Secondhand Sunday

I've been looking for a food processor for quite a while.  The blade on the one I have now keeps getting jammed on the support post, and after I have been using it, the blade is jammed on so tight I have to fight to get it off so I can lift the plastic bowl thingy off the motor base.  Did that make sense?  

At one time every garage sale seemed to have a food processor.  Not that there have been any garage sales to go to yet this year.  I've been checking the thrift stores, but have had no luck.  I thought I had found one once, and when I went to plug it in to make sure it worked, it didn't:(  I was most disappointed, since everything is usually checked to make sure it is working correctly.  

In January when we were in Oliver, we finally got around to checking out the Kinsmen's People's Market.  I guess they decided to name it after the beings that were coming to buy things, and not the beings that might be hidden in some of the furniture.  There is a flea market across the street as well.  The KPM is like a giant garage sale/thrift store.  Some things are priced better than others, but I thought I got a real deal with this food processor for $3.   It's an older Sunbeam, weighs a ton, and works well.  I don't really use a food processor much, but when you need one, well you need one.  Some things just can't be done with a blender.  Mostly I use it for pureeing the red peppers for red pepper jelly.  Just recently though I've started making my own hummous.  I've got tired of paying store prices and buying hummous with unnecessary, why do they have to be there, and what are they, ingredients.  The food processor does a great job on the hummous.  

When I bought the food processor, it only came with the metal blade.  No big deal, I don't have a lot of use for the other blades, although have used them occasionally.  

  Yesterday was a miserable wet day, I couldn't seem to get myself working on anything useful, so I decided to go wander around a couple of thrift stores.   Guess what I found!   A cardboard box that had food processor parts in it.  And it just so happened to be the same model of food processor that I had bought.  So for $5.50 I got an extra plastic bowl and top, three food pusher tube things,  another steel blade, as well as a plastic blade.  There is also a tray that holds a bunch of different blades that fit on the white and clear umbrella shaped things (why can't I think of the right names for these things?).  So there is a grater, a french fry cutter, and four blades that will slice different thickness.  Looks like there are three blades missing (can't expect it to work out absolutely perfectly!).  Made my day though, to find this.

Here's an original water colour I picked up a couple of weeks ago.  I have a soft spot for water colours.  It's about 20 x 24".  It came in a good gold metal frame, and looked fine in that.  But....the picture I decided to replace with this one, had this wood frame around it.  It was the same size, and the style of the frame just seemed to go better with the water colour than the metal frame, so we switched them around.   The picture was on sale for $8.75.

Now for what attracted me to this picture.....well it made me think of where my dad grew up.  He lived on Waterside, a street that ran alongside the River Nidd in Knaresborough England.  There is a train bridge over the river which the painting made me think of, sort of...

Photo by TJ Blackwell

When I looked further, I found this photo of the Low Bridge over the River Nidd in Knaresborough.  Inspiration for the painting maybe?:)

Photo by Carol Walker

Throwback Thursday

My dad was a bricklayer.  A woman he was working for in England talked up the wonderful opportunities for employment in Canada.  We ended up in Williams Lake because that woman's son lived and worked there, and my dad was going to work with him.  He did for a few months, but my mother wasn't happy there, and about 5 months after we joined him, in November, we left Williams Lake for the southwest corner of B.C. and the little seaside town of White Rock.  This photo was taken the next year, 1964, in May.

Larry and I have been doing a bit of sorting out/cleaning up in the garage.  Right now it is messier than when we started.   I have a box of my Dad's old tools, so we pulled that down from a high shelf and had a look through them.

I remember using these, I used to make stuff out of wood when I was a kid

Many of them were his old bricklaying tools.  I'm pretty familiar with most of them, and used some of them myself.   The trowels and brick chisel are in the middle.  To the left of the brick chisel are the brick jointers.  Skinny pieces of metal that were run along the concrete joint between the bricks to make them nice and smooth.  First though you had to make that indented joint.  See that thing that looks like half an old roller skate?  It had a nail sticking out between the two wheels.  You ran the wheels along the bricks, with the nail sticking into the partially set concrete between the bricks.  Pushing it back and forth cleaned out the concrete to the depth set by the nail, and then you smoothed it off with the jointer.  

That long metal thing to the left of the string wrapped around the little blocks of wood was a brick carrier.  You put a bunch of bricks side by side, long sides together.  The carrier was adjusted with that pin so that it fit over the bricks with a bit of room to spare.  When you picked it up by the handle, the end where the pin is swivelled, and put pressure on the line of bricks.  That way you could pick up and carry six bricks at a time, all with one hand.

I worked for my Dad a couple of summers.  The first when I was 12, and I made 50 cents an hour.  That was before my dad had a cement mixer.  The cement was mixed on a big sheet of plywood.  You would walk around and around it, using a hoe to pull and push the sand and cement back and forth to mix it together.  Then you would make a big hole in the middle of the pile, and add some water.  Round and round you would go again, pulling the dry mix down into the water, working fast to keep it all contained if the water broke through the outer wall of mix.  Round and round, working it all together.  Then the concrete was shovelled into metal bucket and carried to where it was being used.  If  only a small amount of concrete was needed, it was mixed in a wheelbarrow.  I carried lots of bricks up the ladder to the roof with that brick carrier.  I worked for my Dad again when I was 15.  He had a cement mixer by that time, thank goodness.  I made $2.50 an hour that year.  I guess I worked harder:)

In the end, we packed all the tools back into an old 7up box, and back up on the shelf they went.

Memories

A couple of weeks ago when I was visiting my mum, she made a comment about November...two births and two deaths.   Mine and Meredith's births are the 6th and 23rd of this month.  My dad died 26 years ago today (29th), and my maternal grandmother died this month also, 24 years ago, although my mother didn't remember the day.  The past few days I've been sorting through some of the paperwork that we shoved into a big box when we were clearing my mum's place up in the Spring.  Lo and behold I came upon information regarding my grandmother's death.  She died on my birthday:(  That just seems weird and kind of sad, and I don't recall ever knowing that.  My dad died young, only 61, and I'm not that far off that age myself.   It makes me realize how young my dad was, and it seems so unfair.  He missed so much.

In that pile of paperwork I came across three recommendations that my dad must have brought with him when he came to Canada in April of 1963.  I had to chuckle at the wording of this one.    He obviously didn't come to work drunk,  got there on time and put in a full day:)

                               He was fun loving guy and was game to try just about anything.

He was a bricklayer for 13 years in Canada before making a major life change when he was 51. 

Ten years later he died out on his sailboat.  Meredith was two years old.

I wish my kids could have grown up knowing him.