Horing Around

It’s official–I am a hor. And no, that’s not a spelling error, and no, I didn’t hit my 60th birthday and decide to use my feminine wiles on an unsuspecting and soon-to-be appalled clientele–no, ‘hor’ is short for horologist. And what is a horologist? I hear you ask. Has Mydangblog suddenly earned a certification in the art of telling people that a random constellation assigned to their birth defines their character, and that I’ve started providing daily reports about very specific things that will happen to them–and the millions of other people also born in that month? Of course not–that would be insane. But I AM crazy–crazy for clocks. And if you know anything about me at all, you know that I’m obsessed with clocks. I have OCD, and I find great comfort in being surrounded by clocks, not sure why, because all the explanations on the interweb don’t seem to apply to me–I don’t have a fear of time passing, I don’t obsessively check the time, and I don’t compulsively count things. (I DO have what’s known as ‘magical thinking’ about clocks, but it only applies to the digital number 3:33, because at 3:33, the clock in our bedroom, which projects onto the ceiling, looks like 3 spaceships having a battle, and if I wake up in the middle of the night, it’s usually around 3:30, so I wait until 3:33 to see the space battle, whisper Pew Pew! to myself, and it puts me back to sleep.)

At any rate, at last count, I have over 56 clocks scattered around the house, and only about a tenth of them actually keep time. But lately, I’ve had a run of luck.

First, if you recall, there was the antique mantel clock that I retrofitted with a battery pack–it runs like a dream and is currently sitting in pride of place in my bathroom. Then, 3 weeks ago, I came across a beautiful gingerbread clock at Value Village for only twenty dollars. It didn’t work, so I was planning on selling it in my antiques booth as ‘clock decor’. It was taking up room on the kitchen island so I brought it into the dining room. It stayed on the dining room table, dormant as a bear in winter, until I needed to clear the table. I put it at the back of the sideboard. A little while later, I could hear a faint sound, a sound that was both exhilarating and soothing at the same time. I approached carefully–the gingerbread clock was RUNNING!

Me: Ken!! Ken!! The clock is working!
Ken: What clock?
Me: Don’t come any closer! Tiptoe!

Of course, Ken completely disregarded my instructions and clunked his way into the dining room, but it was fine–the clock didn’t even seem to notice, and kept right on ticking. A few minutes later, it began to chime.

Ken: Is it really 8 o’clock already? It doesn’t seem that dark out…
Me: Shhh. Just give it some…time, hehe.

Despite my best efforts, the gingerbread clock loses about 20 minutes an hour, and chimes out random numbers, but that’s just fine because I GOT IT TO WORK.

And then, a few days ago, I was at the Mennonite Thrift Store (Mennonites dress like the American Amish, but they have cars and cellphones), and right by the till, there was an antique Sessions clock, just sitting there, as though it was waiting for me. It was very cheap, and there was a sign on it that said, “Pendulum package and key inside.” So I bought it, because who doesn’t need another clock, especially one that’s almost 150 years old?

I got it home and set it on the counter. It seemed to be a little overwound, so I took the back off and manually started the pendulum. I did this several times. Suddenly, the pendulum continued to sway back and forth, and the next thing I knew, the clock was chiming–and not only was it chiming, it was keeping THE CORRECT TIME. I kept it on the counter for two days, where it continued to keep perfect time. Then, Ken and I went out grocery shopping, and when we came back, IT HAD STOPPED. I almost cried. But I was never one to give up–I moved it to the dining room, the scene of my last success, and kept manually trying to restart it. Finally, I sprayed the innards with WD40–EUREKA. And now it sits on the dining room table, and we all tiptoe around it, and I’m scared to move it in case it stops again. Temperamental little b*tch. But it keeps perfect time.

And you’re probably now thinking, Isn’t this supposed to be a humour blog? This isn’t that funny, her going on about some stupid clock. But it IS funny. Because I’m a hor. A hor for clocks.

Over Rated

Ken and I began doing jigsaw puzzles during the pandemic when we were super bored and found one in a cupboard that belonged to Kate. It was Niagara Falls, all lit up, and by the time we were finished, we were hooked. Up to that point, I’d never done a jigsaw puzzle in my life and scoffed at the whole notion. Now, it’s rare not to see the puzzle board set up on our kitchen island. But good puzzles can be pricey, so we quite often get them second hand, and do swaps with my parents, who are masters at the puzzle game.

