A weak moment.....

I left my parent's home one day last fall and I turned and saw these salt and pepper shakers in a box. They were something that my mom bought on one of our summer travels out west. I had decided to toss the bunch. Stupid emotions make you do things that stopped them going to the landfill.  As you can see I grabbed the shoe box with a bunch of them in it and brought them home. 

They are watermelon heads. They are imports of course.......from Japan. You can see the makers mark on the salt holes as they didn't smooth out the clay bumps when they poked their tool into the top.  Three holes for salt, two for pepper.  

And catch those wonderful blue eyes looking out at you saying "take me home."  My sons will have to throw them away someday when I have been sent to the looney bin.  They are kind of perky in their own way.  

I have decided that anytime that I can't think of something new to blog, I will dig out another set. I have quite of few in which to display from  our world of ketch.


Thanks for reading......

A fish tail or two....

I have dug into my old folders and found some more fish pictures. I need to take more new ones and will. It is a busy life. These two comet goldfish live in my 55 gallon tank in the basement. They spend their summer outside in a stock tank buried in the ground. I don't even try to overwinter them outside anymore. 
I discovered a specs label was covering the tripod hole on my camera so I will take the tripod down and work the fish more with new photos soon.

A surrealistic view of the tank. Two koi in the tank following the large goldfish.  This is an old photo as the gold and black koi is bigger than the other koi in the tank.

As I have told in older blogs that I will not buy an expensive koi.  Five dollars is my top price and I will only buy when I see one that reminds me of a koi with traditional markings.  The gold koi is covered with metalic color as the white one with mottled colors has just a little metallic reflection.

My experiences of learning range from having new ones leap out of the coverless tank and commit suicide, to having a very large one freeze in my outside pond.  I swore off having any koi for awhile as new ones had leaped to their death and I was mad at myself for letting that happen.  I felt I was too stupid to own koi if I couldn't remember to cover the tank.  I think all life is too valuable,  even fish life, that people shouldn't be careless or not responsible owners. 

Our snowstorm went south so we escaped a few more inches of snow.  It will be spring soon everybody, think spring, and maybe we can see green again.  Thanks for reading......

Sissy Cup......

My Ebay purchase finally arrived.  It came from a Canadian establishment and it takes awhile for it to get here. Ten days shipping was what I figured that it took to get here.

If you remember in an older blog, I had bought this saucer for a dollar in northern Minnesota at a flea market.  I liked the design on it so much I wanted to get a cup to go with it.  You can see the gold trimmed plate is that cheap plate.  The pattern is called Greenwood Tree.

As an inexperienced bidder I was playing games at the end with a bidder to see how high they had set their bid and I got stuck with the above cup and saucer for a high very large price. I went fifty cents over their top bid. At the beginning at the bidding all the unknown bidders of antique shops had made bids hoping to get it for nothing.  I had set my top price and I ended up going way over it.  Heck it was my first learning experience with something like this.

There was one problem that I now know was my fault, that I should have written to see what size it was.  The saucer is a normal size but the cup is a small thing.  Some of the people selling on ebay tell the size but this one didn't. I now know that I should ask if they don't tell.


At the funeral today I was reminded of a story. The wonderful woman, Lois, who passed away, had a dad named Andy Ewoldson.  His first wife had died and he remarried to a nice woman named Bonnie. After her dad had died, Lois remained a  good daughter to her and we were at Bonnie's house one evening.  While there she fed us ice cream and coffee.  As she put cups on the table, she asked if I wanted a mug or a sissy cup.  I said I wasn't sure what it was, but I was man enough to take a sissy cup.  So she gave me coffee in her fine china cup instead of a mug.  


So as a grown man, I bought myself a sissy cup.  I do believe that I will create a landscape painting around the design on this cup with it's old tree.  If I find a mug, with gold trim on it, I may buy it and then try to resell the cup and saucer above.   I really like the colors of the mug. I like that it is a piece made in England.  I like that pieces of the sets are showing up in Australia for sale and more in Canada.  They haven't been produced for a very long time so their value is not going to decrease.   

Well, enough on this.  I want to sell art on Ebay so it makes me more aware of what I need to tell the buyer about actual size.   Thanks for reading.......

Hey Nanook from  the  North here, we are suppose to get five more inches of snow through the next two days.  We will have clean, white snow again!!!!!

I've got nothing.......

