Hello again, Tild fans! It is I, your humble ITTR (Imaginary Typical Tildology Reader) here for another foray into the hidden world of our eccentric, seldom-updating blogmistress Tild.

When we last checked in on the old coot Tild she was rambling on about something called a “day job” that seems to eat up most of her time and keeps her from posting more often. Talk about your lame excuses!

From the new headers, it looks like she’s back into crate labels again. No real surprises there; we learned a few years ago that Tildebunkport’s kitchen is decorated entirely in Early Crate Label,with a touch of Local Flour Sack.

Hey Tild! Whatcha up to? Inquiring minds (both real and imaginary) want to know!

Tild:   Well, first of all, back off, Snidely!   You’re crimping my snood. There. That’s better. Yeah, I’m spending a lot of my time messing with crate labels these days. I’ve always loved crate label art. I spent an entire day once on Cannery Row in Monterey just going through thousands of old original crate labels. Expect at least a few more crate label blog headers still to come. I’m even starting to design my own.

A new wrinkle is looking for Droste Effect crate labels. I just recently learned about Droste Effect packaging, and now I’m looking for it everywhere. Here’s the Droste cocoa package design from 1904 that the effect is named for:

Yes, that’s right, recursive picture mavens. It’s… to infinity and beyond!!

With only a little bit of searching I’ve found three Droste Effect crate labels so far:

(click on the thumbnails for the full size versions)

And last but not least, the extremely rare Triple Droste:

Find any more examples? Post a comment, please.

And a h/t to The Mississippifarian for pointing me to the Droste effect article. Thanks, TMiss!

Update: Found another one! Now, this is really embarrassing — this one’s been on my kitchen wall for NINE YEARS and I never noticed it was a recursive picture until 5 minutes ago. Sheesh…

~~~

Posted: May 2nd, 2008 under Crate Label Art, Droste Effect, Personal History.
Comments: none

Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy interview.
Well, maybe not so much bumpy as meandering. Wayward? Erratic? Not your straightforward point A to point B, that’s for certain.

Greetings, Tild fans! I am an imaginary interviewer, a hypothetical composite of the typical readership of Tild’s blog, aka Tild~, or tildology.com to be exact. I’m a mashup of all the folks who tend to show up here:

…The woman in Georgia with a cold who’s looking for information about nose washing;
…The guy in Dubai who wants to read about bad girls who don’t keep their tape sticky;

…The She-Blogger fan in Toronto;

…The folks in the UK who can’t get enough of Laurel & Hardy’s “Way Out West” dance;

…One of the hapless clods who keep trying to hotlink to the wily strawman picture so that they can add it to their comments and thereby look totally super-bitchin’ in those endless flame war threads at FARK or the Something Awful forums; .

…The many admirers of Easter Jesus’ chocolatey goodness;

And the people who come here looking for Meerkat Manor family trees

or for a bit of Minnesota-specific political snark , be it about prominent local prig Katherine Kersten , Minuteman-wannabe Dick “Rambo” Day, or notorious now ex-MnDOT commissioner and fandancer Carol Molnau,

…or maybe just for a little cheesecake.

Whatever you’ve come here for, you’ve no doubt noticed that it’s been pretty quiet around here for quite a while now. We’re lucky to get one new post a week. What’s the deal with that?

Look! There’s Tild now. Let’s ask her.

Imaginary Typical Tildology Reader: Hey! Tild! It’s 4:30 in the morning. What are you doing up?

Tild: Oh, hi. Hey, if you’re one of those idiots looking for the strawman picture, goddammit will you PLEASE learn how to save images to your own server?! Use your own bandwidth for a change, asshole!

ITTR: Umm, excuse me Miz Tild, but I am most certainly not one of those idiots. What I am, in fact, is an Imaginary Typical Reader of your blog, come to interview you and find out what’s next in the exciting ongoing history of tildology.com.

Tild: You are? Hmm. Do you mean to tell me that the typical reader of my blog is the disembodied head of Agnes Moorhead’s even snider younger sister inexplicably floating in the stratosphere next to a “flying wing” airplane?

ITTR: You tell me. You picked this image to be the ITTR avatar.

Tild: Oh. Yeah. Well, alrighty then. Never mind! What was the question again? Why am I awake at 4:30 AM? Well, my youngest kid the high school senior is in the high school’s Concert Choir which is going to Washington DC for four days, and they needed to be at the high school at 4 this morning to board the buses to the airport. I’ll never get back to sleep now, so I guess I’m up for the duration.

ITTR: Aha. So then. Please tell us: What have you been up to lately? Sure hasn’t been blogging.

Tild: Well, you do know that I have a full time day job, right?

ITTR: Yes, I’ve gotten that impression over the years, but you’ve never really described what it is that you do. So, what exactly is it that you do?

Tild: I work for a large corporation; a big player in an industry that’s run for profit but really shouldn’t be. The mitigating factor for me is that the particular division that I work in is more or less a watchdog unit. We investigate the billing habits of the purveyors of our industry’s services. Our work is to keep those purveyors honest — or, you could say that in an ethically challenged industry we try to make sure that its practitioners adhere to the laws, such as they are, and to industry standards, imperfect tho they may be. That fact helps me sleep at night, I gotta admit. You know, because I feel like in my little corner of the industry I’m more a part of the solution and not so much a part of the problem.

ITTR: Wow, that’s quite discreetly phrased, I must say. Can you describe what you do there?

Tild: Sure. I gather data from various sources, convert the data into the formats used by several databases, and upload that data. One might say that I’m a data wrangler.
Yeehaw!

ITTR: Gosh! Sounds fascinating!

Tild: Uh huh. You said it, not me. I’ve also been working part time at a book store since last fall. The end result of all this toil and trouble is that I haven’t had huge amounts of free time to devote to blogging. Or when I do have some time, I often don’t have any energy for it.

[TO BE CONTINUED...]

Posted: March 10th, 2008 under Blogistan, Chez Tild, Meta, Personal History.
Comments: 1

Tild sez:   Hey, wait a minute — Don’t start thinking that this is some kind of homage to local hysteric Mitch Berg and those excruciatingly tedious (so I hear, I’ve never read any of them)  ‘It Was Twenty Years Ago Today’ posts he’s so fond of doing.  No. I’m pretty sure the only similarity between this post and one of Mitch’s is in the title. 

About an hour ago I remembered that today is the anniversary of my mother’s death. 
Twenty years ago.    I can’t believe I’ve lived twenty years without my mother.  Without my father too, for even longer — he died 9 years before my mom did.  
It took me a long time to get used to being the oldest living generation in my immediate family. I finally got the knack of it, but after all these years do you know what I still miss?  Feeling like a daughter.       

Anyway, to mark the occasion here’s an excerpt from  “Grace”,  a post I wrote about my mother a couple of Mother’s Days ago…

