The Progressive House!

Went back to visit a very cool little local thrift store/junk shop on the outskirts of town today on highway 395, 'The Progressive House'.

It's one of those old-school stores, a cross between grandma's attic, an eccentric yard sale and treasures found in an old barn.  The folks who run it give off a definite Hippie/Burner vibe and are very chill and fun.  When you first see the place it gets your attention right away:

 Flowers decorate the eaves all along the front...

One of the signs for the place was created using repurposed items and glass...

Another sign.

The also have 'Burma Shave' type signs all along northbound Highway 395 advertising their stuff nailed to various fenceposts.

We hauled along some outgrown clothing of the kid's to donate...

Their 'Open' sign.

One of the ladies there had painted this skateboard.

Then you get to go inside...

Cool door knocker.

And when you DO go inside...well let's just say that you can't look fast enough.

There is stuff hanging from the walls and ceilings as well as stacked on the floor and stuffed into every available nook and cranny.

Cool vintage lamps...my husband fixed me with a steely look and said, 'NO MORE FUNKY LAMPS'.

An old stump revamped into a costume jewelry rack...

Nothing is priced. When you ask how much something is, they smile pleasantly and ask you how much you think it's worth, and that's what you pay!

Someone has quite the eye for creating fun little scenes, and mixing modern with vintage.

A collection of vintage games and home movie equipment, it was like opening the hall closet door at grandma's house.

Love the Mid-Century Modern look of the logo on this projection screen.

A shirt signed & gifted to the shop by a tourist group.

The back of the store...

I struck out on what I had my eye out for--stuff for funky outdoor yard garbage--but the kid snagged herself some strange rubber duckies, and I unearthed a couple of old world atlases that will become origami and some fun chicken coop decorations...because what's the point of even having a chicken coop if you can't decorate it and make it into something silly?

More weirdness, and coolness...

Yeah, you never know what you're gonna fin--

Wait--'Leather Goddesses of Phobos'?!
While I stare goggle-eyed, husband shrugs and says, 'Oh yeah, that was a game.'

It's true, you never know WHAT you'll find in a thrift store...

More Stuff...

The Plymouth has gleefully decided that it isn't going to let anyone enter on the passenger side anymore, thank you. Damned stubborn car. The push button on the outside of the door has been getting stickier and sticker, and today just made a very final-sounding, horrible grinding sound when I opened the door. It DID open, with much cussing, teeth-gritting and two-armed heaving on the door on my part. I think I bullied it into submission. Not easy to do with a 41 year old chunk of Detroit steel, but I did it.

But obviously, tomorrow's project: take apart the passenger door on the Fury and see what the heck is up in there, and fix it if I can. Not looking forward to taking the inner door panel off, when I removed them before to refinish the panels the plastic clips that keep them on were showing their age...I need to add 'replacement clips' to my never-ending list of impossible classic car parts to find/repair.

The kid managed to pull off the Spaghetti tree harvest trick on both a friend at school, her cousin, AND her grandmother today. *sniff* I'm so proud... I just made sure I took my little Chicken Drum (makes a VERY authentic chicken sound) around today, making it sound in inappropriate places and then carefully assuming a blank look when people started whipping around looking for a chicken at their feet. Great fun.

Went out tonight to drop off the kids' overnight stuff at grandma's since she's spending the night there, stopped at El Pollo Loco on the way back and narrowly escaped a HUGE blockade by the local police department--they had a major street blocked off for who-knows-what was going down. It looked like a major accident involving a whole slew of cars, though. Come to think of it, I also got to see one of my neighbors over by my daughter's elementary school being arrested first thing this morning when I was taking her in, too. He did NOT look happy.

On the way home tonight it was amusing to experience the mixture of Spring scents with people cranking up their fireplaces due to the cold snap we're having...

*Driving along with the top down, cold weather be damned*
'Ahh...flowers...'
*aroma of fajitas grilling*
'Orange blossoms...'
*fresh-cut grass smell*
'Ooooh, Night Blooming Jasmine!' (the scent of which is like sex and just melts me, thank you)
*FIREPLACE OUTTA NOWHERE!*

Yeah, really jarring when you are just floating along in a convertible enjoying a Spring evening.

An Unexpected Spring Storm...

is attempting to strip away the blossoms from my fruit trees, grrrr. To try and counter this I did my annual honeybee replacement self-pollinating using a child's dry paintbrush. I think the fruit trees and I are engaged now though...

The kid did not advance another belt in karate this time due to missing too many classes this month--at the beginning of the month some kids in the yellow belt class had come in and been little Typhoid Marys, spreading a particularly nasty virus around which we of course caught--we were all sick for about three weeks.

Still have to alter the kids' Faire costume, she was asking about going last night and it's coming up soon...

