time and place.
This week, Reverend Price's Civil War journal, which he published in 1901 as "On to Grafton," is "serialized" on our Pocahontas County History web site. Rev. Price was a Virginian, and like most of the people in this area, approved of secession. Here's what he had to say about "The Cause" on his second day out on the Grafton campaign:
Early in the afternoon I reached Huttonsville in Randolph County where I found the people much excited and worried, and wearied to the verge of exhaustion by attention to soldiers a day or two before. Some persons seemed very desponding of the final outcome....I tried to cheer them up by saying to them that the cause of Virginia is a just one, such as the God of Hosts would approve. We might be slain in battle but never conquered....The question then was whether we should sustain the usurption of power and draw the sword against our friends, or whether it should be resisted and stand on the defensive. If let alone no blood would be shed, but if assailed then battle for all that is near and dear to the noble heart.
Moreover in my table and fireside conversations I tried to impress the minds of all that the question now is whether Virginia shall have the privilege of self government and regulate our taxes according as our interests and social institutions require, or whether we are to have our laws made for us, and enforced by rulers, whose popularity at home is in direct proportion to their hatred of us and abuse of our social and political institutions.
As a seminary trained minister, Rev. Price's opinion on which side the Lord of Hosts would approve must have carried some weight. I find myself anachronistically despondent reading (and transcribing) all the pre-battle puffing up. I want to tell them, "No! Don't! Just stay home--it's going to be worse than you can even imagine." There is, of course, no talk of slavery at all. It appears that it was not considered polite to mention it. Rev. Price and all the other writers of this time use the word "servant" when they must talk of people owned as chattel. It's a nicer word, and it's in the Bible, so it must be OK.
Sometimes a blog can be a handy online filing cabinet for things like this: 50 Free Resources That Will Improve Your Writing Skills. It's a list of links, most of which point to further lists, sometimes of advice, sometimes of still more links.
I'm particularly impressed by the scope of "writing tips." These include English grammar, advertising copy, student term papers, Web pages, writing prompts, rhymes, and famous writers on writing.
My favorites are the "tools," like Wordcounter, which points out your most frequently used words. I tend to think of some dandy five-dollar word, and then use it over and over again in the same document.
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel--This is chapter 3, "Schrodinger's Dog." It's wonderful.
I can't tell you exactly how I came upon this--I know I started at Sherry Chandler's blog, followed a link, and another link...and there I was, reading Orzel's bitter complaint about a New York Times movie reviewer who proudly displays his ignorance of physics. A physicist and college professor, Dr. Orzel is often irritated by The Innumeracy of Intellectuals. Sadly, indifference to math is not limited the the intelligentsia. Adult basic education students, school children, and college freshmen all use a smug tone to tell me they "are no good at math," meaning "Get out of my face with that stuff, I can't be bothered." In contrast, people who can't read well generally try to cover up and fake it. I don't get it, but the reason I often end up teaching math to the unwilling is the scarcity of teachers willing and able to take on those classes.
I'm looking forward to reading the whole canine physics course--we never got to quantum mechanics in my undergraduate physics class, because the physics department thought it was "too hard for biologists." I wish I'd had Dr. Orzel!
Our garden had mixed success this year, but one crop I was very pleased with was the Black Hungarian Peppers I ordered from Seed Savers Exchange. I've tried several times to start peppers from seed, but this is the first year I had anything to harvest. The peppers start out a dark, eggplant shade, but turn red when they're ripe.
They're good-flavored mildly hot peppers, but the thing I liked best about them was the way the plants looked as they were growing. The seedlings are nearly black (leaves and all; sorry I didn't think to take a picture last spring!), and the even the blossoms have that purple pigment.
Check out those black anthers!
We're living in the new house now, still doing finish work, and still moving in, a little at a time. I don't have any interesting progress photos to share, as the changes are incremental and unspectacular, but I felt the need to break blog silence anyway.
I had thought when the walls were painted, the floor covering laid down, and the cabinets installed that most of my finish work would be done. There were just a few doors to install and paint. We bought pre-hung masonite doors, and installation took one day. They were already white, so how long could it take to get a little off-white, washable semigloss paint on them? Turns out, a really long time.
Our house only has four rooms, so how did I end up with eleven doors to paint? Well, there's the front door and the back door, the cellar door, the bathroom door, the bedroom door, and the office door. Then, there's the pantry door, the double doors in the bedroom closet, the office closet door....
