14 August 2009

Trimmed Brunette and Oiled Redhead

I know my Flickr stalkers and Facebook peeps have already seen these, but for the rest of you, here's what I look like now that my hair is a whopping twenty inches shorter:

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Cute, eh? The shirt was designed by my SnB buddy Aaron, and is a reference to a reference (yes, a reference to a reference, that's not a typo) to a video game that I've never played. I just like pie.

...I'm sure there's something else I wanted to tell y'all about, but I have Candide on the turntable, and it's distracting me. Wherefore and hence, therefore and ergo...

*ahem*

Oh, right! I was poking around in my storage unit the other day, and was dismayed to discover a thin-to-moderate layer of mold coating quite a few of my possessions, including Brigid, my beloved walking wheel. I pulled her out and brought her to Erik's, where I cleaned her up and have been giving her a new coat of linseed oil every few days. The wood is beginning to look a little less old, and much more colorful... turns out this wheel is more of a redhead than I thought she was.

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The oil is showing me that her various parts may be different types of wood, which fits with the evidence I saw when I first got her that she'd been re-spoked. The spokes have a definite redness, while the hoop seems to be much more yellow, and the table and legs seem to be somewhere in the middle.

Any woodworking folks out there want to guess what the various bits are made of? I can spot walnut most of the time, but most other local woods all look the same to me. Keep in mind that Brigid may have been made in Virginia or thereabouts, but she was in Massachusetts when I met her, and I'm not sure at what point during her journey she picked up new parts.

And while I'm soliciting information, are any of you familiar enough with bird species to tell me what this is? (Click to embiggen.)

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It looks like a peregrine falcon to me, but I'm no ornithologist, and everything I've heard about peregrines in the last decade relates to them living in cities, not rural Vermont.