Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A Fred Conlon Turtle made from an army helmet.

Santa dropped this off on Christmas morning. He leaves a turtle every Christmas.

Don't get fresh with me!

One morning, while I was eating my breakfast cereal, Jerry was in the kitchen putting together our lunches to take to work. He was cutting some pineapple spears we got at Costco into bite-sized pieces. As I was swallowing a mouthful of cereal he said, "I sure am glad to know that my pineapple is 'Alpine Fresh.'"

It took a bit of time to regain my composure and wipe up the cereal that had sprayed out of my nose.

To add to the absurdity, the pineapple's label tells us Alpine Fresh is in Florida, a very flat state. Its highest point is a whopping 345 feet above sea level.

Alpine, indeed! But no doubt fresh!

I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas

Well, a frosty Christmas. Poor little birds...their birdbaths froze over on Christmas morning.

But I broke the ice so they can get their morning water.

Merry Christmas!

(Damn gophers!)

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A pot signed "Shutiva Histia Acoma N.M." (probably Jackie).

Summer Solstice to Winter Solstice, 2009

Six months have passed since we saw my first stab at solarography.  I took down the cameras at sunset the evening before the summer solstice, reloaded them with paper and put them back up in time to start recording some solstice-to-solstice pictures.

I made two cameras out of Guinness beer cans and two out of quart paint cans. The beer cans weren't terribly successful. The paper in both of them curled up and stopped taking their pictures. At least they got some of the sun's progress recorded.

This first picture is from a beer can that was strapped to the old clothesline pole. It isn't the full six months because I looked at it some time into the exposure and noticed that the paper had shifted over the pinhole. So I took it down and put up a second one in its place.

Here is June 20 through sometime before August 2 from the clothesline pole.

Here is a shot from the clothesline pole from August 3 till the paper curled and blocked the pinhole.

Here is the view from the weather station on the roof. Its paper curled so it didn't record much of the sun's progress. I'm really confused about how it got some of the sun early in the exposure then conked out completely for a long time then kicked in every now and then some time later. This is a mysterious picture.

I was amazed at the amount of detail that was seen in the foreground of the spring-summer pictures but was disappointed that the top part of the sun's path was cut off. When I put the cameras back on the roof for these pictures, I put the pinholes higher on the cans so they would record higher in the sky. That worked but now I have none of the roof showing. Oh, well.

Here is the view from the paint can that is facing southeast. It kind of looks like June Gloom persisted into July by the fuzzy trails in the higher passes of the sun in the mornings (on the left) but my weather station seems to say that we were gloomy only until about July 1. Maybe it's just that the edges of the pictures just don't record all that well.

And here is the view from the paint can that is facing southwest. The tree on the left is the tree on the right in the above picture.

(In case you happened to notice, I got some of my pictures' names wrong. The got the beer cans mixed up so their names are swapped.)

The cranberries are nestled all snug in their bowl

I just made the cranberry sauce for Christmas dinner from a recipe Karen sent in 1996.

1½ cups sugar

¾ cup water

3 whole cloves

3 whole allspice

2 (3-inch) cinnamon sticks

1 (12 oz.) bag cranberries

Zest 1 orange

Bring sugar, water, cloves, allspice and cinnamon sticks to a boil in a 4-quart saucepan. Cook, stirring, until syrup is clear, about 3 minutes. Add cranberries and cook until they just begin to pop, about 5 minutes. (Do not overcook the cranberries; the little pop when you eat them is fun.)

Remove from heat, add orange zest and cool.  Keep in refrigerator at least 3 days before using. Makes 2 1/2 cups relish.

[I cook longer than "until they just begin to pop." You'd have a lot of uncooked berries if you stopped that soon, wouldn't you?]

The chain is going down to a steeping ball that is holding the cloves and allspice. This keeps us from having a surprising little extra crunch.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A lamp with a crane on a turtle (much like another thing you've seen).

A spectacular tree in our yard

Well, it was supposed to be a spectacular tree.

