A Bright Side if You Look for One

Years ago, someone posted a prompt/challenge at a writing site, beginning with a photo of a neglected, abandoned house and asking writers for a short "flash" story using five of a list of words that seemed chosen to suggest a depressing story. A horror story, even, like this rather clever one:

https://writinginnorthnorfolk.com/2017/01/07/tearing-down-the-house/

Looking at the picture, though, I think of all the little towns in "flyover country" that have been abandoned because a factory closed. A determined couple could see this as the start of a cheerful story. I, having some good memories of remodelling homes as half of a couple, see this picture as positively erotic.

[Photo is in the public domain, so far as I know.]

Five words from the list: abandon, abundance, axe, disappear, love

"What luck to get these two fixer-uppers together for such a price," Jill said, squeezing Jack's hand. "I love it, I love it, I love it!" 

"Whoever abandoned it wasn't thinking of abundance," Jack agreed. "The smaller house is a wreck inside, but it should be ready for us to move into by the time Junior gets married."

"Eww ick! No kissing!" Junior yipped from the back seat. "Those yellow walls are just begging for an axe. Can I make them disappear? Please?"

Bad Poetry: Long-Ago Rooms

First read the explanation (and the poem) here:

http://withrealtoads.blogspot.com/2018/04/micro-poetry-long-ago-rooms.html

Then, this...How would I know whether it's good or bad? This web site uses the "Bad Poetry" label for two things: poems written for Bad Poetry Day and/or collected as Bad Poetry, or poems written by me. If I've ever thought that an e-friend's poem qualified, I've not mentioned it. E-friends' poems are tagged as "Poetry."

Long-ago rooms show through
the old house, for me,
so though I see
the green paint peeling off the ceiling
where only sunshine lights the room
because the new lamp gets no current,
in memory
a bare ugly bulb glares down revealing
the room whose walls are painted blue.
When I can afford to refurbish it
you'll see those long-ago rooms, too.



And has the Cat Sanctuary ever needed repair and improvement, ever since the 2011 cyclone zapped the electricity in the older part of the house...It's still a wonderful, historic old house. Just add money.

Book Review: When a Woman Takes an Ax to a Wall

A Fair Trade Book

Book Review: When a Woman Takes an Ax to a Wall



Author: Allegra Bennett

Date: 2002

Publisher: Renovating Woman Books

ISBN: 0-9656173-2-7

Length: 126 pages

Illustrations: some black and white photos and graphics

Quote: “The task at hand often serves double duty as an unex­pected but inevitable meditation zone.”

When a Woman Takes an Ax to a Wall...Where Is She Really Trying to Go?, asks the subtitle. The book answers the question. This is a book about women who have found home improvement jobs to be a path to personal growth.

Several of these women discovered their talents for home improvement work after losing the men in their lives. Although some of them work with male colleagues, the stories they share are not about working with men as partners. I suspect that this was a deliberate choice. Working with a partner is fun, but this book was meant to encourage women to start working all on their own.

Another deliberate choice was to broaden the geographical scope of the book beyond its local interest market. Allegra Bennett had been writing for Baltimore newspapers about the ongoing and badly needed renovation of certain infamous sections of Baltimore. (I hope the one in which people driving up Route 1 from Washington always get lost was the worst. I hope it’s been improved since the last time I saw it.) Most of the stories women shared with her for this book are about either Baltimore or Washington, D.C., but a decision was made to include stories from Michigan, Georgia, and California too.

Most of the stories in this book aren’t about practical details of home improvement, although Bennett shares a cheerfully vindictive story about a divorcee whose intuitive guess about how to fix the garbage disposal turned out to be better than her ex-husband’s. If your garbage disposal or other appliances back up, this story alone would have been worth the $12.95 this book originally cost. We had replaced an “Insinkerator” with a “Badger” at considerable expense; we never had a real problem with the Badger but after reading this book I’ve wondered whether Bennett’s insight might have saved the Insinkerator, and of course saved us a few hundred dollars.