It isn't that I haven't been creative. My timing is off. I can't keep up with the blogs I follow while trying to keep three blogs going.  I am being creative as I finished a painting today, after repainting everything everywhere, gazillions of times.  I am happy with that. I have another to finish and then I can continue on by starting a new one.  I received my ebay purchase in the mail from Canada and it is disappointing.  I like what I bought but it is so small.  It took ten days to get here from Canada. 
What I will show you for a visual is a large amount of bird houses at the Des Moines's Blank Park Zoo. It was a small crowded little jungle area, but on one wall were all these houses for the birds to nest.  I wonder if they have time to blog and get new ideas going.   
We travel today to Osceola for a funeral.  Not a great way to cheer oneself. A wonderful woman who lived a full, good life.  I hope our roads will be cleared by the afternoon as we have had another snowfall.  We have some farmers who never got their corn out.  Some picked a few weeks ago, but now the snow is too high.
Enjoy your weekend everyone and stay warm.. Thanks for following and stopping by.......

Inkwells......

As I attended through all of my grade school years, we sat in wooden desks that had a hole manufactured in them  for the purpose of holding some device for ink.  Not once did I ever dream that there were actually a real inkwell that fit into those holes. I assumed that they would have been the glass bottles of ink that fit into them and students would have to dip their quill pen into the bottle.  Every student who ever attended school in the building had taken a pencil and followed around the inside indention making marks inside of that opening.

After college, in Aplington, Iowa, I was rummaging through a century of old boxes and paper bags in a workroom of a store. There were old hinges and furniture drawer pulls and things like that.  One time I found a small  unopened wooden box  in the back of that old furniture store. It was the second generation person, my son's grandfather, who owned the store.  The box had been shipped to the store when the great grandfather was alive and was running the business.  Inside of the wooden box, which was nailed shut for shipping, six of these ink wells, packed in sawdust. They had already started to rust even though they had not been taken out of the box. The glass liners, ink containers, were packed along side of the metal outside pieces and a couple of them were broken. 
It took a little time to figure out what they were but then I thought that the school's probably ordered their school desks through furniture store's back then as there  wasn't any special stores that sold just school things. I do know in the past that the business had ordered caskets for the local funeral home of the time. 
I have an old school desk from an old country school that they fit in, but it is now stored in the basement, and the boys were never too impressed with the desk anyway. They thought the bench seat was uncomfortable to sit on, and they were right.  I sat on ones like that from 1955 to 1964 until I moved up to high school.
The glass bottle is an old ink container but I don't know much about it. It never had a lid and was found at a rummage sale when I was a kid.
Thanks for reading......

Toy tractor.......

Another toy from the "John and Iva" collection

As a kid we lived on a farm south and east of a small town of Murray.  We did most of our shopping in Osceola which was the opposite direction.  The old highway 34 was hard to drive on as it had large  concrete edgings along is sides to help control water. They weren't level with the highway but stuck up four or more inches to keep the water on the road. They would have openings created for the water to drain away every once in a while.  It was built for model T.'s and the road was narrow.  New cars could get caught up on those edgings and if you hit a drainage area  with a tire you could go flying.  My dad would drive from the farm though the country to Osceola just to avoid that highway.  

It was a beautiful drive on the gravel roads as we would wind up and down to get to town.  One of the areas that we drove through had a road that headed down a steep hill into a river valley and it wound around a farm area. The road then  wound back up another hill.  On the way down that road, in a field, sat one of these old iron horses. It was so unusual to me because of the metal wheels that were on it. You could see the metal cleats that were at an angle to help give it traction as it plowed fields.  I would always marvel at the tractor sitting in the weeds all rusty and isolated and think about it's past life.

When I found this toy tractor it was all rusty also and it had the little farmer wired on so it wouldn't fall away.

The sound that it makes on a table or the floor is amazing as it clunks along on those different cleats. I painted it as a kid and I don't regret it as I really wouldn't sell it anyway. I am sure John put the wire on that farmer to keep it attached to the tractor.

Thanks for stopping by.......

More variety with less talk.......

Filler flowers that I don't recognize. If it is baby's breath it is larger than the normal variety.

I didn't get this posted with the others.  I wanted you to see another before and after of the brass cleaning.

I actually ruined this piece of furniture with my aquarium leaking on it's top. I sanded it out some and maybe will work at it harder some other time, but for now it has some good water stains on the once perfect top.
In actuality, if I hadn't rescued it from a furniture store in Aplington, Iowa many years ago, it would be in a landfill right now as the new owners  of the store carted all the used furniture away to the dump.
The piece was originally a sideboard with a dining room set and had legs on it that made it taller.  I destroyed it's integrity by making it into a tv stand by removing a foot off of it's legs.  It also was stained this dark blackish walnut stain to even out it's color.  It is made from poplar wood.  The good kind of poplar not the paper and plywood making poplar.  I have a dresser and mirror that matches the poplar wood but not the design.


Thanks for reading......