Thursday, 23rd March, 2006

Pressies

wallpaper

The other day, someone (I think it was Dan) was asking if I had a larger copy of my stream/wine/header image, to use as a desktop background. So, benevolent as I am, here's three versions of it ...

17 inch (1680 x 1050)
15 inch (1440 x 900)
12 inch (1024 x 768)

And, just in case anyone wants it (and why wouldn't you?), here's a 12 inch version of my Dress Different picture.

You can indeed

got their genders confused in the middle

I don't quite get you there — do you mean where they say "him"?

Help

photo

It's always wise, when taking your keyboard apart for cleaning, to have either (a) a diagram, or (b) a spare one, so that you know where the keys go when you're putting it back together

Ah, see, this is probably the one and only example of the benefits of me being a total lush who gets drunk and spills wine over her keyboards on a regular basis — I have plenty of spares to check against

Actually, as I was putting all the keys back on (carefully), I found I instinctively knew where most of them went — it was like typing, I guess. It was also like doing a jigsaw puzzle — I did the edges first

It was worth it though ... look what was underneath them...

Indeed

Never read things before posting them Beki — I never do

That header image is awesome.

Thanks Neil I've been waiting for you to leave a comment — you and Becky's gravatars work the best with all this whitespeace

I need a can of compressed air or something.

Can I recommend cans of cider Tiffany? They don't clean anything, but they make you not care.

I want to see the return of the "remember me" checkbox

What is this — a Becky and Jane conspiracy? I'm working on it, dammit

Clicky, the thunder god!

mixed it up with the black keys from an old iMac keyboard I had

I always thought youd' just spilt something on it Emily

Historical Bumpage

photo floor history house

So I was sat on my floor a wee while ago, drying my hair, and my mind wandered in the direction of the little clusters of bumps on my floor.

There's four of them in total (clusters, not bumps), and it was only me sanding the floorboards that made them visible.

Actually, let's go back a little bit — to the summer of 1996. I'd had the house for nearly a year, and one of the things I was intent on doing was sanding the floor. Previously, in another flat I used to live in, I'd done the same — but with one of those Big Heavy Machines™. It was a sodding nightmare — noisey, dirty, and I was picking sawdust out of my nose for weeks afterwards.

This time therefore, through some idiocy of logic, I figured it would be much better to do it with a hand sander.

It took me two weeks

(I never actually finished, as it happens. There's a one square metre patch of old varnish underneath the rug that my chair in the studio is on. The hand-sander packed in just as I was about to finish)

So yeah, doing it by hand meant that I couldn't shift the blackness from inside these little indentations — which is why they look a little bit like a leopard.

For quite a while, I tried to figure out what made them, and why there were four clusters in a neat rectangle on the bedroom floor ... until it dawned on me one day — they were the indentations made by the legs of a bed.

Now, I'm not sure if they're from the original bed, but I've got a little mental image of an old, iron bedstead, being jiggled around by lurid Edwardian action

...

But anyway, being as my mind was drifting, I started to think about how this house must have been when it was first built — and the people that lived here. A while back, there was an exhibition in the local museum about Victorian terraces like mine (although mine's later, I'll come back to that), and how to trace the people that lived in them.

After a few hours in the library, flicking therough local Gazetteers, I'd found a guy called "Edwin" who was the original occupant, and is recorded as living here in 1933.

Thing is though, I was sure my house was older than that. And it wasn't until I remortgaged a few years back that I got a clue about exactly how old it is.

For some reason, I've managed to end up with the original deeds for the little terrace that I live on — all of the houses . Not sure if I should have them, but they were sent to me because I did a Land Search, and I'll be buggered if I'm letting anyone else get them

Here's a few shots of them — I really love the little wax seals myself...

Gorgeous, aren't they?

There's quite a lot of history hidden in these deeds, in particular, what happened to the guy who originally owned the land, and why my house was built in the first place.

There's a clue in this bit...

The language in them is weird and archaic — usual legalese if you ask me — but all the way through, they talk about this guy being of "unsound" main/mind. I've read through them a few times, and this is what I've figured out...

Ny house is built on the site of an old "shippon", which I think means "paddock" — basically a place to keep cows. There used to be a barn next to us, where milk was churned.

Anyway, in the late 1800s, the guy who owned the land went doolally, and got carted off to the mental asylum up the other side of town. His wife continued to leave nearby here, but to afford the costs for him, they had to sell off some of their land.

They sold it to a guy called Waites, who then contracted a guy called Nicholson to build five houses.

Now, the deeds say 1905 on them — but I think that's just when the contract to build was signed. My house isn't on the 1910 map of Lancaster, and there's no sight of it until 1913 (which is odd, because building wasn't very prolific here in that time — what with the War and all that).

Anyway, there you go — my house was built because some guy lost his marbles.

...

I often wonder about that guy "Edwin" and who lived here with him. I'm presuming he had a family, but they're not mentioned in the Gazetteer (although I think I might have found mention of them somewhere else).

It's odd, thinking about a family living here — washing in a tub in what's now my kitchen, cooking and eating in the front room at a range (before it got converted into a coal fire sometime around the 30s, and then to a gas fire in the 60s, and finaly to a stove, by me, a couple of years ago)

I wonder what they'd make of what I've done with the place I wonder if they'd approve of the previous owners splitting the back bedroom into two to make a bathroom and (what's now) my studio.

Most of all though, I wonder what this Edwardian gentleman and his family would have made of a 34 year old man swanning around their home in a wedding dress.

Betcha they would freak

Do you ever get frustrated at all these US Blogger Meetings?

Nah, not really. I would like, maybe, to go next year, but I wonder sometimes just what input I could possibly have to something like that. I mean, I like to think this thing is pretty — just not ground breaking.

And besides, there are other sorts of conventions I'm thinking about going to, in compensation

You Need Hands

photo

...to be a Sound Designer these days.