Our Floss Silk tree is blooming. For the first time. Ever.

Poor little tree. It was supposed to be huge by now.

Floss silk trees are "resistant to drought and moderate cold" according to the Wikipedia article. Apparently our cold is more severe than "moderate." The frost burns it down to stubs each year. It comes back and grows out again. Then frost strikes it down again.

We keep saying that we ought to just get rid of the tree.

Poor thing. Frost's a-comin'.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A Tower-o-Turtles.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A leather turtle (with a turtle bell you've already seen).

Thanksgiving is off to a great start

Our home-cooked Thanksgiving meal this year was breakfast.

(food styling by Mr. Bears)

The pancakes were made with:

• Wheat and oats that we milled this morning with our KitchenAid grain mill
• Vanilla made the BobBIE-Baby Way

On top of the pancakes we put:

• Peanut butter ground in our BlendTec Blender
• Pomegranate syrup made from juice from our bush

I'm thankful that:

• We had a nice, wholesome, home-cooked meal and didn't get overfed
• There aren't a lot of dishes to take care of
• We have all our gadgets that make fairly healthful meals like this fun to make
• I have friends and family who humor me by reading these silly messages
• I have Jerry to take care of all the hard parts of Thanksgiving meals (and the rest of my life)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Autumn is Icumen in

Here we go again.

This year's pomegranate harvest was much better than last year's. Last year I didn't grow quite enough pomegranates to make one batch of jelly. This year I got a lot of pomegranates. I made three batches of jelly and one of syrup. Pancakes like pomegranates, too.

That took a gallon of juice. That took getting a lot of little arils out of the tough rinds.

I made a movie of the process.

Thrills ahead!

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A mug (put into service as a pencil box) and matching box.

Gadgetmania

Jerry and I have joined the 21^st Century.  We got new cellphones!

We got Droids. Now we are never without phones. Or email. Or the web.

I was going to try to post this from my car at lunch today but I'm not good at typing on the tiny keyboards yet.

It's got GPS and can navigate using Google Maps. I had it guide me home from work yesterday. When you reach your destination it switches from the map to Google's street view. I found out that they've got a close-up of our house now.


View Larger Map

Their notion of our address is kind of off.

The picture was taken after our flood and shortly after the bike race (if you move to the left you'll see mud on the road from the truck that got stuck in the muck).

But all this is beside the point.

We have a very comprehensive phone plan now. We have unlimited data use. And unlimited text and picture messages. The use of the phone isn't unlimited but we've got a lot more time than we had before and we never went over our plan's time. We need to talk more.

So text away! Email is pretty much instant, too.

It's powered by Google's Android operating system. To get full use of it we needed to get Google's gmail email accounts. I'll be sending our my new email address soon. The old addresses still work but if you use the gmail address I'll be notified of new mail almost instantly. The others might have a 15 minute lag.

Keep in touch. We're never out of reach now.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Here I am in a T-shirt.

Just hangin' around

When I got our latest turtle, I bought a bat also by Henry Dupere.  We were busy last weekend so it didn't get installed until today. It's just hangin' around above the front door.

While we were deciding where to put the bat, Jerry noticed this moth just hangin' around on the door jamb. I guess she thinks this is a good place to start a family. There's not a lot to eat here.

Moths sure are pretty.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A herd of horse hair pottery turtles found (I think) in Madrid, NM.

Autumn in New Mexico

My first morning in New Mexico gave me a bit of scenery that I really hadn't counted on. Snow!

Here's my little Southern California car's first encounter with precipitation.

I got to use its heated seats for the first time.

I needed to get a scenic panorama of the cliffs around Los Alamos. I ended up at the Clinton P. Anderson Scenic Overlook on the main road into town. Here we see (I think) Los Alamos Canyon and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I wish Blogger would leave my pictures at their full resolution. If anybody wants to see higher resolution versions of the panoramas, just ask.