And one of the baby chicks has broken or dislocated her left leg at the hock and is gimping around. The homemade splint we put on last night was an unqualified failure, so I took it off again. Now she's gimping around the brooder box, but surprisingly doesn't look too bad, I think if she takes it easy she may heal OK.

It's like a drama stew around here this week!

Fun...

A rather exotic and eccentric tag off the kids' new dinosaur:

It's just SO over-the-top!

And sometimes the kid sets up little playtime scenes with her toys and we run across them later. Last time was a dinosaur/Disney Princess tea party. This time it's Halo's own Master Chief, who, with or without a cork tree, likes to sit just quietly, smelling the flowers*...

*Bonus points if you get the reference!

Steel?

11th wedding anniversary today, yay! The traditional anniversary gift list says that the 11th is 'Steel'. What the heck is up with that? Not 'Linens' or 'Glassware' or some other normal household thing. Steel? Is this the bottle cap anniversary or something? What's next year--coke for stoking the blast furnace?
When I was giving J. his gift, I was telling him that this one was the 'Steel' year, so he piped up and asked, "So what did you steal for me?"
Smart ass...
Oh well, off to Magnolia Bird Farm for more dessicated bugs for Scout the mockingbird and Jake, the sparrow.

Also, the Euflexa injection I got on Thursday is marvelous for my right knee, two more injections to go with this round. Then on to more rehab and a new knee brace for the thing. My right knee is being entirely too needy right now...

Too Many Irons In The Fire...

Medically speaking. Between myself, my husband and the kid, it's been the Summer Of Medical Issues at our house, continuing it's wildly popular sold-out run into the Fall!

yay.

And, southern California is burning. Again.

This Week...

Another trip to the fair, and this time we got brave enough to actually enter the avocado fudge booth....sadly, no free samples, and it turns out the fudge is NOT avocado flavored--it's chocolate--and the avocado merely performs the dull and somewhat lackluster duty of 'moistening' the fudge. Humorless signs in bold print told us so. I guess the people working the booth had had enough of people who had juuuust enough beer in 'em to be 'Sparklingly Brilliant' stopping by to make witty comments.

Dang. Missed out again.

N. did score a huge stuffed cobra colored a bright blue with, oddly enough, red flames. She rode rides to her heart's content and we ran into our friend John, the hairdresser who had disappeared about a year ago. To our surprise he told us that he was now owner of the salon and had two more opening up. He had his fiance and her daughter with her, and they looked happy and healthy. It's nice to run into old friends and find them content and successful.

Also on the plus side, tonight I went to a different supermarket, Ralph's. I got fed up with the local Stater Brothers. On a recent trip there the whole market smelled. I mean, it smelled BAD. A friend of mine, whose ex-hubby was in the supermarket management biz, told us that this particular smell is the scent of maggots. Oh, joy. To make matters worse, when I opened the milk cooler I was actually assualted by the smell of sour milk. Double joy. The place was also so picked over, non-stocked or stocked with 100 boxes of the same item, that I asked the two teenage girls lounging behind the deli counter if the store was closing. No, they said, blinking at me dully. The shelves looked like shoppers had stripped them in preparation for a natural disaster. To top it off, we found a block of cheese that had expired FIVE YEARS AGO. So when I went through the checkout I gifted the cashier with the fossilized cheese and informed her of the horrible smells, to which she said offhandedly, "Oh yeah, we need to hire a new janitor." I told her if I was the manager and MY store smelled that bad, I would grab a mop myself and have a go at it.

So, much as I hate learning the new layout, new store. Clean! Bright! Well-stocked! Absence of weird/funky/dead thing smells and creepy science project petrified foodstuffs! I'm happy. What gave me a giggle today was the sign over one of the aisles....yes, it's true..."New Age Soda"! A WHOLE AISLE! Only in California, I snickered. By the way, 'New Age soda' is apparantly anything made by Sobe, Powerade or any variation of flavored/carbonated water.

The other fun thing is the new song my five year old daughter is singing....a la K.C. and the Sunshine Band, that immortal hit from the '70's--(in ohsocute young child voice) "Shake, shake, shake...shake, shake, shake...shake your buddha...shake your buddha..."

Hell NO, I'm not going to correct her! Just as I'm not going to correct her calling her belly button a 'bee butt'.

The mental imagery is just beyond wonderful.

Today's Slice...

Well, we are sitting here with the hatches battened down, still waiting for The Big Storm to arrive. It was promised for afternoon drive time, between 3 and 5PM...it still hasn't showed up but the wind is kicking up now and blowing J's sheet music off the amp, where it amusingly enough struck the guitar strings on the way to the floor...music playing the guitar, for a change!

