Amy Smith Linton
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Hippy Hoppodays.

12/21/2020

2 Comments

 
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One of my faves.
This time of year, you're apt to overhear a lugubrious but truncated version of "Happy Holidays" around our house.  

Not that Andy Williams doesn't already win in those dubious lugubrious stakes, but ugh, I can't stand that song. One of us will start belting it out and then, if it's me, stop and swear briefly.  Every year, the third week of December rolls around and somehow, this annoying song gets onto my internal jukebox.

And because that's how I play, the words of the song get a quick change-up, so I'll unwittingly start singing, "Hippy Hoppodays!"  only to stop, swear briefly, and try to change the channel.

Without resorting to "The Girl from Ipanema," of course.  

​For instance, I might try for a sarcastic version of "Here comes Santa Claus" or a full-on 39-and-a-half-foot-pole version of "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch."  Thurl Ravenscroft rocks. 
Or possibly the most upbeat offering of the season, Bare Naked Ladies' "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen." 
May your winter holidays be joyful and full of good noise.
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Dreadful Music

5/17/2020

10 Comments

 
A title like that and you're still reading? Bless you! I hope I can make it worthwhile.

As a rule, I prefer to share stuff I adore. Rare finds. Unlikely but likable things. Unexpected pleasures. Books that I think deserve a wider readership, for instance, or experiences that I'd like to encourage others to have.

But that basic human urge to share the other side --the irresistible impulse that says, "Jeepers, this stinks! Sniff it!"  

Is there a Germanic term for this instinct , like schadenfreude? There ought to be.  

It would be generous to imagine that our impulse to share things revolt the senses is like –– as the old phrase has it, trouble shared is trouble halved.

But I don't guess kindness is any part of the underlying motivation. I believe the reason we love sites like cake wrecks and people of Walmart is NOT to reduce the shock one feels. Sharing amplifies that shock but also, like a clever party-goer, scrapes off the offending image or scent onto someone else. Here, look, isn't it awful?!   

So when I say the three worst songs in my music history are as follows, I am not simply trying to entertain. 
I can live with Flock of Seagulls' one hit. And Tony Basil's  "Micky" just makes me smile fondly at those early MTV days. But Toto?

I don't care who covers "Africa."

It's still a tone-deaf ear-wormy catchy damn tune that irritates me down to my cuticles.

This song, plus Europe's "The Final Countdown," and Toto's other smash-me-in-the ear, "Rosanna," make me doubt in the cheering power of pop music.
Sure, it was funny on Anchorman. But the earnest warbling of "Afternoon Delight" so lacks irony or even basic self-awareness... 

And ultimately it's worse, even, than those other two late 70's sex embarrassments, Captain and Tenille's "Muskrat Love" and Paul Anka's awful "Having My Baby."  
Super creepy AND awful, so when you find yourself humming the refrain of "Into the Night," you've become complicit.

Trying to listen to this –– why do I even remember it? see above. The wretched refrain! –– was a toss-up of unpleasantness with the almost-equally miserable "Young Girl, Get Out of My Mind" by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, another pedophilic tune that, oddly, falls right into my vocal range. 
And as a bonus, because back when irreverent reporters waited for results or otherwise idled in the Sports Department of The St. Petersburg Times, the game we played was to pick the line-up for the band that was playing in Hell.

​Karen was always on the skins. 
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Lost Stories

5/8/2020

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File under: stuff you find while looking for something else.  

It's a thing that happens with readers: perhaps we gobble up a couple of dozen books a year (wink wink).

In six years, that's a gross. Fast forward ten or twenty years, and frankly, who knows how many books.  Some books remain vivid, but the majority tend to –– fade. 

Highlights linger like the memory of a dream, fragmented but compelling. Perhaps a title or something about the situation or characters, or the appearance of the book itself will persist. 

And while some people can simply let it go...others will be haunted.
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For many years, my book-loving Mumsie used to tell me about stories she remembered but hadn't had in hand for several decades. She had an ongoing quest to find a copy of The Swish of the Curtain, which she'd adored as a child.
​

It was, she told me, about a group of theater-mad children who staged shows in their English village. She looked for it at every used bookstore, but when I told her I'd located a copy (ah! early days of the internet!), she shied away from actually getting it. She said she didn't want to find it like that. She admitted she'd rather not test her memory of its charms.
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Googling it today, I see that the book was made into a British television series in the 1980's, as well as older "radio plays.'  There are recent paperback editions, and ebook versions. Huh. Turns out Mumsie was not the only one who loved the story. 

