snow was general all over Eugene

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.



Yes, without a doubt, Joyce gives good snow. If there's anything I could change (and I'm presumptuous like that), I'd take out that phrase "His soul swooned slowly," with its alliterative nonsense and adolescent drama, not to mention physical impossibility, but the description of snow falling faintly and faintly falling, slowly, thickly, obliquely falling snow, oh yes. It wraps you up in its glory, that paragraph. When it snows I can't resist the temptation to say:

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Eugene.

Say it with me. You know you want to.

Having grown up in the Midwest, I know what a drag snow can be. But the thrill of waking up with the world white, a smoke grey sky and blue light, ahhhh, that's one of the greatest parts of being alive.

We only get snow here once or twice a year, and it's wet and doesn't stay long. But it sure is pretty. I don't have many good angles in my yard for snow pictures, but I did snap this shot of our grape vines and butterfly bush/tree. Trust me, though, snow is general all over my yard.

wood you be mine, part deux

We are horrified by the state of our kitchen. I've already mentioned the Big Bang Theory about the soy sauce explosion, right? Having somehow completely forgotten that myself, I took a look at the butcher block top on the counter next to the stove and thought hmmm, it's been well-seasoned; that looks nice! One thing the previous owners did right.



Then I remembered that these people didn't like to clean, and there were literally rivers of oil and soy sauce running down the sides of said counters.

We repaired to the internet, bent on scraping off every particle of oily mess. There was a great deal of advice about maintaining a new butcher block, and the wonderful soothing oils you can massage into your wood. It spoke of the importance of seasoning and how to keep your butcher block looking like new.

I like to cook. A lot. It pains me to remove seasoning. But it was far from new. It was like the bottom of a vat of curly fry oil, if the bottom of a vat of curly fry oil would ever be made of wood. It had to go.

First, my husband went at it with a finishing sander and some rough grit sandpaper. About 10 sheets of oil-clogged sandpaper later, he stopped. I then took it over to my friend's house, a man who knows tools. I need a belt sander, I said. You need a scraper, he said.



Because the butcher block is end-grain, you can't plane it with a hand-held plane. Sanding it is out of the question, given how much oil is on the surface. A warp in the middle of the board makes electric planing difficult, too.

So we attacked it with the scraper. It is a vintage tool with an oak handle, painted brightly with red and green at the tip. The business end has a pivot head, so you can position the thing at the right angle for scraping. The method is easy enough for us to follow: put scraper on board, push down and pull.

It makes a godawful noise, oily shavings, and ugly streaks in the wood. It works. And it makes us feel that we're not so far from our Iron Age ancestors after all.

The Man Who Screwed Too Much, A Cautionary Tale

Once there was a man named Mr. Phillips who screwed too much. He didn’t care how, where, or when. He loved screwing so much that his whole life was full of screwing. Sometimes, when he thought he might give up screwing, he turned to nailing, but that didn’t give him the same pleasure as a good, long screw. Screw Goethe, he thought, there is an alternative to being a hammer or an anvil. He screwed happily all day and long into the nights. Screwing was his entire life. It gave him purpose. It gave him pleasure.

One dark day, Mr. Phillips realized he could no longer screw. Every single surface of his house was riddled with screws. Mr. Phillips had screws in his drywall, ceilings, window frames, cupboards, moldings, and even in his refrigerator. Then he decided to sell his house to screw the new homeowners. Haha, thought he, there’s nothing like a good screw. That house, thought he, will last forever with all those screws, so I’ll charge a premium. He made a good profit. Mr. Phillips up and moved his family to New Orleans so he could find a new place to screw.

Mr. Phillips didn't find New Orleans to his liking, however. It was a place with a serious building material shortage. Hurricane Katrina caused such a building boom that there were simply no screws to be found. What a screwy situation, he thought. He was terribly disappointed.

Carpal tunnel set in, and he found his wrists twisting, twisting in his sleep. Have you ever seen a hose that gets all twisted up? That’s what started to happen to his arms. Have you ever seen the movie Edward Scissorhands? That’s what started to happen to his hands, but with screws, not scissors. Mr. Phillips tossed and turned at night, dreaming of screwing. During the day, he listened obsessively to the local oldies station.

Let’s twist again
like we did last summer
Let’s twist again
like we did last year

What are you doing, asked his wife, who was sick and tired of all his screwing.

Dancing, Mr. Phillips replied with a steely look.