Tonight as my 5 year old daughter was taking a potty break, I CLEARLY heard her singing "YMCA"...she says they sing it at school, complete with hand motions. It gave me a giggle though.

There are currently 4 very large Barn Spiders lving in the nectarine and cherry trees in the back yard. They make huge, impressive webs each night around 9PM and by dawn they have whisked them away and retreated back to their leaves to sleep. I'd been nursing a sincere fantasy about having the twitling who burgled us last year return in the night and become hopelessly entangled in one or all of them while flailing about emitting high-pitched screams. Just like those B-grade horror movies where the heroine runs around at the end opening closets and finding all of her dead friends. Well judging by a wrecked web and a broken off branch of the orange tree the other morning, it seems to at least have partly come true. I consider the broken branch a small price to pay for such inner contentment and karmic rebalancing, and thanked the tree for doing it's bit to physically harm the little bastard while I trimmed off the dead branch.

My vacumm cleaner has reached terminal old age and has broken in three different places, all at once. I'm stubborn and refuse to just trash it though, so in for repair it's going to go. Now if I could only find a few days when I don't need it.

The chickens are suffering through a bout of Fowl Pox, which sounds a lot worse than it is. It's a virus mostly carried by mosquoitos, and other than causing some blister-like lesions on the facial skin of the birds, doesn't do much harm. It does open the door to secondary problems like respiratory infections though, so we'll have to keep an eye on them. It's kind of like when you are a kid and everyone in the house gets chicken pox. The chickens are very aware of their appearance though, and know that they are less than pretty right now. Truth be told, some of them look like little mutants or radiation overdose victims...

Also on the appliance front, my microwave committed suicide today in a very grand fashion when I asked it to make some popcorn. Loud, weird noises and bright flashes made me turn around and then leap for the plug, yanking it and all of the others in the outlet out of the wall. I found a hole burned right through the side of the thing! Good thing I hadn't walked away, it was seconds from catching fire. Stank some, too.

Weird week so far, and it's only Tuesday...

The Circle Of Life...For Today, Anyway

My back patio is a disgrace--covered in dust and chicken poop it will have to be cleaned very soon. I mentally add it to the list.

Life...and I mean everyday, run-of-the-mill life...is such a fleeting, tiny slice of adventure.

My daughter home sick with a fever and cold symptoms and the accompanying grumpy 'tude, a visit from a very nice city official regarding the dirt on and the weeds under my '69 Plymouth--she said she felt stupid bugging people about it but it was a new thing she had to do. I promised to clean things up and everyone was happy. Later I listened to the guy on the next block rev his Top Fuel dragster at heart-stopping decibel levels for two solid hours while he worked on it, and wondered where the city's priorities were currently being housed. I had a few unladylike ideas. One of my sisters calls this kind of typical City thing a "Cranial-Rectal Inversion".

After that I went out to the back yard a few times to hang out some laundry. Each time I appeared the entire flock of chickens would come running up joyfully, hopefully...but no goodies. Did you know that chickens can look dissapointed? Then the siren call of Patio Cleaning was heard, so I took daughter out armed with sidewalk chalk and plastic dinosaurs plus the boombox and an ELO CD for me. She was no problem but the chickens and the tortoise kept getting entangled in my feet or would go spelunking in the Mysteries of the Open Garage and then would have to be rescued and/or hauled out. The tortoise felt a deep inner need to carefully....slowwwwlllyyy...investigate every tool I was using. She also came back later to play in the hose water when I hosed off the patio,resulting in my shoes getting soaked.

The patio needs revamping, right now it is an ugly and uninviting holding pen for things like the trash cans and the barbeque. I just have to figure out how to use what I have to improve it, and step one was cleaning. On to step two!

After cajoling Miss Grump into ingesting a tuna fish sandwich I accidentally stomp a HARD plastic Disney 'Stitch' toy which cheerfully tries to imbed itself in my bare foot. As I yowl with pain I try not to use any words I'd rather not have a parent-teacher meeting about later on. Where are my shoes? Out back on the porch drying, of course...

After this I load the kid into the car, preparing to descend on the cable company office and fling money at them. Bless my stars, just as I get into the car my husband arrives home and volunteers to go drop it off, the darling. He also mentions that he has a sore back and neck from tossing several hundred pounds of machinery on his back and running it up some stairs. *sigh*

Take confused 4 year old back into the house and spend the next 20 minutes explaining to her what just happened. Four year olds must have Union rules which state that each occurence, question or statement must be repeated 20 times. After that I give up.

Tonight I skip the 5 o'clock news in favor or sitting in the back yard savoring the cleanness of it, blowing bubbles for the kid and playing with the chickens.

One of whom has pooped, right in the middle of my nice, clean patio.