I just accidentally reminded myself that eight years ago I wrote the first post on the first incarnation of the LeEMS Bean, also called the LeEMS Bean. Happy birthday Bean! The first post was boring, but this one from 2008 is interesting:
Gardening finds
I found a small statue of St. Joseph in my front garden. Other than a disem-housed toy chimney, it is the only garden discovery I have made that is not building materials. Not immediately recognizing it, and being raised with more of the mezuzah tradition than that of the catholic saints, I had a strong inclination to put it back. I decided to clean it up and research first.
What I found is that St. Joseph, in addition to being a patron saint for families, parents and working people, is also the patron saint for home buyers and sellers. Burying a small figurine of St. Joseph upside down and facing the house will help your house to sell. You should remember where you put him, so you can retrieve him once the selling is over and give him a good place in your new house (oops to the previous owners). Since we are so happy to have found our house, we’ve given him a good place in ours.
The Catholic Supply Company has a few variations on the St. Joseph home selling kit, the one pictured is the figurine found in our garden.
More on Jessica Fletcher
Says Jessica Fletcher: “But when I examined the theatrical scores, I found no tympani indicated.”
How do you find out if that sound was murder or music? You look for the tympani.
Penelope Sea Chapter Six | The LeEMS Bean
Chapter Six of Penelope Sea and Ocean End just posted on The LeEMS BeanBiblioFair
Novel idea for putting your home library to work: BiblioFair | Book trading, exchanging and swapping made easier.
It’s interesting to me that this concept of home library exchange highlights the inadequacies of libraries to meet patron demand. Before libraries existed in this country home library exchange would have been the only option to borrow something new, at least among those who could afford to have a book collection in the first place. From the site:
Is the book you are looking for too expensive or always unavailable in your local library? Would you like to save both money and nature and rather buy a used one?
BiblioFair helps you find publications available for sale, donation or lending in home libraries located close to you!
I don’t know if this would work for me, since when I weed a book at home I want it out of the house quick, and the books I want to keep around…I’m not very good at sharing. I just hear my dad over and over again in my head: never lend something you actually want back.
Penelope Sea and Ocean End: Chapter Five | The LeEMS Bean
some more evolutionary diversion
I dreamed I was walking in the desert, and came across and giant armadillo. Only it wasn’t really an armadillo. It was more like some ancient plated dinosaur predecessor of an armadillo, as big as a medium sized dog with a long armored tail that stretched suspended over the arid ground as the animal walked.
It was a pangolin. In the same order, Xenarthra, with armadillos, sloths and anteaters, pangolins are solitary, nocturnal and eat ants and termites. They’re also threatened because their armor plates are thought to be of medicinal value.
Top 25 Fantastic Soviet Buildings | English Russia
Top 25 Fantastic Soviet Buildings | English Russia is a collection of truly fantastic buildings. I wish there were some sights like this in my daily life.
The Electrical Experimenter on the Internet Archive
Are you hankering for some easily digestible, perhaps incorrect and outdated, home science and hopelessly optimistic paleo futurism? Then the Internet Archive’s collection of the Electrical Experimenter is for you. Read articles from the likes of Nikola Tesla, Hugo Gernsback, and Frederick Finch Strong.
What, you say you’ve never heard of paleo futurism before? You’ve never toured through the worlds we were supposed to have if the idealistic scientists of yesterday had their way? Then I also recommend Paleo Future, where you will find countless examples of how clean, peaceful and advanced we should be living today if all predictions had come true.
Penelope Sea | The LeEMS Bean
Chapter FourThe ugliest spot in the house
Every house has them: those rooms that need sprucing, the hole that needs patching. Well, after we finally painted the pokey hallway, my kitchen became the ugliest spot in the house. It’s visible from so many places in the house, it’s just too hard to ignore.
And it’s not that it was that horrible. The no frills black cabinets and grey laminate counter tops are actually in really really good shape and better quality than I had in my last few apartments. It took some time for me to warm up to it, but I no longer want to just rip everything out. I can deal with the counter being unlevel.
What was bad about it: paint splatters around the sink and the melted butter yellow paint splotches on the blue-grey walls, holes in the drywall from an open shelf pantry we removed on the opposite wall, and a lot of dirty. The paint splatters and most of the dirty just took a lot of cleaning, but the dirt smudges just wouldn’t budge off the mat finish blue grey paint. I didn’t like the color anyway.
We also wanted to inject some midcentury style back into the 90s remodel. In my dreams, this involves minty appliances, bold colors, and restoring the partial wall that was removed to make it ‘open concept.’ In my reality, we picked some retro feeling pattern for the backsplash ala kurtcyr’s pollen-euphorbia pattern on wallpaper at SpoonFlower.com. Updating the cabinet pulls with sleeker, super simple options made a huge difference, and we painted.
The result is extreme. The semi gloss we picked makes the room glow, though the effect is hard to capture on camera with all the windows throwing off the exposure.
Eventually, we will build a kind of partition to shield the living room from the stove top, instead of allowing it to throw grease and vapors willy nilly onto upholstered furniture from it’s place in the middle of the peninsula. I know this placement isn’t so clear in these pictures; I am dribbling out my before and after snaps so you only see how awesome it all is. More will come later.
Shoe Shopping
It’s been awhile, but we all know what I do when I can’t find exactly the right thing while shopping. I draw it! Wish I had the ability to make these too.
Set Your Thoughts Free – Hemingwrite
My house needs one of these; my husband and I would be fighting over it all the time. The Hemingwrite allows you to type, with the tactile pleasure of a real typewriter keyboard, offline while still providing the ability to sync what you’ve written with your cloudy documents. It is projected to have a six week battery life and 1 million page, plus, memory, so get one when they are get-able, pack your gear and go camp writing; I’ll join you. Set Your Thoughts Free – Hemingwrite.
Penelope Sea | The LeEMS Bean
Chapter three of Penelope Sea and Ocean End posted on The LeEMS Bean.
What Causes the Smell of New & Old Books? | Compound Interest
What Causes the Smell of New & Old Books? | Compound Interest is a concise info graphic about the volatile organic compounds that make old and new books smell the way they do.
I still think this is an unexplored marketing angle, especially in a world where print book publishers are terrified that print book consumption is on the decrease. The food and make-up industries, among others, already use scent to make their products more appealing. Why not engineer books, through specialized paper and ink, with specific smells designed to attract buyers?