Another Small Treasure

I used to have a TON of these things in the way-back:

Note the imperfections and scouring on/in the glass.  That's the original netting.

It's hard to get a good photo without overwhelming flash.  This is an outtake but I like the way it looks.

That would be a glass Japanese fishing net float, and this particular example was scrounged off of a Japanese beach near Wakkanai, Japan, where literally thousands of these things would wash up on the deserted beaches near the air station.  That was back in the day, of course, said day bein' between 1968 and 1970; this is the sole survivor from those days.  Once upon a time I had about 50 of these floats, many of which looked like this:

The largest float in my collection was at least as large as the one pictured above, and I had about three or four of 'em.  I also gifted my father with a few floats and he kept them out on his patio back in the day.

There's a story behind how I acquired my floats, albeit a short one.  My buds and I would take our mo'sickles to the beach while another friend drove his pick-up behind us.  Once we got about five or ten miles away from the air station we'd park the truck and then take off up the beach on the bikes, which we could ride... unimpeded by anything other than sand dunes... for 20 or more miles.  We'd go on our foraging expeditions at low tide and make a day out of it.  Those were great good days, Gentle Reader... yes, they were. 

Many were the times when we'd return to base with the bed of that pick-up filled with glass floats, and I mean FILLED.  The Deity At Hand only knows how many floats we left lying on the beach... we'd reject "bare" floats (without netting) and the ones we considered undersized.  In case you're wonderin' how we managed to get that many floats back to the truck... we jury-rigged travois-like things on the back of the bikes made from bamboo poles and canvas.  You could haul quite a few balls in those things, but once you were loaded up you had to go kinda slow.  But Hey!  Necessity-invention.

We're gonna run out o' subject matter like this pretty rapidly, coz the artifacts in my personal museum are few and far between.  There was that beer opener I featured back in January; here's another small treasure I posted in the near way-back:

And finally... a remark about our ashtray.  This chromium beauty is an antique of sorts, what with having sat on our father's nightstand since my very earliest memory, which goes back to 1949 or so.  She's a beauty:

This is one of my treasured possessions, albeit one that shows the ravages of time.  The chrome isn't as bright as it used to be and there are pockmarks in the plating.  All that just adds to its beauty though, as far as I'm concerned.  I'm thinking the Ol' Man would appreciate the use this artifact is still getting today.

Yup, small treasures.  We has a few.