Quiet in the Snow

I haven't written much here because, well, I find I don't have anything much to say. Now there's a change... What could it be? Age? Hmmm. Yes, probably. Wisdom? No, probably not.

I think of stuff sometimes that I might write about here, in the middle of the night usually, then day comes and chases whatever it was away. Must not have been very important. So, I guess I'll just shut up for the time being.

We got a regular pounding of snow the other day, first time in a while, so I ran out with my camera and snapped a few.



Where Have You Gone Projectivist?

I am still reading, if not much writing, and I have been distressed in recent weeks to try to click through to my favorire Aussie Blogger, the Projectivist. One day, her lovely Blog was just gone. Removed. No more. I have been a bit worried. Proj., if you're out there, drop a line.

It's A Wonderful World Part 2

I have again been indulging in a little guidebook reading. This time, it was the Golden Guide to Tropical Fish that came to hand. (Golden Press, NY 1975).

So, here for your consideration, are the names of some fish that some people actually have swimming around in their living rooms (probably in tanks - I don't know a lot about fish - our foray into fish ownership ended badly, for the fish and the children, but I am solid on the tank requirement):

The Bloodfin

The Glowlight Tetra

The Rummynose

The Dwarf Barb

The Flying Fox

The Skunk Loach

The Talking Catfish

The Brick Red Wag

I could go on and on. Sorry about not providing links through to these various fish. I am at the library with no time for a proper post. See you on the weekend!

OK, I Can't Really See That Chateau From Our House

You may be surprised to learn that there are not many Chateaux along the banks of the Mississquoi. I don't think the Last House, a clapboard number that is falling into its cellar hole, qualifies. However, I just finished reading Nancy Mitford's biography of Madame de Pompadour (Mistress of Louis XV, among other things) and I bought a little collection of postcards from the 1950s at the thrift store the other day and, so, voila, today we have a faux view from the Last House.


Bon weekend tout le monde.

Nancy Mitford's book was so good, BTW, that even though I just finished reading a copy from the library, I shelled out for one of my own.

Oh, and "Vert" "Mont" is, you guessed it you clever rascal, French for "Vermont."

The Woolfoot Decade?

I've just had a look at the Cluster Map, the little widget at the bottom of this page, that shows, roughly, the location of visitors to this blog. You know, it's that teeny world map with the little dots showing that makes the world look like it has measles.

I saw a Cluster Map on someone else's blog a couple of years ago and decided I needed one too if I was going to keep track of the global location of the 5-10 people a day who typically stumble in here.

Anyway, I had a gander at my Cluster Map today, and I find I need to have a word with you people from central Asia, Africa and most of South America. You are really not holding up your end when it comes to visiting my blog. I'm not happy about it.

Vast tracts of planet Earth, populated by hundreds of millions of human beings, and not one of you could be arsed to stop in here in the last few months? I am getting the idea that unimaginably broad swathes of humanity are not interested in reading about my trips to the dentist, or reports on the latest cracked plate I have acquired, or the funny things my kid said.

So I am here today to ask, just once then I will let it drop, what is wrong with you people of central Asia, Africa and South America? How do you think this ostentatious absence of yours makes ME feel?

Before you start composing your responses, be advised that I don't want to hear (and won't publish) a lot of lame excuses like, "oh, but I do not speak English," or "my village has electricty only two hours a day," or "there is a civil war here" or "the authorities will not allow it," or "I have river blindness" or, worst of all, "I am not interested in anything you have to say."

I'll bet whereever you are on the aforementioned continents that you managed to procure cooking oil and some form of starch today. So??? How much harder would it be to have a look at a few posts at this web address?

The cold fact is that I, like all writers of this sort of material, require validation. The more the better. Being ignored is hurtful. Even if you Asians, Africans and South Americans would just zip in here and zip back out again I would get a new pock mark on my world Cluster Map.

Let's see what you can do.

I'll be watching.

How do you say: "don't let me down" in Kazak?

Stranger in a Strange Land

Gawd. His teeth are awful!

I have visited a strange, foreign land recently, one close to home, but in another way, far, far away. (And no, it wasn't Canada).

In this place, the people rise early and, before leaving their homes, they take a toothbrush, one that costs about $180.00, and attend to their teeth. The $180 toothbrush has a timer that alerts the citizens of this land when 30 seconds have passed, so that the toothbrush can be advanced to the next quadrant within the brusher's mouth. Quadrant by quadrant, the teeth are cleaned, front and back. Also the gums, which are carefully and thoroughly raked by the vibrating bristles, and also the tongue, which is regarded in this land as a kind of louche quarter, where bacteria linger and multiply and get up to their bacteriological evil doings and hence must be power swept away.

