Ponderables

Y'know, I was thinking the other day- dangerous business, I know! -and got to wondering: I've read that our physical selves are basically a whole new organism every seven years; that is, in that time span the process of cell replacement that goes on primarily at night while we sleep has pretty much rebuilt a person completely- hair, skin, organs, everything.

That being the case, even if we set aside the infinitely indecipherable processes of the mind; vocabulary, memories, favorite smells, tastes and so forth, why do we keep something like a cowlick in our hair?

Big question: Why don't missing limbs or digits or eyes grow back?!? I think what started this line of thought was a radio trivia question: Americans lose 25,000 of these every years. The answer: Eyes!!! That's frightening! Definitely not 'trivial' either...

And why do scars keep their place? I've got a few that stick out and while it doesn't trouble me from day to day to look at them I have to wonder why, if the entirety of me has been rebuilt, what?, three or four or more times since the initial injury... and they're still there... Go figure...

The week in revue

Sunday: Post Sunday afternoon go-to-meetin'- since our building serves two congregations we alternate morning and afternoon meeting times -made a trip across the river to a swell steak buffet. Always a taste-tempting treat plus there's a fabric/craft emporium along the route home, found some useful stuff for my makings. Yay!

Monday: Was an exciting day of packing and sorting stuff I sold via eBay, plenty of my own homespun playthings plus a handful of vintage pieces and parts that have been cluttering up the bins for a while on their way to the four corners of the map. Yahoo!

Tuesday: Received a batch of TV cowboy photos from an online vendor expecting them to be of good caliber, clean reproductions that I could use to illustrate custom-made boxes for my Bonanza men and other western figures I'm hoping to create. Instead I got fuzzy, bitmappy computer prints which won't be useful at all beyond the lesson learned. Bah!

Sunday's culinary adventure comes back to haunt us, both son-boy and myself got sidelined by a peculiar malaise. Yuck!

Wednesday: Saw my little old lady seamstress to hash out some details on current doll clothing in the pipeline and plan some upcoming projects. She's 90-plus and still sturdy despite protesting some eye problems that give her fits when sewing the details on my little men's duds. Widowed, she lives with a temperamental cat named Snoopy in a wooded property populated by deer, squirrels and the occasional pheasant. The place always smells of wood smoke from the stove, pleasantly reminiscent of my folks' home where we had fireplaces and wood stoves a-burnin'. Mmmmm....

Thursday: Spent a few hours walkin' and talkin', Bible in hand. Well, okay, it was mostly driving to reach the remote corners of the area. I thought Red Lion had some wilderness, Dover has its share as well.

Friday: Me mudder has been trying to make room in her garage for a vehicle since she built her new house, going on two, three years now. Since I had a coupla stacks of moveable bins full of my toymaking leftovers and comics and toy collections and assorted ephemera helping to clutter up the place I was recruited to help sort and remove some out to the garden shed, some in from the garden shed for an upcoming yard sale and so on. Ugh!

The Hyundai made like a truck on the way home, packed from back seat to bumper with boxes of comics binders, Batman model kits, Munsters cars, VHS from the 80s and more containers of I don't even know what, brought home and stacked unceremoniously in the dining room. Since my antique-slash-junque shop outlet closed up a while back I'm looking around for a new venue to offload some of the excess. eBay is great but you have to be prepared to practically give it away if you offer a thing at auction.

Saturday: Another coupla hours stumpin' the neighborhoods after the regularly scheduled AM Bible study program. Doorstep topic of the day: Coping with the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, unequal opportunities. Rather conspicuously illustrated by myself in my 1950s issue brown suit- my wife hates it, I love its unassuming 'vintage' aesthetic -riding in company with a young pretty 'power couple' in their H3. Strange but true.

Then the afternoon spent weeding, mowing and trimming with our pal, Jerry, at our meetin' place. Suffice to say, I don't spend enough time in the great outdoors or in moderate regular physical activity so the weed hacking and spraying in the afternoon temps approaching eighty- felt more like ninety! -was somewhat taxing. Phew!

After a leisurely din-din at the Dover Diner- we practically lived there while we were moving into the area but have been absent for a while now -came home and plugged in some Big Valley on DVD. Good stuff, I wish I had the episode with Adam West but I'm sure that doesn't come along until later.

