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.

Solid Saturday

In heaven, all Saturdays would start with a half dozen Golden Gate donuts eaten in the car en route to five estate sales, culminating with a fancy Floral brunch in the early afternoon. In fact, if every day in heaven went something along these lines, I wouldn't much object. Especially if I had such stellar company as Roxanne, Marianne and Jen for each go around. Groundhog Day, I say, bring it on.

A sampling of today's loot, in order of acquisition:

Square Ceramic Floral Dish with Lid + 2 smaller dishlets

Shell shaped vinyl placemats in avocado, the kind you can wipe down with a damp cloth and they're good as new. Perfect for those of us who are laundry-deficient.

Long coveted first volume of the Julia Child staple in any cookbook collection. I spotted this one despite the key information faded entirely from its spine.

Linen placemats with pockets for their contrasting napkins. I may need a larger table in the near future, so that I can mingle both sets simultaneously. Goodness, do I love to set a tidy table.

The other purchases are more the outdoorsy type if you catch my drift. They'll make an appearance in the next post, so stay tuned.

Use of Space

Recently on a visit to my local coffee hole, I went to use the ladies' room and found they'd recently painted the walls. If memory serves, they went from being dark, black maybe, to now being starkly white. While black walls might be attempting to deter graffiti from accumulating, white walls almost certainly invite it and certainly the transition from black to white sends some sort of message.

Added to this, they've attached a whole slew of paint markers to the walls, strung up by chains to make marking territory that much easier. As I was sitting in there the other day, I got to thinking about spaces like this, truly bowing to destiny by encouraging what is probably inevitable.



I wonder how the same idea would carry in less contained spaces, that is more public spaces. Surrendering control intentionally, allowing use to shape the form of a place and watching as (human) nature unfolds.

Treasures

I hit 5 estate sales and a thrift town on Saturday with Marianne and Chad. Last weekend's scores were almost unanimously kitchen oriented, are you shocked? These were the brightest stars by far:

A good old can that still smells faintly of laurel leaves. Very orientalist, as you can see faintly from the illustrations on the side panels.

And this little book, published 1960 by Harcourt Brace & World. The I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken, drawings by Hilary Knight. Though written with sly sincerity, this book is chuckle-worthy from cover to cover and features such classics as "Bisque Quick", a bulked up version of the Campbell's original and "Homebody Beans" which boasts a handwritten notation deeming it fabulous! An excerpt for your dessert:

A parenthetical note here. It is understood that when you hate to cook, you buy already-prepared foods as often as you can. You buy frozen things and ready-mix things, as well as pizza from the pizza man and chicken pies from the chicken pie lady.

But let us amend that statement. Let us say, instead, that you buy these things as often as you dare, for right here you usually run into a problem with the basic male. The average man doesn't care much for the frozen-food department, nor for the pizza man, nor for the chicken-pie lady. He wants to see you knead that bread and tote that bale, before you go down cellar to make the soap. This is known as Woman's Burden.

But sometimes you can get around it. Say, for instance, that you are serving some good dinner rolls that you bought frozen and then merely put into the oven for a few minutes, as the directions said to. At dinner, you taste them critically. Then you say, "Darn it, I simply can't make decent rolls, and that's all there is to it!"

If you are lucky, and have been able to keep him out of the kitchen while you were removing the wrapping, he will probably say, "What's the matter with you? These taste swell."

Then you say, in a finicky sort of female voice, "I don't know--they just don't seem as light as they ought to, or something..." And the more stoutly he affirms that they're okay, the tighter the box you've got him in. Admittedly, this is underhanded, but, then, marriage is sometimes a rough game.

That Peg, sure knows how to tell it.

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.

Ballooned

We spotted these old cannisters on a big exploration mission on Sunday. We biked up to Point Richmond for the first time which was fun and I only noticed these on our way back through the industrial stretch of our route. They're the kind for storing gases like helium and they had such good colors that I wanted to document. Old carnival waste maybe? Or evidence of birthday parties past? I can't imagine what else these are for, and even though the place housing them seemed abandoned they manage to muster some romance, don't you think?