The All-New Bunrab

Watch the gap! is the LIRR's motto, apparently, and they repeat it more frequently than almost anything else. For that matter, Amtrak says it a lot too, although they are more polite and less New York about it: "Please be aware of the gap between the train and the station platform." I've just been in New York again for a few days, visiting my friend Sally-the-hoarder and helping her throw out some more stuff. We got a lot done. The upstairs of the house is *almost* empty, so that it can be recarpeted and repainted and rented out, which will help a great deal in supplying money for doing long-delayed maintenance and renovation to the rest of the house. We put a whole bunch of small furniture items out at the curb, and, since it's the weekend lots of college students are settling in, almost all of it disappeared within minutes. Except for a sofa in really bad condition, cat-pee-wise. Which is too bad, because other than that, it was in excellent condition. Oh well, it will keep the town sanitation department bulk pickup guys employed. And lots more papers went to recycling, and lots more stuff that she's keeping went into clear plastic bins where it can be stacked neatly and she can see what's in them, instead of losing track and buying duplicates. Progress! Next: convincing her to get rid of some of the downstairs stuff, where she has her grandmother's stuff, including furniture, and ALL her parents' furniture, as well as everything that she has purchased over the years. And she claims to love it all, including the 50-year-old lamps with brittle cords and shades that are in shreds. Sigh. Oh well. A little bit at a time.

I got back Saturday. Coming back on the LIRR to get to Penn, there were many, many college students, and many, many open cans and bottles of beer, and much shrieking. Which made the conductor change the announcements a bit: "Watch the gap. And take your crap with you. This means you. Take your beer bottles and crap off the train with you." The Amtrak regional back to here was quieter. Train really is a very comfortable and easy way to travel. And do it late enough at night, and the fares are less than half what they are at peak times.

Today we went to the State Fair, as this is the last weekend of it. I looked at all the "home arts" - needlework and cooking, mainly, and I was interested mostly in the needlework - and we went to the Sheep and Goats pavilion and the Swine Judging pavilion and the Cow Palace - skipped the horse barns, since there were signs saying no strollers allowed past this point, and I assumed that applied to my scooter, too. Yes, same scooter that I took to Europe. It makes wandering around several crowded blocks' worth of fairground doable. Let's see, then a tiny chickens-and-rabbits building, then the Exhibition Hall, with vendors of all sorts of stuff Ginsu knives!, waterless cookware!, handwriting analysis!, Jews for Jesus!, Electrostatic brooms! (we bought one of those); candy apples (I bought a couple of those...), cinnamon pecans, Jack Daniels mustard and barbecue sauce! For those of you not familiar with State Fairs in the USA, this is a pretty typical vendor selection. All sorts of crap, mixed with some good stuff, mixed with booths from the political parties and several government agencies and a few more charities and a lot more crap for sale. Then through the 4-H petting area, which included a very attractive llama and a snooty alpaca. Walked through the Midway a bit, and the food pavilion featuring locally made/grown foods - everything from corn-on-the-cob to lamb sandwiches to pit beef, not just junk food but some halfway real food - to get to the last hall, the Agriculture Hall, which featured lots more state agencies' booths, and a John Deere tractor, plus all the prize-winning individual pumpkins and apples and corn and flowers... chatted with the people from the Maryland Insurance Admin for a while, wherein we shared a few laughs about Inland Marine insurance. I don't often get to talk to other people who think Inland Marine is as funny as I do. Outside that pavilion were the armed forces recruiting trailers, and the Motor Vehicle Admin's trailer (guess how many people wanted to visit that) and the county fire department's safety training trailer. And then a last glance toward the Midway, and we were done. We would have spent longer, but they don't have as much of a rabbit show here as they have at the Texas state fair or the Massachusetts state fair, nor nearly as many hysterical-looking chickens. No emus. No pig races. And we skipped the learn-to-milk-a-cow parlor.

So, now that I'm back from being sick (previous post) and going to NY and going to the fair, I have about two weeks worth of y'all's posts to catch up on, ha ha. If there's something I absolutely need to know, give me a comment here so I can go check it out, 'cause otherwise I am going to just read the last couple days' worth.

The Texas Department of Insurance had a door-decorating contest for Christmas for many years - decorate your office door, win a ribbon. As you know, being an atheist has never stopped me from enjoying lots of Christmas, and so I participated with vigor. One year, I covered my door with silver foil wrapping paper, then cut out a six-foot tall pine tree from green wrapping paper and pasted it on there - and then made a couple hundred origami stars, in many colors, and pasted them to the tree. It wasn't terribly fancy but it was lots of homemade, and I certainly got good at folding those stars. Made a big one for the top of the tree. Got an honorable mention.

Probably the funniest thing I ever did was rescue the covers of "annual statements" that were being disposed of. Insurance companies send in these huge (11 by 14, or larger, and about 130 pages) financial statements every year. They get kept in hard copy for a couple of years, then microfilmed, and then the hard copy gets destroyed. (This is the 80's and 90's - a lot of companies don't file hard copies any more in the 21st century, just electronic.) The covers are heavy paper stock, in different colors for different kinds of insurance companies - property/casualty companies have yellow covers, life insurance companies have blue covers, and there are peach and tan and green and pink... So, one year, I rescued all the covers, cut them into strips, and made a garland of paper circles, the kind we made out of construction paper as kids. And I strung that garland along the wall over the doors ALL THE WAY AROUND OUR FLOOR OF THE BUILDING. It didn't win any prizes, 'cause it didn't do much for any one door and didn't fit the categories, but I still think it should have won a recycling prize. That sucker had to be a couple hundred yards of garland. Needless to say, if I hadn't already had a solid reputation for being crazy, that garland would have cemented it.

You might think about doing that with some of your junk mail, if it comes in colorful envelopes!