Presenting, without comment, some recent photographic documentation of my various atrocities….
Herringbone
So, I have a lot of overalls. Probably too many, but shhhh! Don’t tell anyone I even partially admitted that. But yeah, I’ve got quite a few pairs of overalls. Blue, Hickory striped, white, black, green, brown, and even a couple of pairs that I dyed purple. And now I have a pair of herringbone overalls! Color me excited!
There they are! The brand is Key, which are distinctive for the bib pocket that peaks in the middle and has a snap enclosure on one side, and for the green diagonal label that reads “KEY Imperial — Aristocrat of Overalls”. Key also matches the green label with accent stitching that’s also green, on the pencil openings and the watch-fob button-hole thing at the top of the bib. I already own three pairs of Keys, one in blue and two in Hickory stripes (one of which is one of the pairs I dyed purple). So what’s this about herringbone?
From a distance, they look like they’re either Hickory striped or just a light grayish-blue. It’s when you get close up that you see the pattern:
Lots of tiny blue-and-white stitches, alternating diagonally up and down. They look really cool, and I’m thrilled that I finally spotted a pair in my size on eBay. I never knew this fabric existed until I saw them while in college in Iowa, back in the early 90s, and I did get a pair way back then, but that pair was quite a bit larger than these, as I was quite a bit larger back then than now. I ditched that old pair years ago, and only decided some months ago to start looking for a new one. The problem was that Key (and other manufacturers) stopped using the herringbone fabric a long time ago, so herringbone overalls are increasingly difficult to track down. Nevertheless, my search finally came to an end a couple of weeks back. Huzzah!
Even better was that I got a really nice price on these, and they were new with the original tags still attached. For vintage overalls, that’s especially sweet.
That tag is pretty interesting. The “79.8 percent tougher” figure, for instance — how did they determine that, I wonder, and how did they come to that level of precision? And the little hole through which you can view the “Original Keyweave Denim”, as if you can’t see it all around the tag! Advertising and sales claims from earlier times are always interesting to behold.
Anyway, I’m thrilled to have this rather unusual type of denim represented in my overalls collection. I look forward to wearing them out and about…perhaps paired with a burgundy sweater and my blue star-map scarf. Overalls are life!
Share This Post
Instaweeks
Recent photographic dispatches from my little crazy corner of the world….
Dog shadow.
Yeah, we really need to find a natural predator for these little bastards.
I don’t know what I was drinking, but it made me happy!
These are…OK. Not awesome. I don’t regret them, but one package is enough.
The sun coming up over Casa Jaquandor.
Nice doggie. Nice. (I’m still not sold on this whole “dog” business, though.)
Reflections of a writer.
When this dog gets up a head of steam, it’s impressive to watch. Interesting, he was apparently a poor racer in his brief career, never placing higher than 7th!
No, I have no idea what makes a normal battery a QUANTUM BATTERY. I used this one at work for a wall clock, which seems an inadequate use of a QUANTUM BATTERY.
Leaving a pen in the work pants turns out to have not been the best thing in the world to do. Luckily none of my shirts were rendered unwearable, but some of them do sport a few dark spots that weren’t there before. Luckily they’re already dark, and in some cases the spots will be hidden when I inevitably wear those shirts beneath a pair of overalls.
Peanut-butter-filled pretzels. These things are like crack to me. Seriously, they should be a controlled substance with a street value!
Another sunrise at work. Morning skies are always amazing there.
Two brothers, looking out the back door.
Still working….
Cane has to smell my car whenever he goes for a walk. I don’t know why, but it’s the first order of business whenever it’s walk-time!
I took The Daughter to our favorite local outside burger joint the other night. That little white light behind the sign? That’s the moon.
The WNY countryside as autumn harvest time looms!
At long last, sweaters-and-overalls-and-scarves weather has arrived! I rather like the way this outfit looks, if I do say so myself. (I bought that pair of Dickies overalls twenty years ago, and they’re still going strong!) This was my outfit for our annual day in Ithaca, NY.
A little writing while The Wife gets ready to leave our hotel room.
My PF Chang’s fortune cookie says that I will be a successful writer. (Of course that’s what it means! And yes, it’s right! Never question the soothsaying cookie!)
