The Baboon Congress

Pastry Dreams

104 Comments

We looked at the weather before our trip and we knew it would be cool in the mornings in the mountains. But although we took warm clothes, we seriously underestimated our ability to enjoy a cold breakfast out of the cooler on cold mornings.

That’s how we ended up driving through Castle Rock early one morning last week, looking for a warmer breakfast. We found a tiny little pastry shop, Dream Pastries, tucked between some other storefronts.

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Wonderful, marvelous fancy pastries and good hot coffee – nothing frapped, latte’d or macchiato’ d. In addition to the great breakfast, the little shop has a wonderful modge podge of different tables and chairs, as if the owner had shopped at garage sales for his furniture. And along the walls there was shelving covered in cake plates!

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All colors and sizes, some foster glass from the 40s and 50s, some fancy plates with “jewels” draped on them and some just whimsical designs. I asked the owner about the plates and how long it had taken him to collect them all. He also shared with me that if you purchase a cake from the bakery, you can borrow one of the cake plates to serve it on.

It made me wish I lived in Castle Rock.

As we drove away, it made me think of my collections.

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My first “collection” started when I was in 5th grade. My folks took a long weekend trip to Kentucky and when they returned they brought me a brown ceramic pig bank. They’d seen in a shop there and thought I might like it.  He sits up and the hole is on the bottom with a big cork plug. I was charmed with him, kept him on my dresser and in the mysterious ways that these things happen, I received another fun pig bank for my birthday later that year.

So suddenly I was in the piggy bank collection business. I have about 50 pig banks these days, most of them stored in the attic since Young Adult was born. To make my collection a pig bank has to be really unusual, so I don’t add to the collection much. My goal is for them to eventually come back out of the attic, but I may have to wait until my youngest cat becomes less of a “knocker offer”.

Do you have any collections?

104 thoughts on “Pastry Dreams”

  1. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    Thanks for the post VS. Sounds like a fun place to be.

    At this moment I am viewing my world class collection of liquor boxes which contain my Worldly Goods. Although we are back in the upstairs of our house, we are awaiting the arrival of the new egress window for the basement bedroom. Until that is here and installed, then the drywall sanded, nothing is unpacked because the dust will re-emerge.

    Within the boxes are the real collections, my favorite of which is jars, canning and otherwise, dating from 1873 (on the jar) until the present. Most of the jars came from the basements and root cellars of family members. I could never bear to throw them away as so many did. So now they populate my house and office.

    There are other collections, as well, the most prolific being dog hair.

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  2. I make my own collection of music on CD’s. First a theme and then a musical selection usually by title. Weather, sports, female and male names, transportation, animals, cities, states, countries, communications, specific words, languages, etc. I had to buy an external drive for the computer to fit the thousands of song titles I have borrowed from the library. Please do not turn me in to the authorities for illegal copying. I don’t sell the product. They are for personal use only.

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    2. i love borrowing the library collection for the same reason. i am hguilty of having lost my collections so many times i have to admit i still like the vivyl out tin the garage. it doesnt have the plus side of being able to hold 1000’s of them in a little electronic box but i do like the real sound and feel and i have discovered 20 minutes of a particular taste of music is often about right. if i have 4 hours i like 8 or 10 variants instead of 1 long dive into who ever. i did however do a harry nilssen dive yesterday after bir mentioning the point and found that wonderful but then youtube transitioned while i was away and when i got back they were playing bruce springsteen. i dont know where i would go after harry nilssen but i dont think it would have been the boss.

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      1. tim, hennepin county library has this thing where you can log into your account, then log into Freegal – where you can download 5 songs a week. For Free. And you can keep them. And it’s legal.

