33 and a Third

Before and After

I’ve been slowly refinishing my dining room set. Really slowly. My parents bought it from a neighbour ages ago for $50. On the back of one of the chairs, someone wrote “May 28, 1943″ - so I guess it’s 60 years old!

My brother used the dining table and chairs while the kids were little, then started using the chairs for workshop duties and painting. I got the hutch when Reid and I moved into our condo, which fit perfectly in the dining room. Even then, it was somewhat sorry looking. I took the table and chairs from my brother and stored them in the locker. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize there was a water leakage problem, and the table was damaged (the veneer started coming off) and I think a few mice nibbled on the chair pads.

Before Ronnie was born, I decided to take a furniture refinishing course. I brought in one of the chairs. One of the women in the class with me laughed and said… “Don’t let the instructor near it with the rubber mallet!” But I did. Next thing I knew, my chair was in pieces. He was quite right — the chair was wobbly and needed to be re-glued. So I stripped it, re-glued it, refinished it and then did it to a second chair. These two chairs have been safely stowed since then. I didn’t put them into use.

I had the table repaired by a professional — it was beyond me. It turned out ok, but you can still see the damaged parts. I refinished the hutch myself in early fall. Inspired by the hutch, I finally tackled chair number 3 - about 10 years after the other 2 chairs! You can see the before picture at the top of this log. I took it all apart and brought it with me to Thorold when I went to visit my parents. They helped me strip it.

Actually, stripping it with my parents was a lot of fun. My mother was anxious to help. But she only wanted to strip the big pieces, refused to do the finicky harder parts and would not do the final touch ups. She’s funny - I saw the child in her then. And my dad was amazing. I had spent a good half hour repeatedly applying stripper and sanding with steel wool, pressing as hard as I could. I applied stripper for him and showed him how to sand. I noticed he was using his two fingers (index and middle fingers), and I suggested he use the side of his hand where his thumb was. He looked at me and said - “Oh, that’s ok”. A few moments later, he showed it to me and said — “How’s that?”. Whew. What he did in a few minutes with two fingers, took me half an hour of hard scrubbing. (Although a small man, he was always as strong as an ox. And now that he’s older and complains of being weak, he’s still stronger than Reid and I put together. His pinky finger is as thick as my thumb!)

After bringing the chair back home to Toronto, I glued it back together. I recovered the seats with a fabric that matched the original colour (and recovered the other 2 chairs as well). Well - three out of four chairs are all done and we’re actually using them in the dining room! I wonder if it’ll take another 10 years before I get to the very last chair!

I started to think about my early cooking experiences after reading Debbies web log about her forays into cooking, and her comment: “… I’m not one of those natural cooks who can whip something up out of her imagination, with an intuitive knowledge of what ingredients go well together, just the right amount of spice to add.”

I’m not one of those cooks either. (Although I expect Reid would disagree. But that’s just because he so rarely cooks.) I thought about how much time I devoted to reading cook books when I was quite young, and how I enjoyed experimenting. Especially with desserts.

And I remembered one of my first recipes. One that I made up myself — my first, and last, original recipe. I must have been in my early teens, and my friend Carmela, was over for a visit. I told her I thought of a new dessert I’d like to make and I asked for her help. We took a couple of bananas and mashed them, and then added chopped up colourful fruit (like grapes, apples, etc.). Stirred it all up. Yum. Then my mother came into the kitchen and we offered her a taste. My mother took one look at the quivering brown, lumpy mass, put her hand to her mouth, turned an interesting shade of green, and ran from the room. I took a more critical look at our dessert. Ick.

I can’t stop giggling about it as I write this. My poor mother. Brought to mind my experience with snot muffins. Unfortunately, I can’t claim them for my own. I lived with my brother and sister-in-law while I was in university. My sister-in-law is quite a good cook, and she often made muffins or other yummy tidbits. I came home from university one evening to the lovely smell of home baked muffins. They offered me one, and I took a big bite. I found there were some sort of strange, gelatinous lumps within the muffins. What a weird, texture, I thought. I looked at what I had bitten into, at the greenish blobs, and exclaimed “Ew! What are these?!?! Snot muffins???!!” My poor sister-in-law was outraged: “They’re rhubarb!”. Ew. I couldn’t eat them, and it put me off rhubarb for years. The snot muffins are a running joke between us now. Along with the six-layer shit she served for dinner one night. But that’s a whole other story.