1-Nov-99 A new leaf
It's not a big deal, yet. So far my redesign is limited to upgrading the navigation arrowheads at the bottom here and on the month index page, and changing the border color of the calendar. It's a start. The border image is alder cones picked up along the river walk in Waltham on Nov. 3 (an example of journal time travel, or some lack of forthrightness in dating my entries.)
I printed the fifth color on my Lake Sevan Church prints. It turned out to be a dark brown, not the black I had been thinking of. Now they just have to dry, and I have to decide whether or not they're finished or if I want to add another stamp at the top.
This morning I stopped at Highland Hardware for leaf bags. Back when I was a kid my father used to burn the leaves in the street, and I loved to watch and help. For a long time around here you would stuff your leaves into plastic bags for the garbage collection. Now they have to go in big paper bags for composting.
Highlands Hardware is holding out against Home Depot. It's a place with a well-worn wooden floor. One wall is covered with little drawers full of all sizes of nuts, bolts, screws, washers, eyebolts, acorn nuts, bushings, spacers, cotter pins, and so on. You take as many as you need, no bubble packs involved. The other aisles are crammed with everything else you could reasonably need. If you don't see it, you ask the owner, and he'll move something out of the way and pick out your item, telling you how many years ago he sold the last one of them. Today it looked as if half of the store was stocked with paper leaf bags.
The guy who runs Highlands Hardware is somewhere around forty, with bushy reddish-brown hair and beard. He's usually on the phone brusquely ordering more merchandise, or discussing last night's sports results in fairly vulgar terms. He will interrupt that to look at your merchandise, which totals $3.19, and say, “give me $3”. Some people consider him a community treasure for maintaining the place in the face of superstore competition, and some consider him and the store a crude anachronism. Opinions seem to be divided mainly along gender lines.
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