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Culture History Inspiration Museums Realizing Your Dream Stories Uncategorized Vintage

Making a Museum: Establishing A Collection-This one is focused on Everyday Life

 

What does it take to start a museum? What is the impetus? What do you want to say or explore? Is there a topic upon which you want to expound, examining its’ multitudinous dimensions? Are there stories that highlight a specific theme that you want to tell? Do you want to preserve specific memories?  These are the driving forces behind establishing a collection/museum.

In the first of this several-part-series that focuses on creating displays that cause conversation, I’m going to cite the Museum of Everyday Life in Glover, Vermont.  Charmingly situated on the edge of the road, on the shores of a small pond (where, one of my compatriots, told me, a large set of plastic shark’s teeth used to jut out of the water, evoking JAWS!), this old barn beckons you to ENTER!

According to the Museum’s website, the Museum

“…is an ongoing  revolutionary museum experiment based in Glover, Vermont. Its mission is a heroic, slow-motion cataloguing of the quotidian–a detailed, theatrical expression of gratitude and love for the minuscule and unglamorous experience of daily life in all its forms. We celebrate mundanity, and the mysterious delight embedded in the banal but beloved objects we touch everyday.”

And, true to their mission, the Philosophers who staff, curate and direct this most un-stuffy and unusual exhibition have collected quotidiana that defies definition.  In fact, as their First Manifesto states:

“The Museum of Everyday Life is proud to launch its mission of glorious obscurity.”

 

While, mostly, the objects on display underscore our desire to grace the very ordinary with a little bit of life, the staff is also interested in discussing why we need these items.  For instance, toothbrushes are one category of household necessities is well-represented.  The Philosophers ascribe the need for the humble toothbrush to our interest in foods, particularly sugary ones, vis-a-vis our equally strong interest in preventing tooth decay.  One of the most eye-catching dental devices on display is a “His and Her Toothbrush,” an alligator  who comes apart. The chopper cleaner that was crafted by Katherine Nook is brightly colored and sure does bring a smile.  It makes you wonder why she didn’t make more of them!

 

 

 

Pencil Sharpeners

 

 

This is fabulous pencil art!

A history and homage to The Match is another amazing exhibition. A matchstick rollercoaster,  working instruments made of matches, the story of Prometheus and a giant match are some of the objects that kindle the imagination with their luminescent wit!

 

 

 

This stunning beauty is made of all things metal — and she sure does shine!

Significant collections of safety pins, keys and locks explore humanity’s needs to hold things together and keep them locked up.  Clare Dolan, Chief Operating Philosopher, together with her Co-Philosophers, have amassed amazing arrays of these pins, locks and keys and explore their uses with depth and wit. 

When it comes down to it, the Museum of Everyday Life provokes discussion about how we live by taking a gander at some of the material culture that comprise our day to day existence. I like what Clare Dolan said in a Vermont Public Radio interview, and I’m paraphrasing here, that she hopes this will inspire others to start their own museums featuring their own stories!

For an online tour of the Museum, and, lot of interesting information about its’ history, programs and current exhibitions check out their website http://museumofeverydaylife.org/.

They also have a cool Facebook page.  And, speaking of similar concepts, check out the Museum of Everyday Life in Iceland: Hversdagssafn – museum of everyday life.

 

 

Categories
DIY Fashion Home Projects Uncategorized Vintage

Mama’s Got A Brand New Bag!

Vintage clothes, antique hats, old fashioned frippery, they can all be so chic, so stylish, so hip and so dirty! Stains and smells easily ruin the look and contaminate cachet.

What do you do with those gorgeous gowns or prestigious purses bedazzled with beads, especially if you are working on a budget or don’t have access to tailors or others who are used to working with antique fabrics.

In the course of wading through my mother’s things, I found a beautifully beaded evening purse that I just couldn’t give to Goodwill or a local Theatre group or throw away. It is awfully pretty and awfully stained.

First, I tried using a stain remover, something guaranteed to remove any discoloration, but it just did not work (for me at least). In fairness, that purse is old and the stain is probably almost as ancient. So, getting it out might be a fools errand, so to speak.  I might do more damage to the bag if I bleached it. So, if that’s the case …. why not just go with it and try covering up the stains with a new stain?

A few years ago I learned about tea-staining linens from a lady who I knew.  She had a real flair for decorating and mentioned that she often dipped clothing and towels into tea to achieve a certain effect. So, I tried her idea and dyed a dust ruffle by soaking it in a big bucket of hot tea. It occurred to me that I could accomplish the same thing with this little evening purse.

Using tea is a simple, affordable and easily accomplished solution, so I decided to give it a go.  In essence the purse became an extra large tea bag!

Start with a large pot of water …….

  and, bring it to a boil…..                                                                                                                   

Add a Tea Bag         

      Let it steep.

Pull lining out of the purse.

 

Lower purse into hot tea and let it steep for an hour or more.  Remove and let dry.

 

It sports a new shade of chic-ness!  Let this dry for a day or more….And, Mama’s got a brand new bag!

