I'm having one of those wistfully weird mindfully synchronous days.
Dropping the 3rd Person schtick, although it involves the Acquisitions Dept as much as the Curator, I'll start this long shaggy dog tale with these photos of a handsome, leather-clad Dietzgen hand-cranker...
...with a very nice 100-foot blackface steel tape inside...
..that I found on January 1st, 2021!
It was part of a flea market haul that grabbed 'First Find of the Year' honors in the (
doing math on his fingers in public...)
10th Annual Garage Sale thread.
Why am I posting it now? Because I apparently never posted it anywhere else before. I used the Search function on Username Already In Use's
'Tape Measures' thread, then 'This forum', and finally 'Everywhere' - where it turned up in the 2021 GS thread. I went to my 2021 folder of photos and, sure enough, there it was.
But what the heck made me think of it now you may be wondering?
Good question!
If you're still with me, that's where the story gets a little weird.
Earlier this morning, in a thread called 'Prices of vegetables at farmers markets' up in the Free Parking forum, I posted a reply, linked
here, that was probably a little too dark and philosophical for GJ, where I referred to a 2008 dystopian novel called
World Made By Hand in which modern life as we know it had been reduced back to an agrarian- and craftsmen-based barter society.
About an hour later I went for a daily exercise walk. I was coming up to a house with its long driveway being re-done. The house is one of the older houses on this thoroughfare, a coastal evacuation route between town and the beaches, that, much like mine, has not yet been demolished and replaced with a McVictorian Replica. It's in a state of disrepair. But the owners, who I have never met, have bees, because they have had a little sign out front for a few years stating, 'LOCAL HONEY FOR SALE. OUR BEES LIVE HERE.'
As I was walking past, there was a young-ish guy with an armful of tats in grimy jeans on his knee holding a Stanley 25' yellow carpenter's tape to a stake in the ground, and a young-ish woman with white hair, also with an armful of tats, also wearing grimy jeans, a toolbelt, and big onyx black disks of the type I associate with African tribal rituals in her earlobes, struggling with the other end of it, the tape stuck, kinking, or whatever, and I heard her say, "You never take good care of your tools."
I heard him say, not un-kindly, "Bla bla bla." Literally. As if they had been through this routine before.
I smirked, thinking to myself, '
that's not really the proper tool for that job, anyway,' but, minding my own business, and not wanting to stare, I continued on my walk. I couldn't get it out of my mind, though. As I completed my usual circuit, I started to think about all my vintage 100-footers collecting dust, the young beekeeping couple and their driveway, and the fact that I had no honey in my evening tea last night!
By the time I got home, my mind was made up. I went down the basement, grabbed the Dietzgen, jumped in my truck, drove back to their place, double-parked - not planning to say too long, put on the 4 ways, and hopped out.
"You're probably gonna think this is kooky," I say as I approach.
Ten minutes later, after a very pleasant, charming conversation, in which I learned that they don't own the house or the bees, she works for the owners spinning the honey and her husband is trying to start his own general Mr. Fix It type business, and they learned that I was a vintage tools hound willing to part with an antique if they promised to take care of it and that their last name meant "scrap" in the native tongue of Eugene Dietzgen, I walked away carrying this jar of honey!
and sending you?
. If he punts it away, I may attempt to look.