Here's a picture of picture of the mesas just to the right of the center of the panorama. The Sangre de Cristos are behind the clouds. This picture isn't one of the shots that went into the panorama. I zoomed in on the mesas more than in the panorama.

Snow is pretty but I don't think I want to live where it you expect it to happen. I suppose it is nice to experience once every 20 or 30 years.

Since I'm in a panorama frenzy, here is a picture of Burnt Mountain behind the house I grew up in. There were a lot more trees when I lived in Los Alamos.

Oh, look! There's the start of a new forest in the foreground!

And to continue the frenzy, here's one more panorama from the Painted Desert. I named this picture "Kachina Point" and that's the name I gave to a picture in my Petrified Forest post. The two pictures aren't showing the same place. One has got to be Chinde Point. I'll figure it all out some day.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

From my stop in Madrid last week.

The Petrified Forest

Mom and my new car demanded that I take a road trip. I obeyed them last week.  The car got a bit more than 52 miles per gallon on the way to Los Alamos but only 51 mpg on the way home.

On the way to New Mexico, I stopped for the night at the Motel 6 in Holbrook, Arizona. I got up the next morning and headed over to the south entrance of the Petrified Forest National Park. The winter hours went into effect that day so I had to wait until 8:00 to get in.

I took pictures.

Here is an obligatory picture of petrified logs along the Long Logs Trail. I passed a man who had his very serious camera on a tripod set to take a picture of the end of a log. He was woking on his shot for a long time as I approached and was still working on it as I headed back to the car. I took artsy close-ups, too, but I won't bother you with those. Mine didn't take an hour each.

One of my favorite gadgets is Photoshop Elements' Photomerge^TM Panorama feature. You take many pictures that overlap a bit and it pastes them together into one, long picture.  I should have read the tutorial about how to use it most effectively.  I should have shot in portrait orientation rather than landscape. I sometimes used a tripod but didn't for this picture. It's a kind of amphitheater with petrified logs strewn around. Click on it to enlarge it. (Blogger limits the size of the pictures. The original is much larger.)

I drove up to the Crystal Forest. This is the view of a hill you see as you approach the Crystal Forest's parking lot. It struck me as pretty. (What in the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert isn't pretty?)

Here are petroglyphs on the Newspaper Rock. I wish doo-doo heads wouldn't add their scratchings to it.

I took some more panoramas in the Painted Desert part of the park. I used the tripod to keep the camera facing the same altitude for each shot so it worked better than the Long Logs shot. Here is the view from the Lacey Point overlook.

And here is the view from the Kachina Point overlook. I used an additional wide angle lens and aimed the camera into the valley rather than at the horizon. The wall at the bottom of the picture either is straight or curves around the parking lot. It doesn't really bow away from us.

The trip through the park is a great way to spend four hours and only ten dollars. Everybody should do it when they have the opportunity.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A tealight holder.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Three Avon products. Two for candles and one perfume bottle.

(It's not that we especially like Avon turtles. They're usually not even out much of the time. They just were in antique stores when we still had room for such things. You don't need to find Avon turtles for us.)

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

You've seen this nightlight before but it was in the background of another tchotchke.

Here it is in its full glory!

What could it mean?

Years ago, Peggy decorated a mug for each of us. Mine has a Valkyrie hollering her war cry (as Peggy understood it):

What could it mean?

A-TEN-shun!

I usually don't pay attention to ads on web sites. I especially try to ignore the ones that have annoying animations going on. A year or so ago, there were some ads on the New York Times site for Design Within Reach. Their ads were simply their name on a red background. For some reason I checked them out. And spent hours looking through their products. I've gone back to drool over and over again.

I want a second house that we can decorate with contemporary furnishings.

One of the stops of our trip last month was Penzeys Spices in Santa Monica. Just across the street from Penzeys happened to be a DWR store. Oh, boy! Oh, boy! Oh, boy!

One of the things I wanted to see was a miniature of a molded plywood elephant designed by Charles and Ray Eames. The only one they had was in their display case. Jerry bought it for me!