~~~

Grace was a 5′6″, bubbly, strawberry blonde Betty Grable look-alike. She was warm and funny and talked a blue streak and drew people to her like moths to flame; like bees to honey; like whatever to whatever [insert favorite simile of your choice here].  At 5′11″ I felt like King Kong standing next to her, and whenever possible preferred to step back into the shadows and let my mother shine. I don’t remember ever begrudging her that. It’s possible I did at the time, but I don’t remember it now.

Mom had been a widow for 5 years when this photo was taken in 1984. She was 61 years old. My dad, Gunnar, died in 1979 at the age of 54. He died of congestive heart failure complicated by scar tissue on his aorta and an enlarged ‘athlete’s heart’, both consequences of having rheumatic fever when he was a child.

Grace continued to get out and about a good deal of the time, as she and Dad had always done.  I often told her that she had a social life I’d kill for.
She did volunteer work at the Shriners’ Hospital; went out to dinner with her Eastern Star chapter, and her garden club, and her 500 club, and “the St. Mary’s gang”, all the gals she’d roomed with at a boarding house downtown near the Basilica during WWII, when they were all flighty young singles working at Honeywell, assembling steering controls for bombers by day, and dancing the night away every night. She always said that in those days she wore out a pair of shoes a week, from all the dancing.

This is Grace on Christmas Eve 1987. She looks tired, as well she might, considering she’d had a mastectomy three months before, and was undergoing a 6-month course of chemotherapy at this time. Her doctors were fairly confident they’d gotten all the cancer, so they said the chemo was really just a precaution, to make sure the cancer hadn’t metastasized into the lymph nodes. Grace was tolerating the chemo well, altho the steroids made her face look kind of puffy and she also said the steroids gave her manic bursts of energy when she couldn’t sit still or stop talking. Everybody who knew her wondered how she could tell the difference.

This turned out to be the last photo ever taken of my mother.

Less than two months later, on the morning of February 12, 1988, Grace called my sister and brother in law at 4:45 AM. She’d been out dancing until past 1 AM, then had come home and settled into bed but suddenly felt “kind of funny”. It was strange, she said; like she couldn’t catch her breath. My brother in law told her to hang up and call 911 right away. Grace lived only a few blocks away from Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina, and the paramedics could reach her within minutes if necessary. She agreed to call 911, and hung up. My sister and her husband waited for a minute or two, then called 911 to confirm that Grace had called. Yes, the dispatcher said, and the paramedics were already on their way.

BIL then jumped in the car and headed for Grace’s house, about 15 miles away. When he got there he saw a policeman standing at the front door, which was all splintered and off its hinges. The paramedics had arrived within 3 minutes of receiving Grace’s call, yet she was already unable to get to the door, so the paramedics had to use a crowbar to break the door down. The policeman said that Grace had had a heart attack; she was alive but it was “very serious”. The EMTs had taken her to nearby Fairview Southdale, all the while frantically working to revive her.

My sister called at about 5:30 AM and told us what was happening. We then picked her up and drove to the hospital together. I was seven months pregnant with my first child at the time.
We arrived at the hospital within 20 minutes of getting the call. My BIL George met us at the entrance and said: “I don’t know how to say this, but Grace has passed away.”

The cause of death was found to be pulmonary embolism: a large blood clot had formed somewhere in her lower extremities and had travelled upwards through her system to ultimately become lodged in a spot near the juncture of her heart and lungs. Death came very quickly; within minutes.
Grace was 64 years old.

It’s been a long time now; 17 years; so the pain has had time to get dull and familiar and I don’t feel it as sharply as I did then. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss her and wish she could see my kids as they’re growing up. Well, maybe she is seeing the kids somehow; I hope so. I guess what I want is to be able to see her seeing the kids.

And these days I’ve started thinking of how she died as being rather a good way to go, since we’re all gonna go sometime, some way. Think about it: Grace lived her life fully and actively and joyously right up to the very last moment. No drawn out withering away for her. No watching her slowly become unrecognizable as disease consumed her.

She went to a party on that last night. She went out dancing til past 1 in the morning. She went dancing.

Posted: February 12th, 2008 under Chez Tild, Loco Parent, Personal History.
Comments: 2