Fun and Games Dept

It’s Earl’s birthday weekend. We started the celebration yesterday with a stop at a local restaurant we’ve been wanting to go since moving to Tucson nearly a year ago. We finally had the opportunity to stop at The Barnyard Crafthouse and Eatery.

I’m enjoying living in a part of the world that has flowers blooming during the third week of February. This is a new experience for me.

A napkin holder exactly like this one sat on my grandparents’ kitchen table for decades. Even when the mid century style dining room table was replaced by a monstrosity my grandfather built (it could fold and expand and had inserts labeled with compass directions for proper orientation), the napkin holder exactly like this one lived on until my grandmother’s passing in 1996. I don’t know what happened to it after that.

I find a certain comfort in little trinkets and objects like this, especially those with a Mid Century flair. I mentioned last week that I was looking for drink glasses from the period that I remember in Grandma Country’s kitchen. They arrived earlier this week and I’m happy to add the glasses to my collection.

My interest in this time period is not only inspired by memories of my childhood but also because there was some pretty cool designs going on. While commercial buildings of the time are quite boring, I really liked mid century residential designs. When we were in Palm Springs a couple of months ago I could help but marvel at all the wonderful architecture.

While my grandparents’ custom designed was is pretty conservative in it’s mid century design, there are plenty of elements that lean the home in that direction. I love the use of slate and brick and the angles of the lines. My grandfather had a customer of the family contracting business design the home for him in the mid 1950s so the customer could pay off his bill. There were adjustments all the way; the kitchen was relocated so my grandmother could look out a window facing the front of the house when she washed dishes. She liked watching the trains pass by behind the hay field across the street. Because of this redesign the dining room was made smaller. My husband never liked the dining room. He thought it was too small, and honestly, it was more of a pass through area getting from the kitchen to the main living space. He didn’t like the kitchen off by itself. There were pocket doors scattered about. And the aforementioned slate and stone and brick. Built in 1959 it was a charming house.

After the kitchen and dining room were renovated into some dark wood colonial motif (that I absolutely hated), the only place one could find the speckled linoleum of the dining room floor was in the hall linen closet. The slate floor was reserved for the head end of the living room. The colonial linoleum that replaced the speckled original floor always seemed liked it shouted its presence. The dark cabinets that replaced were so very heavy in stature.

The house was sold after my grandfather died to a man that turned it into a hunting camp. I have the numbers from the in-wall kitchen clock that had stopped working sometime in the early 1990s. I might have to put them in a wall here in our home in the desert. It’d be a nice tribute to my fondness for Gram and Gramp’s home.

I have two of these glasses. From the mid 20th century, they are Libbey “Nordic” glasses. I believe Grandma Country bought them at Woolworths. I remember her finding another set of glasses on a shelf sometime in the mid 1970s and happy that she could expand her set.

The glasses originally came in the tumbler seen here, as well as a shorter juice or cocktail glass. I may have found a set online and that set may be on its way to our home.

Most would find them simple. I find them delightful.

It has been an interesting week. Tomorrow is Friday and due to circumstance and the like, have absolutely no plans for the weekend.

I took a few moments to sit with Truman and gaze out the window to ponder the meaning of life. It was nice to enjoy the quiet. He is true to form even when I’m not feeling well, he’ll be nearby to offer support but he’s not going to cuddle.

It’s been a day but all is OK. Earl and I drove a little ways up Mount Lemmon. It was pitch black and a wonderful opportunity to try the night mode on my iPhone 13 Pro.

Today has been an interesting day. Let’s just go with some humor. Here’s a fun scene from “The Golden Girls”.

I took this photo while out for walk in the neighborhood the other night. It was taken about an hour after sunset and it was dark enough in that I couldn’t really see where I was walking without a flashlight. Yet, I decided to snap this photo to see if I could get a picture of the surroundings.

Night mode on the latest iPhone is very impressive. The sky was nowhere near that bright. I like the resulting contrast in the photo.

I fell down a YouTube hole, looking at old clips from radio stations and stumbled across a brief video from June 1993 at WRCK Utica-Rome, New York. Of course, this is where I started my decade long radio career as a weekend DJ and then I filled in for folks during the week. I had started interning in late 1992 with nighttime DJ B.B. Good.

Here’s the video; I’m the one wearing the baseball hat in the first few seconds of the video. B.B. is. running the board and we are coming out of the :20 stop set (commercial break), I recognize the placement of the jingle. The jingle is part of a package from JAM Productions, if I remember correctly it’s called Z World, and was originally produced for Z-100 in New York. When a jingle package is produced for a big radio station like Z-100, it’s essentially syndicated and available for other similarly formatted stations, just with re-sings over the original instrumentals. When I first became Program Director at WOWB/WOWZ we purchased a few Z World jingles before moving to a company out of Seattle called Reelworld Productions.

Anyways, here’s the video from 1993. It’s amazing what one can find on the Internet.