And then there were two...

The Sweetest Kitty in the World is gone. She died this afternoon at home. Keith found her when he came home for lunch.

Mu mind can't comprehend it enough to even begin to write about it. I'm going black for a couple of days. I'll be back with more info after that.

The year my dad died (in the spring), her sister Basil died that fall. This year, my mother dies in the spring, and Bennie dies in the fall. That's a creepy pattern.

Mom died in May. Lost my job in July. Now, this in October. If bad luck really does come in threes, then it's time for someone else to be the recipient. I'm full up.

I'm almost numb at this point. Kosh just started crying for her.

I do hope Bert and Ernie don't get probed!

Apparently, Martians like oatmeal. Who knew?

For no particular reason...

..how about some Jesus and Mary Chain?

Updates and Linkages

No time for much right now, just a couple of notes:

My uncle and I cleaned out the storage unit where I was keeping Mom's stuff last week. We donated the clothes to a thrift store (of course!), then loaded the rest on his van. Now it's crammed into my backyard shed with all my stuff. I've been chipping away at it all weekend, getting it organized. My goal has always been to have the she turned into the place where I keep my booth merch. I've just been putting off getting it cleaned out and organized. Not any more! I've got to get Mom's stuff stashed until my brother can get up here and we can sort through it all, but I need to keep it out of the way of the rest of the crap in the shed. I'll be getting back to the mines in a bit.

With a little bit of rain and some cooler temps, the Louisville funk is subsiding a bit. We've still not had enough rain to make it all go away, though. We had a pretty severe drought this year, and those storm drains still need a real good washing out. But it's not as bad as it has been.

The booth is still struggling this month, and I cannot figure out why. After two bang up months, October has sucked royally. I just (finally) made the rent a couple of days ago. On the bright side, I have had at least one sale every day, but a lot of them have been pretty tiny. The past two days have been up to the level that they should, so I'll clear a little money this month, if the trend holds. Just wish I knew what the devil was going on.

My uncle said he's had slow sales at his place across the river this month as well. Maybe it's a Halloween curse of some sort? Or maybe such is the life of a junk dealer?

My Vintage Soul mourns the loss of a local landmark for secondhand shoppers.

Speaking of links and such, you may have noticed that my blogroll has gone missing. Fear not, it will return. Dummy me didn't realize I would lose it all when I started twiddling with new templates. The whole thing needs to be redone and updated, so it's probably a good thing it's gone for the moment. Several sites have changed addresses, while others--comics news sites, for instance--I never visit any more. My goal is to have a new look for the blog ready to roll for the beginning of the year.

Gotta run! Time to finish the dishes and head to the back yard again!

Think your job sucks?

You could always be this guy!

And then there was the time that The Cowboy Junkies paid tribute to Townes Van Zant

Eddies in Music: Love at the Five and Dime

I've always liked my name. I have known people who hated their names when they were kids, but grew to appreciate them later. I never had that problem. I always liked mine, but it seemed like I could never find it anywhere.

At first glance "Eddie" might not seem to be that unusual of a name, but check out the rack of personalized keychains or coffee cups next time you have a chance. You'll probably find an "Edward," and maybe an "Edwin," and possibly an "Ed." What you won't find is an "Eddie."

Now my name may be short for Edward, but that's not what people call me. And the only two people in my life who ever called me "Ed" are both dead. And if you do find anything printed with a name that sounds like mine, it's usually spelled with a "y." (Which is odd. I've know other Eddie's, but we've all been "ie" people.)

I've owned exactly one thing in my life that as personalized with my name on it, a Wonder Woman beach towel, and it was a special order. I got it when I was in sixth grade and I still have it, since it does have my name on it--and. duh, because it's Wonder Woman!

You also never see that many references to Eddie in popular culture, either. There was "Eddie and the Cruisers" and Eddie Van Halen, and that's about it. Okay, there's also that "Ed, Edd, and Eddy" cartoon on Cartoon Network, but the less said about it, the better. They didn't even spell it right!

So, I'm officially embarking on the Eddie-torial Comments "Eddie Quest." As I find them, I'll be posting Eddie's from the worlds of comics, music, movies, etc. here for our mutual eddie-ficiation. (Sorry about that.)

And here with my first entry is Nanci Griffith with a classic, sweet tale of love, music, and retail therapy.



