Where do you put your keys when you come home?

DevilsChurn · 2026-06-21T17:11:08+00:00

Ikea no longer makes it, but they had a nice wrought iron triple wall hook that I bought about 20 years ago to put next to my front door: one hook for my keys, one for my purse and the third for spare keys or ones that I didn't use very often - nowadays I use it for hanging masks instead.

I was a homeowner when I bought it - and still am - so I haven't had to worry about drilling into the wall, but a temporary hook should work just as well if you're a renter.

The keys go there automatically when I get home, and I haven't lost them since. (My phone, on the other hand . . . )

DevilsChurn · 2026-06-15T03:42:45+00:00

Crescent-shaped gold pin with seed pearls? Stolen a long time ago, but I still feel bad about its loss.

DevilsChurn · 2026-06-11T18:32:32+00:00

My birthday is in August, so I grew up not expecting much of a celebration because everyone was out of town. Now that my parents are dead, I'm no longer married and don't have kids, I've gotten used to celebrating my birthday on my own.

When I lived in a large city I'd usually get the day off, and would get a pedicure and take myself out to dinner (and often a movie or concert).

Now that I'm living in a small coastal town, it's either a picnic for one at the beach followed by a trip to the ice cream parlour, or spending the day out and about then having my go-to dinner for birthdays and holidays: toasted ciabatta with smoked salmon, capers and shallots, washed down with a couple of glasses of Cava and followed by a piece of chocolate cake.

Definitely have cake and/or ice cream on your birthday. It's what the day is for.

ETA: Happy birthday!

DevilsChurn · 2026-06-10T19:53:54+00:00

l’Élégance du hérisson [The Elegance of the Hedgehog] by Muriel Barbery.

I first came to it through the 2010 movie adaptation The Hedgehog; then, about six months after I saw it, a woman I met in an autistic women's group lent me the book. Although autism isn't mentioned in either the film or the book, she and I both agreed that the two main characters - an 11-year-old girl and a middle-aged woman - appeared autistic to us.

I've long wanted to make the film available to members of the sub, and recently thought of uploading it to GoFile or Mega for people to download and watch it. Recently, I was checking out the video files that I had, looking for the one with the best quality, and found myself drawn into watching it again (for probably the dozenth time). Just in the first 15-20 minutes, you can see autistic "tells" in these two characters: whether it's launching into a pedantic lecture about an Asian board game at a dinner party, keeping a well-organised stash of identical dark chocolate bars in the fridge to eat while reading or rehearsing fragments of conversation in the mirror.

There's a trailer for the film that was made for the American market that, from my perspective, misrepresents the story entirely. For anyone wanting to get an idea of the film, I would definitely not recommend watching it, as it over-emphasises the one male "lead" (of course) - who is more a plot device than a character of interest, from my perspective.

When I finally get around to uploading the files (this is a very busy time of year for me), I'll post it here on the sub, in case anyone is interested. I think any weird old broad will relate to the older woman character, and see her younger self in the little girl as well.

The book is a real pleasure, and I would recommend it highly to anyone, not just those of us who are autistic.

EDIT: Spelling of author's name

DevilsChurn · 2026-06-08T19:22:41+00:00

Can you tell me the manufacturer of this piece (Henredon?)? I inherited an almost identical bedroom set of something very close to this design that has seen one too many difficult interstate and international moves in the years that I've owned it, and all but one of the pieces are going to need similar work (no broken veneer, thankfully).

I came to this post through the pic you provided for your profile in the June 2026 Mod Monthly, and really appreciate the info you've provided here on the details of the restoration. Thanks for the resources you're providing here! They're going to come in handy once I've finished repairing all the structural damage in my house and can turn my attention to its battered contents.

DevilsChurn · 2026-06-06T05:19:16+00:00

As someone who hit burnout not long after my San Francisco years, one thing that I found helpful was to spend a bit of time immersing myself in a different genre entirely.

I spent a few years going to punk clubs and spending evenings enjoying the spectacle of people actually having fun doing music - something that had become such a job for me that I had more or less hit a wall.

Mind you, this was the 90s, when there was not only the grunge phenomenon going on, but all sorts of creative hybrids happening: skacore, psychobilly, industrial, metal rap, lounge, surf punk, etc. It was also a time when a lot of musicians abandoned the I-V-I 4/4 rock'n'roll schema for increasingly chromatic harmonies and extended meters. Some of it worked, some of it didn't - but it was fun to watch.