You don’t look well, she said.

He went to the doctor. He was ashen grey. His back was bent over, and his shoulders were pivoting in their sockets. His head pounded, and he felt as if he had been stripped of his utility, his very raison d’etre.

It must be stress, declared the doctor, and prescribed some anti-biotics, just in case he was wrong. Come see me again in six weeks.

Mr. Phillips could soon barely think of anything but screwing. He found himself banging into doors, kicking walls, rubbing up against rickety chair legs. His communication skills grew rusty, and he gave off speaking with his wife altogether. Screw her, he thought. She doesn’t understand my needs. When the radio ceased to give him pleasure and instead just emitted a series of tinny sounds that made his fillings ache, he even stopped listening to his music.

Then, one day, the mail arrived. In it was a bill from the doctor. Five hundred dollars for a 15-minute visit? And the doctor hadn’t done anything?

And what was this note? His insurance coverage hadn’t yet started? He was responsible for the whole, entire fee?

Mr. Phillips had been screwed.

In frustration, Mr. Phillips, banged one contorted hand against his living room wall. Sadly, because of the lack of screws, the pictures fell down and the walls of the entire dwelling shook and rumbled and crashed to the ground with a loud imploding thud.

Mr. Phillips had been screwed.

If that had been me, if that had been you, we surely would have yelled and screamed and tried to get some kind of retribution from the universe. Mr. Phillips was not like us, though. He felt a warm feeling coursing through his cold, stiff body. His face flushed and he started to tremble. Slowly, a smile spread across his face and his pounding headache started to dissipate.

Mr. Phillips had been screwed.

He sighed contentedly. A beam fell from the ceiling and knocked him straight on the head. He fell through the floor and was stuck there, wedged in between two boards in the subflooring. Swooning, he closed his eyes. He felt spent, used. His head was filled with bliss. He felt solid and purposeful again. He rested, immovable, anchored.

Word is he’s still there today, holding his ground.

(Image courtesy of Jacci Howard Bear http://desktoppub.about.com/)

o christmas tree

I'm a tree-killer. I'm going to just come out and say it. Worse yet, I am a murderer of a tree previously saved from doom. It's kind of like I went out on Black Friday and butchered the turkey pardoned by the White House on Thanksgiving. When everyone else in the neighborhood was tossing out the old Christmas trees, I was uprooting a perfectly unused, alive model and throwing it on the pile.

Here's how I got to be so heartless.

The previous owners, a couple we'll call the Phillips in honor of their love of screwing in hundreds of (mostly stripped) phillips screws all over the house, planted their Christmas tree, an Alberta spruce, six inches from the house, right next to the front door. It must have been last year or the year before. In their stunted, childlike universe, trees don't grow. They must not have seen many sights in the Pacific Northwest in their, oh, thirty-some-odd years of living here. Perhaps they thought that their exotic spruce bonsai would morph into one of those pom-pon tree sculptures you see outside of some brick modern houses.



And for the most part, they were right. In a year, it didn't grow. The tree lacked the sunlight and space it needed to grow, and was very unhappy crammed in next to the rhododendrons and the drain pipe. It had to go.

We had planned to use it as our Christmas tree this year, but the living room wasn't done and I just couldn't bear the idea of more open boxes and geegaws. Plus, when I checked it out, it was full of mud and spiders and who knows what else. It just wasn't worth the bother. Sure, I probably could have replanted it elsewhere in the yard. Simply put, I don't want another conifer in my yard, much less a shade tree, to ooze sap and spread its acidic pine needles into the already acidic soil.

It was relatively easy to uproot and pull out. I'm using the area for all my tulips and daffodils, which may or may not come up this year since I had such a late start. I finally got them in the ground yesterday, and planted my dahlias alongside the house, as well. Anything is better than that tree.

The next question is what should I do with my lovely brick planter? Right now, there are crocuses (it seems) and the herbs I planted last fall so I wouldn't have to look at the hideous real estate agent-interred mums. (Yes, folks, I also murdered six mums.) I think that in the future I'll use it for bulbs, but this year I may have to resort to annuals.



For anyone keeping track of such things, you can see the Phillips Family Memorial Brick, the one used to hold together their toilet, on the upper left corner of the brick planter. One must maintain a sense of humor about such things. Maybe I should have saved some spruce sap. Oh well.

you like?

