now that's sad

Sometimes, surfing around, you find something a little sad.

I was looking at some of the Ohio historical sites (I don't know why but thinking about places like Deep Lock Quarry make me feel cooler).

And I found out that Hudson School #2, which was where I attended third grade, has been torn down. Just this year.

I suppose it was a matter of not being able to make it code-compliant, and it having outlived its purpose, but it still makes me a little sad. Yet another building that only lives as a ghost in my memories.

(There are more photos of the exterior here. It wasn't, perhaps, a beautiful building, but I can still remember the smell of the steam trays at lunchtime, and the view from Mrs. Irish's third-floor corner classroom, and sitting out on the steps with my friends....

(And more history: Summit Memories, devoted to Summit County. They have a whole section on houses in the town where I grew up. In fact, the very street on which I grew up - Atterbury Boulevard - is featured. (I never knew that it was going to be an early housing development, and the would-be developer went bust in the Depression! And that, apparently, one of the few "old" houses on the street was the weird old place we referred to as the "Vonderheide House" - it always seemed odd to me that the gothicky old house didn't fit in with the more modest 1950s/60s Colonials and ranches, but now it makes sense - it was built in 1928, before the developer went bust.

Fascinating. (And I'm kind of relieved the developer went bust; I don't know that my parents would have bought a house in a ritzy subdivision called "Lake Forest.")

I don't really have any works-in-progress or finished stuff to show just now, but I think I will share photos of something I made a number of years ago that I never posted about here.

This is one of the little creatures that lives on my bedside table.

Years and years ago - it would have been perhaps 1975 or so - I read a book in school (it would have been first grade for me) about a girl who was part-fairy. She was (apparently) orphaned and was sent to live with her aunt. She had a sort of guardian or fairy governess in the form of a tiny dog named Gloria.

I remembered the book very fondly...I read it, as I said, during SSR ("Sustained Silent Reading") time in school. I forgot the title but remembered Gloria and the basic outline of the story.

And one haunting bit - which I remembered as the end of the story, but I guess was not. Annabel (the girl) had done something that displeased Gloria - perhaps she even denied her fairy nature (?) But at any rate, Gloria did something that struck me and kind of haunted me, because I think it was the first instance I experienced of the idea of self-sacrifice, at least written in a way that would make sense to a child. (Of course, I had heard the Easter - or rather, the Good Friday - account in church, but I think I was still too young at the time for it to make a big impression on me).

Anyway, Gloria, having decided that Annabel had no more need of her, sat down in the glass case of mechanical animals (Gloria's aunt collected small wind-up animals), adjusted her gold collar, and willed herself to become inanimate.

Thinking about that as a child made me profoundly sad. And angry at Annabel for her stupidity at hurting what was such an excellent and wonderful friend in that way.

(The book does, as it turn out, have a conventional happy ending. Though what I remembered was Gloria turning herself to stone for the sake of Annabel.)

Anyway. I don't think the book I had had pictures; I always imagined Gloria as a beagle-sort of dog, as that was the kind with which I had the most familiarity.

I forgot the title and the author (and apparently most of the story), but I still kept that image down through the years. And one day, in grad school, surfing bookseller sites I ran across Loganberry Books, where the owner posted information about books people remembered but could not find.

And I rediscovered the book!

It is - if you've clicked the link (or if you were a kid or had kids in the early 1970s and have a better memory for titles than I did) - No Flying in the House, which is apparently far from being an obscure book, is one remembered fondly by many kids (mostly girls, I'd guess) who were of the age to read it in the early 70s when it came out.

(This is also the book where supposedly the hallmark of being of fairy blood is the ability to kiss your elbow. I don't remember trying to kiss my elbow when I read the book but I suppose I did. I think it's a pretty safe test to use as I have never met a human who COULD kiss their elbow.)

So I went out in search of a copy of the book, armed with the title and the author. And almost immediately found a copy at Babbitt's Books, the wonderful used-book store in the town where I lived at the time.

This was a 1982 edition with illustrations by Wallace Tripp. And in it, Gloria is shown as being a terrier sort of dog - perhaps like a white Jack Russel.

And even though I was in my mid-to-late 20s when I re-found the book, I felt the inspiration to make my own little version of Gloria. (I had always wanted a tiny toy of her as a child, but never had quite the skill to make a good one. But as an adult I did:)



This is her side view. She's felt, with embroidered features, and a gold collar (that is an important part of the character).

