This is a cookstove. I’ve been calling it alternately a STOVE and a CAMPSTOVE, but apparently it more accurately self-identifies as a COOKSTOVE. In other words, it’s a stove on which one cooks.

It’s really quite nice — it’s full of big heavy iron compartments in which one makes fires, and who doesn’t love starting fires?

We like fires around these parts, and so we’re a big fan of anything that enables that. Cookstoves are particularly and rustically nice, especially given our current chances at coming anywhere near a “conventional” oven.

Of course, it should also be mentioned that this stove — er, this COOKSTOVE — looks quaint and modest, but pictures do lie because the bitch weighs about eleventy billion pounds. Remember wen I noted that this beast is full of big heavy iron compartments? Do you know how I know this? Because we had to move it last week, along with Stacey’s few and meager material possessions and Scott’s reliquary, comprised of a hundred thousand old quarter-inch audio tapes, a hundred crates of wires and cabling and a half ton of India BS546-to-Switzerland SEV1011 power adapters. Because you NEVER KNOW when we might inherit an Indian television station and decide to move it to Bern.

But do you know what this means? This means we’ve moved it all, and the quest for Crapshack-worthy materials begins in earnest. And it also means we need a beer, probably. As always, you’re more than welcome to give us one or both.

So I’ve been a little remiss in updates. Not for lack of crap, that’s for sure. Let’s say it was a well-deserved break for springy ceremonial holidays, with blood of gefilte and easter bunny stew. That, and I keep forgetting to charge the battery in the camera.

In the meantime, here’s some tile, of the edging or dividing variety. Scott just had this idea for a way fancy tub, whose incongruity in a Crapshack is just the sort that sits well with me, so maybe this tile can line that. Or maybe it belongs around a flower bed or cozy secret-garden bench. Hell, it beats me… I’m the sort that’d use it to spell out highly offensive words on the ceiling. And I may not be good at a whole lot, but I’d be willing to bet money that the offensive words I know are the most offensive words there are.

Speaking of money, on popular request, I’ve added a donation link at the side. If you really want to send us some Crapshack Bucks, and you just can’t sleep till you do, I’m no longer going to stop you. But if you really want to send some, you’d better send a whole lot.

How it got here: this, too, is from Paula’s Collection of Crap. What I’ve discovered in the first month or two of crap collection is that it’s really to nobody’s advantage but yours to hook up with benefactors with exquisite taste. One day I’ll post some of the other artifacts from Paula, and you’ll see that even the dropcloths are shiny and gorgeous.

We got a huge heap of knotty pine that we were told was tongue-and-groove, but which Scott assures me is actually shiplap. I think BOTH tongue-and-groove AND ship’s-lap are perfectly tawdry and suggestible names for types of wood cut, and would be thrilled with either, but when I tried to make a joke about tongues and laps I was silenced by “this will make very fine wainscoting once we sand it and cut it down to size.”

And it will make very fine wainscoting. Even though now, by association, I can’t think of the word wainscoting without giggling and going all red-faced. I know only a few words funnier than tongue-and-groove, none of which I can mention here without attracting the wrong kind of crap-benefactor to this web site.

But it’s very nice and we’re looking forward to you coming around to help us rip the nails out, and sand it, and cut it down to size. This is from Agi, with a thousand thanks for saving it from the fate of Erik’s fire-happy maw. Here’re a few of them lined up, with the mountain of more in the background.

Distance traveled: a few miles

How it got here: well, that’s not as interesting as what happened this weekend. We went to the future home of the Crapshack to clear out some space for the Pre-Shacking Trailer, which involved cutting down a few overcrowded little birch trees that are in the way. And let me tell you, I suffered what might have been some sort of manic fit, thinking that maybe I’m the kind of asshole who poisons frogs in his pond because they’re keeping him up at night. The kind who moves next door to the dairy farm because she loves the bucolic idea of the farm, without realizing that, you know, it smells like shit. Or the kind who cuts trees so that she has a place to live.

(I can mail you that Harpers piece if you don’t have a subscription)

But I’m no dummy when it comes to trees, and I know what happens when they’re overgrown. They start out ambitiously growing up with no support, in a futile attempt at a fresh breath of sunlight, then get sad and lose their fight for life and start to bend over and droop. And it’s best for everybody to thin some of that crap out. But still, you try taking a bowsaw to a birch who was never given a chance. And try doing so with a three-day hangover. In the rain that’s just about to turn to snow. And tell me you wouldn’t shed a tear.

That’s what I thought — heartless bastards. Let’s get back to dirty puns on shiplap, and pretend this little intimate divulgence never happened.

Later in the week, stay tuned for the kitchen sink. Or parts thereof.

The Crapshack is not presently planned as the most handicapped accessible place on the planet. To put it more accurately, the Crapshack will be positioned atop an impressive cliff (OUR cliff), and while scaling it outright won’t be necessary for reaching the Crapshack, it’s going to be a challenge for any but the ablest of bodies.

And our bodies are not getting any younger or abler here.

So we have this big pile of stair treads, unconsciously donated by a local manufacturer of alternative energy solutions, by proxy of a huge faceless corporation who makes things like airplanes and trains and nefarious many-million-dollar defense contracts. Which is a generous way of saying: these were rescued from a dumpstered fate.

So we’re going to put some steps around the cliff, a nice little unobtrusive walkway, and slap these on top of them so your clumsy asses don’t fall and sue us when you come for a visit. They’re the color and style I expect from institutions of the Cuckoos Nest variety. Appropriate. Nice.

How it got here: I’m not sure, but by my reckoning, this crap has had at least four residences since its acquisition. The photo doesn’t do justice to how heavy they are, and the last time we moved, I may have whined just a smidge about how much heavy crap Scott has amassed, and why-the-hell-do-we-continue-to-tote-this-shit-from-one-pile-on-one-porch-to-another-pile-on-another-porch and other little spats of domestic senility. And while I’m very glad now that we can use them, and I should be shamed at confessing the whining, I’ll be mighty happy not to have to touch them again.

Distance traveled: several hundred miles from place to place. Plus several tens of feet in my arms from storage facility to storage facility, which deserves mentioning again.

MONDAY STRIPTEASE

Here’s a peek at our cliffside, or part of it. The shack’s going to be up there, on the other side. The steps will go around the far side. I can’t describe it here. You’ll have to come up and see.