Antiques, Anyone and At Home?

The wife is normally the one who occasionally surfs through cable channels showing antique shows dramatizing the valuation processes of items presented during the show. And it is typically during the segment when the valuation amount ranges are explicated titillatingly by the experts that the suspended curiosity index of the onlookers heats up and jumps off the scales.

The usual revelation that certain things looking so inconsequential, or old looking, or maybe even showing extensive wear and tear, are valued so much as to be out of the realm of normative reality. And getting the gaping audiences frenetically thinking down the road whether there might be somewhere in their own possessions similar items that would approximate such values. Things maybe grandma or some distant eccentric uncle did not want thrown away while they were living and then stowed away and forgotten after they had gone.

But, wake up, isn’t that the very nature of the world of antiques, where values are determined not so much intrinsically, or through functionality, but mainly because of rarity or at times, arising from some silly cravings of certain individuals with oodles of money to pursue their whims? Or maybe because of the more predictable gauges of the economic law of supply and demand? That is, value is pegged on a calculated estimation of how a very finite group of moneyed collectors would be willing to pay to acquire such as treasure or novelty, and, silly me, how much a seller would be willing to part with his junk.

I believe, by and large, that’s how antiques change hands, from owner to collector, or from one collector to another collector, rather than through some complicated mathematical and/or scientific processes applied.

Of course, a lot also depends on the specific item that is being valued. If it is a universally desirable and a very rare kind of item in this finite universe, then its value will depend largely on how much an interested group with financial resources would be willing to part in order to acquire that item. Regardless of every other measure that some exalted experts may deign to apply to it.

In some contextual regard and on a personal note, I suffer from an inveterate proclivity not to throw stuff if I can find a place to hoard or stow it. Thus, unless time, Mother Nature and its elements do the disposing, I tend to keep with longevity things till they get to be too old for any use, or they may have taken on the qualities of being antiques or collectibles. And this could be an advantage, or simply an untold burden to people living with me.








Anyway, some years back, a dear old friend of the wife who was in her 90’s died and bequeathed to us some old furniture and fixtures in her home after the wife had expressed on occasion admiration and beauty in what she saw. Though she was Irish and grew up somewhere in Montana, she had gone west and ultimately married somebody who came from an old Italian family in San Francisco. She had only one son who was only too willing to dispose of the furniture from her house where she lived alone.

The meticulous old lady had taken special care of the old furniture that she said was brought by her husband’s family from Italy.

So we are now the proud owners of these old furniture and fixtures and are displaying them at home. Though at the back of our minds, we continue to entertain this rather itchy impulse that maybe these items are worth more than what most of us would typically think. If only we could have somebody who knows take a look.

Though outwardly we are very happy that we have them and enjoy their looks and functionality and adequately thankful to both the old lady and her son for the generous gesture. We do like to include in visitors’ queries about them a bit of friendly reminders about their past history.

Profiling The Blogger's Workplace

Maybe we now have close to 40 million blogs around the globe, and still counting. We have been served up a plethora of insights about who these bloggers are and what they blog about. We invariably catch passing glimpses of them around town, in WiFi hotspots lugging their laptops. We see them in airports parlaying waiting time to rapt sessions on the web reading or writing blogs. We know friends who are bloggers and in personal conversations, they tell us about themselves and their blogs. Many of the more successful bloggers came from mainstream media and so we have known of them previously as journalists. In fine, we do pretty much have a good profile of who the more visible bloggers in our virtual world are.

But they do not account by any estimation for the bulk of bloggers. And precisely because these are members of the “citizen journalism” caste or more popularly, members of the Pajamas Media, they stay and lurk in anonymity, creating their blogs and reading other blogs in the privacy and secrecy of their little worlds at home. And indeed, mostly attired in their creased pajamas, lingerie, shorts, and I’m quite sure, a number bare naked at their computer table their fingers humping at the keyboard as they create their blog entries.

What would one give to be a fly on the wall and quietly and voyeuristically watching the proceedings? Other bloggers have of course given personal insights right in their own blog entries, describing in at times nonchalant prose how their computer stations are set up, what items are on their tables, and maybe what time of the day or night they crank out their entries.

And sometime ago, I read from an MSM newspaper which featured the life of a youngish wife and mother who was quite addicted, in some particular context, to blogging. Pictures were included, showing a well-strewn desk with a dirty ashtray and an opened can with the remnant of some drink. One picture showed the lady in a grimacing growl, showing mock rage and anger, very early in the morning in her robe and ready to plug away on her PC for her regular cadenced attack against Pres. Bush and his administration.