In addition to being freed from the menace of bacteria, the teeth in this process have also been just a little bit remineralized, as the toothpaste in question is a prescription-only $22 tube from 3M - the same people who make reflective material for Stop signs and Post-it Notes. How clever are the scientists at 3M! Their toothpaste has four times the amount of fluoride available in those toothpastes available for $1 at Family Dollar.

After the two minutes brushing is completed, the residents of this country replace their toothbrush in its charger and proceed to take out a small angled brush, with a little tuft at each end, something that looks like it might be used to clean one's ears. With this they reach back behind the back molars, wisdom teeth if they have been so unwise or so cheap as to have held onto those, and give those dark alleys a police raid. When that is done, they reach for the floss, which follows brushing in this land as night follows the day. The floss is wrapped tightly around the fingers and then, tooth by tooth, crevice by crevice, it is pulled between and behind each tooth. Again, the gums are tended. Then, at last, there is the remineralizing mouth wash.

This strange place is the land wherein my dental hygienist dwells. I visited her there this week. Each time I venture over her border, she insists on sharing the folkways of her country with me. She wants me to move in there. In my heart, I say "never, not a chance," but I don't say this out loud, of course. I lay back in the chair and look at the mirror, again, as she demonstrates proper flossing technique, again, and I lie, again, about my dental cleaning regime. She is polite, but I can tell she is not fooled. I can tell that she believes that I don't give my teeth a properly central position in my life, that I have refused to invest in them as I have been advised, both in terms of cleaning them and fixing them. I know she despises me, at least a little, for my apsotasy.

In her world, the tooth occupies the place that King Kong occupied in the life of the islanders from whom he was fetched by the white people. I am not at home in this land. I am hasty brusher with an inferior electric brush (no timer), a half-assed flosser, a gun ignorer. I am repelled by the idea of brushing my tongue and I suppose this shows

Honestly, my teeth aren't bad. All are white, or whitish - at least the ones in the front that anyone can see. More importantly, none of them hurt. My hygienist seems to be on a campaign to convince me that this is not good enough.

My resistance to her efforts to get me a passport for her country is made a bit easier by the fact that I sense she is working at least partly on commission. The references to the superior toothbrushes, rinses and pastes have the same ring as a hairdresser's pitches for shampoos, conditioners and fixatives when you are captive in their chairs. Ha! I was born at night, as the saying goes, but it wasn't last night. I'll give the office a call when something breaks or falls out or causes me pain.

I did buy the $22 toothpaste, though.

Sin, Death and Transferware

A beautiful platter...

In ghastly condition, but apparently regarded for ages past as too good to be thrown away. Life support was called in, who knows when, maybe a hundred years ago. Perfection, as I have said before, is overrated. The cracks,and the repairs, make this art as far as I am concerned.

The Sabbath was observed in the Last House today by a morning screening of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. "Don't go in the attic Tippi!"



The kids sat on the stairs and watched it in their pajamas. The morning's other accomplishment, if watching a movie on TV counts as an accomplishment, was setting up a Facebook account for the Understudy. Why did I agree to such a thing?


What we have here is a milkmaid scolding a cow for kicking over the milk. Sigh. I love it. No marks at all on the bottom, but I am guessing 1830s...

I have my great grandmother's goin-to-church Bible, a little pocket number with a flap that folds over the front to keep it dry. Her name is written with a fountain pen on the fly leaf. The type is tiny. It saw a lot of use. That flap is just barely hanging on. Sorry Grandma. I am hoping I have not sent you spinning. Protestant guilt survives, if the habit of church attendance has not.


Making things worse, no doubt, was that 10 AM saw me perched on a not very comfortable, very ugly Victorian chair at my favorite auction house, which may be sort of the opposite of church. I left the auction with two box lots of 1840s to 1850s transferware. (The ugly chair and its mate went for $40 shortly before I left to go have lunch with a friend). I had seen these boxes of dishes at the preview yesterday, and coveted their contents.

I was laying in my room just now, looking at all the books and pictures and plates I have acquired over the last few years. Someday, I was thinking, when I have gone the way of great grandma, all these worldly goods will go the way of worldly goods. Given my spiritual circumstances, I think I better leave them to charity...


These little bowls are in a pattern called "Farm" that I have seen repeated on many other wares, usually not nearly so old as these. I gave my sister a biggish "Farm" platter for Christmas. The transfer printing on these is fabulous and crisp. Ooo!