The book also includes one contemporary and one historic ghost story, and, in case any readers feel that they’ve bought or inherited a haunted house, a recipe for ghost-banishing floor wash. Don’t laugh, skeptics. As a long run of wet summers has created a plague of mold in my home town, I’ve noticed that, whenever my Highly Sensory-Perceptive nose detects the presence of black mold in a house, certain people who do and don’t believe in ghosts report feeling that “something doesn’t want me to be there” or “I have to get out of that house.” Scrubbing walls and floors definitely provides fast temporary relief, in all cases, and the recipe in this book sounds less toxic than chlorine bleach. I’d like to know more about efun, “a chalklike substance that dissolves in liquid,” to understand the physical and chemical effects this treatment would have on mold generally and Stachybotrys atra in particular. Well, of course, to find out about the efun and the precise method for making and using the floor wash, you have to consult an expert on Yoruba folklore. In Washington and Baltimore there are several of those.

But mostly this is a book of inspirational stories for women who find themselves needing to tackle “a man’s job” in their own house. It’s particularly recommended to women doing home improvement in Washington, Baltimore, or suburban Maryland, because it contains the stories and real names of neighbors who’ve gone professional or semi-professional.

This review was written several years ago but left on hold because the book was too new to be offered as a Fair Trade Book, too old to be touted as a New Book. Now it's been out long enough to be a Fair Trade Book. When you buy it from this web site, for $10 per book (it's semi-rare!) plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment, we'll send $1.50 to Allegra Bennett or a charity of her choice. At least seven more books of this size would fit into one package, and they might be offered as Fair Trade Books too...feel free to browse!

Book Review: Oil Lamps

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Oil Lamps

Author: Catherine M.V. Thuro

Date: 1976, 1998

Publisher: Collector Books

ISBN: none

Length: 360 pages

Illustrations: photos by Ken Bell

Quote: “Kerosene lamps...have been and still are a stand-by for electrical power failure. Bless the blackouts! Without them, thousands of early lamps, burners and chimneys would have been destroyed years ago.”

Kerosene, Thuro admits on page one, is “dirty smelly smokey COAL OIL.” Firelight and candlelight seem romantic, but who'd ever want to spend a romantic evening sitting around an oil lamp? In fact the generation that grew up with kerosene lamps tended to form a habit of putting out the light and going to sleep after one hour, because one hour of smelling kerosene was more than plenty. Thuro obviously likes her kerosene lamps, and was delighted to report that in 1976 it was possible to get a new, more “refined petroleum product” that “gives a much cleaner and brighter light than candles.”

Just about anything can be made into an electric lamp but the quirky-looking shapes of kerosene lamps served practical purposes. Oil was stored in a bowl, or “font” or “fount,” below a vertical passage that held a wick upright in a limited amount of air space. The wick was lighted in a small open “burner” space, beneath another piece of glass, typically an inverted bowl or dome or cone, which often featured an upward-pointing stem that served as the chimney. The result was usually a knobbly upright shape that left lots of room for creative shaping. Since it had to be taken apart and cleaned regularly, it was likely to be made in separate pieces, sometimes sold separately for easy replacement since glass often broke.

Lamps also generated a great variety of cute and collectible accessories. Since metal bases might damage a table and kerosene might drip down, a proper Victorian housewife knitted, crocheted, or tatted a doily to set under each lamp. Metal match holders were convenient, one for new and one for used matches if possible. Some lamps were suspended from hooks screwed into shelves or ceilings; some were ensconced on walls. Special gadgets for cleaning chimneys and trimming wicks were patented. Bell-shaped glass hoods were sometimes suspended above a lamp chimney to trap a little more of the soot generated by burning kerosene. Kerosene was brought home and stored in “oil cans,” sometimes just well-covered buckets, sometimes specially designed with pouring spouts that admitted air so the kerosene didn't bubble on the way out, or “whistled” when the contents of the can ran low. Truro has collected samples of each of these, some dated by one specific year.

Her passion, though, is the glass domes and bells, of which she's collected a splendid array of designs. The glass parts of a lamp could be plain and generic, but nineteenth century taste encouraged artistic creativity. If nothing else, the glass manufacturer might dimple the glass with a rod. Usually they seem to have wanted to do much more. Scallops, ribs, curlicues, flower shapes, leaf shapes, diamonds, bows, stars,bars, hearts, shells, human heads (some identified with celebrities although, as Thuro observes, no particular resemblance was necessarily observable), and even landscape pictures could be etched or molded into a glass dome, and were.