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  4. my collections started as a kid with baseball cards then went to bottles and then to records. i loaned out my favorites to a friend after her house was broken into and lo and behold it was broken into again. so i have taken 40 years to remember which ones i really liked and today you can get just about anything on the internet. harry is the most recent amazon purchase about a year ago coincidently. harry nilssen did an album called harry that showed his picture on the fornt and i loved it. it got lost in the loan 40 years ago and i never never see it in garage sales or at record stores so i was pleased to find it for about 4 bucks on amazon and have listened to it 5 or 6 times in the last year or two that i have had it. i bought a collection of jazz form the father of my banker who was a late night jazz disc jockey in rochester about 1960 or 70 johnson was his last name, john or bob or something generic. he has it donw to a science. 3 ring binders spelling out the different labels the same recording was published under in different countries. big band, be bop, the swing orchestras, i was never a big fan but dudes like percy granger were white boys with some kinda soul. and duke and count basie were the guys who taught them how to orchestrate with a minor chord on those horns and carinets and it was a cool time.
    i have since rekindled my hat collection to epic proportions and have the problem today of no apprecaiting them as mch as i once did because they ar ea part of my business life. i have thousands and am an expert in some areas of hat micro nutia. coats and shoes to a point. prarie home companion cds form the 80’s and 90’s with some crap cassetter recorder are fun to relive. i have unsorted collections that i will likely leave to my kids who will shake their heads and throw them in the dumpster. too bad but… maybe they will figure out that there is a life in doing what you love and putting it on the internet. today you dont have to leave your kitchen table to be the worlds greatest expert on a subject. good new bad news.
    a weekend for collections….. remember those tin soldiers. sting ray bicycles, decoder rings,
    the twins are celebrating the 50th anniversary of being in the world series against the la dodgers this year and it seems like that is reliving the stuff that happened yesterday. i sell lots of hats form the 40’s and 50’s i remind people they arent perfect but damn theyre 60 70 80 years old. they are pretty good.

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  5. Is it true that the definition of a collection is having more than one of something? So…while others my age are talking about cleaning and clearing their homes and collections, I hang on to mine but am not actively pursuing. When I was young and everything I owned fit in the back of my convertible, I still had room for the books. I don’t have thousands, but I do have more than the book shelves hold. Then I started collecting houseplants. I have plants from my great-grandmother; plants from the 1960s that a friend gave me when he moved from Denver; two Jade trees I nurtured from that same time. I won’t count the live chickens and goats. Baskets which increased in number when my mother died and I inherited hers. I also inherited her collection of canes, some with bird handles, horse handles, some with carved and painted pictures. Several have come in handy as I recover from physical therapy on my leg and hip. I love the shape of jars and bottles, pitchers, boxes. I want lots of pictures on my walls, especially if it is art created by a friend.
    I’m not exactly a hoarder but I do like to collect things.

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  6. At first I was going to say I really don’t collect anything anymore, but then I saw Jacques comment about the jars.

    I do have quite a few nice old ones and especially like the old blue ones.

    I should really get rid of a lot of the plastic in the house and put those to use instead.

    I also have a real weakness for old needlework tools. I don’t think of them as a collection, because I also like to use them, but I do like them for themselves as well.

    New foster kitty at our house. Very shy and fierce bit of black fluff. She has yet to come out of the carrier. The resident delinquents are intrigued.

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      1. The resident felines make it really clear, “this little pest isn’t staying, right?”

        Our newest little warrior princess has eaten and used the facilities-otherwise the only reason you know she’s in there is the glaring eyes and little pink mouth wide open for a very quiet hiss.

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  7. Music boxes. But I can’t abide the ones with a tinny sound. Has to be good quality music. The curio is full, though, so NO MORE, please. Well, unless it is the one from Kathe Wohlfahrt’s Christmas Store in Stillwater. The one that plays “We Are The World” and is a globe with a ring of kids of different nationalities holding hands and circumventing the equator. I visit it every summer in the shop.
    I’ll make room for that one. You come up with the $2,000.

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  9. I used to have a wall filled with books and several cabinets filled with CDs, but didn’t see either of them as a “collection.” When I redecorated my home, I did assemble a modest collection of Arts and Crafts pottery.

