Tuesday, October 25, 2005

New Wall of Photos

My aunt and uncle from Cleveland are visiting this week for a few days on their way home from vacationing in China, so my wife has been furiously cleaning and decorating. On Monday my wife scrubbed the downstairs spotless, clean enough for open heart surgery. We brought our Golden Retriever in for the night, and sometime in the night had diarrhea all over the floor. I got up in the morning to clean it, only to find that the pump motor had failed in the mountains above us, and our community had no water. Not a bad day it was, with the fragrant smell of dog diarrhea hanging in the morning air, and not a drop of water in the house.



One thing I have done since Peace Corps is put up pictures of friends and family. My parents sent me dozens of pictures, which I assembled into a huge collage that was a constant generator of questions and attention from my students at the village school where I was teaching. Since then it has been a tradition in my family to cover the walls with pictures of the family. It just seems a waste to have all those pictures stashed in volumes when they could be up for everyone to enjoy. Pictured above is the main wall of pictures in our house.



My wife added a new wall the other day, this one of our trip to Sri Lanka. She makes these by using cheap white plastic soundproofing from B&Q. She puts up two layers held together by double-sided tape, and then tapes them again to the wall with double sided tape. The soundproofing is the only stuff that is light enough to tape to a wall -- you could put up a soft wood, but that is expensive and a pain. Ordinary tacks/pins are then used to affix the pics to the soundproofing.

3 comments:

225712012 said...

While I enjoy your rants about domestic politics, it is nice to see a glimpse of the Turton domestic household for a change.
I can empathise with the dogshit situation, my cat used to do this on a regular basis before he ran away. Except that he used to do it on purpose just to piss me off.

Supercords said...

Oh the joys of pet ownership.

The picture wall is a great idea. It could also be a fun activity for any English classroom--having the students bring in pictures from home and then slowly adding to it over the semester.

Shane

Michael Turton said...

Except that he used to do it on purpose just to piss me off.

I think all cats are that way. We had two that used to coordinate......