I just love her sweet introduction. I'm off to search for unnecessary plastic objects. Woolworth's closed here a few years ago, so it's going to take a while. Maybe one of them will say "Eddie" on it. I'll keep it next to my Wonder Woman towel.

Hanging Out at the Hospital

I'm spending a lot of time at the hospital these days. Not because I or anyone I care about is sick, mid you, but because it's convenient.

When my dad had his first heart attacks in 1997, he was sent to a cardiologist in Louisville. We spent the next several years doing appointments and such at the hospital where the doctor was attached. At one point in time, Dad needed some dental work done, and they actually had to admit him into the CCU here for monitoring because of the amount of blood thinners he was taking to prevent stroke.

Years later, when he had his heart/brain incidents that incapacitated and ultimately killed him, he was sent back to the hospital, where he stayed for almost a month before being released to the facility where he died.

The oncology unit that my mother was referred to for her chemo is in this same hospital. I've spent a lot of time there in the past decade or so. And I've actually grown a little fond of their cafeteria. The food is decent and reasonably priced. And the space itself is large enough to allow for some privacy while eating, which is kind of important to me.

My own doctor's office is right down the street, so the hospital became a regular stop for me on appointment days. When I had physicals, I would break the mandatory fast with a breakfast there. If I didn't have to fast, I would eat there before my appointment. Sounds weird, I know, but it was right on the way, and since I usually bike or walk or take the bus, I don't have to worry about parking fees.

My favorite thrift store in also just down the street, which makes the hospital a good place to hit afterward for coffee. My mother taught me the value of taking a break for coffee in the middle of the day, so I try to do that as often as I can.

I may be losing the thrift store as a reason to pop by the hospital cafe. They've got a for sale sign in front of the store. According to one of the cashiers, if the sales at this store don't pick up, then they're looking to move it to a new location to the east. I don't know if she means to the east part of downtown, which would be okay or to the east end of the city, which wouldn't be quite so nice. If they leave the downtown area, there will be only one thrift left in the downtown area, which is kind of sad. Louisville is on the verge of becoming thrift-poor.

Salvation Army closed their stores a couple of years ago, which left a big hole in the local thriftosphere. The official story was that the stores weren't making enough money, which is really kind of odd. After all, the merchandise is donated, which means that most of what they make on each item is profit. In a down economy, an agency dedicated to working with the poor closing an affordable retail outlet seems nuts to me. Having shopped at the Salv. stores, I think they could have been retooled, rather than closed. They were messy. The selection was poor. The prices were high, given the quality of the goods. All of those issues could have been easily fixed and the stores could have stayed open.

As far as my favorite downtown store goes, I'm hoping they'll turn around and be able to stay. Honestly, they dealt with their biggest problem recently by getting rid of two of the most unfriendly, unhelpful staff people I've ever seen anywhere. Who wants to shop in a place where the staff are always loudly complaining about each other, about the store, and about the customers?

It's only been a couple of weeks, but I already find it to be a much nicer place to shop now. I'm also seeing the manager there take a more active role out on the floor, instead of hiding away in the back. They've still got a way to go, but I think they may be on the right track. I hope so. I do like the place and would miss it if it moved.

Anyway, back to the hospital. Taking my new part-time gig has actually led to spending a bit more time there. It's got a nice covered bike rack area that is really secure and out of the rain. In the morning, I ride my bike there and then catch a bus across town to the NPTG. It works well for me, as I just don't feel like wrestling the bike on the rack on the bus in the middle of downtown traffic. And the bike stays nice and safe waiting for me to come back.

When I get off in the afternoon, I stop off and get a cup of coffee at the cafeteria before heading home. Gives me a chance to decompress and read a bit before coming home to do booth work.

It's not the strangest thing I do, I guess. But neither is it the most normal, according to some people. Nevertheless, I'm spending a lot of time at the hospital these days.

It's the oddest little things that get to me

I had one of those odd moments on Saturday, the kind that hit you right out of the blue and leave you wiped out for a few minutes. One of those odd little grief moments that remind you how much things have changed. This one was brought on by Chex mix, of all things.

I was at a church sale that ended up being pretty dismal. The selection was bad and the prices were worse. I did find a mystery by one of my favorite authors and a couple of small items, but nothing major. As I'm checking out, I glance over the baked goods they're also selling and see a bag of homemade Chex mix, which I also bought.

My mother had made huge batches of Chex mix (the original) every year for Christmas for as long as I could remember. I always got a tub of it with my presents, and so did my brother. Seeing that little baggy of the stuff at this sale reminded me of that. It also reminded me that there wouldn't be any tubs of Chex mix any more.