    Almost none of that made the move to Oregon. I have a bookshelf the size of a fridge, but 99 percent of the books, CDs and pottery stayed in Minnesota.

    Which is good. When Cynthia and I have our virtual wedding, she won’t have to make room for my old stuff. It sounds like she still has enough for a household. Don’t worry about wedding gifts, although a few virtual gifts are always welcome.

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  10. Nice job, Vs; Dream Pastries sounds like a haven for dessert lovers. I have one question, though, and I’m not trying to be a smartass (not that that usually takes much of an effort), but shouldn’t it be “we seriously overestimated our ability” rather than “seriously underestimated our ability”?

    Collection! Do I have any? What kind of question is that? Of course I do, but not in any organized and systematic way,

    I love pottery, so have lots of pottery. Still adding to that collection as most of my pottery get used a lot. That means the occasional piece get chipped or broken and needs to be replaced. I have had several good friends who were wonderful potters who have long since passed away. I’m particularly fond of their pieces, and I treat them with great care. It’s a comfort to me to know that each of these pieces have passed through the hands of someone that was important in my life.

    Cookbooks are another passion, and despite the fact that I have too many of them, I still add the occasional ethnic one. The latest addition is Yolele! Recipes from the heart of Senegal.

    As a direct result of the cookbook collection, I also have a serious collection of spices. These get used most every day, and I don’t really consider them a collection, but I certain have way more than two.

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    1. I don’t have a hard time parting with cookbooks that I own but that I know I never use or even peruse. Sometimes I buy a cookbook, and it doesn’t turn out to be what I had expected or hoped, and then I’ll part with it again.

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      1. Corn, sweet peppers (yellow and orange), beans (green and yellow), scallions, 9-grain bread and a chocolate almond pastry. Petted at least 15 dogs!

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        7. No, but I’ve always wondered how the term got so popular with low end retailers. Wilhelm Reich used Dorbuster as the name for his energy-releasing therapeutic device. Did some copywriter unwittingly appropriate Reich’s terminology?

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  12. I have a lot of unmatched pottery. I have a hard time resisting a piece with a nice heft to it and an interesting glaze. I bought a set of mixing bowls at an art fair when I was about 19 or 20, and have managed to not break them all these years. There’s a couple of lovely batter bowls in different sizes, a little egg cooker, a cheese plate, a bread baker, assorted plates and tumblers. I might have been a potter in a previous life.

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    1. Most of my pottery is unmatched as well, although I do have a very nice collection of cups by my friend Martye Allen, a potter whose work is unmistakable. She i northern Wisconsin, up near Steve’s old cabin.

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  13. Not everything of which we have an accumulation do I consider a collection. We have a lot of pottery, some of it Japanese and some of it by local potters but I’ve never thought of it as a collection. We have a lot of CDs as well, and some vinyl, but I don’t think of that as a collection either. Even our many books are not in my mind a collection, though I have some specific subgroupings that I do consider collections.
    We are both collectors by nature and always have been, I think. Some collections we have retained and some have lived with us a while and then dispersed. I had a collection of about 35 vintage toasters once, but it just took up too much room. I had a collection of 78 RPM records and several wind-up phonographs for a while but I let that go also. My collection of images related to 19th century theater has been interesting in that, because I have them posted online, I get requests for their use in publications. As a result, I have a small collection of books in which my images have been used.

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        1. What a fabulous collection. Where do you find such photos and how long have you been collecting them, Bill?

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        3. A lot of it has to do with timing. It was once possible to buy whole collections on eBay in a single transaction; now the images are offered singly and at a price considerably higher than I paid per piece. Nowadays, I occasionally add an image or two to fill in gaps in the collection but much of it has gotten too rich for my resources.
          Regarding my policy of making the images available on request, it’s my feeling that I don’t own the image itself, only a copy. There are other collectors that jealously watermark any image they post and collections that charge for use of their copy of the image, but I prefer to have the role in enabling their use.

