Journal: Grandchildren, Cats, & Christmas Shopping

Remember last week’s story of Carolyn and Violet helping hold the hymnbook, and ‘singing along’ (silently, only moving their mouths)?  Well, I finally remembered to look at our church service online, and see if the cameramen had happened to zero in on Larry or Victoria during the song service.

Sure enough, they had, though not right whilst the hilarity was occurring.  Can you tell Carolyn and Grandpa like each other?

A friend asked, “How many grandchildren do you have, Sarah Lynn?  Do you ever get their names confused?”

We have 23 grandchildren, 6 step-grandchildren, and 2 step-great-grandchildren.  No, I don’t get their names confused – or at least no more so than I did my own children.

I once yelled, “Aleutia, stop that!” at Keith, our oldest.  Aleutia was our big ol’ Siberian husky.

The kids went into peals of laughter.

You know, it’s really hard to gather all that wind back into one’s sails and re-yell with the same degree of enthusiasm as one did the first time, after such an ignominious blunder.

Speaking of ignominious blunders, this one regarding sewing matters, I once sewed a single-flap zipper into a skirt, just as I had done hundreds of times before (or so I thought).  When it was done and I removed the basting stitches, ... ???  Where was the zipper?  It was behind yet another mysterious seam!  On the inside of the skirt, it looked perfect.  On the outside of the skirt, it looked perfect, too – except the zipper didn’t show.

Never ever did figure out how I did that.

Then there was the time I was sewing with a friend.  She cut the skirt wrong, making it a bit too short.  “Not to worry,” I consoled her; “We’ll just run to K-Mart and get a fabric stretcher.”

And she started gathering up her coat and purse.  🤣

Tuesday evening after supper, Larry was outside working on his pickup.  It was getting late when I heard him banging away on something.  I sent him a text:  “Noisy!  And it’s 10:30 p.m.!”

His phone played its notification jingle – over there on the other side of the table.

If he kept up that racket, I would have to march out there on my pedal hoofers and tell him, personally, mouth to ear, that he was waking the dead.  Or the neighbors.  He can’t hear well, so he generally has no idea how loud he’s being (or at least he pretends he has no idea).

Fortunately, he soon hung it up for the night and came in.  It’s hard for him to quit, when he’s soooo close to having it done.   

Wednesday, the Question of the Week on one of the online quilting groups was, “What’s the best thing you’ve ever stitched…for yourself?”

I’m not sure if this is THE favorite thing I ever sewed for myself, but it’s definitely in the top 5:  a Vogue suit jacket and skirt that I made of light lavender linen with dark purple suede upper collar and covered buttons. The skirt was also light lavender, but I cut it shorter than the pattern shows and attached an 8” band of narrow pleats at the bottom. I made a silk blouse to go with it in blended tones of purple, lavender, plum, and forest green.  I made a little matching suit and blouse for Dorcas, who was 2.  We wore the outfits to Larry’s brother’s wedding.  Hannah, 3, was the flowergirl.

Thursday, I went to the bank (why can they never, ever get all the signatures and initials on any documentation the first time?!  Maybe they should have one signature covering everything, instead of signatures and/or initials for every last piece of tomfoolery they can dream up), then to the post office, and finally to the Salvation Army to drop off two heavy boxes of 33 rpm vinyl records.  We’ve saved all those songs first to cassette, then digitally, years ago, and got rid of our turntable almost as long ago.  If we haven’t listened to vinyl records for 35 years, I’d say there’s a dim possibility we’ll be doing it any time soon.  Maybe somebody will venture into the Salvation Army and find himself a treasure trove of 33 rpm vinyls.  So now there’s a nice empty spot in our closet for Larry’s newest pair of boots.

That evening, we had chicken eggrolls, asparagus, and mangoes for supper.  We no sooner sat down than Tiger was begging for food from Larry.  The cats know he’s a milquetoast, and I’m more likely to say, “Don’t bother me; I’m eating!”  I’m not nearly so generous with my food.

When Tiger first showed up here, he didn’t know anything at all about table scraps.  He would never, ever take anything from our hands.  But now he will, every now and then, vewy, vewy carefully.

Larry looked at the cat, then at his plate.  He sniffed at it.  “These don’t smell that much like chicken!” he remarked.

