[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I’ve spent a lot of this last month’s non-rainy days in my backyard making noise. The constant noise comes from a small but surprisingly loud bluetooth speaker that subjects my neighbors to (lately) Elvis Costello, Blondie, Joe Jackson, and whatever the Amazon Music algorithm associates with albums by those three. Blondie does a particularly good cover of Buddy Holly’s “I’m Gonna Love You Too” so the when that comes on the neighbors get to hear it repeat at least a second time. The intermittent noise comes from my new table saw.

We redid the living room and dining room, by which I mean we turned the living room into a office for my wife and I with a big TV to watch muted baseball games on all day, turned the dining room into a living room, and realized that we always eat at the kitchen table and don’t need a dining room. To decorate the living room formerly known as the dining room, we pulled old prints and paintings out of the closet and took them to a framer.

The largest was a Willem De Kooning print from a 1994 National Gallery exhibit. I’m fond of the print. I went to that exhibit to keep a friend company and came out interested in art. It’s odd shaped; 39 ½” x 30 ½”. We picked out a green distressed painted frame with gold trim and learned there were types of glass. The woman told us it would cost $325 to do the job. That’s a very fair price, it turns out, but if you haven’t had anything framed in over a decade and come in with no frame (sorry) of reference as to price, it’s a bad number. I had five other pieces I needed framed.