Pillow book III, day n+6...and poor Jeep is dead...

Had to rescue the Good Prince again. We thought maybe he could drive the Jeep just a couple of more times to use up the tank of gas, but no such luck. And this time, it was stopped at a most inconvenient spot. We had to push it (uphill, no kidding) into a parking spot. As the Good Prince shut the door, something underneath rattled. "The catalytic converter, it's about to go," he said. Sigh. 15 years of service, now the Jeep is all alone, left at some parking lot waiting for the tow truck to arrive. I didn't even get a chance for a last ride. It's funny, but I do feel sad. It's the first car I've had for such a long time. It's the first car I've had that was purchased new, and we've had some fun times going on road trips with it. Coming back from Texas one year, we had been given a giant container of Texas grapefruit by relatives. As we came close to the California border, I suddenly remembered that California had all these laws about what fruit you could bring in. Not sure that we would be allowed to keep the bounty, we stopped at a rest area right before the border, and ate as much of the grapefruit as we could! We ate and ate and ate, sitting in the Jeep, in the middle of the night, and we didn't make a dent in the amount of grapefruit we had. It was a very big box. Turned out, California didn't care about grapefruit, at least not that year.

I guess it was fortuitous that we got the Subaru last night. Here's a picture of the Good Prince removing all our things from the car:



The first not rainy day for weeks! I celebrated by going out for a long walk up Nansen Summit. Partly to walk, and also because I needed to collect some materials for the piece I promised for the Lake Oswego Chronicles. It was a misty, foggy day, but clear at the top:



Spent the bulk of the day trying to finish up book III. Although I'm not quite there yet, I'm very close. The pages are very loosely sewn down on the left, using little tiny gray glass beads as spacers to keep the pages loose. The first few pages are also not sewn down all the way, and the threads are all left loose and dangling. I want the whole thing to seem to be on the verge of coming apart. So here's a shot with the book closed:



With one page turned. You can see the first page is not sewn down on the bottom:



The last page. I used the glass beads to frame the image, and here on the last page, the framing is complete. As you flip backwards, the pages lose their framing. The first page, only a little bit of the beads are left on the upper left corner. You can sort of see it. Again, threads are left loose.



To see the previous day's work on this book, see this entry.