Driving. Lots of driving yesterday. Next year we try to book two nights in our Rochester hotel, instead of driving all the way from Ithaca to Buffalo.
I was taking a photo of The Wife looking at Taughannock Falls, but she turned and looked at me at the last second. Oh well! (Isn’t she pretty, though?)
Taughannock Falls.
Fried chicken and waffles at Waffle Frolic, one of our favorite places to eat anywhere. Just a wonderful, wonderful meal!
The Ithaca Apple Festival. It’s a bit screwed up this year, because Ithaca is rebuilding its downtown Commons. It should be back to normal next year, though.
Behind the hubbub of the Apple Festival was this church. This entrance seems to me like something out of a Stephen King novel.
There was a terrific jazz band playing yesterday. I could have listened to them a lot more, and we did linger over them! I very nearly took a candid shot of a young couple, two college kids maybe, dancing as if they were all alone with the band in the world. I decided not to, though. Some moments should be left as memories in the hearts of those who experienced them.
And then, during the band’s break, the toilet paper mummy wrapping contest!
On our way home, we crossed from the Cayuga Lake valley into the Seneca Lake valley, in time for the skies to clear and the sun to shine on the waters of Seneca Lake. I adore the Finger Lakes region.
Morning coffee as I start the back half of my vacation. Aside from finishing my proofreading, what to do next!
Share This Post
A few things
I’m on vacation now, so I won’t be posting until Sunday at the earliest and Monday at the likeliest! Anyhow, a couple of things:
:: Hecklers can ruin comedy shows — but sometimes comedians get the last laugh. (Salty language alert!)
:: Inside Steven Spielberg’s JAWS vault. A look at ephemera from the making of the movie. Awesome!
:: Interesting video about hot sauce and hot sauce labels:
For the record, my favorite hot sauces are Franks, Cholula, and Sriracha with the rooster on the bottle. I have no use for Tabasco. It tastes funny to me.
:: All 32 NFL team helmets imagined as Star Wars-themed. I, for one, would proudly root for the Buffalo Banthas!
:: Interesting article about near-death-experiences and what they tell us about dying. I’m not sure I totally buy into everything here, but I don’t know nearly enough to say one way or the other. I’d like to believe that something endures after death, but…well, there’s only one way to know and no way to report back, thus far.
:: The Baltimore Orioles are pretty cool in that when they do a post-game pie-in-the-face for the game’s hero, they don’t put shaving cream on a towel. A local bakery makes their splatting pies for them, out of real edible stuff. I respect that and partially root for the Orioles on that basis alone! (Although I think I’m rooting for the Royals now, since the Pirates got bounced by the Giants in the wildcard game. Get ’em next year, Buccos!)
:: Finally, speaking of pies in faces, you may recall from when I did the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that I expressed hope that a pie-in-the-face challenge would come around next. Well, a bunch of them have been going on, pertaining to a number of ailments: depression and suicide awareness, Huntington’s Disease, Parkinson’s, Childhood cancer, and even cerebral palsy. (Obviously that last would hit too close to home for me.) Well, seeing as how a lot of the good in these “viral” fundraising bits of goofery lies in the idea of “raising awareness”, I was fascinated to see a pie challenge for a syndrome I’d never heard of before: Porphyria. This thing is both nasty and rare, so I decided that’s what I was going to do. Yesterday morning I launched my vacation by taking the Porphyria Pie Challenge.
Pies and a good cause: you can’t go wrong with that. (Yes, I donated as well.)
:: Oh wait! Really finally: check out my Official Author Site, if you haven’t done so already! The ACTUAL TITLE is revealed!
That’s really it. See you all in a few days!
Share This Post
Instaweeks!
Time to disappear again down the photographic rabbit hole!
Let’s get the Flummoxing Felines out of the way first, shall we?
And then there’s some recent food and such. The Daughter nagged me into deep dish pizza (I already don’t make it all that often because it’s fairly labor-intensive, and I make it even less now that The Wife is on a gluten-free diet and this is a virtual memorial statue to gluten):
Ramen with fried egg. I only have Ramen a few times a year, because of the salt. But I do love it once in a great while. (Hey, you know what makes Ramen really awesome? Having it with some buttered rye crispbread on the side. You dip the rye crisp into the broth and it’s heavenly. That’s a combo I learned from my father, way way way back when. To really be emotionally authentic, it has to be the round rye crisp, with the hole in the middle. It comes wrapped in paper and you break off the piece you want. Not the nicely-cut rectangular rye crisp! That gives you the right flavor, but shapes matter, folks!)
