Several friends who saw a photo of my
‘gift-wrapping room’ have asked about it, wondering how such a thing came
about.
Before it was a gift-wrapping room, it was my
sewing room; and before that, it was Hester’s bedroom. Before the little library upstairs was a
little library, it was Caleb’s bedroom.
(The grandchildren like that room.)
My quilting studio used to be Victoria’s room.
I do like having a gift-wrapping room. I used to wrap gifts on the living room floor. Yikes, I’d have to use a wheelchair to get
around, after several hours sitting cross-legged or on my knees on the floor,
like I used to do. 😂
When the children were little and we had no
extra rooms, the living room was their playroom. When I took it over as a gift-wrapping room
at Christmas time, they had to retire to far corners and play with things that
wouldn’t get in the way of the gifts.
The smaller kids were happy as larks if I gave them a small pair of
scissors, some wrapping paper discards, some scotch tape, and a few little
things to ‘wrap’. They always wanted to
be doing the same thing I was doing. 😊 Fun times.
One time when our
son-in-law Bobby’s father John was a little boy, his mother was gathering all
her sewing supplies together to make Christmas dresses for her four girls.
She couldn’t find
her good dressmaker shears.
She hunted high and
low, but she simply couldn’t find her scissors.
It was not the day
and age where people bought something they already had, just because they
couldn’t find the item. She got out her
old and very dull scissors, and with a great deal of effort managed to cut the
fabric. Finally the dresses were all sewn,
and duly worn to the Christmas program.
Christmas Eve, the
family gathered around the Christmas tree to exchange gifts. Somewhere in the midst of this, came John
proudly bearing a gift for his mother.
She opened it.
There in the box,
in all their glory, lay her good dressmaker shears.
“Oh!!! My scissors!” she exclaimed.
John beamed. “I knowed
you’d like them!”
Tuesday, I wrapped gifts most of the day. I
took a break once or twice to pay a few bills and order groceries from Wal-Mart
(it’s really nice to have a 50-pound bag of sunflower seeds [for the birds]
delivered right to my front door).
It got up to 50° that day, and was bright and
sunny. There was only a 15-mph breeze,
and the snow outside was perfect for making a snowman. Or
snowballs.
“You
should hide out and wait for Larry to get home and pelt him with snowballs!” a
friend wrote to me.
Haha, wouldn’t he’d be surprised! I
haven’t done that for a while. We used
to have the most rip-roaring snowball fights when we were teenagers. 😂
Finally, late that night, I retired to my recliner and
tucked a heating pad behind my back. Ahhhhh...
And then I remembered that Larry needed some
work clothes washed.
So I scrambled back out of my chair, and soon
a load of clothes was doing spirals and turns in the washing machine. While
I was at it, I watered the houseplants that reside in the laundry room. Now, if I could just stay awake until the
washing machine played its little tune to inform me that the clothes were done
and ready to be put into the dryer. It’s a quiet little ditty, and I was four
rooms away. If I fell asleep, the jingle would blend right into my dreams.
But I found some interesting quilting tutorials
online, and actually stayed awake long enough to do not one, but two
loads of clothes, leaving only one to do the next day.
I dream nearly every night. My dreams are wild and illogical, such as flying
in an airplane somewhere, and then winding up flying – without the airplane.
One minute I might be in a big mall
somewhere (I hardly ever am in a big mall); the next, I’m
stuck in a closet, hiding from marauding wolves. Wild, I tell you.
I go to church without my shoes... and then – click –
I’m in Jr. High again, and I can’t find my locker. I capture a burglar, and then – blink –
he turns into Larry, and we’re about to get married again – but when I get to
the altar, the wrong bridegroom is awaiting me. (One of the times that happened,
I said, “No, I won’t!” angrily, right out loud, and woke
Larry himself right up. He in turn woke me
up, inquiring, “Huh?”)
I dream about airplane crashes... car
crashes... and campers tumbling down mountainsides (whilst I am in them). I’ve dreamed of alien UFOs whizzing around my
head... and fish swimming fiendishly through the room – in the air, sans H2O.