By the time I got back in the car, I was a mess. We had to sit there for a few minutes before moving on. Thinking about the Chex mix also reminded me that my mother was the last person who could make my grandmother's fudge right. I try to make it every year and always screw it up. I knew that the holidays would be different this year, but I hadn't realized just how different until then.

And the Chex mix I bought was nowhere near as good as my mother's.

True Tales of Yard Sales: Go Get That Cross!

Actually, this is a true tale of an estate sale, but I think it all works out about the same. This is a slightly older tale, from back when I didn't totally have my blogging shit together. But, it's still a good story, and there's no statute of limitations on those.

This one took place about a year and a half or two years ago, during the usually sale-less months of winter. I wasn't doing the booth yet, so we were out shopping for the fun of it.

The sale was in a grand old house in a neighborhood near ours. There were three stories, tons of rooms, an awesome attic, and decor that had not been touched since 1945, at least. Every room was just chock full of all kinds of antiques and goodies, many way out of my price range.

At one point, when I was walking into a bedroom, I got pushed out of the way by a woman coming out of the same room. Pushed out of the way, as in rudely shouldered out of the way with no "excuse me" or any kind of acknowledgment of my presence whatsoever. I would have just ignored her--there are no shortage of rude people to be found at these sales, after all--except that she was carrying the largest statue of St Joseph I have ever seen in someone's home. It was easily 3.5 feet tall.

Image 'borrowed' from Knit and Pray blog.

We're talking classic, pre-Vatican II, Catholic home devotional statuary, complete with the Child Jesus and the lily of purity and everything. Just the kind of thing that makes me go totally weak in the knees, and it's in the arms of one of the rudest bitches I've come across in a while.

I was consoling myself with the thought that it was probably way out of my price range, when I stepped through the bedroom door and saw a sick call crucifix laying on the dresser.

Image from reigninggifts.com.

Sick call sets were staples in Catholic homes in the pre-Vatican II era, and are still in use today, just not as much. They were kept in homes in case a priest needed to make a visit to a sick person.

The face of the crucifix would slide off and stand up. The inside held a cloth, a bottle of holy water and a couple of candles. The priest would have many of the tools he needed to do his work when he got to the home.

I find them at sales from time to time, usually empty. I've only found one or two over the years that still had all the contents in them. This one was not only empty, it was in pretty rough shape to boot. The corpus was loose from the cross and the wood had swollen so that it wouldn't slide easily open. It had some nice inlay work on the cross, but that was about all it had to recommend it.

It didn't have a price tag on it, either. Since a lot of what I saw in the house was priced way beyond my pitiful little range, I figured that, even in this condition, I probably couldn't afford it. I was just about to put it down when I heard this hiss from the door "Go get that cross. That man has it. Get it from him."

Well, being the only person in the room at the time and holding the only thing that even slightly resembled a cross, it was pretty obvious who the whisperer was talking about. But, seriously, "get it from him"? As in, "grab it out of his hands and run?" Really?

So I turn around and who is standing in the doorway (of the room she just left, mind you), pointing at me? It's Ms Bulldozer with St Joseph, and she's ordering a young boy of about 12 to come take something out of my hands. The poor kid is staring at the floor, clearly embarrassed by the whole thing. And I'm thinking "Seriously, honey? You've got the nicest item in the whole damn house and you're trying to get your kid to snatch this puny little thing from me? It's on, babe. It's so on."

So instead of putting it down, I held on to it, turned, looked her right in the eye, and walked out the door. I had no idea at this point if I would actually buy the thing or not, but I sure wasn't going to let her have it. I carried it from room to room, frequently followed by Ms St Joseph and her brood (which actually included three kids). From time to time, she would actually point at me and say "There he is!" or "That's my cross." or some such nonsense. It was actually quite deranged.

After my second or third such encounter with Mama Dearest, my evil side kicked in. I'd wait until I knew she had seen me, and I'd set the cross down, but never quite take my hand off of it. A couple of times, I actually just caressed it with my fingertips, like I was considering leaving it. She'd really start whispering orders to her kids then, and I'd snatch it up again and walk on.

Finally, I got to the point that I folded my arms, cradled the cross in them and walked around the place like an ersatz St Therese.