I really love sugar-sweetened Dr. Pepper. It’s pricey (almost four bucks for a four-pack), but it’s a bit of a luxury. Just awesome stuff, though.
Labels on Asian food products make me happy.
The coming of fall means the reappearance of candy that isn’t easy to find other times of year, like Oh Henry bars.
The Daughter also confronted her first day of tenth grade with the requisite enthusiasm.
Fall is coming quickly! September was, like the months before it, cooler than usual (after an odd burst of hot weather to start the month). As the weather starts to turn cool, my fascination with the sky usually fires up a bit. I love the sky, and my normal shift at work starts each day when the sky is often doing some amazing things….
I don’t want the earth to feel neglected as I look up at the sky a lot, so here’s the ground.
I continue to do stick-figure doodles in my occasional free time at work. I make no claims to the genius of xkcd, but it’s a good way to make a few little points here and there. For instance, there’s a trope that shows up in fantastic fiction now and again that irritates the hell out of me:
(I’m looking at you, The Dark is Rising sequence!)
Diagramming the wisdom of Kenny Rogers:
I’ll be posting a review at some point, but this one sentence perfectly sums up my love of science fiction in general and my admiration for the series The Expanse in particular:
Patience, grasshopper!
I didn’t care for this book:
Our next door neighbors are doing construction on their house. Looks like they’re adding on so their elderly dad or dad-in-law can move in with them. It started with the removal of a couple of trees that would have encroached upon their house’s expanded footprint. Which meant…lumberjacks!
And let me tell you, folks, it’s always fun to listen to guys like this talk. No swearing, just a funny run of comment through the job. At one point, a fellow who has climbed thirty feet up and is cutting branches off shouts down, “Uh, I think I cut the wrong thing!” Whoops.
My next car will likely be something bigger than my current Buick Century sedan (although not monstrously huge, just a bit bigger). Still, if I had money right now, I’d find this jalopy enticing. It’s sitting at a VW dealership just down the road.
I sorted my washers and bolts. Actually, I didn’t sort all my bolts, just the quarter-inch, twenty-count thread ones, because that’s what I use the most at work. This is exciting shit, folks.
Here’s a screw I ran up against at work. I have a set of bits for tamper-resistant screws, which are basically normal screws with really oddball heads so they’re tamper-resistant simply by virtue that very few people own the drivers to budge them. This thing was even too obscure for me, though. I got it off using needle-nosed locking pliers and a lot of salty language. I don’t recall what it was on, but there was nothing about the gizmo that screamed out “Holy shit, we gotta keep the riffraff from removing this screw! Grab that center-pegged pentagon screw! That’ll stop ’em!”
I knocked off one major project at New Casa Jaquandor: replacing the dining room light fixture with something better. The old fixture was a perfectly nice fixture, but it was misplaced. It wasn’t well-suited for hanging above a dining table, being a low-hanging fixture with a single halogen lamp that shone straight down, casting a fairly small pool of light on the table instead of illuminating the room. No such problem with the new fixture, which is (a) awesome, and (b) so bright that the next big project will be converting the existing switch to a dimmer.
And, of course, there’s the usual stuff of my life…writing, overalls, writing in overalls, et cetera and so forth.
And these last, because even though I’ve posted them here already, I think I’ll need them in the future:
Share This Post
I’m not interested in being “normal”.
Overdyed Overalls
So, over the years, my obsession with overalls has led me to the realization that they’re not really known for color. There really aren’t a lot of options: blue, mostly. Hickory stripe, too. White is also an option, but the problem with white is that it’s used almost exclusively in “painters” overalls, which for some reason means that the bib pocket is an odd triangular shape, which doesn’t thrill me all that much.
