Allowances for old cornmudgeon brothers

Most of you know our dear old cornmudgeon brother, Walt, died just about a year ago. There was another stroke a year ago last Memorial Day, he spent the next several weeks slipping away, and he was gone. He left behind six children, one a complete surprise who came to the funeral.

He left behind a little money and the large mess of being intestate. Two of his sons slogged through getting an executor named, getting power of attorney to open the storage lockers to his two vintage automobiles, getting them sold, etcetcetc. Some other sons and wannabes elbowed to the head of the line, demanding their share until Mark simply announced he would put the signed titles on the front seats of the vehicles and quit paying rent on the storage lockers. Then everyone would get the same—nothing. Mark is one sensible fellow.

But, I digress.  Walt also left behind the barn he and Tom shared, to the rafters with Walt’s “stuff,” as Walt parted with almost nothing. Perhaps even nothing, as Tom has come to believe as he has slogged through sorting, pitching, saving. There even were baby pictures of the surprise daughter, although we knew her when we saw her; her face used to belong to our Aunt Ruth.

The two bottles of mercury were a real surprise. There was a tiny bottle of mercury in the house when I was a child. I think it contained the remains of some broken thermometers. I don’t know; my brothers found it far more interesting to roll around the dining room table than I did.

Walt alluded to the bottle on occasion, along the lines of the EPA was simply out of line banning mercury, it was just another government plot to take over the lives of  honest citizens. Perhaps even a conspiracy, who knows. I only know Walt seemed to have dad’s little bottle of mercury around and thought no more of it.

Two bottles! I told Tom, just don’t fool with it, I’ll find out what to do. I asked the road guys the next day. They know everything! “Should I call the EPA?” Don’t do that, one immediately advised. They’re liable to tent your barn. He thought for a bit and then advised I call the fire chief.

Charlie’s phone number is still in my phone from my old fire clerk days.  I told him it probably amounted to a quarter cup (Tom’s estimate), and could I give it to the fire department to dispose of?  Just sit tight and he’d find a legal way. So, I could no longer leave it on the fire station doorstep in the dead of night.

A few days later Charlie called. It could go to the Household Hazardous Waste Center if it were clear double bagged. Our HHWC is only open a couple hours a week in the summer, beginning in June. All my sleuthing was done in April. At the supper table tonight something jogged my memory—it’s June and I need to get rid of that mercury.

“I already went,” Tom said. “Got there two hours before they opened and I was third in line. There were thirty of us by the time the gate opened.” I can imagine thirty old gents, shooting the breeze. When he handed off the old cornmudgeon’s stash the person on duty ascertained it was properly bagged and called out “Mercury here.” Men in gloves came to take it. I wonder if Walt winced? It’s nice to know “the authorities” seem to take old cornmudgeon brothers into account.

Waiting for sunshine

Spring, and "meteorological" summer (bah) have yielded precious little sunshine.

It rained this morning as I came back from work.

But I looked up from lunch and saw sunshine.

Time to impart a  bit of wisdom to another generation.

Vinegar!

Newspapers!

Elbow grease!

How the windows shine.

I was thinking about a previous encounter with elbow grease.

Five years ago I was felled by that massive stroke,

but delivered to the hospital in time to be clot busted.

When I regained consciousness an arrogant little nurse demanded the name of the round thing on the wall, and the little thing on her wrist. I could not find the words.

Every time she woke me, the same questions.

I couldn't locate their names.

Many times later I said "If you'd tell me, then I'd know, wouldn't I!"

She didn't!

Before I fell into the void again I struggled and struggled for the one on the wall.

It came and went and came and went.

I woke up to it coming and going.

She caught me on the upcycle.

Clock!

I made my daughter bring me a notebook and pencil.

Every noun I remembered that week went in the book.

Words the doctors said went in the book.

I wrote "red" and drew a shoe.

Someone brought back my red sneakers and put them on the windowsill.

People came in and evaluated me constantly.

The last day the speech therapist came in, and there was a test in pronunciation and definitions.

The last word I had to define: elbow grease.

The next day I went home.

