Saturday, February 2, 2008 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
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My new leather wardrobe pulls, February 2, 2008
Those dratted wardrobe pulls
Lazy Daze has long used square plastic pulls or, on later models, rectangular ones glued on the mirrored doors of the wardrobe. At least in the Mid Bath models those doors are in a relatively narrow hallway and the pulls can be quite annoying. They'll catch a shirt sleeve or jacket pocket as you walk down the hall; with some luck you can stop moving before the riiipppp. They have sharp edges too - those edges hurt.
Yesterday when I dropped in on Andy he was replacing those dratted pulls in Skylark; he'd had enough. Of course I instantly grabbed his idea (with his permission) and set right to work on my own version here in LD. Of course, me being me, I had to do it a little differently.
While worrying the dratted pulls off the glass I discovered that if you pull at the top or bottom of the door to open it it opens much easier than when pulling at the center where the pulls were. Well, duh! These doors are latched top and bottom and by pulling at the top or bottom the door springs a bit and one latch releases before the other instead of both at the same time. So as an experiment I hung my pulls over the top. And instead of using fabric loops as Andy had, I made mine out of leather with buttons instead of loops.
They're a little over the top, don't you think?
I think I'll go add a Leather Wardrobe Pulls page to My Lazy Daze where I can keep track of this little upgrade to LD.
Night camp
Site 8 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - very good signal and access speed ( I have to qualify this - during my January 2008 visit the signal and access speed was excellent - in January 2009 it was practically non-existent during the day and slow at night with unpredictable short periods of excellent access)
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park website
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park on my Nightcamps map
- Check the weather here
A Siberian dog signal-howl
A camp in the middle of a clear, dark winter's night presents a strange, wild appearance. I was awakened, soon after midnight, by cold feet, and, raising myself upon one elbow, I pushed my head out of my frosty fur bag to see by the stars what time it was. The fire had died away to a red heap of smouldering embers. There was just light enough to distinguish the dark outlines of the loaded sledges, the fur-clad forms of our men, lying here and there in groups about the fire, and the frosty dogs, curled up into a hundred little hairy balls upon the snow. Away beyond the limits of the camp stretched the desolate steppe in a series of long snowy undulations, which blended gradually into one great white frozen ocean, and were lost in the distance and darkness of night. High overhead, in a sky which was almost black, sparkled the bright constellations of Orion and the Pleiades--the celestial clocks which marked the long, weary hours between sunrise and sunset. The blue mysterious streamers of the aurora trembled in the north, now shooting up in clear bright lines to the zenith, then waving back and forth in great majestic curves over the silent camp, as if warning back the adventurous traveller from the unknown regions around the Pole. The silence was profound, oppressive. Nothing but the pulsating of the blood in my ears, and the heavy breathing of the sleeping men at my feet, broke the universal lull. Suddenly there rose upon the still night air a long, faint, wailing cry like that of a human being in the last extremity of suffering. Gradually it swelled and deepened until it seemed to fill the whole atmosphere with its volume of mournful sound, dying away at last into a low, despairing moan. It was the signal-howl of a Siberian dog; but so wild and unearthly did it seem in the stillness of the arctic midnight, that it sent the startled blood bounding through my veins to my very finger-ends. In a moment the mournful cry was taken up by another dog, upon a higher key--two or three more joined in, then ten, twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, until the whole pack of a hundred dogs howled one infernal chorus together, making the air fairly tremble with sound, as if from the heavy bass of a great organ. For fully a minute heaven and earth seemed to be filled with yelling, shrieking fiends. Then one by one they began gradually to drop off, the unearthly tumult grew momentarily fainter and fainter, until at last it ended as it began, in one long, inexpressibly melancholy wail, and all was still.