I also added other details - tiny paw pads worked using a pigma pen



Gloria has "thread jointed" limbs (a technique I learned from making tiny teddy bears and that works pretty well on a toy that's really more for display than active play). So she can stand, sit, and lie down.

Even though it's not "canonical" to the book, at the time I was making some Christmas gifts for people out of a delicate leopard-print polar fleece, so I made a little puffy bed for Gloria out of the scraps.



You may have guessed from the perspective in the photos that Gloria is fairly small. One of the things I really wanted to do was to try to make her "actual size," that is, the size the character in the book would have been if she was "really real." So I think she's about 2 1/2" long. Here's a photograph for scale, with her standing against a standard mass-market sized paperback.



I love being able to do this kind of thing. I haven't done it in a long time but it's one of those funny skills I have - I can start with making a paper pattern of what I want, and then I just cut and adjust and change things up as I go to get what I want. The drawback to this is that everything I make this way is a one-off and I would never even have patterns I could give out or sell based on the creatures I make, nor could I make one just like it. But it's how I know how to do stuff - doing pattern drafting to have a "permanent" pattern is different from how I do things (and not quite as fun or as "loose").

This is a post I meant to do some months back, but never got around to. And I was reminded of the subject for two reasons - first, this month's Yankee magazine had an article on "Vermont's Sleeping Roads" (the phenomenon is briefly described here). The upshot is, there are hundreds of old roads - mostly old wagon tracks used as farm-to-markets - that have kind of fallen off the maps, but still have traces out there. There's a new law coming on the books that will make these traditional "rights of way" revert to the landowner (and so the right of way goes away) in 2015 unless communities claim them.

Yankee puts its own spin (which, irritatingly, I am noticing more and more) on the story: newcomers moving into the area are aghast that people have traditionally used these as free rights-of-way for hiking and hunting. Newcomers decided they OWN the land and post it. The locals aren't happy. Those darn newcomers!

(Though as one hay farmer who regretfully decided to post his land - at least for certain activities - points out: "90% of the people are great; 10% are a nightmare" and goes on to observe that people who drop bottles and cans along the trails can mess up his haying machinery, plus, "Who wants to buy hay that has trash in it?" So I would actually lay blame not so much at the "newcomers'" feet, but at the feet of those people who - like "special snowflakes" everywhere - think the common rules of decency and politeness (like, not littering on someone else's land) don't apply to them. Though of course some of them may well be newcomers).

Anyway, the idea of abandoned roads is pretty fascinating. (And also the fact that they are using GIS - one of the things I teach - to help find and plot the roads, and then figure out what to do about them.)

And then Lynn posted a link to a site about abandoned power plants (some of them quite creepy and romantic)

So I was reminded of the link I "saved up" from back when I was reading "The Artificial River" - about the Erie Canal. Canals have always fascinated me.

See, I grew up in Northeastern Ohio. I wasn't far from the old, old site of the Ohio and Erie Canal. I learned a little of its history in school (but not all of it; I had not heard of the 1913 flood that destroyed much of the canal before I read some of the online history sites). I've seen some of the old canal sites. Deep Lock Quarry was a favorite place for school field trips, and also my parents would take me hiking there a lot.

That was where I think - as I've said before - I first really developed my interest in history, particularly the more "everyday" sort of history - what people ate, how they dressed, how they made a living. Standing on the edge of the deep lock (one of the few that held water - cold-looking, slimy, algae-filled water, which was all the more scary to me because of a childhood fear of deep water (though the lock's water was probably only 4 feet deep or so)) I would think about the people who USED to live there - who had worked and traveled and lived and died some 140 years before me - even before some of my ancestors were in this country (though I didn't know that at the time). And how I would never know for sure who they were, and how they probably never thought that so many years later a little girl would stand on the edge of the lock and look in and wonder about what life might have been like for them.

So, thinking about old canals again, and particularly the sites not too far from me, I searched around a little. And I found a fascinating site, which I spent a late-afternoon-into-evening sitting in my office looking at. It is called Abandoned Ohio (and it's done in a very evocative black-and-white theme with Gothic typeface). It has a lot of links, or you can click on the pictures for different subjects - buildings, covered bridges, canal locks. (You may need to scroll down below a picture to get the clickable links. My one complaint is that the "menu pages'" pictures are kind of large and you don't see the links below them immediately). There's a whole page on the Ohio and Erie canal itself, with some history and links to as many of the locks as could be found. Deep Lock Quarry also has a page, but they focus more on the quarry (which I also remember) than on the lock (which is what I remember more - again, I think it's that water-fear that burned it into my mind.)

