I have two questions. What isn’t a joke? And is the G silent?
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Author Archives: tarvasalutes
Earring Organization with Buttons!
A great way to store stud earrings and keep them together so that you don’t have to spend time hunting for the other half of a pair in your jewelry box trays is to put each pair into a button.
These particular buttons are 7/8″ in diameter and the distance between the two holes is 5/16″, which makes them big enough to accommodate all my stud earrings.
A package of about 20 basic plastic 7/8″ two-hole buttons cost me around $2 at my local JoAnn store. The fact that they were purple was just a bonus!
Angling for Smiles
It’s always pleasant to see people’s creativity when it comes to yard decorations.
These folks have taken a humorous approach to the springtime flooding that has affected our neighborhood over the past few months.
The Toy Box
In any good home organization system, it’s important that you label your containers. Take this toy box, for example. You can easily identify the contents at a glance.
Nostalgia! A Working Walkman
Apparently—and amazingly—I own a working Walkman portable radio/cassette tape player.
I came across this Walkman this afternoon while I was sorting USB and charger cables. I popped in some batteries, popped in Golden Greats by The Ventures—a tape which I just happen to have, along with a couple of Johnny Horton tapes, because I’m slow to let go of old technology—connected it to some speakers (also old), and presto—it worked!
Right now, I’m listening to “Wipe-Out.” It’s the last song on Side 1, so pretty soon I’ll get to flip the tape to Side 2. How fun!
This Walkman, and a couple of others like it, were used by me and my siblings on many a family road trip during the early 1990s when I was young.
If You Met My Family, You Would Understand
Here are some fun sayings and quotations about family:
Some family trees have beautiful leaves, and some just have a bunch of nuts.
It is the nuts that make the tree worth shaking.
Friends come and go, but relatives tend to accumulate.
He who has no fools, knaves, or beggars in his family was begot by a flash of lightning.
—Old English proverb
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
—George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright
I don’t have to look up my family tree because I know that I’m the sap.
—Fred Allen, American comedian
Can a first cousin once removed be returned?
Sunscreen and the Second Amendment
The American West:
Where we’re cool with your open carry firearm, but not with your aerosol spray sunscreen.
A Successful Day at the Thrift Store Threesome
On Saturday, I visited Clearfield, Utah and spent a fun afternoon shopping at what I call the Thrift Store Threesome—a Goodwill, a Deseret Industries, and a Savers store all in the same block. Here’s my haul. It was a great day for shoes and stylish tops.
The Story of My Childhood as Told in Photos of Books: Part 2
The Project
As a result of a spring-fever cleaning urge, I recently sorted and cataloged my books using the Libib app and website. Near the end of my project, I had a nice time going through a large box of books that I kept from my childhood.
Just from looking at the books, it was fun and enlightening to see who I was when I was young, and to think about the ways I have and have not changed.
Vintage Books
These children’s novels and basic readers hail from the school days of my parents and grandparents.
I must have come with an innate liking for history and “vintage” things, because I loved reading all of these books during my own elementary school years.
Note the five rather battered, yet lovely green hardback Bobbsey Twins novels—plus a sixth, which is missing its cover. These novels all have copyright dates from the 1920s and 1930s. In these stories, the main characters are two sets of fraternal twins (Bert, Nan, Freddie, and Flossie), all siblings, whose dialogue includes words such as “Hark!” and whose parents are always referred to as Mr. and Mrs. Bobbsey.
I also enjoyed reading the Dick and Jane and Alice and Jerry basic readers, which were full of stories about the respective title characters’ adventures growing up in the New England countryside. I remember being fascinated by the descriptions and illustrations in one chapter of Neighbors on the Hill as Dick and Jane went maple sugaring in the autumn.
The Family Treasury of Children’s Stories in three volumes were also a favorite, as they contained all kinds of now-politically-incorrect stories ranging from fairy tales and nursery rhymes to accounts of famous men and women in history, extracts from English literature, and retellings of classical mythology.
I credit many of these books with instilling in me a very 1950s sense of patriotism and optimism that persists to this day.
How Did It Get There?
Let’s speculate as to why there is a car headrest in this tree. Ready, set, go!
