crazy phrase again

Category: dribblings

Curb your Appetite for Destruction.

 

that is all.

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EoT Painting and Adventure Club part II

Category: dribblings

Despite The Search for Greasy Cove being a really confusing read, Ma, Popsicle, Mark, and I all read it. Mark’s grandmother had grown up in that area, so Mark kind of knew the roads that were mentioned in the book. We weren’t sure how to find the old Lutes’s house (in the book the author mentions that the house has rotted away but that in the winter [when the leaves and bushes are bare] you can still see the stone chimney.) We did find an old chimney, but it was close to the road so we figured that was a different house.

We did visit two old cemeteries. And we managed to find Mr. Lutes’s grave marker. I’m not sure the name of the cemeterey, in the book she calls it Steele Cemetery. I didn’t see a sign. But it’s next to a Methodist church right off HWY 11.

and by searching the Scarboro Collection http://collections.alabamamosaic.org/cdm4/results.php?CISOOP1=any&CISOBOX1=greasy+cove&CISOFIELD1=CISOSEARCHALL&CISOROOT=all

you can see some old pictures of the murder site. (it’s not gory) the one that shows the house has an X under one of the windows. The author says that marks the room where the bodies were found.

The other picture is the group that helped search for the murder weapon. (hatchet?)

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4. Search For Greasy Cove by Rebecca Jones

Category: 50 Books

I am going to try to be as kind as I possibly can.

This book is sort of true crime, but we have it in the biography section at the library. Probably because it’s also a memoir. The story is about how a lady and her mother try to find information about a murder that took place in Greasy Cove, AL in 1911, and to find if their greatgrandfather/grandfather was part of the murder or not.

I wanted to read the book because it was written by a local person about a local place. Apparently Greasy Cove is an old name for Gallant, AL. Gallant is right down the highway from where I live. (in fact, it’s in the same county.)

Parts of the book were really sweet. You can tell the author has a great love for her family. And she has a love for history as well. The only problem with this book is that it’s terribly written. I AM being kind. The grammatical errors and extreme overuse of exclamation points, I can mostly look over. Why? Because it looks to be self-published, and you can tell Mrs. Jones is just trying to put down a local story to paper. She’s not writing this for money.

That parts I find hard to forgive are where she quotes the Gadsden Times and there’s no quotation marks to set it apart from anything else. At the ends of the paragraphs she tells you she’s gotten it from the newspaper, but since it’s in the middle of a piece of a story, it’s unclear what you’ve just read. Where did the quotation begin? That would have been helpful.

The whole book was actually confusing. At the end she thanks her sister for proofreading it for her. I’m not sure she did proofread it. Or, if she did, maybe a better choice of proofreader would have been someone who didn’t know about the murder or the family members. It was difficult to know who she was talking about at any given time. The timeline skipped around with no warning. The author used so many pronouns at a time you had no idea who she was talking about. It was so confusing in fact, that one of my coworkers (who LOVES to read about historical things in general and historical Alabama things in particular) tried to read it and could not finish it because she was so confused. This isn’t a long book either (it’s 70 pages). You could read it in an hour. There were probably 80 points that needed clarifying. And if those had been cleared up, I would have called it a success despite the grammatical errors and spelling.

If you’re interested in local history, I’d say give this book a shot. If you can’t finish it because it’s too confusing, you’re not alone. If you do finish it and you’re still kinda, “Wait, what?” you too, are not alone.

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after church drum session

Category: dribblings

Benford + a Muller + a Rowe

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conversation with the Wii Fit part IV

Category: dribblings

you guys. yesterday the Wii Fit pulled that shit with me about “I’ll be filling in for your trainer today.” so instead of the girl trainer i had the guy trainer again. i figured he probably has a crush on me. he had to talk to the chick trainer all, “hey, lemme fill in for you tomorrow, please? i’m trying to hook up with that stone-cold fox, jaimie.” yeah, that’s probaby just how it went down.

s’anyway, today i logon and the chick trainer? the VIDEO GAME chick trainer? HAS HAD A HAIR CUT.

i’m not making this up. monday she had a her hair pinned up in the back. next day the dude is in charge. then she comes back with a bob. it’s not a Dorothy Hamil or anything, but it’s a bob.

i’m not making this up.

okay, obviously i made up the part where the guy trainer wants to get to know me (and let me just say, i had  a much larger made-up conversation in my head about what all he would trade with the chick trainer to get my time slot, and it had to do with him buying the next starbucks and/or bubble tea. yeah, that’s right, bubble tea. lookitup.) but other than THAT i’m not lying. she has shorter hair now.

i wonder if she’s going to Marcia Clark her way through the Hair Spectrum.

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EoT Painting and Adventure Club part I

Category: dribblings

Popsicle, Mark, and I were supposed to paint the inside of someone’s house, but they called and said they all had the flu so instead of working we went on an adventure.

The first part of the adventure involved two cemeteries and Greasy Cove, AL (which I think is just about the same thing as Gallant, AL, but I’m not a native of this area (and didn’t have any knd of map) so don’t take my word for it. I’ll blog about this when I get my pictures resized.

The second part took us from Gallant to Steele to Ashville where our quest was to find the Looney House. It’s not what you think.