And if you're in to old canal photos (this being the Internet, I'm sure there's someone out there who is), there's a really good collection - viewable online - from The University of Akron's Canal Photo site

I've often thought it would be interesting to take road trips - especially if one had a good camera or was talented with a sketchbook - to some of these "abandoned" places, and to make records of them, either photographic or artistic. (Of course, it's more complicated in a lot of cases than just getting in a car and going; for some sites you need to get permission, and probably sign waivers agreeing that you will not (a) remove artifacts from the site and (b) sue the landowner if you step through a rotted floorboard and break your leg).

I was going to say that I'm sad there's not really any "old" stuff of that sort in my town - that it's not much fun to drive out of town friends around and say, "Yeah, that's where the Papa John's Pizza franchise used to be" as our own form of Abandoned, but now that I think of it, a lot of the downtown merchants are spiffing up their buildings, removing the old ugly aluminum false fronts that were put up over the brick in the 50s or 60s, and trying to recapture the old "ghost signs" that still exist. I had someone honk at me one day because I didn't see a light was green because I was so intent on looking at an old sign that had shown up on a recently renovated building - I think the building had once been a grocery and the sign was an ad for (I think) Owl Cigars. (I should walk down there some day when I have time and photograph the sign and put it up here; it's pretty interesting).

But, the places (like Ohio) that have seen longer continuous European settlement seem to have more interesting Abandoned stuff. (Though that might just be my personal prejudice). I wonder what Abandoned stuff exists in Europe, or if (because they have more of a premium on land), a lot of it's been taken down or renovated into something useful?

I'm still not done posting on the different items made over my long break.

Here is the third, final, and I think, most spectacular project from the "Taupe Mist" Vanna's Choice:



It is a crocheted version of Edward Gorey's "The Doubtful Guest" (an odd, penguin-like creature that invades a large Victorian household and does things like deposit pocketwatches in the pond for "safekeeping," tear the pages out of books, and collapse in fits of melancholy (unfortunately just outside the drawing-room door)).

(This WAS a free pattern I found via Ravelry but it seems to have since disappeared from there. (But a bit of hunting in my archives turns it up: it's apparently still in existence here))

I used the Vanna's Choice because (a) I had it close at hand and (b) I thought the sort of marled color might capture the sort of woodcut-like quality of some of Gorey's drawings.

I will say this is one of the complexities of 2-D being rendered into 3-D: I think the "nose" (or "beak" or what have you) should by rights be longer and droopier, but that's kind of hard to recreate in crochet, I guess.

The shoes sounded wildly complex but I found that by just trusting and following the pattern, they came out right. (The scarf is my own design, a bit different from what the original pattern author did. I did the narrower stripes because I hate weaving in millions of ends, and I was able to just carry the unused color this way. As it turned out, I like the way the scarf looks better than the original. And it seems like it drapes better.)

Here's a better photo with the scarf:



I think I've mentioned before that I read parts of Amphigorey as a child (yes, I was a strange child). For some reason, I loved the character of the Doubtful Guest - I didn't really see his more sinister sides; he was more like an odd pet that showed up and did funny things. (Of course, I'd be annoyed if I had a real-life one; I'd have to lock up all my books).

I remember making a small toy form of this creature as a child, using an old dark-grey glove: I cut it up and used the fingers for the head and arms and made the body out of the palm section.

(Another person's remembrance of The Doubtful Guest, with a small photo of the cover of the stand-alone book extracting the story from Amphigorey)

I am not sure why the creature is funny and appealing; I suppose it had something to do with the illogicality of its actions and the fact that it got away with them. As a child, I frequently wished I could "get away with" more than I did, but having "proven" myself capable of logic on a number of occasions when it benefitted me to, my parents wouldn't let me get away with some of the illogical kid things I might have otherwise. I think maybe the slightly anarchic quality of the Guest appealed to me, the fact that he did what he darn well pleased and no one could really do much about it (either he did not understand human speech, did not speak the language of the householders, or, perhaps, like snakes are, was deaf)

Another odd but appealing thing was the fact that the creature wore a scarf (at least until he had adjusted to life indoors) and plimsolls (not unlike Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars, but I think "plimsoll" is a more fitting term here).

