Mother of God and all the saints

I hurt tonight.  Today I worked on moving a truckload of furniture for Hands.  Her mother came into town with a five-piece bedroom suite, sofa, mattress and box spring, bookcase, filing cabinet, and tons of boxes of household impedimenta.  Hands’s friends who were supposed to show up and help with the work mostly didn’t.  One came for about half an hour at the beginning, and two others showed up after all the work had already been done (fat lot of help THEY were!).  By tonight my arms and elbows are sore like nobody’s business, my upper back feels as though someone’s drilling into it with a gimlet, my shoulders and lower back ache nastily, and I’m figuring to be doing my celebrated impression of a 2×4 come morning.

Despite the struggles of moving, there was an awful lot of good stuph in.  The bedroom suite is pretty good modern Mission-style, and both dressers have cedar-lined drawers built in for storing woollens and such.  I fell immediately in covet with an 1850 Chauncey Jerome 30-hour ogee mantel clock in simply fanTAStic shape, save for one missing weight.  A ceramic jardinière that Hands initially thought was “nothing much” looks to be Roseville, and in amazingly good condition (big Roseville pieces tended to get knocked over and broken).  A black japanned tea cart is gonna take some identifying work, but I have the feeling it’s Something, and while Hands was unwrapping pictures, she came across a folio-size caricature by Spy, cut from an English Vanity Fair magazine of about 1895—again, she didn’t realize how good it was at first, and I had to kick her ankle politely and ’splain it was far better than she was giving credit for.

I have no idea what-all else is yet to be pulled out of boxes, but on present form, I have hopes there are more treasures to be unearthed.

Cornelius Vanderbilt was boggled by the South Pole for the vivid skateboard.  Fnord.