Countless other folks are likewise looking or volumes that they only partly remember.

Ask any bookseller or librarian for their war-stories ("It was a suspense novel set in the American Southwest. The cover was yellow. Can you find it?").


Naturally, in these internet days, there are online services that can help.

For a couple of bucks, 
Loganberry Books helps the hive mind focus on your need.

The 
Library of Congress has a page of suggestions for how to find lost books/lost lyrics and more.  The LoC site links to a veritable warren of rabbit holes, by the way, if you are so inclined (declined?) to potter around chasing other people's trails.

​Like this Reddit 
page, this specific one, and so. many. more. <shakes head vigorously>
So if you have a vague recollection of a book about a thing, set in that place? The one you picked up at the Strand bookstore or the long-lost White Horse Books?

You can probably find it if you want to spend a bit of time. 

And if not, man are there some great books out there waiting to be read.  Hit me up for a recommendation if you like.

​Stay safe, friends.
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Odd phobias

4/7/2020

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Everyone knows someone who is irrationally (well, that's all in the perspective, right?) afraid of, say, legless reptiles or eight-legged wall-walkers.

​Not just slightly averse to these creatures, but seriously, panicky, clawing-a-way-out-the-window fearful.  

Each of my parents had one. For my father and his siblings, having survived a canoeing accident as children where they and their mother clung to an overturned boat while long strands of seaweed brushed their legs, the fear was snakes.
Daddo would refer to them as "serpents" because even the word "snakes" was dreadful to him.

While enjoying a spaghetti dinner at our house, a neighborhood kid joshed offhandedly about how it was like red snakes slithering up into our collective mouths. My father dropped his fork in disgust and stalked to the other room.

Toward the end of his life, he'd say that if we really wanted to be rid of him, just toss a plastic serpent into his lap. He promised it would be quick.
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Daddo was not kidding. Probably.
I never noticed Mumsie's issue until that first summer at the cottage. We'd gone to take a quick look at what they had purchased –– waterfront! as is! Bill Bailey blue! furnished with toys and musty furniture! –– on the shore of Lake Ontario. We ended up just staying all summer. Daddo went off to work downstate during the week while the three of us swam and read books and played with the neighbors (each according to her tastes. Mumsie was not much for running around pretending to be horses).

Naturally, given the body of fresh water, the long Northern summer days, and the untenanted nature of the cottage, there were spiders.  But it was a summer cottage. When sweeping, you directed the little pile of debris down that knot-hole in the floor in the hallway. On Thursdays, before Daddo came up, we'd eat ice-cream for supper. It was a Platonic ideal of summer cottage life.

Except for the spiders. One morning, we all scooted out of the house while Mumsie sprayed some sort of aerosolized poison. We must have been gone all day. Or maybe it was stormy when we returned, because while my sister and I, diminutive then, walked into the shadowy cottage without incident, our mother entered to a suspended carpet of deceased arachnids. All hanging at about eye-height from the ceiling. The horror. The horror.
In college, I pestered Mumsie for an explanation.

She had a scientific mind, fearless and nature-loving. 


She rehabilitated birds of prey, talked unhesitatingly about the facts of life, and if you stepped on broken glass and were pretty sure you needed stitches? All the kids knew to skip their own parents and go straight to her. She'd say, mildly, "Oh, don't bleed on the linoleum," and patch you up.  

Grinding over long-term depression and agoraphobia, she held down a job to support herself and her youngest child. She solo-camped as a newly divorced woman in her late 30's. 

​But spiders freaked her the hell out.
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Eventually, she dredged up a memory for me. "It might be this," she said, draping her paperback over her knee. "When I was very little –– on the farm in Springville –– I was playing in the creek."  [The word "creek" in the geography of rural northern Pennsylvania was pronounced "crick." A thing I miss from her.]

She turned her head in the same questing way as when she was trying to recall the details of a dream. "I was splashing the water with a stick and there was an enormous water-spider. I hit it and it burst open and dozens –– hundreds?–– of baby spiders spilled out."


Gulp. Okay then. 

My sister shares the distaste for spiders. We've often agreed that should there be an unfortunate single-car accident in her life, it's a near certainty to have involved a spider emerging from under the dashboard and landing on exposed skin.
I'm not fearful of snakes –– Not wanting to be afraid ever, I seized the opportunity in high school of grabbing up a handful of cold, writhing serpents as they emerged from their winter hibernation.