The "pre-primed" masonite doors didn't take paint well, so two coats of primer were required, followed by two coats of semigloss. Eleven doors, painted four times each. The doors started out one shade of off-white, the door frames a different white. The primer was a greyish white, and the final coat a pale, pale yellow. ("Mesa Beige," actually. The naming of paint must be an interesting industry.) I still catch myself humming "A Whiter Shade of Pale."
Now, we've moved in the kitchen, the bedroom, and the part of my office contents required to keep working, and I'm chipping away at the rest. We're turning the old house into a workshop, so I'm trying to decide where stuff "belongs" before I move it over here, and trying to not leave wreckage behind. The TV, china cabinet, and the parrots are still in the old house, along with most of my books, our home-canned goods, and my grandma's china collection. It feels like we're moving one teacup at a time.
I've received a complaint from Pendleton County on lack of new house photo coverage. August was a busy month, but it turns out that newly painted walls don't make really interesting photographs. Here you see the intersection of two kitchen wall colors, and the kitchen cabinet installation, already in progress.
This is the same flooring we have in the whole house. It wasn't hard to put down, but there really is a lot of it. My knees are still complaining. The kitchen counters and counter top are in now, as is the sink.
I made three trips in three days to the big-box home improvement store in Lewisburg this week. I don't usually go to Lewisburg more than once a month, so this is city-overload for me. The motive for this frequent driving was paint selection for the new house. On Thursday, I got paint samples, on Friday I bought paint for three rooms and half-pint paint samples in some colors I wasn't sure about, and on Saturday, I bought more paint.
I really love looking at paint, and paint-color displays. Here are just a few of the colors I brought home and held up against the walls. You can see I'd already decided on "green" and "blue" and "yellow," but comparing hues and tints and shades...I could turn it into an end in itself.
I'm evidently not the only one who sees the possibility of paint-choice paralysis, according to The Onion's Study Finds Paint Aisle At Lowe's Best Place To Have Complete Meltdown.
"Even the most well-adjusted individual can be reduced to a feeble, trembling shell of his or her former self after a half hour of paint shopping at Lowe's," said Dr. Olivia Kang, a behavioral psychologist at the University of Texas and lead author of the study. "The pressure to make a decision between two seemingly identical shades of beige, the glaring fluorescent lights, the frantic patrons on all sides—it's too much for the human psyche to process."
"In terms of causing normal, healthy adults to completely lose their shit, the Lowe's paint department amounts to a perfect storm," Kang added.
I've painted the drywall with primer, and we've installed the ceramic tiles we'll use as a "hearth" for the wood stove to stand on. These were, for the most part, fun activities, and they made the house look different, which ups the satisfaction ante.
This week, the kitchen cabinets we ordered came in, but the flooring has been delayed until next week. I've been playing with paint samples, looking at them in different light conditions, holding them up against the cabinets, a flooring sample, the windows....I suspect I could do this indefinitely, as it is a lot of fun, but I've picked out some colors, and today I went to the store, and came home with paint for the bedrooms and bathroom, and...more paint samples.
The drywall is up now, and last week I painted it with primer. It has become hard to photograph progress now that all the walls are up and painted uniformly white, but you can see the textured ceiling and the new ceiling fan here, and the drywall in the process of being primed.
This week's project is the subfloor, and, perhaps, the tile platform for the wood stove.
A few weeks ago, Larry Ayers, of "Riverside Rambles" posted a link to Norman Blake's version of "Done Gone". I started gathering URL's about my own experiences with that tune (including how it helped me get my banjo fixed for free), when I came across this video of West Virginia's Clark Kessinger, performing at the Newport Festival. I have a number of his recordings (including "Done Gone"), but I'd never seen him in action before.
Whatever I meant to say about Larry, Norman Blake, "Done Gone," and Clark Kessinger has vanished from both brain and hard drive, but Mr. Kessinger's fiddling is well worth a link.
I don't use Microsoft products myself, but I recently put together some training sessions on Excel spreadsheets. Here's the list of free resources I handed out to my students. Everything here will also work with OpenOffice's Calc.
Like other cats, Princess enjoys a new cardboard box. However, this puny box makes her look like another candidate for the Washington-based journalists' "2009 Poverty Tour" across the Alleghenies. Eventually she spilled out of the box the printer paper and ink cartridges came in.
