Another treasure made its way up from the basement the other day and while I won’t bore you with the ridiculous amount of minutia my mother recorded during my first year of life in this baby book (Aunt Charlotte gifted us a silver spoon, woot!)….. I would like to point out that at age five?
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I was apparently as round as I was tall.
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I have to admit while the information itself didn’t mean much, holding a book filled with my late mother’s handwriting did make me choke up a little.
Do mothers even do this anymore… or is there just an app? Because I gotta say, fifty years from now when a grown up child finds that? No tears will be shed.
The husband and I recently celebrated our 39th wedding anniversary and to be honest, at this point it’s hard to remember a time when we weren’t married. Although looking back at the first ever picture of us together… you know, during those 6 long days of dating before we wed …
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It’s even harder to remember being that young.
Our 39th started out with the delivery of a giant basket of flowers and the exchange of cards.
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We planned to spend the day doing something fun and end with a nice meal. Unfortunately it was the beginning of the week and thanks to post Covid understaffing and the slow winter season in Maine, everywhere I wanted to go was closed. After wasting a few hours driving along the coast….
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We opted for lunch at the Dockside Grill.
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Planning on a larger meal for dinner, we chose light fare. Chicken Caesar salad for me, French onion soup for the spouse.
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One cocktail for me, one beer for the spouse… with tip? $86. For soup and salad! This is getting ridiculous.
By then it was early afternoon and we were still searching for something fun to do… so we sat with our phones Googling like mad. I opted for a museum, but the ones we haven’t already visited were hours away. I did find a quirky cabinet of curiosities worth seeing, but after reading there was no heat in the building? My desire to go quickly waned.
Fun be damned, we ended up antiquing instead. At least the husband was happy.
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I saw these clever mussel shell Christmas trees on sale and thought about getting one, but they were so delicate I didn’t see it traveling or storing well.
As usual, there were some unexplainable items for sale. Most notably, this…
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Made entirely of glass, I can’t imagine anyone wanting that gracing their coffee table.
After a few antique stores, we were back on Google checking our favorite special occasion dinner spots. Par for the course? Every single one of them was closed. By then I was thoroughly disgusted and ready to go home and make a sandwich but the husband wanted another piece of fabulous cheesecake so we ended the day at the same restaurant where I was served crab balls instead of cakes a while back.
I won’t bore you with food photos but the mussels were good and made more interesting by being served with polenta frittes.
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Crispy on the outside, creamy on the inside. Dipped in the white wine garlic sauce? A meal in itself.
I went downstairs to check the progress of the husband’s basement project yesterday and it was not going well.
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Nope. Not well at all.
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I stood unnoticed, chortling while I watched him attempt to wrangle trifold insulation into a corner by himself. It was quite amusing, but I took pity on the poor guy after a few minutes and lent a hand.
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You’ll notice he bought a new toy. After the first low velocity hammer tool wasn’t strong enough.. he upgraded.
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This thing is basically a small gun that fires explosive rounds to propel nails into hard surfaces. In this case, concrete.
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And while my husband is (we never say was) a Marine and familiar with weapons, his usage of this tool made me a little nervous.
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The video doesn’t do justice to the noise. But trust me, that thing is loud.
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And best observed from a safe distance.
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I have to laugh that our entire cellar is a junk filled mess except for this one little corner. But he’s determined to put a ceiling, insulation and shelves throughout so I’m not complaining.
That’s an easy one for me. The best…. or should I say most fun… car I’ve ever owned.
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(Not my picture, but I don’t feel like digging through 124 albums to find one … so this is the same year, model and color)
It was 1982, I was single but dating a car guy. He had a cousin who owned a 1967 Mustang that had seen better days and been living in a garage collecting cobwebs. I saw it, fell in love with it, and my guy bought it for me.
A good bit of restoration was needed, the floor boards were pure Bondo… but after six months of weekend work she was road ready and throaty. We had a blast in that car, but a year or so later I met my husband and married him in six days. Feeling guilty for a lot of reasons, I gave the ex the car.
It was the right thing to do, but I still miss her.
How about you. What car do you wish you still had?