Everything about the creature was odd and didn't quite fit. And I think that's why I liked him. (I don't know whether it says anything psychologically about the fact that I usually felt like I "didn't quite fit" among my peer-group, at least until I got to high school)

I suspect also I imagined it as having a certain kinship with the Tove Jansson creatures - the Moomins and such - which I was madly fond of as a child.

(And it's funny that I usually refer to it as a "he;" everywhere in Gorey's story it's just "it" and as the commenter I linked to points out, it's apparently the only one of its species, so gender would not be an issue...)

The 'Guest is ironically enough quite cuddly and nice. It (he?) turned out larger than I expected, nearly a foot tall, and required the purchase of a second skein of the yarn (thank goodness one of the shops in my parents' town had it; I had bought it down here, used some for the manatee and some for the planarian, and when I started making this creature I thought I'd have enough - I very nearly unraveled the planarian just to have enough to finish this).

I was going through my old files, and I ran across a bunch of the slides I took in Summer 1998 when I was doing all my prairie sampling and later had scanned for a presentation. Because some of the media I'm storing stuff on seems to be degrading (a CD-rom that had my dissertation on it no longer claims the existence of such a document), I figured I'd at least upload them to my hard drive and from there to Flickr. Just for the heck of it.

And I can share a few of them with you.


Damme, these shots make me homesick.



I'm pretty sure this is Beach Cemetery Prairie in Ogle County. (I'm guessing that because it's a hill prairie without many trees, and because of the twin nuke towers in the far distance). Beach was a lovely site - a glacial drift hill prairie with lots of gravel in the soil and some different species. And being up on top of it, you could see so far. And get the summer breeze.



A lot of the remnant prairies in Illinois were old pioneer cemeteries. I don't remember which one this was. The cemeteries were among my favorites because they had high species diversity and usually a lot of things were flowering.

I have to admit, I also like the IDEA of a cemetery being a prairie; I'd rather my final resting place be under coneflowers and bee-balm than in a manicured monoculture of Kentucky bluegrass.



I THINK this may have been from Spring Grove (I'm guessing from the type of fencing and the density of the vegetation). Yellow coneflowers. Everything looks so lush.



And here I am, ten years younger than I am now (but my hair is the same length and I'm about the same size), sampling in one of the cemetery prairies - I think the same one I have the photo of above.

It's funny how much I grumbled about that summer of sampling when I was doing it, how overwhelming it seemed. But looking back on it, it was probably one of the best experiences of my grad school life - I got REALLY GOOD at identifying prairie plants (still am) and also got really good at interpreting the Illinois Gazetteer and the sometimes-somewhat-cryptic Nature Preserves maps. And it was fun, bouncing down the back roads, with one of my many "field hands" (a lot of times my mom acted as my field hand when I couldn't find anyone who owed me a favor or whom I could take out to lunch in return for a half-day's or day's labor. It was actually really good because it was spending time with my mom as an adult, you know, without the "little kid" baggage that sometimes comes with adult-child-and-parent relationships. And she knew a lot of the plants I didn't, so it was a lot better having her along than some random zoologist who could, at best, shrug and go, "Well, it's in the daisy family...")

Oh, and one more shot:



"Fire! Fire!"

"Yes! yes! fire! fire! fire!"

uh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh.

(And yes, the grad students used to do the Beavis and Butthead "fire" quotations when we were getting ready to go out and do a prescribed burn.)

This has been kind of an unhappy week in a number of ways, so I thought I'd finish it off with something that makes me happy.

I don't think I shared this before.



This is a quilt (well, most of it - the bottom row or two wouldn't fit in the photo) that my mom made for me.

It is alternating squares of a simple square-in-square block (most of them were blocks left over from a quilt my mother and HER mother made...and some of the fabrics in there, like the daisy-print-on-black in the lower left corner, are ones I remember my mom having clothes from when I was a kid). The alternate blocks are drawings I did of animals. I loved to draw animals when I was a kid (I think we started this quilt when I was maybe 6) and was very fond of the Ed Emberley drawing books (anyone else remember those?) I had the animal book and a lot of my animals are Emberley-style.

Here are a couple sections of the quilt, showing some of the fabrics (I think most of them are 1960s-70s vintage) and a couple of my favorite drawings.



A funny green beetle I drew. I think this is my favorite of my animal drawings on the quilt now. (I was probably 7 when I drew this).