I first heard of the Looney House two weeks ago when a mother came to the library to find a book about it for her son who had to do a report on it. I was only able to find one paragraph in a really old Alabama book we had. The book said it was in the next county over so I looked it up on a map. It looked really easy to find. Basically take HWY411 south turn left and blam! house.

IT WAS NOT LIKE THAT.

I’m thinking we had a hard time finding it because we had come from the back roads into Ashville (from Steele) and not the way we usually would have come from (RBC). Also, it did not help that Greensport Road seems to be the default road name in those parts.

If my camera battery had not died, I would have some awesome pictures of two houses. The first one was a crazy place with all of these paintings hanging on the fence by the road (not in a “Hey, these are for sale” kind of way, but more in a “obviously a crazy person lives here and probably uses these paintings to keep evil spirits away.” kind of way.) The house across the street from Crazy Painterland had a whole Christmas Village in the yard, complete with full size Santa Mannequin.

Now, where was I. Right. The Looney House.
So we finally found it, after pulling over at a local elementary school where two teacher-types were standing outside, we asked directions and went on our way. We were on the right track, we just had not gone far enough. Way not far enough.

We find the joint and the fence is locked. There’s a hand-written note on it saying call this number for an appointment. Appointment! What kind of bullshit is this? So we call the number and no one answered. Assholes.

I didn’t want to break the law so I didn’t cross the fence. Although it would have been easy enough to do so.

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crazy phrases stuck in my head part 1,000

Category: Uncategorized

once again the phrase fairy has been in my head and you’re gonna love these:

1. The Cask of the Caramel Macchiato

2. Montezuma’s Revenge of the Nerds

huh, and what do you know? i blogged about the Cask of Amontillado last January. so i won’t mention it again. how it’s always two thoughts away. d’oh!

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Janney Furnace all over again

Category: dribblings

ever since laura and i went to Janney Furnace back in October I knew i wanted to go back. so finally we had a nice weather day here (no rain or snow and the sun was actually out. and, as a bonus, i think it was in the lower 50s. boosh!) and i talked Mr. Fleegan in to taking me back to see it. he wasn’t really keen on going. but i think once we got there he was kinda impressed with it. at least enough not to be all, “what a waste of time,” about it.

unfortunately, they decorated it for Christmas and had not yet taken down the wreath. it was January 15.

 


i give him a heads up and this is the face he gives me.

back in October, Laura and I had not walked the grounds much. she had to get back to work. jimmy and i walked up this hill and behind the furnace and there were these signs all around. one sign was about some kind of charcoal house… but there wasn’t any kind of anything around the sign. another one talked about a reservoir and a bridge… of which there was neither in sight.


this iron ore sign was just off the path in the woods. it kind of made no sense.

this sticker was on the ground so i stuck it on the fence to take a picture of it. i’m not sure which one of our months is Confederate History Month, but i wish i had known about it sooner. there was this old jerk at work last week (i mean, just a day before this) who was bitching to me about how everyone gets mad that we had slaves in the south, when “according to his research” we only had 4.5% of the slaves, and that Brazil and Jamaica had tons more than we did. (i’m sure he ignored the fact that that by the Civil War that “measley” percent was something like over 4 million people.)  then he went on to complain about February being Black History Month. “Why should they get a month of history? you don’t see White History Month. if we tried to have a month they would say that’s racist.” was the shit coming out of his mouth. had i known about Confederate History Month i would have slapped him in the face with it and asked why those traitors get a whole month.

instead i just walked away with a stack of books to be returned to their shelves.

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animals

Category: dribblings

check out these two loafs:

over Christmas holiday i was sick. one day Laura and Ben stopped by with a stocking filled with medicine and tissues. the stocking, or Christmas Sock as Ben called it, stayed on the couch for a few days. Lebowski loved that thing. he would either sleep on top of it or right next to it. it was all the more funny because there was cat on the stocking.

and here’s liznchris trying to convince gracie that lebowski just wants to cuddle and be her friend. gracie isn’t buying it.

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Janney Furnace Museum

Category: dribblings

The museum is a bit of a catch-all. it has Civil War stuff and Native American stuff as well as books and maybe there were colonial things as well? i can’t remember.

these were buttons from uniforms. i think it was a mishmash of Confederate and Union buttons.

 

money! seeing the money reminded me of how easy it was to make counterfeit money back then. it was a HUGE problem. there was a great book i read last year, or maybe the year before called Stealing Lincoln’s Body. it was about a conspiracy to steal the president’s body in exchange for this guy who was in prison. the prisoner was this big counterfeiter guy. they wanted him out to help them make money. So the book went into a great detail about counterfeiting at the time and about how the secret service was put in charge of busting it up. also, i think it mentioned a good bit about the Pinkerton detectives. (i could be thinking of a different book.)

ANYway i was wondering if the money in the display was real or maybe some of it was old fake bills. considering almost half of the currency at that time was fake? probably a good bet.

they had other weapons: rifles, pistols, um, bugles. several musical instruments, in fact.

it was a pretty cool place. the museum is quite new, so cut them a break for being a bit small. i think it’s open weekdays from 10am – 5pm.

 

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