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.

[Taiwan]