This is right next to the beetle but shows a few other of the parts of the quilt. The rabbit is, I think, supposed to be Thumper. And the mouse - if you can read the caption on the top of the block I helpfully placed there - is Bernard (from the Miss Bianca books and the Disney movie "The Rescuers." I was very fond of the Miss Bianca books when I was a child; I had a box set of all five of the books and I think I read them several times).

You can also see the two "special" blocks my mom made for the quilt. One has my first initial on it and commemorates my 7th birthday, the other is from Valentine's day of that year.

We started setting the quilt together and my mom originally was going to quilt it in pieces (like the original Lap Quilting method). But we got busy, time and other projects intervened, and it never got finished.

I grew up and forgot about the quilt. I guess at some point I assumed it either got lost in one of the periodic basement floods we had, or something had happened to it.

My mom found the pieces again a few years ago (Well, I think she had them tucked away and never totally forgot them). She set them together and added the wide red border (which is actually leftover fabric from the "Chimney Sweep" quilt I have in the frame right now...I had pieced the quilt when I was home visiting them that summer and left my leftovers there). She and the quilting group at her church quilted it and she gave it to me a couple of years ago at Thanksgiving.

The funny thing is, I'm kind of glad this never got finished when I was a kid...as a kid, I was kind of hard on stuff (I was sort of a tomboy) and I could see the quilt having got marked up from me sitting in bed doing homework with a ballpoint pen, or it getting faded in the sun. Now that I'm an adult and know the kind of work that goes into these things, I can care for it properly.

And yes, I do use it (carefully!) on my bed sometimes. Not for very long - I might put it on for a month and then rotate it off. But I do like having it and it makes me happy to look at it. Because it contains a lot of memories - memories of the kid I used to be (I haven't just sat down and drawn for fun in years), memories of doing projects with my mom. And memories of the clothes she wore - as I said, patches in the quilt came from scraps from some of those clothes. And even memories of my grandmother, because some of the fabrics came from her and I think she pieced some of the square-in-square blocks.

It's good to have things like this.

It's odd, the things that pop into a person's head.

I'm analyzing some data this afternoon. (Which probably will not make it into the paper and the presentation...they're not very good data, boo. And boo to the wildly fluctuating temperature in the room where I had to do the experiment - I think that's partly why they are not good data).

Anyway, one of the plants I am working with is Chamaecrista fasciculata. Better known as partridge-pea, but I abbreviated it CF for my own purposes.

And looking at the CFs I had written down in the notebook, I suddenly thought of Chicken Fat.

Does anyone else remember this? It was a record (I remember it as an old 45 that one of my homeroom teachers had). It was a little "fitness" song that involved toe-touches and other stuff (which today would probably be considered way too tame to whip the little fat kids into shape). I remember doing it a lot of mornings in early grade school, and I also seem to remember the teacher pulling the record out on rainy days at recess time.

Chicken Fat (warning: song will start to play. May not be so good if you're at work. Or if you have a psyche that's scarred by memories of such things being brought up)

the lyrics. Huh. Robert Preston ("Professor Harold Hill") sang it, and it was written by Meredith Wilson. (Odd that both also worked on "The Music Man" - at least the movie version. I wonder if the collaboration for the song came out of that?).

Apparently it was a big thing in the 1960s (the result of some JFK program), but I can aver that it was still being used - at least in my school system - in the early 70s. (And yes, it was the Robert Preston version.)

I hadn't thought about that in YEARS but now I cringe a bit at the memory of all of us kids doing toe-touches and push-ups in the classroom with its stained, nasty, indoor-outdoor carpeting (and SOME OF US in jumpers* and saddle shoes to do them, even). I don't know that I'm as horrified by the memory of it as some of the people commenting on the various sites. I certainly don't feel "scarred for life" or anything similar by it. But then again, I was a thin-to-average little kid (and I could whup the tails of most of the other girls in sit-ups at least; I was one of the few who did the 100-in-one-minute required by the President's Fitness test. I lost on the pull-ups, though; no upper body strength.)

(*UK folk: pinafore-dresses. Not pullover sweaters).

I got to thinking (for some reason) about stores I remembered as a kid.

It turns out that the "BEST" warehouse-showroom stores (where a lot of the family appliances came from in the 70s and early 80s, and which I remember best for those weird lady in the rain lamps) are gone now - according to Wikipedia, they went bankrupt.