I’ve dreamed about old jobs... but not about
quilting, though time and again I wake up in the morning knowing exactly how to
resolve a sewing or quilting issue I was having the previous night.
Sometimes I awake abruptly, knowing I was
dreaming, and can allllllmost recall the gist of the dream; but the harder I
try to bring it back to consciousness, the more it blurs and drifts away, like
a fog of crystals vanishing in the morning sunlight.
Sleeping brains do funny things.
Wednesday was another pretty, blue-sky day, with
a high of 48°. The birds had gobbled down the last of the black-oil
sunflower seeds, and the 50-lb. bag I’d ordered wouldn’t arrive for another day
or two. Nyjer seed filled one feeder, and there was suet in the wire
cage, but that didn’t satisfy the feathered fowl. I could hear hordes of sparrows, finches,
doves, woodpeckers, cardinals, and blue jays out on the back deck, squabbling
with each other and cooking up evil schemes against me all afternoon.
Thursday night, I finished wrapping gifts, except for three items that haven’t
come yet. The items are on my invoice,
and I was charged for them; but they didn’t arrive. I called J. C. Penney about the matter, and
soon had a refund, with replacements due to be shipped out promptly.
Friday... can you guess
what I was doing?
Did you guess??
After a bit of housecleaning, I headed
upstairs to my quilting studio to work on borders for the Atlantic Beach Path
quilt! Yaaaay!!!
Late that night, I went downstairs to refill
my coffee mug – and discovered
a pile of boxes from UPS – including the pictures I had ordered to put in our Christmas
cards – on the front porch. According to
online tracking, they were delivered at 9:06 p.m. Christmas delivery hours are in full swing,
it seems.
Two of the boxes were from Wal-Mart – a
smallish one, and a gigantic one holding the aforementioned 50-lb. bag of
sunflower seeds, which Larry lugged in for me.
One of the things in the small box was a bag of loose-leaf tea called Tiesta Tea Passion Berry Jolt. It has freeze-dried passion fruit, pineapple,
cornflowers, marigold petals, and raspberry bits in it. I did not notice when I ordered it that the
description said, ‘High Caffeine Energizer Blend’. I promptly made myself a cup. It was mmm-mmm, good.
With a fresh, steaming cup of tea, I headed
back upstairs, and finished attaching two more borders to the Atlantic Beach
Path quilt. The narrower border
(3/8") is a flange or fold. The
quilt now measures 103.5" x 104.5".
There are at least three more borders to go.
Before hitting the hay, I took a quick look at
my computer for messages – and found a post from a new member on my MeWe quilting
group which read, “I want you to join my group – ” and she listed a group where
she sells her crafts.
I deleted the post and removed her from our
group without a word to her. Too bad, so sad. She should’ve known
better. After all, the introductory
paragraph to our group clearly states, “We prefer that members not use our
group to post invites to other groups or sales venues.”
I wonder why people think that’s acceptable
etiquette on the Internet? They’re
probably the same rude people who spot a Tupperware party going on next door,
and trot over to tell everyone to come to their Mary Kay party instead. 😂
Saturday, I worked on border #4 for the
Atlantic Beach Path quilt. Cutting,
sewing together, and pleating 129 inches of this 3.5" border took almost 6
hours. What was once 129" is now
less than 60". I need 420 finished
inches.
Larry wondered why I hadn’t used my Amanda Jane pleater. My
pleater/smocker won’t make tucks that wide or that far apart, and I wanted each
tuck stitched down. The pleater would make the border too thick to suit me,
too.
Oh, well.
It’s fun to sew along pell-mell, one tuck after the other, the only
stipulations being that they are an even distance apart and the stitching the
same distance from the edge. I can
listen to an audio book or music without winding up with blocks askew when the
thot plickens (à la son Caleb, at age 13) and I forget to pay attention to my
sewing. Or I can just have it nice and quiet, with no sound but the
twittering of birds at the feeders.