Prices fluctuate wildly, and what are usually found in estate sales and spring cleaning sprees are no more valuable than they were when new. Still, even if vintage lamps aren't especially valuable, they can add an important authentic touch to any reproduction of a period look. Kerosene lamps were very much a part of any nineteenth century evening or night scene in North America. Critics jeered when George Selznick allowed lamps made a few years too late to be used in Gone with the Wind. Thuro offers to help anyone producing a drama or reenactment from this period, or seeking the perfect lamp to set on an antique table.

What I had at the time of writing was an imperfect copy of this book, in which an extra copy of one set of pages seems to have displaced other pages. Since this is a picture book whose purpose is to help collectors recognize antiques, however, both the glass collector who bought the book and the antique collector to whom he bequeathed it claimed to find it useful anyway—and the copy I have won't be appearing on a display any time soon, either; it's taken. If you want to collect Oil Lamps, you'll want to own this book about them.

This is a big coffee-table book with glossy paper and lots of pictures, originally sold for a high price, and due to its appeal as an investment guide its price apparently never has come down very far. This makes Oil Lamps a rarity--A Fair Trade Book from which your purchase will actually direct two dollars' worth of encouragement to a living author. When you send this web site $15 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment, we'll send $2 to Thuro or a charity of her choice.  

Gratitude Post: The Sun-Mar Toilet

Well, my water line started to thaw out, then froze again. It's been frozen for most of two weeks. How do people use the bathroom in such situations?

One solution is of course to use someone else's bathroom. This can work very well as part of a barter arrangement; people who trust one to do odd jobs in their home are likely to be delighted to pay less cash and share their bathroom, and look disappointed when one's own bathroom is operational again.

But where does that leave one when nature calls outside of one's working hours?

At the Cat Sanctuary, it leaves one in exactly the same situation one has occupied, with regard to calls of nature, since about 1990. I wasn't living here when my parents installed the Sun-Mar dry toilet.

The company web site shows that much research and development has gone on since the Cat Sanctuary was equipped with a truly modern toilet. Newer models make ours look downright clunky. It's a clunky thing, too, being longer, wider, and higher than a traditional water-flush toilet. In its day our toilet was such an innovative gadget that somebody offered grants to people living in the vicinity of mountain springs to get them to test Sun-Mar toilets, which was probably the only way my parents would have tried to buy one. In its day our old clunker cost $1800. Now they're advertising sleek new models that look hardly any bigger than a water-flusher and cost less than $300 (not counting shipping, installation, and maintenance).

However...the old clunker clunks on. Whatever else freezes, my toilet will not only work, but will actually do its little bit to keep the bathroom warm. Even during a power outage...it uses heat to dry out all things organic and yucky (it likes weeds, banana peels, and junkmail), and it does keep working, not at peak efficiency of course, on the greenhouse heat it gets by being near a south window.

Our toilet had to be shipped from Canada, although the grant covered trained laborers to help Dad install it. And back then you needed trained laborers, because the separate pieces of "The Unit" are too big for one person to carry easily, and the vent system is complicated. Now the ads show dry toilets that look as if college girls lugged them in from stores like this one (near a D.C. Metro station) and set them up in one afternoon--which I believe is technologically possible. Bigger toilets are for bigger families. If there are four of you plus pets, and you often entertain, get a big one. If you're renting a basement all to yourself, a small one should work fine.

Besides being reliable during water or power outages, other advantages to a dry toilet include that you're not polluting (you can even get a solar-powered model for an off-the-grid cabin in the woods), you're not breeding roaches in a sewer, and you never have to worry about water seeping out, rotting your bathroom floor, and fostering black mold (Stachybotrys atra grows slowly on almost any organic material, but grows fast wherever it finds a trace of urea). Dry toilets kill mold and roaches, even in urban areas that are already infested.

Also, your contribution to the local landfill is drastically reduced by the Sun-Mar toilet. It runs most efficiently when plenty of dry organic material is added to what tends to be moist contents. That means it positively eats food scraps, pet litter, weeds, and waste paper. You can flush paper towels and some kinds of diapers. If you do end up throwing away garbage, the Sun-Mar at least reduces the volume and nastiness of the garbage. What comes out looks like potting soil, is good for roses...and will burn if you need emergency fuel, too.

