The Year in Review -- The Year 2017, That Is!

Happy September 2018! 

Yeah, I haven’t exactly been blowing up either of the blogs for a long while. I was actually shocked to realize how few postings I’ve made in the last couple years. I guess I think about writing here far more than I actually do write here. Even my personal (handwritten) journal has received short shrift since the middle of this year; I happened upon it under a pile of junk on my dining table last weekend and was horrified to realize how long it had been MIA. No wonder people keep sending texts and/or emails asking if I’m still alive. Yikes!

So – here I am, welcoming myself back to my own blog! In celebration of what is, I hope, the end of my writing hibernation, let me catch you up on what’s been going on in LOL-Land. 

[I am going to throw out one tiny little bit of excuse for my laxity, which is that time seems to go by ever-more-quickly with every passing day. I am constantly shaking my head and thinking, “How can it already be January/summer /my birthday/Christmas/a new year/(name any event or season)?” For a while, I had begun to wonder if I had reached the point where the world around me actually blurred from the rapid spinning of the planet. However, it turns out that blurring was just cataracts. Ha!]

Anyway, here is 2017 in review. 

Oh, but before 2017, here’s one fun thing from 2016.

One of my sister’s Christmas gifts was a handmade (by me) representation of her favorite word. As she told our dad once (when he objected to her use of the word), it’s the perfect word – it can be a noun, a verb, an adjective, or an adverb. (He didn’t buy it. She didn’t stop using the word.)

It’s a paperweight! I saw a very nice pewter f-bomb paperweight in a catalogue and knew she would love it, but it cost $40. I am way too cheap to pay $40 for a paperweight, so I started thinking of ways to make one. I found plenty of patterns to knit or crochet, but none of them hit me just right. Finally, I remembered my old friend Sculpey™ clay! This bomb has a rock as its core to make it heavy-ish and a ball of aluminum foil is wrapped around the rock to keep from using so much clay that it wouldn’t bake and harden properly. It took me quite a while to sculpt this as I am no kind of artist, but I don’t know when I’ve had so much fun or laughed so hard making a clay project. 

Back to 2017 – I bought Cashmire a flying saucer heated cat bed. She apparently used it behind my back (hair all over the pad, pad all ruffled up), but spurned it to my face. Finally, I caught her in there! Don’t you love how snarky cats can be?!

Carolyn and I went to a craft fair. One vendor had items hand-made from all kinds of natural elements. I was trying to decide between two autumn wreaths, but just could not make up my mind. I told Carolyn my dilemma and we discussed the merits of each wreath. She also liked them both and told me whichever one I didn’t get, she was going to buy. After more discussion, she asked, “Which one?” I pointed at the sweet little wreath made out of wood rounds, with a cute burlap owl on it. Carolyn immediately snatched it off the display and told the vendor, “I’ll take this one.” I could not believe she was buying my wreath right out from under me! I was shocked speechless. When the vendor took the wreath to look at the price, Carolyn turned to me and said, “Merry Christmas!” Then she laughed and laughed. She said the look on my face was priceless. 

I went to Wichita Falls several times to visit Cindy, and we painted that town pink (Cindy’s favorite color)! Cindy took me to cute boutiques, fun antique stores, a craft fair, and twice we saw a play at the community theater. Every trip was so much fun! On one of my visits, Cindy fell in love with the switch plate in the women’s restroom at one of the shops. She found the owner of the shop, and ended up buying the plate right off the wall. Now it’s in her restroom!

I cannot remember every single place I went with Cindy, but I know I've eaten at Casa Mañana twice. It's the home of the famous Wichita Falls red tacos! The tortillas are soaked in a red wine sauce before frying. Yummy!

We ate breakfast one morning at the TGS Cupcakery. They are open all day and serve wonderful homey meals. I loved their signature cups so much that I bought one!

Some of the other places we went:

At one of the little shops, I bought a hilarious little tin. Here's the front:

The back:

The front edge:

I adore that the snarky little thing looks hand-embroidered. It's proudly displayed in my dining room so I can giggle every time I walk by the secretary. 

Marlene and I went to Iola, Kansas, to attend a Buster Keaton celebration. It was my second time to attend and her fourth time, so we already had the lay of the land and knew just what ancillary sightseeing and shopping we wanted to do before, after, and between sessions. We had a blast for four days! We each made a few purchases (not least, we each left the Russell Stover candy outlet with a heavy shopping bag and a light pocketbook), but my favorite purchase is my monster handbag. It has a nice long cross-body strap and it will hold everything I need for a quick dash to the grocery store. I seriously dislike grocery shopping, but this little bag adds a jolt of entertainment. Not everyone has a bag wearing a tiara!

