New stove.

My mother came down to visit yesterday with a rented pickup truck *filled* with stuff.

Highlights?

A GAS STOVE. No more cooking on this electric range nonsense! Thirty minutes to boil water, indeed. Since the electric stove belongs to the landlord, I figure I may move it out onto the front glass-enclosed patio, which I intend to use as a greenhouse, and use it as a plant stand. The landlord's idea was to move it into the storm cellar -- but my god, I won't live here forever, and getting it down there is going to be damned near impossible. Getting it back up is going to be the *last* thing I want to have to think about when I'm trying to move out. So I'm figuring it's gonna turn into a plant stand which can be cleaned off and moved back into the kitchen on short notice when that time comes. A thousand thanks to Meredith for the stove -- it's *identical* to my grandmother's -- with not one, but *two* ovens.

A PHILCO RADIO. Well, really, just the empty husk of one, since my mother refinished it years ago and replaced *most* of the innards with equipment that actually worked at the time -- a 'seventies vintage turntable, cassette deck, AM/FM tuner and eight-track tape player. I don't *care* if we destroyed its resale value when we did that -- that's the stereo system I grew up listening to, and it's drop-dead gorgeous; and even has all its original knobs and facings. I figure the knobs are probably worth more than the rest of the thing combined.

MY ANIMATION TABLE. Remember when all animation went from flipped sheets of paper painstakingly traced onto celluloid sheets painted from behind to *digital*? Well, precisely one year before that definitively happened, I happened to buy an animation table with an Oxberry 12-field disk and backlighting unit. Damn, that was a stewpid purchase. Except now it's pretty unique. If worst comes to worst I can use it as a writing desk -- or better yet -- use it to display (for special occasions) some of the many fabulous drawings I happened to collect from certain cartoon studios back as I was just beginning to realize I have no aptitude for drawing whatsoever and will never, never, *ever* be an "animator" in the traditional sense of the word.

MY TRANSCEIVER. A late-sixties Swan 260 which I bought but never used after I got my Novice Class radio license from the FCC. The "CW" (Morse code) portion of the test was the hardest thing for me to get past -- but I did get past it, and got licensed. Since then, I've use CW in palace and enjoyed the hell out of it. Now I'm looking over my materials from way back then and find myself thinking things like "whoa -- I really *understood* all those schematics?" So now I'm toying with the idea of taking it up again -- only now, Morse code has got me *hooked*.