* Just distressing news-of-the-world and it does feel somewhat like we're living through some of the worst parts of the nineteen-teens and the nineteen-seventies and the nineteen-eighties all at once and I don't like it; I want to have a few months, at least, of calm and relative quiet and not feeling a bit doomy.That said, I know very little about geopolitics, so I have no solutions - just like when everyone looked to me about what was safe in the pandemic (which I suppose arguably, as a biologist, I might know), I feel like I have so few answers I have negative answers.
* We're supposed to get big storms tonight. Fortunately it sounds like the biggest risk is hail and wind, not tornadoes. I hope we get some rain, it's been very dry here. Then Wednesday and Thursday, we're supposed to get ice. This is not great as we have a zoom interview with a candidate then. The original plan for those of us NOT isolating (I think one member has some health issue that makes staying home preferable) were going to meet in an office on campus and do it as a group - but one person lives in Denison and I would rather not drive home after dark in possible ice so maybe we will each be doing it from our homes. And I was supposed to give an exam on Thursday....
* What looked worse initially, for selfish reasons? Saturday was going to have another short round of freezing rain after a warm up Friday.....and I had planned to go to Whitesboro that day, because Sunday is my birthday (and even if I *weren't* filling the pulpit for the on-vacation minister, many of the places I might wish to go would be closed on Sunday anyway). I plan to go to the yarn shop, at least. I might, heading back into Sherman, stop at the Ulta (The "free birthday gift" this year is a mascara sample, which, meh, I don't wear mascara - especially now given that I cry more easily) and maybe JoAnn's, and also do grocery shopping for the coming week
There is a potluck at church but I was told not to prepare anything as I am filling the pulpit, and that's enough work already.
Another option for Saturday would be to go up to Chickasaw, but it's supposed to be in the 40s, so it would be too cold to walk around. I might go one day over spring break, though again - everyone will be out of school then and it will probably be crowded if the weather is nice.
* I'm picking away at the big crocheted afghan, because right now I just need something simple that requires little concentration. I also have plans for a side-to-side blanket (using more of the color-shifting cake yarns) and I have some yellow for a crocheted blanket that is just big hexagons. I don't know why blankets - I have a lot of quilts, I have regular blankets as well, and making them takes a long time. But there is something appealing about them, I think because they don't generally require a lot of complicated counting or decreasing, and you can just work.
* I also solved a long time mystery last night, by some concentrated websearching. When I was a kid, friends of my family had a little lamp - they had something like one of those bookshelf/secretary combos, and on top of the bookshelf part, there was a little lamp. It was a figural lamp - that is, there were figures INSIDE the globe, and they glowed. As I remember it was a little cottage and trees but I could be wrong on that. I also remember them as glowing a pinkish-orange, not quite as orange as a sodium lamp, but similar. At one time someone suggested it was maybe a nixie tube, but every nixie tube I saw online was "numbers or letters" (like for in clocks) and the color was slightly wrong. But somehow - I don't know if I searched "figural light bulb" or what, I ran across the Aerolux bulbs, also known as "Aerolux Cheer Lights" I think this, or a competing company, had to be what made the lamp I'm remembering.
Apparently these came in an amazing variety - it looks like flowers were most common (at least, based on what an image search turns up) but there were also religious symbols (crucifixes and Stars of David), things like Shriners' symbols, Reddy Kilowatt, animals, and even - made in the USSR, I guess - little portraits of Lenin and Stalin (!!!!).
I don't *really* want one (though if I saw one of the lamps for a good price and it seemed trustworthy and unlikely to start a fire, I'd be tempted). But somehow it's nice and it's reassuring to know that that thing I thought I remembered was a real thing and it had a name. (And it's weird to me that these were apparently super popular from the 1940s up to the 1970s, but now are so forgotten that it was hard for me to find their existence until I stumbled on the right combination of search terms)
In a way, it's kind of like the lady-in-the-rain lamps: another thing I remember from my childhood that I wouldn't necessarily want as an adult, but which is sort of a nostalgic thing (kind of like conversation pits, too - another 1970s thing).
I dunno. The 1970s really weren't a very good time* but I do think of some things from them nostalgically - I suppose partly because I was a kid then.
(*But really, is ANY time a good time? I doubt it any more)
No comments:
Post a Comment