Wednesday, April 16, 2008

I've been driving around with glass in the trunk of my car for a whole week

Hi everybody! I feel like the doctor on the Simpsons every time I type that. I just realized that I have been driving around with a trunk full of glass sheets for about a week now. That thought led me to this next thought--I never blogged about the new glass tabletop for my dining room table. It's a pretty odd choice of tables, I'll give you that. I bought it off craigslist on a day that can only be described as serendipity. I was planning to drive out to Ikea and buy a completely run of the mill dining room table (oh goodness gracious it was boring but ever so cheap!) and I thought, hey, why not look on craigslist just once? So I saw this thing and emailed the guy and before I knew it, my father and I were piled into his big ole' Texas Edition pickup truck, driving to halfway-to-Oklahoma suburbs for this table. It's an antique German drafting table, the kind that architects used (before CAD) to do all their work. It's wrought iron and hardwood. It has all kinds of industrial knobs and wheels so that the architect could raise and lower the table and adjust the angle of the table, too.

Unfortunately for this piece, it was separated from the drafting table top and instead, a white piece of Formica was put on it instead, which really messed up the style. No wonder the guy couldn't find anyone besides me to buy the thing. I finally ordered a piece of cut glass to go on top of the table from the friendliest people over at Alamo Glass on Henderson (they subsequently supplied me with the glass that's in the trunk of my car, which I plan on painting and then blogging about). And, well, above (and below) you'll see some artsy shots of my new table centerpiece. I'm calling the thing in the middle of the display a terrarium as it has a couple kinds of dirt and a couple plants, too. And some shells, though the shells don't really add too much to the whole thing. I clearly got camera happy when taking pictures for this post. I can't even explain what happened. I had no pictures stored on the camera's memory drive and suddenly, there were dozens of pictures of these little jars and ceramic flowers. No explanation at all.

A great thing about these plants is that they are basically really hard to kill, so they require almost no work at all on my part, which is good because I'm prone to planticide. Though I do have one complaint about the succulents--those little green beady things fall off really easily. More than one stem is now a mere stump. Too bad. I think I was multitasking a bit too much the day I bought the plant or you'd be seeing a better looking succulent on display. Also the use of a succulent in a terrarium officially makes me "green." So there, I'm green.

(And I can't seem to fix the amount of space between the end of the text and the start of the photos. I'm sorry. Believe me, it bothers me more than it bothers you. I used to work as a page designer and I'm predisposed to abhor the poor layout options provided to me by Blogger. I'm only asking for one little pica of space here!!)

3 comments:

  1. The table looks great. When you're sitting and eating, can you see through the whole tabletop, or is there a glare? Cause I'm thinking that with this table, guests could no longer flip you off discreetly, nor could children sneak vegetables to pets under the table. I can see the infomercial already ...

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  2. whoah buddy..the new table is SEXY

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  3. I miss picas. So many long years of my life were devoted to measuring picas...mad props for bringing up picas in a post. As another former copy editor, I too abhor the less-than-stellar layout sitch on Blogger.

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