In the meantime, they are lovely... And I do contemplate the lives of those who made these, and owned them before me, and repaired them (every piece has a crack)and preserved them. Does that help? And how about confessing. Any points for that? Or is the road to hell paved with transferware, and books and pictures?

Don't answer that.

I Heart the Laundromat

I am entering, or well within, my Chatelaine years - the time of life wherein I am Mistress of the Household, keeper of keys and budgets, director of furnace fixers and cable installers, as well as the children. Despite my advancing age, however, (the odometer just tipped over to 45), and status as a landowner - albeit in a poor corner of a poor state - I spend the bulk of my time at the moment in rented premises: two bedrooms over a garage. Our apartment is pleasant and clean and new, but we are required to make do there without a bathtub, or dishwasher, or a washer and dryer.

Work and school considerations prompted our move to Stowe this year. We still have the Last House, and hope to hang onto it, though the long-term plan is to buy a place in Stowe. Stowe, home of the famous ski resort and one of a handful of Vermont towns which is famous for its wealth, is about an hour south of the Last House. As such, it is much nearer to work for me and the kids can go to the good Stowe schools. This year, however, and for the foreseeable future, I am a renter again.

One result of our move is that I have found myself doing laundry communally again,as I did in college. My laundromat is on the ground floor of some newish senior housing in the village. It is called, rather coyly, "The Stowe Laundry Company."

It is not a cheap place to do the wash (it is Stowe, after all). The other washer-folk appear often to be second home owner types with king size down comforters in need of a triple loader. The matron/on-site trouble shooter, is busy all day long washing the clothes of people who have obviously paid to have their laundry dealt with by someone else. Still, many of the people who wander into the laundromat intrigue me. Lots of them are middle aged. Why, I wonder, don't you have a washing machine at home? What's your excuse? Maybe they are wondering the same thing about me.

We are generally sort of a nice class of people, although apparently mostly down on our laundry luck. Manners are reasonably good, at least when I go during the day. Maybe the crowd after dinner is a little rougher. The matron, who comes from Houston, Texas (we had a chat one snowy day) says she finds people often unfriendly. "You say hello to someone and they just glare at you," she said. I chalked this up to New England reticence, at least partly. And then, not everyone who winds up in a laundromat is a sympathetic character, even in a middle class laundromat.

It's bourgeois character, however, can not be doubted. There are no ashtrays anywhere and the bathroom is scrupulously clean. The reading material, however, is strictly laundromat fare: Soap Opera Digest, wrinkled Ladies Home Journals; back issues of Field and Stream. These are arrayed in a neat fan atop a bank of Out-of-Order washers. (BTW, I suspect that these washers aren't all out of order at all, but that they have been disabled as the laundromat seems to have excess capacity. No sense keeping all the machines running if they are never all pressed into service at the same time. Maybe I'll ask the matron about this next time I go. I'll report back.)

The other patrons generally mind their own business, though some will nod and smile. The kids and I were waiting for a load to dry one day a week or two ago when the young woman at the next dryer, after a long period of futilely stabbing the laundry debit card into the payment slot, asked if we might know what was wrong. Shackleton had various suggestions and tried his own technique. She was happy for his help, maybe thinking that a person so like a leprechaun might be lucky. He wasn't, but she she smiled, and got the matron. The debit card insert required a subtle motion of the wrist that none of us had, but the woman in charge managed to add 20 minutes to the dryer time.

I was glad to think that my kids will have a laundromat memory or two. I'm sort of proud (I know it's shabby and only making a virtue of necessity) that I am laundromat patron, the way that I am sort of proud of having an address in a poor town and driving ancient cars. We are sooooo not keeping up with the Joneses.

I have also been pleasantly surprised to find that I sort of enjoy going out to wash my dirty laundry in public. There's something about going down to the laundromat that satisfies an atavistic tendency to community: like going to the river to beat your clothes on the rocks with the other ladies of the town, only without the rocks or any requirement for crouching.

And then, there are the machines. I love the machines; their massed quantity and their quality. You can do many loads at once! And the washers and dryers are so Mighty! When the spin cycles start, it sounds like a jet taking off. Best of all may be the little carts that take heaps of clothes between washer and dryer and then to that wonder of wonders, the purpose-built laundry-folding tables. No surface in our house is sufficiently clear of clutter to allow for laundry folding. Spreading your warm-from-the-dryer clothes out on one of these tables is a pure laundromat luxury.

It's not forever, I guess. But for now it's fine, and even a little better than fine.


(Photo - Wikimedia Commons - not my actual laundromat)