House Beautiful

One of the things on my list for 2016, to do as soon as possible, is to take up the last of the carpeting in my house.  Almost a year ago my mom helped me with the floor in my living room and hallway, but the bedroom and office are still the same.  It's time to say goodbye to that filth of a floor covering.  Did you know that the backing on old carpet disintegrates over time and looks and feels a lot like sand?  Not to mention the years of crumbs and other stuff that have seeped through.  Not that I ever really eat in those rooms, but things have a way of getting tracked around.

Which leads me to reveal my next plan: paint the rest of the living room and finally make real curtains.  I have one of those giant vertical blinds over one of them and a piece of fabric tacked over the other one.  It's been like this also for about a year, mostly because I haven't gone out yet and picked fabric for the curtains.  Making them won't be too hard.

Today's weather was less crappy than normal so I dumped a shitload of stuff into the compost.  I hope I'm not ruining it by putting in things like cotton stuffing from a moldy cushion, or particles from the bagless vacuum cleaner.  I'm good at adding things to the container but not turning  it or keeping it damp, so I don't think I'll have usable compost for a very long time.

OK, enough about that. What I really want to talk about now is how awesome it's going to be when I go see Earth and Super Furry Animals in February, FOR FREE because I've had this McMenamins gift card lying around unused for the last five years.  Until now.

AND ALSO that I have another DJ thing coming up, it's been official for a couple weeks but I'm going to have a slot at the upcoming Twilight Rummage Sale in February.  I get a free table and $20, so I guess I'm a pro now.

The January edition of the rummage sale was last weekend and I had a pretty good time.  I spent most of the money I made two days later on my table for the Frankenstein's comic book show that's coming up in March, and my page/publishing cost for Vision Quest #4 that's also on the way.  Just doing my part to keep the comix economy alive.

My Beautiful Laundrette

I can't believe I've left out my laundry room. Hanif Kureishi isn't going to write any love stories about this place, but it's all mine:

I hate the drain right beneath the dryer there in front.  I feel gross just looking at it.  It reminds me of that Dario Argento movie Inferno, with the hole in the floor leading to a watery room and a corpse floating around in it.
 
It's more than the place where I wash my clothes.  It's also the massive mega dvd library storage unitopolis.  I'm starting to take a lot of stuff out of here to sell at the Twilight Rummage Sale.  I don't like to own many movies, unless they're really special.  I don't even have a copy of My Own Private Idaho, and I'm ready to see that one again the moment the credits roll after a viewing.

See these horizontal file drawers?  They're packed full of nothing but Asian action movies.

Yes, another dollhouse. Shut up.

 There's a nice deep set of plywood shelves here of which I've made good use, as well as a view of some of the dvd library:

I don't have a master plan for this yet.  I'm still dealing with the books from that back room area, so talking about this spot is a minor distraction from that.  This room looks large here but it's tiny.  You can see it's absorbing some of the book overflow from other regions.  My stuff makes the Carnegie libraries look like chump change.

I went away for the weekend and had to spend a two-hour layover in LAX, which is like sitting in electrified garbage, but I saw this video on a monitor at a fake Hard Rock Cafe - style place.  So, it wasn't a totally terrible experience after all.  I've been listening to this guy at work now.  I like the drab 70s Masterpiece Theater film stock.

The Successful Closet

I can't believe I never went into detail on the linen closet.  This was the first part of my house I really went overboard on sorting.  I touched on covering the shelves before but not much else.

Common sense has to rule in your linen/bathroom supply cabinet as elsewhere, probably a little more than in other areas of your house.  If you're like me you probably have medicine, soaps, toilet paper and other necessaries in there besides towels and sheets.  I don't have a normal medicine cabinet inside the bathroom.  This is where the first aid supplies are so it's important to keep everything orderly for an emergency grab, like when I dropped a brick on my foot last year and it bled for 3 hours straight.  

February marked two years since I started Fake Job Inc., that is, my volunteer position at the museum, but I'm celebrating this month because my ID runs out in April.  It gets its place of honor next to Real Job With No Paycheck (Sparkplug/Bad Apple), Real Job I Almost Forgot I Had (CAD position 2012), and the present Real Job Inc. where I work now and where I'm very happy.

I visited Table City II and III (or III & IV?) in a huge way over the weekend, with Linework both days and the Twilight Rummage Sale on Saturday afternoon and evening.  It was a little too much, what with Gridlords starting things off on Friday night.  It was fun and exhausting and maddening.  The hammer blow to the face came with the after-party at White Owl Social Club.  We arrived to a rave in full swing in the back patio.  I had a sandwich and hugged my friends and took off for the night.

This song, especially with the video, always makes me feel better.

Beds and Blockheads

I'm not where I can do any real work right now.  There's been a couple entries where I mentioned by new bed, but forgot to say where it came from.  I want to plug this company, Mission Craft Furniture, because they're local and affordable, and they do all the work custom right in their shop on St Helen's Road, Portland.  I wanted something extremely simple that I just wasn't finding on Craigslist or at estate sales.  The owner took my order and had the parts made and delivered (there might be a small fee for that, I can't remember), then they set it up right in the bedroom.  That was a year ago.  They had all kinds of styles and woods, and you can just point at what you want and say, I'll have that kind of leg with this kind of headboard and this finish, blah blah blah.  I even specified how high I wanted the platform built so I could store things underneath.  My bed is just legs with a frame on top for the slats, no head or footboards, but if I need another new bed someday I would go to them.  I feel pretty strongly about getting used stuff over new with just about anything. 

