Monday, June 29, 2020

Some Monday things

* Did the first day of Meals on Wheels. I worked with G., who is from Germany and is pretty much no-nonsense. Also, since this is the middle of a pandemic, no real going into people's houses (when I did it previously, the person I was with knew some of the people, and they invited us in to talk and....it took like an hour and a half to deliver to five people. Today, it was more like 45 minutes). I am with her again tomorrow and with Mike on Wednesday.

The people were all doing well today; even the person where there was a warning on their file to "knock loudly, hard of hearing" heard us and was right at the door.

I admit I am always slightly apprehensive about this because one of the women I once worked with told me about the first time she did it - at one of the houses she got no answer, and no answer, and looked in, finally, and saw the man  lying on the floor....she called the EMS, it turned out he had died (I think it was that he was a Type I diabetic and went into a diabetic coma) and that's a little unsettling, though then again: Meals on Wheels probably provides the additional useful service of a check-in on people who are very much alone. (My mother, even though she's alone now, she has good neighbors who call or stop by regularly, and my brother's family and I speak with her a couple times a week. And she's in pretty robust health, though a fall could be bad.

We went masked up and gloved, and the food was packed into plastic bags we could easily hand off.

* One of my neighbors (and I admit I am embarrassed that I don't remember her name; I should try a reverse white-pages lookup by address to see if I can find it) came over and talked to me while I was clearing out my car (moving the field equipment - sadly unused now - to the back so I could fit the big coolers for Meals on Wheels in my back seat) and she talked a little bit. Apparently down the block there's a condemned house where people were selling drugs out of it; and there was a "prowler" in the neighborhood the other night and, yeah, it is not as nice a neighborhood as when I first moved here, and I think that's because better-off people want bigger fancier houses and most of the houses here are rentals and are not kept up to a high standard, and so....they rent them cheap and apparently are not too picky about who rents them.

it is kind of sad. And yes, she remembered the House Full of Buffoons that was next door to me years ago and yes, it turns out they were selling drugs too, as I suspected based on car traffic and the fact that people would come to "visit" for five minutes or less and then leave.

Then again, with the exception of them and the dude a couple years ago pounding on my door late one night, I've never had problems or even seen any of the supposed "prowlers," but then again, I'm pretty much closed up in my house from nightfall until the next morning - and in the before-times, when I would go out, I had lights on.

I would HATE to move at this point (though in-town moves, maybe, are not so bad?) but I admit if the neighborhood decayed much more and I could afford it, I'd move to a slightly fancier neighborhood just to have more quiet and peace of mind. (Then again: I've had few problems up to this point, maybe because I am quiet and I also don't live "flashily" so I might not attract people who might want to rob)

* Nearly done with the One and Done shawl, or at least, nearly up to where I do the dropped stitches, so at least 3/4 done

Also nearly done reading Gina Kolata's "Flu" and it was less harrowing than I feared (though yeah, the recounting of 500,000 Americans dead in the 1918 flu gives one pause, even if we have better medical technology now). But I see some of the same missteps being made (and apparently there were anti-maskers back in 1918, too). And the whole Swine Flu mess and the question STILL about Guillan-Barre syndrome (and they still ask you about that, every time you get a flu shot, though the evidence Kolata presents seems to suggest the link with it and the swine flu vaccine is tenuous at best)

Next up in the reading for "continuing ed" is going to be a book on the history of ecology in the US, because there may be some things useful for my own teaching in there.

And looking over my labs - well, I transferred them to the new flash drive (along with allllll the downloaded patterns, just in case), I realize that I have five labs ready to go, and a sixth one that can be made ready to go with a few minor tweaks, so I am at least half-prepared with that. (And, as I said - if we get even a few weeks on campus, I can do some outdoor labs during that time. I'll have to think of a few more but....I'm doing okay)

I do need to get back to these, maybe spend a couple hours tomorrow hunting around at that ESA site to see if I can get any inspiration.

* The Smurfs I ordered finally came, and yeah, it is weirdly like having a little piece of my childhood back. Most of them are the late 70s/very early 80s make; one of them (I'll note which one) is marked "W. Berrie Co." in addition to the Schliech and Peyo marks on it, which tells me it's later - I know a lot of them were re-issued in the late 80s and early 90s (before the weird CGI  movie, and the movie tie-in Smurfs look REALLY different and I reject those).

My favorite one is the king Smurf, because he is so detailed. His copyright date is 1978, so I presume he's of the era when I was collecting them as a kid (I think one of my friends had one like this, but I never found one to buy when I had money to buy them)


Gold paint and everything.

I also got a beer-drinker, which amuses me (can you imagine the Alpha Moms now, who scan everything their kid might be exposed to, and want to ban anything - from everyone, not just their kid - that they deem "inappropriate" for their kid?). But of course "les Schtroumpfs" were originally French or Belgian, and they have more relaxed attitudes to such things

This is the Smurfette. Unlike the others, marked "Made in Hong Kong," she is marked "Made in Portugal" (I guess for a while manufacturing there was cheap; I have some other small toys from the same era marked "Made in Portugal"

The arrow that was part of her set is broken off - I knew that - but I've never seen an intact one of these for sale (I do not remember this Smurf being available when I was a kid)

And then, last of all, the two harvest-time Smurfs:

first, with a cornucopia. Perhaps that's part of their magic and how they can be little creatures in a little town but still have enough to eat, even without what looks like extensive agriculture

And finally, the clumsy one - there was a Clumsy Smurf on the Smurfs cartoon (at least in the English language version, they were mostly named based either on some characteristic, or based on a profession (e.g., Baker Smurf)). I think this one is newer because of the different mark and the pvc just FEELS a little different, but it's a cute design all the same:

I find now I....kinda want more of these. I am telling myself I still have my childhood ones at home (and I really do need to put up a small wall shelf somewhere for these and a few other small things) but there is something familiar and comforting about them. Smurfs were....just "there" when I was in late childhood/tweenhood. I didn't always have the pocket money to buy them, but they were a thing. And it was a good day when I had the money for one or two, and the chance to go to the store that sold them, and to hunt through the big basket for the ones I wanted. They didn't always have them - in the early days they were sort of a craze and of course the kids who had more pocket money and more indulgent parents would get down to the store more frequently and get the popular ones (it was a big, big day when I was finally there when they still had a Smurfette in the bunch; she was hard to come by at first).

This was also the same store - called The Land of Make Believe, and it apparently held on until just a couple years ago and then closed when the original owner retired and couldn't find a buyer - that sold the Mrs. Grossman stickers. So that's two big thing-memories from my childhood (well, my later childhood; I don't think Smurfs were really a thing until I was 11 or so)

(And now I'm thinking: in some other timeline, the My Little Pony blindbag type figures would not be blindbags, they would come in a couple hundred different poses - each of the Mane Six in many different poses, as well as many of the so-called Background Ponies - and they would be sold like Smurfs were, loose, in small gift shops, and you could go in and hunt through the box or basket and pick out and buy the ones you wanted.)

I dunno; I just like small things like these. When I was a kid I played with them - or made "houses" for them of various sorts - or just lined them up on a shelf to look at them. And as an adult I can still enjoy them, even just lined up on a shelf.

1 comment:

purlewe said...

ok the first look at king smurf and your lamp behind him looked like he had hair coming out the top of his crown. It took me several double takes to see it was a lamp. LOL