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My head hurts.
We spent most of the weekend in Linthicum with the heat off, since every gas appliance in the house decided to spring a leak, sequentially. I'm told they're finally fixed, although someone subsequently managed to back into our lamp post (now that it's in the middle of the sidewalk instead of inside the fence) and knock it loose, breaking the glass. This in addition to the fact that besides cutting down the giant trees and most of the bushes and replacing the front walk, the street widening people also put down sod, in february, without watering it, and left clumps of mud all over the brand new front walk in the process. How this relates to widening the street and replacing the sidewalk, I'm a bit at a loss to determine. Fortunately, there had already been some talk of possible garden beds along the front fence, now that everything else is gone, so if the sod all dies, it'll be that much easier just to pull up and put in raised beds or somesuch.
I dreamed that the front yard was twice as long and steep and that they'd graded right over it with a huge slope of bare dirt that ended right at a little sidewalk around the front door, and spray painted the entire back wall of the house bright yellow.
When I was little, we had one chiming clock; it's a dark green thing, a standard wall clock that now hangs on the wall in my parents' dining room, and strikes on the hour, at least when anyone bothers to wind it. My parents brought it back from Japan, I believe, some years before I was born. And except for a brief fling with a cuckoo clock when we lived in the house that we moved out of when I was seven, a clock which hung in just about the center of the house and went the way cuckoo clocks do, it's springs unsprung in some fashion (although I believe it to be still in the attic somewhere)... except for that, the striking clock was "our" clock when I was growing up.
When I came back from my year out west, my parents had taken in (and repaired) the chiming clock that they had given my mother's parents soon after they were first married. It chimes on the quarter hour, with musical phrases that increase in length from quarter to half to three quarter hour, and although it is calibrated to keep time at the same rate no matter how tightly wound it is, it is slightly slow, and loses about ten minutes between windings. As a child, it sat in my grandparents' living room, where I often slept on the sofa when we went to visit, and for the first week or so with it here, I was struck with a great sense of dislocation every time it chimed; it was a sound that belonged in my grandparents' brown and orange parlor, kept nice for company while they did puzzles and crafts and watched TV in the family room, where I used to leap from flower to flower on the big 1960s rug like stepping stones.
I came back yesterday, tired, somewhat headachy, and conscious of having wasted a lot of my time, to find that the cat tower that stood in the far corner of the living room had been moved to overlook the stairs by the front door. And in the space where it had stood, there is now a grandfather clock, fairly new, moon-faced and chiming. It sounds to me like churchbells from half a mile away, and I keep glancing up and wondering where the sound is coming from when it goes off. It came from an estate sale in Vienna, at which a woman not too much older than my parents was selling off her doll collection, her dead husband's things, and much of her furniture preparatory to moving to a retirement home in Vermont. I picked up a few quite nice things for my dolls (a chair that fits Lady beautifully, a set of engraved wine glasses, an elegant tea set) there as well. She told my father that she and her husband had gotten the clock one year as an anniversary present, and was glad to hear that my parents were considering it to be an early anniversary present of their own. (Very early, as they got married in June, but still...)
I have no chiming clocks, although I have got a medieval replica of a spinning one that I picked up at a yard sale and faithfully wound every day for some time, years ago. It's in a box in storage now, like so many of the fantastic things I haven't got space for these days.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
grauwulf has forbidden the use of clocks that tick in the bedroom, as he can hear my watch at fifty paces and is not amused, so I suspect that the clock that runs backwards will go in the kitchen, when it's finally close to finished (and the day will come; it's almost close enough to see, now) and if I put a battery back into the crazy salamander that my high school english teacher made, that may go in the craft room. We'll see. Perhaps I should start a family tradition and reclaim the cuckoo clock, fix it, and put it up on the stair landing. It might at least amuse the cat.
We spent most of the weekend in Linthicum with the heat off, since every gas appliance in the house decided to spring a leak, sequentially. I'm told they're finally fixed, although someone subsequently managed to back into our lamp post (now that it's in the middle of the sidewalk instead of inside the fence) and knock it loose, breaking the glass. This in addition to the fact that besides cutting down the giant trees and most of the bushes and replacing the front walk, the street widening people also put down sod, in february, without watering it, and left clumps of mud all over the brand new front walk in the process. How this relates to widening the street and replacing the sidewalk, I'm a bit at a loss to determine. Fortunately, there had already been some talk of possible garden beds along the front fence, now that everything else is gone, so if the sod all dies, it'll be that much easier just to pull up and put in raised beds or somesuch.
I dreamed that the front yard was twice as long and steep and that they'd graded right over it with a huge slope of bare dirt that ended right at a little sidewalk around the front door, and spray painted the entire back wall of the house bright yellow.
When I was little, we had one chiming clock; it's a dark green thing, a standard wall clock that now hangs on the wall in my parents' dining room, and strikes on the hour, at least when anyone bothers to wind it. My parents brought it back from Japan, I believe, some years before I was born. And except for a brief fling with a cuckoo clock when we lived in the house that we moved out of when I was seven, a clock which hung in just about the center of the house and went the way cuckoo clocks do, it's springs unsprung in some fashion (although I believe it to be still in the attic somewhere)... except for that, the striking clock was "our" clock when I was growing up.
When I came back from my year out west, my parents had taken in (and repaired) the chiming clock that they had given my mother's parents soon after they were first married. It chimes on the quarter hour, with musical phrases that increase in length from quarter to half to three quarter hour, and although it is calibrated to keep time at the same rate no matter how tightly wound it is, it is slightly slow, and loses about ten minutes between windings. As a child, it sat in my grandparents' living room, where I often slept on the sofa when we went to visit, and for the first week or so with it here, I was struck with a great sense of dislocation every time it chimed; it was a sound that belonged in my grandparents' brown and orange parlor, kept nice for company while they did puzzles and crafts and watched TV in the family room, where I used to leap from flower to flower on the big 1960s rug like stepping stones.
I came back yesterday, tired, somewhat headachy, and conscious of having wasted a lot of my time, to find that the cat tower that stood in the far corner of the living room had been moved to overlook the stairs by the front door. And in the space where it had stood, there is now a grandfather clock, fairly new, moon-faced and chiming. It sounds to me like churchbells from half a mile away, and I keep glancing up and wondering where the sound is coming from when it goes off. It came from an estate sale in Vienna, at which a woman not too much older than my parents was selling off her doll collection, her dead husband's things, and much of her furniture preparatory to moving to a retirement home in Vermont. I picked up a few quite nice things for my dolls (a chair that fits Lady beautifully, a set of engraved wine glasses, an elegant tea set) there as well. She told my father that she and her husband had gotten the clock one year as an anniversary present, and was glad to hear that my parents were considering it to be an early anniversary present of their own. (Very early, as they got married in June, but still...)
I have no chiming clocks, although I have got a medieval replica of a spinning one that I picked up at a yard sale and faithfully wound every day for some time, years ago. It's in a box in storage now, like so many of the fantastic things I haven't got space for these days.
grauwulf has forbidden the use of clocks that tick in the bedroom, as he can hear my watch at fifty paces and is not amused, so I suspect that the clock that runs backwards will go in the kitchen, when it's finally close to finished (and the day will come; it's almost close enough to see, now) and if I put a battery back into the crazy salamander that my high school english teacher made, that may go in the craft room. We'll see. Perhaps I should start a family tradition and reclaim the cuckoo clock, fix it, and put it up on the stair landing. It might at least amuse the cat.