Tchotchke Overload


We had a spectacularly sunny week in Sea Isle City this year; four families shared a five bedroom house with a beautiful view of the ocean-- and while the house itself was perfectly situated and also of new construction, our only complaint was with the interior: it was overloaded with tchotchkes . . . brass mermaid on the counter, wooden Italian man holding a pizza amidst various sized pottery, giant model ships, bowls of glass balls, a wooden canoe on the dining room table, strange ornaments on the toilets, little chairs on the landing, loads of throw pillows, etcetera . . . and everything was BIG . . . big couches and big chairs and a huge table on the porch that you could barely walk around and big wooden beds that couldn't be moved, something between Pottery Barn and Vermont farmhouse, and so all the kids slept up in the master bedroom, and the two little guys slept in a four corner poster bed-- ridiculous-- but none of this mattered, we only broke a couple of things and we'll probably get the deposit back, the only thing that was actually dangerous was a giant wooden mirror leaning against the wall at the foot of the stairs (there's a picture of it above) and when I saw it, I immediately put it behind a chair in the corner so that someone wouldn't put their arm through it, or worse-- so it wouldn't topple over and kill someone (one of the kids on the trip has CP and walks with sticks and occasionally leans on furniture for balance, so this thing was a hazard) and right after I put it behind a chair, the owner came in to check things out from the previous week and I thought he said he was going to do something with the mirror-- like remove it-- but we left to go to the beach and he put it back in its original location, so we had to move it again . . . I think in a situation like this, the owner has created an attractive nuisance of a house, and the deposit should be reversed and we should receive some money for making sure his giant Harry Potter mirror of Erised and his wooden boat collection and his various gewgaws didn't get destroyed.

6 comments:

zman said...

zwoman wanted a full length mirror for Christmas and I saw several just like that while shopping online. You can't live in a house with children if you have a leaning mirror, or at least not in a house with my children.

Dave said...

imagine if i would have slipped on the tonka truck and then fallen through the leaning mirror . . . i would not have caught the mustard.

Clarence said...

You might have sat on the sausage.

Lecky said...

I like how you imply that "the kids" might break something, when drunk Dave has broken more things than anybody

Dave said...

i definitely have some spatial estimation problems when imbibing . . .

rob said...

i didn't see the mirror of erised thing coming. the owner of the house desires nothing more than to have that mirror leaning on the wall. it's like a meta escher painting.

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