I’m
going to twist the tucks – one side will be down, the other side up, as they’re
sewn into the adjacent seams, if you know what I mean; and I’ll sew a pearl
here and there on each tuck, so the line of pearls makes S curves along the
length of the border. ? I’m
almost very mostly partly sure that sense made sentence.
Quilting will be a
piano-key effect, but split at the pearls.
Many
were the little dresses I made my girls in years gone by with tucks and pleats
in bodices, sleeves, cuffs, skirts, and so forth, whatever struck my fancy. Fancy strikes again!
Speaking of audio books, a friend and I were
discussing bad readers. She mentioned
one reader she had recently listened to, and declared, “That man shouldn’t be
aloud to read allowed!”
(Read that last sentence carefully.)
“Listen to him, if you dare,” she added.
One of the things that drives me plumb
berserk when people are reading is when they put very noticeable commas – they
could almost do double duty as periods – into sentences where commas are not
wont to go. Ugh, makes me want to slap
them silly. The readers, not the commas. The commas can’t help
it. They didn’t want to be there any more than I wanted them to
be.
Like this:
“One of the things that drives. Me
plumb berserk when, people are reading is. When they put, very noticeable
commas. Into sentences where, commas are
not, wont. To go.”
And then there are those who try to read with
a great deal of drama, but all they succeed in doing is making you think you
are listening to a tale of mystery, and any moment now a shot will ring out, or
a ladder will fall on a black cat, or the butler will murder the chauffeur in
the pantry. They don’t even need to cue the spooky music.
As Larry gets ready
for church, he likes to play music on his tablet or his phone. Sunday morning, I could hear him singing
along with the Golden State Baptist College choir, Jesus Hold My Hand,
the old 1938 Albert E. Brumley song.
I thought back to when we were teenagers, and
sometimes sang together in small groups for our church. One Sunday evening, Larry, our friend Linda, and
I were going to sing. I’d taken the sheet
music home Sunday afternoon so Larry and I could practice it – and then I
forgot to take it back to church with me that night. I didn’t realize the music was missing until Larry
and Linda came up to the piano to sing with me.
Larry, realizing the music was AWOL, nearly had a heart attack, because
he figured Linda and I knew the song by heart, and would just launch into it.
Linda had to go trot-trotting off across the
front of the church, right in front of everybody, and rummage up another copy
of the song in the little music room on the opposite side of the sanctuary. Ah, the agonies I have put people through!
Last night after church, we went to Hy-Vee
for some fresh fruit, a bag of lettuce and vegetable salad, and a few things
from the dairy section. Caleb and Maria
were there too, and we walked in together.
Just inside the store, we spotted Jeremy and Lydia and their children,
having just checked out and heading for the door. Family reunion, family reunion!
This was today’s Drabble comic:
I let the smoke out of my blender once,
making pumpkin purée for chiffon pies. I had a dozen pumpkins, which made
several dozen pies. There wasn’t any appliance smoke to be had anywhere
in town, and even if there had’ve been, I didn’t have an ASR (Appliance Smoke
Refiller) tool. So there was nothing else for it but to buy a new
blender.
After I ran out of room for pies in my
refrigerator, we started taking unset pies to intended recipients, so the pies
could set up in their refrigerators. 😏
I called my sister Lura Kay, who lived next
door to us, and inquired, “Would you possibly have room in your refrigerator for
a pumpkin pie that needs to set up?”
She assured me that she did.
“Could you eat it, after it’s set up?” I
asked further, which made her laugh.
We got those 12 pumpkins cheap at a nearby
pumpkin farm at the end of the season. We doled the pies out
to sisters, brothers, parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins once, twice, thrice,
and fource (Victoria’s word, at age 3) removed. Kept half a dozen big
ones for our family of eleven, and they were gone in three days flat.
I went out to fill
the bird feeders a little while ago, and was surprised to find that we have a
couple of inches of new snow. How did it
manage to accumulate on the deck, I wonder, when the winds were over 45 mph all
through the night and up until noon today?
It’s only 18° this
afternoon. So how, I’d like to know, did
I get a mosquito bite?!