Image from DrStandley.com

I was kind of hoping to wait her out and then just leave the thing there, but my patience was wearing thin. So, I decided to go ahead and see what they were charging for it and then go. Sure enough, soon as I got in line to pay, she was right behind me, St Joseph and the kids in tow. I told the woman running the sale that it wasn't priced, and she looked it over thoroughly, then told me: "It really could be a nice piece, but it's in such rough shape. How about five dollars?"

That sounded good to me, so I paid her, crossed my arms again, cradled the cross in them, turned around to the crazy woman, nodded at her and left. As I was leaving, she was demanding that the woman running the sale tell her how much I had paid.

Honestly, everything about that sick call set just paled in comparison to the statue she had, but she hounded me through the house for it. If I hadn't been so fed up with her, I would have waited for her on the porch and told her she could have it for twenty bucks. Or else offered to trade it for St Joe.

There are obsessions, and then there are obsessions. That bitch was obsessed.

Nemesis!

Batman has the Joker. Superman has Lex Luthor. Rachel Maddow has the Republican Party. Phyllis Schlafly has feminists. And, now, I, too, have a Nemesis.

The community of secondhand stuff geeks and resellers in any area is typically small enough that, after a while, you start to see some of the same people around at sales. And after a few encounters, you start to learn who to avoid and who's fun to strike up a conversation with. I ran into a woman last weekend who was so much fun to look through a box of junk with that I hope we meet again. She even started handing me things she thought I would like!

Sadly, though, there are enough obnoxious dealers out there, that someone is bound to cross the line from being merely annoying to becoming someone whose very presence at a sale actually causes it to be less enjoyable. From there, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump until they are a full-fledged nemesis. Yard Sale Bloodbath has Annoying Jewelry Guy. I have (Smelly) Book Woman.*

I used to see her from time to time before I started selling, usually at major book sales. She would corral every decent book in the place and sit in the middle of the floor with stacks all around her sorting through them at a snail's pace, snapping at anyone who got too close to her or one of her piles. Honestly, her whole set up is pretty hard to avoid. When I say "middle of the floor," I mean the literal middle of the floor, blocking traffic, yet getting annoyed at anyone daring to invade her space.

After keeping all her selections tied up for usually over an hour, she'd pick maybe a third of them (or less) and walk away, leaving everything else stacked in everyone's way.

It was bad enough when I was just out buying for fun. I'm not sure what tipped me off, but eventually I realized that she was a dealer. So when I started selling, she became not only annoying, she became competition. Now, I honestly try very hard not to be one of those resellers everyone hates to see coming because they are so rude and grabby. Seriously, if someone else gets something I would have wanted, I can live with that. I stood behind a woman one time who cleaned all the good titles out of a box of 25-cent DVD's. I just didn't see the need to get in a grabbing war with her.There will be something else down the line. There always is. In the end, it's just other people's junk. But this woman rubs me the wrong way entirely. Just to be classified with her makes my skin crawl. I would die if anyone ever associated me with behavior like hers.

This year, it seems like I can't turn around without running into her(or smelling her). And to make matters worse, she's gotten one of those bar code scanners that lets her look up what things are selling for online. So now, she tries to corral every book in the place and not let anyone near them until she scans them.

For the record, I hate the scanners with a passion. I work by my gut and my own knowledge base. I treat books like I do everything else: I look for things that strike me as unique or unusual or that I know will sell well from past experience. I can maybe see myself having a scanner to confirm a hunch, but to have one as the sum total of my knowledge base? No way in hell. That's lazy and demeaning to those of us who try to take what we do seriously.

Back to the Nemesis, I ran into her leaving a sale at a church library last weekend. She had maybe five or six books with her. The folks working the place opened the back door to air it out after she left. I'd been in there a few minutes, when one of the workers said to someone who just came in: "Did you see that woman at the books a while ago?" I knew exactly who they were talking about. The rest of the conversation was not positive.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the booth to do my weekly updating, and who do I see sitting in the middle of my book space? YES! It was HER! Now, I'm wheeling a cart full of merch to put out and she's sitting in the spot where I usually set up to start working. Figures.

I'm feeling a tad violated, like she's made her way into my Sanctum Sanctorum, when I realize that, hey, she wants to spend money on my stuff. That's not a bad thing, per se. And I don't have to interact with her while she's there, which is definitely not a bad thing. So, I discreetly park my cart in the aisle and go to get my second load.