​I carried the ball of them around at arms length, thinking if I could do this, I was snake-proof for life. Mumsie, gardening a few yards away, said, "Yes, well, put them down before they start biting you."
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It's plastic, okay?
​As for spiders?  I understand they won't actually kill me, but I find it hard to casually look away once I've noticed one nearby. I find their globular bodies shudderingly distasteful.

Be that all as it may. I actually meant to write about weird phobias. There's no shortage of oddity in the world.  And phobias are the most common of mental illnesses.

Mental illness. Huh. ​

​I've felt claustrophobia. Couldn't get into an elevator for two years.  It was a side-effect, I think, of a dreadful boyfriend and asthma.

Once I nearly fainted –– and me a farm kid! –– at the vision of a big splinter protruding from someone else's finger. All the blood and guts in the world, and I was about to keel over from a splinter. I couldn't even help her yank it out. 

But that's pretty mundane stuff. What's more intriguing is the fringier fears.
For instance, I have one friend who cannot bear, to the point of vomit, not just the texture of the cotton plugs found in aspirin bottles -- but even a discussion of the dusty, squeaky cotton found in aspirin bottles. A full-grown man with his fingers in his ears, chanting, "Nah, Nah, I can't hear you!"

Another who runs –– runs! –– from praying mantis. One who cannot shower in an empty house.

​While there's one pal who claims to be petrified of the music produced by the barrel organ, I'm less sure it's fear. Annoyance maybe.  
One of our elders has what's known as "White Coat Anxiety." Whenever confronted with a doctor or medical professional in a clinical environment, her blood pressure goes sky-high.

I worked with a woman who couldn't stand scissors. We'll call her Peg. Another co-worker, Liz, a capricious but observant creature, had noticed that Peg invariably moved books and files so that a pair of shears on a colleague's desk would be hidden from her view
​Peg was not a particularly pleasant work comrade; she tended to hover, to micro-manage, to mouth-breathe and offer unwelcome suggestions on how better to do one's job.  

Liz, a graphic designer, took to asking Peg to hand her the scissors or the Xacto knife she needed when Peg came near her desk. In less than a week, Peg stopped hovering and micromanaging anyone in the graphics department.  

I should be ashamed to admit that I, too, began leaving a pair of shears, gaping open, on my desk in editorial to ward Peg off.  

Harnessing the power of fear.

It's what we're all doing right about now, indulging in our inner germophobia*. Which is fine, unless it's someone else pulling those strings. 
​
*Technically, it's mysophobia or verminophobia but that's just me showing off. 

​Be strong, my friends. 
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On Retreat, on Making Stuff, Onward

3/25/2020

4 Comments

 
Do I even need say that my favorite skipper and I are shut in these days? And that I am not complaining?

So far, so good: despite a near-miss on that cancelled trip to Italy, a nearer-miss on the replacement trip to Manhattan, and even though the head-cold plus a random hot flash FEELS like the onset of Covid-19, we are staying healthy.

Knock wood.

I am grateful that we aren't worried about how to feed our family this week. I'm grateful for a nice window to look out. I'm grateful for the sewing skills imbued in me by my sweet mother-in-law. I'm grateful for the internet. 
Teddy Roosevelt NP old gatehouse
Back in the days of roaming freely...Mr. Linton exploring the old gatehouse at Teddy Roosevelt National Park.
Mr. Linton has been fishing pretty regularly, though because of last summer's red tide, he can't bring anything home. Social distancing is easy on the water. 

And naturally, he has a lot of boat-work to fill his days on shore.  

The two 2.4 Meter boats (one fresh, one experienced) are slowly coming into alignment. Jeff's re-rigged the older boat so that it's indistinguishable from the newer one. Fresh paint, fresh lines, carbon-fiber bits and bobs. He orders stuff on-line and obsessively checks delivery times.  He splices lines while watching Bosch in the evenings.

Given that many of our upcoming regattas have been cancelled, he seems content.
And me, I'm always looking forward to a chunk of time in which to write but as it happens, I've been distracted by real life. It's hard to make up a story more exciting than the news right now.  

So instead, I'm doing a lot of reading (check out my goodreads shelf for the bookwormy details).

​And making stuff.
We're avoiding the grocery store –– taco Tuesday involved some freezer-burned ground beef that I might normally have donated to the fishes, but it tasted fine with the fresh greens from the garden –– and keeping our IRL social distance from the world. I've become a big fan of FaceTime right now for actual social interaction. Yay internet!

