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Clarence in his Toughskins Sunday, December 21 2003
I stoked up a hot fire in the wood stove today, and in a few hours the living room was the warmest room in the house, a title usually held by one of the four upstairs rooms (where we spend most of our time in the winter). The animals are especially sensitive to warm places at this time of year, and they all took advantage of the situation.
I finished the new coffee mug rack today, a task that mostly consisted of filing surplus solder from the joints and then burnishing the copper throughout with an abrasive pad. It looked so good in its new place that I looked around for other places to make other such racks. One idea Gretchen and I considered today was for me to build some sort of pot rack above the kitchen's island.
The new copper pipe coffee mug rack, installed on the side of a kitchen cabinet.
Clarence snuggling with Eleanor on the living room couch. A hot fire in the woodstove made the living room unusually cozy today.
Whenever our newest cat Clarence is engaged in one his prolonged playful bouts, he can often be seen dashing across the floor from one place to another, often in pursuit of a tiny hemlock cone (such cones, which are plentiful in the yard, are his favorite toys). When he's not absorbed with his hemlock cones, he also can also be performning WWF moves on Mavis, having his head devoured by Eleanor, or leaping either way through the pet door. When Clarence is acting this way, Gretchen routinely declares, "He's really wearing his ToughskinsTM today!" I didn't know anything about them, but apparently ToughskinsTM were a brand of blue jeans manufactured by Sears back in the 1970s. Whenever Gretchen imagines someone wearing ToughskinsTM, the picture in her mind is of a surly, skinny boy with close-cropped hair and a dirty face. She searched in Google for ToughskinsTM and found a hilarious description. I particularly like the imagery of someone's brother beating his ToughskinsTM against a bed post "so he could walk without making it look like he had just gotten out of a Turkish prison."
I have to do something about the increasing chaos in the laboratory. There's a five string electric guitar, a pile of computer circuit boards, several computer carcasses, two separate piles of copper pipe fittings, two different kinds of soldering torches, a flux-stained piece of WonderboardTM, and now, a huge multicolored pile of LegosTM.
Toughskins
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