Naturally, we found fun on the road as well as in and around Iola. We decided to eat lunch in Tulsa on the way up. Since neither of us have a clue about that city, I asked Siri for some options. Marlene and I chose a barbeque place that sounded local, and followed Siri to the food. 

  

The onion and jalapeno rings were divine. I had a delicious pulled pork sandwich, but it was completely overshadowed by the awesomeness of the rings. 

On the way home, we stopped in Coffeyville, Kansas, to tour the Dalton Defenders Museum. They have lots of interesting memorabilia from the era, plus a fascinating documentary about the Daltons and the foiled bank robberies. (The Dalton Gang planned to rob both of the town’s banks at the same time, but it didn’t work out the way they planned.) Coffeyville was the first town whose citizens banded together to try to prevent a bank robbery, then chased the robbers to their horses while they were trying to get out of town. There’s a walking tour that follows the paths the bank robbers and the townspeople took during the event. The buildings that housed the two banks in question are still there, and you can trace everyone’s footsteps. (The city has even painted footprints on the pavement to help you out with that.) When we paid admission, the older-than-we-are gentleman volunteering at the museum that day gave us each back two dollars more than we were expecting, explaining that there is a special price for people who visit on Sunday. Later, we saw a little sign advertising the senior discount – two dollars less than regular admission. We loved that he gave us a “Sunday price” rather than tell us we were eligible for the senior discount! Now, that’s a kind and tactful man! 

In October, I went to Bentonville, Arkansas, to attend the annual Fall Craft Fair hoopla with Lynzee and her friend Heather. Heather invited us over for a fabulous home-cooked breakfast feast to keep us strong for the shopping. We had limited time, so we decided to hit the Fair at War Eagle Mill first. (Check it out at https://wareaglemill.com/fall-craft-fair/. There’s more to War Eagle than just the annual craft fair.) We stayed there so long – the Fair was HUGE – that we didn’t have time to go anywhere else!! It was crazy how many booths there were! Someone had fresh, hot kettle corn, so we munched on that while we shopped. We limited our purchasing to only what we absolutely could not live without (who wants to either carry it all around or make a bunch of trips back to the car??), but we saw a ton of cool stuff we wanted. In the end, I bought just enough things to make me feel extravagant without totally loading me down, including three little handmade (of fabric) pumpkins, three flavors of handmade pasta, and a jar of Hatch green chile seasoning. 

After the Fair, we met Heather’s husband, Nathan, at a local Mexican food place, where I ordered a margarita and Nathan had a beer. It looks kind of normal in this photo . . . . 

. . . . but, good heavens, look at the size of that margarita glass next to Lynzee and me!!

I’m pretty sure we also ate food, but I don’t remember that part . . . . . (just kidding!!)

The next day, Lynzee and I went to Fayetteville. We visited the Savoy Tea Company, where I purchased an herbal tea named Prince Charming; a kind of bohemian bead-jewelry-clothing shop called Dark Star Visuals whose owner was delightful and helped me figure out which beads I should use for a knitting project and where I could order them online; and some other fun stores where my only purchase was a cake pan. As soon as I got home, I made blueberry bread in it:

It looks perfectly disgusting, doesn’t it?! SCORE!!!! I love it, and made several yucky-looking breads throughout October. I may create a sugar-skull cake one of these days to try my hand at cake decorating, but nothing’s going to beat blueberry batter in there!

I got on a handmade (and sometimes weird) roll at Christmas. It began when the women at the office decided we would each decorate one of the inner windows. All sorts of grandiose plans were flying around, so I hatched one of my own. Behold the hanging advent calendar window:

Carolyn taught me about the candy canes. They are cheap plastic six-to-a-package ones from the Dollar Store, wrapped with strips of colorful fabric. I taped various kinds of Lindt Lindor truffles to the bottoms of the canes as the daily treat. The numbers were cut from vintage-holiday scrapbooking paper. It looked pretty nice when I put it up. Sadly, the candies were too heavy. I tried everything I could find except duct tape and permanent glue to hold the canes up, but every morning I had to re-hang at least half of them. 

Wrapping the canes was totally addictive; I made way more than the 24 I needed for the window. I put a bunch on my tree, and every package I wrapped had at least one attached. 

After Christmas, I went back and bought all the leftover canes I could find so I can make more this year. I’ll find a use for them . . . . . maybe a bunting on my mantle?

