Visiting my childhood

Do you currently live near where you grew up?  I do. I grew up on a corner and pass that house at least twice a week. Saturday I stopped to visit neighbors who lived two houses away throughout my childhood. I used to run into the man occasionally, but haven't seen the woman in probably 20 years. Why haven't I done this before? Aren't most of us in a hurry to get to our destination and guilty of thinking we have unlimited time to contact people?

Mr G wasn't home when I knocked on the door, but Mrs G was. She had a look on her face that said "who are you and what are you selling?". I told her to take a good look, then told her it was Charlene (yes, it is true, I have a given name and it isn't Knitty ) To say she was surprised would be an understatement.

I only intended to stay for 15-20 minutes. After 45 minutes I tried to leave because I hadn't told my hubby that I'd be gone this long on my errands. Mrs G wanted me to stay because Mr G was on his way home with their great-granddaughter from a child's birthday party. How did their daughter, five years younger than I am, become old enough to be a grandmother to 10 and 6 year old girls? Of course I stayed. Mr G recognized me right away and said I hadn't changed a bit. He always was a sweet ole liar. After two hours, I did leave, promising to stop by again, and not after a decade passed but sometime this summer.

Besides reminiscing over their kids' childhoods and stories about my parents, I was told neighborhood stories I never heard before. For a time, the neighbor between their house and ours was a divorced woman with two girls. I thought rumors about her were spread because she was an attractive divorced woman in the middle of married suburbia. I never knew exactly what the rumors were because my parents didn't think kids needed to hear those stories, especially since I was friends with the older girl. The younger daughter told Mrs G's daughter that her mom sometimes gave the girls something to help them sleep soundly.  Supposedly the woman would turn her porch light on when her daughters were both asleep for the night but it wasn't for security, it was a signal to gentlemen who would only call on her after dark. One of the men was the married neighbor on the other side of the G family!

All of the stories weren't sad or salacious, but I had already heard most of the tales that were safe for a child to hear. What struck me about these stories was that in the 60s it was still possible to grow up blissfully unaware of the misdeeds of adults. Kids didn't think about their parents having intimate moments with each other, much less a whole string of people as in a Jerry Springer episode.

Soap operas are disappearing from television but reality TV lives on. What I discovered Saturday is that my street could have existed in Llanview, Salem or Pine Valley. The soaps weren't real, but they pretended to be.  Reality TV however, pretends to be real and isn't. Some make fun of old sitcoms because June Cleaver always wore pearls and Donna Reed never had a hair out of place while handling a family crisis, but they readily believe a new employee has a camera crew following them around (Undercover Boss) while managers reveal private, very personal matters to the new hire at the water cooler.

I'll take the old sticoms and illusion of people behaving in acceptable ways to most of what we see and hear today, both on TV and out in public. Keep your private conversations private rather than exposing everyone in the checkout line to who said what because their babydaddy told some (expletive) babymama how (expletive) their stupid boss is. And so on. And for goodness sake, pay attention to what your young children see and hear on TV! 

In a few weeks I will call Mrs G and see if she would like to go out to lunch or have me bring some lunch to her. We'll compare what is right with the world today to what we discarded (before we knew we'd miss it so much) from yesteryear. I won't be wearing a dress and heels, but I could probably manage a Laura Petrie flip and wear some pearls.

Barber shop scrapbook pages

I don't consider myself a scrapbooker, but I do enjoy paper crafts. I have good intentions of making scrapbooks but we all know what happens with good intentions. I put together a book for my older son a few years ago, from birth through the high school with a few photos of him as a Marine which happened a few years later. My younger son's book is still stuck on preschool pages.

My daughter-in-law got a small book last year on Mother's day, but that was easy to compile with her pregnancy photos and Colton's baby photos for those two months. The intended scrapbook for me is still in my head except for two pages recently completed, dedicated to Colton's first haircut which I wrote about here.

Here is the two page layout as the pages will appear in the album, followed by close ups of the single pages.

 I love photographs and some of the sample pages I've seen in stores seem to feature embellishments to the point of photos being secondary to the completed page. I think striking a balance is going to be a challenge for me. Still, getting anything on a page and into an album is progress and there certainly is no right or wrong to this.

If you indulge in this hobby, what are your words of advice? I mean on anything and everything from composition to which adhesive you prefer and why. Also, how do you photograph a flat page without the distortion I am showing in these? I am thinking I needed to have the camera higher and centered over the subject.

Click here for a card from me to all of you:  Happy Easter!

