Over the last year, the Orchard Park Antique Mall has become a favorite place for The Wife and I to spend a few hours. The Sunday before last, we had a couple free hours…and we still ended up rushing through the back parts of the store because our time started running out.
I’ve decided that what I love most about the antique thing is that, while there are familiar things that are always there (several booths of action figures, for example, heavy on the Star Wars), there is always something new, something that’s really pretty unique, something that I’ve never seen before or something that I have seen before but maybe wouldn’t mind buying. You really, truly never know what you’re going to find in antique joints.
Like…a sombrero!
(Yeah, finger on the lens. No idea how I did that. Sorry. But notice the print of comic art down there, next to the sombrero: “But I had to kill her! We wore the same dress!”)
No, I didn’t buy the sombrero. Nor did I want to. It’s the principle of the thing, folks!
Nor did I buy these Toby mugs, although I gazed wistfully upon them for quite a while:
They’re the Three Musketeers, although I’m not sure which is Athos, Porthos or Aramis. Toby mugs are always expensive there…which breaks my heart because I want to own some, really badly. I think that Toby mugs look absolutely awesome. There are always quite a few available at the Antique Mall, but they always go for upwards of $50 or more. Someday!
This bust of Richard Wagner wasn’t there last time:
It had no price on it, oddly. This might have tempted, had it been cheap.
Of course, there are books:
I bought both of these…Phantom for The Daughter, who is hugely into The Phantom of the Opera, and the omnibus of Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels for myself. Huzzah!
And for all the “OMG, I really want that!” which you’ll find in an antique joint, there are also the items that are remarkable in other ways. Such as…this handbag!
Hand-made, never used. French in origin. All the puzzle pieces fall into place!
The Antique Mall is a brightly-lit store of modern look; no dark and dusky alcoves containing items of unknown origin here. But that doesn’t mean that grim things don’t reside there:
AIEEE!
And if you want furniture with mirrors, well, the Antique Mall is the place for you. The mirrors seem faulty, though; every one of ’em seems to be showing some dork in overalls. Buy with caution.
Yeah, I am slowly getting bitten by the antiquing bug!
Time for a few more answers to queries from Ask Me Anything! 2011. This time out I got some questions relating to the overalls, so here are a few of those.
Lynn asks: Can you remember your first pair of overalls? Wax nostalgic.
I can vaguely remember them. I was quite little, in the preschool age, if memory serves. I wore the living heck out of those things. I don’t remember the brand, but I remember that for some weird reason, I liked them tight. No idea why…especially since, for as long as I can remember now, I don’t like tight clothing much at all. I recall that they had the standard buttons to which the buckles fasten, and then there were two atop the bib pocket (like on the pair of Dickies I’m wearing over there, in the sidebar photo in the “Your Humble Narrator” section), and for some reason I thought that the lower buttons were where you hooked the buckles. (Hey, I was four, and I might not have been the intellectual marvel you now know. Stop laughing!) But this practice ended up in one or both of those buttons occasionally ripping off, so my mother was often sewing the stupid thing back on. Until finally they decided that I had outgrown those overalls, and got me a bigger pair. I think.
My overalls memories don’t start becoming more clear until high school and college, when I started wearing them in public. That resulted in a few conversations of the “Huh, I didn’t know you wore overalls” type…and then, people pretty much stopped commenting on them. Of course, this was Iowa, where seeing people in overalls isn’t exactly like seeing rogue pachyderms in Central Park.
And a reader named Jenny sent in a bunch of detail-related queries:
Enquiring minds want to know: Button fly or zipper fly – which do you prefer on overalls? What’s better on the sides of your overalls, 2, 3, or 4 buttons? Whatever your choice, why is that better than the others. Buttons: copper, nickel or other? Which is better? Last question. If you were a late twenties gal like myself, who unfortunately missed the overalls glory years of the 1990s, what brand would you recommend which you can actually get today?
I have to admit that I don’t have a whole lot of preference on details like this! The type of fly doesn’t matter much to me…unless it’s a fake fly entirely, in which case I’ve purchased a pair of overalls from an eBay seller who doesn’t know a man’s pair from a woman’s pair. Yes, this has happened. I thought I’d scored on an awesome pair of white Lee overalls, only to have them turn out to be women’s overalls. The Wife now owns those. They fit her a lot better, anyway.