The candy canes got me rolling and next thing I knew I was making other crazy stuff! I knitted a few striped tree-shaped ornaments based on a free pattern from Lily Sugar ‘n Cream and Love Knitting magazine. My favorite color combo was teal/lime! Then I knitted this triangular tree and sewed a pocket on the back to hold a gift card. 

Lynzee likes pandas, so I stitched this ornament for her. The frame is an embroidery hoop wrapped with ribbon and felt. In retrospect, I probably should have just painted it. Oh, well!

In honor of Lynzee’s cats, Elaine and Tina, who love sparkly pom-poms, this:

I felted a couple polka-dotted Christmas ornaments, but forgot to photograph the finished balls before giving them away. This one had small dots

 and the other one had big dots. I made them by felting red roving onto a round Styrofoam ball, then felting white dots made with white roving or wool yarn onto the red. I made hangers by felting the ends of a loop of the white yarn on the top. I want to make some more felted balls this year in other colors, and keep one for myself this time!

So, that’s 2017 reduced to one blog post! There was more to the year than that – I do have a few tales to tell – but that’s enough to get the ball rolling for now. I’ll be back soon, I promise!

An Instagram Story

My friend, whom I am going to call Georgia, is a huge sports fan. Recently, while she was home fighting off the flu, she opened Instagram on her phone and listlessly scrolled through a sports channel. She saw a photo of a basketball player with some stats on it and, in trying to pull it up to see the stats, accidentally “liked” a comment that was alongside the photo. The comment said, “I have a big-ass booty.”

While Georgia was trying to figure out how to un-like the comment, she started receiving all manner of, um, interesting replies from men. She freaked out and called her 20-something son for help.

His first response was, “Mom! What are you even doing on Instagram?” Then, “Why did you “like” a comment? Stop reading those responses! Get off there right now!” Georgia kept trying to explain she was just scrolling through a sports channel and didn’t intend to “like” anything, but he wasn’t having any of it.

Georgia wailed, “Why would someone even post that she has a big-ass booty?” It turns out, sports figures have groupies who follow them on social media and make comments designed to draw attention to themselves. Apparently it works, as Georgia certainly got a lot of attention of her own simply by liking someone else’s comment.

The attention Georgia got horrified her – both the comments themselves and the speed with which they appeared. Within 20 minutes of her accidental “like,” she had pages of responses. Being an LOL and not a young thing with a big-ass booty, she didn’t even know what some of the responses meant. “One guy said if I want a real straight guy, talk to him. What does that even mean? A real straight guy? As opposed to a fake straight guy? Is he gay? I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

Naturally, Georgia and I could not stop laughing over this unfortunate incident when she told me about it, and the next day at work I told a couple of my 30-something coworkers the story. They laughed pretty hard, too. Then I remembered the “real straight guy” and asked if they knew what he meant. My coworkers’s eyes grew large and then they howled with laughter. They did know. This is not an R-rated blog, so all I’m going to say is, the key word is “straight” and it has to do with rigidity as well.

Oh, my.

I need to go tell Georgia.

Check This Out, June 30 Edition: Unclaimed Baggage

Check this out!

There is a store in Scottsboro, Alabama, called Unclaimed Baggage Center. Doyle Owens started the enterprise in 1970. Today the store, run by his son, covers more than a city block. In addition to selling some pretty interesting merchandise, the company donates money and goods to many causes, serving those in need both at home and abroad.

You can follow the link below to read more about this cool place.

Then let me know if you want to join me on a road trip (or meet me in Scottsboro) because I am definitely putting this place on my "Go There" list!

 

https://www.unclaimedba.com/about/timeline/

Huh?

For years, one of the most ridiculous issues my sister and I had with our mom was her refusal to admit she had some hearing loss. Even sitting face-to-face with us, unless we were speaking very loudly, her initial response to everything we said was either “What?” or “Huh?” When I pressed her about having her hearing checked, she told me in no uncertain terms that she could hear everyone except me just fine and she would hear me, too, if I would stop mumbling.

Now, let me just say right here that if there is one thing everyone who knows me knows, it is that I don’t mumble. In fact, I am loud. I always have been loud. Once I went home for the weekend with a college friend whose dad worked nights. When we arrived, her dad was asleep. After we’d been talking quietly for about an hour, she suddenly said, “Oh my gosh! I’ve been trying to figure out what’s weird about our conversation and it just hit me. You’re being really quiet! I’ve never heard you speak quietly before.” (By the way, that was embarrassing. I tried to be quieter all the time. I couldn’t. I still cannot.)

