The Elephant's Child

Writing Notes.

The Lost Art of the Thank You Note. 

I've been the recipient of some very kind gifts and other nice favors done for me. A friend, knowing that money was tight for us, shipped us some coffee beans and a coffee grinder.  Another friend gifted me with a book for my Kindle that she knew I didn't want to have to wait for from library. 

I can't often return the favor, nor can I often buy little gifts or suprises for friends and family like I might wish to do.  But I try to remember to write thank you notes.  I don't always remember.  And I don't always write them by hand; sometimes I send an email.  I'm not perfect.

There is something lovely about handwriting a note, though.  Not only is it a treat for the recipient, but you yourself gain a few moments of respite by sitting down at a sunny table with a cup of coffee or glass of wine and doing the deed.  Plus, it gives you an excuse to buy pretty paper or thank you cards and interesting stamps. 

 

My Husband's Been Keeping A Secret.

I'm cleaning out the media cabinet.  There is an awful lot in there that hasn't been listened to for a long, long time.   I expected that.  But I did not expect this:

You've got some 'splaining to do, Mad Musician!

 

Real Men, By The Numbers.

If half the men twice his age were one-quarter the man he is, the world would be a much better place for women and a much safer place for children.

He's less an aberration than he thinks, although he's got more courage than most.  Most who feel the way he does find themselves plunging along the free-fall of hook-ups and privileges taken for no recompense, arms flailing, and give up, beaten and defeated by the beastly horde, only turning to look at the wreckage when years have winged by and nothing can be changed.

Stand for something, men.  If you can't stand for at least this, how can you expect any woman to respect and love you?

Why?

The 1950s owes us a blanket apology for crimes against food:

The Unbearable Sadness of Vegetables. 

(Scroll down for page navigation.)

Not sure they did much better with meat.

Delightful Disneyland.

I went to Disneyland twice as a little kid, and Jen's (of Cake Wrecks! Yay!) post about her recent trip makes me really rather want to go again, this time as an Americana-and-all-things-vintage lover.

I have no real desire to go to Disney World.  Too big!  But Disneyland is smaller and I have fabulous memories of my trips there as a child.  As I read Jen's post, it seems Disneyland has kept its old-school Disney-ness better.

I'm always fascinated by the activities, inventions, creations, art, food, music and well, everything that is uniquely American.  And Jen's descriptions of the lovely people who work there: what a bright spot in a world where things seem to get meaner and stupider each day.

A Pictoral Study of Increasing Portion Size.

On the left, a modern Corelle "dinner plate".  On the right, a 100-year-old porcelain "dinner plate."  The modern one has a 7-1/2" diameter eating surface and the century-old plate has a 6" diameter eating surface.

Promised Pictures and a Decision.

I've been debating whether to start using this china as my "everyday dishes." Special things don't get enjoyed when they're packed away in the attic. On the other hand, my brief research shows this set dates from between 1884 and 1909, and the thought of gradually breaking every piece through ordinary use makes me sad.  It's fine, real porcelain, too.  If you hold the plates up to the window you can see light through them. Oh, they're really not my style.  In fact, I'll bet all my dear families are right this very minute having hysterics at the thought of ME! using plates so delicate, so pink, so gold-trimmed.  Flowers! Horrors! These plates are like the dress my mother keeps threatening to bury me in if the good Lord takes me home before He does her.

The set was given to me by a dear friend from the church Mad Musician and I were married at.  Norma was of a generation two generations removed from me, but from her I learned to love doing things the right and proper way, from setting a nice table for the choir's Christmas dinner, to dressing properly but utterly timelessly for church, to how to fill and adjust finicky oil-filled church candles.  When she and her husband Ed moved from their large Craftsman bungalow in the old previously-German area of Milwaukee and into a small apartment, she gave me this china.  It had been Ed's mother's wedding china. There are five complete place settings, and various partial place settings, and many, many serving pieces, including platters, covered bowls, open bowls, and a gravy boat.

So.  After two days of mulling things over, I've made a decision, and today I climbed up to the attic to retrieve the two boxes all this china has all been packed in since our move nearly five years ago.  I unpacked the place settings, and put aside four complete place settings.  These I carefully re-packed back in their boxes.  That left me with five saucers, one bowl, three dinner plates,  and five luncheon plates (we'd call them dessert plates nowadays) which I washed up to use for every day.  I left the fifth coffee cup packed up.  It will serve as a spare for the four complete place settings that will go back in the attic.  It's just too darn delicate to have out with a child in the house.  The cups are even more translucent than the plates. 

Next week: a similar decision to be made on a four-place setting jade green tea & dessert set, enameled with gilt dragons and with mother of pearl interior glaze from the 1904 World's Fair, also a gift from dear Norma.

Backing Up's So Hard To Do.

Aren't you glad you bought an iPad?

Knees.

In the 1940s, we had knees. What happened to the knees?  I noticed, watching Sparkle Kitty play outside in her Easter dress, which is above-the-knee in length, that she could run and jump freely in her dress, and the dress didn't suffer from being played in outside, either.

It made me wistful for a more innocent day, when girls could wear short little play dresses a little more freely.

Most little girls' dress styles are reserved for dressy nowadays, and they're long - usually to the mid-shin.  Even the sweet knit play dresses that merchants like Lands' End and Hanna Andersson sell are below the knee or are pictured as being worn with leggings underneath them.

I'm Free! Free at Last!

I'm going to give Songbird a run and see how I like it.  I'm so sick of iTunes.  Not only do I have a fair amount of general unease about Apple products, but iTunes won't cycle through all my podcast subscriptions.  How hard is it to simply go back to the first one after you toggle to the end?  But noooooooo.  You have to click, click, click, click back through the pages to the first one in your list.

It's idiotic. If there's a better way to navigate, I haven't found it in two years of running iTunes. 

I've never found iTunes to be intuitive to use. Firefox practically runs itself.  Every time Google Labs launches something new, it "thinks" like a Google product, so you can find your way around it with reasonable ease even if you've never used it before.  Not so iTunes.

One would think that Apple, if they're really the computer and technology geniuses that everyone says they are, could make iTunes so incredibly awesome that PC users would be instantly converted to the incredible coolness and techie cachet of Apple's gleaming whiteness, toss their black-cased Dell-built computers and grovel at the doorsteps of the nearest Apple store. Nope.  iTunes is big and slow and bulky and, sorry to say, stupid.  It even looks stupid, like the dialog box for the installation disk of an old CD-ROM game.

With iTunes, I fought for days and trawled untold forums to figure out how to subscribe to the podcast feed of one free internet radio show that didn't come up via searching from the iTunes store, before I found, buried two menus deep, where to put in the address of the feed.

Just now it took me about 10 seconds to do the same thing in Songbird, and I didn't even need to look in the help topics. 

I don't care how "cool" Apple is.  At this point, I don't even care if their systems actually do work "better" than PCs (as long as you don't try to install third-party applications that Apple doesn't like, that is. All your base are belong to use, sucker, even though you paid for the product.) 

I just hate them on general principles now.