Good morning everyone.
I hope everyone else is OK
She wants to “go home” I finally discovered where “home” is. It is the place we lived in Annandale, Va. Those were “good” days. We moved there in 1972 and raised Chuck there. And we lived there ten years after I retired. It was good. But I’m glad I don’t live in Virginia now.
But she is having a hard time. Which means that I am too. .
Chas- That reminds me of my brother’s step-son, who ran away to Santa Cruz, CA, from
Arizona because that’s where he last felt happy. I think he was 17 or 18 at the time.
Good Morning. The surgical drain pump has not worked. Thankfully Mr P’s Baby Boy is friends with the surgeon. A call from the doctor this morning avoided a trip to the ER.
Amos is on some pretty strong meds as well and is confused by being off of his schedule. Twice this week he has pooped in the house. Add in the BG trip to the ER and I have had quite the exciting week. I am ill equipped to be a caregiver. I do have a schedule and rotation on the ice packs. There are other things I have had to do that are waaayyyyyy out of my comfort zone, but I won’t bore you with that.
I have been to the store already today and have everything lined up for Sunday Dinner tomorrow so that Mr. P can see Little Miss. He isn’t happy about that because she will be with her parents and will go home with them. Ummmm…..that was the plan. He is all I can handle right now and HE doesn’t need to be handling her either.
Chas, take the moments when she remembers the past, sit and listen to her reminisce, and talk to her about them.
In my work with those whose brains were aging and forgetting, those times of reminisce were some of the times I saw them come back to who they must have been before they needed my care and I learned more about them by listening then. When I took my Writer’s Craft English course I had to write a poem in free verse (modern style), and I wrote about those encounters I had when those with dementia remember:
“Dementia”
I’m back
From my drifting journey
For a moment,
Maybe days,
Hard
To say.
What do you care?
My father cared.
He was wounded, you know,
In the War.
Yes, he had a hole in his head,
I put my finger in it.
Can you help me?
I was ill.
My father and my mother
Left me at the hospital.
Too far to travel,
Alone.
Where is this place?
It makes me feel
Like an orphan
With no one I remember.
Returning
To an empty house.
If you enjoy clean, hilarious comedy, I would like to recommend Nate Bargatze. He has a special on Netflix, which I would recommend you watch first, but not necessary. He has also started a podcast that is on YouTube called “Nateland.” Every episode is funny but best to start with the first one because they refer back to stuff from prior episodes. I especially enjoyed number 13 because he had his father on, who is a professional magician and as funny as Nate is. I sit here and watch them on my computer and do, literally, LOL. If you check him out, let me know what you think.
Phos: She doesn’t remember places and events. She remembers people and thinks they are still around if she can go to see them.
I don’t think she has pleasant memories from childhood. Her mother died when sh was eleven. Her older sister raised her. She loved her older sister as if she were her mother.
I made it through the Word Weavers group although I went to bed last night between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m. That was when I finished geting my article, Prayer Walking 101, on the computer for critique. I need to work some on the structure. I may take a nap later however that probably won’t work because we are suppose to be under a tornado watch or possible warning around 4 p.m.
We had some wind and rain and possibly a few tornadoes from Hurricane Delta around 4 this morning. I wouldn’t know. I was asleep. I only saw what others had posted on FB and then the morning news. The sun is shining now, so I may go outside and read in a little while.
Since I checked in with you last, I have had lunch, baked All-Bran bran muffins for Papa and Little Miss. Friday, a week ago she declared them “Yummy”. Now I am on to the oatmeal, dried cherries, chocolate chip, walnut, coconut cookies. They both like those as well. It is only 10 of 1 here now.
Football is on TV and Mr. P is napping, I mean watching, it.
We have left over Chinese food from yesterday, so that will be late lunch, early dinner.
We had some potatoes that needed using (I’d been removing sprouts for too long for the second half of the bag) and steak that needed using, and a new wine we hadn’t yet tried. Some broccoli added since I need something besides meat and potatoes, and we are now both sated, with leftovers for the next couple of days.
