This and That: A Blog

 Hodgepodge Questions - Volume 673  1. When you think of autumn what sounds come to mind? Leaves crunching underfoot. Canada geese honking southward.  2.  Is a trip to the mountains something you enjoy? What's your favorite mountain?   I live in a valley surrounded by mountains, so a trip would be a short drive for me!  I don’t have a favorite mountain.  I grew up in a valley with one mountain, Mt. Diablo.  I liked going to the lookout at the top, on a clear day you could see so far in all directions.  There were also wind caves to climb into.   3. What's something that once felt like a mountain, but is now just a molehill?    I’m not so sure my former mountains shrunk as small as molehills, but having to figure life out after my husband died, with two children still minors, felt like a mountain.  There are still struggles resulting from that event, even after more than 20 years.  4. Let's play this or that-...

 Finally!  Some good stuff from Goodwill!  Not one of the new stores of course. A 19" wooden mask.  I always associate the dots with Australia, however this could be African. Or Indonesian.  $7.19 because it's so big.  I now have seven carved wooden masks from around the world on my bathroom walls!  I didn't set out to collect them, I just found them over the years.  This is a Pacific Northwest wood carving from red cedar.  $4.04 Hyacinth by Patricia Jones, copyright 2001.  $4.04, a surprisingly low price as it's framed.  There is just the one small paint scuff in the top right, the white line.  There are a few artists with the name, but none fit the signature or style.  (I cut off some of the signature, but it's P in a stylized J wrapped around it.) How about a glass horned lizard?  It's just 2" and a pendant.  $1.34   Online descriptions say it is " borosilicate glass with embedded dichroic glass elem...

  Sunday Stamps this week is Celebrating Inventions. Canada 1986  Top: Rotary Snowplow and Canadarm (mechanical robot arm for the NASA Space Shuttle program) Bottom: Anti-Gravity Suit and Variable-Pitch Propeller USA 1995  Rube Goldberg's Inventions One of 20 Comics Classic Collection postal cards. Next Sunday Stamps we'll see some Birds.

 Moveable Bridges for Thursday Postcard Hunt .  Tower Bridge over the River Thames, London, England  The postcard dates from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, and is postmarked 1951, however the image is of the bridge in the 20s or 30s. A Pontoon Bridge and Timber Log Raft on the Upper Mississippi river in Iowa.  Pontoon bridges allowed steamboats and log assemblies to pass through the railway and wagon crossings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  c. 1908, but not much later as deforestation ended the timber log rafting era.  This postcard has the  glitter detailing widely produced in the Edwardian postcard craze of 1900-1915. Somerset Bridge , Bermuda, is known as the World's Smallest Working Drawbridge.  c. 1962 (older versions lack the traffic light)  The damage is due to post office mangling.  They do that far too often.  October brings us weekly themes.  First up will be UNESCO sites. 

 My son and I took a trip to one of the Goodwill stores that hasn't been remodeled, or moved to a brand new store.  For all their newness, they aren't very good.  I found this oil painting. " Jerusalem ," by Barbara Dirlam (a Rhode Island art history professor who died in 2001) for $7.19.  Besides her work in academia, she is known for local history and civic preservation.  I find no mention of her own artwork.   It fits really well into the color scheme on my bedroom wall.  An accidental color scheme, I didn't plan it, it just seemed to be where I hung similarly colored paintings!  It was framed and it's pretty big. She tried out a different subject on the reverse, but abandoned it.      I wrote that the new stores aren't very good, but I gave one a third try a few days after visiting the one with the art above.  I found one item of a sort I'd never heard of before.   This is a saccharin holder/server from ...

Another Monday, so more random things around here. Wild Grapes (California Wild Grape, Vitis Californica ) A reblooming daylily, Longfield's Pink .  May May is the other one blooming again. Morning Glories with rain drops.   A hummingbird visiting the morning glories.   China aster in the evening.  Delosperma  I have almost all the deck boards up. See how the deck went way past the edge of the house on the right?  It didn't need to do that, there is a concrete patio to the left of the house. I don't need the area to be out so far from the door either.   Mickey's a big help!  He seems unphased.  The only time he notices is when I use the lawn rake to get the smaller pieces of wood together, then he gets the zoomies.  Mickey had a disappointing park walk on Saturday.  Too many dogs off leash (it's not an off-leash park, and there is a fenced dog park there).  One, a yellow lab, was chasing a ball over and over, taking up th...