“Tiger thinks the sound of silverware on stoneware smells like chicken!” I told him.  😂

Later that night, I hemmed the pants, put buttons on the suit jacket sleeves, and opened all the pockets on my brother-in-law John H.’s new suit.  It’s a $2,000 suit that they got on sale for a very good price at Dillard’s.  It’s made of the finest Merino wool, and both the wool and the suit were made in Italy.  The fabric is very fine, very thin, and I had a hard time keeping my stitches from showing.  In fact they do show a little bit, even though I was careful to catch just one thread for each stitch.  Nothing to be done for it but to hide them as much as possible, and keep them even.  (picture from the Dillard’s website)

Friday, since I would be going to town to take the suit to Lura Kay, I gathered up a couple more bags of stuff for the Goodwill.  I’m really on a throw-it-out-or-donate-it spree.  Larry’s getting nervous I’ll run out of stuff in the house and start zeroing in on his stuff out in the garage!

He also warned me not to get John H.’s suit mixed in with the donation stuff.  😲

Once upon a time, one early autumn, I took all our dry-clean-only winter coats to the laundromat to be cleaned.  Three or four days later, I went to pick them up. 

I’d been cleaning the house, and had filled the back of the Yukon with stuff for the Goodwill.  (You already know exactly what’s going to happen, don’t you?)

Now, of course I should’ve taken the stuff to the Goodwill first, but the trouble was, you see, the laundromat was about to close, and there wasn’t a minute to spare – and we needed those coats, because the temperature was going to drop like a rock the next day.

I picked up the coats, put them into the Yukon, drove to the Goodwill, and unloaded the Jetsam and Flotsam, A-One, First-Class Stuff and Things.

Then home again, home again, jiggety-jig we went.

The next day, as advertised, it was cold.  I realized we had forgotten the freshly-cleaned coats in the Yukon.  I pulled on a jacket and trotted outside to retrieve them.

I opened the back door of the Yukon...

It was empty.

I blinked, and stared harder.

It was still empty.

I leaped into the vehicle and hotfooted it (hotwheeled it?) back to the Goodwill, where I told them my tale of woe, and asked if I could please, please, have our family’s coats back.

They assured me that I could of course have them, but I’d have to find them myself.  They let me into their storage room, and there I faced a multitude of gigantic boxes, each of them big enough to hold a concert grand piano.

Aaarrrggghhh.

Thankfully, one of the ladies had a good idea which box had most recently been filled, and directed me to it. 

I peeped over the edge of that box and stared down into mountains of clothes, many still in bags.  I stretched an arm down inside, gingerly plucked up a bag, repositioned it.  I kept going on that side until I could reach no farther, moved to the opposite side, and began repeating the process, wondering if I would eventually just have to climb right on into that box. 

Upon moving two or three bags, I suddenly spotted a bit of black fur showing through a thin, clear, plastic bag.  I dived at it, hope springing afresh.

It was my coat!  And under it, all the rest of the children’s coats, and Larry’s, too!

With great relief, I pulled the bag out, thanked the ladies profusely for letting me have them back, and headed back home.  I would henceforth take great care to see that that never happened again.

Friday evening, we sat down to eat.  We were having a garlic chicken skillet dinner from Schwan’s.  Tiger promptly came begging from Larry.  “MRRROOOWWW!!!” he begged plaintively in his gravelly voice.

Larry glanced at him, looked at his food, thought about how hungry he was, and said petulantly, “But Tiger, I just sat down!”

Tiger looked as woebegone as a Tiger kitty can possibly look and responded quite clearly, “Ohhhhhhh.”

Larry and I laughed and laughed, while Tiger stared at us reproachfully.

Larry then cracked, and gave Tiger a small piece of his garlic chicken.  (Tiger knew he would.)

I never did get to sleep Friday night, although there were a couple of times when I alllllmost fell asleep.  After not quite 3 ½ hours of trying, I gave up, got up, made the bed, and went for my morning ablutions and shampoo.  😏🙄😶

Victoria sent an audio clip of Violet, age 1, looking at a picture of a tiger: 

Violet growls ferociously.  “Is it a tiger?” asks Victoria.  Violet growls even more ferociously.  “Can you say ‘tiger’?” queries Victoria.  And Violet, in a sweet little voice that sounds like a totally different person, says carefully and softly, “TI-ger.”

