Own a piece of the Club

campaign chest

The Colonnade Club, that is. I got a circular in the mail today about an auction at Harlowe-Powell in Charlottesville of many antiques and art objects that have been “deaccessioned” from the Colonnade Club at UVA, the faculty club that sits in Pavilion VII.

This was the first pavilion, or professorial residence and lecture hall, that Jefferson built in his original suite of buildings for the university, but it has long since become the permanent home of the faculty club and is now reopening after a long renovation. Apparently the club has to auction some of the items that it’s accrued in the intervening 180 years to pay for some of the restoration work.

The details of the auction are here. Although I’m a member, I haven’t spent much time inside the club, but I do remember a few of the pieces, in particular this spectacular sideboard.

Must be spring

Adam notes that he was hard at work this weekend too. Sounds harder than the stuff I was doing:

… we attacked our overgrown and uncared for backyard. We cleared out blackberry bushes and weeds as well as a dump pile that included 5 sections of fencing, a christmas tree, and a trampoline. In total, we filled 20+ yard bags of waste. We also discovered that there’s a 10′ x 15′ concrete slab out back which is now the future home of a shed or patio.…

Yikes. Reminds me of a time in college when some friends, in their annual cleaning of a house they had rented for several years running, decided it was finally time to clean out the back yard. After bushwhacking all the ivy and other plants back, they found that there was an entire terrace that had been hidden by all the overgrowth, complete with steps.

Bricks and blockbusters

Ah, late spring/early summer blockbuster time. As for the last few years, it’s the time that you’re not afraid to admit to friends, co-workers, and even your wife that you’re still a comic book geek at heart. X-Men 2 (I can’t quite bring myself to call it X2) was excellent last night. Though afterwards I was sad (not for the first time) that I let my collection (which included, in addition to complete runs of various mini-series and spinoffs, included numbers 94 (in which Nightcrawler, Storm, and Colossus made their first appearances, and Wolverine joined the team), 95, a handful of issues between, and then numbers 135 through about 225) go shortly after graduating college. —Sorry; geek off. (But there was something so fascinating about picking up the comic for the first time around #171, then going back and learning where all these friends had come from and where they had been. It helped that my first job was in a comic book store.)

So. Bricks. We’re about halfway done with our job, and our full pallet of bricks. There was one scary moment after we did the ramp from the driveway to the section we had already bricked in by the recycling, and started the section from the gate to the side garage door. And then I realized that the bricks were about an inch too high for the gate to close. We had done the new stretch at the same height as the other sections, but it was too high. Swearing, I had to dig out the bricks under the gate path. So now we have a bi-level path. At least until tomorrow. I’ll have to look at it again in daylight and see if I can live with it.

But it’s not all dusty and hard work. We have roses coming into bloom. And irises are starting to come out.

More bricks ahead

It’s been just about long enough since our last brick excursion that we’ve forgotten how painful it was. So we have another order in to finish the job. When we’re done, we’ll have a complete path around from the driveway to the back patio, which is perfect because it includes the major accesses for the garden and the recycling.

Man, I’m boring. How boring? Just put in a composter last night, that’s how boring. But I’ll be a boring guy with the best vegetables on the block. The herbs are growing like wildfire too.

Tonight, though, the X-Men movie.

—Oh, and Esta: impressive stream of consciousness. But I have to disagree with you about one thing: as much fun as it was to mow over the mint, the best part about mowing the lawn each week was always stopping.

More from Storr on Churchill

This morning’s extract from Anthony Storr’s essay about Churchill in Churchill’s Black Dog:

…most of us can tolerate disappointment in one sphere of our existence without getting deeply depressed, providing the other spheres remain undamaged. Normal people may mourn, or experience disappointment, but because they have an inner source of self-esteem, they do not become or remain severely depressed for long in the face of misadventure, and are fairly easily consoled by what remains to them.

Depressives, in contrast to these normal folk, are much more vulnerable. If one thing in the external world goes wrong, they are apt to be thrown into despair.…Disappointment, rejection, bereavement may all, in a depressive, pull a trigger which fires a reaction of total hopelessness: for such people do not possess an inner source of self-esteem to which they can turn in trouble, or which can easily be renewed by the ministrations of others. If, at a deep internal level, a person feels himself to be predominantly bad or unlovable, an actual rejection in the external world will bring this belief to the surface; and no amount of reassurance from wellwishers will, for a time, persuade him of his real worth.