I just finished another book by Mary Roach… but instead of her usual quirky and irreverent devotion to one particular subject, this time she’s sharing a collection of quick stories covering a myriad of topics.
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Still quirky, still irreverent… and because they made me chortle?
I’m sharing.
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Being a menopausal woman of… ahem, a certain age…. I can totally relate to this. My thighs haven’t been there for me for years, the bastards.
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When my mother had too much sherry she called my father Pork. That may sound dirty, but they used to collect beautiful little pigs made from precious stones and gems so it was actually a term of endearment.
Hold on to your hats because I’m about to turn your world upside down.
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“Yup, it turns out that Humpty Dumpty from one of your favourite nursery rhymes wasn’t actually an egg and the more we think about it, the more obvious it seems.
Let’s give you a rhyme refresher:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
Still a banger even now, but does it actually mention that HD was an egg?
The idea that Humpty was an egg first appeared in Lewis Carroll’s 1872 novel, Through the Looking-Glass. Chapter six of the book is entitled “Humpty Dumpty’ where he is described in all his eggy glory. “However, the egg only got larger and larger, and more and more human: when she had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes and a nose and mouth; and when she had come close to it, she saw clearly that it was Humpty Dumpty himself. It can’t be anybody else!’ she said to herself. I’m as certain of it, as if his name were written all over his face.”
So it’s safe to say that this is where the idea that Humpty was an egg came from, but the rhyme apparently came before Lewis Carroll’s novel. Fortunately, after a Twitter exchange, the truth has been uncovered again, and Humpty’s true identity is even weirder than we first thought. It all started when author Holly Bourne tweeted:
Who decided Humpty Dumpty was an egg? Its not in the lyrics, and deciding he’s a giant egg is quite a random leap for someone to make, and everyone else being like, “yeah, a giant egg on a wall. Of course.
She added in a follow-up tweet:
Also, imagine having NO ARMY because they’re busy fixing a broken egg. “The king sent literally EVERYONE out to save the giant egg who isn’t actually an egg, leaving the realm wide open for attack.
Jane Etheridge, who is the Vice Chair of Federation of Children’s Book Groups, came to the rescue and offered a theory as to what HD actually is.
And apparently he was… a cannon?!
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She wrote: “It’s believed to be Roundhead propaganda about a Royalist cannon. First appearance as an egg was in Through the Looking Glass It adds up with the ideas of several war historians, who agree that he was in fact a cannon.
Yep.
A large cannon which is believed to have been used in English Civil War (1642-1649), specifically, in the 1648 Siege of Colchester.”
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Humpty Dumpty was a canon? I had to research this further.
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“The original story pre-dates Carroll’s take on the character. According to a number of military historians, Humpty Dumpty was the name of a cannon used by the Royalists during the English Civil War.
The conflict raged from 1642 to 1649, and in June of 1648, Humpty Dumpty was stationed on the walls of Colchester. It was one of several cannons erected to try and keep Parliament’s army from taking the city. The next month, however, the Parliamentary forces heavily damaged the walls beneath Humpty Dumpty with their own artillery. You can guess where this is going: Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, and broke into pieces.”
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And if that’s not bad enough? Here’s another theory…
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“This all fits together very neatly, but there’s no decisive evidence that the tale is the origin of the nursery rhyme. In 15th-Century England, “Humpty Dumpty” was a common snarky nickname for somebody who was a little on the large side. Muddling the matter further, it’s also been suggested that Charles I himself was Humpty Dumpty, having been toppled from a great height by his Parliament. Those loyal to him certainly couldn’t put him back in his lofty position after all.”
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So our beloved egg was actually a canon… or a fat king.
In light of this discovery there’s only one thing I can be certain of now.
I gave my husband a set of handy dandy pool cue cleaners for Xmas and upon further inspection, I believe English is not the manufacturer’s first language.
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Things are getting serious with the cellar project downstairs. How do I know this?
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Low velocity tools have been purchased and I have to admit…. I’m a little scared.
Upstairs in the office –
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A seemingly appropriate calendar has been placed on my desk.
River's world..... 