Play time!

I was so annoyed with the quality of some of the pictures that I took for the Baltimore post that, without thinking about it too much, I went and ordered a new toy.

Tadaaa!

It's a scanner!

I got rather tired of spending enormous amounts of time fiddling with the lighting for various pictures and having to make everything perfect just so that I could show off a picture or two for demonstrative purposes.

...

And it is in this moment that I realize that this is mostly only true for the comic book posts and that as this is primarily a novel blog I might have just wasted a lot of money on something that I won't be using all that often.

Well shit.

But who cares, because look at me not using it for the things I should be using it for!

Carpet 1

Carpet 1, but  prettier.

Don't mind our dust.

Carpet 2

Oh my god that one's ugly. I do apologize.

But then, maybe to offset that, there's also this thing.

This is a partial scan of a tree trunk from a tree that once was in our backyard.

That little grey thing in the middle is an iron nail that in some forgotten era had been hammered into it, and which over the subsequent ages had poisoned it.

We took the tree down because it was causing a nuisance for the neighbours, and there's a tale in that.

In the taking it down, I mean, not in the nuisance. That was pretty much your usual thing. This is about taking the tree down itself.

To cut it very short:

We didn't take enough precautions and it was really touch and go there for a while, but in the end we managed to let it slam down in our own backyard, luckily only pulverizing some of our own tiles, rather than, say, anything of the neighbours or one of their demon cats.

*scowls at his hand and remembers a past wounding*

There was a lot of lumber to clear away but as it seemed a shame to let such a majestic tree go without any kind of memento I kept a bit or two.

There's the bit above, which I use mainly as ornamentation. And only in the one place, where I originally put it, because the resin ended up seeping out of the wood and onto the top of the bookshelf and that shit is very hard to clean up. It sometimes smells delicious though.

And here's the other bit.

Now, this thing is pleasantly solid. Not sure how much it weighs but it's quite heavy.

I use it mainly as a bedside table, instead of the other four actual bedside tables that I still have standing around like so much useless standing things, 2 of which actually match my bed.

But wouldn't you choose this one as well? This one's so much cooler.

The top isn't completely level, but it's level enough to hold a drink or two, a book and my glasses.

Some delicious grooving on the top there.

Clever as I am, I selected the bit of the tree just above where that nail did all that damage.

You can actually see quite clearly the damage that it did.

At this point it split the already massive trunk into three smaller trunks.

Over the years in the spot where it branched, water and sediment and likely also the damage from the nail itself, caused it to rot. Which led to the precarious state of affairs, which in turn led to the decision to lay waste to this once great and glorious testament to nature's might.

Three pads at the bottom, for ease of movement and also because I don't want that stuff with the resin to happen again.

Now obviously the surfaces of these things have been treated.

I did most of that work myself, some few hours of sanding, working from rough to smooth, although I did have help from my dad who, like many men his age, have an odd love for working with wood. He constructs guitars in his free time, you see.

Lover of guitars and music, that man.

After that we treated it with some sort of alcohol-based solution, of that selfsame man's devising.

It smelled lovely it did. These days that smell only pervades the room when I lift up the ornamentation trunk from its clot of goo on the bookshelf.

It's delicious- the smell, not the goo.

I'm babbling and it's because I'm severely sleep deprived because I've been trying to readjust my sleeping rhythm after an extended vacation filled with drinking, feasting and being only mildly violently ill. I'm still coming out of that last one and it's the nights that are worst: I slide into bed and it's as if a needle of ice just burrows through my nose and rams itself straight down my throat.

I got to adapt my sleeping pattern back to normal hours in a hurry on account of me having to go to work again in a few days.

*sobs*

But well, you know how it goes:

If you keep spending it, you gotta keep earning it.