Toby, a retrospective and an achievement

Facebook sent me a picture yesterday of one of the few things I've posted there, a picture of Toby the day he came home, four years ago. I titled the picture "Lucky Kitty."

My friend Carol and I were on a two day excursion to the Three Rivers Art Festival in Pittsburgh, to visit Linda and Cara, exhibiting there, and do some shopping. Back at the motel the first night everyone heard a kitten in the bushes, in distress. No one could locate or capture it.

The next morning there stood a young girl holding the struggling kitten. The kitty app on her phone brought it straight to her, one quick nab and he was hers. Then the girl's mother was in distress; she learned the Humane Society did not open until ten and she wanted to be on the road long before then. "I'll take him," I said.

The kitten had no energy left for hissing, spitting and clawing, only to struggle to be free. Carol and I gave up all thought of a second day at the fair, and started home. The little guy and I spent two hours in a hand over hand battle. He squeezed high enough in one hand to escape and I fastened the other around him. And yes, he still howled a tiny kitten howl.

At home he fell on a bowl of kibble softened with water, drank a lot of water and climbed the quilt to sleep in my bed. I took him to the vet the next day, where he was pronounced barely four weeks old and lucky to be alive. I started a blog the same day, and my first post was about the Lucky Kitty, whose name became Toby.

Of course we take far more pictures of the babies than of the growing children. Here is the kitty his first summer, 2011.

Toby had two stepbrothers to annoy. Purrl was the outdoor cat who avoided Toby.

Ryon was the indoor cat, who he could easily annoy, especially in Ryon's safe and secret place on top of a dresser in a closet.

Ryon and Toby got along for the most part, especially as timid Ryon abdicated the catbird seat to Toby.

Yes, Toby, there is a Santa Claus.

That's the end of kitten pictures, and I had so many to select from!

He had so much energy, I bought him a gross of ping pong balls.

They were fun for quite a while,

but went on a high shelf when they weren't quite enough fun.

He has located the basketfull, and when the last little white globe disappears under a cupboard, or under the basement door and down the stairs, he merely climbs the quilt display in the studio and forks himself another from the basket.

He's more mature now. Here he is at breakfast with Laura, but only to keep her company. He will not accept table food and ignores any tidbit left in his bowl. My brother-in-law grumbles, "He won't eat real food!" He does appear from nowhere to lick the empty tuna can, however.

He still monitors the neighborhood,

and the studio,

and the front door, where he has perfected "The Lean."

He still begs for leaves every fall,

and has turned into our live-in flycatcher. No fly enters our house and lives.

Imagine Jan's surprise the other night. Toby trotted from the studio, head high. He was prevented from making the "Look what I caught!" squeak by the tail and hind feet of a mouse protruding from his mouth.  Jan called, he trotted proudly up. She picked him up, carried him outdoors and set him on the deck rail.

Not the outdoors! This cat has the same opinion of the outdoors as of table food.. It is not good. He dropped the mouse, in shock, and was rewarded by being put back in the house.

The mouse eventually left, scampered under the ramp and disappeared. Lucky for him, Purrl is on mouse patrol in cat heaven.

I thought I was Road Runner, but I may be Wily Coyote or, I’ve absorbed a Niagara Falls of credit card technology in one afternoon.

It took me one trip to the phone store and two calls to the help line to get my cute little square up and running today. At the phone store two young women, I’d guess eighteen and twenty something, helped me download the app to my phone.  The younger one, Amanda, began the download, which took several minutes. Waiting, I said to Morgan, the older, I quit all this technology more than ten years ago and the last mobile point of sale terminal I used was a radio signal transmitter.

“Wi-fi?” queried Amanda. No, I told her, this was before Al Gore invented the internet. An actual radio signal carried the swiped credit card data winging to the processors and the approval back to my terminal. “Wow.”

I became an entrepreneur about the time credit cards were offering revolving credit, not thirty day terms. It was the wave of the future to a forty something weaver with goods to sell. We started with a knuckle buster, an imprinting machine, put the day’s slips into a glassine fronted envelope and took them to the bank to deposit.