I hadn't heard of Charles Eames and the Eames Chair until Charles Eames gave the commencement address at my college graduation.

I wish I could remember the address. I'm sure it was full of wonderful ideas to help us to do great things with our lives. The one thing I remember is that he showed us his film "The Powers of Ten." My friend Walter Kubilius was excited that we were going to see Mr. Eames and his movie. If it hadn't been for his excitement, I might have let the whole experience pass as just another inspirational speech. Sadly, Charles Eames died just three months after that address.

I'm glad I know a little about the Eameses. And I now have my own little Eames-designed piece. Now I'll have to go back and get a chair.

"The Powers of Ten" is a very interesting little movie. I hope you watch and enjoy it.

Happy Powers of Ten day!

How smuggy can you get?

I had to put the icing on the cake. My Prius now has an Apple sticker on it.

A collective noun proposal: A smugness of Prius drivers.

The Smug gets thicker!

Yesterday, I took the Prius to the dealer to have the security system installed and the paint and upholstery protection applied. When I picked up the car, the service manager gave me a prize!

Now, when I shop for groceries, I can be greener yet! And proudly display my dedication to the environment! (We already use canvas bags but we need to increase the smug level in these parts.)



By the way, in case you're interested, here's a link to an excellent episode of South Park on this very subject.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A nightlight.

Level IV Smug Alert!

My little Corolla was almost 12 years old. It was getting rather frayed around the edges. It had a cracked windshield. Its headliner was starting to sag. The plastic trim around the doors had shrunk and had pulled away from the door frames. Its fuel economy had dropped to only 28 miles per gallon tooling around town.

It was time to think about getting a new car.

Thanks to BEA being bought last year and Mom's advances on our inheritance, I had some money sitting around screaming "SPEND ME!"

Today was the day to obey the money.

I didn't record the results of the poll I had with my BEA story but I remember what the outcome was. The choice with the most votes was "Buy a Prius."

I bought a 2010 Prius IV.

You thought I'd get your basic model? I thought I would have but I didn't. I wanted the solar powered ventilation system and the remote air conditioning system. I didn't really want heated, leather seats but, hey, why not? I've been rather frugal with my cars for a while.

Now I have to read about all the fun things I can do with it. I have to learn how to get my phone to talk through the bluetooth connection to the car. I have to figure out all the buttons (there are a lot of buttons).

It's going to take a while to be able to just walk up to the car and get going. Cars need keys in an ignition switch to run. At least they used to.

Well, I need to read up on this thing.

It was Fate

There was a hobby that Jack introduced me to that I embraced completely.

For a long time I was fascinated by the paranormal.

Out of the blue, Jack got me an issue of Fate magazine. I guess I really enjoyed what I read. Jack got me a subscription to the magazine!

One of the first issues I got in the mail really got me hooked.

The article "Table Up! or How to Tilt a Table" got the ball rolling. This is a way to get answers to all of your questions.

It was easy. Three people sit at the east, south and west sides of a card table. You then rub your hands together until they are warm then place your hands on the table so that your thumbs are touching and your pinkies are touching the person's pinkies next to you. You then chant "Table Up! Table Up! Table Up!" After a short time the legs on the north side of the table rise off of the floor! The table then will answer your questions. You tell it to dip up and down to give the answers. For example, for a yes/no question, you could have it dip once for "yes" and twice for "no." I suppose you need to give it an option like three dips for "I'm not telling!"

It actually worked! Three of us got out the card table, sat around it, did the chanting, and, miracle of miracles!, the legs on the north side of the table rose from the floor! It did its dipping to answer our questions!

I can't remember what sort of questions we asked. I certainly don't remember if the answers were very accurate. But it was a miracle that the table ignored the laws of gravity and dipped out answers.

This led me to the 130s section of Mesa Public Library. I must have checked out every book of their paranormal collection.

