Friday the 13th of December......

 

Sitting on the edge is what life is like right now.  I know that we have a lot of things now done so we will probably make all our business deadlines.  I really hope that no one comes in now with last minute jobs as we are moving along well enough with our present projects.  We deliver three of Della's work tonight after school.  She has one more commission to finish up and I have three things still hanging over my head.  I do plan on getting our large tree up tonight.  We don't always decorate them right away but the main job is reassembling that tree and getting the lights on it. Other smaller trees that we put up may become be seen this weekend and the decorating will come sooner or later.

The heritage mug also reminds me of the movie I showed yesterday in history class.  The students were watching the movie 1776 about the American Revolution.  It is a complicated story and they tried to include everything in the musical.  John Henry Lee sings a very irritating song in the beginning but it is an interesting way to depict history.  Henry sings while riding a horse and then dismounts and sings and dances with Ben Franklin and John Adams.  That particular scene must be their comedy part of the movie.  Kids were suppose to catch all the clues from the movie including the daily weather report from Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin's gout.

Local tv, no cable at our house, tends to get really bad this time of the year.  So we watch some of our favorite movies.  Usually we do that during snowstorms when we can't get out.  It is December and we have already started the first movie of the Narnia series of three.  TV has had to be really bad as we have already finished off the three Lord of the Rings movie.  I think that was back in November. I am in a rut with the coffee mugs but I am pulling photos from archives today.

This bell was found in a box of things that I bought at a auction back when I was younger.  I think I was in college and I was at the auction of a farmer who was a brother to the John and Iva connection. John and Iva gave me a lot of antiques and his brother had a homestead that was older than theirs.

The box had many wonderful old things in it and I can still smell the powder box that was in the cluttered old box.  I , in later years,  decided that this is a brass bell that was use to be placed above a business door like the ones of the businesses in town.  It would be hit by a projection on the door as a customer would enter the store. It may have been a spring action set up but I just don't remember it.  I can still hear that ring from the old Lasalle store bell that was near us in Lasalle, Iowa.  It was a very small store and filling station run by an older lady who lived up stairs above the store in an attic apartment. Lasalle was a very small French settlement that never grew larger than a hundred people. My dad bought his cigars there and we got candy or ice cream bars. This happened whenever the King Edwards cigar box got to be close to empty.

I found this archived photo of the model of the Split Rock Lighthouse.  The real thing sits on the northern shoreline of Minnesota. It sits on a large rock formation overlooking Lake Superior.  I am finishing off with this lighthouse matching the first photo of the cup in a light house shape.

I am in the high school math room today. It is a work day for them and it should be a smooth day except for a couple of students in each class who can't even handle a free work day.   Thanks for stopping by today.