Linda still uses her knuckle buster. She tells about a young man at the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts last summer who wanted to interview her about her knuckle buster. He was a Penn State student in a Business and Technology class who had never seen such a thing. Could she process a check with it? He took a picture of it to show his class.

I was not long at out of state shows to realize there is a class of lowlife who depended on knuckle busters to deprive craftsmen of both their goods and their money. We had a point of sales terminal on the wall in the studio by then, and every night I would call home on our 800 number and read the imprinted slips to my sister to key into the terminal. The few iffy cards I took were generally resolved by finding the person in the local phone book and straightening it out.

It was still a cumbersome enough process to look into mobile technology, and we undertook the expense of the radio terminal. The scalawags were more numerous by then, and I learned to look up from my terminal and say “Oh, dear. This card was declined. Do you have another one you might want to use?”

Or the time I looked up into the eyes of a handsome young college man, making about a hundred and fiftyish dollar purchase. “Oh, dear. My screen says I am to keep this card if I can and call the police as soon as you are out of sight. What should I do?” And he said, “Oh, that must be the card I reported as stolen and forgot to throw away. Here, use this one.”

That wonderful little terminal was the end of my credit card processing experience; I sold it to another artist and left the world of sales forever. I thought.

Now I want to process credit cards again, and got the little square and a no monthly charge plan for less than we used to pay for actual point of sale processing. Cute little bugger, isn’t it:

Pretty little app on my phone; that dollar sign there to the right of the middle row of apps. Who could ask for anything more?

After supper tonight I whiled away a few minutes reading my news feed. There was an article in the “picked especially for you” section. On October first, the new and improved EMV credit cards will be deployed by all banks. To convince merchants to accept them, the processors have adopted the expedient of shifting the liability for fraud from the bank to the retailer. As more and more customers pull out their Europay Mastercard and Visa (EMV) chip embedded plastic which is not swiped, savvy retailers will buy the new readers.

Card reading terminals will soon join knuckle busters.  Oh, the irony of being drug into the post millennial era of credit card processing and obsoleted, all in the same afternoon.

Warp and Woof

I’m sure you remember the warp is the length of the fabric; the threads come up off the back beam of the loom so the shuttle of weft can be passed through the shedd and finish making the cloth. Listening to The Mill on the Floss yesterday, while putting a new warp on the loom (I have no recollection of ever reading that book!), the author referred to the warp and woof of the heroine’s life.

The new warp

I know the word “woof” as part of the stuff that makes up fabric. It has a murky history, seeming to come into the language from many olde sources. I cannot recall when I last read the word. It hasn’t been near as long since I last exhibited at a show, but that’s exactly what Linda and I are doing this Saturday.

I held out the opportunity to Linda a couple of weeks ago.  My ulterior motive was to have part of her booth, but she’s not amiss to selling some rugs, either. So, come Saturday two old weavers will share a booth at a venue I hope will become successful for the young entrepreneur sponsors.

The show is called The Peninsula Flea, modeled after similar affairs in towns much bigger than mine. Boston, New York. My thirteen year old grandson told me that if the Cleveland Flea is referred to as the C Flea, he supposes ours is the P Flea. Ha ha.

The premise of the shows seems to be upcycling, repurposing, clever ideas for old stuff. These new ideas just pass me in a flash. I suppose it’s as trendy as shabby chic was a decade ago. Here’s the link to The Peninsula Flea; you’ll have to smile. Or, as Linda and I once said to each other, waiting for Ann and her friend to be finished browsing an antique store, “Their collectibles are our mother’s junk.”

It’s been twelve years since I mounted an exhibit. I have nothing. Hence my invitation to share Linda’s booth at a show that was not even on her horizon before I told her. Then I told her how we would set it up to accommodate both of us, and then I set out to replace things. Receipts. Coat hangers. Bags. Cash box. What about credit cards? Hopefully in the nick of time I have purchased The Square. It’s supposed to come this week. Like my very first point of sale credit card terminal, I may learn how to use this one at the show.

We have two young women to schlep it all in and back out at the end of the day. And, we have lots of upscaled warp and woof to sell. We’ll see how it goes. Well I hope; I’ve signed up for three weekends.