I investigated dreams. I studied the Tarot. I got a Ouiji board. I read about UFOs. I thought about telepathy and psychokinesis.

A weird thing about the Ouiji board was that whenever Peggy was on the other side of the planchette, the board would give very rude or obscene answers. I guess Peggy was channelling unhappy spirits. I hope they have found their peace.

I never got good at reading the Tarot cards. I probably needed a teacher. Like most of the things I learned outside of school, I was self-taught. Book learning about mystical things isn't the best way to go. The knowledge probably has to be passed empathetically from master to student.

But mostly I learned about testing hypotheses.

I never saw that any of these mystical activities were shown to be real through reproducible tests.

Fate had features where readers would send in their proofs of survival (of this plane's life) and of mystic experiences. Most were rather silly. One woman told about waking up one night to see an otherworldly surgeon operating on her chronically sore hips. She woke up the next morning and the pain she had experienced for years was gone! She had scars on her hips that were proof that she had had the overnight surgery! Even though I was trying to be a believer and I was rather young, my eyes rolled and I thought, "Lady, you have stretch marks. Maybe you lost some weight and your hips aren't working as hard holding you up."

I couldn't be a believer. But I still have fond memories of my time trying to find more in this universe than can be experienced by our five traditional senses.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A nightlight with dichroic glass elements.

Fire!

I check the traffic map before I leave work. Today there were some yellow diamonds right by home.  The details of the incidents said that there was a fire in the field in the northeast corner of the intersection of Bear Valley Parkway and San Pasqual Valley Road. We live in the southwest corner of that intersection.

Before I left work I saw the details up to about 4:34 PM.

Jerry called to say that I ought to take a different route home since traffic on Bear Valley Parkway was very slow.

Before I got home, Jerry and a neighbor got to watch a palm tree go up in flames.

I got home and went down to the field at the end of the road with my camera to watch the goings on. Of course, I took a movie. It's pretty dull. We get to see helicopters fly around and drop water on the fire. I missed the fixed-wing plane dropping the pretty pink water.

Here's the dull movie. The most interesting thing about it is the strobing of the helicopter blades that makes it look like they spin very slowly.


This is a map of the area. We live in the house toward the bottom. We watched from the person standing in the field. The helicopter landed at the helicopter. The fire was somewhere around the fire. And there's another marker under the buttons just to keep the fire in the picture.

View Neighborhood Fire in a larger map


The fire is out. Its origin is suspicious.

This hobby laid an egg

Chickens.

"Son, you want to raise chickens."

No, I didn't.

Another of Jack's hobby ideas was for me to be a chicken rancher. He was serious. He bought me books on the activity. This would be a 4-H project. I'd get a merit badge and he'd get eggs and chickens on the table.

An aside: I was in a 4-H club. Its focus was on electronics. I made a toolbox that was supposed to hold all of my electronics equipment. It was a simple plywood box with a hinged lid with a hasp we could lock it with. I never used it. It would have been pretty useless for tools. There was nothing in it to keep it organized.

I had mixed experiences in my 4-H career.

One year I went to a statewide 4-H competition where I demonstrated making an extension cord. To make things go smoothly, my 4-H leader had me precut the insulation at the proper places. In the demonstration I simply pantomimed the cutting. I removed the insulation from the wires on one end of the cord, fed it through the plug and tried to tie the Underwriter's knot that keeps the cord from being pulled out of the plug.

I tried and tried but the wires were too short for the knot. After struggling a long time (and after the judges told me to relax) I realized that I was working on the wrong end of the cord. Because there were different plugs on the ends of the cord, one end's wires needed to be shorter than the other's. I was working with the wrong end. I went well beyond my allotted time. I didn't win an award.

Electronics wasn't the only thing I did for 4-H.

I kept bees. For some reason, they gave me credit for entomology. I wasn't studying bugs. I would have thought that beekeeping would have been a 4-H category of its own.

And I cooked. I won a blue ribbon in the county fair for the biscuits I entered in the 4-H category. That let me send some biscuits to the state fair. No ribbons came back to me.

