Antiques, Weapons and Geeks

I've always considered myself a pacifist, despite my predilection for mysteries and thrillers. Guns, swords and other weapons have never really been on my radar, except in fiction and action films. Two things have conspired to change that.

First, romantic suspense author Shannon McKenna wrote a guest blog for Barnes & Noble's Mystery Forum, which I moderate, talking about a weapons expert named Adam Firestone who helped choreograph her action scenes. I was intrigued. Since then, I've met Adam in person when he gave a weapons workshop for my writing group, and he's done two Q&A's for Romance University.


My knowledge of weapons has increased exponentially, but it's still pretty much at preschool level. As you can see, I don't have the faintest idea how to hold a weapon - this was unloaded, but the way I wielded it during the hands-on part of the workshop still made Adam very nervous!

Anyway, the other night I had dinner with my friend Keri Stevens and her husband. Keri missed Adam Firestone's workshop because it was the same weekend as the Romantic Times conference, so we ended up talking about that a bit. Her husband was interested, too, since it turns out he's very knowledgeable on the subject of weaponry. 

Gun talk led to talk about other weapons, and I mentioned my dad passed on some swords to my son - swords that I assumed belonged to my grandfather, who served in WWI and WWII. I've always been curious about the origins of those weapons, and Keri's husband gave me some good ideas where to start digging for information.

After a couple of hours doing Google searches, I now have a much better idea where these items came from. Only one is a sword, as it turns out. Another is a bayonet. And the third, which I knew wasn't a sword but didn't know what to call it, appears to be a parade stick of some sort. The long one is the sword - as you can see, it's really long:

As far as I can tell - there are no manufacturer's marks - it appears to be made by Ames, and it is similar to their 1840, 1850 and 1860 Staff and Field officer's swords. But even though my great-great-grandfather did fight in the Civil War, he wasn't an officer. 

He was, however, active in the Grand Army of the Republic, and it turns out Ames made similar models for the GAR. I now believe that sword belonged to my great-great-grandfather, Rev. Isaiah Villars, who also wrote a number of books:

Illinois Civil War Muster and Descriptive Rolls Database:     Villars, Isaiah - CPL - Co D - 35 IL US INF

      Residence, Catlin, Vermilion Co, IL; Join, 3Jul1861-Catlin,IL; Age, 23; Born, Clinton Co, OH
      Mustered out, 27Sep1864 
From:  Honor Roll of State of Illinois, Illinois Veteran's Commission, Oct.1,1956      Villars, Isaiah,  Date of Death, June 15, 1915
       Buried Elmhust Cemetery, G.A.R. Section, Joliet, IL
Will County Illinois USGenWeb Necrologist Reports (© 2002 The ILGenWeb Project All Rights Reserved):
    June 12, 1915 - Rev. I. J. Villars, former chaplain Joliet Penitentiary and prominent as anti-saloon worker, at New Lenox, aged 76 years. He was a veteran of the civil war. 

I haven't been able to find the exact sword online - this one has the clam shell handguard as well as some decorations in a thistle motif, both next to the grip and etched on the (very worn) blade.There is also a tiny "W" under the clamshell, which I believe is an inspector's mark.

I'm less sure about the bayonet and haven't got a clue about the origins of the parade stick/staff. My grandfather, Col. Horace S. Villars, served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps in WWI and WWII (Legion of Merit, Army Commendation Medal Oak Leaf Cluster). He served in England, France, Germany and Panama, that I know of. 

I'm assuming the parade staff is his, but I have had zero luck identifying it. It's made of row upon row of individual slices of bone? glass? ivory? - I can't tell.

The bayonet looks similar to a French Lebel bayonet:

The first Berthiers approved for service were the Carabine de Cavallerie Modele 1890, Carabine de Cuirassiers Modele 1890, and the Carabine de Gendarmerie Modele 1890. The Gendarme carbine could be fitted with an epee bayonet similar that that used on the Lebel. which the French Poilu affectionately referred to as "Rosalie." 1

Until I started fiddling with it, I didn't even realize there WAS a bayonet inside the case - I thought it was all one piece!

It appears these bayonets were made long before WWI, so maybe my grandfather purchased this as a souvenir when he was in France. I wish I knew more about these, but at least I can pass this information onto my son so he has a better idea where his inheritance comes from.

If any of you reading this can add information about these pieces, please let me know! Also, if I've identified them incorrectly, please correct me. I'd love to know more. I've become a weapons geek!

Picking Up the Gauntlet

Therese Walsh, author of The Last Will of Moira Leahy and co-founder of Writer Unboxed, recently threw down a gauntlet. It was picked up by Jan O'Hara of Tartitude fame, who passed it on to me (and six others). 