Soon he’ll take a nap and I’ll take a walk (I need to digest a bit first), and sometime this afternoon we’ll probably reconvene for ice cream (raspberry dark chocolate chip for me, and he’ll probably keep working on the rocky road). Little pleasures.
Chas, people are what I remember from places too. I have met seniors who had a parent die in childhood. I have not found that the loss of a parent makes their memories of childhood inherently painful. In fact, any loss does not seem to make the memories inherently painful. Unmitigated evil committed against them (i.e. abuse), yes, but not loss. My grandmother spent her childhood moving from place to place as her father struggled to find work, and lost her twin baby brothers in her early teens, but she remembered the good and the bad together, and found the good outweighed the bad. She wrote us letters, Youngest and I, who were the youngest of her grandchildren, for our birthdays, in which she remembered, good and bad, what happened in the year she was the same age.
Husband is cooking with his new essential hot air cooker deal. Something about chicken and butter and seasoning. I am off to my walk in the rain to get the mail.
Phos, it isn’t that she lost her mother. It is that there wasn’t a female adult. She had an aunt who naught reams of cloth and made three dresses, exactly alike from it. Three of the girls looked alike.
Elvera wore the :”same” dress for years. She went to school and worked (picking cotton, etc.) after school. There was no adult in the house except the father. Though some aunts “looked in on them”. her father later married and Elvera has (had, he died some years ago) a half-brother. She liked the lady her father married, but she was grown and about to leave by then.
Two brothers went off to war and a sister went to live with an aunt & Uncle.
My house downstairs is a disaster. I look like a hobbyist gone amuck.
The photo albums MUST be scanned before returned to their rightful places–upstairs.
I’ve got a puzzle going.
My Adorables need masks, so the sewing machine is up, along with the ironing board.
Paper everywhere. Craziness.
So, I’m upstairs for the day scheduling my Utmost Responses onto Facebook and Gmail. I’ve announced my anticipated fast and have to prepare for that. I didn’t realize Advent is six weeks away, which means 42 Utmost Responses . . . !
14 down . . . it takes a while. 🙂
I’m supposed to be at a writer’s conference, too, but I bought the premium pass so I can watch it later. Too much going on here!
Oh, but, so lovely. There’s a soft gentle rain outside. Just what we need. 🙂
Except, the scorched hillside, when wet, smells like a doused campfire.
Chas, many in your generation have similar tales to tell. Second recently got a book to read to her children called ‘Home in the Woods’ (https://www.amazon.com/Home-Woods-Eliza-Wheeler-ebook/dp/B07NKNXH3X) based on the author’s grandmother’s experiences, another of that generation. It tells the story of eight children and their widowed mother during the Depression era, who were evicted after their their father died and went to live in an abandoned shack in the woods, living off the land in order to survive. The afterword of the book states that the siblings in later life would often reminisce about their life then, and how the obvious hardships of such a life seemed never to darken the memories of how they pulled together as a family. Remembering the hard times does not mean there is only pain in the memory.
My great grandmother, mother of my maternal grandmother, lost her mother when she bled to death in childbirth. The children were all separated. One was adopted by wealthy relatives, the eldest had a mental breakdown and ended up in a mental institution, my great grandmother ended up in an orphanage, until she was 13, when she became a nurse maid in an upper class British house. She worked her way into the position of cook, the highest a person of her class could go in service, before marrying her husband, a brother of friends also in service, and coming to Canada with him. She wrote about her life in her senior years, and she finished her account by thanking God for how he had brought her through her life. Remembering the past can help us see the pattern God weaves in our lives.
I went to return the rental only to discover they “close” at noon on Saturdays. What?
But I double-checked the paperwork and it’s not “due” back until noon Monday. I assume they’re closed tomorrow.