Side buttons — thinking about it, I’ve never owned a pair with four buttons. That would seem a tad like overkill. Most of mine have two; three was more prevalent on pairs from places like Gap and Old Navy, back in the 90s when overalls were popular. I used to own six or seven pairs from Gap, but I scaled that back when I lost quite a bit of weight a few years ago, and now the only Gap overalls that I own are the ones pictured in the sidebar pic at the bottom (the one where I’m wearing the green tie-dyed hoodie). Those have two side buttons, actually, as do my Dickies, Lee, and Key overalls. Generally I leave the top pair of buttons unfastened, for comfort reasons.
As to the metal comprising the buttons — I generally don’t care about that, either. My Gap overalls have silver hardware; my Dickies mostly have dark bronze-colored hardware; my Lee and Key overalls have gold hardware. Again, no real preference here.
I will say, though, that in general I like overalls that look functional; like they’re actual workwear or could be. The “busier” they look, the less I like them (which is why I don’t own any pairs by Liberty; there’s just too much going on there on the bib). I just like them basic, and comfortable.
As for recommending overalls for women, well…I know they’re starting to show up in stores again now, but I don’t really know what brands are out there. Personally, though, I’d just recommend going the vintage route. Clothes from the 90s could be considered “vintage” now, right? I’m putty in The Wife’s hands when she wears a pair of these Old Navy overalls, and my favorites ever on her are these Gap ones. Or you could go really vintage, as this blogger did, with great results.
Remember the short story where the Prince aspires to the Princess’s hand, so the King has the Prince stand before two doors, one of which leads to the Princess and marriage whilst the other leads to a really hungry tiger? And how the story ends as the Prince chooses his door and opens it? And how the story leaves unanswered the question as to which door he opened?
No?
OK, forget it.
(On a more boring note, I’d love to be able to wear these overalls in public, but there’s a hole in the butt. No, I didn’t split them, they came that way when I bought them on eBay.)
In accordance with my complete lack of interest in what constitutes “fashion”, I have apparently been committing a possible fashion no-no for years, in the form of the “Double Denim”. This is a denim top coupled with denim pants. I, of course, take it one step farther by wearing the denim shirt under denim overalls (albeit hickory striped, in this case). But in general, I fail to see what this woman is doing wrong by pairing denim with denim…or this one (dance step aside)…and then there’s…well, you get the idea.
Generally, I like the way denim feels, so why not pair it? Double denim rules!
UPDATE: I would later don double denim — this same denim shirt with another pair of overalls — for my 40th-birthday pies in the face. Double denim still rules!
I don’t do this sort of thing very often at all…in fact, I almost never do it. I’m talking about sneaking photos of complete strangers when I’m out and about…and especially not when I’m at work. It just always seems a bit underhanded to do that, although lots of folks do it so maybe it just falls under the category of “people watching”. But anyway, I was at work the other day, wandering about The Store taking care of maintenance issues, when I saw these two guys doing their shopping, I suppose for stuff for Christmas dinner or some such. And, well, my jaw dropped, because…well….
It turns out that I’m not the only long-haired wearer of overalls in the Buffalo area. Huzzah!!!
(Yeah, could be they were just in town, visiting from someplace else. It’s not like I was gonna charge up to the guy and start quizzing him, because I’m not a creepy stalker type. Unless George Lucas, Gillian Anderson, or Sela Ward walk in. Then, all bets are off.)
:: Some years ago — I don’t recall how long — I read the first few volumes in Lois McMaster Bujold’s series of books on the adventures of a man named Miles Vorkosigan. I’m not sure that the series has an “official” name, so for my purposes, I’ll call it the Vorkosigan Chronicles. I’d been hearing about these books for years; it consists of a long series of self-contained novels about Miles Vorkosigan and the people around him, and every time a new book in the sequence would come out, I’d see a flurry of discussion in various forums online as fans of Bujold’s books devoured her latest offering.
This is one of those series where there tends to be a bit of diverging opinion as to the “best” order in which to read the books. One can read them in “story order”, meaning, reading the books in the order that the events within take place; or, one can read them in the order in which the books were published. In truth…I’m not sure which order I went with. Baen Books has reprinted the novels over the last few years in omnibus editions that gather two or three at a time, making it easy to read the books more-or-less in story order, or so I think. Anyway, I started with Cordelia’s Honor, which gathers two novels, Shards of Honor and Barrayar, which tell the story of how Miles’s parents come together and have their famous son. So I read a book consisting of two books, out of publication order.
You can see how this gets a bit confusing.
