Category: House

I replaced another light!

And it went without incident.  True, that makes for a much less stressful project, but has the consequence of also being much less amusing fodder for a post.  Oh well.

We got the matching wall light to the street light (which was an interesting and stressful installation).  There’s still two more to go, but for now, I’ll enjoy the simple incremental step towards home perfection.

–Simon

I was denied a promotion at work

Ah well, such is life.

So I did what I rarely do: I shopped to make myself feel better.

And so it was that I revisited a long-neglected hobby.  I bought an aquarium.  Specifically, I bought a small aquarium I had been eyeing for a time at the local pet store, before the Feng shui minimalist style apparently fell out of fashion, because the only aquariums I see now in stores are the bulky and cheap rimmed kind.  And so, skeptical about UPS’ ability to deliver unto me an intact and glass aquarium (seriously, I had acrylic tanks), I ordered the Fluval Chi.

I had always been jealous of the ADA (Takashi Amano) style aquariums, and while I lacked the budget to create one in earnest, the Chi allowed just enough space for a convincing facsimile.  I planned to use black sand substrate, vertically-aligned driftwood, and a java fern.  And, since I didn’t want to clutter the tank with hardware, I would forego the heater and use coldwater-tolerant fish: the White Cloud Minnow.

And while the tank did ultimately arrive intact, sadly, my desire for instant gratification was sabotaged by my local fish store’s lack of stocked driftwood, java fern, and While Cloud Minnows; though it did have black sand.  I grabbed the sand, then noticed a pre-packaged single java fern in a plastic tube…for eight friggin bucks!  Those things grow like weeds and are truly the beginner’s aquarium plant.  I grumbled, and bought it anyway.

Eventually, I found some White Cloud Minnows at a different store, and paid way too much for a simple common fish.  But I only needed 3 so whatever.  Still, no wood, so I resorted to sawing off a chunk from my main tank–which can’t be seen anyway since it’s long-since been overgrown by a decade’s worth of Anubis growth.

At last…

It also has a cool fountain/filter, so I placed black river stones in the top, added some spiderling plants, and dug up a little moss from the back yard.  It now doubles as a small water garden.

Now, when I’m working at home and become embittered, I can glance over and receive a moment’s respite in the micro aquaculture environment I have created on my desk.

–Simon

I went through a phase in my youth where I was obsessed with clocks.  Something about the sophistication of mechanical engineering to such an exactness so as to measure time accurately was just fascinating.  Beauty can indeed be defined through such means, like the way I appreciate a fine knife for its design and metallurgy long after it’s been scratched and resharpened into what so many others view as a simple chuck of cutting steel.  It’s why I went through a lockpicking phase–timeless engineering that has only been marginally improved upon.  Analog perfection.

I never quite grew out of that phase.

In the Lubbock years, one of dad’s colleagues had a grandfather clock.  It was bizarredly contrasted to the lime-green shag carpeting which traversed the entire house, but even that could be overlooked when in the presence of such a masterpiece.  It was a dark reddish wood, perhaps mahogany, with the typical polished bronze components.  Its quarter-hour chimes punctuated the evenings with delicate reminders of time’s passage without being jarring.  The chimes, I would only recently discover, were the Westminster quarters.

Since then, I had always been on the lookout for such a clock to call my own, but transient residences and limited finances prohibited such an investment.  Finances still do, as a true grandfather clock today runs well into the thousands.  But on occasion, I would see them in antique stores and would be reminded of the fantasy.  The ones in these stores were markedly smaller and cheaper than what I remembered too, and labeled with dubious claims like “It still works”, despite not actually having been wound recently, and “As-is, no returns”.  Conditions such as these are why my next car will not be pre-owned.

Then a neighbor had an estate sale.  Liz snapped a photo of such a clock and asked if I wanted it–for a modest $75.  Turns out it was a grandmother clock–a smaller variant, and term with which I was unfamiliar.  But, it had been maintained by The Village Elder, so its mechanics were guaranteed from a reliable source.  I confirmed the purchase, and with the help of The Village Elder, it was waiting for me in the dining room when I got home.  Whatever it’s called officially, it’s still a satisfying 6 feet, and while being of a laminated wood, looks as nice as any well-made laminated furniture.  And the price couldn’t be beat.

But of course I couldn’t let it go as a simple aesthetic accent for the room.  I needed to know its origin.

So I opened the clock and looked for identifying marks.  I found 2:

And so the internet search began!

The metal plate revealed that the clock had been made by Colonial Manufacturing–a company based in Zeeland, MI; and a company that had apparently gone out of business in 1983¹.

Further digging led me to a clock specialists’ forum, which claimed that the catalogs didn’t exist in any readily-available digital form, but the metal stamps weren’t introduced until the 1970s².  This backed the claim of clocks I had seen previously in the antique stores, which were labeled as from the 70s.  Also, the veneer is thick, and modern stranded board is from the early 1980s, so while not definitive, it would appear logical to conclude the type of veneer to be a direct predecessor, so again–1970s.

Is a far cry from the ominous chronographic sentinel of my memories, but it’s a very lovely timepiece nonetheless.  And its chimes are the same.  Liz too has distinct memories of that sound.  Perhaps it will be good for the kid–to give her a sense of how fleeting time really is.  Eternal time, measured in quarter hours.  Tempus Fugit indeed.

–Simon

¹http://www.furniturecityhistory.org/company/3447/colonial-manufacturing-co
²https://mb.nawcc.org