Alien Tea Shoppe

 I watch some channels on Youtube.  Spooky stuff, unsolved things, etc.  I found Scary Interesting & Chilling Scares , but my older sister found Modtricca, What Lurks Beneath,  & Slapped Ham , which I call the Spooky Pig Channel.  Anyway.   There are others, but that's not important.  Like she'll watch MorgueOfficial or some Canadian lady who is a remote viewer ( Elizabeth April ?) & I watch Townsends , where he's like Wallace Shawns goofy cousin, but who talks about cooking & life in the 18th century.  If you close your eyes, he sounds like him.  Ya know, "Inconceivable!!" from The Princess Bride . I won't watch those two channels she has, because I think they are hokey as fuck.  But she fell asleep once & woke up to the 18th century guy & said he was interesting.  Which he is!  Even recently when I said that I was going to get rid of some channels I added, she became concerned, "But not the lit...

Oh!  This Buzzfeed article that came across my feed this morning is so full of happy!   35 Awesome Toys Every 80s Girl Wanted For Christmas . The childhood my sister and I lived was actually pretty awesome in some ways, one of those ways was toys.  We had one insanely wealthy grandmother and another who was insanely good at purchasing super awesome toys.  So, while there were really bad things and troubling times and all that, one consolation is that we did have awesome toys... and quite a few of them! Girl Talk Date Line board game I had a somewhat mild interest in wanting this game.  The game I really wanted for some reason was Mall Madness. Fashion Plates We had those exact fashion plates.  They were a gift from the second grandmother to my sister... so once the newness had worn off I was allowed to play with them as well.  We loved those fashion plates. Barbie and The Rockers The first grandmother sometimes would buy us a ...

stock photo They go by many general names; Persian Rugs, Oriental Carpets, Tapis de Orient, S ajada, Prayer Rugs, Saff.  This of course doesn't even cover the various types of rugs and their names; Caucasian are rugs from the Caucasus region,  Anatolian are rugs from Turkey,  Ghali are large rectangular rugs from Persia, Makatlik are long narrow rugs, Turbehlik is a grave carpet, or that Turkoman are rugs from Turkistan.  Or styles such as Tabriz, Sarouk, Shiraz, Kelim, Bukhara. One thing they all are, however are handmade works of art in a utilitarian form.  Oriental rugs come found Iran (once known as Persia), Turkey, Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Daghestan, Turkmenistan, Nepal, China, India, Romania; also from Albania, Hungary, Egypt, Greece, and Morocco, though to a lesser extent.  What they never are, are machine made.  It may have an oriental design, but if it's machine made, then it is not real. Works of art in ...

So, I think I have lightly hit on the fact that I attended a private Catholic school in my youth.  Today I saw a Buzzfeed thing about that very subject, so now's the time to dive in, I suppose. Religion was already weird in my family by the time I was born, or even by the time I attended the aforementioned school.  Everyone had different religions or no religion or had switched religions.  Some could find a common foothold with someone else, but most times there were a lot of arguments. My mother attended a private Catholic boarding high school and on Halloween 1978 she converted to Catholicism from her childhood religion of Presbyterian.  My father and his sister, unbeknownst to each other in the moment, converted from non practicing Baptists to Mormons; he while at college & she while in Germany, where her then husband was stationed.  Even my mothers sister converted to Anglicanism in her twenties.  My sister was baptized Presbyterian and then follow...

Gus is a museum curator ghost Recently I went through and read my children's books to see what I'd be keeping and what I'd be giving away.  I did a previous blog post about what I found from that read through, here .  But this post today is much lighter and less scandalous.  This post is about Gus the Friendly Ghost.  There were three books and I adored them when I was a kid.   The first, titled Gus the Friendly Ghost, is about Gus living in the attic of a home.  A family resides there through the spring and summer months.  In this story, when the family leaves for autumn, a mouse moves in.  Mouse and Gus have a lot of fun, but Mouse shows jealousy when the family returns and Gus has to mediate and say they all have to get along.  Great story, but rather boring.   I'm guessing things didn't go as smoothly as Gus intended in the mediation, or else him and Mouse have amnesia, because a few years later, Gus and The Baby Ghost s...