Anyway, this was the second time I had read Cordelia’s Honor. The first time, I liked the book just fine…but I wasn’t sure I understood the wild love that fans have for the series. I found it genial enough, but I wasn’t overwhelmed. I later read The Warrior’s Apprentice, the first actual book about Miles himself, as part of the omnibus Young Miles. That one, too, I enjoyed…but wasn’t overwhelmed.
So why did I decide to return to the Vorkosigan Chronicles? Well, even though I wasn’t wowed by it, I did like it, and always meant to get back to it. But I’d waited long enough that I figured I pretty much didn’t remember enough of it to keep going, so I figured I’d best start over at the beginning. Which meant going back to Cordelia’s Honor. And this time, I was wowed by the book.
I’m finding that this happens a lot for me when I return to books some years later, especially SF books that I either didn’t dislike but also didn’t find fantastic the first time around. I chalk this up to the fact that I’m a more experienced SF reader now than I was even five, six, seven years ago. I find it easier to pick up on certain SF tropes now than I used to, which makes it a lot easier to read some of these books.
But maybe this shouldn’t have mattered so much in the case of Cordelia’s Honor, as the book is very character-driven. At no point did I get a feeling that I was reading the unfolding of a plot, but rather following the actions of a group of characters, some of whom are deeply sympathetic and some of whom are…deeply not. As the book opens, Captain Cordelia Naismith is commanding a scientific expedition on some planet when her group is attacked by soldiers from the militaristic world of Barrayar. Left behind by her fleeing co-workers, she finds herself depending on the similarly-stranded Barrayaran officer Aral Vorkosigan for her survival. Cordelia is from Beta Colony, a rival world of Barrayar, and as the two work together to survive, they discover plots afoot…and increasingly complex feelings for one another.
I don’t want to give away much, since the story twists and turns in a lot of fascinating ways, but it’s no spoiler to note that eventually Cordelia gives birth to young Miles Vorkosigan, who will be the hero of all the books and stories in the series to come. Miles, though, is not without his own set of challenges; for reasons outlined in Barrayar, Miles is born with his growth stunted and with extremely brittle bones that are constantly breaking. In short, Miles is the last kind of son a man would wish to have in a heavily militaristic society. I look forward to reading how Miles overcomes these challenges in the books ahead; just from the two volumes presented in Cordelia’s Honor, I can tell that Bujold’s approach is to create engaging, sympathetic characters and then put them through hell.
:: Another book that I probably should have read long before this is Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which was published in 1962 and won the Newbery Award. [CORRECTION: Until just today, I always thought that the famed award for Childrens’ Literature was spelled “Nerberry”. It’s actually “Newbery”. Thanks to the reader who pointed this out — that reader being none other than my retired librarian mother. Thanks, Mom!] I had no idea at all what to expect from this book, but even so, it defied the few expectations I had. I expected fantasy, but the book is much more strongly science fictional than fantastic in nature (even taking into account the forever-shifting dividing line between SF and fantasy). As with many books involving children as protagonists, the heroes are misfits — generally unpopular at school and not understood by anyone except for a couple of their peers. They are whisked away on an improbably adventure, this one to rescue their father, who has been missing for years and whom most believe to have basically run off, either with a mistress or for some other reason.
What makes A Wrinkle in Time compelling, in addition to well-done characters, is the ominous tone struck throughout the book, and the fact that it’s so overtly SF. Among books published today, I don’t see a whole lot of SF for kids, but there’s so much in Wrinkle that is SFnal that I end up wondering anew when it was that kids turned away from SF, or had SF turn away from them. Nowadays, it seems that the only real SF-type stuff kids ever see aimed at kids are a lot of Star Wars materials and superhero stories.
Anyway, I’m not sure how A Wrinkle in Time managed to elude me all these years, but I’m glad to have it off my “I should read that sometime” list. Now to track down the others in the sequence.
:: Way back when we were in college, The Girlfriend (now The Wife) bought a goofy book called 14000 Things to be Happy About. And that’s exactly what it is: a giant list of 14000 things you should be happy about.
Obviously you don’t just read this thing cover to cover. That way, madness lies. Instead, you dip, here and there, finding things you’re already happy about, or that you should be happy about, or things that you’d be happy about if you were certifiably insane.
Of course, I’d be silly to read anything into this, but it tickles me nonetheless to see two of my favorite things on the same page, out of 14000:
Of course, I’m ambivalent about unbuttered green beans, and I’m not sure why I should find appeal in the rattling of garbage cans, but bib overalls and pie throwing? I’m there!
