Saturday, August 1
Saturday afternoon. My roommates are still asleep, which makes sense. I could hear them talking until some time around 5am.
Along with thin walls, this house comes with a back yard and a clothesline, so I went to McGuckin Hardware to find clothespins. McGuckin differs quite a bit from my childhood memories of the independent hardware store, and it's not exactly cheap, but it's an amazing place. Sort of a monument to the sheer material and technological wealth of our culture, rendered as a working commercial enterprise. Every time I go, I succumb to the kind of technofetishism that I imagine drives people to write things like Cool Tools.
I made it out with two kinds of wooden clothespins (the two-piece + spring kind and the one-piece pegs) and a bag of shop rags, but I probably spent an hour looking at stuff. I almost bought:
- A washboard
- A metric hex driver bit set
- A bamboo brush
- A $10 mechanical pencil
- A length of brass tubing
- A box cutter
- A yellow, spiral-bound field notebook
- Work gloves
- Ceramic kitchen utensil holders
- Several small glass jars with different colored metal lids (for spices)
- A salt shaker
- A bike rack
I also spent a long time looking at the clocks, although I didn't have any intentions of getting one.