By the time I get back, she's gone. She ended up not buying anything. And she left piles of books all over the floor of my booth. I felt like Snoopy as the WWI Flying Ace standing on his Sopwith Camel, shaking his fist at the Red Baron.

Curse you, (Smelly) Book Woman!

*I added "Smelly" in parentheses because that's a relatively new development. I used to think she just sweat a lot, but here lately, it's been pretty hardcore funk. I mean the kind that lingers in the room for a while after she leaves. It's like being at an anime con.

Likewise!

A couple of weeks ago, the half-price tag colors changed at my favorite thrift store, which meant I had to make the rounds to all three of the branches. They use three different colors of price tags at this store: white, green, and yellow. Each month, one of the colors is the half-price color, and items with that tag are half off. I've never been able to figure out what day the change happens, though. It seems to be different every month. But, when it happens, it sets off a second-hand retail pilgrimage.

One of the stores is downtown and the other is right near the house. I usually hit them in the same afternoon. The other is across town, not too far from our favorite Mexican place. Of course, this means a stop for yummy food after the bargain hunt is over.

We're regulars there, so we get pretty conversational with the staff. This particular visit our server was Maria, who is one of the best servers there. She hadn't waited on us in a while, so we spent a few minutes catching up. She told us it was good to see us again, and Keith said "Likewise," which is one of his standard replies to things like that.

She stopped for a minute, but quickly went to wait on another table. On her way back past us, she asked Keith to say the word again. When he did, she got a big smile on her face and said "I've never heard that before. I like that. Likewise." A few minutes later I went to the bathroom. When I got back, Keith told me that she had asked how to say it again and had asked what it means. Keith had told her it kind of means "I agree." or "It's good to see you too." She told him that she liked it because it sounded so polite. She was really happy to have learned a new word.

Keith and I talked a little bit about the incident on the way home. I think it had been a while since we'd been a part of a demonstration of cultural differences like that. It was kind of cool to be a part of someone's learning process with just a simple word. Ages ago (I can't remember where) I read that you should try to learn something new every day. For that one day, I guess we helped Maria meet that go

The Evolution of Man(a)

This is another of my favorite Muppet sketches. I'm known to break out into a chrus of "manha manha!" from time to time. (It's kind of amazing the things that end up having that kind of impact on you, isn't it?)

Come along with me and trace the progression!

It started like this:



The early Muppet designs were so primitive and obviously puppet-like compared to what they would become. I always liked the way they would show frustration by clenching their whole face up. It's a cute little touch they lost along the way, although Kermit would still do it from time to time.

And, now, on to this:



I think this one may be the funniest. The phone call at the end still cracks me up. I always loved the idea of Kermit as the host/producer of this wacky crew of performers, trying to hold things together long enough to put a show together each week.

Add a touch more sophistication, and you get this:



The best bit here, is when he stares into their mouths.

And finally, take away the Muppets, and this is what you get.

And thus ends Muppet Week at Eddie-torial Comments!

When Irish Eyes are...Swedish?

Thought about saving this one for St Patrick's Day, but realized I might forget I was saving it, so here it is. Besides, I'm Irish on my maternal grandmother's side all year round! So why not acknowledge it in true Muppet style?



This song always makes me think of my brother, whose name is Herman Reginald Fernando Danny. The vid is nutty enough that he would really like it, so I'm dedicating this to him.

This was my favorite Muppet sketch from Sesame Street.

I loved the two little Martian dudes and their "Yep yep yep yep" noises. They don't look like any other Muppet in use at the time, which is a part of their charm. They're almost kind of ethereal in their shapelessness. I love the way that their big chins snap upright when they're surprised or scared. Still too funny after all these years.




When I was looking for this sketch on YouTube, I was surprised at how many times these guys have been used. I remembered a few of them, but there were a lot that I was unaware of. It was a fun video search to do. The telephone bit is far away my favorite one, but I like this next one a lot too. It reminds me a little bit of the old fable about the blind men and the elephant, but with a fun twist. They can see the clock, but are trying to identify it using a book that is giving them ambiguous ideas. What fun.

Still striving for a modicum of class, this time from chickens!

This has got to be the most fun you can have with a bunch of chickens and not get arrested. Be sure to watch the bottom row of chickens after Gonzo steps out front!



"Not enough to kill it." Ha!

It's time to raise the bar here and bring some class to this here joint

Welcome to Muppet Week. How can you not love poor, unfortunate Beaker, especially doing Beethoven? Especially love Statler and Waldorf at the end. Play it again, indeed. Over and over and over and over....

