Why I Oughta...

Back at the end of June, I added a coaster (and glass cover) to the #CoasterCollection here on the blog and kind of just glossed over the actual hotel.  Being a fan of old-school hotels, the lobby at the Roosevelt deserves a post of it's own here in my online/travel diary.  Check out the photo above to see the mosiacs, the fixtures and the all around glamour of the place.  They don't build hotels like this any more - in terms of the materials but also the space.  There is so much 'useless' space that isn't in rooms.  The areas around the elevators on the upper floors is generous.  Today? They'd build that space into the rooms.  There are these little weird half-floors that are totally NOT ADA-compliant.   And in keeping with the Waldorf-Atoria tradition of featuring significant clocks in their lobby , the Roosevelt has a beautiful piece called "The Paris Exhibition Clock.  Turns out, despite the clock being made in 1867, it has o...

We installed exactly two items on the walls of our #NewOldFarmhouse .  The first was a television.  I mounted it on the wall in the first few days after we moved in.  The other?  Our cuckoo clock that you see above.    I posted about the clock before when I posted a photo from my sister Vic and described how we bought our clock in the Black Forest and then after receiving it, how it went right into storage. Ours is an eight-day version, so the big weights you see in the photo have a long way to go to reach the floor, but I keep yanking them up after just a day or two so we've never had them dangle close to the reach of the kids. There are three kids on the clock with the middle one not glued down, so we have to place her over to one side or the other.  With it striking just the cuckoo at the bottom of the hour and playing a song at the top of the hour, I've grown to really like hearing it around the house.  It was running a bit fast, so I...

My sister Vic sent me this photo above from Oli's in Triberg, Germany - the home of the Master Carvers Club who handcraft *real* cuckoo clocks .  She was in Triberg with my folks recently to show them the town (it is awfully cute) and to show them how you can see/tell the difference between clocks (hint:  look at the side and if you see plastic in the little circle, pass on it.).  My sister and Equation Boy/Man bought a clock from Oli's and while they were there, they sent the photo you see above.   The one in the middle is the clock that Nat and I picked up when we were there all the way back in last Summer.  It has 'balusters', which is kinda awesome if you have been keeping up with our house build . It's funny, though:  we shipped the clock to Elmhurst from Germany and when it arrived, it was so well packed that, since we didn't have a place to put it, we just left it in it's box and mostly forgot about it.  This photo, though, brought me righ...

After staring at - or at least referencing often - this clock for close to twenty-five years, it is now a member of the permanent collection of the Elmhurst/Downers Parrillos as it came home with us from Coloma this past week.  I'm considering it a kind of 'see you later' kind of token and as we build out my new home office in our new place, I'm sure that I'll figure out how to give this a prime spot somewhere on a shelf or bookcase and I'll always remember where it sat for a long part of it's time in our life. It isn't the prettiest or best looking clock, but it has been in my life for a long time AND it had something that drew my Dad to it two decades ago.  It has #147 on it - meaning it was an early member of my Dad's collection - so I'll honor it and keep it in a place of high regard.  And yes, that means my Dad was a collector of sorts and he even kept records on all the treasures he came across.  Good lesson to learn, I think.  Probabl...