Chickens.

I read the books on raising chickens. There were many unpleasant things about raising chickens.

For one thing, you had to kill them. I didn't look forward to that. Poor things.

And you got to be an amateur veterinarian. One activity in the book that looked like was in my future was caponizing the roosters-to-be. The thought of castrating the little chickens scared the heck out of me.

The chicken ranch was going to be in the back yard around the shed. I think that we were going to convert the shed into a chicken coop.

I don't know how close we came to rounding up the initial flock of chickens.

But Chris came first!

Jack had a friend who had a golden retriever. Karen was in love with that dog. The pooch became a parent (I can't remember whether it was the mother or the father). The friend gave us, well, gave Karen, one of the litter. This was around Christmas, 1968. He was named Golden Duke's Christmas (after his father). Chris for short.

Thank god for Chris.

He got the part of the yard that was going to be for the chickens.

NO CHICKENS!

Chris and Karen, January 1969

Thank you, Chris!

Red hot poker

Jack's choices of hobbies for me weren't always as successful as beekeeping.

Out of nowhere he gave me a book on how to play poker. I don't remember ever expressing an interest in the game.

The book was filled with the obvious information about the probabilities of filling your inside straights and how likely your two pairs will be beat at a table of four players.

The most interesting parts of the book were about the psychology of the game.

Much of the book was about how to play in a weekly game against a regular group.

We learned how to observe the mannerisms of our friends to understand when they're bluffing and when they have an exceptional hand. We learned how to encourage our friends to give away information through these signals. Of course it taught us how not to have such bad habits ourselves.

It taught us how to win but not win so much that our buddies stop playing. If one of the guys is looking like he's about to drop out of the Friday night game, we were told how to start losing some of our money to him so he'd be encouraged to stay in the game and lose much more money to us.

There were many problems with taking up poker for fun and profit (mostly for profit).

Among them:

1. I was a kid (in high school, but still a kid).
2. Without a lot of money.
3. Who didn't know anybody with money.

But mostly it seemed to be teaching me how to cultivate friendships in order to take as much of their money as I could. That didn't interest me.

There must have been tips on how to win against people we've never played against. But you probably have to get good at the game by first cleaning out your friends' bank accounts.

I never played poker for money.

I wonder why Jack thought I'd be interested in poker for a living at that time.

"Here, little number cruncher, you can make a living at what you're good at."

"Here's something I wish I could have done. Make me proud."

"This is your last best hope."

"Get rich quick."

I'll never know.

Schadenfreude

Jack wasn't always uninvolved in my leisure time. Sometimes he was very involved.

He'd choose my hobbies for me.

One of the hobbies he chose for me was beekeeping. I didn't like honey back then. I'm not much of a fan of the stuff still. Give me jam for my biscuits any day. So this wasn't the most satisfying hobby for me.

But beekeeping was an interesting activity. It let me see what is the rather miraculous process of little insects gathering nectar and pollen and turning it into more little insects and wax and honey.

We got hives from Sears that we had to put together and paint. We filled the frames with sheets of foundation for the little bees to build their combs on.  Jack got me "The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture." We had the jumpsuits, gloves, and hoods that would let us work with the bees without getting stung.  Much.

We ordered the bees from Sears (is there nothing you can't get from Sears?). They came in the mail in wooden boxes with screen sides. Each box held three pounds of worker bees and a few drones and a little box with a queen and a few attendants. There was a can of sugar water that kept them fed for the days they were in the mail.  The queen's box had a plug made out of sugar that the bees would eat through to release the queen. The time it took to release her gave them time to accept her as their leader.

We'd don our protective clothes, open a box of bees, shake them into their prepared hive, hang the queen's box between two frames, put the lid on and wait.

A week later we opened the hives to remove the emptied queen's box. The bees had started building combs! This was fascinating.

My career as an apiarist had begun.

