Today I learned about the history and mystery of seashells.

I love shells. I have loved shells since I was just a kid. I remember we had this giant conch shell in our yard and when I heard from a classmate in school that you can hear the ocean in a shell I was determined to test the theory. Being landlocked in the Midwest, nowhere near an ocean, I was really curious to know what the ocean sounded like.

When I got home, I went straight to the yard and picked up The Great Shell. It had sunken into the dirt with time and when I picked it up it was muddy and there were earthworms wriggling, exposed, and protesting its removal. I put the shell up near my ear, and I cringed as I imagined an earthworm popping out and tickling my earlobe. But sure enough, I heard the roar of the ocean. Wow! Magical!

And I think that’s when my love of seashells began.

I have a basket of shells in my bathroom. They remind me of the years my husband was in the Navy and beaches were more easily accessible. As I cautiously slid the shells into their weekly sink-bath I mused that as much as I admire shells, I still have a lot to learn about them. So, today I learned about my favorite beach adornment.

Obviously, there’s the whole original purpose of a seashell. A house for an invertebrate. (Which is why those wormies must have felt right at home in The Great Shell from our yard…) But I already learned all about mollusks and bivalves and all that in high school biology class. Here’s what I learned today:

• What I didn’t know is that the study of seashells is called Conchology. Which is fun to say. To me, it sounded like a celebration word that you'd shout during salsa music. But when I said it aloud a few times in a row, Waybums thought I was pretending to be a train.
• One of the world’s best collections of seashells is at the Smithsonian in D.C. Now, there's a place to learn stuff...
• I learned that seashells were one of the earliest recorded forms of currency, and the greater inland they traveled, the more value they held. (Actually I knew this to some extent, having read Anna Lee Waldo’s book Sacajawea. Lewis and Clark’s expedition loaded up on seashells when they finally reached the Pacific because they would be able to use them for trade on the way home.)
• I always wondered why seashells had perfect little holes bored into them. I thought perhaps it was just something stores did before the shells were sold, but today I learned thats not the case. If an octopus is hungry and catches a snail, it’s not like he has some sort of gastropod can-opener he can use. But he does have a handy built-in drill that he can use to bore into the shell and do some damage. There are a lot of sea snails that drill into other shell-bearing critter's houses and then use their proboscis to suck them out of their protective shells. Yeesh. Who needs Sci-Fi when there's stuff that freaky in the real world? And it makes sense that these holes are found in the shells that wash up on the beach because their owners are no longer around using them. So, predation is the leading cause of holey shell syndrome in seashells. The other leading cause is jewelry makers.
• This little fact is of particular historical interest. I learned today about antique collectibles known as Sailor’s Valentines. The Girls Back Home probably prefered to believe was that their seafaring fellas would collect teeny shells from their destinations and during their downtime they would make fancy designs for their ladies’ fair while they were pining away for them. Usually the designs would adorn the top of a box, or a bit of jewelry. Or a jewelry box. As romantic a notion that may have been, it was much more common for sailors to swing by Barbados and pick them up at a souvenir shop. Handy for those sailors with a gal in every port, because they’d never have time to swab the deck if they was always makin’ purdies.

But the thing I really learned today was that collecting seashells was just a great excuse to go to the beach. It's times like this, driving down snow tunnels on every street, that I miss the sand in my toes and the salty sea air. It's like a treasure hunt, to dig around in the sand and find a swirly shell or an oyster shell or even bits of driftwood.

Baby Waybums and Me at a beach in Japan

As I was drying off my bathroom shells, I handed one to Waybums and told her that she could hear the ocean if she put it up to her ear. She put it up to her ear and her eyes widened, she sat the shell down and she ran off. She came back with her trusty kitty mug, held it to her ear and said:

"Mother! Did you know there's the ocean in my cup, too?"

I held it up to my ear, and sure enough there was that ocean sound. You know...that might have been nice to know before I got dirt and earthworm goo on my face as a kid. ;) I take comfort that Waybums is a bit more clever than I was.

Yep. You learn something new every day. As far as tomorrow goes...
I'll keep you posted.

Today I learned how to start a furnace fire, and tips on longevity from a raccoon.

It's been a day full of busy activity. While I've been learning all these fascinating things, I've also been working on a month-long lesson on how to organize and simplify my house. (Which I'll share when I've finished that lesson.) We have moved four times in six years including a cross-country move and an international move, and I'm tired of living out of boxes. There's a glorious, spacious bedroom upstairs that has been moonlighting as a storage area, and it's time to get settled and get to use the space. I've been doing a lot of sorting and purging and regrouping.

So, today, when I wasn't playing with the kids and attending to their many cabin-feverish requirements, I was working on the house and trying to think of something interesting to learn.  I came up with a couple of ideas that will work well for later, but nothing that really worked for today. My husband is a chaperone for our church's youth retreat and so I decided to have supper at my grandpa's house with my mom and hang out with my parents for awhile. When I got there, my mom suggested that I could learn about Grampa's wood-burning furnace. I thought that was intriguing and so I went out to the car to get my camera and stumbled upon another lesson.

