Hubert

Think you're having a bad day? I bet is isn't as bad as Hubert's.

Snow Shovel Shoes!

Fear not, fellow residents of snowy cities! Look what I found on the internet today!

 

Worried that gray won't go with your favorite parka? Pick another color as you make these for yourself with these directions .

 



Stay warm. Stay sane. I'm not sure I'm either right now.

First Friday of the New Year

I don't know why reaching Friday is such an accomplishment in retirement when theoretically one day is the same as the next, but that Friday feeling still exists. Even without special plans for the weekend, Fridays still feel good, the promise of fun, relief or both.

Here in SE Michigan, we could use a little relief from cold weather but we are neither as bad as some areas nor at our worst yet. Next week's highs will be single digit temperatures. Single digits!!

I can't leave Michigan. My roots are here. My family and friends are here. This house has been our home all of our married life and it means a lot to me. Winter doesn't last forever but love does.

I've often said that I was meant to be an island girl. My hair was once this dark. I can wear a flower. I can sway from side to side. Unfortunately the similarities in body image end there.

I had a great idea recently. If you aren't familiar with the location and shape of Michigan, here is brief lesson. The lower peninsula, where I live, is called The Mitten. The upper peninsula can be reached by the Mackinac Bridge  (pronounced Mack-in-naw) which is a long suspension bridge. The upper peninsula has a common border with Wisconsin, not us "trolls" who live under the bridge.

Lower Michigan borders the states of Indiana and Ohio, as seen here:

With no offense directed at my Indiana and Ohio neighbors, my great idea was to physically cut the Mitten off of Indiana and Ohio and become an island. Brilliant, right? We would suddenly be warm. Tropical flowers would bloom. I would be oh-so-very happy!

Mother Nature stepped in and stomped on that idea. I cancelled the huge reciprocating saw that was going to accomplish this feat when I read some news on Facebook. Look on the map, the right of Detroit. Do you see that heart shaped blue water between Lake Erie on the south and Lake Huron on the north? That is Lake St Clair. Near the top of that heart, very close to the red line that indicates the division of American-Canadian waters, is Harsens Island. Our family has a cottage there. Most people on the island are summer people but there are 2000+ people who live their year round. The only way to reach the island is by your own boat or crossing over by auto ferry. Due to ice on the river, the ferry shut down yesterday afternoon with hopes of the coast guard cutter freeing things up this morning so that ferry crossings could resume.

Apparently making the Mitten an island wouldn't bring me the balmy weather I desire. Darn it. But never fear, I still can say TGIF....do you know why? Because we are one day closer to warm weather!

I'm even feeling sorry for the squirrels in this weather!

A quilt shop hop adventure

Are you old enough to remember the original Dragnet TV series? Episodes began with announcer George Fenneman telling us "The story you are about to hear is true; only the names have been changed to protect the innocent."

This is my shop hop story, told Dragnet style. Following Sgt Joe Friday's directive of "just the facts, ma'am" I will begin.

 

It was a sunny August day in Michigan. My sewing buddy and I joined 40 other women on a bus to visit 6 quilt shops on a round trip that should have totaled 260 miles over 12 hours. Two hundred more women were doing the same thing on 5 other buses, one from each of the participating shops following the same circuit. All meals and snacks were included in the cost of this adventure on chartered buses with bathroom facilities. We were supposed to look like this:

This was the first time for this particular shop hop. My sewing partner and I have been on others before, but never by bus. Statistically, buses probably do not break down any more frequently than cars, but if one car had transmission trouble and another had a flat tire, only two carloads of women on this adventure would have experienced delays, not all 240 of us. Yes, you read that correctly. All of us had to delay our arrivals at scheduled shops for the two buses with problems.

 

Each store had a drawing for each bus load of women. You've probably seen game show contestants behave so exuberantly, you wondered if they were coached to act that way. Perhaps not, based on some of the reactions I witnessed.

Seems a bit much for a pattern, doesn't it? Or for a book about canning. And just what does canning have to do with quilting?

 

Our bus driver was very nice as were the two women assigned to our bus representing our store of origin and the whole shop hop event. Before returning to our "home" store, we were asked to fill out a questionnaire about this experience so they could improve for next year. Here is a photo of Joe Friday and Bill Gannon discussing the questions. Or maybe Joe is rubbing his temples and asking Bill for extra strength headache medication.

An hour per shop proved to be too much time. All of the stores were very nice, but a certain portion of goods carried in any store dedicated to a hobby are going to be the same. Most of us lapped the stores at least twice, made our purchases and still had time to kill before getting on the bus again. Here is Joe calling home to tell his spouse how much later he was going to be because of the bus snafu.