When I branched out into Carhartts, that yielded a few new colors: black, a couple shades of brown (although I don’t own the lighter shade of brown yet), and a hunter-green pair. This last took some searching, as Carhartt doesn’t make the hunter green anymore. Key used to make overalls in a fabric called “herringbone”, for which I’ve been prowling eBay, but what I’ve really wanted was a nice pair of overalls in a burgundy red.
Which eventually led me to remember this old blog post by a fellow traveler in the world of overalls, and I thought, “Hmmmm…I could do that!” For some reason, I never thought of just dyeing a pair into a new color. Whenever I saw some different color of overalls out there in the world, I always assumed for some reason that the company made those for a while but then they stopped…not unlike this pair of Key overalls Anne Hathaway rocked in the movie Love and Other Drugs:
I figured, at some point Key actually made overalls like that, and hey, for all I know, maybe they did. I own a pair of black Dickies that are essentially overdyed hickory striped overalls.
But after learning, and remembering, about overdyeing, I set out this weekend to do just that. I used three hickory-striped pairs, which looked liked this to start with:
My dyes are from Dharma Trading, and I followed their instructions for tub-dyeing. I did two colors: Maroon (two pairs) and Forest Green (one). I was hoping for a burgundy outcome on the maroon pairs; the idea is that the white stripes take on the dye color while the blue just darkens a bit. The entire process took a few hours, from immersion…
…to rinsing.
The results? Well, the maroon dye didn’t turn out burgundy so much as purple, which is not quite what I was looking for. But I do like the result:
That last photo actually makes them look more purple than they really are, but they’re pretty purple. Luckily, I like purple!
The forest green pair looks pretty nice, though:
I’m pretty happy with those.
I suspect the purple/burgundy ones will look better with dark solid tops; pairing them with tie-dye will likely make me look cartoonish. Well, more cartoonish than usual!
I won’t be doing this often; I’m not looking for an entire rainbow of overalls in my wardrobe. But a few new options is nice, and the process was fun to do.
Share This Post
Of buckets and the dumping of the water therein
If you’ve lived beneath a rock of late, you may have missed a viral fundraising activity that’s going around the social media sites. I’m not even sure of the exact “rules”, but it’s all voluntary anyway, so it’s not like the rules matter all that much. It involves dumping, or having someone else dump, a bucket full of ice water over your head, after which you challenge a few other folks to do the same, whilst making a small donation to the ALS Assocation. ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) is a particularly awful way to go, and like all awful diseases, its defeat is a worthy goal. There’s been an awful lot of tut-tutting over the thing, and to my way of thinking (along with Roger, who as always has some good links), that all pretty much misses the point. Donations are way up, and people are having fun doing it, so what’s the problem? Why be such a Muggle? Fuhgeddaboudit!
Anyway, I received my challenge/nomination last week, and I finally got ’round to doing the deed. Aside from the efficacy of this as a fundraiser (yes, I did kick in a few Quatloos!), what are my thoughts on up-ending a bucket of water over my head? Well, it actually felt good! Luckily I got a fairly warm day. This particular summer hasn’t been all that hot in my neck o’ the woods, but I imagine this would have felt awesome on a 90-degree scorcher in July. It was over quickly, and if it had been really hot, maybe I wouldn’t have even bothered changing afterward — I could just hang out outside and air-dry. Alas, it wasn’t quite that warm.
So yeah, I got my challenge done. I’m not challenging anyone else, seeing as how I think I’m coming to this bit at the tail end of its potency (most folks I know have already done it, anyway). But my friends should be warned: if a similar fundraising challenge starts making the rounds that involves a pie in the face, oh, there will be some challenging going on!
Share This Post
An act of scarvery
I suspect that “scarvery” isn’t a word. Oh well.
In a bit of retail therapy this week, I made my first ever Etsy purchase, from tartx.com. The item in question? A new scarf! Check it out:
Yes, that’s old Will himself, the Bard, Mr. Shakespeare to you.
Here’s a closer look at Mr. Shakespeare:
And the printing at the scarf’s other end:
I can’t wait for scarf weather to return! Actually, for this one, I don’t even need really cold weather, because it’s a much thinner material than my other scarves. I might wear this one on our annual trip to Ithaca in the fall…scarves and overalls are a way of life, folks!
I also made one other small purchase for the library decor, but I don’t have it on the wall yet, so that’s going to wait. It’s cool, though. Really.