furniture

Cockeyed And Crazy

/ Diane Henders / 35 Comments

Various people have suggested that my grip on sanity is tenuous at best, perhaps because I tend to zone out and mutter at random moments while I wrestle with plot problems, but mostly because of my tendency to risk unnecessary bodily harm. Usually I just disregard their reality and cheerfully substitute my own, but lately my state of denial has been harder to maintain.

Between kickboxing and home renovation and automotive work there’s rarely a time when I’m not decorated with at least a few bruises or abrasions, but I’ve been a veritable paragon of common sense while my back’s been sore. Weeks have passed with my knuckle skin completely undamaged. Even my fingernails have grown out into clean, smooth half-moons. For somebody who usually uses 10W-30 for hand cream with a manicure by Makita, that’s positively unnatural.

So apparently I’ve decided that some injury is required to restore the balance of the universe. Hubby may not realize this, but he has enabled me in my quest for pain.

It all started when I decided I’d like to have an actual bed for the first time in my adult life. Up until recently our mattress and box-spring sat on a steel bed frame. It was sturdy and practical but ugly as homemade sin, and the middle caster was positioned exactly so as to rip your toes off every time you made the bed.

Hubby and I looked at some new wooden beds, but the prices were exorbitant and the designs were boring. I admit I’m a cheapskate, but it seems to me that if I’m going to pay three thousand dollars for a bed that doesn’t even include a mattress, it better serve me drinks and rock me to sleep. Or rock my world somehow, but we won’t get into that.

So Hubby decided to build us a new bed. I designed it, he built it, and we’re delighted with the result in cherry and live-edge maple burl:

This photo doesn’t do justice to the satiny ripples of figuring in the burls.

This photo doesn’t do justice to the satiny ripples of figuring in the burls.

It’s beautiful. It’s one-of-a-kind.

And it’s dangerous.

We’ve lived in this house for sixteen years, and my reflexes are finely honed to skirt around the end of our bed in the pitch dark. But now the bed is eight inches longer.

I’m pretty sure if you look at the picture closely, you’ll see my kneecaps dangling from the end posts. I’ve smashed into those posts so many times my knees look as though Guido and Luigi paid me a midnight visit with their baseball bats.

And just because it’s not enough of a challenge to unlearn a decade and a half of habit, I’ve also started a two-week trial of eyeglasses that leave my right eye uncorrected so I can continue to see clearly in the distance, while correcting my left to see clearly up close. If I can adjust to that, I can have LASIK surgery on my left eye and ditch the umpteen pairs of reading glasses lying around our house.

But until or unless I get used to that, my depth perception is screwed up.

So I’m squinting cockeyed at the world while I limp around muttering disjointed sentence fragments and occasionally stumbling over imaginary obstacles on a flat smooth floor.

It’s lucky I don’t go out much. The loony-catchers would pick me up for sure.

Please inject a dose of sanity here.  Has anybody else tried the one-eye-for-distance/one-eye-for-closeup thing?

Chair Demons

/ Diane Henders / 49 Comments

I’d like to think it’s not just me. Doesn’t everybody harbour a few items in their home which, when considered out of context (which is to say, ‘by any sane human being’), are just a little… um… creepy?

Some things are intentionally creepy, and that’s okay. For instance, I love this candle-holding sculpture my sister gave me years ago: As the candle flickers, its eyes glow and seem to follow you around the room.

Totally creepy, but in a good way.

Totally creepy, but in a good way.

In the ‘that’s odd’ category of creepy, I also own a stuffed beaver.  *insert the revolting double entendre of your choice here*

No, really, it’s a child’s toy. I’m not sure I’d want to meet the twisted toymaker who one day looked up from his designs of cute, cuddly bunnies and bears and thought, “We need beavers!”

…Okay, I realize most guys have that revelation at some point in their life, but this guy followed it to its logical conclusion: “Everybody needs beavers!” And here’s the result:

He’s cuddly-soft, and his name is Bob. Don’t ask.

He’s cuddly-soft, and his name is Bob. Don’t ask.

Moving on up the ‘disturbing’ scale, I also own two rubber chickens that reside in the planter in my living room. Well, to be technically accurate, one’s rubber and the other is silicone, which is even grosser than rubber because it’s all wobbly and floppy.