But Acme is still there. And yes, it's THAT Acme, not the one based in Philadelphia. (I grew up in Summit County, Ohio). Acme #4 was within walking distance of my house.

I always thought, when I was a kid, that it was funny "our" grocery store was named Acme - because of the Acme Corporation in the Roadrunner cartoons. (It turns out - live and learn - that Acme wasn't just a funny name; in Wile E. Coyote Universe it apparently stood for A Company that Makes Everything. Heh.)

(Of course, "Acme" also means the same thing as "zenith" or "the best," which is probably why so many real companies adopted it as their name).

Other stores gone? Woolworth, TG & Y, Handy Andy (a Home Depot type place with a sort-of Village-People-esque mascot), probably others that weren't big chains or haven't entered the hive-mind of Wikipedia yet. (I think the Noble Roman's pizza chain is gone. And Little Caesar's is very nearly gone, at least in my part of the country. And I think Burger Chef - which was a McDonald's-esque chain that I just barely remember - is gone too).

Polsky's (which I think was just an Akron-area department store) closed when I was a kid. My dad bought lots of stuff at their liquidation sale; for years I had a massive wood desk (with a typewriter drawer on the right-hand side) in my bedroom that came from them.

And Halle's is gone, but they were moribund before I was even in high school.

(I wonder if O'Neil's, the other big Akron-area department chain, still lives?

Oh, no, it's gone. Bought out by blasted Macy's. I'm kind of coming to hate Macy's; they seem to buy up a lot of the small regional chains, claim they won't change a thing, and then a few months later erase any kind of individuality and put their name on the store. Sad. O'Neil's was the default "good-clothes-shopping" place, and also, the big old downtown one was where they did Breakfast with Santa.

I wonder how many kids now have the experience of going to a big fancy "downtown" department store - not one part of a mall - and shopping there and then eating lunch in the tearoom or the coffee shop. It seems like such a 1950s thing now, but I did it with my mom and dad when I was a kid.

Wow, and Lazarus - the big Columbus version of O'Neils - is gone too. Yes, another meal for Macy's. [there is something a wee bit ironic about a store named Lazarus being a goner...])

And Montgomery Ward, affectionately known as "Monkey Ward."

Oh, and Gold Circle. I always liked the toy department at Gold Circle when I was a kid. They were kind of like Target is today, but maybe not quite as fancy as Target is.

Oh, and Eagle Food Centers, which was the preferred grocery once my family had moved to Illinois...a former employee of the chain said, regretfully, "they were too generous with their employees" and she believed that was part of the reason.


I have to admit some sadness (especially at all the smallish, regional chains being subsumed into the Macy's monster). All of these things I knew from my childhood, all these things I remember as being a part of the Akron area, gone. But I suppose that's how it is, isn't it? Nothing stays the same; few retail outlets seem to hang on for terribly long unchanged.

People around here talk about stores (like a Penney's!) that used to exist downtown before the malls opened and everyone had a car, and driving to Sherman became a sort of everyday thing. (Perhaps one tiny silver lining with high gas prices? Maybe more stores will return to smaller towns, and actually be viable, because it's cheaper to buy locally than to drive to the mall some distance away.)

And I guess now that Macy's has bought so many of the chains, it's better they have their name on it rather than have some kind of strange zombie O'Neils with all Macy's products, or some weird undead Famous-Barr with the Famous-Barr skin stretched over what was really a Macy's. (another one gone - but since they were St. Louis-based, I didn't really have a chance to form an attachment before they disappeared)

KIIIIIRRRRRRSSSSTTTTEEENNNNN! (if you are the Kirsten I think you are) Long time no hear from! I'd been wondering - I'm sure you've been busy.

Yes, The Attic was a little store in downtown Hudson (when we were in high school). It was originally in a different location - when I was "little" - and was really into buying penny candy - it was a tiny shop BEHIND another shop (a Realtor's, maybe?) I just remember that it was small and sort of oddly shaped and it was off the main line of the downtown - but they did move, I don't remember exactly when, it may have been about 1980 or so.

I also remember "The Land of Make-Believe" (I think that was what it was called?) and the Reserve Exchange and Saywell's Drugs, which will forever be in my memory as The Shop Where Brian From My Class Fainted on a Hot Day after the Class Walked Down There for Ice Cream (that would have been like 6th grade or so for me).

Oh, oh, and the Learned Owl bookshop.