Have you done anything unusual in food prep this weekend? I did. I used Kool Aid to dye hard boiled eggs. Just last week I discovered some packets of Kool Aid that I bought so long ago, I don't remember buying them. While wondering if Kool Aid goes bad, I left them alone and by pure chance, found a blog about dyeing eggs with Kool Aid here.

The blog author was correct in stating that lemonade alone didn't color the eggs at all. I didn't doubt her, I just decided to use up all the flavors I had in the house. The egg marked TP was dyed in Tropical Punch which didn't look much different than strawberry (S). Strawberry-Kiwi (SK) was pretty, but pale in comparison as was Green Apple (GA). Berry Blue (BB) was my favorite and the differences in intensity relate to how long I left the egg in the cup. The egg labeled "Yuck!" was an experiment of all the colors I had on hand. The one to the left of it didn't fare much better.

Will I do this again? Probably not, but the fact that it didn't require boiling water or vinegar would make it a kid friendly project. The downside would be the Kool-Aid color staining little hands, clothing and the inevitable spills in the kitchen.

Some day I will tell Colton that mommies and grandmas long ago used beets and onion skins to color hard boiled eggs because that is what they had available before Paas made colored tablets and sold them every spring. Then I will show him this picture, explain I used what I had on hand, and then we'll go to the store to pick up a package of Paas.

               

The Queen's long reign

Do Americans stop to think about how long Queen Elizabeth has reigned? How about a pictorial review:

She has reigned while 11 presidents have been in office. Ten are pictured above. Did you notice immediately who is missing? From top to bottom, we have Barrack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman.

Who was the missing president and why? Lyndon Johnson is the answer. According to fun trivia's site here  the short answer is that the queen was pregnant at the time of Kennedy's funeral and unable to travel and Johnson rarely traveled outside of the U.S.

A few weeks ago I mentioned this book in this blog entry

 The woman who leads our knitting group is knitting the royal couple and the archbishop and they are as cute as can be!  I didn't plan to get caught up in the lives of the royals, but apparently I am. It sure beats contemplating taxes and complaining about the weather.

An Easter card

Bill would probably call this the $200 Easter card, but he isn't here to call it anything. And it's my blog, so there!

Over the years I've acquired a lot of scrapbooking/cardmaking tools and supplies. It never fails that if I go into a scrapbooking store I find something that I really, really need. Fortunately he understands this. He isn't a gadget person, but as a mechanic by training, he understands the value of a well made and helpful tool. The only difference is that his tools have been used to make money over the years while mine have...er.....nevermind....this is getting too lengthy.

On a recent trip to Archiver's,  I bought honeycomb paper and stamps from Inky Antics.

After cutting cardstock and scoring it on my Martha Stewart scoring device so that there was a bit of spine to accommodate the bulk of the honeycomb carrot, I tested placement of the stamped rabbit image and carrot, and added them.

The carrot top was to have been stamped on green honeycomb paper, but the store was out of green the day that I shopped so I ad libbed.

I stamped a greeting and used Spellbinders Nestabilities to cut the scalloped oval. The edges were tinged with an orange stamp pad.

The edging of the green paper was cut with a Martha Stewart punch, the bunny is mounted a foam squares for a little dimension and the paper flowers are adhered with glue dots and have a dot of orange Stickles in their centers.

Now that I have one done, the next three or four that I make will go more quickly. Or at least that is the theory.

The Royals sure know how to throw a wedding!

I can't disclose who my secret pal is in over in England, but let's just say she has a grandchild getting married soon, never carries cash and has an amazing collection of jewels. She recorded this just for me. Never mind that silly T-Mobile business at the end. Liz and I are BFFs. Really. 

Latest socks

I feel like I've been knitting these socks forever, but it isn't their fault. I've been pulled in other directions and have often knit only a few rounds before setting the sock down for days. Truthfully, I am premature in using socks (plural) in the title as only one sock is complete so far.

The pattern is Rosebud from Wendy D. Johnson's  
Toe-Up Socks for Every Body. 

 

I was concerned that the knit pattern wouldn't show up well in a yarn with flecks that can be distracting, but it is turning out well. This is one of those cases where the work doesn't photograph well, or at least not by this photographer.

 

The yarn is Ty Dye Socks Dots in lilac 6744 from Knit One Crochet Too

 I have nothing lilac in my wardrobe so I'm not sure why I picked this color. I don't dislike lilac, it just isn't a good color with my complexion. Shopping or another knitting or sewing project for a top might be in my future!