Grampa's dog Drake (AKA "Get-Down-Dog") sat on the swing, looking like some kind of furry sentry, watching for mountain lions or something and so I snapped a picture of him.

Just as I was about to go into the house I heard a startling and unfamiliar sound coming from near the barn. Whoah! What IS that? If you don't mind spoilers - it sounded like this.

Drake went rushing off to the source of the noise and I followed him...at a distance. I might be curious but I'm not ready to sign up for rabies shots. I couldn't see anything, but there was a lot of noise. Drake was lecturing the critters for trespassing, "Grrr-snarl-ruff!" And they were trash-talking him, "Chareeka-chatta-grruhchuk." And then Drake just stood there barking.

Silly raccoon.

I learned a couple of lessons from this incident.

1. 
   
   Petty bickering amongst yourselves can lead to much greater confrontations from elsewhere.
2. 
   
   If you are going to stir up a ruckus, you better have a good retreat available.
3. 
   
   The raccoon that runs has a better chance than the one who climbs a slippery metal pole in winter.

I tried to distract Drake, but he was pretty worked up. I suppose he understood the raccoon cussing better than I did. The masked bandit kept slipping and then climbing up and slipping and climbing up and finally fell from the pole and was snarling before he hit the ground. He got chewed out and chewed on, and to his credit he solicited more than a few yelps from the ol' dog. Drake came away and I didn't know if the racoon escaped or if he was dispatched. But I know enough not to go into a dark barn where there might be an injured animal. He's probably in the haymount, nursing his wounds, thinking that he's not going to argue so loudly around this farm again.

So, I went inside with my camera and commenced my lesson on Grampa's woodburning furnace. Before the lesson I knew two things. The first was that Furnace + Baking x Cooking = Hotter than the Sun. There have been a few years when I made the mistake of wearing a sweater to holiday festivities and wondered if the doctors would chuckle and call the press if they got a heat-stroke patient in mid-December during sub-zero temperatures. The second thing I knew is that I can tell if something's been at Grampa's house by its faint campfire meets echoes of homemade bread smell.

Here's what I learned tonight:

You need fuel for the fire. Obviously.

Here Grampa takes the Waybums into the firewood room so he can show her how they get the wood down there. All my life I knew that the room used to be a "cistern" but I never knew what a cistern was until I looked it up tonight. I always thought it was a kind of septic tank. LoL! Not quite. When I learned that a cistern is a kind of water reservoir, the references my grandma had made to using it suddenly made more sense. That's just one of the many back-burner things I'd never got around to really learning about. I thought I knew what it meant and so I never thought to ask. I know it probably seems dorky to someone who knows the meaning of the word. But we all have things that we think we understand but don't have it quite right. Just clarifying the meaning of one word suddenly helped shift a dozen stories my grandmother told me into focus. The most distinctive memory I have of this room was during a tornado when I was a kid. My brother, sister, grandma, mom and I were all crammed in there. I remember it felt like an adventure.

The furnace has two doors.

The larger door on top an the smaller one underneath.

The top is where the firewood goes...

And the lower door is where the ash is collected.

I realize this picture is sideways, but I kind of get a kick out of all of you turning your heads to the side to look at it, so I think I'll keep it that way. :) Sometimes it's more interesting to look at something from a different perspective.

After Grampa's demonstation I decided to do a little research on this furnace.

The furnace is a Longwood dual fuel furnace that can burn either oil or wood, and the name "Longwood" comes from the fact that it can burn logs up to five feet long. The founders of the company that manufactured it actually started out as earth-movers working with their Caterpillars, hauling mud around when people built houses or needed a pond somewhere - that sort of thing. Well, when this gentleman built his own house he didn't really like electric furnaces and so he designed and built a custom wood-burning furnace for his house. The neighbors liked it and wanted one for their own - word of mouth spread and they went from moving dirt to manufacturing furnaces. I love stories of such versatile people who stumble into success by accident, but had the good sense to run with it.

It was a good learning day. A little bit Wild American. A little bit This Old House.

Most of all, I just learned how much fun it is to see Grampa teaching the kids about things. He's such a stand-out fellow. Guys nowadays don't even have enough gumption to change out of their jammer pants before they go to the store for a gallon of milk, and my 80-something Gramps uses a cane to go up and down the stairs and make a fire twice a day. They just don't make 'em like they used to...

This was the cutest moment. He went to all the trouble of lowering the seat on this old-school exercise bicycle so Waybums could reach the pedals. She's barely there, but Grampa told her he'd help her try it again once she grew some more leg. :)

Off to sleep perchance to dream.

I'll keep you posted.