Ian Dury named his record "New Boots and Panties!!" because that was all he would buy new for himself, I can understand that point of view.

Garage Sale Day

My mom and I had a garage sale at her house yesterday.  The whole thing was literally in the garage.  She had placed an at in the local paper and sure enough we had about ten or twelve people waiting outside when we raised the doors!  I wasn't expecting the onslaught.  When I have sales in my own driveway I have to sit there all day to sell anything.  My mom had a lot of vintage furniture, which seems to draw a lot of people.  I did sell the bear footstool, and a load of nice dishes that I had no use for at home.  I was gifted three sets of dishes last year all at once, and I already use two sets and have no room for more!  It's nice to see people excited about your stuff. 

My star customer was a guy, about 60 or so, who wanted to buy vinyl albums.  We had some, Jim Nabors and the Pointer Sisters et. al., but not what he was after.  He told me the records we had were "too liberal" for him, and that he wanted music from the 1950s.  I showed him a shoebox full of cassettes just in case.  He passed up Hank Williams Sr. and Patsy Cline but purchased Rage Against the Machine's Battle of Los Angeles.  ?!?!?!  Then he got a backpack shaped like a bat, hoping that one of his grandkids would like it.  That's a bat, like the small flying mammal, not a baseball bat.

I'm reading a book called Lies My Mother Never Told Me, by Kaylie Jones.  She's the daughter of James Jones, the author of books like The Thin Red Line and From Here to Eternity.  Kaylie has written several novels, including A Soldier's Daugher Never Cries, which is based on her childhood.  The book I'm reading is an actual memoir about both of her parents, their lives together and their alcoholism, which Kaylie inherited.  It's very good, but I think I would like to read some of James Jones' work for once.  I read some a book with some of his letters to friends, not his novels yet.

What was my mother doing with a Pointer Sisters album?

It's a mug's game

Here's some music while you read:

The lyrics to the song are a lot sadder than I actually feel, but I'm getting weighed down by the seasonal affective nonsense this week.  I can't seem to keep a train of thought going during the day, and I get weirdly more motivated as it gets later at night.  Right now I was going through a pile of Dylan's sketchbooks and other assorted papers to find safe spots to keep them.

I watched a terrible movie today: The Proposal.  Stupid!  I was hoping for more from Betty White, which is why I borrowed it from the library in the first place.  Sometimes I'll watch a dumb-ish movie while I do housework and I can listen to it without missing much if I'm looking away.  I don't like Ryan Reynolds at all or Sandra Bullock, let that be a lesson to me.

The fact that I had to go to the dentist today didn't help anything either.  And I forgot to bring enough bus fare to pay my way back from OHSU, so I had to walk down the hill in the gloom of a Portland evening.  I kept looking down the steep side of the hill that slopes sharply down from the sidewalk - more of a cliff, really - and thinking that a car could careen off the road and hit me and we'd all go over the edge, and I'd be impaled on a leafless tree branch!!

It's time to bring up the sun lamp from the basement, I think.  This S.A.D. is hitting code yellow, where I feel it but I'm not hopeless yet.

Every day in every way...

...things are getting better and better, said John Lennon to Sean.  Here's a corner I worked on for about two hours this afternoon.  Does it show?

I had to crop it, you can see in the lower right a portion of a porno-graphic novel that I culled from the Bad Apple's stock.  Whoopsie!

You can see some of the great art I've got downstairs.  The piece in the yellow frame is a painting by my friend Sean Christensen A.B.T.  I made it a note on my to-do list to start finding frames for prints and think about moving my art around again. 

I'm reading one of the latest novels by Juliet Marillier, Shadowfell.  She usually does fantasy fiction that takes place in more or less a real time and place in history, but this seems to be pure fantasy.  I like it but it's more on the juvenile side of her genre.  I've read all of her writing so far and I have another of her new works on hold at the library, where it's getting processed as a new book.  I'm in it to win it.

Black Snake Moan

Part of the problem of being married to someone who saved everything is that when it comes time to take inventory of what's around, I can't tell what parts belong to what.  Over the years we had a number of dvd & video devices, both for home use and portable, and there are a million cords and chargers and coaxial cables and carrying cases that are piling up.  I know some of them will go to Free Geek, but I'm making a big stack of whatever I find so I can be sure to have what I need "just in case".  I made a shelf in the laundry room just to collect all the technical stuff I don't know what to do with yet.  It's a big black snaky mess.  I found two old cameras I didn't know existed, and one case between them.  I guess I should take comfort in the fact that if the VCRs and such that I used currently are working properly then I don't need more cables to support them.  I did find a remote control for a laser disc player I had given to a friend months ago, I should see if she wants that.  It had a dried up spider sticking to it, ugh!

That brings me to another facet of this job that I dislike, and that's the fact that there are spiders, and occasionally centipedes, in the basement.  I can't stand them, I have a phobia.  It's one reason why I'm going so slowly, I anticipate ahead that there are going to be pests living in the boxes and shelves I need to empty.

Now I'm going to change the subject to something more pleasant - let's watch Eric Burdon of the Animals.  Introduced by the immortal Otis Redding!