My sister almost laughed herself sick when I told her about the mumbling comment, said, “Mumble? You? She’s even more deaf than I thought if she thinks you mumble,” and then laughed some more. She also confided that she could cheerfully backhand the next person who said, “Huh?” to her because she was so tired of hearing it when she talked to Mother.

Mother never did admit to hearing loss and never did have her hearing checked. Her inability to hear us was a source of both annoyance and amusement for Susan and me until she died. As a result, we both swore to eschew vanity and go for hearing aids when needed.

I noticed a while back that ambient noise was becoming a problem. In a loud setting, I couldn’t always understand what people were saying. That made me nervous, so I had my hearing checked. The highest range of tones were inaudible to me, but I could hear all the normal things. The nice technician explained that the ambient noise problem is common and not to worry until I can’t hear well in a more normal setting. Whew!! That was a relief!

Fast forward to a couple months ago. A friend and I decided to stop at Target on our way somewhere. While ambling around in there, we had this conversation:

Margaret: Do you know if they have blah-blah-blah here?”

Me: If they have what?

Margaret: I need blahblah.

Me: Sorry, I didn’t understand what you said. What are we looking for?

Margaret (speaking very slowly and distinctly): Hearing aid batteries.

A pause while we look at each other, then start laughing.

Margaret: Well, that was a little ironic, wasn’t it?

 

Anybody seen a hearing-aid center around here? 

 

Carolyn's Quaker Sampler

The Quaker Sampler is one of Carolyn’s most lovely stitched pieces. She explains here why she chose this pattern.

(Oh, and she wrote this post a couple months ago but never published it. I nagged her so much that she finally just sent it to me to publish.)

 ------------

I’m obsessed!  At least for now I am.  I’m off school for the summer, so I have a little more time, and I am obsessed with cross stitching.  I cross stitch all year long, but during the school year, so many other things take precedence.  I have kids, so their activities have always come first.  There is always homework.  They always want to eat, so there is supper to fix.  And I teach.  So there are papers to grade and lessons to plan.  So during the school year, stitch time is at a premium.  But right now, it’s summer!  And I’m obsessed.  I have been stitching like a mad woman.  And I love it!

One aspect of stitching that doesn’t get finished all the time, however, is the finishing.  I completely stitch the piece, but then what?  It needs to be finished into an ornament, a box, or it needs to be framed.  Framing can be very expensive, so the big pieces get rolled up and put away sometimes.  Actually, they get put away most of the time.  But the other day, I pulled out the box and decided it was time to get something framed.  And there it was.  The piece.  I knew which one I needed to get framed.

I stitched the Quaker Sampler several years ago.  I had just started cross stitching again.  I had been introduced to stitching on linen.  I had only stitched on Aida cloth before.  Linen was beautiful!  When I chose the Quaker Sampler, I had to choose which size linen to use, and I chose the 40 count linen because of the size of the pattern.  It’s a large pattern, so I wanted to use a count that would make it smaller.  You see, 40 count means there are 40 squares per inch.  That’s tiny!  I already have progressive lenses.  I had to use magnifiers clipped to my glasses to stitch this piece.  (Boy, was that attractive!)  But I wanted that pattern and the challenge of 40 count linen.  You see, it was a challenge.  It was linen, and it was tiny.  I love a challenge.

There was something else about that pattern, too.  It was the words:  Harmony, Honesty, Peace, Truth, Unity, Integrity, Simplicity.  I love those words.  I want those words in my life.  I want to live those words.  Speaking of challenges….   Did I mention I have a family and I teach school?  Plus I have friends in my life, and I go to church, and I interact with the public on a daily basis.  Those words….  How can I live those?  How can I speak those every day?  It’s a challenge.  With all the negative in the world, how can these words work?  They have to!  They have to work in MY world.  I have to rise to the challenge of living these words.  If I give up on this challenge then evil wins.  I have to challenge others to live these words!  If I don’t evil wins.

Maybe I’ve found a new obsession….

The Blue Pill vs. The Rolling Stones

Packing for my trip to Amarillo this summer, I tossed a sleeping pill into the container with my vitamins. I don’t use a sleeping pill very often, but if I am too keyed up when I go to bed (which I thought could happen after hours of laughing and talking with a friend I haven’t seen in six years) or am anxious, sometimes either I can’t go to sleep at all or I wake up at 3:00 a.m. and cannot go back to sleep. My doctor prescribed a very low-dose sleeping aid; it helps me fall asleep but its effects wear off after a couple hours.