Here are the details of the challenge:


1. Go to the 77th page of your work-in-progress or latest book.
2. Count down 7 lines.
3. Copy the 7 sentences that follow, and post them.
4. Tag 7 other writers.


Here are my seven sentences from THE GODDESS OF MICHIGAN AVENUE. 


Mini set-up: 


Willa, the heroine, isn't completely over Sloan, her ex-husband. 


Dante, her long-time best friend, aims to change that...

           “You smell so good,” Dante murmured. “Like Christmas trees and cocoa.”

             “That’s not cocoa, it’s Tino’s tiramisu.” As if it mattered.

            “I love tiramisu,” he whispered, his mouth closing over hers.

            She was lost. Someone groaned softly, and then the world narrowed to the place their lips met. Willa remembered the first time Sloan had kissed her. His lips had been gentle, his tongue hesitant, his fumbling caresses awkward and sweet.

            Dante’s kisses devoured her. 

Here are my seven choices to play the game: 

• Gabriella Edwards
• 
  
• Keri Stevens
• 
  
• Jennifer Tanner
• 
  
• Carrie Spencer
• 
  
• Robena Grant
• 
  
• Janai Robinson
• 
  
• Sharon Cullen

You’re all welcome to post your own lines below OR on your own blog, where you can link and tag your seven next victims. (If you're too busy writing to play, no worries!)

If I haven’t tagged you and you'd like to play, please DO post your entry in the comment field below.

The Time Machine in My Garage

Today, my husband and I took a trip through the Wayback Machine. All we had to do was step into our garage - it was a wild ride!

First, a disclaimer: If you walk into my house, you don't have to squeeze through the door and navigate through stacks of things. I don't have wall-to-wall collections, unless you count books, and those are neatly shelved on bookcases. Those that wouldn't fit in bookcases are in organized bins. I'm not a hoarder.

Doth I protest too much? Probably. Because while I'm not a hoarder, I AM a collector. Okay, with certain things I'll admit it, I'm a pack rat. (Have you seen my Pinterest page? That's after only two months. Imagine what I can collect in twenty years.) To some extent, so is my husband.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. We've saved some really cool stuff, like every issue of the Beatles books my husband received during his years in the Beatles' fan club back in England. We have a LOT of Beatle albums, 45s, books, magazines, newspapers - pretty much anything related to the Beatles, we saved.

We also saved a lot of crap. Treasured crap, but still...

I saved pretty much every sheet of paper my kids ever drew or painted on, every school assignment, every Sunday School paper, programs from every play they were in, Student of the Month awards, sports awards, and so on and so forth.

I'm a letter-writer, card-sender and postcard-mailer, always have been. In return, a lot of people have sent me letters, cards and postcards over the years. I've probably saved 90 percent of them. Okay, maybe only 80 percent. It's still a lot of paper.

If only that were all I saved, it would be relatively normal. But no, the pack rat in me didn't draw the line at pretty cards, treasured letters or my kids' memorabilia. I saved everything.

Today, I decided to tackle the bins of papers we've stored in neat, organized, non-hoarder type stacks in the garage. Spring cleaning for pack rats is never a simple project. In this case, it was less a cleaning project than a trip back through a time machine.

Among the things I found:

*A canvas sailor hat my friends autographed back in 1966, between 8th grade and freshman year.

* I tried not to stop and read all the Christmas and birthday cards in the bins, but I did find a 21st birthday card to me from my husband.

*Business cards and pay slips from every place I've worked in the past 35 years or so.

*Cancelled checks and bank statements from the year my daughter was born (1983). I paid some bills the day I went into the hospital!

*An old wallet insert filled with pictures of my husband from the mid-1970s.

*My union card from when I was in NATSOPA in England in the late 1970s.

*Mortgage papers, plus receipts for carpeting, furniture and repairs on the two houses we owned in England, back in the 1970s and early 1980s.

*My pocket calendar with the list of farewell parties we attended right before we moved back to the U.S.

*Newspapers with just about every major event in the last 40 years.

*Wallpaper swatches my husband and I both recognize but can't for the life of us remember which houses they were from.

*Countless cards and letters from relatives who haven't been with us for years.

*Half a bin filled with letters, cards and postcards written by me when we lived in England and mailed to my grandmother and mother, who saved them. My mom passed hers on to me when they moved to a smaller house. I'm sure they tell an interesting story of our life over the pond, but will I ever read them? Will anybody? Probably not. The only people they're likely to interest are me and my husband, and I can't see us going through them all. Life goes on.

*Although, we did find a huge stack of journals my husband wrote while we lived in England. He flipped one open to the day I fell down some wet marble steps, sprained and fractured my ankle and tore some ligaments in my knee. It took a long time to heal (because it happened while I was working - we were madly busy and I didn't take the time to go to the doctor for two or three days). When I hit my fifties, that dang knee started acting up occasionally. I'd forgotten when it happened - now I can pin it down to the exact day in 1977.