Examples of painty goodness:



The living room. All we need to do now is put up the pictures, get a rug, and hem and hang the curtains (one is up on each rod for color matching). In the right upper corner, you can sort of see how the "Wool Skein" changes color with the light.

The bathroom. Here, "Wool Skein" looks beige. I think it looks particularly nice with teal. I'd like to thank Marshall's for having kickass Umbra bathroom hardware on sale for a third of the retail price.

in which we praise skeins of wool

Veni vidi vinci. I drained this sucker. We've now gone through ten gallons of paint. I'm not on the paint-every-room-a-different-color bandwagon. Sure, with some design sense, one can use various hues to create lovely home that really highlights the best of one's furnishings. But for the rest of the thousands of home painters out there? Um, put down that brush. Please.

Call me a conservative traditionalist boring fuddyduddy. I like soft beige walls, off-white trim, and white ceilings.

When I was on the aging side of little, I begged my mother to take down the wallpaper in my room and let me paint the walls white. My best friend had an international modern house that was as cold and white as snow. I just wanted one tiny piece of that in my room.

My mom loved wallpaper, and she loved bright wallpaper, and she loved themes in rooms. My theme was "1984." My room had wallpaper that looked like crayon drawings in bright, primary colors. The drawings were pictures of kids engaged in good deeds, and underneath the drawings, the kids had written things like "clean your room!" and "brush your teeth!" and "be nice to your sister!" This Orwellian panopticon was rivalled only by my sister's room, which was done in bright pink and ruffles.

When we renovated our house, I moved to a new room and thought I could have my stark white psych hospital look, but my mom nixed the idea. We compromised on plain, slightly textured, grey-beige wallpaper and natural low-pile carpet. My theme was "nothing."

My design ideas haven't changed. Strangely enough, the interior paint color we chose was the suggestion of my mother, who has come a long way, baby. Now that she has painted dozens of houses for her rentals, and has seen hundreds, if not thousands, of colors and themes gone haywire in her journeys as a real estate agent, she has slightly changed her aesthetic. She'll never be modern, but she has learned to choose the plainest, ugliest, simplest things for me -- she knows I'll love them. On my end of things, I have infused my dull walls and natural floors with reds and terra cottas in my fabrics and accents.

The magic paint that satisfied both of us? Sherwin-Williams color "Wool Skein" in satin finish. There's something in the paint that makes it really changeable with light -- it goes from beige to grey to almost white depending on the room and time of day. In my bedroom, it looks as if I have two different paints on adjoining walls because of the window light and shadows. Each room looks different.

Another thing that makes "Wool Skein" a lovely paint is that it matches with teal/aqua just as well as it matches with reds and oranges. It's in the green family, according to Sherwin-Williams, but it holds its own with any color. It looks great with brushed nickel and with my white and black checkered kitchen floors.

We did our trim with "Dover White," a perfectly acceptable off-white. It lacks the magic of "Wool Skein," but it's a decent color.

wood you be mine?

I'm enamored of our red and white oak 18.5x2.25" strip wood floors. Alternating red and white oak were used a great deal here during the period my house was built. Longer strips of oak were becoming scarce, and the softer (and less attractive, imho) fir had become too expensive for economy dwellings. Our floors were dark brown when we moved in, so dark that the floor refinishing guy couldn't see the stains in the dining room. In most of the rooms, the floors are in good shape, with a few stains here and there. In the dining room, however, it appears that somewhere in the house's sordid past, someone kept animals and let them repeatedly urinate on the floor. Maybe there was carpet and it soaked through to the wood, who knows. But it was a disappointment to see large stains when we hadn't been expecting them. I guess I should be grateful that the refinishing sealed in the smell of 25 years of dog effluvia.

When the floors were refinished, they had to do quite a bit of filling, as the boards shrank over time, but there are very few places that the floor creaks, and very little damage to the planks. The refinisher said that they have only been sanded down once in their life, so they really cleaned up well.

What I love best of all in the floor is the grain patterns. Each plank is different. It's miraculous, really, to think of the way wood grows and striates and swirls. I like to stare at the floor and ponder the mysteries of the universe.

There is no place I like to mull said mysteries more than this place, the one plank that seems to be of different wood than the rest of the floor. It's in the living room, and it is in the middle of this photo (and in the middle of the photo above, which is of the same area).

Anyone know what kind of wood this is? Is it possible it is just a weird slice of oak?

And Happy New Year!