American flashback
22.09.11
If not for the TV, the charged lights and other reminders inside that this is, in fact, the 21st century, a company might think the door to Trevor Stephens’ west Eugene serene is an enchanted portal to the mid-1800s.
Every room of the small quarter is filled with practical and decorative antiques, from rustic original American furniture such as dry sinks and apothecary cabinets, to displays of thick grain measures, pantry boxes, firkins, bowls and spoons.
Stoneware bowls, jugs and crocks elaborate benches, shelves and corner cabinets, while walls exposition artful bits of Americana — from centuries-old embroidery samplers to framed mid-20th century railroad and airline share certificates.
Stephens, 23, a graduate law student at the University of Oregon, has composed American primitives since he was just 14. He grew up in the Redmond compass, where his grandmother dealt in antiques. And now, both in his home and in a space at Coburg Outmoded Mall where he peddles his own wares, the ambitious young accumulator celebrates an era of American history that gives credence to that adage, “They well-deserved don’t make things like they used to.”
Source: The Register-Guard
Living off the land? Not exactly
18.09.11
THE Agronomy LIFE: In the second of our series, beef and sheep farmers tattle KATHY SHERIDAN that there is money in the food business, but it’s the factories and processors that are making it – and the only way for families to persist in farming is to work off the farm
‘Oh yes, it’s true. My bridegroom is a kept man,” laughs Teresa Turley, arriving people's home from work to find her husband Tom and The Irish Times drinking tea at the kitchen mesa of their comfortable, 400-year-old farmhouse in Clonfert, east Galway. It’s not lock a joke.
Behind the excitable headlines about farm-income hikes, the genuineness is that three-quarters of all farmers still earned well below €20,000 from the farm charge in 2010, according to a Teagasc study. That’s half the subject average industrial wage and just over a third of the average public sector compensation, in Tom Turley’s words.
In fact, just a casern of Irish farms – some 26,000 – were deemed economically practical businesses in 2010. It’s hardly surprising then that more than half of all farms have an off-be killed income. And that often emanates from the wife, that highly desirable being once known in farming parlance as “the layin’ hen” – in theory a nurse or teacher. Or indeed, Teresa, who runs a vegetable machine shop in Nenagh.
Source: Irish Times