Although Laura and I stayed up too late on Saturday night, talking and laughing into the wee hours, I had no trouble sleeping. (The two bottles of wine we drank while staying up so late may have helped with that.) Before we went down to breakfast, I knocked back all my morning vitamins, including a blue capsule that I took to be an acid reducer.

After breakfast, as we were packing up to head out, I thought about the blue capsule I had tossed in with the vitamins. I looked in my vitamin bottle. Yup, I definitely took the blue capsule before breakfast. Then came this conversation:

Me: Bummer.

Laura: What?

Me: I took a sleeping pill before breakfast.

Laura: WHAT?!

Me: My acid reducer and my sleeping pill are both blue capsules. I didn’t bring an acid reducer because they are an every-other-day pill and I took one yesterday. I brought the sleeping pill in case I got too keyed up and couldn’t sleep. I just took the sleeping pill.

Laura: Are you sure?

Me: (Yawn) Yeah. I’m sure.

It wasn’t that big a deal. Laura wanted additional knitting practice and I needed caffeine, so we went to a nearby Starbucks where she learned to purl and to cast off and then practiced everything she’d learned. I answered her knitting questions, drank some espresso beverages, and yawned a lot.

We stayed at Starbucks three hours. By the time Laura was feeling comfortable with her new knitting skills, I was wide awake. We hit the road.

By the time I was halfway home it had begun to rain, giving me a barometric headache. I was surrounded by 18-wheelers, half of whom were crawling along I-40 doing 50 while the other half were rushing by at 75. I was jittery from all that caffeine and not enough protein, I was low on gas, and a bathroom break sounded really good. I stopped in the next town.

Before I re-hit the road, I checked my phone and discovered a text from my sister. I decided to prolong my break and called her back. We discussed our respective exciting weekend activities. When I told her how I had mistaken my sleeping pill for an acid reducer and then spent some time at the coffee shop in Amarillo to sure I stayed awake on the way home, she told me a story of her own.

When Susan was a freshman in college in Wichita Falls, her boyfriend in Austin asked her to meet him in Dallas for the weekend because he had tickets to see The Rolling Stones. Woo hoo!!!!! They saw the concert, stayed out pretty much all night, partied up a storm, and had the most fabulous weekend possible!

Dallas is a only couple hours from Wichita Falls, but there’s not much to see along the way. Typically that’s no biggie, but after a party-filled, no-sleep weekend, Susan was exhausted. About halfway to the dorm, she realized she needed to take a nap before she fell asleep at the wheel. She turned onto a farm road and drove far enough that no one could see her car from the highway and she could just barely see the roof of the farmhouse in the distance. She then drove into the empty pasture, leaned her seat back, and went to sleep.

She’s not sure how long she was asleep when she blearily awakened with the feeling something was wrong. She came wide awake when she realized her car was shaking. Bolting upright, she saw that she was surrounded and her car was being pushed back and forth by  . . . . . cows. They were all jostling for a better view of the girl in the car, pushing their noses up to the windows, and shoving each other around. The car was rocking pretty hard. Susan was afraid the car was going to tip over, and she was going to have to explain to the parents what she was doing somewhere between Dallas and Wichita Falls in a cow pasture on Sunday evening.

She fired up engine, eased her way (honking) through the cattle, and hauled butt back to the highway. The rest of her trip was uneventful. The parents never knew she spent the weekend in Dallas with her boyfriend.

Susan and I should probably not take any road trips together.

Stitching

I have started several posts, but can't seem to get any of them completed. So, to keep us all entertained between words, here are photos of some of the LOL's recently completed projects.

Snowflakes stitched by Carolyn. Isn't that a pretty design?

Becky put the finishing touches on her carrots:

The bunny is cute, but the little flower buttons! I will definitely stitch these carrots one day for myself. So cute!!

I think I mentioned a l-o-n-g time ago that I was working on the 12th of a series of Christmas ornaments. Here they are, all assembled and ready to hang. (Thank you, Lisa!! I could never have made these look so pretty without your help!!)

Here's another ami by Amy W. She crocheted this a while back, but I forgot about the photo. Adorable lion!!

After giving one away, I knitted an Orbiting Oddity to keep. I love it, but it's obvious I had relaxed a lot when making this one as it's way bigger than the first one I made and the stitches are a little sloppy at the top of the aliens. Oh, well. One of these days, I'm going to knit a much smaller one with fingering yarn and little needles. In the interim, this big one makes me laugh.

Craft on, everyone!