Can I hear the Sun-Mar toilet? Yes, sometimes. Smell it? Yes, sometimes. About the same as a water-flush toilet, except when the water-flush toilet clogs or backs up and smells worse.

The main reason why people do stick with old water-flush toilets is cost, which is becoming an increasingly shortsighted reason. Conversion will probably require at least one day's work for at least two professionals. On the other hand, once a dry toilet is bought and installed, the electricity it takes to run probably costs less than the city water bill for a water-flush toilet.

The main reason why some people should stick with an old water-flush toilet, at least for now, is ease of use. Someone does have to get down on the floor and remove the peaty stuff from the bottom of the Sun-Mar toilet, every day or two. It's not especially heavy labor but it could be hard for people with hip, knee, or back problems. Well, if you have the opportunity to live near a mountain spring, why let that stop you? You should be able to hire somebody to do that, and a few other chores to fill up an hour a day. But if you live in town, anyway, the physical work of using a dry toilet might be a valid reason not to switch.

A reason why some people could not use my Sun-Mar toilet would be any mobility impairment. Mine is not wheelchair-friendly at all, and it even seems cavalier about brittle old bones. The newer models look as if this issue has been addressed. There's always the question of height, since some wheelchair users need a high toilet seat and others need one that's not so high, but the company's web page looks as if somebody's been designing dry toilets with the family that needs one of each in mind.

Years ago, Grandma Bonnie Peters published an article titled "I Love My Sun-Mar Toilet." I love mine, too. Even when subzero temperatures cause pipes that are insulated only with those cheap little sleeves of foam to freeze solid, and ice to form in the bathtub, the Sun-Mar toilet works.

Thank you, Mother. Thank you, Dad. Thank you, Sun-Mar.

(Fair disclosure: Neither GBP nor I ever received any payment for singing the praises of the dry toilet. This is one of the few inventions that people will honestly advertise free of charge, because it's that good an idea.)

Book Review: Setting Up Your Sewing Space

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Setting Up Your Sewing Space

        
Author: Myrna Giesbrecht

Author's web site: http://blog.myrnagiesbrecht.com/

        
Date: 1994

        
Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company

        
ISBN: 0-8069-0495-X

        
Length: 160 pages including graphics, charts,and index

        
Quote: “I live, eat, and breathe fabric.”

        
And yes, this is a book primarily about how to avoid breathing fabric if you prefer not to breathe fabric...how to organize your supplies so that you have time for actual sewing rather than trying to remember where you put things. If you have trouble keeping your “creative clutter” in a genuinely creative, organic order rather than letting it turn into a hopeless mess, this book just might help you.

        
For some of us, I suspect, using this book with good intentions will be just another excuse to play with our toys (and possibly be inspired by them). I don’t sew, myself, but I’m like this about knitting. I collect yarn. Very early in my knitting life, there was one day when, inspired by Kaffe Fassett’s approach in Glorious Knitting, I just threw a lot of balls of yarn around the bland, beige, mostly empty sitting room just to notice what looked good next to what else. When the sitting room was fairly well wall-to-wall unravelling balls of mixed yarns, someone came to the door. The “don’t want to know what goes on in this flat” vibration was overwhelming. Not immediately, but before my flatmate came in, I sorted all those yarns by weight and color and repacked them all into wooden storage cubes...

        
Actually, if you’re interested in a book like Setting Up Your Sewing Space, you probably do want to know about my cubes. They used to be sold at Hechinger’s, which used to be a local hardware, furniture, home improvement store chain in Washington. They looked just like these, once you'd put them together, and cost about one-quarter to one-third as much. A Google search turns up lots of sources for 15" particle-board cubes, foreign and domestic, preassembled or not, and even a video showing how to put them together.

        
Anyway, organizing and reorganizing our craft supplies is one of the sensuous pleasures of doing handcrafts. Setting Up Your Sewing Space will tempt you. Maybe, after using these nifty organizing ideas, you could move in more fabric, a different sewing machine for different projects, a quilting frame...and you know authors of craft books, most of whom get their ideas by working in craft shops, aren’t going to tell you not to buy more supplies and plan more projects. (After all, there might be a yarn, fabric, wood, etc. shortage some day, and we all know that crafters don't survive their last project.) Or, if we plan projects to use up everything in the local craft store, and then realize that we’d have to pursue our crafts every day for 200 years to finish all those projects, the current owner of the local store can move to St Croix and we can keep the store ourselves...

