Two views of (parts of) my apartment at Avant (photos by Opal Armstrong Zwicky), so you can see some of the things I’ve been writing about. And then can be used for a more urgent purpose: opposing death — I am on deathwatch for one of my oldest and dearest friends — by laughing in its face and by counterposing the power of sex against it. This will take us down some surprising paths, of parallels and analogies and loosely related circumstances. And then somehow it will all end in Latin, with Catullus, where I at least will find release and repose — cease, Galatea, cease to grieve. But in a lot of steps, and only a bit of it today.
Archive for the ‘Furnishings and tools’ Category
Where I live
August 25, 2026Lecterns on wheels
August 13, 2026They bring me reference volumes for work in progress, allowing me to hold them open on the lectern itself.
My reference works are mostly big heavy volumes, very hard for my disabled hands to cope with at all. Lifting them is a problem in itself. Then I used to have a space on my worktable, in front of my tv, where they could lie open, right next to my computer’s keyboard, to the pages I needed. But that space had to be used as the phone center for my home office, so more complex measures were required. From an office supply company, lecterns on wheels.
Oh dear, now you’re entertaining fantasies of crazy-eyed mad professors zooming around dusty lecture halls, all jazzed up on their turbo-charged lecterns — bumper cars for the academic elite. Sadly, the excellent Interion mobile podium / lectern from Global Industrial (which mostly provides heavy-duty industrial office supplies) moves slowly but majestically; it was just what I wanted, and I needed two of them, one for each of two bookish rooms. They definitely required assembly by a professional — and even so consumed a fair chunk of time for the mechanic — during which I suffered sharp pangs of tool envy, an affliction I am prone to.
But it was done, and here’s the one from the main room of my apartment, with the most-often used reference works installed in convenient places:
Second Sunday
July 19, 2026My second Sunday at Avant, beginning to refine old routines and create new ones. Did not celebrate with gay porn, but instead with an old favorite movie, the frivolous Astaire-Rogers delight The Gay Divorcee (from 1934). Your wife is safe with Tonetti / He prefer spaghetti. No Palo Alto Sacred Harp singing this Sunday, so I sang for two hours on my own, to Irish YouTube videos, eventually reaching peak loudness and passion. My tongue broke out in unknown strains / And sung surprising grace.
Accumulated the beginnings of way too many postings to come. And did the Sunday thing of restarting the computer and doing a save of its contents.
Ordered more household items, got some delivered, mostly things with instructions that are incomplete or completely incomprehensible, at least to me. On the first, I have a new atomic clock for the bathroom, the 40-year-old veteran being on its last legs; the new one has homed in on the right 12-hour Pacific Daylight Time, but has provided no way — that I can fathom — to set the date and day of the week. On the second, I have the mounting tape but completely fail to understand how to adhesive-mount my collages (merely printed on stiff paper, not framed or heavy) on my walls. And on and on.
This will all get worse tomorrow, when even more stuff gets delivered. So I can wander fretfully from one puzzle to another.
Turkish hand towels
May 5, 2026Awaiting the delivery of 4 Turkish hand towels (for use in bathroom and bedroom), to supplement my old 15 x 27″ stock, in white and yellow, as they gradually fray and shred and get retired as rags or trash. My helper Isaac asked how old they were, and was astounded to be told that Jacques and I bought them 40 years ago. The new ones:
Slightly larger (16 x 28″), in a color labeled silver grey
Things I didn’t know
April 14, 2026Things I probably should have known, but didn’t, and have just recently discovered: one linguistic (on a pronunciation in BrE), one botanical (on the identity of a plant growing on the street a block from my house).
The passing domestic scene: waterfalls
October 18, 2025The second installment on recent events in my life (yesterday’s posting “The passing domestic scene: biopsies”, covering 10/2 to the present, was the first).
Today’s story begins on the morning of 10/7. I was intently focused on a cute posting about a Bizarro cartoon — “The flannel frontier”, finally posted on 10/9 — when I became peripherally conscious of the sound of running water. Really loud running water. Had I left a faucet running?
I looked up from my keyboard, to witness waterfalls streaming from the ceiling in four places, drenching everything below them, pooling on the carpeting in the living room and surging in a wave into the little hallway to the bathroom.
The Venus bear trap
September 26, 2025In today’s Bizarro cartoon, a hybrid portmanteau, a portmanteau name for one kind of hybrid referent, a referent with an assortment of features drawn from the referents of the contributing expressions; think of triceradoodle (referring to a hybrid of a triceratops and a poodle cross) = triceratops + doodle ‘a poodle cross’ (to be illustrated below):
(#1) Venus flytrap + bear trap = Venus bear trap: the appearance of a giant Venus flytrap leaf, with the bait of a foothold bear trap (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
To come: details about the two contributing referents, the Venus flytrap and the (foothold) bear trap; then a factor that makes this portmanteau especially rich and satisfying, in contrast to the less complex (but far more preposterous) triceradoodle.
The rainbow made us gay, the penguins say
August 26, 2025From Steven Levine on 8/19, this image from a Facebook group on thrift store finds, about a rectangle of needlepoint (probably intended to be a wall hanging) depicting penguins marching from left to right, through a rainbow, each emerging from the other side with its body, inside and out, in one of the colors of the gay pride flag; the rainbow makes them gay:
(#1) Steven of course thought of me, but appreciated that this would not be the time to be giving me penguiniana, so contented himself with letting me enjoy the strange spectacle
I’d never seen anything quite like it. Marching penguins, yes, of course. Penguins in the colors of the gay pride flag, of course. I’ve posted both. But the preposterous fantasy of penguins getting gay-transmuted by passing through a rainbow, absolutely not. And then to realize it not in drawing, painting, or trick photography, but in the unpretentious craft medium of needlepoint, where we expect earnest images (stylized birds) and slogans (BLESS THIS HOME), well, that’s wonderfully goofy.