I'm hoping to settle into whatever this new normal is and get back to my keyboard sometime soon, but in the the meanwhile, as they say in one of my favorite movies, "Rule #32: Enjoy the little things."
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Wishing you safety and kindness from here...
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Everglades Challenge: On Line

3/3/2020

5 Comments

 
Not unexpectedly, Twobeers has his hands full with plumbing and physics: the core elements of any last-minute boating design challenge.

One asks oneself: How many pounds of foot pressure is required to move a gallon of water up a pipe of diameter x? 

What is the likelihood of the West Marine store producing a promised y-valve?

How long does it take to drive from Davis Islands to St. Petersburg and back during the tourist-enhanced afternoon rush?

These are not particularly difficult questions, but add the element of time tick-tock-tick-tocking to the starting line only four days hence...

Times like this, nobody knows how tempted I am to rush up to my favorite skipper and exclaim, "No man, the BLUE wire! The BLUE wire!"

Of course, he's the hero. A single drop of perspiration may slide down his face as he hesitates with the wire-snips, but he manfully clips the red one and saves the world regardless. 
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But be that as it may.


​Here's a link to the Watertribe Challenger Tracking site (or just click on the picture!).  

​The event starts Saturday morning at dawn. Charlie "Gaajii" Clifton will be official shoreside support, chasing the team by land as they sprint down the state.

We keep our fingers crossed...
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Volcano, Iguana, Finch

2/17/2020

1 Comment

 
According to Henry Nicholls in The Galápagos: A Natural History, part of Charles Darwin's inspiration for his Theory of Evolution came out of bad accounting.

Back in the 1800's, standard operating procedure for a naturalist was to capture and kill any number of small creatures. Pack 'em in salt, pickle 'em, pile 'em into boxes to ship home. All  in the interest of scientific study.

So young Darwin, circling the globe as the resident naturalist aboard The Beagle, harvested hundreds of animal specimens and squirreled away crate after crate of fossils and plants.

But there were so many. As it happened, he neglected to properly label some carcasses from the Galapagos.

No doubt he'd never expected there to be much difference between, say, a dark little finch from Floreana and that other one from nearby Isabela.

Poor guy: back home in chilly England, unpacking box after box of corpses and he discovered the awful truth: his sparrows weren't labeled very well.  

​Or maybe not.

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The story varies.

In any case, Galápagos mockingbirds are also distinctively different from mockingbirds on the mainland. And they are different from one Galápagos island to another.

Which leads, step by painful step, to Darwin's theory of evolution and the eventual publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Phew.

Sidebar drama: Interestingly enough, as a Christian, Darwin was troubled by the implications of what he discovered. However, when a naturalist pal of his, Alfred Wallace, came up with a parallel theory, Darwin's misgivings subsided enough for Darwin to polish up his own manuscript and send it to a publisher. It became an overnight sensation. 

While we were doing our own exploration in the Galápagos (zero collection of specimens, thousands of photos, great guides, and a tidy ship thanks to AdventureLife), we stumbled across a little mockingbird family drama on Floreana. 
I've got a theory or two (as usual) about this scene. It might be a long-held rivalry between the matriarchs who were born sisters but grew to their own greatest rivals.  It might be a fresh incursion between an upstart gang and the Boomer family they rejected.  

Or maybe it's a daily show staged to entrance the tourists –– 14:00-15:20 beached walrus pups, 15:20-15:40 mockingbird display, 15:40-whenever tortoise crossing.



References
lwww.aboutdarwin.com/voyage/voyage03.html
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0014-3820.2006.tb01113.x/full
 
​
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The Would-Be Farm: Mulch

1/27/2020

7 Comments

 
Ah, mulch.

Mulch is the collective noun for material that evolves into actual soil. It's organic material (leaves! bark! wood-chips!) that gets defined by function: it's used to protect tender plants, and add good stuff to the soil.  By etymology, it comes from a word for "soft."

​Wood chips are my preferred mulch at the Farm.
Amy in Orchard
Neem oil in hand, she stalks the orchard...
It's super-neat-o how it works: you apply a layer of wood chips around the base of your plant.

​It smothers weeds and –– rather faster than you might imagine –– the mulch turns into rich, light soil in a sweet ring around around young fruit trees and asparagus. 

The mulch provides extra insulation over the winter, and gives emerging plants a little additional opportunity to stay safe in the chancy spring weather. ​
Mixed in with the native clay of at the Farm, these wood chips (plus whatever other amendments we can find) are the start of the most important rehabilitation of the farm: the ground.

