This Is Drivel

My brother sent me a photo of a Tom Thumb toy typewriter he spotted in an antique mall, apparently because he knows how I geek out over typewriters. That’s the only explanation I can think of, anyway. I don’t have a Tom Thumb in my “collection” yet, mostly because the only places I’ve seen them are in antique malls with price tags on them that make my eyes pop out on springs and waggle around in the air in front of my face!

I say collection in quotes because I don’t collect typewriters so much as snatch them up whenever I find one at a garage sale or in a thrift store and I have enough cash in my wallet to walk away with it. Collectors are people who can tell you a typewriter’s history just by looking at it and know its market value to within ten dollars. When I look at a typewriter, the only thing I can tell you is whether or not I think it’s cool. I’m just a geek.

My Auntie Sue snagged a Tom Thumb just like this one at an estate sale and I think she said she only paid something like five or ten dollars for it – whatever the price was, it made my eyes pop out & waggle, etc.

Today was bike to work week. I biked to work. I biked to work every day this week except Thursday, when I took the car to work only because I had to go to a medical appointment later in the day.

I still didn’t get a t-shirt.

So, nuts to you, bike to work week.

This, my friend, is a space ship. You may have seen space ships on television and at the movies flashing through the skies, piloted by steely-eyed men who flew by the seats of their pants. It makes for pretty good drama. The difference between those space ships and the one in this photo, though, and the difference is somewhat significant, is that this one is real.

In fact, I’ve seen it, or at least the pointy part of it, where the people sat. It’s an exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science & Industry, just a few hours’ drive from where I’m sitting on my skinny butt typing these words. Think of that. There’s a space ship on display in a museum. An artifact of history, sitting where I could walk up to it and press my nose against the window to get a good look inside. Makes me just about wet myself to recall the memory.

Even weirder, it’s an old space ship. They built this jalopy about forty-five years ago. You don’t see too many cars on the road any more that are as old as forty-five. I was barely tall enough to ride the Tilt-A-Whirl when three guys flew this thing around the moon over the Christmas holiday in 1968. They flew a couple laps around it, taking pictures and putting on a little television show that I must have watched, because astronauts were my thing back then. I wish I could remember it, but the brain cells that were entrusted with that memory must have withered away many moons ago. Hah. Moons. I didn’t even mean to do that.

There isn’t a space ship in the world now that can do what this old can did back then. Bummer.

About six months ago my old cell phone went on the fritz and I’m so lazy that I didn’t get around to replacing it for a long time. So long, in fact, that my service provider, Virgin Mobile, closed my account and gave my phone number to somebody else. But it’s a pay as you go plan, so I didn’t get too torqued up about it.

When I got a new cell phone and a new phone number I didn’t tell any more than two or three people because, again, I’m lazy. I mostly call My Darling B and that’s it, so why would I want to tell anyone else, right?

But my brother, one of the three people who ever send me text messages, kept sending to my old phone number because, once again, and for the last time, I’m lazy and didn’t tell him that wasn’t my number. I probably should’ve told him. Because this is what happened.

It rained this afternoon. Not all afternoon, just for the fifteen minutes or so right in the middle of my thirty-minute bike ride home. Right. Square. In. The Middle.

I thought I was going to miss the worst of it when I was about halfway home. I could plainly see the storm brewing way out across the lake and thought, “That’s miles away! It’ll never get way over her before I’m home and dry!” Then it came rampaging across the lake, throwing up whitecaps where the winds tore at the water. Because I was pedaling past Olin Park at the time, I had an unobstructed view of the monster. Made me pedal faster. And then faster still. And even faster than before. Pretty soon, I was really hauling ass.

To no avail. It started raining cats and dogs as I reached the north side of Monona. I hid out under the eaves of a shop, hoping the worst of it would blow over. When it looked like it did I made a dash for it, and five minutes later I was slogging through sheets of rain that didn’t let up until I was just a hundred yards or so from my front door.

Fifteen minutes after I peeled out of my sticky clothes, the sun was out and the birdies were singing again. Damn.

Today is the first day of Bike To Work Week. Coincidentally, I rode my bike to work. Didn’t get a t-shirt, though, for some reason.

There are going to be so many raspberries in the back yard this summer! I went back to pull some weeds in the back corner of the yard where there used to be a stand of lilac bushes until I cut them all to the ground so My Darling B could enlarge her garden. There’s one little strip outside the fence, though, where I couldn’t dig out all the stumps, so I just left them to rot, but until they do I can’t mow back there, so I have to clear the weeds out by hand.

One of our neighbors has a big raspberry patch in the corner of her yard that’s right up against the corner of our yard where the lilacs used to be. She told us she’s been growing raspberries in that patch for something like 47 years. Shortly after B put her garden in, the raspberries began to pop up all along the fence line, so she encouraged them a little and they pretty much took over half of the back fence. Last year we brought in quite an impressively large crop of raspberries from those few canes.

And I noticed that the raspberries were volunteering in the corner of the yard where the lilacs used to be, so I kept it weeded by pulling up the garlic mustard and covering the ground with lots of straw. This year there are even more raspberry canes popping up, and they’re marching up the lot line toward the house. In a couple more years, if we keep encouraging them, we ought to preserve enough raspberries to have jam on toast every morning all winter long.

Singing along with Manfred Man’s version of Blinded By The Light on the way home from the hardware store:

She was blinded by the light
Wreck up like a douche under the rover of the night
Blinded by the light
Wreck up like a douche under the rover of the night

Some silicone sister with a man of Jemister
Told me I got what it takes
She said, “I’ll turn you all son into something strong
With a teenage coffee break.”

What? That’s not how you sing it?

This is one of the few pop-culture mysteries I haven’t tried to solve by looking it up on the internet. I looked up the words to songs like Elton John’s Bennie and the Jets because I never heard anything that sounded like words in the first place, except for the title. And I looked up the words to songs like Paul Simon’s All Around The World because we just had to know if he was really saying “Well the lights go up and the lights go down, Elvis is a watermelon” (he wasn’t – it was “ever since the watermelon,” of course).

But I’ll never look up the words to Blinded By The Light because the words I learned are the words I want to stay with me the rest of my life. I mean, if “calliope crashed to the ground” isn’t in there, I don’t want to know it. That’s one of the most awesome mental pictures ever.

(No, I have no idea what a man of Jemister would be. Somebody from a very exotic country, possibly in the middle east, or perhaps he works for a mysterious government agency.)

It didn’t rain last night. This is the first weekend in about a month that the lawn is not too wet to mow, so you know where I’ll be all day. Let the yard work begin!

The third batch of beer brewed this year is BOTTLED! And, if I may say so myself, it tastes pretty darned good.

I brewed this one thinking that I wanted it to be a little darker and a little maltier than the first one, but I still wanted a zingy hop flavor, so I threw in plenty of Newport hops. That turned out to be a pretty good idea – the bitter hops were strong enough to counterbalance the sweet malt. Very yummy.