But the rubber one makes up for its deficiency in the gross-out department, because:

  1. Its gaping beak is disturbingly reminiscent of a blow-up doll; and
  2. It squawks when squeezed – a horrible half-strangled wail like bagpipes possessed by the spirit of an evil piper who died in the throes of an asthma attack.
creepy chickens

I’m not sure which bothers me more, the gaping beak of the big one or the flaccid-phallus appearance of the little one…

 

But the top ‘Creepy and Disturbing’ award goes to our dining room furniture. You’d think it would be pretty difficult to make shudder-worthy dining chairs. And I’m not talking about physical discomfort.

No, I’m talking about the kind of creep factor that sends a shiver down your spine and makes you question whether you really want to turn your back on the item in question. I mean, seriously, what sick and deranged mind thought it would be a good idea to carve this on the back of a dining-room chair?

Would you turn your back on this?

Would you turn your back on this?

It looks like one of the minor demons from hell, perched at exactly the right height to chew a crippling chunk out of your spinal cord with its fiendishly gaping mouth. Then once you’re incapacitated, who knows what it might do?

This dining-room set belonged to my husband’s grandparents, and as far as I know they lived healthy, normal lives unmolested by denizens of the Pit… but these chairs give me the shivers anyway. I’ve lived with them for over a decade by convincing myself that, like gargoyles, they’re fierce guardians of our home. If anybody ever threatens us, look out! The chair demons will get them!

But that only works if I don’t think about it too much…

Anybody else harbouring satanic furniture or other creepy items?

* * *

Woohoo!  I’ve finished the draft for Book 8, and it’ll be off to my beta readers / editors this week!

Cheapskate!

/ Diane Henders / 38 Comments

I’ve reluctantly come to accept that I’m a cheapskate.

I tend to make do with what I’ve got until it’s long past time the item was replaced.  When I finally do buy a new item, I’m willing to pay for the features I need, but I refuse to pay extra for non-essentials.  Like colour.  (Which probably explains why I was such a resounding failure as an interior designer, but that’s another story.)

Self-help programs point out that it’s necessary to first identify and accept that you have a problem before healing can begin.  My cheapskate epiphany came when I realized I’ve owned nothing but white cars since 1989.

I’ve disliked white cars since I was old enough to pronounce the words “I like the red one better”.

In 1989, I bought a well-used 1975 Dodge Dart for $1100, which was all I could afford at the time.  It had one of the old 225 slant-six engines you couldn’t kill with a howitzer, and I loved that car so much that I forgave it for being white.  (Plus it had sporty stripes on the sides, so it wasn’t completely white.)

When the Dart rusted away several years later, I bought a 1986 Taurus cheap at an auction because it was (again) all I could afford.  It was a piece of shit.  I spent more time repairing it than I did driving it.  And it was white.

In 1998, I’d been divorced for a couple of years and I was back on my feet.  I decided I deserved a new car.  I’d never bought a vehicle off the lot before, and it was time, dammit.  No more hand-me-downs.  No more making do.

Off I went to the Saturn dealer to buy a new car.  Any colour I wanted.  Ha!

But they offered me a deal.  They had a demo on sale.  It was brand new except for the few hundred kilometres that had been put on by the dealership’s test drives.  And they’d knock $6,000 off the price and give me an extra year’s warranty.

Yeah, you guessed it.  I’m still driving it.  It’s been a great car.

But it’s white.

Because I’m a cheapskate, my motorcycle helmet has a fiery red skull on the back, and there’s cabbage-rose-patterned furniture in my living room.  Many would consider those patterns to be mutually exclusive.  I mean, really, most people are either flaming-skull or cabbage-rose, right?

But the helmet had all these great features, and it was cheaper than the plain black one.

And really, the furniture wasn’t my fault.  My mother chose the pattern.  Back around 1973.  That furniture has survived exposure to decades of children, cats, three different households in two provinces, and nearly 40 years of direct sun, all without fading or sagging or showing any visible signs of wear and tear.  I’m pretty sure it would survive a nuclear holocaust.

It is, however, violently unfashionable.  When I said “cabbage-rose”, you thought muted pinks, didn’t you?  Wrong-o.  The background is navy blue with poison-green leaves, and the cabbage roses are blue and orange.  Big suckers, about 5” across.  That furniture is so obnoxious, it even makes my fiery skull shudder.

I don’t want to spend the money right now, but some day, I’ll buy new furniture.  Any colour I want.  Ha!

…Is there an echo in here?

Please tell me there’s somebody else out there who makes do with not-so-perfect colours for the sake of frugality (which is a much nicer way to say ‘cheapness’).