First, understand that soil is made up of two things: minerals and organic material. Minerals can be in the form of a very fine grind like espresso, which makes for heavy clay soil, or a more coarse grind (sand), all the way up to, of course, solid rock.

The organic component includes leaves, roots, decaying matter plus soil microbes and other busy little creatures under the surface.  

There's an ideal mix of minerals and organic material, and it's rare to find it –– especially on a neglected old dairy farm like the Would-Be. The very best soil is rich, airy, full of nutrition and microbial life.

Unlike most of the ground around the Farm.

First line of remedy: a compost pile.
Compost heap
The Would-Be Farm's main compost heap is slightly disguised by a stack of logs.
Where else to pitch coffee grounds and carrot peelings and used chicken bedding from the neighbors' coop?

​Where else to pile grass clippings and weeds?


I took an actual composing class a few years ago. I'm not an expert, though I am a believer.  Long story short: a smart gardener just keeps heaping stuff onto the compost pile, turning it from time to time, and using the finished, good-looking stuff from the bottom of the pile to improve the soil under the plants.

Lucky for my trees,
 a friend had an enormous pile of chipped tree –– the remains of a big ole maple –– to share for mulching purposes.

Truckload by squatting truckload, we've conveyed chips to the farm over the past couple of years. I used square yards of it to coddle my young trees and the asparagus.  A few chips made it into the compost heap, along with mule-loads of grass clippings and eggshells. 

Alas, all good things come to an end.  Even the remains of a big ole maple. 

With chips thin on the ground that autumn, I toted a couple of bales of straw to the farm to bed things down for the winter.  

Always an experiment.  

​I figured straw was a better option than hay.

The terms are used interchangeably by some: after all, both are some sort of dry vegetation that come packaged in bale form and are used in animal husbandry.  

But straw (like the plastic ones we now think of first), is generally the hollow, dry, stalk of an oat or wheat plant. The middle of the plant. Hay, meanwhile, is the tops of various grasses and plants ––  cut green and allowed to dry. Hay might include clover, timothy, broom, alfalfa, and any manner of meadow plants.

Naturally, hay is full of flower-heads. Any gardener will tell you, the point of flowers is seed. So if you aim to smother weeds (and weeds are just plants growing where you don't want them to grow), you do NOT want to spread flower-heads around.

Ipso dipso facto macto, you'd think straw would be a pretty solid choice to protect plants and not compete with the resources at root...
sprouting wheat




sprouting wheat
Surprise surprise surprise.

​The wheat straw made a miraculous rise from the cold soil this spring.
Wheat head
Instead of simply blanketing my sleeping plants and giving itself over to the forces of bacteria and mushrooms, the straw followed its own generative agenda.

Full disclosure: It did seem odd to see actual heads of wheat in the bale last fall, but I didn't take the time to investigate.  

It's always hurry-up time when the cold weather is coming.  
​
Alas. 

via GIPHY

Wheat is a lovely crop. I am not knocking wheat. I'm good with gluten, and I admire wheaten gold waving on an autumn field.  

​But as a crop, it's not a good match for the Would Be Farm. Or a good mulch. I'm guessing it will continue to pop up around my daffodils and plum trees for years. Probably not enough, however, for even a single loaf of artisanal, hand-ground-grain bread.

I vowed not to be caught chipless again.  I've been checking Craig's List a little too regularly. So far, none of the chippers are just right for our needs.  
Until I find the appropriate tractor-powered equipment –– somewhere between "wimpy" and "Fargo" sized––I am obliged to hunt chips where I may. The county maintenance guys have not panned out, nor is there a lively tree-service economy nearby.

Sadly, in June, I ended up paying good money for a truck-load of funky, treated commercial stuff from the local wood-pellet operation.

via GIPHY

In the parlance of our friend Curt, the going rate for a pickup truck-load of dark brown landscaper's friend is a pizza and a half.  ​

​I'd rather have the pizza and make my own dang chips, but as Mumsie used to say, if wishes were horses, and horses could fly, there'd be nothing but horses in the sky... 
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Lazing on a Saturday Afternoon

1/23/2020

2 Comments

 
It's a thing we've enjoyed every now and then now for decades: an afternoon slouch on the couch watching whatever dope crap Jeff selects. 
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Back in our early courting days, we were en couchant watching some Voyage of Sinbad or another.  You remember the kind of movie: claymation, sparkly costumes, "exotic" locales somewhere in the hills east of Hollywood. 

