littlewaif.com Blog

Vintage Book Les Bons Enfants

Originally uploaded by littlewaif

This is a book that I recently purchased (1 of 5 I got at the flea market, you can click on the picture to go to my photostream at Flickr to see the rest). It is a French play published in 1876 Les Bons Enfants…. so cool. I love old books. I’m not the type who buys them up, only to cut out the illustrations. I love the book itself. I love the way that people inscribed them as a gift or wrote their own name in them. One book had a vintage photo tucked into it, the silver had picked up the type from the page and you can barely see the image of a woman in the photo.

At Montana State University in Bozeman where I went to college, they used to house vintage magazines way back to the early 1920s through the current year (which was a little after that, hah) in the main library area. I used to spend hours looking through the old magazines, staring at the old illustrations and reading the odd stories of how life was viewed at that point in time. I’m sure I spend more time in the library looking at old books and magazines than I did studying which I had originally come to do there. I am much more interested in social history than political history (which they seem to favor in school).

My husband is in Sweden for the week and I have no one to talk to. My kids don’t want to talk to me (they are teenagers and i am old). So mr. internet will be my confidant. Shhhhh…. don’t let the cats know you are reading this. I am sure that cats are poised to take over the world. Have you ever noticed how they mark everything that comes into your house? They are not marking it as theirs, as cat psychologists would have you believe. There is secret coded messages that cats leave for each other, unbeknownst to us poor stupid humans. Since the advent of the public libraries, they have been able to pass messages to themselves through books…. marking each and every message with communication from local neighborhoods. At first the process was simple and their plans were small. Where were the good places to hunt, which cat was in heat, who had a mouse problem and who left out yummy garbage. Then, video tape rentals. Some cats used this new mode of communication to pass on more negative and covert information… where the bad dogs lived, who was a bad owner, who didn’t let their cats out to roam, who didn’t change their cat litter. But the internet brought the bigger changes. People started sending more boxes to each other. Ebay made this easy. Now individual homes could start communicating with each other on a grander scale. No more flimsy romance novels to encode secret cat messages on. Now, people sent big boxes of stuff with grandma’s old mixer and regretful garage sell purchases. Cats could send huge messages to each other. And as people started buying more and more from each other, the cats messages became more directed. “What should we do to protect our species?” “What to do about the annoying dog problem?” “What should we do to enable people to buy more canned cat food and teach them that we need more food”. The message have become more insistent.

Please watch your cat. If you get a package in the mail, make sure the cat doesn’t mark it. Protect your library books and tape rentals from the local blockbuster. The cats will rise up and bring us down. It is only a matter of time.

Teaching Bunny to Smoke

Originally uploaded by littlewaif

I did this painting a while back. And the block cat, I did that too. I now have a place to paint, we had electricity installed in our shed. Everyone puts a chandelier in their shed, don’t they? After it gets all set up, I will post a picture or two.

Went to the endocrinologist today. Scheduled my needle biopsy on my thyroid nodule for June 5th. He told me he doesn’t use local anesthesia because he figures giving someone 5 shots in the neck to do one digging shot in the thyroid doesn’t make sense………. Sounds good in theory, I’ll let you know when I am getting jabbed in the neck if anesthesia would have been nice. He also said he will have a pathologist in the office to make sure the sample is a good one. Hope this all goes well. My nodule feels like it is getting larger, I seem to notice every time I swallow. Or I might just be paranoid.

Fabric from Grandma’s Quilt

Originally uploaded by littlewaif

This is a favorite patch from the quilt my Grandma Rachel made me. I used it all through college and then put it away for quite a few years. When my daughter got to her teens, I put it on her bed and she has used it ever since. She also still sleeps with the crib sized quilt my Mother made for her.

I can’t remember if I’ve complained about this before. My daughter is 15 and doesn’t like shopping for clothes. Now that I have some money to spoil her, she isn’t even really interested where I bought her clothes. She could care less about brand names, would wear second hand clothes from Goodwill if that was all I bought her. I do buy some clothes from Goodwill, it is amazing how much some people pay for clothes and then pass them on in good shape. I will go out to retail and buy her new clothing, but she is generally not interested in coming along.

I used to be all consumed about how I looked. Probably because we were poor when I grew up and secondhand or handmade clothing was looked down on during that period in time (late Industrial Age…. okay 1960s thru 80s). Luckily for me in college, the “flashdance” rags look and punk rock and retro vintage clothing look was “in”. Or I would have gone insane trying to dress in clothing with no money so spend on it. I remember going with my sister Lisa with my Grandma scouring thrift shops for old “grandma coats” to wear. I still have one of the ones we bought, it weighs about 15 pounds and is wool and is so impractical for Delaware, but if we ever have a nuclear winter, I am ready.