Fabulous or Frightening?

I bought this on ebay.

I can explain.

I met a guy recently who impressed me tremendously. He's a naturalist from the state of Delaware who retired in Vermont some 20 years ago. He's 86 years old and he looks like 30 years younger. I mean, strong legs, straight back, clear eyes - hearing that is way better than mine. When we met he told me he and his wife had been out every night for the last six nights, mostly listening to classical music or going to wine tastings and the like.

It came up in our conversation that he had written and illustrated a few books of natural history while he was still working. He explained that he used something called "scratchboard" to illustrate these books. I didn't know anything about scratchboard and he explained. It's pretty much like it sounds - you scratch away the image from a board and the board can than be used to make prints.

So..... Fast forward a few weeks and somehow, while searching for paintings of Terriers I saw this kitten. I am not sure how that happened, but you know how the Internet is.

I don't know if what I have here the actual scratchboard or a print. I don't want to break it out of the frame and it hardly matters to me. I was just lured in by the "scratchboard" part of the description - and the eyes. This item was created by an artist called Helen Anderson and the ebay seller was trying to gin up interest by noting that Ms. Anderson had an auction record of $750. (My price, $9.99 and I was the only bidder.) Can you believe it?

So, here is an addition to the collection who now gazes up at my cracked ceiling with his little open mouth and wee paw fetchingly placed on, what is that? A ball? Whatever.

Frankly, I can't decide whether I like it or should be embarrassed. OK, I like it, but I think that means I should be embarrassed. What do you think?

Shackleton speaks:

At dinner tonight, while he was refusing to eat the broken hamburger that his father was trying to sell as "sloppy Joes" Shack said, "If I were a monster, I would eat all of the human being except the head. Who wants hair with their human?"

Another excellent question.

Bad Blogger

Just stopping in on a Sunday PM to say I know I have been lame, remiss, what have you, about getting fresh stuff in here. Work has heated up unpleasantly - in August! And there's the usual family stuff to attend to. I have managed a couple of bike rides and the Ustudy and I took the picture above on one of our periodic photo shoots. I took the picture and she ran it through instagram - destined to be a visual cliche of 2011 but isn't it cool? Hope the summers of any stoppers-in are going well.

GE Genius Hall of Fame: Dr. John Schenck, MRI Pioneer | GE Reports

GE Genius Hall of Fame: Dr. John Schenck, MRI Pioneer | GE Reports

Click the link above for a little inspiring GE propaganda. That's my Dad. The genius.

All on a Summer's Day

A very lazy Sunday draws to a close here... Nothing but cupcakes to show for it, and those now mostly gone. Here's a shot at redemption, a few summer photos from around the Last House taken by the Understudy mostly. Summer is in absolute full swing here at the moment... We are going to rouse ourselves briefly in about half an hour, the Ustudy and I, to take the bikes out for a ride and a photo shoot. The place we rode through yesterday, a little dirt road through some woods and fields nearby, was so beautiful we decided we had better go back with a camera. Hope your Sunday was peaceful too.

This Actually Happened...

The other night I opened the medicine cabinet to get my toothbrush off the built-in little holder behind the mirror. The medicine cabinet probably dates to about 1960 (based on the approximate date of the salmon-colored bath fixtures) - soooo, the toothbrush holder has a bit of a rust issue ...

Anyway, I hang my toothbrush there because Whusband is unlikely to open the medicine cabinet when he is looking for a toothbrush. He is a notorious non-respecter of toothbrush property rights. That is, if he sees a toothbrush, he will use it.
So.
I know. You don't have to say it.

Anyway, I opened to the medicine cabinet to get my toothbrush late that night and found an earwig curled around the back of it, resting in the rust. Boy, an earwig can skedaddle when you take away his toothbrush!

What do you think I did next? Wrong if you guessed, "ran and got a picture for the blog!" (Sorry).

What would you have done?

I'll tell you next time.

Alaska - Done and Dusted

Breakfast on the boat



Seen in Skagway




Well, just for us, and just that southwest bit of it to which we were transported in the most cosseted possible fashion. Here's one last blog post re: the trip, written on board for later blogging purposes. Back to work tomorrow...

Cabin 5562 Log – Thursday July 14, 2011


The very clever people who know how to move a luxury hotel full of people into the Arctic Circle and then take it out again are at their posts. We are steaming dieseling (?) into Glacier Bay National Park. I have already been up for breakfast (7 AM local time). Scrambled eggs with peppers and onions, fried potatoes, coffee, cranberry juice. Then, cause I saw it for the first time, some smoked salmon with fresh onions, accompanied by French bread and finished off with a few slices of fresh pineapple. The pioneering spirit, as you can tell, is not dead…

This is as far north on the planet as I am ever likely to get at 59 degrees north latitude. For the first time on this trip, everything is shrouded in mist and the sun is nowhere to be seen. I took a turn around the upper decks and thought of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner (although no one here is dying of thirst). It is 7:50 AM local time and Shack is still snoozing off the effects of yesterday’s tourism. We were in Skagway, Alaska – a gold-rush born town of 800 people with 10,000 tourists there yesterday. The effects were predictable. All during this trip I have been thinking back to an essay by the late David Foster Wallace called “Consider the Lobster” It’s all about lobsters and their place at the center of a Lobster Fest in Maine.

At the time I read it (heard it on audiobook, actually) I was irritated by his attitude toward the masses in search of a good time. What an easy target - a straw man. Wallace did, however, talk about himself as part of the problem, as ruining the thing he came to see - a “parasite on a dead thing” . Skagway still has the bones of a frontier town but the face of a rapacious tart. Diamonds for sale at eight different places within 200 yards of the ships. (What’s with all these diamonds and “tanzanite?” Can people not buy this at home? Do they only want it when they’ve left home on a boat?) But yesterday, after Shack and I bought our T-shirts and postcards in Skagway (playing our parasitic part), we went up a scenic railway, naturally with a thousand other people, and saw scenery that was so beautiful it almost didn’t seem possible that it was real. It was, the conductor said, the nicest day of 2011 in the area so far. The views of mountains, crags, cataracts, forests primeval etc. stretched for miles in all directions. We were, all of us parasites, coming to see and, in a way, to pay our respects to these sights of this world. And, let it be said, we are a natural part of it too and if there were no on lookers to see it, would the world still be so beautiful? We tourists may not be attractive, but there was nothing but goodwill in our hearts for all those crags and cataracts and, I think, a sense that we were very small in the face of this splendor.

A Post for a Hot Night

Uggh. One day back from Seattle and Iiiiimmm Meltinggggg! The only place in the country with decent weather at the moment was Seattle. Hmm. Still, it's nice to be home. Flying into Burlington yesterday, I saw little Vermont with new and grateful eyes.

Anywho - since it is hot and I am feeling all-in here's a little video I took as we were dieseling away from Skagway, Alaska last week. Also featured is Shack, who is acting like a nut and modeling his Russian army hat, which we had procured at the Russian American store in Skagway. The hat was the hit of the trip. I am hoping that somewhere under that hat he will keep the images of the scenery he saw in Alaska...
































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