This morning I found this link on Fark: "After decades of being dissed, the ranch-style house is cool again". The article got me thinking once more about our house's design roots; so I went poking around the Goog and found an article about the origins of steep gable roof design in California homes of the 50's and 60's. Lo and behold, the article featured a picture of our exact house model, and a couple of paragraphs about its design (second image down, labeled "Anshen + Allen's gable design for Gavello homes, 1956"). The Internet, people! You really can find bloody everything here.
The article describes our roof as a "clerestory", which made me laugh because about half the people who've visited the house so far have referred to it as "the church". (Other comparisons have included "boat", "chalet", and "cabin" - the place is a conversation piece, for sure). I guess the ecclesiastical overtones are particularly appropriate, though, considering we have the Wrong Reverend Wee in residence...
In other news, the hardwood floor refurbishing is completed, and holy shit, is it pretty. Also, you can get a pretty decent buzz from huffing the polyurethane fumes. I'm so glad we had it done, even if our current mobile lifestyle is wearing a little thin (we've been living in a rented RV parked outside the house since Wednesday, and can't really move back into the house until Tuesday). Most of the floor was in OK shape to begin with - the thick rubber carpet pads were probably in place for most of the house's existence, and they really protected the floor surface. Given our dread of moving all our shit around yet again, we were tempted just to scrub the surface and live with it as-was. When we sold the last house, though, we did a lot of things to "increase value" that we were kicking ourselves for not doing sooner just for our own benefit; afterwards we promised ourselves we wouldn't procrastinate like that in our next place, within financial reason. So now, having followed through on that notion despite the temptations of slackery, we have a gorgeous floor that's worth probably 4-5 times what it cost us to fix it up. O happy day... Now let's just hope we can manage not to fuck it up too badly.
The other night I had a dream that I was in a big indoor swimming pool and saw a bunch of light brown M&M's - who were faceless but had arms and legs like their TV counterparts, except skinny and black - lined up on top of the high dive platform. They were jumping off one by one, even though none of them seemed to want to jump but were somehow coerced into doing it anyway. Then one dark-brown M&M stepped up to the edge, and he was even more freaked out, and as he jumped some invisible hand swooped down and squashed him against the edge of the platform, showering the pool with little shards of candy coating.
Since then I've come up with several possible interpretations:
Posit #1: The M&M's are brown, therefore they represent the oppressed minorities of the world; the platform is Western capitalist imperialism, and the invisible hand is that of, perhaps, Dick Cheney or Paul Wolfowitz.
Analysis: I confess that, unlike such keen humanitarians as Bono and/or Angelina Jolie, my own self-absorbed consumerist psyche doesn't spend a lot of time agonizing over the hardships of the Third World... So, probably not.
Posit #2: The M&M's are tasty but fattening treats, and my psyche is punishing them on behalf of all of their empty-calorie snack pals for being too magically delicious for me to keep out of my piehole even though I've gained back a bit of all the weight I lost before the move.
Analysis: There's some merit to this one, but M&M's generally aren't the craptastic munchie of choice for me; if the point of the dream were to depict avatars of my gluttony, a more appropriate symbol would be wee ambulatory cartons of Ben and Jerry's Phish food frozen yogurt, or lurking salt-and-vinegar potato chips, or frowning wedges of cheddar.
Posit #3: The M&M's represent all the insects that were exterminated at our tented house last week.
Analysis: Maybe... Again, the candies were brown, as are many bugs, and they had skinny dark buggy legs instead of the fat white legs they have on TV. I'm not sure how to account for the one dark-brown one that got smashed - maybe he was intended to stand out as a particularly wrenching symbol of persecution, the dream equivalent of the little girl in the red coat in "Schindler's List"?
Well, anyway, at least this dream was different from the usual "Running-the-halls-of-high-school-naked" or "I-have-thirty-seconds-to-grab-shit-before-fire-engulfs-my-house" retreads.
When I was reading the IMDB message boards for the cinematic tour de force that was 1976's "King Kong" this evening, I came across a poem that... You see, it's... um. Well, I just thought others might enjoy it as much as I did. Here you go!
KING KONG AND QUEEN DWAN
Dwan what a charmer,
like Faye Wray, well ALMOST like Faye Wray.
She holds over the beasts being
total absolute sway
Atop the dual phallouses
that sadly are no more.
The Queen Begs DONT LET ME GO!
But he knows what is is store.
Is his own gargantuan simian way
as tears fills his giant eyes
He seems to know in his giant heart
that he is going to die.
"O beautiful queen, I will die,
before you I let them kill.
You have, my heart with total joy
given such great fill."
And man with his instruments of destruction
go after the kings beautiful head.
The king falls off the palace top
and on the street lays dead.
His beautiful queens weeps bitterly
for her king is no more.
She was a regent in his eyes.
And never was the whore.