Each year we'd harvest the honey. We didn't have the equipment to spin the honey out of the combs so we'd just hack the combs into squares and put them in plastic boxes. These would get sold at work much like Girl Scout cookies. But better...people got their money's worth. I don't think I was involved in the marketing of the honey. Whew!

Those bees terrorized me for years. The hives were set up in the back yard near the gate that took us to the parking spots behind the house. The bees' flight path took them across the walk up to the gate at low altitude. Now and then one would get caught in someone's hair. Ouch.

When you're a good beekeeper you don't need the protective clothes. You know how to handle the bees without getting them riled up. We never got good at it.

My happiest day at beekeeping was when Jack was doing something with the bees by himself. He got into his jumpsuit, zipped on the veil and went to work. He didn't get the veil completely closed.

The bees found the weak spot in his protection. He got a face full of stings. He was quite the dancer while this was going on.

Finally, a bit of a comeuppance for all the terror he had brought upon me.

Schadenfreude, it's human nature.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A nightlight.

Squill trying to satisfy requests

Poss wanted me or Jerry in a picture of the squills to show the scale better.  Your wish is my command!

Squill growing

I showed you my giant squills a few days ago. They're about finished blooming for this year. The tallest one is now 6'7" tall.

This is what they look like today.

Colleen's comment suggested that I should have added something that gives you the scale of the flowers so I did just that this time. You'll notice two Papo fantasy figures that Peggy and Michele gave us. There's Rhino Man on the left and Werewolf on the right. They wear skintight shorts are are very well endowed. Thanks, Peggy and Michele!

The Queen Mary

We spent a couple of nights on The Queen Mary while on the road last week. You've seen what I ate there and you've seen what we did during the day between the nights on board. There's not much to tell about the rest of our experience in the hotel.

Here's another picture I took of the ship while passing it on our way to Catalina. The window I had to shoot through wasn't perfectly clean and had the sun shining on it.

Wikipedia has a better picture from about the same point of view.

In my earlier post, I pointed out the general area of our room. We checked in at the desk near the bow and had to hike to our room near the stern. It's a looooooong hallway. This picture from in front of our room taken with my phone probably doesn't really show the length very well.

The rooms are long and narrow. This is the view of the bathroom door from the bed end of the room. The door into the room is on the wall to the left of the bathroom door. There's a vanity to the right of the bathroom door.

The walls are very thin. You can hear everything the neighbors do. They got a 7:00 wake-up call each morning. We were already awake at that time. It would have been a bit annoying if we wanted to sleep in. The neighbors were already bustling about by the time they got their call.

Here's the original (but not operational) fan.

(I couldn't tell that the picture was this blurry when I took it.)

At the right of the picture is a door that connects our room to the next room in case we wanted to have a suite. Of course it is locked. The second night we had neighbors in that room. They were unsure what the door was to. They tried and tried to open it. The knob would rattle every few minutes. I wondered in a clear and somewhat loud voice why the neighbors were trying to get into our room. With the thin walls they must have heard me. But that didn't stop them from trying to see what's behind that mysterious door. The next morning there were some more attempts to get through the door.

The portholes weren't locked shut. They're big enough to crawl through but I guess nobody bothers to get a room in order to end it. They must just take the cheaper tour and jump from the Promenade deck.

We had a view of Long Beach.

There was a problem with the air conditioning. The thermostat wasn't controlling it. So the room was very cold. We tried leaving the windows open but that didn't help much. And it let the mosquitos in. I got a bunch of bites that were red and a bit swollen but didn't itch at all. Strange.

They fixed the problem the second night after Jerry asked if there was something that could be done about the temperature.

The bathtub had some knobs that don't do anything these days. Apparently you could bathe in salt water in the good old days. Do cruise ships still use salt water?

The towel was nicely hung on the bar. The fandolded washcloth was tucked in a pocket folded in the hand towel.

It was nice to stay on the Queen Mary. I still think I'd feel too confined to spend time on a real cruise.