I spent some time this morning going through a pile of junk mail and other “paper” that needs sorting, I usually do that regularly but the last two+ weeks, what with the accident and all busyness and confusion that followed, it’s just kind of piled up.
I continue to be surprised by the passage of this year. I noticed tents up on the vacant corner a few blocks from my house, on the main highway, and it took me a few minutes to realize it must be pumpkin patch time. At first, I thought it must be still summer fruit stand time …
Annie’s asleep in the cat bed on the floor and is making very cute noises.
It looks awfully dark out and tornado warnings are in town. We have a gentle rain so far. I hope my brother escapes the worst of it as he travels home from the office.
Miss Bosley just ate two garbanzo beans on the way to become a vegan cat. Not.
I did get in a much needed nap. I hear a freight train or is it a tornado? That’s a definite negative about living by the rails.
Janice – You were joking about Miss Bosley becoming a vegan, but I have read of people who actually did put their cats on a vegan or vegetarian diet. The poor cats died because cats are carnivores and need the meat to survive.
To add a little to yesterday’s conversation about how Jo should reply to her grandchild (I think it was) who posted something unkind or nasty about Vice President Pence. . .
There are two issues that could be addressed. The first, and most important one, is that we should not insult people by saying nasty or snarky things about them. We should protect people’s reputations (“name”, as the Bible would put it), and give them the benefit of the doubt. I think that would be the most important thing to try to get across to a young person.
The other issue, which could end up derailing the whole discussion, would be about defending Pence’s character. That could end up turning into a futile debate/argument that would overshadow, and possibly negate (in the other’s mind), the first matter.
Do any of you have the problem of homes with crumbling basements or foundations in your area? That is something that has come up in my area over the last few years. An area company that put in basements and foundations used a different kind of concrete with something in it that ends up breaking up the concrete many years later. It costs something like $100,000 to $200,000 to fix.
My neighbors (with the daycare) have that problem, and they are now in the process of having their foundation/basement removed and re-poured (at least, I think that’s how it is done). Their house is up on a jack-like thing, six feet above the ground!
If I have this right, the Connecticut legislature ordered insurance companies to cover much of it. At first, the companies were refusing to cover it at all, and there was a huge controversy about that, and about what, if anything, the state should do to help the affected homeowners. My neighbors will end up paying $25,000 out of pocket, while their insurance covers $150,000.
We may have a lot of repairs needed in this house, but I am so glad that our basement is 120 years old, way older than those affected.
That would seem to be something the company that used the faulty concrete should pay for unless they were mandated to use it by government. I can understand why insurance companies would object.
Roscuro, I have seen a review of that book in World Magazine twice and have it in mind for some granddaughters.
Chas, it’s the nature of the thing that children who lose one parent in childhood either end up with only one adult in the house or with a stepparent, either of which can be a less than ideal situation. In my family alone, my mom was 15 (her younger brother 12) when her dad died; one of my dad’s brothers died and then his wife died a couple of years later, and their children were something like 12 and 14; I was 16 and my younger siblings 15 and 13 when our dad died; my brother’s second wife had a baby and a toddler when her husband died; my daughters were 12 and 14 when their mom died; and my sister’s five children were 14 and under when their father died. Losing a parent while you are a child or a teenager is a very hard loss, and even a life-changing loss . . . but not as bad as having one parent walk out, which many of today’s children face.
If Elvera’s older sister loved her and took care of her, that’s more than many young children experience after the loss of a parent. And I’m sure she has many happy memories if it was a loving home.
I can commiserate with Elvera on wearing the “same dress” for years. Mom always made my sister and me matching dresses so as we grew I always got her hand-me-downs. The worst was when it was a dress that had itchy lace on it. First I suffered in mine and then suffered in my sister’s. I’m glad there were only two of us 🙂
Kare – There was a funny photo thing on Facebook a while back showing a big sister and little sister in matching dresses. The older one is frowning, looking very unhappy and saying, “I’m wearing the same dress as my sister.” The little sister says the same thing, but has a big, happy smile on her face. My daughters related to that. 🙂
My mother died when I was 7. My sister (the oldest) was 14 and filled in where she could. Dad didn’t remarry until In was almost 16, so most of those years there was no adult female in the house. An aunt and neighbor watched out for us.