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        4. What do you mean by “filling in gaps” in your collection? Is there some sort of list of actors and actresses that must be included for the collection to be considered complete? Or are you talking gaps in time? I intrigued by the range of your interests.

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        5. When I say, “filling in gaps” I mean that there are certain actors or actresses that interest me that are unrepresented or underrepresented in the collection. Certainly the collection will never be “complete”. I am mainly interested in the ones whose names I recognize, the ones associated with the New York, Boston or Philadelphia stage and ones with a national following. Part of the fascination of a collection like this, for me, is the research required to appreciate it. I have many reference books and contemporary biographies to provide me with the backstories of these personalities.

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        8. Is there a way to search your collection for particular people? Are they mostly Americans?

          It’s quite wonderful.

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      3. Madislandgirl, no search capability on the Flickr site. The actors are American or foreigners who performed extensively in America. Is there any one in particular you would search for?

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  14. I like to think I don’t do much collecting any more, but then I walk around the house. As someone above has alluded to, there is a fine line between “accumulate” and “collect”, so I have just started typing several things that I have now deleted.

    If we replace “pottery” with “bowls” in PJ’s comment above, you pretty much have my main collections – bowls, cookbooks, and spices. I also love cool boxes and containers, anything with a special lid – little cases for (say) doll clothes, some cigar boxes… a “useful pot to put things in.”

    Maybe we should have a day on the blog when we post pictures of things we are looking for to complete our collections. Would that work, if you send me a link – I am always looking at thrift shops for pieces of my grandma’s everyday dishes (I have one platter), for example.

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  15. Collecting more grey hair trying to get the boy on the bus.

    Took a half hour to make a 10 minute drive becayse you can’t get there from here and neither can anyone else.

    So we were late for the bus, but that’s ok because the bus is a half hour late, make that 45″, an hour, 1:15….

    Then the driver refuses to take a solo 16-year-old.

    Greyhound agent had seats on the bus leaving in the next half hour. Gave us a discount as he says that driver is full-od-it and he felt we had suffered enough.

    So now we are waiting for that bus.

    Farmer’s Market will be closed by the time I could get over there.

    I may need a slice of rhubarb pie after this.

    Side note: the rhubarb elderflower popsicles by St. Pops are excellent, plan to try to duplicate this week.

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    1. I can understand the bus driver wanting some kind of assurance or proof that an unaccompanied teen has permission to go, especially in view of the recent runaway teen who absconded with $6,000 of her parents’ cash. But to refuse him when you were right there, that’s insane. It’s not as if he needed a babysitter.

      Last night husband and I were at the Minnesota Zoo to attend a Jerry Jeff Walker concert. Halfway down the path to the amphitheater you must show a driver’s license or other ID in order to obtain a bracelet that allows you to purchase a beer or wine at the venue. I hadn’t brought my purse since husband drove. Would you believe they wouldn’t give me a bracelet? No siree bob, no dice; no bracelet. As if I don’t look a day over nineteen.

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      1. The guy was over an hour late due to having a tough time finding a road he could actually drive on with all the closings in the area, so he was probably irritated in the first place (I can relate).

        I see in their FAQs it says you must be 17, but I’m not seeing it when you buy the tickets (s&h did this transaction himself- I’m working on getting him to take care of his own details-but we had looked at the booking info together before this).

        It simply did not occur to me thos would be an issue. Greyhound, it turns out, is fine with 15-year-olds.

        For the record, the driver wasn’t checking ids or anything.

        I have a bottle of wine saved for just such an occasion :).

        And warrior princess actually let me pick her up (bundled in a blankie) and stroke her little head, so things are looking up!

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        2. Yes she is. I’m impressed she is ok with a little bit of handling. The goal is to put her down before she struggles. So far, so good.

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        3. When I got Zorro, he didn’t want to be handled at all. So every time I walked through a room and saw him, I scooped him up and then immediately put him down, before he even had a chance to react. After about a month, I’d pick him up and take a few steps, then put him down. Then a few weeks later, more steps. So 15 years later I can carry him all over the house, but if I stop moving, it’s time to get down!