More book notes, as always, as I read more books….
Christmas has come and gone for another year, as it always does. As always, it was full of a lot of beauty and a little stuff that wasn’t so beautiful, but we’ll concentrate on the good, OK? Because I’m sure that none of you were naughty this year.
Or something like that….
The Christmas season for us began, as it does for a lot of folks, on the weekend after Thanksgiving. After an activity-filled Black Friday, we continued with the next day, traveling to my “ancestral” home in Allegany, NY, where my parents live.
This is the house where I grew up — at least, from June 1981 onward. The house didn’t always look like that; when my parents bought it there were no trees on the lot at all, and the house still had its original siding. In those first few years my parents did a lot of tree-planting. That big pine there, the one that dwarfs the house? My parents bought that at my request one day at some nursery when I decided that I wanted a tree, too. They further humored me by planting it right outside my bedroom window. Now that tree is so enormous that you can’t even see out that bedroom window anymore.
After that, the holiday season settled into a bit of routine, but it was pretty busy. There were a lot of church functions to attend: potluck dinners, Christmas pageant rehearsals for The Daughter, Christmas parties, and so on. Here’s our church’s roof after the first big snowfall of the year:
And there was the quarterly Used Book Sale at the library:
This stack is just what I bought for myself. The total I spent on these, plus books for The Wife and The Daughter? Fourteen bucks. God, I love the library book sale!
There was the sudden realization that I needed to buy new work boots:
I spent some time this Holiday season wondering about the aging process. Part of this is natural — I am almost 40, after all — but part of it was brought on by an odd lady at the library who actually asked me if I had kids approaching me thinking that I’m Santa. Huh?
I know that a gray or even white beard is on the way, but I’m not there yet! And I keep my beard fairly short. Portly guy plus beard of any color equals Santa? Huh? Should I therefore suspect that if I were to lose a lot of weight, I could look like Jesus?
Well…what else? There was one day when we were driving home and the sunset was behind us:
And there was the day I had to drive home through Bills-game traffic, including a bus destined for wherever “Test Pattern” is:
And of course, no matter how busy the Holiday season gets, one must always take time for kitties.
I spent a muchly-deserved, muchly-anticipated long weekend over the Thanksgiving holiday. It was a great time. Details and photos and such after the break. This is a “daily life” type of post, with a bunch of photos. But there’s also a punchline at the end which you may find amusing, if you’ve ever thought I warranted some kind of “just desserts”….
Thanksgiving Morning here at Casa Jaquandor is a lazy affair. The Wife and I are often quite tired heading into this particular weekend, as our jobs both tend to pick up and become very hectic as the Holiday Season approaches. We’re always grateful to have a morning that consists of lazing about, watching the Macy’s Parade, drinking coffee, and eating donuts. It’s especially relaxing because…we don’t cook T-giving dinner.
For the last five or six years, our tradition on Thanksgiving has been to eat out. With my parents not really feeling like cooking the massive meal anymore, and with their drive to our home being about an hour, we’ve decided it’s best just to go to a local restaurant. We tried a couple of different places early on, and were disappointed, but then The Wife and I discovered Danny’s a few years back. We first went there on an October night several years ago, whereupon we discovered that they were open for Thanksgiving with special meals, including a turkey dinner. We loved their set-up, and we had a winner. So that’s where we go. This year, they did away with the “special Thanksgiving menu” and instead set up a buffet line, with all the usual Thanksgiving selections. (Almost all, actually — The Wife didn’t get her beloved green bean casserole.)
After the mid-afternoon meal (when we sat down, the Lions led the Patriots 17-10, but when we left, the Patriots had won 45-24), my parents absconded with The Daughter for a couple of days at their home, allowing The Wife and I some quality time together. This was extremely welcome! The Wife and I have, in the past, found it entirely too easy to lose sight of making time for one another — especially since for years we’ve worked opposite shifts at our respective jobs — so now, we tend to aggressively plan our time together and make the most of it when it comes. And we crammed a lot into the 48 hours we had together!
After T-giving dinner, it’s become our own little tradition to go to a movie. This year we selected Unstoppable, the runaway-train movie with Denzel Washington and Chris Pine. But since the show-time was still ninety minutes away, we were able to run home and change into more comfortable clothes.
Among the many virtues of bib overalls is that of all pants, they are by far the most comfortable to wear in the hours following an enormous meal.
