Tess and I went back to the barn and finished it up!  Not that it doesn’t need reinforced, rebuilt, and rechinked, but we’ve done what we can until someone helps us put chicken wire up to stop critters from getting into the tack room.  (unfortunately, lots of things like chewing on the salt residue left by sweaty horses!)

Vernon helped us hang a new medicine cabinet, the last was built from an old Carnation Condensed Milk crate that was weak and small.

While clearing out the old… We found some neat items…

An old Hudson pump sprayer.  Two cans of Rawleigh’s antiseptic powder. Spohn’s Compound… “good for man or beast”.  An unknown powder from Virgil Humphrey’s vet clinic, “add one level teaspoon to horse’s feed”… Johnny thinks it was for “heaves”.

But my find that I now have sitting in my kitchen window…

That cool bottle on the right!  It has just the slightest purple tint, having been buried in a corner under hay and dust for who knows how long!  It did have a partial cork still in it, and nothing on the fragments of the label was legible.  It appears to be hand blown, or at least made by a poor mold as it sits slightly crooked.

Manganese dioxide was used in glass until around World War I to create clear, instead of greenish glass.  Put the glass in UV light, though, and it turns purple.  Remember me slicing my finger open a few weeks ago looking for “desert glass”?  Well, here’s a complete bottle!  You do realize that makes this bottle 100 years old?

It’s now living in my dirty kitchen window… catching lots of UV rays to deepen its purple tint.

I’d say that makes a good ending to the barn story!

I’m done!