Couple more links and couple more musings

Queen of Fifty Cents has come up with a novel spin in the yard sale report back blog post. She turned it into a video! Now, there are lots of voiceover, blah blah, YouTube vids out there where people pan and scan their yard sale finds as they wax (sort of) eloquent about them. Queen Fifty has gone those shows several better with this fun montage of several weeks of finds arranged by price. Check it out.

I'm linking to her blog post rather than embedding the video in hopes that you'll also check the whole blog out. I just found her and it's pretty neat. In addition to the usual talk about her shopping adventures, she takes pics of the dogs at the houses where she stops. It's awfully sweet and worth scrolling down to see.

I'm really psyched that the Old 97's have a new release coming out. There's a sample mp3 here and a promo video here. Rhett Miller just gets sexier all the time! The song sounds great, so I'm plotting how I can scrape together enough for the CD. They're one of my favorite bands, so I'd really like to get this one.

Image from the Old 97s website.

Speaking of music, Emmylou Harris is putting the final touches on a new album, due out next year. Of course, I am beyond psyched about this one. I'll donate plasma to get the money for it if I have to. She talks about it a little here. I'm surprised after all this time that she's still having to defend Wrecking Ball. Besides being one of the most amazing albums of her career, it's hardly the left turn that so many folks seem to think it is. I find it impossible to listen to just about any of the albums that came before it and not hear germs of the seeds that led to WB. Her entire career led to that album at the moment. I think her last release, All I Intended To Be, was kind of the culmination of the phase of the journey that began with Wrecking Ball, so it will be interesting to see where the new one leads. I know I'll be along for the ride for s

Louisville stinks these days, literally. Especially in our 'hood and the downtown area. We've had so little rain lately that the drains haven't been cleaned out in a while and the urban area is taking on that open sewer smell as a result. It's really disgusting, but there's nothing one can do but hope for a good downpour.

I think this is going to be a good month for the booth, but it will be a long crawl to get to the end. Last month, nearly every day was at least a 20-dollar sale day, sometimes a lot more. It was the best month I've ever had. This month, I'm back to the up and down path I'm more used to--20 bucks one day and 3 the next. It's going to be a long road to the end of the month at this rate. I'm bracing for the long haul.

The double space across the aisle from me has opened up. I'm thinking of consolidating my two single spots into it. I'll need to talk to the manager next time I'm in there.

Tomorrow is going to be a busy days for yard sales. Two church sales, plus a block sale in the "cool" part of town. I'll be hopping for sure, on the hunt for merchandise and hopefully a treasure or two.

Linkages and musing

October is always a fun month in the blogosphere (Does anyone use that term any more?) as various bloggers start their spooky celebrations. I've got something planned for a little later, when I've got time to fire up the scanner, but here are a couple for your reading pleasure right now.

Bully is revealing the awful truth about Archie's hometown. And it's shocking. And apparently all the evidence has been staring everyone in the face for years, but no one ever put it together before. Leave it to the little stuffed bull to put it all together.

Meanwhile, at Postmodern Barney, Dorian has started his annual celebration of horror movies with a long-forgotten "gem" from the 80's and the early days of the video revolution.

On the yard sale front, Yard Sale Bloodbath shows us how Berkeley a yard sale can be. In case you're wondering, it's pretty Berkeley. That may not qualify as an October horror--unless you're a rabid tea-partier, that is--but it's certainly something to see. I'm kinda jealous I wasn't there.

October or any time of year, Thrift Shop Horrors is always the best stop for things that should not have been sold the first time, much less resold.

Continuing my Nanci Griffith kick of the past few days, here's a very nice overview of her career and its ups and downs, album by album. No vids this time, but I do have a couple set aside for a special occasion.

October has started off extremely slow for the booth. Last month I set a sales record; this month I've only broken five dollars in sales on two days, so far. It's going ot be a long, slow, up and down month, I fear. I'm taking another load of Halloween and fall-themed merch over today, including a couple of cute vintage straw cowboy hats. Hopefully, that will help. I may add some fall-colored decorations to the booth to make it stand out a bit.

When You Can't Find a Friend, You've Still Got the Radio

I wonder sometimes whether young people today have the same kind of relationship to music, particularly to the radio, that I did in my teens. I was a smart, non-athletic, bookworm, comic nerd, who didn't have a lot of friends. My parents divorced, which scandalized some people in our small town, and resulted in us moving away for a while to a bigger town where I really didn't fit in. On top of all that, I was gay and couldn't even begin to admit it, although there certainly were more than enough signs that only I could see.

