Easter Eggs

While I was frolicking around my brand new slab on Friday, a few things caught my eye that I thought y'all might like.

First, remember that awesome hot pink bird wallpaper in the bathroom?  Look what's peeking out from under it:

I might love that even more that the pink birds, except that I want to see more of it, and I can't bring myself to tear the bird paper to see the rest of the green tile-like design.  I've been pricing antique wallpaper on the Internet.  I might have a problem.

Next, I found this in a pile of broken and to-be-carted-off cinderblocks.  

I washed it, but it's still more clear in person; that's a random chunk of marble.  That top-right edge is beautifully cut (Google tells me it's a DuPont edge.  I'm going to have to learn more about that stuff), and to the touch, you can tell that it was once polished.  It's riding around in the back of my car if you want to check it out.  

I'm not sure where it came from, but I think it might have been in a stack of stone leveling the piers that the house's beams are resting on (we got these new ones poured with the foundation for a few of the back ones). Is it from a furniture piece, I wonder, or did there used to be marble in the bathroom or kitchen?  

My favorite find required me to poke around under the house a little.  I was careful, I promise.  Since the back of the house came off I've been able to see, from afar, a pipe (cold water?) that appeared to be wrapped in bits of something, and I've been curious.  Under-the-house is possum territory though, so my curiosity has stopped where encounters with Rodents Of Unusual Size might begin.  They more recently cut some holes in the floor to fix up the foundation, and I was able to check out this pipe a little more:

Definitely wrapped in newspaper.  Mostly so fragile that it just shattered at my touch.  But luck was with me:

This chunk of headline is pretty stable.

The Houston Chronicle from Tuesday, January 7, 1932.  

It's like a warm Grandma-hug, to me, to think about the guys who originally lived in my house carefully wrapping their pipes in newspaper against the cold of that long-ago January.  It amazes me to think that the brittle newspaper did such a great job of insulating the pipes that 82 years later I was able to successfully get water from my sink on 30 degree mornings.  The power of human engineering is on display every day in Space City, but the power of simple stewardship, of maintenance, of love and home and coziness, has been underpinning that innovation for a long time.  And there's your grandiose thought for the day.  Happy Easter!