What have we here?
Looks like a lot of something.
Long term readers (hello, how is your year going so far?) will know exactly what this is.
It is my dining table, which is not small and regularly seats six but can do eight. It could do more until the OH, who had watched a programme online about rufty tufty woodworkers in the chillier bits of Canada, decided to copy them. They were making a dining table by cutting down big trees, sawing them in half, fastening the results side by side with extremely large nails and then running a massive side-mounted circular saw over the top on a sledge. I saw the film later. They were laughing immoderately because they were not doing that to the soft pine dining table that was a wedding present from a dear aunt and uncle.
Long story short, the OH had to cut the end off the table and I only spoke to ask him to pass the salt for a week. I make him sit at the cut end in front of the lift door, contiguous to the table leg, so that he has nowhere to put his knees. This is kind of me, I feel. I could make him sit underneath.
Here we are sideways on, where the good people sit., those who have not destroyed the dining table that was a wedding present. This is nearly my entire collection of expanded polystyrene trays. As you can see they are full of the results of pouring porcelain for well over a week, in the chilly kitchen in January, until, to confirm my feet were still attached to my ankles, it became necessary to look down. Thank goodness for microwave hot water bottles.
But what is in the trays? (I nearly wrote: I hear you cry. I do not do this. I have no idea what you are doing as you read. You could be picking your nose and wiping it on the keyboard for all I know. As far as I’m concerned, and going by the emails, you are very gracious. I also know you are bright and highly intelligent.)
(Do intelligent people pick their noses or is this the province entirely of small, hankyless children and ne’er do wells on street corners? Did Einstein pick his nose? Maybe, he certainly wasn’t keen on brushing his hair; I’m saying brush, you would never have got a comb through that hair.)
Readers with vast experience of my strange life will identify the contents of the nearest tray with little trouble. These are the parts for a new 24th scale doll. The keener sighted, or those who know how to zoom in, will note a torso with dropped shoulders and arms connecting below the shoulder. Really crackers doll collectors will be thinking eighteenth century, and would not be wrong at that.
A couple of new dolls, a few porcelain computer keys, as you do, well, I do, but what is all the rest?
Apparently 400+ tiny bits of something. Some are round, some are triangular.
A mystery! We’re beginning the year with a mystery. And I am not going to solve it for you until the summer, though there may be hints on the way.
I hope that will be very interesting for you, what it will be for me is work, with a capital erk.
Better get on. I anticipate a few weeks of sitting very still, getting very cold, concentrating, rubbing down, very carefully, before I can put the kiln on.
Erk!
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