I used Google Earth one day to find the house where I grew up. It's still standing (though I already knew that - one of my mom's friends back there called her up one day asking if she and my dad didn't want to move back to Hudson because she "knew a nice house that came on the market"). But still, there's something oddly comforting about looking at the Google Earth aerial view and seeing it still there. It looks like the spruce tree next to it is still there, though most of that (terrible) Russian Olive hedge is now gone.

(And I am sure the occupants of the house would love the thought that I'm remotely spying on the place where I grew up.)

Hudson seems to have changed a lot - lots more housing developments, and (from what I've heard of the people I know who still live there) incredible, terrible road congestion.

***

Always a nice little surprise to hear from someone from my past, before I sit down to grade lab reports. (Lab, mercifully, got done over an hour early today...it was hot in that room. Guess the a/c is on the fritz yet again.)

Half-done with the harvest.

Taking a little break and looking for things online that delight me and make me laugh.

Found one: knitted Space Invader toy/pillow.

Hahahahahaha. (The blog title - SAS knits it again - I know it's based on her first name, but SAS is one of the big statistical packages we use here in the States. It makes me smile to imagine a statistical software package knitting. And you know, if it did? It probably would make something like Space Invaders.)

When I was a kid, we had a TI computer. It had games for it that were kind of knockoffs of the Atari games - they had a Space Invaders type one with differently-shaped things... Each different level had its own "thing." (it was NOT TI Invaders, at least the version of it that had screenshots online - there were these "spores" that hatched into the things....)

The Attack! That's what it was! Oh, my gosh, yes. I can hear the ominous little synthesized tune that went with it now... doo doo doo doo doo dooo dooot, doo doo doo dooo dooo dooo dooo.... here is a screenshot, and in the very middle is the "thing" that I remember best - red, vaguely humanoid, with that white dot on it). I should make my own version of a Space Invaders, making one of those "things." Because really, I played The Attack a lot more than I played Space Invaders when I was a kid.

You know? Those red things look a wee bit like "Plankton" from SpongeBob SquarePants. I knew I liked Plankton for a reason...he triggers memories of sitting in front of the first computer we ever had, playing a crazy game.

We also had Hunt the Wumpus, which was one of my favorites. And Alpiner. And if you didn't feel like playing a game-game, there was an excellent music program where you could score music and then the computer would play it. And I learned to play chess using a game on that computer.

I have the u-necked "Back to School" vest (from Fitted Knits) almost finished:



All it lacks are neck and collar bands, and I didn't quite have the energy to (a) hunt up the correct needle for that from my needle collection and (b) pick up all those stitches.

But I do love this vest. I particularly love the thermal "waffle" stitch:



I worked on a couple other things last night. I picked up the stitches for, and began the "straight" part of the crown, on the Lady Detective Hat:



It doesn't look like much now but I'm hoping with finishing and blocking it will look a bit more chi-chi.

I also started a new amigurumi:



And it's true - the cheap acrylic yarns are easier to work with for these.

I've always liked making toys. They were about the first project I ever made - I learned to hand-sew when I was 6 or so, and learned to crochet at 8 (Knitting came two years later). I was young enough when I learned to do those things that being able to make my own toys - my own "friends" - was kind of magic. (Oh, I realized, even in those early days, that they were "just" toys. But it still seemed kind of magic.)

I was sort of a lonely child - I didn't have a lot of friends, and many of my friends lived on the other side of town and I didn't get to see them often. So I spent a lot of time alone, making stuff or creating elaborate situations (like little stage-plays) and moving my various characters through them - I think my two favorite types of toys were my stuffed animals and those little plastic zoo (and farm, and other - I had a set of "dog breeds of the world") animals that used to be so common. (You don't see them much any more - they used to be a very common toy at places like Woolworth's - a plastic bag of maybe 20 or so different animals, made of plastic, ranging in size from about an inch to maybe two inches).

Being able to make toys was kind of a big thing, though - for one thing, I didn't have a lot of allowance money to spend on toys, so getting a new one from the store meant weeks of planning (and going without things like the penny candy they sold at a little store in my hometown called The Attic). But making toys - I could ask my mom if I could use some bits of fabric or yarn she had (she almost always said yes).

The other thing was- there was the idea that I had something that no one else had, exactly. You could go into the dimestore and all the little bags of zoo animals were more or less alike - or you could go to Reserve Exchange (another store in my hometown) and buy a little Dakin stuffed toy (probably made in China, even then) and have it be the clone of thousands of others. But when I made my own critters - especially when I made up my own patterns - it was totally my own.