*The journals are incredibly detailed, and we've had some laughs at the descriptions of a few of our arguments back then. I was touched that my husband mentioned my new hair style (he liked it), and that he'd listed every little thing I gave him for Christmas.

*There were a lot of things I have no clue why I saved - book club catalogues, magazine clippings, brochures from hotels we stayed at, even airline luggage tags from every trip we've ever taken. There were also lots of cool things, like playbills from all the shows we saw in London. Good times!

We probably transferred fifty pounds of paper from the storage bins to the trash bins, and there are a lot of bins left. Both Marty and I are feeling nostalgic, but with no desire to actually return to those days. Our little jaunt back through time has been fun, as well as dusty and a bit tiring. When it comes right down to it, though, even though we're older and grayer now, I really wouldn't want to go back through time.

I like it fine just where I am.

Must...Read...

A really old picture of me reading

I'm a bookaholic - no secret there. You can find my recent reading list on Shelfari and more favorites at Barnes & Noble. Recently my friend Kelsey Browning blogged at Wordplay about the benefits of reading deprivation as a sort of cleansing process. The thought of going even a day without reading gave me chills, and not in a good way.

As a kid, I often got in trouble at school for having an open book in my lap, hidden by my desk. At home, I drove my mom nuts by sneaking a flashlight into bed and reading under the covers. If there wasn't a book handy, I'd read cereal boxes. 

Since I was the oldest child, our house wasn't full of kids' books when I was little. That happened gradually, as my brother and I were allowed to get books from Scholastic and Weekly Reader Book Clubs. My allowance went to Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden books. Later, I used babysitting money to subscribe to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. My first "real" paychecks in high school supported my book club habit: Literary Guild, Mystery Book Club, Doubleday Book Club, the History Book Club and the Paperback Book Club. Even later, I subscribed to Harlequin, Silhouette Special Edition and Candlelight Ecstasy Romance book clubs - and more.

I also went to libraries a lot, and never left a used book sale without at least a bag of books. My husband shares my love of books, even if he's not quite the reading addict I am, so our date nights frequently take us to bookstores - and cafe's IN bookstores. Not a week goes by that I don't buy at least a few books. Hell, on average, I might even buy a book a day. (My husband is nodding vigorously.) And I'm lucky enough to get books from publishers and authors, too. I have a huge to-be-read pile (we're talking hundreds of books) in paper, and a whole lot waiting to be read on my Nook, too.

But it never struck me how much I need to read until yesterday. My husband and I were out running errands when our car battery died. Luckily we belong to triple-A, so all it took was a phone call to arrange for help. We were told a serviceman would be with us in twenty minutes or so.

Since we'd only planned on being out a short time, I had left the house without Nook or book. Well. Twenty minutes. Easy peasey, right?

Two minutes later I started to get antsy. My husband, playing with his iPod, was cool and calm. I fidgeted, watching another minute tick away on the clock. Fidget, fidget. My husband didn't say anything, but I think I saw his eyebrows raise. Apparently, I have the attention span of a five-year-old.

I eyed my purse. When was the last time I cleaned it out? Went through the surprisingly clean make-up bag. (Yes, I travel with a make-up bag at all times, because you never know when you'll need mascara. And a roller-ball perfume or three.) Dug a few old receipts out of the bottom and stuck them in a side-pocket for disposal later. Found a relatively new pack of gum - opening that took another ten seconds or so.

The zip pockets - rats - must have been cleaned out the last time I switched purses. Nothing to occupy me there. Then I pulled out my wallet and struck gold. Amazingly, there were five insurance cards in there, all seemingly identical. 

"I don't suppose I really need all of these, do I?"

My husband took them from me, squinting at the small print. "Some of these are bound to be old."

"Don't worry about it," I said, as he put on his reading glasses. "No biggie."

"No, now I'm curious," he said. "You've hooked me on the mystery."

A few seconds later he muttered, "Aha!" and pointed to the printing dates in tiny numbers on the back. 

Huh. A couple of those cards went back 2009 - who knew?

After that I dug out three expired Garden Writers Association membership cards, a Lancome discount coupon that expired two years ago, and business cards for every hairdresser I've ever visited. I stuck a bunch of those in the discard pile (the side pocket of the purse). Another five minutes had passed.

I pulled out the credit cards. I was squinting at the small print on the back, when my husband laughed.

"What?" says I.

"Look at you - you're reading credit cards!" He shook his head. "I knew you were addicted to reading, but I never knew you were this addicted."

Assuming an air of nonchalance, I put the credit cards away, dropping my wallet back into the dark depths of my purse. 