The food that we were served on the buses was provided by the shops we had just left. We had breakfast, a morning snack, lunch, an afternoon snack, dinner and after our last store, dessert. My only complaint about quality was the cold breakfast dish of eggs and sausage as we left the first store. The complaint that most of us shared was over our eating utensil throughout the day. This photo might look like Joe Friday is examining a knife, but what you don't see is the clear plastic fork we shop hoppers had to use for breakfast, lunch and dinner. He isn't using a magnifying glass because the fork is clear, he is using it because it was so small.

What? You don't believe me? Allow me to present Exhibit A, the fork used on the shop hop photographed next to one of my forks at home.

By the time we reached our last shop, most of us had backaches from seats that didn't sit up straight enough and swollen feet from sitting in one position too long all day. I will visit the last store again some time when my eyes aren't glazed over and my head isn't throbbing from a lame video that played the last two hours of the trip. A screen and speaker were right over our seats. The store could have had a pot of gold free for the taking or a pile of dead bodies and I don't know that I would have noticed either. Walking around inside was more about flexing knees and hips and using the rest room for most of the bus, including the driver who didn't use her bus' rest room because the light didn't work.

 

Did I say it was a long day? It was over 14 hours from leaving my home to returning.

 

Would Joe Friday, Bill Gannon, my sewing buddy and I do this again?  Sure, if we could take our own wheels and leave a store when we were ready.

And if we came upon this, we'd pick it up for our dining pleasure!

 



I'd like to know.....

Ah! Sweet mystery of life
At last I've found thee
Ah! I know at last the secret of it all!

Yeah, right.

That bit of lyric if from Thoroughly Modern Millie and is about love. I have nothing against love, and yes, falling in love is a very sweet mystery. I just don't know if it is the mystery of life.

 

I'd like to know where time goes. How is the second week of June already?

 

I'd like to know why there is a three degree difference between the temperature and humidity feeling warm and humid to chilly and damp. Ever had your legs too hot in jeans and your exposed arms and feet cold at the same time?

 

 

I'd like to know if there will ever be balance in my electrical life again. Electrical life? You know...having your car, appliances and computer all working perfectly at the same time, leaving you free to tackle the larger issues like world peace.

I'd like to know why a pattern company would print the charted design for a knitting pattern in print so tiny (I'm talking really, really tiny squares with hieroglyphics within those tiny squares) that even with my glasses and a magnifying glass, I'm ready to utter unladylike curses. I could scan the pattern, enlarge it and print it but that would require the electronics in my life to be working properly.

(Not the chart I am using, just an example)

I'd like to know why I find these two thoughts so darned funny when they are so entirely true:

The irony of life is that by the time you're old enough to know your way around, you're not going anywhere.

I was always taught to respect my elders, but it keeps getting harder to find one.

I leave you to ponder all of this and more, hopefully with a smile or two thrown into your day. Maybe this answering message will make you make you happy. I'm considering using it....if I can find the manual to tell me how to reset the preprogrammed message!

Answering machine message, "I am not available right now, but thank you for caring enough to call. I am making some changes in my life. Please leave a message after the beep. If I do not return your call, you are one of the changes."

Let's dance!

My "Prince of Sweetness", Papa's "Buddy", Uncle Billy's "Bug", the child otherwise known as Colton was here for the better part of day Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week while some remodeling was going on at his house. Papa (hubby) and I (Gigi) see him often, but these three days were more insightful than usual. Three years old can literally grow before our eyes, both in physical, social and educational development. Struggle over a word, reaching something just a bit out of arm's length or lack of a social concept last week was a breeze this week, but of course other words, reaches and social graces present themselves as a challenge, especially when tired. Tired might mean Gigi and Papa, not the three year old!


Playing Mario on a very old game system at the cottage. Everything old can be new again to a 3 year old.

For reasons I don't claim to understand, the three days this week were time to explore toys long neglected here. Monday was spent playing with felt food that I made months ago but hadn't really been interesting to Colton yet.

Tuesday was Caillou and Rosie day. If you don't know them, Caillou is a four year old boy and Rosie is his little sister in animated stories on PBS and Sprout TV. We have plastic figures as shown here, that come apart into three pieces each. We may not have spent consecutive hours playing with them, but collectively by the end of the day, Caillou and Rosie must have felt either very loved or very tired. They even went to bed for a nap in Gigi's bed with giggles over sleeping on Poppa's pillow.

