Happy Halloween

My big brother just wrote to say he smashed his thumb putting in fenceposts and had to have stitches. Now he's disguised as Frankenthumb. Bwa ha ha. I borrowed that wicked laugh from Dark Mind, the evil genius of blogging.

Maybe you are wondering why the picture of this normal looking bike, instead of something gorgeous. To me, this bike is a wonder. Someone did a nice job of making a seat cover for it, but other than that it was pretty well broken by the time HH bought it. There was a great whopping hole through one of the cylinder walls and the piston was poking out. For a few years, it was just a pile of rubble on the floor up against the wall. Everything was dismantled. It really looked like rubbish. I got a thrill buying parts for it, under instruction from HH, on E-bay. This is it all put back together again. Isn't it nice?

New Old Furniture

The picture is the young ornery kitty sitting half on the floor of the drum room, and half on the drum rug. Whew! I don't miss that ugly indoor-outdoor carpet scrap! Maybe it's one reason this room looks so much nicer with the beautiful (I didn't know it would look so beautiful) poor old beat up baby grand piano. I like our garage, which we can only use for the 1957 pickup that doesn't lock, and my car has to sit outside, because it has the old old old pump organ that was my mom's first keyboard after she married my dad. I used to practice on it in the morning, because it doesn't make much noise. My big brother is taking it home when he can borrow his son-in-law's pickup truck to haul it in. Or, maybe HH will work out something where we drive it up in our old pickup, but bbrother will have to come down and load it, since it makes HH nervous. Besides the old pump organ, which is pretty, are the two items of furniture I haven't made room for, 3 broken chairs that I'm supposed to have repaired, and a bunch of other furniture that's on it's way out, either to bbrother's or charity shops.

This morning I was a useless dweeb, just ran around looking for things I couldn't find and trying to remember why I went into the room, whichever that was. That makes me mad. OH! Bye!!!

About Time

If this photo works, isn't it great. Collections of a friend of a friend. An amazing fellow, I think.

I've taken an old drawer from a dresser that fell apart and the rest of it went to the dump, but I put a pet blanket from the pet store, sworn to kill bacteria and be machine washable, in the bottom, and the poor old blind kitty curls up in it and sleeps and feels fairly safe from the ornery young whipper-snapper kitty, who likes to bite her ears just because she can. Cats! Hmph!

The piano is in! The room looks great, and we have friends vieing over who will get to store the drums at their house, since they really are quite big and it doesn't look like they'll fit in the closet, unless we give up wearing clothes. I've made room for the two dressers. The small cupboard my Grandfather made fits nicely into the tiny dining area, but his small table hasn't found a place yet, and neither has my old desk. Well, that's not true. It's just that I have to extracate the drafting table from it's spot before I can replace it with my old desk, which my parents used as their first kitchen table in their first house. I also have their second kitchen table, and it fits beautifully into my tiny dining area. It's the table I grew up with, and my little brother and I did homework on it. It's so nice to have! HH and DD seem to like it, too.

A New Week

Ah, here it is, Monday morning. A new week. A new chance for perfection. The photo was taken yesterday on Mary's Peak by HH. He said he was taking his bike around the block. That's a euphamism. Since this bike is from 1942, I consider it less reliable than the 1984 Honda Nighthawk, so send him off with the cell phone when I can. He said the WLC handled as well as anything he's ridden down Mary's Peak. Hmmm. I wish you could see the carburator of the Nighthawk right now. It is all dismantled, its parts laying in orderly fashion on a red shop towel on the custom work bench of rolled steel HH had made for his shop. It looks like one of those exploded drawings in a shop manual, with little lines pointing like the typewriter on my last post, except there are no lines, and it's not a drawing.

Yesterday we visited Heidi and MIL. Heidi has gotten wilder and more energetic, biting and licking with manic energy and ferver. She is still very pretty, but less inclined to tire. She loves toys that squeek, and is a good fetcher. We make the toy squeek, then throw it, she chases and brings it back, where she shakes it silly in front of us so we can admire her tecnique, and when she's ready she backs off for the designated tosser to take charge. MIL says she knows the words "tug of war," their favorite game.

Celebration

Here's my cute manual typewriter. I got the ribbons for it. I had to order them from New Jersey, because that's where the typewriter collectors are. It looks like one of the things my dad collected was typewriters. My brother found them all over the house, and brought them all to one place. It looked like a museum display. I've had mine for ages, but I found the receipt for it at Dad's and discovered that my brother bought it. I asked him, and he said I could keep it, so I ordered the ribbons. I typed a letter to my cousin on it. I was surprised that I could still do it.

Yesterday HH found a buyer for his Kawasaki W650, so he's happy. We will be able to pay down the loan for the expensive 1942 Harley Davidson. He was talking about selling his Nighthawk, too, but I think I talked him out of it. It has a shaft drive and doesn't have spoke wheels, so is relatively unadventruresome, which is good for having fun and getting there and getting back and still having fun. He says he almost fell over in the early morning soggy fog in San Francisco when he drove over one of the huge white arrows painted on the road. He says you have to be in total focus mode driving in San Francisco. He also said he would have been so embarrassed if he had, because all the other bikes there were Ducati's or other flash exotica, and he felt such a hick with all his camping gear strapped onto the back, and it would have scattered all over the road.

Yesterday afternoon we went to The Darkside theater and saw the French movie, The Science of Sleep, which surpised us both. It didn't sound that great in the previews, but it was. See it if you get a chance. I don't want to say anything in case
you do. It's fun to go in with no expectations.

Stuff

Can't stay long here. Must put self in HIGH GEAR to make GREAT STRIDES toward destuffing and making room for baby grand piano. Are we going to have a garage sale? The talk on this issue fluctuates and I don't know what I'm doing. If we do have the garage sale, then I'd better not haul any more stuff off to charity shops. If only we lived close to HH's brother, who runs his own charity shop through his church....though I guess they have no shortage of donations to deal with. I haven't heard from my brother regarding when piano may arrive. He wrote and said he has major tooth things happening to him.

HH is talking about selling his drums. Might as well, I guess, as he's too beat up to play anymore, and he only likes to mess with motorcycles. Dang. I wonder, though, if I got rid of enough stuff in the closet and his drums would fit in there, would he be willing to keep them until the eventuality of him not being a mechanic and beating himself up at work too much to play. I got things away from the door enough to open it. I still need vent holes in door. There are mystery-things in that closet.