Recovering From Illness at Covet Central

Good grief, kids, whatever you do, Don't Hit 'Return/Enter' after typing the title of your blog entry - it posts directly and immediately! Hopefully I deleted the thing before Feedburner or whoever sent an email to my hapless readers. I'm not a Blogger-hater, but some of the whizbang updates they foist upon us bloggers are a real pain in my ass.

Anyway, here's the post-Xmas post; I say that as if it's a tradition - I have no idea whether I've posted after the holidays or not, and I'm not going to look at previous Decembers to find out. You should know by now I'm not that kind of blogger, the kind that cares.

I was sick over the holiday; unfortunately, my mother's druggist doesn't carry my favorite cold medication:

I really do need a teaspoon full of it every four hours, just as is says on the label. Since I had to do without, not only was I expectorating like a late-stage consumption patient, I was cranky as hell. Lucky for you, I've been home a couple of days now and taking my Pectoral Compound as prescribed, so I'm no longer ranting about the holidays and my relatives.

{Nota Bene: These wonderful olde-timey labels are courtesy of Spookshows.com - you can download a zip file of high-quality versions!}

I treated myself to some fine jewelry from Perfidious Beadworks for the holiday season, and I simply want to say that everyone out there needs to purchase an Edgar Allan Poe pin. Anyway, the proprietor of PB recommended I check out photos of dearly departed folks at The Art of Mourning. I've been avoiding that site, because I knew it would waken lusts best held at bay (unemployed people should only want food, shelter and a job, not old junk about dead people). But I went there, and indeed found much to covet. So if anyone is interested in buying me a fine present for my upcoming birthday (50th - I deserve something fancy for my 50th!), below are the sorts of things I would enjoy and appreciate:

A late 18th century fob (another view below)

 

A late 18th century clock (another view below)

 

A hair chain (for an eyepiece?), circa 1840

I definitely need the latter item - I had to fake a chain for my eyepiece recently with some shredded silk ribbon, and it would be much nicer to have something like this.

A final mention of things related to death, I found another lovely website, Morbid Anatomy. Want to read old broadsides of crimes? Look at photos of medical students and dissections? Look at 19th century photos of albinos? The site covers a lot of territory, but if you are interested in science, medicine, pathology, death, crime, and the history of these things, you will undoubtedly find something there to keep you amused.

I'll be doing a post on knitting stuff soon - and to stay on the theme of old and dead, I'll make sure I post something written by some long-dead housewife trying to feed her family by writing knitting patterns. But right now, I've got to take another dose of my Pectoral Compound (cough! cough!).

'ere, now, wot's all this, then?

Picking on the knitters  - for shame!  From The Telegraph: 

9. Mother Clancy must have found the deal of the year at the Arran jumper shop: 'Buy one get three free'. 

I must admit, though, that's a lot of Aran knitting on those four boys. Hopefully some knitter was handsomely paid for all that cabling.

A Fine Idea for Clutzy Needleworkers

When my father died a few years ago, my mother wanted to have all the men in the family over to pick through his tools for what they wanted. No way! I cried. Why, I might want to build an airship! Or a Tesla coil! Or at least a Tesla induction motor...

In truth, I haven't even glued the leg back onto my pizzelle iron, simply due to laziness. But I did drag a few tools home, and they do come into good use, even when no construction is involved. For example:

This is one of those extending magnets for reaching icky areas and grabbing loose screws and bolts, and quite a powerful one at that.

And those safety pins? They are part of a box of 300 safety pins that spilled on the floor. Mr Extenda-Magnet was lying nearby when I spilled the box of pins - what, don't you leave tools lying around your house? Y'all are strange. I have a hammer next to my bathtub and a crowbar hanging on the bathroom doorknob.

Anyway, the magnet was lying on a bag of roving, so I grabbed it and used it to collect bunches of pins at a time.

It worked great! (Until I got to those evil little brass pins, consarn it!). It worked so well, brass pins excepted, that I vowed I'd use it next time I spilled a bunch of straight pins (which happens every five years whether I need it or not).