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        4. Some cats just don’t like to be handled. Martha is one of those. She’ll let you know if she wants attention, and she’ll let you know, too, if she doesn’t. She’ll often initiate petting, and then when she’s had enough, she says so.

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        5. Oddly enough, this little girl will just on my lap for quite a while.

          I think she is possibly just petrified, but she doesn’t shake or struggle. She hates being In too much space and will flee to safety if she feels too exposed.

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        8. I had a male cat who did not like to be handled at all (maybe because I tried to put ear mite medicine in his ears in his early years) until the dog died and he was the last cat left in the house, then he became my best buddy and even started sleeping with me and letting me pet him…not to discourage you but he was about 13 or 14 then.

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        9. Well Cynthia, we are fostering only, so I have a week to at least sort of bring her ’round, maybe more. We’ll see.

          Our Princess Beatrice was a shy kitty too. She is still skittish with most people, but is quite cuddley with me. I suspect the same will be true for this little girl when she gets to her forever home.

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  16. Having been married to a small-time hoarder, his collecting overwhelmed me. He dumpster-dove, roamed garage sales, pick up stuff by the road, and did warehouse sales to find his treasures. He had every cupboard, drawer, closet, and the garage overflowing with his stuff. He crammed things behind the knee wall upstairs, over heating ducks in the basement, and, when no more room existed in the house, began making piles in the backyard (which he’d cover with blue tarps).

    I resisted making the decision to move to the cottage strictly due to not being able to even imagine where all of his garbage would go. A garage sale effort only resulted in about 1/4 of the stuff bought. His problem (which became mine as well) was that for every item he sneaked into the house, there was some far-fetched, crazy plan to some day make use of. He deemed himself an artist; there were a hundred mouse traps and five fog-making machines for a project making a giant domino while fog and lights surrounded them snapping as he tipped the first one. Another art project involved six blenders and seven toasters. He had a habit once he thought of a new idea of hauling in multiples of the same thing.He deemed himself a photographer; there were a dozen cameras, projectors, and developing equipment. It didn’t help that he was ADHD.

    I divorced him 11 years ago partly so that I could finally live a simple, uncluttered life, but it took me until half a year ago to finally deal with his leftovers. Not to my amazement and while my massive de-cluttering binge a few months ago, I found his finds crammed into the many high storage spaces that were out of my sightline and reach. There, I found seven old broken phone answering systems, two dozen games the grand kids never played, 23 pairs of ices skate, etc. etc.

    So, no, I have no collections, probably because I’m still trying to get rid of someone else’s.

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  17. I have a fine collection of, er, science experiments, in the refrigerator. I like to see how long it takes leftovers to grow fuzz and also it’s a good test of my memory, not only of what is in a certain container, but when it was originally cooked or purchased.

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      1. I’ve experienced that once, but NOT in my own refrigerator. That’s taking “science experimentation” to a whole new level. Don’t particularly want to go there.

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  18. OT: picked up son, d-I-l, grandson at airport. Went to Hells Kitchen for lunch. Waiting for table bar tender came by dripping blood. He stepped on a broken glass drove it through sole of shoe into foot. They call paramedics.

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  19. We have very nice neighbors and the wife collects antique books on homemaking. (There may be be a different order to her collection as I certainly haven’t inspected it all). When they’re on vacation and we’re collecting their mail she probably gets 4 books / week.
    (The collection is all nicely arranged on nice shelves and a few laid out as ‘coffee table’ books. I mean we’re talking 1000’s of antique books plus a whole wall of regular books and then other misc bookshelves in the house.
    It’s not ‘cluttered’ by any means… but they have a LOT of books.
    And the basement walls are kids or teens books.)
    So once I found an old book at a garage sale, put a note in it with the date, waited until they were on vacation and we were housing sitting again and slipped into the middle of a random pile.
    A week later she emailed me thanking me for the book.
    She said she does in fact go through the collection fairly regularly and rearrange.
    I’m impressed.