She’s so funny.  One would never guess that it’s the same little girl who did the big scary growling, now saying ‘Tiger’ in that sweet soft tone.  hee hee

Saturday, I got nearly all the Christmas presents ordered for our family.  I ordered everything from J. C. Penney’s, and because I made a new account and got a store credit card, I got 25% off – and then I got another 25% off because of a Thanksgiving promotion they are running.  A few things were on sale already.  I wound up getting over 50% off on many items.

Hannah and Levi stopped by that evening on their way home from Kearney, where they’d shown their Lilla Rose hairclips, etc., at a crafts and trade event.  Hannah had some gifts for Larry that she’d gotten from other vendors, including homemade buns, chokecherry jelly, and this nifty wooden moose puzzle.

On our way home from church last night, the snow started coming down, and by the time we were on the last mile, it was snowing fairly hard.  The wind was blowing over 30 mph.  It was 21°, with a wind chill of 8°.  Tonight will be even colder; it’s already down to 3°, and the wind chill is -6°.

A friend’s kitty died a couple of days ago, and she’s feeling badly about it.  We get so thoroughly attached to our pets, it really does hurt when they go.

18 ½ years ago, our Siberian husky Aleutia died.  We used to give her the peanut butter jar when it was almost empty, so she could lick it out.  To this day, I remember and miss that dog licking her chops, slurping, and looking up at us hopefully when she heard that particular sound of a knife scraping a nearly-empty peanut butter jar.

As I was editing pictures, Larry, peering over my shoulder, spotted this one.

“What did you say that made me grin like that?” he asked.

“You always look like that,” I told him.

He laughed.  “Maybe I just want everyone to see my new teeth!”  😁

This morning I filled the bird feeders.  Brrrr, it was cold out there, and the snow tumbled in over the tops of my slippers.  Before I got back inside to the window, the perches were again full of finches and sparrows, and juncos scratched about on the railings and deck, gathering up all the spilled seed.  Every now and then a blue jay came swooping in, and the little songbirds skedaddled.

I just finished the Christmas shopping.  I was able to use J. C. Penney's rewards points from Saturday’s orders, which deducted $50 from the total.  They were having a Veterans Day sale, and that gave me 35% off since I ordered over $100 worth of merchandise.  Then, because the final amount before taxes was over $99, I got free shipping.  All this, combined with some items that were already on sale, saved me $270.27, and my total was only $128.43.

It’s Veterans Day.  I am thankful our son Joseph made it back from Iraq with only a couple of broken eardrums and residual hearing loss.  The tank he was in hit a mine, and the explosion upended the tank and killed two of his friends.

I just wrote to Victoria, “How would you spell it, using the ol’ phonics system, the way Carolyn says Grandpa Jackson?”

She wrote back, “Gampa Gan.”

hee hee  It’s so cute, the way she talks.  “How does she say ‘Grandpa and Grandma’?  What about ‘Brinkman’?” (her own last name)

“Sometimes she says Gampa Gamma Gan for Grandpa and Grandma,” Victoria told me.  “All Grandpas and Grandmas are Gampa/Gamma Gan... they sound too similar.”  😆

One night after church, we were walking out together, with Carolyn holding my hand.  She pointed at our Jeep and announced, “Gampa Gamma Gan Bpbpbpddmmm-bpbpbpddmm!”

I laughed, “Sure enough!  That’s our Jeep Commander.  Can you say ‘Jeep Commander’?”

“Jeep Mando,” said Carolyn carefully.  Then she wrinkled her nose and grinned.

Look what Kurt and Victoria found at their house a couple of days ago, the day after she posted on Instagram that they wanted to get a toy kitchen for their little girls.

They learned that it came from Kurt’s paternal grandparents, who’d been shopping at a thrift store in York on Saturday.  When they finished shopping and went out, they saw people putting the kitchen into the front store window – so they went right back in again to get it.  😃

Carolyn and Violet are delighted with it.

It is now 1°... but at least the wind has calmed down.  Bedtime!

,,,>^..^<,,,          Sarah Lynn          ,,,>^..^<,,,