Hajime
1000+ Head-Fier
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- Feb 20, 2003
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*** If you don't feel like reading a long narrative, just skip down to where I've placed the four stars. ****
Over the past few years my father and my sister have accumulated a good deal of junk. They have an unusual method of accomplishing this: they drive around and look for it on the side of the road. One of the worst things they have brought home is a very large couch with a matching footrest. This couch was the incredibly gaudy type that cartoonists love to draw as a stereotype. It was bulky, a mixture of brown and grey and it looked terrible. Oh, and it absolutely reeked of cat urine.
Most of what my family (myself excluded, of course) amasses I consider absolute junk. Almost all of it is out of the house within months. Often we spend a lot of time, effort and sometimes money on this junk. For instance, due to the unpleasant odor of the cat-piss couch (the name I gave it when they brought it home) my parents had the couch cleaned at the cleaners. We ended up getting rid of it two months later. It never lost the odor of urine.
We've had more than one couch come in to the house. My mother (who disapproves of the curb-side acquiring) spent $98 on a couch at a church sale. This couch was also incredibly ugly but, luckily, did not smell like urine. It didn't weigh as much as the cat-piss couch but it was very wide and tapered out at the top. Because of its size it ended up being too large to get through the basement door. As a result we had this ugly couch in our dining room for a week or two, then in our garage where it took up space for a month or so. We tried to sell it at local garage sales. Then we tried to give it away once it was clear no one would buy it. We tried to donate it to the veterans society (my father's a veteran). We couldn't give the ugly thing away for free! I'm not sure how we finally got rid of it. I think my mother ended up leaving it somewhere as a donation.
****
Well, today my father and sister finally brought home something worth keeping. A local church was throwing away their organ and had left it at the side of the road. My sister spotted it and ten minutes later my father was strapping it on to the top of our Buick LeSABRE (not a large car by any means). At first I didn't believe them when they told me we had a church organ in our garage. "You've got to be kidding me!" was my reaction to this dubious claim. But it was true. They had brought a church organ in to our garage and it was out there waiting for me to check it over. After a herculean effort to get the organ in to the basement--my father and I slid it on a rug then tipped it down the basement stairs, waiting under it and hoping we could keep it from crushing us--we put it in a corner where I got to check it out.
This thing is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. It's more of an electronic keyboard than an organ. It has no tubes (it's completely solid state) and gives me the impression of it being an early-80's product. It has jazz, rock, mambo, etc. settings and all sorts of loudness and tone controls. It also has built in speakers with woofers that have got to be at least twelve inches. Needless to say the bass is pretty cool.
Over the past few years my father and my sister have accumulated a good deal of junk. They have an unusual method of accomplishing this: they drive around and look for it on the side of the road. One of the worst things they have brought home is a very large couch with a matching footrest. This couch was the incredibly gaudy type that cartoonists love to draw as a stereotype. It was bulky, a mixture of brown and grey and it looked terrible. Oh, and it absolutely reeked of cat urine.
Most of what my family (myself excluded, of course) amasses I consider absolute junk. Almost all of it is out of the house within months. Often we spend a lot of time, effort and sometimes money on this junk. For instance, due to the unpleasant odor of the cat-piss couch (the name I gave it when they brought it home) my parents had the couch cleaned at the cleaners. We ended up getting rid of it two months later. It never lost the odor of urine.
We've had more than one couch come in to the house. My mother (who disapproves of the curb-side acquiring) spent $98 on a couch at a church sale. This couch was also incredibly ugly but, luckily, did not smell like urine. It didn't weigh as much as the cat-piss couch but it was very wide and tapered out at the top. Because of its size it ended up being too large to get through the basement door. As a result we had this ugly couch in our dining room for a week or two, then in our garage where it took up space for a month or so. We tried to sell it at local garage sales. Then we tried to give it away once it was clear no one would buy it. We tried to donate it to the veterans society (my father's a veteran). We couldn't give the ugly thing away for free! I'm not sure how we finally got rid of it. I think my mother ended up leaving it somewhere as a donation.
****
Well, today my father and sister finally brought home something worth keeping. A local church was throwing away their organ and had left it at the side of the road. My sister spotted it and ten minutes later my father was strapping it on to the top of our Buick LeSABRE (not a large car by any means). At first I didn't believe them when they told me we had a church organ in our garage. "You've got to be kidding me!" was my reaction to this dubious claim. But it was true. They had brought a church organ in to our garage and it was out there waiting for me to check it over. After a herculean effort to get the organ in to the basement--my father and I slid it on a rug then tipped it down the basement stairs, waiting under it and hoping we could keep it from crushing us--we put it in a corner where I got to check it out.
This thing is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. It's more of an electronic keyboard than an organ. It has no tubes (it's completely solid state) and gives me the impression of it being an early-80's product. It has jazz, rock, mambo, etc. settings and all sorts of loudness and tone controls. It also has built in speakers with woofers that have got to be at least twelve inches. Needless to say the bass is pretty cool.
