Lights, trees, electricity, paper... unrelated

"Lights, trees, electricity, paper... " sounds a little Christmasy, but it's not that.

Holly is refurbishing her room, mostly from things from around the house and in the shed. She claimed two '70's swag lamps. One had been in the closet in the library (only used when looking for a record), and the other had been on a shelf in the garage for over a dozen years, getting dusty. The dusty one (now cleaner) is showns. The other is punched copper, from Mexico. I wanted to show the plugs, though. Holly thinks they're wonderful. They scare me. But when I was her age, plugs like that seemed safe and modern because the wire was rubber or vinyl covered, rather than copper wires in woven cloth, and the plug had a way to hold onto it, rather than being round and domed. Those were "old plugs" in my youth—stuff from the 1930's and '40's. You can enlarge those for details.

Those are three trees in my front yard—a mimosa that came up voluntarily from seed blown over from a neighbor's tree, something big I don't know the name of on the left, and a beautiful Arizona Cypress on the right. Our yard is very shady in the summer, and that's a huge luxury in New Mexico.

So I was wrapping up a bunch of books, in tissue paper and cardboard, as I do sometimes, because I'll be gone quite a bit this fall and others might need to mail out book orders. One of them turned out exceptionally beautiful, as there was some green cardboard box I cut up, and it came up in the pile at the same time as some beautiful green tissue paper. It's on the top there. It will be in the pile and will probably just go out randomly. So if someone gets a beautifully wrapped book, don't think they're all that good! Some are plain cardboard and plain solid-colored paper.

And this is just a picture I should've shared sooner. It's Keith, Kirby and Marty Dodd, nine days ago. I was in that game of Trans America too, but I got up to take a picture, from the stairs near that table.