So we went to see Unstoppable, which we loved. I’ll have a full review of the movie up sometime soon, but I do want to note that the Regal Cinemas in the new addition at the Walden Galleria Mall is a great place to see a movie. They’ve somehow made the concept of stadium seating even better, with seats that rock a bit and armrests/cupholders that swing up and out of the way, which makes for easier hand-holding with one’s sweetie during a movie. Yay! (We tend to like the action pictures on T-giving Day. Not sure why.)
The next morning, of course, was Black Friday. We’re not the types who go out at four in the morning to find the best deals on stuff; we do go out shopping a bit, but later on, after more morning relaxing and coffee.
Later on we ventured out to do some shopping. JCPenney (clothes for the kid), Barnes&Noble (book ideas for the kid — but none purchased), JoAnn Fabrics (sewing supplies for some of The Wife’s projects), Home Depot (bought a Dremel 4000 rotary tool, huzzah!), and a few other stops. We had lunch at Panera Bread, where I looked kind of bored:
We also planned to make a nice dinner that night of steak, and squash, so it was off to a grocery store to pick up those items among a few others, including…three coconut cream pies.
More on the pies later….
But amidst all of this, we were also having some frustration with a local tire dealer. Our minivan needed new tires, and to make a long story short, The Wife got a quote for new tires several weeks ago, and then, in the intervening period, the tire place changed managers. This new guy proceeded to muck things up to the point that next time we’ll just go someplace else. (For the locals: it wasn’t Dunn Tire. Not going there in the first place was probably our first mistake.) This manager guy started off by telling us he would honor the quoted price, then said that he could only honor the quoted price if we got the same identical tires as last time (which weren’t in stock), then told us he couldn’t honor that quoted price unless we could prove, with receipts, that we’d had the previous tires properly rotated every…however long it is you’re supposed to allow to transpire between tire rotations.
Anyway, The Wife got more and more angry until the guy finally got all apologetic and offered a $100 discount for the “miscommunication”, but we’re still unhappy and do not plan to go back. I love it when management people blatantly screw up and try to blame it on a “miscommunication”. Ugh!
During all of this, lake-effect snows started to move into the region, for the first real snowfall of the winter.
To give an idea of how quickly the snow bands can move at times, this intersection — about 2 miles from Casa Jaquandor, the corners of Southwestern Blvd. and Milestrip Rd. — looked like this ten minutes after I had driven through it the first time. That’s what can happen in Buffalo, folks! It’s been a very mild winter thus far — the one day before this that we “had snow”, a couple weeks ago, it was an overnight dusting that had already melted by the time we got up.
Now, however, the “blustery” has arrived.
Our other main shopping destination that day was the Orchard Park Antique Mall, which is a big store that is full of antiques, offered by different dealers. We spent close to two hours there, that’s how big and fascinating a place it is — you can find everything there from beautiful antique jewelry to vintage action figures to old books to old furniture. Just an amazing place.
And in any antique store, you can find lots of questionable stuff as well. At one point we saw a set of glow-in-the-dark plastic figurines from the Casper the Friendly Ghost movie that came out in the 1990s. The Wife and I recoiled in horror, because these figurines were a tie-in item when we worked at Pizza Hut. Aieee!
And then there are things which are well-nigh inexplicable:
I do not want to know.
After that — about five o’clock — we went to pick up the completed minivan and returned home for our steak dinner. Later on we drank some wine, we watched The Man with the Golden Gun…and we attended to the matter of those three coconut cream pies.
Obviously we couldn’t eat three entire coconut cream pies — not just the two of us, at any rate. So, to what use did we put them? Where did those pies end up?
Well…here’s where they ended up:
Yup. All three, in my face.
What can I say? I’m a sucker for a pie in the face. This is a fate that befalls me every once in a while, and as my good friend Belladonna once said, “It’s a bit of a rediculous tradition I suppose, but it has been fun and keeps me from taking myself too seriously!”
The holidays can be a deeply emotional, and for some folks, troublesome time of year. I find that getting hit in the face with a pie is a good antidote to that. Yes, I believe in “pie in the face therapy”. Hey, it can’t be any less effective than some other “therapies” out there!
Here’s how it went down:
I hope your Black Friday was as much fun as ours (new tires notwithstanding)!
UPDATE: No, this wasn’t the first time I’ve been pied. My last pieing can be found here. (Ignore the date on that post — I backdated it to keep it hidden as a kind of “easter egg” for people who went digging around for it. Now, I figure, why hide it?)