Last week, they came over with a stack, which I tucked in the closet until I was done with my latest, a 1000 piece Ravensburger that’s no longer available but that I was obsessed with. It’s called The Sanctuary of Knowledge and I’d been looking for it for ages. I finally found it on Facebook marketplace and drove quite a way to get it. I put it together, only to discover that it was missing FOUR PIECES. All that effort and no payoff. So I went to the closet and pulled out a nice 300 piece that I could do for a quick dopamine hit. I opened the box, dumped out the pieces, and saw this:

And there are so many things to unpack here. First, “Ken and June” (and I feel even more salty about the dude being named Ken because MY Ken would never do this), you two BOUGHT the puzzle. “Too short”?! Did you not see the GIANT “300 PIECES” written on the box? How long did you THINK it was going to take?

Second, who exactly are you rating this for? You gave it to a THRIFT STORE—was your intention to convey to random strangers who will never meet you that you are sophisticated and world-weary puzzle aficionados? “Ah, yes, you plebians at Goodwill might be satisfied with a mere 300 pieces, but to us, it was a waste of our precious time. We crave the chaos of frustration; give us not the ease of rapidity.”

Also, the rating was on the INSIDE of the box, so it wouldn’t even help a potential puzzler make a decision.

And what kind of rating system IS this anyway? You docked the puzzle THREE WHOLE POINTS for taking exactly as long as a 300 piece puzzle should take? That’s like me getting a 1-star review for my first novel, which very clearly states on the cover that it’s about a sixteen-year-old girl, from a 70-year-old man who didn’t like it because it was about a sixteen-year-old girl. SERIOUSLY.

But despite the terrible rating from “Ken and June”, I did the puzzle anyway, and really enjoyed it. Then I got to the end and no, there weren’t any pieces missing this time; in fact, there was one EXTRA piece that didn’t even belong to this “short” puzzle. I just hope Ken and June didn’t give the puzzle it belonged to a 10 out of 10, because they’ve lost the little credibility they had left:

Puzzle person: Ooh, I can’t wait to do this 2000 piece puzzle…what’s this written inside the box? “A masterful creation, complex and time-consuming, but well worth the Herculean effort. 10 out of 10”, signed “Ken and June”. What a ringing endorsement!

Four days later…

Puzzle person (staring at completed 2000 piece puzzle with one piece missing): Curse you, Ken and June! Curse you straight to hell!

Ode To The Smelly Chair

You all know how much I love a good bargain but sometimes, it can be a problem. In the past, I’ve been given the eyeroll by my daughter at the grocery store when I buy 30 rolls of toilet paper just to get the extra points. And I only ever buy something from Lancome if there’s a “gift with purchase”, which means that I have more eye make-up remover and sample size mascara than I could possibly use in one lifetime. But sometimes, my love of a bargain has its downside. Well, downside mostly for Ken:

Me: I need you to go into Ayr tonight around 7 o’clock.
Ken: What? Why?
Me: I bought a 7 foot column.
Ken: What do you mean a column?
Me: You know, like, a pillar. It was a really good price.
Ken: What do you want it for?
Me: I don’t know yet. But it’s awesome, and I told them you’d be by around 7. Here’s the address.

And the column WAS awesome, even Ken agreed. Right now it’s in the corner of my office, but one day, it will be used for something really cool, like a super-tall pedestal for a bust of Shakespeare, or to hold up a low ceiling or something. I do this to Ken all the time, and I’m glad he’s the kind of guy who sees into the future for this stuff. Last week, I made him go and buy a vacuum cleaner hose for the central vacuum cleaner upstairs. He gave me a hard time, which is par for the course, but he later agreed that for $30, it was worth the drive to Cambridge so that he didn’t have to drag the downstairs hose up the stairs anymore. See, I’m always thinking of ways to make his life easier.

