Acquisition & Divestiture -- with FREE BOX!!!

Acquisition:

I was at an estate sale this weekend and found some medium-good boring postcards. They weren't marked -- estate sale faux pas, in my humble opinion -- but when I ran down the owner he carefully counted them up before announcing they were $2.00 apiece. $2.00 apiece! You know what Michael5000 does when you try to sell him old postcards for $2.00 apiece? HE LAUGHS IN YOUR FACE, that's what! Albeit civilly.

Oddly, the guy let go of this 1941 map, which you could probably squeeze ten or twenty bucks from in the right situation, for a measly dollar!

It's not quite like anything else in my vintage map collection! It's not a road map so much as a page from the old Rand McNally Commercial atlases, folded up inside a booklet along with an exhaustive gazetteer. Just the thing for the travelling businessman who visits a lot of obscure rural communities, in 1941.

For my money ($1.00, that is), the best part is this little blurb for the company's world atlases:

Hey, Pop! "Where are the Azores?" the ad text asks. "Where are Pieping, Suez, Istanbul?" I mean, really? When you think about it? This is heady existential stuff.

Meanwhile, in a nearby Free Box, I found this perfectly unremarkable 2002 map of Seattle, which will be a modest improvement on the 1999 map of Seattle that has been in my truck's glove compartment.

Divestiture

Speaking of Free Boxes, today we're taking this cherished City of Roses tradition online with the first edition of:

The CASTLE5000 FREE BOX

Here are some items that we, the 5000s, are finished with and ready to divest of. Want 'em? As a member of the L&TM5K community, you get first dibs! First come first serve! Postage paid by us where reasonable!

• An old-school military-style duffel bag, olive drab.
• The two quilting hoops that no one wanted when I mentioned them here.
• CD: Lalo, Symphonie espagnole. Anne-Sophie Mutter, soloist. EMI Classics.
• CD: Mary-Chapin Carpenter, Come On Come On.
• CD: Camera Obscura, Underachievers Please Try Harder, not exactly a store-bought copy.
• CD: John Mayer, Room for Squares
• CD: Russian Folk Songs. The Patriarchal Choir of Moscow. Naxos.
• CD: U2, All That You Can't Leave Behind.
• CD: Professor Longhair, Crawfish Fiesta. Caveat Emptor: his hair is actually not especially long.
• CD: Britten, A Ceremony of Carols, Friday Afternoons, others. New London Children's Choir. Naxos.
• CD: Elgar, Violin Concerto. Nigel Kennedy, soloist. EMI Classics.
• Old-style "UO" logo enamel University of Oregon keychain.
• One of those little compasses you stick on your dashboard, with two ineffectual suction cups.
• One computer keyboard, still in box.
• Three (3) irons, all three of which leak water but which work just fine as non-steam irons.
• Nice poster-sized National Geographic map of the world, folded.
• The 1999 map of Seattle that has been in my glove compartment hitherto.
• Book: Peter Hoeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow. Hardback First Edition, excellent condition, not worth much. Caveat Emptor: this is one seriously disappointing book.
• Book: Octavia Butler, Kindred. Trade Paperback.
• Last but not least: Great Expectations (by Charles Dickens, duh), unabridged, on 13 cassettes. Awesome reading of an awesome book, and I bet you still have a tape player somewhere around the house, don't ya.

That's all for this time. Don't be shy! Everything must go!

Acquisition & Divestiture

Acquisition: From the basement of the in-laws5000, a set of small plastic figurines representing the U.S. Presidents from Washington to Lyndon Johnson.


These were apparently a childhood, what -- plaything? -- of Mrs.5000. They are perhaps 8 centimeters high, made of a very light plastic, individually painted, and in very well-worn condition. Several Presidents are missing hands or arms that they actually possessed in real life. James Monroe is missing, but there is an extra John F. Kennedy.

Divestiture

Two quilting hoops, a large oval measuring 17" x 27" and a small circle measuring 12".

For those of you who don't know, these hoops are used to keep a quilt stable while you are doing hand quilting. Now, I have recently reached the point of recognizing that there are some things that, no matter how interesting they might be, I don't want or need to accomplish in my lifetime. Becoming a good hand quilter -- or really, doing any more hand quilting at all -- is one of these things. I'm a decent machine quilter, and such I will stay.

If you are a Citizen of Roses, and want these hoops, let me know. Otherwise, they're bound for a free box.

Acquisition & Divestiture

Acquisition: Mrs.5000 and I like to hit the neighborhood estate sales. It makes a good excuse for a little bike ride, it's fun to see the insides of other peoples' houses (and therefore their lives), and sometimes we find cheap loot that either amuses us or can be used in crafts projects.

