Spring planting, with White-out

[rsc]

I finally got around to putting in the first set of indoor seeds (destined for outdoors eventually, of course). I haven't decided yet how to proceed with the "Eye of the Tiger" violas, which I've tried unsuccessfully in the past, but it seems that may be because I haven't read the planting instructions carefully: this year I noticed that they want to be planted in a cool place, about 60°F, whereas just about everything else wants to be at 70-75°. I suppose I could put them in the basement, but keeping them watered and watched would be a nuisance. Also, I don't know if they need light to germinate (in general, if seeds want darkness the packet will say so), and we don't have a source of imitation daylight in the basement. I may just wait a bit and plant them outside.

So, who here is old enough to remember White-out? (For those of you who are not, this is a white liquid that comes in a small bottle with an applicator brush in the cap, which we used to use to paint over errors made while using a typewriter, since it produced an opaque more-or-less typeable surface. Other brands existed, such as Liquid Paper. In fact, after I had finished typing this entry, I went and looked at the bottle, and what I actually own is Liquid Paper, and now I think of it the other brand was probably spelled "Wite-out".)

(Those of you not old enough to know what a "typewriter" is can just shut up.)

Anyway, this is not the non sequitur it appears to be. I still own a bottle of the stuff, which is an integral part of my indoor-planting ritual. Once the seeds are in the dirt, it's kind of difficult to tell them apart, so I label each one by sticking half of a tongue depressor in the corner of each container with a coded pattern of dots painted on it in LP. (The first time I thought of doing this I used a ball-point pen, which became unreadable once capillary action had brought the water from the dirt up the length of the tongue depressor. Hence the White-out, or whatever.) As I'm doing this, I transcribe the code (and its meaning) onto a sheet of paper.

Some year soon, I'm going to run out of the stuff, and I don't know if it's still possible to acquire it. (jwg says "Sure it is.") I was also a little careless when putting one of the freshly-painted stakes in this year, and got a stripe of Liquid Paper on my right thumb. That stuff sets really fast! Immediate application of soap and water had no visible effect. When I was all finished with the planting, I tried nail-polish remover (yes, this house contains nail-polish remover, despite a complete absence of nail polish), which sort of works. So now I have a very faint white stripe on my right thumb.

And that's how i know it's really springtime.

Comments

[jss]

For the record, I've used and remember the Selectric (which is either ® or ^TM, I'm sure) and Liquid Paper (which according to the bottle I've got is ®).

And I remember rotary-dial phones, television before cable and remotes, and a time before VCRs.

[chrishansenhome.livejournal.com]

Even better than rotary-dial phones, the first telephone in our house had no dial, and an operator answered when you picked up the receiver and connected your call.

This was the mid 1950's, of course. We were NEptune 1-4393.

[jss]

Can't say we had one of those phones (though I stayed at a friend's place one summer in the early 1990s that still had no touch-tone service in-town, and no phone in the house itself (other that the direct-connect one that only rang in his grandparents' place next door)).

I remember the phone numbers before the delettering efforts, though I never learned my home-phone by letter, just by number. I do remember when area codes for NA-based phone numbers were defined by the middle digit being 0 or 1. (Scary how there're folks now who don't know that Used To Be The Rule, huh?) I also remember pre-ZIP code mail ("Southfield 76, MI").

not-so-modern telecommunicaitons

[trawnapanda.livejournal.com]

I remember (nay, owned) manual typewriters (with red/black ribbon), and my first phone number on this continent was 416 266 5219 (or, as some had it, AMherst6-5219), and a rotary dial phone it was. We lived at 71 Guildwood Pkwy Scarborough 711 (now Scarborough M1E 1P2)

my first ever that I remember phone was bakelite, with a braided cord, and the mouthpiece had a cupped bit around to catch the noise of your voice; and yes it had a rotary dial, but also a button above it labelled "call exchange". You didn't get a dial tone until you pushed that button. It was a party line with the folk next door - whose phone was on the other side of the living room wall (it was a semi-detached house). We couldn't call them on the phone of course, it being a party line, so if we at BARnet-8236 phoned BARnet-9470 you'd invariable get an engaged signal. So they system was, pick up the phone, DON'T push "CALL EXCHANGE" but thump four times on the party wall, and they'd pick up the extension, and you could talk.