I’ve gotten many amazing bargains over the years, but I’ve learned some lessons the hard way. Like, don’t buy furniture from chain smokers. Several years ago, we were looking for a certain kind of chair for in front of our fireplace. I was on Facebook, and I saw the perfect chair: dark brown leather, tufted back, recliner—perfect for Ken after a hard day, and very match-ey with the rest of the room’s motif. So I called the owners, and arranged to go and see it. When I got to their house, I was immediately overwhelmed by the smell of cigarette smoke. I looked at the chair, which was gorgeous, but told them I’d have to talk to my husband first and would let them know (because I didn’t want to buy it, but also didn’t want to be mean to this nice old couple who were, apparently, well on their way to lung cancer). Well, when Ken saw the picture of it, he fell in chair-love. “Their house reeks,” I said.
“It’s leather,” he replied. “We can just wipe it down.”
Well, OK then. So we drove back out, paid for it, and loaded it up. He kept saying things like, “See, it’s not so bad,” to which I would reply, “It’s on the trailer and I can still smell it.” But we got it in the house, and it looked amazing. “See,” said Ken, “it’s perfect. And it hardly smells at all.” So we went to bed that night, feeling pretty good about our great deal. Then in the morning, I came downstairs. My living room smelled like a BINGO HALL. I kid you not, it was like a bunch of emphysemic senior citizens had set up shop with their cards and dabbers in front of my fireplace. The chair spent the next three days out on the front porch.
After three days, we brought it back in. It became immediately clear that the problem had NOT been solved, so out came the leather cleaner and the Febreze. Day after day, I cleaned and sprayed that damn chair with a variety of floral and geographic scent-sations. One night, Ken was so simultaneously sad about the smell, but happy about the comfort level of the chair that he spread a blanket over the entire thing to mask the odour and fell blissfully asleep in it. At this point, I realized that no matter how much the chair smelled, Ken loved it like a child—a smelly, poorly behaved child—and I could never convince him to part with it. Over the years, the smell has faded to the point where it’s completely undetectable, unless it’s particularly warm and humid outside and we haven’t turned the air conditioning on yet. And we still call it the Smelly Chair. But it was a great deal, and if nothing else, I’m all about a bargain.

In other news, I’m getting this post ready early today, Saturday, because I’m doing a book fair until 8 pm as DarkWinter Press. It’s an outdoor book fair. The current temperature is 8 degrees Celsius (about 46 degrees Fahrenheit), it’s overcast, and it’s windy. Do you know why that is? Because we’ve gone past False Spring and are now in the Second Winter of Our Discontent. I really hope I sell some books before I freeze to death.

Knocking It Off

One of the nice things about having an antiques and collectibles business is that I get to go shopping frequently. Thrift shopping to be exact. I’ve always been a thrifter, ever since I was a teen and the trend with my friend group was vintage 50s clothing done up in ‘New Wave’ style. The only place to get things like that was, of course, second hand shops. There were some good ones locally, like The Recovery Room, and then of course, there were more than you could count in Toronto, particularly in Kensington Market. One of my favourites was a place called ‘Courage, My Love’, even though I could only make the trek there by Greyhound once in a blue moon, living an hour and a half away from the big city. Now of course, I can go wherever I want, being a grown-ass adult with a car. And also, there are a lot more thrift stores now than ever—Goodwill, the Sally Ann, Talize, and of course, Value Village. A lot of my buying and selling lately has been around vintage and designer handbags and accessories, so wasn’t I THRILLED this past week when I went over to the showcase in Goodwill (the showcase is where they put all the stuff that they THINK is valuable—often it’s not, but it’s still worth taking a look) and lo and behold, there was a set of Louis Vuitton baby clothes, brand new, in the original box for only $14.99! Did I buy it? You’re darn tootin’ I did. And I was feeling pleased as punch with myself for finding such a treasure, even though I was pretty sure it was a knock-off set. But then, I always price things very reasonably and never make the claim that anything is REAL Louis Vuitton unless I can validate the date code. The baby set though—who the heck would ever know? It was adorable, and looked real in every way…until I closely read the description of the articles contained therein:

Now, Louis Vuitton is a French brand, so I can imagine that they could afford proper translations of their products. I mean, ‘trousers’—okay, that’s what some people MIGHT call them, but ‘Jacket For Body’? I was starting to suspect that this set was produced somewhere other than France. By the time I got to ‘Mankerchief’, I was 90% certain that hands rather than les mains had produced this set. ‘Bip’ proved to be the death knell for my excitement. Then I looked more closely at the box (Narrator: she finally put on her reading glasses instead of squinting) and in the bottom corner of the box, there was a small logo that said, ‘Turkey’. And I don’t know whether that meant the set was made in Turkey or whether a turkey reverse-engineered the descriptions into English, but either way, the re-sell price dropped significantly. Still, someone out there isn’t going to care about the packaging and will dress their baby, or their dog, or their teddy bear, in a really adorable mankerchief, body with coordinating jacket for body, and beret, and everyone will say, “Ooh fancy!” Or “Ooh, with a whirl way!”