At the end of the day, they went home with Colton who was surprised not to find them here on Wednesday. Possession and time travel will be concepts to work on at a later date.

Caillou and Rosie were still important on Wednesday and we watched them not only at their scheduled show times, but also On Demand. A teddy bear was featured in two episodes which led to a discussion here. Colton got my Gund bear and adopted, taking him home when daddy picked him up. Gee, I have boxes of crap stuff upstairs that I would be happy to have him haul away, but so far he is only taking small items.

At one point in playing, he began beating another toy with the bear. I corrected him. Later he decided to clear the couch of his Hot Wheels by vigorously sweeping them off with his arms, sending them flying. This isn't the first time I've spoken to him about this so I used a louder and firmer voice than usual. He stopped and looked at me. I could see the gears working in that precious little head but didn't know where this would lead. I was not ready for what followed. He stuck his arms up and exuberantly said "Let's dance!"

 

When faced with something unpleasant today, I hope you can muster up a smile and encourage someone to dance!

Choosing a bathing suit

TGFFE (Thank God for funny emails!)  Other that the two women in the world who are over 25 and not at all self conscious about their bodies in bathing suits, I think everyone else will find the humor and truth in this.

 

When I was a child in the 1950's, the bathing suit for the mature figure was-boned, trussed and reinforced, not so much sewn as engineered. They were built to hold back and uplift, and they did a good job.

Today's stretch fabrics are designed for the prepubescent girl with a figure carved from a potato chip.

The mature woman has a choice: she can either go up front to the maternity department and try on a floral suit with a skirt, coming away looking like a hippopotamus that escaped from Disney's Fantasia, or she can wander around every run-of-the-mill department store trying to make a sensible choice from what amounts to a designer range of fluorescent rubber bands.

What choice did I have? I wandered around, made my sensible choice and entered the chamber of horrors known as the fitting room. The first thing I noticed was the extraordinary tensile strength of the stretch material. The Lycra used in bathing costumes was developed, I believe, by NASA to launch small rockets from a slingshot, which gives the added bonus that if you manage to actually lever yourself into one, you would be protected from shark attacks. Any shark taking a swipe at your passing midriff would immediately suffer whiplash.

I fought my way into the bathing suit, but as I twanged the shoulder strap in place I gasped in horror, my boobs had disappeared!

Eventually, I found one boob cowering under my left armpit. It took a while to find the other. At last I located it flattened beside my seventh rib.

The problem is that modern bathing suits have no bra cups. The mature woman is now meant to wear her boobs spread across her chest like a speed bump. I realigned my speed bump and lurched toward the mirror to take a full view assessment.

The bathing suit fit all right, but unfortunately it only fitted those bits of me willing to stay inside it. The rest of me oozed out rebelliously from top, bottom and sides. I looked like a lump of Playdoh wearing undersized cling wrap.

As I tried to work out where all those extra bits had come from, the prepubescent sales girl popped her head through the curtain, "Oh, there you are," she said, admiring the bathing suit.

I replied that I wasn't so sure and asked what else she had to show me. I tried on a cream crinkled one that made me look like a lump of masking tape, and a floral two-piece that gave the appearance of an oversized napkin in a napkin ring.

I struggled into a pair of leopard-skin bathers with ragged frills and came out looking like Tarzan's Jane, pregnant with triplets and having a rough day.

I tried on a black number with a midriff fringe and looked like a jellyfish in mourning.

I tried on a bright pink pair with such a high cut leg I thought I would have to wax my eyebrows to wear them.

Finally, I found a suit that fit, it was a two-piece affair with a shorts-style bottom and a loose blouse-type top. It was cheap, comfortable, and bulge-friendly, so I bought it. My ridiculous search had a successful outcome, I figured.

When I got it home, I found a label that read, "Material might become transparent in water."

So, if you happen to be on the beach or near any other body of water this year and I'm there too, I'll be the one in cut-off jeans and a T-shirt!

Friday funnies

A few Friday funnies to let you know I am thinking of you.

 

 

 

And for those who observe the holiday this weekend...

Senior Moments

This made me smile, hope it has the same affect on you.

Monday Moaning

Lettuce begin the week on a healthy note. I hope you relish these veggie photo puns. Do me a fava, they really can't be beet so don't turnip your nose at them or try to squash a smile. Chive got a feeling I should stop now, so I yam.

 

There is no caption for this last one, but I'm including it for my knitting friends. I don't know what the wool would be like from cauliflower sheep, but they sure are cute, don't ewe think?