Would these be typical profiles of bloggers in their workplace, or more appropriately, in their private study? For political bloggers, maybe. But there are millions of us out there who most probably do not fit the profiles of these more rowdy and public bloggers.

BTW, because of our numbers that little study where we maintain our blogs or surf the blogosphere must now be as an integral to the typical family home as the entertainment center in the living room, the wide-screen TV in the family den, or the reading desks in the study room. Needless to state, many lives now revolve around that little spot. We are told that not only outdoor time but even TV time have been drastically cut in exchange for more time with the worldwide web.

This leads to some personal introspection and a little house tour with the camera. And being in between jobs I do have more time than many bloggers.

This would be the main station in a loft converted into a den. Two tower PCs underneath the table stand in readiness, the other as ever-ready back-up. Having been a network guy for sometime, I may have installed more precautionary measures than the typical blogger. Like this PC still has Win98SE installed, this version still considered very hardy and typically not anymore targeted for virus attacks and similar malicious schemes. The full keyboard, compared to the smaller ones in laptops, allows for faster touch typing, a hold-over dinosauric remnant from the ancient times of typewriters. I suspect many bloggers nowadays practice the Biblical method of typing, the look and see method. But we actually took up required typing lessons in college. This one small printer services the entire house network. Though I used to maintain in the old house a home LAN with about 14 nodes, this one here is networked simply, all originating from an off-the-shelf broadband router, Ethernet and wireless capable.

To the left but still inside the loft area are three tower PCs, two sharing a common monitor linked together through a keyboard-monitor-mouse adapter. All of these provide additional access to the Internet should the main one be otherwise occupied.

Underneath a desk in the loft area, two PCs also lie in wait. One has a networking OS, NT4.0, installed and the other has a CD burner should the need arise.

Thus, when I do get the chance to update my blog, the menu is cooked right here in the loft area.

But in the kitchen area is where the laptop resides, since it occupies very little space. Thus, when with company and the need arises to access the web, this would be where we would go.

This would be the visitor’s room downstairs. And this PC may be used by them, except that I would have to run a long patch cord to connect to the router upstairs. But that 100-feet cable also lies in wait for any need.

Then for the unused remnants of that home LAN from the older house, they have temporarily been consigned to different parts of the house. Some in the extra visitor’s room upstairs now being used for storage, and on two sheds erected in the backyard.

In conclusion, that is how my workplace, or for me, my leisure place, looks like; so randomly strewn around and so untypical, mindlessly bundled together by somebody who acts a bit like a packrat and a bit like a paranoid too insecure about losing precious access to the Internet and not having provided for alternate recourses.

Religiosity From the Past

(Click images to enlarge)My late maternal grandmother was of great religious faith, having been born and raised in the City of Cebu, Cebu, one of the islands in the Visayas Region of the Philippines. On this city was planted the cross that circumnavigator Ferdinand Magellan used to symbolize the archipelago’s being deeded and dedicated to Mother Spain as her own; and which to this day, that religious symbol still stands on the very same site and securely protected inside a kiosk

My grandmother was quite steeped in the diligent practice of the many enduring rituals of the Catholic Faith. Said her rosary regularly, read from her many missals and devotional prayer books, went to Mass during Sundays and holydays and other days when able. Everything done in Spanish, the language she was taught by her elders.

She has been dead and gone for quite a while and my only nostalgic reminder of her has been this very old devotional prayer book no larger than a typical wallet. Published in 1881 in Barcelona Spain, it has gilt-edged pages and its contents all written in Spanish are adorned by many lithographed images of angels and children. Its title after all is El Angel de La Infancia, which literally translated means The Angel of the Childhood, and dedicated to the children of first communion.








This devotional prayer book would have been very common in that part of the archipelago where many Spaniards, in the over 300 years that Spain colonized the islands, stayed and intermarried with locals composed of native Filipinos and families of Chinese traders.

And prior to my generation, Spanish was the language of polite society in Cebu, in their many printed publications, in their social conversations, and in many of the old private schools. Even the local dialect, Visayan or Bisayan (the local dialect does not have the letter v in its alphabet), has many terms derived from Spanish. Most city dwellers then conversed in Spanish amongst themselves, and the rest of the locals at the very least counted in Spanish, or responded in telegraphic Spanish.