When I was a little girl, we’d go visiting
the Winings relatives in North Dakota at Christmastime. I remember riding in Daddy’s new Studebaker
down country roads where a snowplow had made one pass – and the banks of snow
at either side of the car rose far above the roof of the car. Sometimes
the wind would blow drifts over the top, so that it was truly a tunnel we were
driving through. If we ever met up with another vehicle, someone had to
back…and back… and back… until they got to a plowed lane where they could get
off the road until the other vehicle could pass. We didn’t ever get stuck,
that I recall. Daddy put chains on the
car before heading onto those country roads; he always carried chains in the
wintertime. He was an excellent driver, fearless and intrepid, quick and
well-coordinated. If he spotted a drift covering the road up ahead, he
sized it up lickety-split – and hit the accelerator. He enjoyed
driving in the snow. That suited me just fine.
This photo was taken in Fargo, North Dakota,
in 2011, and posted on a local news station webpage. They get about 10” more snow each year than
we do.
We once had a scary occurrence in the Wyoming
High Country. We were traveling with our TravelAll and 27-foot Airstream
camper. It was wintertime, and the roads were bad – snow- and
ice-covered. It was nighttime.
And then we topped a high hill and discovered
a pileup of cars and big trucks down at the bottom of the hill. Our
lights glistened on the icy highway ------- and then they went off. The
alternator had failed.
It was pitchblack; we couldn’t see a
thing. Daddy tried braking – and the rig started sliding, threatening to
jackknife. He took his foot quickly off the brake and pressed down on the
accelerator to bring it out of the skid. And he said, “Pray like you’ve
never prayed before.”
I was already doing just that.
We didn’t get slowed down much at all before arriving
at the bottom of the hill. Somehow, some way, having seen that there was
a narrow, crooked path open between the smashed vehicles, Daddy, relying on his
memory, managed to wiggle that TravelAll and trailer through it. We
caught a glimpse of a dim glow now and then as we rushed through – lights in
the cabs of the trucks.
Just as we shot out the other side of the
wreckage, our headlights came back on. Immediately ahead was a long hill,
and it was shiny with ice. If we wanted to make it over that hill, we
daren’t slow down! Daddy stepped back down on the accelerator, and we got
enough speed built up that we made it, though the tires were starting to spin
on the last few feet.
We stopped at the next little town, found a
phone, and my mother called the police and reported the accident. That
road was shut down soon after we came through, so at least no more vehicles
would add to the pileup.
Our children remember an October 31st
snow with two- and three-foot drifts ... and we took them out trick-or-treating
in it! It wasn’t too awfully cold (in the 20s), so we bundled them all
up, and off we went. They thought it was enormous fun.
Then there was the blizzard in December 2009
that piled 10-12-foot drifts around our house and kept us from going to the
Christmas dinner at church on Christmas Day. I think we got more snow
that day than ever before, around these parts. Certainly there were
higher drifts.
Oh!
Hee hee Teensy just decided to
sit beside my computer on the table. I
should make him get down, but he looks so cute, I’m just letting him sit there.
I promise, I’ll scrub the table before
suppertime.
Since the Honey Butterflake dinner rolls I
got last night in the Hy-Vee bakery were slightly dry (what do they expect,
putting them into a cardboard box?!), I decided to make bread pudding with
them.
Here’s a fact: I absolutely love bread
pudding.
Fact #2:
I can’t quit eating this stuff! – especially when it’s made from
Honey Butterflake dinner rolls. ((swooon...)) Bread pudding is concocted of some of my
favorite food items: bread, milk, brown
sugar, eggs. Of course I love it!
It’s like French toast to the power of
10. 😋😍
All right, I have to wrap this stuff up and put it
into the refrigerator before I eat the entire panful. Fortunately, I only had a small plate of lettuce/vegetable
salad and a small bowl of sirloin steak/vegetable soup for supper. So the two servings of bread pudding shouldn’t
be too bad for the waistline.
I hope.
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah I Will Not Open the Refrigerator Door Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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