u/AmityvilleBay

These were all commissioned by Eric Mihan, founder in 1951 of E.P.M. Steins and The English Shop, a noted Princeton, NJ, clothier that thrived until his death in 1996. Mihan's name appears on the bottom of each stein along with the date (most are copyrighted 1953) and "Made in Germany."

Although I stopped adding Mihans to my collection some 25 years ago to focus more narrowly on pre-Prohibition college and university mugs and steins, I've somehow ended up with 43 of them in my collection -- all different, all between 9" and 10" tall, half without lids (as originally sold), and all now outside my area of concentration. I cannot make a full-time job out of selling them one at a time on eBay, so anyone interested in acquiring them all at once should feel free to DM me. (Continental US only, please.)

Spotted on the used-car lot of a Toyota dealership in New Jersey.

I'm a happy Phonak user, with about four trouble-free years in a pair of Virto P90's.

Trouble-free until now, that is.

My house is in the middle of a conversion from all wall-to-wall carpeting to all hardwood. Spousal Unit has already begun shopping for large rugs and new (heavier) drapes, but it's apparent to me that it'll be months before her efforts have any effect on the acoustics around here.

In the meantime, the best aural metaphor I can come up with is that it feels like I've moved into a snare drum.

I've set up and adjusted programs before using the My Phonak app on my iPhone, but I need advice and hints from other users about which choices I should be exploring. I'm trying to shorten my trial-and-error period somewhat, but also to avoid the uninsured vi$it to my audiologist for what could be a five-minute tweak job on the screen posted above.

The available pre-sets provided by My Phonak are Default, Comfort, Clarity, Speech, and Surrounding. Within each as my baseline, I can select further adjustments by tinkering with these sliders:

Volume (Low > High)

Noise Reduction (Low > High)

Speech Focus (Wide > Narrow)

Dynamic (Decrease Loud > Increase Soft)

I'll be very grateful to hear from any Phonak users or tuners out there – sound engineers and audiophiles, too! – with promising ideas on best settings for my "new normal."

My thanks to all!

(Edited to add: I'll be posting this to r/Phonak as soon as my membership application there is approved by the mods. What's that about?)

This is the wallpaper spousal unit had hung last week on three walls of our small guest bathroom. The circles in the pattern are 5" in diameter, so the one unbroken papered wall, which is 6' long x 8' high looks a bit like an op art installation, with the effect magnified by the opposite wall's 3x4' vanity mirror.

Thankfully the sink/countertop, tub, and toilet are white and the shower alcove is a solid white stone tile, so this slate blue (almost forgot... it matches the new vanity) is really the only color in the room aside from all satin-nickel finish fixtures.

Anyway, the question of what kind of art to hang has arisen, and she's tentatively chosen the attached Impressionist idyll in a 9x12" ornate bronze-gilt frame. I think it gets lost in the wallpaper's sorta Polynesian-adjacent pattern.

Any ideas about what sort of art we might want to consider? Many TIA!

^(* (...with the exception of the three-lobed mug at top center, which appears to be mid-century, perhaps.))