There was 4 1/2 inches of rain at the Atlanta airport. We hit a new record. Should that be ‘was’ or ‘were’? Is it related to inches or the quantity as a single whole amount?
Anyone know about “flour sack” dresses? I have some quilts made by my great aunt She and my grandmother hand quilted them back when the goal was to make something sturdy and warm not prettily quilted.
Unfortunately they are not big enough to be useful on a bed now so they are packed away in a cedar trunk.
Post surgery swelling hack. Drink lemon water.
Bulgarian style probiotic yogurt? By itself the first couple of bites were -tart isn’t a good description. Maybe acidic? Anyway, some blueberries and a drizzle of local honey fixed it. Also probably negated the probiotic benefit.
Anyway. 2 1/2 miles this morning. Listened to a podcast. Chatted with a neighbor and it’s just now 8 am.
Kim, the local honey has some sort of antibiotic properties (or anti-something anyway) and blueberries are a superfood (if that means anything–not sure it does), and I doubt they hurt the probiotic since it would all end up in your stomach together anyway. Sounds like a good, healthy breakfast.
Morning! It is a beautiful morning in this forest. Cool temps but oh so dry….we need Janice’s rain!
My Mom would tell stories of the underwear her Mom made from flour sacks. Mom said they were soft and well made. Her Mom made all of her clothes. My Mother in law lamented over the one dress she had and that being fashioned from a flour sack by her Mom. My Mother in law was determined that her one daughter would never have to experience that “humiliation” …. my sister in law had one mighty fine wardrobe of very nice clothing! Now the six boys she birthed wore hand me downs and unfortunately my husband was the sixth boy…by the time the clothes got to him they were rather rough and tumbled by their previous owners!
Kim, the quilts sound like they could drape over the bank of a rocking chair. A crafty person could put hand embroidery on them to add color but you might want to keep as is for historical value.
I have flour sack tea towels my grandma embroidered for our wedding. I still use them 36 years later, although they are now quite thin 🙂
Grandma was a talented sew-er and embroiderer. I have a dresser scarf set and one time as I was taking it off the dresser to wash I realized it had been put on upside down!!! The back of her embroidery was just as neat as the front! You had to look very closely to find the knots. She made doll clothes for the whole town’s dolls. Mothers would drop off their daughter’s doll and grandma would make a beautiful wardrobe for it. I still have a doll that is only 2 inches tall that she crocheted a little outfit for.
Good morning. Done with church in Virginia. It was especially good today, still in Ephesians. In celebration of world church or some such thing, they had several of their congregants sing How Great Is Our God in sections of their native languages. Cool! Another picture of Heaven.
I had planned to get to our sister church’s outdoor service this morning but was completely worn out and slept too late. Along with the emotions from the past few days, my knee was really bothering me again last night. I think I just needed a lot of sleep. Knee feels better (not great), but I’m using the heating pad on it this morning.
We’re heading into another unseasonably warm week again, no rain in sight.
No rain in sight here, either, and my little pond is all but dry. It’s normally an acre or two (? I don’t really know how far it extends back, since the only real viewing area is from the front), but it’s down to a patch maybe the size of a car or a little bigger. What’s left is full of frogs and turtles, but they can’t be very happy ones.
We didn’t use flour sacks growing up, nor did Mom make our clothes or do needlework or any such tasks. But Mom nearly always bought a fabric calendar. One year we didn’t have money for a new one, and so we cut out all the months, moved each date one day forward, and glued it all back together. But usually at the end of the year we would cut off the dowel rod on top, throw the calendar in the washing machine, and it would become a dish towel.
Tim Challies wrote what I have been thinking on the common advice to cut negative people out of our lives. I wish he had used a different title, though, because this one seems to be in favor of such advice, but it is not.