 

Categories
Death DIY Estate Legal Documents Uncategorized Wills and Trusts

UPDATE ON “DEATH AND TAXES”

CHUCKING OUT AND BALANCING THE BOOKS

I have been away because I have been working assiduously on my mother’s estate and now have some new information to impart.  Again, my experience has been, at least partially, determined by the fact that I live in Virginia, and, thus, am subject to the laws of the Commonwealth, but, I think that some of these points are universal.

In terms of getting rid of stuff:

This sounds easy, but, believe me, unless your relative/friend was uber organized or had already given everything away, and/or designated which items were intended for specific people, this can be a huge job.

There are a number of options:

Goodwill and Salvation Army are two obvious choices. The Salvation Army will accept/pick up furniture that is clean (i.e. in good shape, not covered in pet hair, etc.)

Other choices include: The Celebration Church and some “Pickers”/Junk Shops.

1-800-Got- Junk charges to pick up.

In some cases you may want to go to Auction houses — usually you will have to transport the furnishings yourself.  Frankly, after a million trips to Goodwill and the Dump, I am tired of hauling stuff. Find someone who will pick up!

Some thrift stores will accept old clothing — but, they will want clothing that is very fashionable and, frankly, they don’t pay you very much for the beautiful old dress or coat that reminds you so much of your departed loved one.

I got an excellent tip on another place to dispose of those old, cool pieces of clothing and other items: high school and college theatre departments.  This is especially true with high school theatre departments because they truly have no budget for costumes or props.  It makes me feel better that these clothes/hats/dishes, etc. will have a new and dramatic life!

THE ACCOUNTING

I have been told that some people actually enjoy this aspect of handling the estate.  I think I would not have minded it so much if I haven’t felt like the stakes were so high.  I’m probably too nervous about it, but, here’s the skinny:

If you have to remember anything, remember to SAVE EVERYTHING and MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A PAPER TRAIL.

Specifically;

1. Make sure you have bank statements from the date of death, which is frequently not the date that the Estate opened. The Commissioner of Accounts will want this to verify the value of the bank accounts as of the date of death. And, will want to see the expenses (funeral, etc.) that between the date of death and the opening of the estate.

2. DO NOT use online bill pay. This is something that no one really tells you. The Court wants a true paper trail of all financial transactions and online bill pay makes that difficult to establish. So, play it safe and pay by check!

3. Be sure to keep your deposit slips and copies of every check that you deposit — even little ones.

4. Keep all copies of invoices/bills, etc.!!!

5. If you do a distribution to the heirs, make sure that they endorse the checks, rather than having a spouse or someone, deposit the check directly to the bank account. The Court wants to make sure that the person to whom the check was written was actually its’ recipient.

You are going to need those invoices, cancelled checks, bank statements, even deposit slips, as back up when you submit the Accounting. Make copies of everything for yourself, because the Commissioner of Accounts will take the originals.

In Virginia, the Commissioner of Accounts can charge you extra if they don’t “like” the way the Accounting was done.  It varies from locality to locality, mostly because some Commissioners of Accounts are more persnickety than others. 

I’ll keep you posted. I’m thinking, give everything away, go off the grid and get a trust. This ain’t pretty….just sayin.

Categories
Uncategorized

Cynthia Erdahl: Answering the Call of Creativity, Again and Again by Elizabeth Bickford

Cynthia with a few of her paintings.

      

Polychromatic pigments seem to flow from Cynthia Erdahl’s mind through her fingers and onto canvas, paper — really whatever surface she can find. “Color, Color, Everywhere!” could almost be a mantra for this artist who came to her calling by a circuitous route.

After years of city case work in foster care and building a counseling practice, Cynthia, who has a Master’s Degree in Social Work, decided to strike out on her own and start an independent practice. “In order to market myself better, I started going to Toastmasters as a way of developing my public speaking.  It was great and led to many opportunities!”

One of her first discoveries was that she was good at it — enjoying the people that she met and the spotlight so much that she began entertaining the idea of appearing on stage. In one of her first plays, Cynthia was featured in a  comedy, where she portrayed a glamorous 1950’s housewife/beauty pageant contestant. Bitten by the acting bug, she kept on tripping the footlights, in addition to keeping her business going.

 

 

Play reading group.

 

One day she idly did a drawing of the beach and later showed it to a friend who was blown away. Her friend, a fellow creative, saw Cynthia’s talent right away. “She told me I needed to do more art. So, I did some pen and ink drawings of places around Richmond and had them made into cards, and started going to shops to see if they would carry them.” Sure enough, the cards were a hit! So, Cynthia moved out to other markets such as Nags head, Ocracoke, Wrightsville Beach, Fredericksburg, DC. and met with success at every turn.

           

 

         

 

I remember, when I first met Cynthia in a painting group. “Success in Making and Selling Art,” was an often-discussed topic, because each of us wanted to pursue that end in some way.  This was many years ago and at that point, though Cynthia was relatively “new to the game,” she had already garnered excellent experience.  She passed on some very good advice,  “Just have a pad and pen with you at all times and draw everything you see. Draw everything that interests you.” That and DON’T GIVE UP.

