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model glue hunt
Wednesday, January 17 2007
It had been a cold night, so I'd kept a fire burning in the woodstove throughout (which wasn't difficult, what with the poodles demanding to be let out every few hours but shitting on the floor anyway). Today temperatures never rose out of the 20s, topping out at around 28 or so. Despite the cold, I had some errands to run so I drove out to 9W and even crossed the Hudson briefly to Rhinebeck. It's a maddeningly useless village, although if your wife is afflicted with good taste and her birthday is coming up, it can be a useful place to shop.
One of things I was looking for was ordinary model glue, the kind I used when I assembled plastic aircraft carriers as a kid back in the yellow-tinged late 1970s. Back then you could buy model glue at the drug store in the Staunton Plaza (this was before it was walled in and converted to the mall it is today). That particular drug store had a whole aisle dedicated to plastic scale models: tanks, ships, cannons, sports cars, you name it. Because this was the only drug store with which I had any experience, I naturally came to assume that all drug stores sold plastic models. I haven't had any interest in model building since I was about thirteen so I've never had any reason to correct this assumption until, well, today. I needed plastic model glue because it is the only effective way to repair certain species of plastic. This is because it actually welds two pieces of plastic together (as opposed to being a dissimilar filler material clinging by adhesion between two pieces - is there, for example, any product more overrated than Super Glue?). So far I've been in the new Uptown Wallgreens, a pharmacy in Rhinebeck, Lowes, and even Michæls (the craft store for white trash Picassos) and I've been unable to find plastic model glue. Was the stuff banned for its obviously carcinogenic properties at some point in the 25 years since I last needed it?
I'm initiating a wintertime horticultural project (and no, it isn't the cultivation of marijuana) and I needed some soil. So while I was out I thought I'd stop by the Esopus and get some sandy silt from its shoreline. But I'd picked the worst possible day to do this. As recently as yesterday the ground was still in a pre-frozen autumnal state, but by this evening it had turned into concrete. The only silt I could gather was under water, but gather it I did. Later I put it in steel cans and boiled off the water atop the wood stove, enjoying the spectacle of the mud bubbling as if above a hot spring.
I stayed up late into the night building a massive new bookshelf for Gretchen's ever-expanding library of poetry.
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