Lucious Pink

 

What I did on my summer vacation….

I’ll work backwards from the present back 4 months.

This is Lake Billy Chinook which is man made filling up the Cove Palisades canyons in Central Oregon.

Oregon Canyonlands: click on photo; it

Crooked River canyon

We tent camped in Cove Palisades State Park near Madras in Central Oregon.  The weather was perfect; high 70’s in the day and high 40’s at night, with brilliant moonlight.

Apple tree pruned by deer in the day

Apple tree in the moonlight

 

Free at last (from my electrician)

Last week I mentioned that I was tired of my chatty electrician moving slowly, holding up my life so to speak. I made him finish last Thursday so he wouldn’t be underfoot on my day off Friday. It was a struggle, so much that I had to again leave my house, so he couldn’t talk to me.

To be fair, he strung up a lot of cool useful stuff including an extra sconce above my future desk, a light in the storage crawl space behind the kneewall upstairs, plus heaters in 2 rooms, outside lighting for my tacky garage and gorgeous brass floor outlets in my new family room!

He hung a new brass chandelier purchased at the Goodwill for $15, and a vintage glass way too expensive one from an antique store. I decided they were in the wrong place, so he switched them!

The glass baby is now visible from the street which is much better for showing off.

 

A gift of a quilt

It was all worth it. Previously I talked about a quilt my mom and I worked on for my aunt, her sister. My mom had bought the kit and was working on it, when she got really sick with COPD. She bought the kit, I cut out every last slanted diamond piece, because she was too ill to stand up and cut out pieces. She got about 12 out of 42 blocks finished before she couldn’t do any more.

After she died, and after I went through all her sewing stuff (gawd help my kid if I die too soon for she will be stuck with my sewing stuff) and fixed on finishing this quilt for my aunt. On a UFO night which we have periodically, we all sewed on my project and finished the center of it in one evening; all 42 blocks! It took me another 2 months to get the borders on, have it quilted, get the binding on, delay the thing enough to actually display it in a quilt show, and take yet another 2 weeks to get the label on: I got it in the mail last week, as a surprise to my sweet aunt.

t took 2 days to get there, but I didn’t hear from her until yesterday when I received a thank you note. She couldn’t call me because she would cry too much to talk. She’d always wanted a quilt because she likes old-timey stuff, and just wanted one. She’d seen Mom working on this one, and had always wanted one I’d made, so it was a double whammy.

 

We are never shocked

The other night while staffing the Science & Business reference desk at Central Library, a young man came in and asked if we had any books on “methamphetamines”. We, of course, are programmed to ask if he wanted stuff on the health issues? or? No, he just wanted some books on “how to, ya know, make methamphetamines”. We actually, in a horribly incorrect librarian moment, snickered and said that no, and we also don’t have any books on how to build bombs available for check out either. We finally did force upon him, the call numbers for health (6l6.864) and addiction (362.29), but I’m afraid that wasn’t what he wanted, and he was amused by us acting like stereotype librarians.

We also keep the books on how to make fireworks pretty much locked up. If we didn’t, they would be stolen in a NY minute; that and tattoo books. About the tattoos, patrons ask if we have any books on celtic designs, and we ask, specifically, if they are considering tattoos, and they are shocked, shocked! How did we know?? Well, it’s easy: apparently celtic designs are popular for tattoos. We get asked this once a day; that’s how we know. It’s a fact, librarians have heard everything.

 

Cool Stylish Apartment!

My daughter was selected to compete in Apartment Therapy’s small cool apartment contest. She had to post photos of her very small apartment for folks to vote and comment on. She has so much more style than I do. The comments below her photos are mostly complimentary with a few mean ones thrown in. See what you think.

Before you go, please note that she’s using Grandpa’s ugly 80’s couch, which drew the most comments, negative and positive, her cat is over 18 and can vote, and she does have some of her stuff stored in my basement!

 

About my annoying electrician

My day off last Friday was ruined by my electrician being underfoot. I took my Dad out to lunch to get away from him and then I left at 3:30pm to run errands before my quilt group meeting, just to get him to work. When I returned at 10pm, I was enraged to find that the room wall heaters were still not installed which meant all the pulled out furniture had to stay there over the weekend!

The man does pretty good work when he does, but it takes him forever because he has to chat. You cannot say one word to him, because he’ll stop to talk. He’s also a get-rich-quick schemer and has a million ideas for him and anyone else standing around which means he has to talk about that too. My perfect contractor won’t work in the same place with him because he wants to keep working.

Four days later he still hasn’t come back to finish, so my life is on hold until I can get him out of here!

 

But what about Acme?

Now there’s another word I am charmed by when I see it: ACME! Only because Wile E. Coyote ordered all of his Road Runner killing supplies from Acme Corporation.

 

-orama

I love the suffix -orama, hence my tacky WordPress website address. Laundorama, for example is such a cool word. The Oxford English Dictionary online describes it as such….

[< -orama (in PANORAMA n. and DIORAMA n.).
Orig. in terms for exhibits devised mostly during the first half of the 19th cent., such as COSMORAMA n., CYCLORAMA n., GEORAMA n., MYRIORAMA n.,
and added to initial elements of ancient Greek origin. From the mid
20th cent. onwards added to English initial elements: an early example
is MOTORAMA n.
The
following quotation attests a 19th-cent. fashion (perh. mainly French)
for adding the element to any word as a meaningless particle:
1896 E. MARRIAGE tr. Balzac Old Goriot 54 The diorama, a recent invention,..had given rise to a mania among art students for ending every word with rama... ‘Well, Monsieur-r-r Poiret,..how is your health-orama?’]

b. Forming nouns
(mostly nonce-wds.) designating a display, event, etc., usually of
considerable size or expanse, the nature of which is indicated by the
first element.

Junk-o-rama is apropos of my collecting habits and the amount of it I have stored in my basement stacks. I consider all that stuff my retirement nest egg.

 

A Reference Aside

At my quilting group, we got into a discussion of group names of animals such as an exaltation of larks or a murder of crows. Back in the old days before the internet, we would get calls all the time at the library wondering what is the group name of plovers (stand) or starlings (chattering or murmeration)? The Science & Business dept would field these calls due to the science part of it. We had a book on the shelf that was green and no one could remember the boring name of it. It was the green book we used to answer these questions.

 

Later that week, while working at the S&B desk I started looking for the book, but it was not on its hallowed place on the shelf. My fellow librarian who has been there since 1974 and I could not think of the title until she searched in some old excel database we have where we stuffed the fugitive facts we had formerly kept in a little card file drawer. The Fugitive facts were bit of information to answer questions which were asked so often that we kept notes on, and which were asked so often that we seldom had to use the actual file. The book…drumroll….Encyclopedia of Biological Sciences, was not even in the dept anymore, but rather shelved with the Telephone Reference people who answer actual human phone calls! Patrons who do not find what they want on the internet or are too old or computer-phobic to have ever learned to use it, call Refline and ask questions! I checked: it WAS green although the spine had faded to blue and it was in terrible shape.

 

It is still chugging along listing Group names of mammal, fish, birds and others; Gender names, and Juvenile and Juvenile Group Names. Call Refline if you want to know the names of baby clams, cicada, cougar, dragonfly, or group names of magpies, horses.

 

Ok, Ok….baby clams (littlenecks), cicadas (nymphs), cougars (cub or pup), dragonfly (naiad) or magpies (tiding), horses (hara, among other names to numerous to mention).

Encyclopedia of Biological Sciences