I had to drive to Longmont yesterday afternoon to the chiropractor. The chiropractor's office is about a block from the Longmont Goodwill so, although I avoided last Saturday's 50% off sale by driving to the mountains, I just had to stop by the Longmont store after my appointment to see what they had.
Actually I am quite practical these days and, because of the temperatures, purchased this cute little fan and some interesting ice cube trays...
I only had two ice cube trays and thought long rectangular fingers of ice might be a fun addition to my lemonade. Hey, it's the little things that make life bearable and I got both of these for 99 cents less my senior discount.
The fan sort of has that "in" industrial look and I've been wanting another fan to supplement the box fan I bought from my friend Olive earlier in the summer, something I could actually have blowing right on me at night that wouldn't be as forceful as either the box fan or the fan on the window A/C unit but would still lull me into thinking there was some air circulating in the bedroom.
Why I didn't plug the fan in at the store, I don't know, but I got it home, plugged it in and saw the blades turning so thought everything was a go. Later in the evening I went back in the bedroom, put my hand in front of it and there was no air movement being generated at all. I even put my hand behind the fan thinking maybe they had the blades in backward! A rodent on a treadmill could have moved more air.
I thought the clerk at Goodwill might have had a little smirk when she told me to leave the tag on anything marked E&M (electrical and mechanical?) until I was sure it worked. I wonder how many times this thing has been purchased and returned. It was only $3.99 and I got my everyday senior discount, so it wasn't a huge expense, but I'll return it and get a toaster instead, which was something else I was looking at and they had several that were this same price. I'd rather have a more versatile toaster oven, but haven't seen one of those at a thrift shop recently.
I had hoped these temps in the 90s were over for the summer and I was spoiled because the temperatures at the cabin are about 20 degrees cooler. It was in the 70s during the day and the 40s at night the entire time I was there.
It seems as if the temperature on what is called the Diagonal Highway between Boulder and Longmont...you see the start of it here in the upper right hand corner of this map...
Map courtesy of AaccessMaps.com
...is at least ten degrees hotter than either Boulder or Longmont, both of which are old towns with lots of big shade trees.
This highway, which follows a busy railroad track, cuts through prairie that looks like the prairie in every Western movie you've ever seen. Think Cheyenne in a wool cavalry uniform. And, of course, I have no air conditioning in my car.
Inevitably, on my return from these afternoon chiropractic appointments, I hit Boulder and every red light just at rush hour, my car starts overheating and I have to turn on the heater to bleed off some of the heat. I was really glad to get back to the apartment. Even though it wasn't that cool, it was a lot better than a car with the heater blasting in an ambient temperature of 94F degrees.
I had a productive few days at the cabin. I'm finally almost finished with all of the little decorator touches I'd wanted to make before my sister and her husband come out if they finally decide to. They've been doing a lot of traveling since spring so aren't that anxious to leave home again I guess. I still want to make the draperies for the bunk area and paint the floor, but both of those will take some funds I don't have available right now so I'm contenting myself with small projects that cost nothing.
I knew when I decided to paint the interior of the cabin dark charcoal brown that the color would hide any damage from the blow-back smoke from the wood stove that's such a problem when the winds are high in the winter and would provide a great backdrop for my thrift store porcelain finds, but would also require lots of reflective surfaces to keep it from being too oppressive. I had several mirrors in that storage unit I cleared out when I moved into the apartment and one that had been in the cabin from the beginning in 1939 I think. I finally figured out during this last visit where I wanted all of them.
I hung this thrift store find...
...on the east wall. The frame is a very heavy metal and I like the oak leaf and acorn motif.
I hung this frameless, probably a five-and-dime, mirror from the 30s on the west wall next to the secretary/hutch....
There's nothing like enlarged photos to reveal every wart and pimple. I see I need to have another go at this with the Windex. I was going to hang the rectangular mirror here, but decided it and the hutch were too much the same shape. Oh, and the little dials? Well, they turned out to be kind of a fun solution to this...
...Blue Light Special that someone brought out to the cabin. I kept trying to figure out what to do with this...no White Tails here although I did see my first Mule Deer just as I was leaving Eldora on Tuesday morning...so I popped the three dials out and hung them under the mirror sort of like miniature international clocks. I'm saving the frame so if someone is absolutely in love with this thing, they can restore it.
The third mirror project had been hanging over my head since last fall when I bought an oval mirror on sale at Hobby Lobby, along with some black velvet ribbon with which to hang it. I wanted it hung over the wash stand and knew it would have to hang in front of an existing shelf. The old round mirror had been hung from the shelf and even I had to bend my knees in order to see myself in it. Hanging the new mirror in front of the shelf would mean hanging it from a ceiling hook and I thought I'd need to drop a plumb line in order to get the hook in the right spot.
I had purchased the ceiling hook at least two months ago...
...I got the swivel hook because it was the only black one Home Depot had...but still I procrastinated because by that time I'd hurt my arm and the thought of attempting this just seemed daunting.
Monday I bit the bullet and got it accomplished. I marked the middle of the shelf and then just put a yard stick flat against the shelf and ran it up to the ceiling to mark the spot for the hook rather than dropping a plumb line.
Then I started "reading" the instructions for the hook...
...almost no actual verbiage, just illustrations and large X's indicating "do this, NOT this" and showing you how to reinsert the hook to the base, but not how to remove the hook from the base to start with.
So I did my chimp-being-observed-and-recorded-for-science routine thinking maybe the illustrations were in French since Cobra Anchors Corp. appeared to be in Montreal as well as Temple, PA. I finally figured out, after starting to screw the provided anchor into the ceiling (shown magically keeling over horizontally after it passes through the surface), that it only needed to be used if the hook was being inserted into dry wall. Otherwise, the hook base could simply be screwed into "madera" which must be wood in French, something I didn't recall after three semesters of the language.
The next big challenge was figuring out how to remove the hook from the base and this really did make me feel like a monkey with a puzzle, but I finally deduced that one side of the base was flat and that had to be turned to slide out of the slot that was the same shape. Yep. Sure enough, it worked. So, I screwed the base, sans hook, into the wood ceiling and slid the hook on.
I decided I didn't want to rely on the ribbon to hold the weight of the mirror, which is fairly heavy, so used some picture wire. Then I decided I didn't like the look of that so set about making a sleeve for the wire...
Here's the finished product...
That's it for today. I took 91 photos while I was at the cabin, so will post some more tomorrow showing additional shots of cabin life and chores, some Rocky Mountains scenery in late August and an update on the foxes. The latter not good, I'm afraid. Teddee
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