In any case, our heroes were bundled to the teeth, trudging across a featureless frozen sea when Jeff pipes up with, "Oh-oh, watch out for the giant walrus." 

Me: What?

Jeff can flatten the affect right out of his voice so while it seems like a warning, the phrase comes out completely without urgency. He spoke to the television screen again, "Oh, no, look out for the giant walrus,"

Me: What in the world are you talk ––

And at that moment, on the little rounded screen of my apartment's television, an enormous walrus broke through the styrofoam ice and speared one of Sinbad's less fortunate companions with a long tusk.

My astonishment was complete. I said, "You've SEEN this before?!"  Honestly, watching it for the first time seemed faintly ridiculous, but it did have novelty value going for it.

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Little did I know that Jeff's tolerance for ridiculous movies was nearly as deep as my own ability to grouse about them while nestled next to him on the sofa.

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​It's kind of a match made in heaven.
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The Would-Be Farm: I Twig That.

5/7/2019

12 Comments

 
Reluctantly stepping away from the dusty hallway that leads to a discussion of deverbal nouns, I give you the word "twig."

It's a stick, AND it's a verb that means "to understand."  

Okay, maybe just one tiny step down that hallway: twig as a branchy bit of tree derives from Germanic Old English. It's related to the word "twain." As in, to be cleft in two.  

Okay, okay, hustling it along: the verb twig comes either from theives' cant or from Gaelic (not pointing a finger, but come on, English scholars, really?!) "tuig," meaning "to understand."
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Photo courtesy Mary Tone Rodgers.
Twig is also the name of a genre of decoration. Twig tables. Twig chairs. Twig frames.

Those enormous Adirondack camps, white birchbark stuff, bent willow 
rustic chairs? All twig.​

I picked up a reference book on the subject at the library book sale over the winter and took the instructions at face value.
As one does.  

I wanted to construct a couple of chairs for the gazebo, and the book had a nifty-looking pattern.

A folding twig chair based –– so the author claimed –– on a Hopi design. Rugged but comfortable, held together with metal rods that bend slightly to accommodate a rounded human form.

Heaven knows we have plenty of twigs at the Would-Be Farm. And a crafty project is right up the alley for the Farm's stated goal of helping foster fresh neural pathways.

Though it looked "funny" in print, I went ahead and cut the 37 or so pieces of wood –– carefully following the directions.
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Do NOT follow these instructions.
And then re-measured and cut most of them again, using my trusty loppers and a measuring jig Daddo would have been proud to see.

​Precision is not my middle name, but I was quite careful.  
​​It did not work.

At the end of Day 1, I sat on my heels and considered the challenge of threading eleven twigs onto a quarter-inch rod when the neatly bored holes simply did not line up –– by INCHES.

On the second day, following my favorite skipper/rough carpenter's advice, I started with fresh material and drilled holes to fit the threaded rods.

Ah, so much better!

Until it came to the question of legs.

​A full 50% of the chair's legs left unaccounted for.

​The diagram I'd been trying to follow simply did not mention how to incorporate the two back appendages.  

I should not have been surprised.
​
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Even knowing that the instructions were crap, I couldn't help but bemoan the injustice of it.

​Instructions that don't.

Measuring guides that don't.

Reference that isn't.

Jeesh.  

Eventually I wandered over to the square yard or so of good cell coverage at the Would-Be Farm –– in the middle of the field –– and Googled some help. Huh. Common theme of the Amazon reviews of the book:  
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A farther scouring of the inter web revealed many many distractions.

Yet, near the distal reach of the digital universe, a couple of nearly related YouTube videos and websites that at least helped me figure out how to get all four legs integrated into the design. 

Day 2 ended when I tested the chair and inadvertently converted it into a recliner.

No blood no foul, but for pity's sake --! 
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By Day 3, I was grimly determined to best the beast. I studied physics in college. I have been making things by hand and by brain for some years now. I will not be thwarted!
It was so. darned. close. to being there.

Mr. Linton lent his good hand (short story: don't drop a Sunfish. And if you do, don't let your hand be caught underneath the fiberglass boat.) and practical cleverness to the effort. He was the one to suggest using the planks of the deck to square up the legs.

This time when I tested the rake of the chair-back, my own old quads suspended me.

Crouching builder, hidden sand-trap. 

By gum, at the end of Day 3, we had ourselves a twig chair.

A bit battered. Not rated to hold an actual human.  Handy for keeping my gardening gloves off the floor.  

Still, it's a prototype suitable for the next round of construction.   

And I can barely wait to begin again.
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