For a lot of that period of time, my main companions were reading and music. I know for sure that's why I can't begin to imagine getting an e-reader of some kind. It would be like rejecting one of my best friends. Part of the comfort of having a book with me has to do with the spine and the pages and the paper. It may be why the mp3 player has never totally caught on with me as well. There's something about buying and having music in a physical form (at least as "physical" as a CD can be) that is really crucial to the whole process for me.

Back to the initial conjecture, with so many avenues to obtain music these days and with so many huge media conglomerates setting the agendas, is the radio as important to lonely teens these days? On the one had, I think the increased means of access to an ever wider variety of music is a great thing, but does that make it harder to find the stuff that really touches you in the way that only music can sometimes. Is it possible any more for music to be more than background nose to our lives? With a hundred different avenues clamoring for your attention, can you find the one that can be your friend?

I'm not sure what the answers are. I'm not even sure if it matters, but every time I listen to this song, I think about this. I was really wanting to use the version of "Wall of Death" that included Nanci Griffith yesterday, but couldn't find it on YouTube. However, I did set off down a wonderful lost hour of watching Nanci sing. There may be a million ways to acquire music these days, but it is good to know that some of them can still have meaning for me, if no one else. Enjoy.

Back from the Wilderness!

I didn't have time last week to get any drafts finished up and ready to post, so I ran out of content yesterday. I'm about to hit a lull in the part-time gig, so I'll be able to get more stuff ready and scheduled and such.

We had a ball this weekend. one of the best times we've ever had camping, in fact. Keith loves (make that LOVES) to camp and goes nearly every weekend in the spring and summer. I like it, but am not that enamored with it. Besides, once yard sale season gets rolling, I've gotta stay in town and go on the merchandise hunt.

So, anyway, we just kind of sat around and did nothing together all weekend. And it was glorious. I didn't read a thing, which is odd for me. We talked. We ate. We talked some more. We ate some more. Keith made a pot of the best chili Saturday. We laid un the tent and listened to the rain on Saturday and napped. We had a bottle of wine and sat in the camp hot tub. It was just a lot of agenda-less fun.

It's been a rough summer between my mom dying and me getting fired. I'm still fighting that on several fronts. Keith has his own work stresses. Another friend of ours passed a few weeks ago. We've got the financial stuff to worry about being down one income. I had a ton of vacation time I got paid for, plus Mom's insurance, so we've been okay, but that's running down and my savings are dwindling. The part-time gig pays well, but not until completion and I've got two more weeks to go on that. We'll be okay through the end of the year, but something has to open up for me before then. I feel really guilty that all this chaos is because of me, but he keeps reminding me that it really isn't.

So anyway, it was a lovely, lovely break. We did hit a couple of yard sales, too, but nothing fancy came out of it. It was nice to get home to our own bed and the kitties too, although now I'm confronted with a house full of stuff that needs doing. Being unemployed was supposed to grant me some time to take care of some things, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Oh well.

I guess I'll get started on the dishes now and the laundry. Got some booth stuff to do too. When I started thinking about everything I had to do at the house over the weekend, for some reason, "Wall of Death" kept coming into my head. I guess catching up on the housework around this place is kind of like riding the Wall of Death, so it does fit.

So, while, I'm climbing one Wall of Death, you can enjoy the musical one, courtesy of guitar great Richard Thompson:



Oh yeah, last thought: I broke 600 last month with the booth. I am so psyched!

I'm not in at the moment...

Keith and I have headed to the wild, wild north to go camping for the weekend. I'm looking forward to hanging out and relaxing. I've got a small stack of books to read. I'm such a bore when I camp. While I might get out and take a brief hike, I'm pretty much content to sit around by the tent and read. Uninterrupted reading time is such a luxury these days. Even when I'm the only one at home, I have a hard time just sitting and reading when I can see everything around me that needs doing instead.

So, I've got a couple of whodunnits packed up and a couple of graphic novels, so I'll see you when I get back.

In the meantime, enjoy The Chills enjoying their leather jackets:

Here, let me ruin the rest of the day for you...

Now, try getting that out of your head.

Don't hate me. Please?

I promise not to ever do it again.

And it could have been worse, you know.

It could have been this:



Ooops!