And I think I became more attached to the toys I made - I guess I felt that I was their "mother" in a way that was different from the store-bought ones. I still have some of them (I think a year or two ago I posted a picture of the fillyjonk doll I made when I was 10 or 11.)

I continued to make the toys - heck, I continue to make them today - even past the age when it was generally considered to be okay to be playing with those sort of things, or even really having them around. But the magic and the fun of it never quite went away - I never grew out of it. And just like the famous C.S. Lewis quote about how what some people view as "childish" books are not that - that there is no book worth reading at 10 that is not worth re-reading at 50 - I hope that I never grow out of the feeling of happiness and, yes, a little magic that I feel when making "critters."

The hallway on which I have my office has a glass door at either end. While I was walking down the hall a few moments ago, I looked out at the rain - particularly, how it was making concentric ripples in the standing water on the patio - and suddenly the song "Drip, drip drop, little April showers" popped into my head.

(Well, actually, it's June showers now.)

(That's from Bambi, in'nit? I tried searching for the lyrics using that phrase, plus "lyrics" plus "Bambi" and...well...on the second page of search results (the first one was mostly bloggers using the phrase as a post title) there were some, shall we say, startling, links...and I have "Moderate Safe Search" turned on).

Anyway. I thought of that suddenly. And I remembered all the Disney movie-watching of my youth (this is how my brain works: it finds some odd little thread in something I think, then unravels that thread down). Most of the Disney movies I've seen I don't remember all that well.

I do remember watching them. And I remember where. Most of them were shown in an auditorium/theater on the campus where my dad taught - there was kind of an older-movie revival-theater thing going on (like on many college campuses). Admission was cheap (I think maybe $1 for adults and fifty cents for kids). And my parents, in those days (the 1970s...) were very good at finding inexpensive yet enjoyable stuff for us to do as a family.

(Maybe today there'd be some families that wouldn't think it was "good enough" for them to sit in a college auditorium to see "The Aristocats" or "The Sword in the Stone"? This was also in the pre-dvd, pre-VHS, pre-widespread cable era. To watch movies, you had to go to a theater or hope they came on tv. The annual showing of "The Wizard of Oz," for example, was a big deal in my household.)

Anyway. Most of the Disney movies I saw and just dimly remember (The Aristocats, The Sword in the Stone, the Jungle Book, a couple of the Herbie movies, the original version of That Darn Cat, and the other goofy-wholesome 1960s era Disney live-actions) were seen on the University of Akron campus in an old auditorium.

I do think I saw Bambi in a "real" theater though - I think my friend Elizabeth's mom took both of us, during one of the periodic re-releases of the movie.

Unlike some people I've talked to, I don't remember being really traumatized by the death of Bambi's mother (yeah, a spoiler, but like is there anyone over the age of 8 who doesn't know). But I do remember the raindrop song (just not the lyrics) and "If you can't say somethin' nice, don't say nothin' at all" (which is actually not bad advice). (Wikipedia says the movie was theatrically re-released in 1975; yes, that probably would have been about the right time...I think I was about 6 when I saw it).

As gorgeous as the movie is (and it is a gorgeous movie, in terms of the background and the usage of color), it's not my favorite Disney cartoon.

I prefer Dumbo. (Yes, even with the seriously politicially-incorrect crows and the creepy pink elephants scene). As a child, I identified with Dumbo...not so much the missing-mother thing (And you know? Disney must have had mother issues. So many of his movies...the mother either dies, or is taken away, or is replaced by a stepmother). But I liked the idea of the little outcast - the one who was laughed at for being different - in the end getting a bit of gentle revenge, and then, being accepted.

(And "Baby Mine"? Still makes me tear up a little when I hear it.)

And of more recent Disney productions (more recent = made during my childhood), I think I prefer "The Rescuers" because, well, it had mice. (I loved mice as a child. Not so much now as a homeowning adult who's had to set the occasional trap, but I still do like cartoon mice). (And The Rescuers was one I remember seeing in a "real" theater, I think with my dad, because my brother was still a baby and my mom was staying home with him).

Oh, and in searching for info on "Bambi," I ran across this article: "Bambi is the most Hichcockian Disney film".

I am not well enough versed in the arts of Cultural Studies and criticry to know if it's in earnest or tongue-in-cheek, but it's still an interesting thought, nonetheless.