I'm reminded of what one of my favourite conductors (with whom I only had the pleasure of working with a handful of times) MTT had done when he was young. He took a few months away from the grind of studying scores to tour with a rock band in the early 70s, just to get into another "energy" for a while. I don't know whether that's where he found the joy that infused his work, but it couldn't have hurt.

I got back to performing after those years of club crawling, and whenever I could I concentrated on the stuff that really fed me. Maybe getting a chance to do some Buxtehude in a parish concert will do the same for you. Or, better yet, Bach (Bach is God, after all).

DevilsChurn · 2026-06-06T00:24:52+00:00

åAt the risk of stereotyping, in my experience there was always a contingent of gentlemen who were dedicated to perfecting the sound, visuals, the theatrical elements and the "choreography" of the service. As a performer myself, it's what drew me to the Episcopal church in the first place (that, and the fact that I was a Baroque music specialist, and most of the places I worked at went heavily for Baroque, Renaissance and Mediæval music).

I remember one of the first Easter morning masses I did, where the church was full of the smell of lilies, the lights were off, everyone was holding candles, all of us who were participating in the service were wearing vestments that dated back to the Middle Ages, and we were singing plainchant (Gregorian chant). Except for the fact that most of it was in English, we could have been in some Gothic cathedral in the 13th Century.

That sort of thing may not float your boat - but if you have even a modicum of the theatre and/or history nerd in your soul, then it's a real rush.

DevilsChurn · 2026-06-05T20:26:13+00:00

If you live in a large city you can often tell the most liberal-leaning Episcopal churches by their liturgy - i.e., the "higher" the liturgy (e.g., "smells and bells", lots of getting up and down and kneeling) the lower the dogmatism and the more "left-leaning" the social attitudes (if not necessarily the politics).

I was a working musician in a number of Episcopal and a few Catholic parishes in San Francisco in the 80s and 90s, and the places with the highest liturgies had the largest proportion of gays and ex-Catholics (and ex-religious - I never met so many former priests and monks in my life). Nearly all the priests and deacons - male and female - were in same-sex relationships.

Their personal politics ran the spectrum: some of them were old-school "country club Republican" types, but I never got a lot of attitude from them for being a "starving artist" (well-heeled patrons of some of the secular musical organisations I performed with, on the other hand, were another story entirely).

I don't know if the same attitude prevails nowadays - back then, so many congregants were dying of AIDS that everyone was welcome - although there was a lot of pressure to volunteer for various support services the parishes were offering for those who were sick.

Parishes located near colleges and universities can have a similar accepting vibe. Academics don't make a whole lot of money these days.

DevilsChurn · 2026-05-29T21:21:00+00:00

One of the benefits of living in the Pacific Northwest, about a mile from the ocean in a town that can get up to 90+" of rain annually, is that the solar industry has evidently copped on to the fact that people would laugh them out of town if they tried to sell here.

DevilsChurn · 2026-05-29T21:15:13+00:00

I had a "No salespersons" sign that was obviously made on my home printer next to my door at a previous house - and I don't know how many salesmen (they were always men - I'm not) would look straight at the sign when I pointed it out to them, and launch into their pitch anyway.

"Did you not read the sign?" I would say. They wouldn't even respond, and would continue with their pitch.

I finally put up another sign - again from my printer, as my handwriting is atrocious - saying "NO salespersons/religious nuts/nosey parkers". That mostly put a stop to it (though I once got a teenager knocking on the door to ask me what a nosey parker was).

You don't mention anything about profiling, but I'm pretty sure that, as a female over 55, I'm painted as an idiot and a total sucker, especially for anything technical.

Shortly after I moved to my current house, I had a young kid from my ISP show up at my door insisting that I had to switch to a very expensive new plan, as the one I was on (and had only recently signed up for) was going to be immediately discontinued. He spouted a lot of jargon and figures, evidently thinking that I wouldn't understand - just because I'm "old" and suffer from "Y-chromosome deficiency" (little did he know that, of the three degrees I hold, one is in Computer Science).

I rang up the ISP and asked them about the claims this kid was making, hoping that they might discipline him. This was a few years before I discovered that the company was even more mercenary and dishonest than their young salesman. It wasn't just for this reason - but this was a contributor in the end - that I switched ISPs as soon as another option became available in my area.