In other news, I have to go into work early to help set up the Santa Photo Booth (for all ages including pets) so I’ll catch up with you later and yes I love my job. Then I’ll be on the radio reading from my new work in progress, Murder Most Novel. I just received a grant to write the rest of it so I better get cracking!

Getting Thrifty With It; Tiger Lily

I’ve always loved thrift store shopping. When I was younger, it was the only place to find the vintage clothing that my friends and I, 1980s club kids, favoured. When I got older and money got tighter, it was a cheap way to look nice. And now that Ken and I have re-instated the antiques business and I’ve opened a second booth at the antique market, thrift stores are a wonderful place to find trinkets, odds and ends and whatnot that I can resell. The other day in fact, I was at a local thrift store, Goodwill, and found some good deals–a vintage action figure for a buck, a few pieces of ironstone and a depression glass rooster candy dish for 4.50. It’s from the 1930s, in excellent condition, and worth a heck of a lot more. So imagine my excitement when one of my co-workers at the antique market mentioned that there was a Goodwill ‘outlet store’ not too far away.

Me: OUTLET, you say? A place where things are even cheaper than at the regular Goodwill?
Co-worker: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. You pay by the pound. We’ve gotten some good stuff there.
Me: Where is this mecca of good deals?! I must know!
Co-worker: Just up the highway. Here are the directions.

I was super-excited, imagining a store lined with shelves of beautiful china, glassware, and other assorted sundries, and me with a shopping cart, just filling it up with things that didn’t weigh too much. Finally, last week, after days of anticipation, I was able to go there.

AND IT WAS THE MOST TERRIFYING EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFE.

I arrived shortly after 10:30 in the morning, having followed my GPS instructions like a pirate with a treasure map. I pulled into the parking lot and the red flag should have gone up right there. It was PACKED. People were double-parked and cars were squeezed together, but luckily my car is quite tiny, and I managed to find a spot partly on the grass. I grabbed a couple of reusable shopping bags and walked through the door…into a giant open room. It was full of large, wheeled bins surrounded by people, who were going through them, tossing things up in the air, digging through to the bottom, and pulling things out. I was hesitant, and took a tentative step forward to peek into one of the bins, which was full of what looked like broken CDs. Then I noticed in the far corner, there was a line of tape on the floor, and behind the line of tape, there was a line of men, standing shoulder to shoulder, fidgeting, rocking back and forth on their heels and looking desperate and hungry. A store worker went by:

Me: Excuse me. That line-up over there—is that where I’m supposed to wait my turn or something?
Worker: Oh no. You can look in all the bins over here. Those guys are waiting for the new bins to come out. You have to stay behind the line until the new bins come to a complete stop and the back-room workers have had time to step away. Then we give a signal and you can dive right in.
Me: Maybe I’ll just watch for a bit.

After a minute, the doors to the warehouse suddenly flew open. The air bristled with anticipation and the men in line started cracking their knuckles and bouncing up and down on their toes. The bins were wheeled over to the corner and parked. A man began to move and a woman shrieked, “NOT YET!! STAY BACK!! The men muttered in frustration while the carts were positioned, and then the workers let go and backed away quickly as a whistle sounded. The line surged forward and everything became pure chaos. Arms disappeared into the bins, then reappeared holding perceived treasures. A cry went up as one man triumphantly brandished a coil of copper tubing. Two other men tussled over loose hockey cards, and another ran back to his shopping cart (I realized they all had carts lined up against the back wall) with a Coleman cooler. It was like feeding frenzy time at the shark tank, with vintage radios and glass vases as chum. Then, as quickly as it had begun, the men tossed their finds into their respective carts and ran, as a unit, to the opposite corner, where ANOTHER LINE FORMED. Apparently, the new bins were placed in alternating corners, and sure enough, a minute later, a set of full bins arrived, and a fresh round of shrieking and digging commenced.

So what did I do? What do you think? I tucked my reusable shopping bags under my arm, got the hell out of there, and drove like the wind to the calm oasis of Value Village.

In other news, I had the tremendous honour recently of being asked to write the foreword to my good friend and brilliant poet Susan Richardson’s latest compilation titled Tiger Lily, to be released on August 19. The collection is an ekphrastic collaboration between Susan and artist Jane Cornwell, and it’s just brilliant. You can pre-order it here. And here’s a sneak preview of one of my favourites, Mermaids Are Real: