Living La Viudez Loca

Sunday, July 3, 2016

Of Past Presents and the Past Future of Particular Pieces Thereof

Or, Gimme a Break, Gimme a Break... Wait! Belay That!

The quest for our one and only wedding present began in the living room of my father and step-mother with my step-mother returning after retrieving a plate1 from a kitchen cupboard.  My wife and I were sitting on the sofa when she proceeded to drop the aforementioned plate1 on the carpeted2 floor.  Since we had not been forewarned of the whys and wherefores of her actions, my wife and I were shocked, SHOCKED, to find someone purposely dropping their own dishes in this manner since one would expect such an action would not end well for the plate1, because E = mc2 3 or some other law of physics.  It turns out that it had been made by Corelle®4, a leading manufacturer of glassware, dinnerware, and heart attacks sustained after watching someone drop one of his or her plates on the floor to demonstrate how break-resistant they are.  Seeing that dinnerware would probably as good a gift as other that my wife and I could think of, we accepted her offer to buy us some.  It was then that she told us that the closest Corelle outlet5 was in Gilroy, CA, about a 34 mile drive without traffic or 4 hour and 15 minute ride if one uses uses the Amtrak Thruway Connecting Service and then catches a local bus in Gilroy.  Since taking the Monterey-Salinas Transit 86 and then the (Santa Clara County) Valley Transportation Authority 17 would only take about 1 hour and 49 minutes, I'm guessing even that would be more popular than taking Amtrak for that purpose.  Either way, my step-mother drove us there, sparing us from having to find out for ourselves.  We eventually settled on several plates, bowls, and teacups, most of which had coral pink6 trim, while some of the plates had roses of the same or similar color6.
Note to anyone viewing this from the front page: feel free to ignore "And now the rest of the story" link at the bottom right.  There's nothing to see there.  Really.  Just move on to the next post.  Y'all come back now, ya hear?
Several years later, I wanted to re-create Bev's (my step-mother) demonstration for a couple of my step-grandsons, but.... Well, her living room floor was carpet, our kitchen floor was tiled.  Whereas her plate1 didn't break, my experiment failed to achieve similar results, probably due to the difference in hardness of the respective floors.  Luckily, I was able to sweep the mess under the rug, except we didn't have any rugs and they probably wouldn't have hid the mess all that well even if we did, so I had to use a trash can instead.


1 Okay, so it may have been a bowl.
2 The importance of such a detail should become clear later on.
3  That's supposed to be c squared, not a footnote.  I just threw that equation in there to make the blog look smarter.
4 At least I'm assuming it's a registered trademark.  Probably better to put it there just in case.
5 While Gilroy Premium Outlets does provide an outlet map, I would recommend its use only to those want only one or more of the approximately ten stores whose names are legible at a reasonable size or have extreme masochistic tendencies, especially since they don't even go through the trouble of labeling the stores A, B, C, or D.  They have another, slightly better map available for download, but even with that, I think it's just easier to use Google Maps.
6 At least that's what it is as far as I can tell.  I am not the most accurate differentiator of shades.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for participating in this discussion!