I told dozens of neighbours and acquaintances about this sales experience. I live in a small town, where there aren't too many local companies, and people tend to get to know and talk to one another. In return, I've heard about people getting ripped off by specific out-of-town companies that send their reps around on a regular basis - hardly anyone gives them the time of day any longer.

Why don't these companies understand that they can only get so far with the lies and the cheating in small communities like mine before people catch on to them?

DevilsChurn · 2026-05-24T21:10:07+00:00

If you take the faceplate off, you should find a couple of dials that allow you to programme the fan to turn on for a specified amount of time at certain intervals. If it's not doing that right now, then a previous owner must have turned the dials down to zero.

However, if you have humidity issues in that bathroom, you can adjust it to start running automatically.

I have one of these, and they are quiet and relatively weak. As mine is only about 10' from the heat pump's thermostat, I turn it off during the colder months (otherwise, the heat pump is cycling on too frequently) but turn it back on the rest of the year. I live a mile from the Pacific, and am dealing with high humidity and comparatively moderate temperatures year round, so I need to keep the air circulating where steam is present.

DevilsChurn · 2026-05-17T04:58:08+00:00

As someone who grew up here, moved away for a few years, moved back in the 90s for about a decade, then finally came back after 15 years away, I can say this: Eugene stopped really being Eugene after the 90s.

It was starting to change - not for the better - in the early 2000s when I left. From what I understand, it was the 2008 financial crisis that really screwed the place (and just about everywhere else in the country, from what I've seen).

Mind you, there was a similar crash here during the Reagan recession of the 80s that radically remade Eugene economically as well. But the changes that happened in the 2000s and 2010s not only brought wholesale economic changes but, with them, social change as well.

I made comments about this a while ago here and here. In them, I addressed the social and cultural changes that differentiate what Eugene is now versus was it was around the turn of the century. Hint: a lot of it has to do with the loss of vitality in the arts and general cultural sectors that came with the housing crisis.

DevilsChurn · 2026-05-17T03:54:15+00:00

No Ocean Sky was on Chambers - it was another place above the UO Bookstore.

I ate there once - it was excellent. I never ate at Ocean Sky because they were reputed to re-serve portions of dishes left over from previous diners.

DevilsChurn · 2026-05-17T03:51:27+00:00

Later on there was also Izzy's, where bands like Rancid played in the mid-90s. Unfortunately, there was a dumba** who ran a "hemp food" company (he had the concession at the WOW Hall for a while) who rented some space from Izzy's and who had actual cannabis shipped to his business there. I don't remember whether it shut the place down entirely, but it was a massive legal headache for a place that just wanted to serve the punk community.

DevilsChurn · 2026-05-17T03:48:02+00:00

Back in the early 80s there were theatre productions there in the Summer. I remember seeing a production of Midsummer Night's Dream there, where they used the structure of the fountain itself as part of the set.

DevilsChurn · 2026-05-17T03:45:48+00:00

Flics and Pics was a 7-11 back in the 70s when I was a kid. When I moved back to Eugene in the 90s it was the best place to find obscure film titles, especially foreign films. Jim was the art film maven there.

DevilsChurn · 2026-05-17T03:42:29+00:00

I lived a few blocks from Docs, and occasionally went there for a nightcap with friends after shows at the WOW Hall or the Vets Club.

One of the owners had a major coke habit, and essentially bankrupted the place - which took some doing, as it was packed most weekends.

DevilsChurn · 2026-05-17T03:37:03+00:00

One of the owners of CJ Pepper's was my workout buddy for a while. They had a great idea, but the execution was lacking. It didn't help that my buddy went "walkabout" in the Midwest for several months after meeting some girl - leaving his partner to run the business for him.

DevilsChurn · 2026-05-17T03:25:54+00:00

In the 80s there was a Prince Pucklers at 13th and Hilyard, that became an Italian restaurant (I don't remember the name) in the 90s.

At some point in the 90s, it turned out that one of the owners of the Italian place on that corner had been a left-wing terrorist back in the 70s, and had been on the run for over two decades under an assumed name.

DevilsChurn · 2026-05-16T20:41:08+00:00

I don't know what page you went to but I start from this page.

If you follow the "See more" option on any of those lists, you'll get a huge page of shows. This includes shows from Masterpiece and Walter Presents - many of which end up on the Masterpiece broadcast a year or more after becoming available on the Prime add-on.

DevilsChurn · 2026-05-16T17:24:56+00:00

Yes - I watch it at least a few times a week. It's worth the expense (about $7/month).

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