        
Just kidding! If you’re determined to use this book sensibly, organize space, and have a place for everything and everything in its place even while you’re working on a maximum of three projects at one time, you can be that rare and exceptional member of our tribe, the constant crafter who never bites off more than s/he can chew or allows the craft supplies to spill out past the doorway of the workroom. Such people exist. If you’re determined to be one of them, this book will show you how.

        

If you’d rather be like most of us and leave 300 unfinished projects to your favorite charity, and why not, charity stores collect lots of money for good causes that way, this book can inspire you to have more fun fiddling with your supply collection. And even branch out...part of this book contains tips on sewing and quilting techniques you may not have tried yet.

Other online booksellers may offer a lower price but, so far as I know, this is the only site that will send Myrna Giesbrecht 10% of the total price of her book ($5) plus shipping ($5). You pay only one $5 shipping charge for as many items as can be shipped in one package, and Giesbrecht or a charity of her choice still gets $1 for each book you buy here. E-mail salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com.

Do You Like an Open Kitchen?

Ezra Klein strays off his usual topic to discuss how people feel about having kitchens that do or don't open directly into the dining or sitting rooms:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/13/dont-listen-to-slate-open-kitchens-are-great/?wpisrc=nl_wnkpm&wp_login_redirect=0

The Cat Sanctuary originally had a kitchen with a solid wall and a door that opened into what was meant to be the sitting room. Probably due to other structural reasons, nobody ever chose to sit or eat in the sitting room; nature just seems to intend it to be used as a mud room and nothing more--although as teenagers, when we wanted to get up early and leave without disturbing other family members, my brother and I used to take turns sleeping in it. And when my parents started remodelling, the first thing they did was to enlarge the kitchen to make room for the twin sinks, counters, cabinets, two stoves (wood-burning and electric), storage areas, and the dinner table. This kitchen proclaims "All food stays here." I love it. I'll never change it.

Should more houses and apartments in Washington come with fully separated kitchens, eat-in kitchens, or open-plan kitchens? I don't remember the Washington Post having discussed this in such depth before, and I'm intrigued. If you have an opinion on this topic, please weigh in.

The Amityville Horror Remembered

Lorraine Warren, one of the "ghostbusters" who visited the house that was named High Hopes but then rechristened The Amityville Horror, remembers that "haunted" house while publicizing the new movie also based on her long psychic career:

http://movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-talk/ghost-hunter-lorraine-warren-tells-us-one-haunted-050927065.html

Although this web site is generally skeptical about ghosts, reminding people that the Bible tells us "the dead know nothing" about the living and warns us not to be misled by "deceiving spirits," my observation is that some "haunting" experiences are definitely not just confined to someone's mind. I'm not talking here about the fond memories and sense of closeness with the recently departed that sometimes comforts bereaved people; that may come from Heaven. I'm talking about the mysterious, horrific experiences that upset people who've never heard that one or more nasty things happened on that site in the past, but can believe such things happened because the site itself still feels horrible to them.

Ghosts tend to be associated with mist and vapors in foggy areas...and really evil, foul-smelling, nasty experiences, like the Amityville Horror, tend to be associated with certain forms of pollution. Green slime, putrid ooze, and feelings of panic and rage--probably including murderous rage--are very real effects that can be produced by things as mundane as septic tanks. The perception that one is levitating can be a reaction to fungal and bacterial pollution. Hallucinatory horrors are another effect many people would be likely to experience. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, walking into this kind of house is a horrifying, even nauseating experience.

The Bible describes certain houses not as "haunted" but as "leprous." These houses need to be vacated and thoroughly cleaned; moldy-colored patches need to be scrubbed and dried, and patches showing green or reddish slime need to be removed and replaced. If green or red slime reappear, the house may have to be burned.

When I was in junior high school, kids enjoyed scaring ourselves with The Amityville Horror and reassuring ourselves that it couldn't be true. After growing up and doing odd jobs that involved renovating old houses, I believe that story could very well be true. Most horror houses can be cleaned and renovated, but sometimes geological conditions make sites hopeless.

It's almost enough to make me want to watch The Conjuring, and if any local lurkers want to buy tickets I'll go, just to try to guess which of the effects are believable, natural, real...and fixable.