My Sandbox: CLOWNS!

This morning I read an article in the Houzz weekly email about interesting items people find in their walls/ceilings/houses during renovations. Both the article and the many comments were a hoot. Unfortunately (or fortunately!) we haven't ever found anything more exciting than bad wiring in our walls. The stories included finds from guns to love letters, newspapers, cash, liquor bottles, risque drawings, rat droppings and everything in between.

But the one that had me laughing out loud was the photo of the head and arms of a large clown doll someone pulled out of a wall. Pretty creepy if clowns are nightmare inducing for you! It was kind of Bozo-esque but it wasn't Bozo.

Do you remember watching Bozo? Were you scared of clowns? Apparently lots of people were/are. I don't believe I ever was and I think I know one reason why. Dad recently scanned all his slides. So I looked through them to find these Christmas photos from 1957 (I think). Yep. That's a clown. We won't mention the scary blue walls and green ceiling. Yikes! (it was a rental)

He was a pretty bizarre looking clown too. I do remember his crackly red hat! It was crackly, wasn't it Mom?

Now I look more closely there are several "interesting" characters here. (and I see the pictures are backwards!) The orange-faced roly poly clown, a rubber Minnie Mouse, I guess that's Pinocchio, a blue kitten and a strange colorless doll house family. :-)

And what's up with the creepy Santa! LOL I remember most of these things fondly, but I really have to ask Mom about that Santa.

The Tramp and I are still on the road to recovery. That didn't stop us from a real trip out on the road on Saturday. Sometime last year we had a grand rearrangement of my sewing and craft stuff so I would have a place to mess with paints and clay that was away from sewing machines and fabrics. In the Sandbox Annex I had a mirror on my table as it's nice to work on glass. And it's tempered glass too, so it was a nice cheap alternative to going to a glass shop for the real thing. It turned out to be not so nice though. Because it reflects, all the lights in the room would dazzle my eyes. I couldn't point my Ott light at my work so I could see what I was doing. Frustrating.

What to do, what to do? A quick look online seemed to show that a tempered glass top for my table would be quite pricey. Darn. Ok. What about removing the paint and silvering from the back of the mirror? This turns out to be possible, though messy and means nasty chemicals. Double darn. Now wait a minute! People sell glass topped things all the time on Craigslist. So after a flurry of searching we found a glass topped desk, for a price that just couldn't be beat! A quick phone call to the seller and we were off in the car to Chapel Hill. Hmmmmm. Sounds like a replay of last week. Even down to the weather.

In between the nice sunny bits it rained. In the sun...

and without the sun.

And back to dry again.

So after a bunch of shifting things, here we are! A comfortable place to have fun. :-)

Dad built this cabinet and it's just right for my bottles of paint.

I figured out I've been dragging this lamp from office to office and house to house for at least 23 years! The brass base looked like it too. So this afternoon I spray painted it black. Spray paint is still my nemesis, but I think it looks just fine.

And even though the light reflects in the glass table top it isn't blinding me and that was the whole point of the exercise. So, Happy Dance!

While I fussed and sorted and moved things in the Annex a short lived but strong storm passed over. The blue dot that is us, is right under the dark red stormy spot in the center. Rain and thunder and wind. And then it was gone.