Our Volvo Is A Champion

My Friday afternoon went something like this.

Roxanne: Want to drive me to Monterrey tomorrow and back to pick up a table and chairs? I'll pay you fifty bucks plus gas money!
Me: Of course!
Roxanne: Super!
Me: Super!

Maybe I'm a pushover. Or maybe fifty dollars is a lot of money these days. Monterrey is 2 and a Half Hours away, friends. And it was SO HOT out on Saturday in our wagon with no air conditioning and vinyl seats. But I knew I'd made the right decision when we pulled into an In N Out Burger at 11:30 in the morning for "breakfast", unflinching, and Roxanne not only bought me lunch (not part of the deal, you'll recall) but also Taught Me How A Real Californian Orders At In N Out. Let me just say Animal Style, people. Grilled Onions, Special Sauce, Cheese and Pickles atop French Fries. Oh baby. I should have documented, but I was too busy getting all the nubbins from the bottom of that little paper boat and sucking down my silky chocolate milkshake.


With that caliber fuel in our belly we set off again down the freeway, bound for glory in the way of a formica dining set located in Seaside. Jennifer, the peddler, lived in some pretty wacky military housing near the DoD base in Monterey. We must have been catching some radiation or something because we got a little spun around, wandered through a commencement at the nearby Cal campus, stumbled across a self-proclaimed Scout Hut, noticed that all the cars in the whole town were sporting For Sale signs, got some bum directions to an atm and then took the longest possible route to her house.





But finally Jennifer greeted us warmly and even helped us strap the thing on top of the car before we got back in and headed off back in the direction from whence we'd come.


All in all, it felt pretty quick; down and back in roughly 6 hours, with only a driver's sunburn and a memento to prove we'd been gone at all. Roxanne finally has a table! Hooray! And now I know where Watsonville is. But the very best part was the new friend bonding. Even mini-roadtrips are good for that.

Extra Bakeware

In a house with only two mouths to feed, there comes a time when you really have no foreseeable use for another cake pan. It is a dark day, indeed.

So when I came upon a bundle of old Bakerex and Ovenex pans a few months ago, I knew I couldn't really use them in my own kitchen but also lacked the willpower to leave them be. They have the most incredible pattern embossed in the metal, I think to aid in even baking and in removing finished cakes. I conidered selling them, but it turns out they're neither rare nor dime a dozen and not worth much in any case. Since I found mine for fifty cents apiece, I decided to keep them and figure something out.

Someone on etsy, I can't remember who, was selling a piece of bakerex and suggested framing something in it. Interesting, no? Cake pans doubling as frames? This daughter of framers had never thought of such a thing, but decided to give it a go.

I selected some better than average photos I recently got developed to float inside the four round pans. Using Elmer's Craft Bond Multipurpose Spray Adhesive (Acid Free) to attach the photos to the pans and contact cement to attach sawtooth hangers to the center backside of each, the project couldn't have been easier. By now of course you know, it worked like a charm.



In this bundle of bakerex & ovenex, I also got some bread pans, which are similarly embossed in the repeating crown pattern but also look like origami, becuase the metal is folded on itself to produce corners.
These are currently storing bits and bobs in our bathroom with a too-small medicine cabinet.

How-To-Do-It Encyclopedia

I picked this set up from an estate sale this weekend. It's only A-D of the set (which apparently includes almost 20 books) by Mechanix of how to do almost anything. The illustrations are amazing, monochromatic usually and a mixture of drawings and diagrams, with very dated photographs interspersed. This edition is from 1961.

If all else fails, I'll just collect flatware.

While I was home in Neenah, WI over the holiday, I hit up one of the good thrift stores looking for small, lightweight things that I might convince myself I could reasonably take back to Oakland with me. Flatware seemed perfectly justifiable; we're always running out of forks and spoons. Especially when I found so many wonderful pieces, it was nearly impossible to resist. And at 20 cents a piece, sometimes less, they fell well within my very limited unemployed spending limit. I used to buy all the same ones, but then found it too painful to ignore the lone knife or fork that happened to be perfect except for its mismatching. So now I have a motley bundle of silverware in our drawer and they seem pretty happy.

These are the newest bundles of joy. I happened to find an odd group of seven pieces of one pattern packaged together; a handsome set of simple, mod elegance.