              

 

Simple, yes? Cynthia has done that and more. Her ability to find markets for her work, excellent classes from myriad artists and teachers, as well as opportunities to show and sell is phenomenal. How does she do this? Devotion to creativity and to her art, and an open mind about her style and media. Staying FRESH. It’s pretty darn impressive when you think about someone who had no prior training or inkling and, now, keeps at it, constantly creating new art.

So, she has shown internationally numerous times in the “Artificium of Humanitas” East meets West Show,” held in the United States and South Korea. Other opportunities were in China and Uzbekistan. In Richmond she has shown at artspace gallery, Artemis Gallery, “The V Tashkent Biennale: Results and Reflections,” Quirk Gallery and many,many other places.

Still toiling away in her studio, her latest show, “Revive” on May 4 in Richmond, at Hummel Associates, 223 North 1st Street, Richmond, Virginia, will feature a range of her work in differing styles, abstract to (quasi) representational. The pieces may wander the map in terms of style, but each is filled with an essential delight, a celebration of life that makes you think, and feel happy, and…… of course, there’s “Color,Color, Everywhere!” Here’s to persistence and painting the world in a panoramic palate!

 

  

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Uncategorized

Top Down vs Bottom-Up: The Battle to Understand Speech

by Kathi Mestayer

(This article also appears on the “Hearing, Health and Technology Matters,” site http://hearinghealthmatters.org/betterhearingconsumer/2018/top-down-vs-bottom-up-the-battle-to-understand-speech-kathi-mestayer/)

Top-down grabs wheel, runs into ditch

There are two different ways in which we make sense out of speech – “top-down” and “bottom-up.”

I first read about this in The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, in which he describes how we take sound input and make sense of it as speech. Let’s start with the top-down system, since it’s the one we’re more aware of.

Top-down auditory processing is more, shall we say, thoughtful, using tools like context (dinner table, board meeting, classroom), expectations (past experience, person speaking), and nonverbal cues (facial expressions, body language).  It considers those factors, along with the speech sounds, and does its best to interpret what was said.

The bottom-up system, on the other hand, makes a lightning-fast, best guess based on the raw sound data. Period. No consideration of context or those other complicating, time-consuming factors. As a result, bottom-up attempts can be comically wrong, like the mis-heard lyrics of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, “he is trampling out the vintage where the great giraffes are stored.”  A thoughtful, deliberative system, like top-down, would not report those lyrics, especially if you’ve heard that song a thousand times. But bottom-up’s job is to get you an interpretation really, really fast.  No editor, no proofreader…a hip-shot.

But sometimes a fast reaction is needed, because we’re busy using up top-down capacity with things like multitasking or making a tough decision.  In those cases, our brains opt for the bottom-up mode and hope for the best.

So, who makes the decision about delegating tasks to the slow road or the express lane?  Our brains do, usually without consulting us, and that’s how we end up on the receiving end of ‘great giraffes’ or ‘national pelvic’ radio.

Top-down and bottom-up, toe-to-toe

Because it has a few more milliseconds to work with, it’s natural that top-down, the more deliberative process, is correct far more often.  But not always.

Take the other night in a noisy restaurant, when my brain handed the task to top-down, assuming that it would be in a better position to tell us what was being said. I was sitting with two friends who were chatting away, when the waitress came up to me and asked, “Are you ready to order?”

“Yes,” I answered.  Then she turned and walked away.

Hmm, what just happened?  I sat there for awhile, puzzled.

A few minutes later, the waitress came back to our table, and said, “Are you ready to order now?”

“Didn’t you ask us that the last time you were here?”

“No, I asked if you needed a little more time.”

At that point, top-down started whirring away, figuring things out. Putting the pieces back together, I see that my top-down system took over as the head interpreter, elbowed bottom-up out of the way, and made the call based on what it expected the waitress to say as she approached the table – were we ready to order?  Nice try.

In so doing, top-down completely ignored what speech sounds were available in that noisy space (which, in fairness, were pretty garbled).  Bottom-up would have given me, “did you betty the border?”  And bottom-up plus top-down would probably have gotten it right.  But top-down, in this case, was about as helpful as the great giraffes. Of course, bottom-up gets a kick out of this. He’s usually the one who gets things wrong. It’s not as amusing as hearing canned spinach instead of the king’s speech, but a new kind of lapse.

Good thing I’m not a control freak. Now, I have two different kinds of mistakes to look out for.  I’m just batting clean-up.  Who’s on first?

 

Kathi Mestayer writes for Hearing Health Magazine, Be Hear Now on BeaconReader.com, and serves on the Board of the Virginia Department for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing.  She has kindly contributed this article to Every Girl’s Dream, but it also appears on the “Hearing, Health and Technology Matters,” site http://hearinghealthmatters.org/betterhearingconsumer/2018/top-down-vs-bottom-up-the-battle-to-understand-speech-kathi-mestayer/.       

In this photo she is using her iPhone with a neckloop,audio jack, and t-coils which connects her to FaceTime, VoiceOver, turn-by-turn navigation, stereo music and movies, and output from third party apps, including games, audiobooks, and educational programs.