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    1. That is impressive, Ben. I have found that I do much better if my collections are severely restricted in size. Otherwise I just get overwhelmed. I used to think of my books as my friends, but as I got more and more books, I felt their presence as more of an accusation of neglect instead of a friendly welcome. As I’ve cut down on the number, I’m more comfortable around them. This is true of other things, too – for me, less is better. So I’m impressed that your neighbor can manage such a large collection.

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  20. Among my books I have a large number of books on gardening. It isn’t a major collection However, it does contain what I consider to be some of the best books on gardening published in recent years.

    The recorded music that I own includes a selection of some of the best Jazz recordings available in the sixties and late fifties. During those years I was a regular reader of Down Beat Magazine which included reviews of most of the recording produced during that time. I read the reviews and then bought many of the ones that I thought I would like to hear. More recently my taste in music has branched out and I haven’t added very many recordings to my jazz collection.

    For the last 30 years I have been accumulating a fairly large collection of mostly rare vegetable seeds which I grow out and exchange with other seed collectors. I keep these seeds under good storage conditions and many are only grown every third or fourth year to keep the seed fresh. My top favorites are grown almost every year.

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    1. Sometime, I’d like to see your list of the best gardening books

      Actually, that might be a fun blog. Choose a subject you know pretty well and give your top favorite books on that subject.

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      2. My favorite is The Garden Primer by Barbara Damrosch followed by some of Eliot Coleman’s book and also The Four Season Farms Gardener’s Cookbook by Damrosch and Coleman which has excellent gardening information and very good recipes

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    1. Cute little town. We also had dinner at a little place called Angies. They made all their own pasta and we ate out on the patio. Some local brew for me meant the Young Adult got to drive my car. Good times for all!

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  22. Well dear Baboons, this day just keeps giving.

    Just got a call from my neighbor’s nephew as they took her to the hospital this morning (while we were waiting for that bus).

    She turns 90 on Tuesday, God willing.

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    1. I hope you found your rhubarb pie. It may not fix everything but it does make life worth living during a tough day.

      I just completed a dog bath. We had both dogs groomed last week: baths, nails clipped, glands expressed. So of course, Lucky, whose name really should be “Trouble” rolled in something dead this afternoon.

      She thought she smelled great.

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  23. I drove 1200 miles since Thursday morning -Dickinson to Brookings on Thursday, Brookings to Grand Forks and back to Fargo on Friday , Fargo to Dickinson today. I am tired. I will post more tomorrow.

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  24. I have a “collection” of five Tomtens made of wool felt from sheep from the island of Gotland. They have wooly beards and red hats. I certainly don’t need any more. Does something count as a collection if you stop collecting? Husband collects hymnals. My mother collected china birds and china bells. I agonized over them and them had the auction company take them when we cleaned out their condo. My dad seemed to collect tools. “If one is good, six are better was his motto”. Same thing with flashlights, clocks, watches, and drill bits (except we have dozens of drill bits.)

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  25. Dear Baboons-we lost our dear neighbor and adopted grandma late last night.

    It is the end of an era and sort of a way of life fir my little corner of St Paul. I’ll be spending the day doing yard work and talking to neighbors.

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    2. So, so sorry, mig. The suddenness of the loss is staggering. Meditating in the garden seems like a sound strategy for reflecting on your grief.

      Say not in grief ‘she is no more’ but live in thankfulness that she was’
      Hebrew proverb

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    3. Losing a treasured neighbor is very difficult and disruptive. I will be thinking of you and the loss today. I am also thinking of how much your neighbor must have treasured you and s&h.

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    4. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
      ~Khalil Gibran

      Our thoughts and love are with you and s&h!

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      1. The toughest bit will be telling the s&h when he gets home. I don’t see any reason ro disrupt his vacation in Madison. We will have a long time to get used to this.

        He will take it on the chin like he does everything, but it will just keep cropping up for the coming year.

        I really thought she would be here to see him graduate.

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