And full circle, we're back to another pleasant valley Sunday. Some are sleepin' in while others poke the keys and touch up some rubber projects and one small fuzzy someone purrs about looking to be fed.

Stay tuned!

New business

Hyundai is all mended, unusual. Nice to start it up without the attendant rumbling of a faulty exhaust, gotten somewhat used to it even if my neighbors hadn't. My son, well aware of my pet name for it, 'Crash Magnet', cleverly decided that should have been obvious from its moniker from the outset. 'Accent'. Just two letters shy of 'Acc-id-ent'. Clever boy. Perhaps too clever!

My recent stopover at MySpace- a much neglected facet of my too numerous cyber outlets -included a few name searches to see who is represented there that I might know. Among others I turned up my best pal from junior high, Mike Halbleib. We were part of a small but mighty gang of uber comic book geeks back in the day; Mike was a serious Spiderman fan and did great drawings in a Gil Kane vein. Most memorable shared Marticville Middle School highlight: Putting on a short play straight out of The Weekly Reader called "Ratman and Pigeon", complete with cardboard Ratmobile. My first experience wearing tights and not my last. Mike's actually worked professionally in the comics field, for Marvel Comics, no less, very cool. I gave him a long-winded capsule history of my life since the eighth grade and will be keenly interested to hear back from him and see what other adventures life has handed him in the intervening years.

Aaaahh, technology. Ain't it a wonderful thing? A wunnerful, a wunnerful.

Old days

So I was putting up a new photo album associated with my toymaking and decided to browse around some of my other albums especially the 'Vintage Family Photos' section. About halfway through the cache of images there I noticed they are all marked 'Private'. Hmmmm, I must have posted them and failed to make them visible. So I remedied that right quick. I'll have to scout the rest and see if they are likewise invisible...

I think I've mentioned previously, at least in passing, my reading habits as a 'tween', tending toward fantastic fiction. My choices in visual entertainment have always leaned toward that end of the spectrum as well- Star Trek, Batman, vintage sci-fi and so forth. So the feature version of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers was a must-see despite its somewhat visceral visuals.

I had to confess though to being ignorant of the source material. So it was with keen interest that I took up reading several of Heinlein's novels this past week. Turns out a pal of recent acquaintance, Roy, was himself an avid sci-fi geek as a lad with a serious interest especially in Heinlein's writings. Being a few years older than myself he had stashed away and collected a number of vintage editions- some are obviously well-loved and careworn, a fact that adds to their charm -and loaned them first to my son boy while on that beach vacation of a few weeks ago.

Citizen Of The Galaxy, The Rolling Stones(nothing to do with the musical group! Maybe that's where they got the name, eh?), Tunnel In The Sky. Next: Orphans Of The Sky and Between Planets.

Worth noting is the origin in Stones of one of Star Trek's more memorable catchphrases, Dr. McCoy's retort "I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer (or whatever apropos occupation)!", uttered first by Dr. Edith Stone encountering an unknown space malady.

Which is not to mention the appearance later in the same narrative of Martian 'flat cats'; formless, purring balls of fluffy fur with a tranquilizing effect on the human nervous system and a fantastic capacity for reproduction. Golly, could they be any more familiar if they were called... oh, I don't know... 'tribbles' maybe?!?

Hats off

    In a little mixing of metaphors or at least confusion of subject matter from my toy arena, I discovered that I can hand sand the hard plastic hats I make for my Bonanza men and they not only go on and off a little better- which is accomplished, if you're interested, from front to back due to the tuft of hair on the actual figure which is molded in reverse into the crown of the hats. Hopefully it'll help keep the paint from rubbing off so much too with the on and off of the hat -but it cleans up some of the inconsistencies in my quick sculpting of the hat and the vagaries of the mold lines and so forth.

In other news it's a pleasant valley Sunday and, despite my somewhat slack-jawed condition after a week of sickliness, it looks like a good afternoon for a motor ride in the country. Mum cancelled our planned Sunday dinner, she didn't sound so good, probably caught my malady when I was down the other day, so the afternoon is wide open. Sorry, Ma.

Well, daylight's a wastin'... Off we go!