I always like to check the kitchen. It is always the grimmest section of a proper estate sale, of course, but everybody knows this and therefore any consumables are priced at rock bottom. And hey -- I go through LOTS of tea at work, tea doesn't really go bad, and you are going to pour boiling water on it before you use it. It helps that, although I like good tea, I'm also perfectly comfortable with bad tea.


Mrs.5000 frowns on this practice, perhaps because of my habit of referring to the stash in question as "dead man's tea." Therefore, this particular acquisition is for office use only.

Divestiture: Khaki work pants. Entered service: c. 1999. Designated for casual use only: c. 2004. Designated for painting and gardening only: c. 2006.


Decommissioned and salvaged for household rags: 2010.

A&D: The Michael5000 Vintage Map Collection

Have I ever mentioned that I have a collection of vintage* maps of the City of Roses? Because I totally do.


Also, of the Beaver State.


...as well as, to a much lesser extent, pretty much anyplace else.


Mrs.5000, who is awesome, even made me a special map box a few years back.


It has all sorts of little map-appropriate pockets and compartments inside. Because Mrs.5000 is awesome!


*"Vintage," at least when I'm using it, means "too old to be useful and not old enough to be valuable." I'm not really a fan of collecting things for the sake of their cash value, or that I need to worry about, and indeed if I suspected that anything in my map box was worth fifteen bucks I'd have it on Ebay in a heartbeat. I don't care about what condition they're in, either. I just like lookin' at them.

Acquisition: The newest addition to the collection is the 1956 Tidewater Oil Company OREGON-IDAHO MONTANA Road Map which I bought for a cool U.S. dollar while tagging along with a recent expedition to an antique shop.

This is awesome because, one, I've never even heard of the Tidewater Oil Company, and two, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana? What a weird group of states to lump on a single map! (Whereas Oregon and Washington, which both fill the same size rectangle at the same scale, are a common pairing.)

BeaverStaters of today can see lots of changes in a 54 year old map, on which Gresham, Tigard, and Beaverton are distinct towns a ways outside of Portland's built-up area. Hillsboro and Forest Grove don't even look like satellite towns. And although I suspect there are many Portlanders today who have never gone to Salem by any route except I-5, here is evidence of a world where the freeway was only a plan on the drawing board.


Idaho and Montana get relatively short shrift from Tidewater Oil, wedged in at a coarse scale along with maps of the Mt. Hood Scenic Highway and Crater Lake. Indeed, Crater Lake National Park -- which features, as you may know, a lake in a crater -- gets almost as much space on the page as the Gem State.

Awesomeness.

Acquisition & Divestiture

Divestiture: When we made the great leap from dial-up to DSL in 2003 or thereabouts, some friends who were making the upgrade to newfangled "wifi" gave us their old router. We drilled a series of small holes in the Castle5000 walls to run cables here and there, connecting two desktop computers to the network. When the laptop came along, its use on the internet involved either lying on the floor next to a third cable from the router, or of course going to the coffee shop.


This all worked quite well for many years, requiring only a weekly-or-so resetting of the router when it would randomly reset itself. But early this month we started experiencing glacial internet speeds that were literally reminiscent of the 1990s. We were horrified, of course. Mrs.5000 spent hours with the DSL provider's tech and sales staff, and I spent hours tediously trying to reconfigure the router by every means I could think of. The problem just got worse, and by the end of the week we had just a single line into the house and the DSL provider offering to provide "home networking" for only an extra gouging a month.

Acquisition: Finally, I went to a big box retailer of home electronics with a reputation for terrible customer service. I explained our dilemma. An affable and knowledgeable sales clerk took me immediately to a new router that fits our needs exactly. It has what strikes me as a comically tiny price tag; the sales guy assured me I didn't need anything more expensive. The transaction took maybe three minutes.



So now we're back up to speed, and I can use the laptop in all sorts of exotic places throughout and near the Castle. It's really trippy. Although I think I'll still go to the coffee shop often enough.

Acquisition & Divestiture

Acquisition: GPS Receiver. As an early birthday present for myself, I was given liberty to splurge on a GPS receiver. Not the one shown here, though. Mine has a little crack on the screen from the first day I used it, when I was staring at myself walking through the world on the screen instead of looking forwards as I walked through the real world. I tripped over a wire, and tumbled forcefully down, my weight on my palms and the gadget in my palms.

A similar incident happened the second day I played with it, but fortunately it was only my shins, and not the gadget, that got banged up this time.

Why a GPS unit? Geohashing, of course.

Divestiture: I got a new pair of glasses recently, and it occurred to me that I have never, since college, thrown a pair of glasses out once it was replaced.

I kept three, and was able to donate the rest to the Lions Club, who will presumably find someone with even less style sense than me to inflict them on.