That's when the triple-A guy pulled up.

Now, honestly, I don't see a problem here. I made constructive use of my time and now have a much more organized purse.

But I'll tell you one thing. I'm not leaving this house in future unless either the Nook or a book is in the bottom of my purse. And I never go anywhere without my purse.

I think Kelsey's idea of the no-reading cleanse probably has merit. I'm pretty sure I'll never find out.

Hair Again...Hopefully, Gone Tomorrow

Or if not tomorrow, SOON! My hair has reached a length that is really starting to bug me. Since I've had some unhappy experiences with haircuts in the past (looks great for a day or even a week or two, then it looks like a shaggy dog), I'm trying to hold off getting it cut until I can get up to my favorite stylist in Chicago.

I never know what to do with my hair--even learning how to blow dry it was a major ordeal. I've had some bad hair days throughout my life:

Almost as bad as these fake hairstyles:



So in the meantime, I've been trying a variety of hair products to control it. Headbands are easy, as long as I control my urge to go crazy with bling. For instance, isn't this pretty? Um, yeah--if I was 19 and getting married all over again.



There are some pretty barrettes and combs available, too:




The problem is, I don't need these for a wedding, a ball or a Royal tea party. I just want to keep my darn hair out of my face so I can type without going cross-eyed. Also, my hair is very thick, so it takes either a very large comb or several hair pins to hold it back.

And, let's face it, I'm a little old for scrunchies. (Although some are pretty cute...)



If I could braid, it would be one thing. Unfortunately, hand coordination is not a strong point. Instead of braids that look like this:



Or even something simple *snort*, like this:

Mine look more like this:



Or even this:



You get the idea. I was born without the hair styling gene. You think I'm kidding? Okay, time to share a deep dark secret. You know all those little clippy things in the hair aisle? I don't know what the heck you're supposed to do with them! But desperate times call for desperate measures, so I've picked up a few of those gizmos lately.

I think these are called hair claws:



I put them in my hair and they promptly fall right out. Luckily, I bought the plain and cheap version, instead of the pretty ones I posted here. (Can't resist bling--what can I say?)

I thought about trying this, but I'm not good at tying scarves artistically, either:



I actually do remember how to do a ponytail pull-through, like the one shown below, and it doesn't look bad even on someone my age. But, damn, after awhile it gives me a headache:



I saw one of these doohickeys, and it looked kind of cool:



But it also looked as hard to install as a kitchen sink. I looked for one of these, which appeared moderately easier to use:




But I couldn't find that particular one. So then I picked up a stretchy comb-thingy by Goody. It's black elastic with a sort of Celtic knot design and two black combs attached. It looks similar to this:



There are no directions with it, and the illustration on the packaging shows a black stretchy thingy on a woman with black hair. Seriously??? But it looks sort of like this:




(Okay, I know this looks nothing like me, but use your imagination, for Pete's sake!)

Sorry, I'm a tad irritable, after wrestling with this damn thing for half an hour. Then my husband got into the act, analyzing the hair product as if it contained the mysteries of the universe. (For all I know, it does.) He couldn't figure it out either so, like a guy, he went online and looked up some tutorials, like this one:



All I can say is, don't be surprised if you see me with really short hair in the not-too-distant future. This is already one of the longest blog posts in recorded history, but now that I'm into this rant, it's hard to wind down. Maybe a couple quotes?

If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?
Lily Tomlin

And more:

“Red hair, sir, in my opinion, is dangerous.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves!

“Some of the worst mistakes in my life were haircuts”
― Jim Morrison

“Interviewer: 'So Frank, you have long hair. Does that make you a woman?'
Frank Zappa: 'You have a wooden leg. Does that make you a table?”
― Frank Zappa

“My hair had grown out long and shaggy—not in that sexy-young-rock-star kind of way but in that time-to-take-Rover-to-the-groomer kind of way.”
― Jim Butcher, White Night

“People always ask me how long it takes to do my hair. I don’t know, I’m never there.”
― Dolly Parton

“Beware of her fair hair, for she excels All women in the magic of her locks; And when she winds them round a young man's neck, She will not ever set him free again. ”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“She was the most beautiful creature on Earth - her hair said so in that language only hair can speak.”
― Gabriel Bá, Daytripper

“Symbolic of life, hair bolts from our head[s]. Like the earth, it can be harvested, but it will rise again. We can change its color and texture when the mood strikes us, but in time it will return to its original form, just as Nature will in time turn our precisely laid-out cities into a weed-way.”
― Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

In the time it's taken me to write this post, my hair has probably grown another quarter inch. I guess I'll finish with a song that's been running through my head all day, from the musical HAIR.

Bye for now. May the, uh, brush be with you!