“But what Hollis and Osteen and others teach goes far beyond this. They teach that we need to reject and avoid people who cause us to feel negative emotions or think negative thoughts. Why? Because according to the principles of positive thinking, our thoughts are the power that change and shape the world around us. To get ahead in life we need to get rid of anyone who holds us back. I am convinced this principle is abhorrent and will offer three reasons why.”
Of course, there are times when we need to separate ourselves from someone who may be truly abusive, but that is not the kind of thing this kind of advice is usually about. Another buzz word these days is “toxic”, and I think many people use the word merely for others that they merely strongly disagree with.
Nightingale and I somehow were talking on this subject last night, and I was proud to hear her mature views, which were similar to what is in the article (except any Christian stuff).
I’m wearing that decompression sleeve again on my knee today, I’ve not worn it for a while. I went out to do some exercises, used both heat & ice on the leg this morning. I really hope this isn’t “kicking up” again, esp now that i’m out of PT.
Good online sermon on Colossians this morning. Our pastor also talked about how much he still enjoys heading for the beach (they live pretty close and he grew up on the beach for the most part) for solace and prayer. I may start doing that myself, we have a pretty quiet beach in town that’s easily accessible. I think feeling wet sand between my toes would feel really good again, it’s been a while.
Sermon: Acts 18:1-17, in Corinth. Encouraging, especially Paul’s vision that reassured him he was in the right place despite the difficulties.
Sewing and childhood clothes:
We were out of fashion all our childhood. We wore ’79s clothes in the 80’s, and 80’s clothes in the 99’s. When my older sisters babysat, they earned money for a couple of my ‘fashionable’ outfits, but the way we really pulled ourselves out if the outdated clothing rut was by learning to sew ourselves.
If I were to cut out the negative people in my life, I would avoid my neighbors to the left and my neighbors to the right. I would have had to distance myself from my own mother rather than be available to accompany her to all her medical appointments and other things. I certainly would not have been taking care of my MIL (the most negative and critical person I’ve ever known, and that was even before Alzheimer’s) for several years.
Sunday Dinner is done. London Broil, toasted veggies, mashed potatoes, corn bread, and Mari ages tomatoes onions and basil.
Little Miss got her Christmas pajamas and wore them the whole time and wore them home. Bitty Baby still has on her Christmas pajamas. The dogs got table scraps. Everyone is fat and happy. Papa is icing his knee and I am about
To take a shower. I am exhausted but happy. I had all but 2 of my chicks in the nest today. One is in Australia and who knows where my Baby Chick is.
Baby Girl(Chick) has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow and Papa has PT.
Life is good and full.
That’s great Kim. I”m happy that you are happy.
I”m sorry I haven’t participated much lately. But nothing is happening here.
Absolutely nothing. But that’s good. I can’t imagine anything good happening now.
Granddaughter’s husband in Florida went in last week for an appendix operation.
He was in one day, out the next.
I stayed in the hospital for two weeks in 1936 with a ruptured appendix. Nearly died. WE lived in Winnsboro, SC. about 30 miles from Columbia.
Thirty miles was a long way in those days. I was sick for two weeks before they took me to the hospital. I almost died.
Dad tells this: “We were sitting in the waiting room and the doctor came out grinning from ear to ear. They could hear me crying. They asked the doctor why he was grinning with me crying. The doctor said, “He’ hungry”.
They knew, then, that I would pull through.
Interesting day. Since all the pastor’s daughters (he has no sons) were visiting, we had an outdoor meeting at the farm house at 2. t’s the first time we’ve met there since March. The weather was perfect: ~80 with a breeze, no clouds. We sat in the shade of a very large oak tree. I joked that we might need hard hats in case the acorns start falling (they can hurt!). We have been meeting at a park, but since 3/4 of those attending today were staying at the farm house, we met there.
And, since the meeting was at 2, we were able to go to our other church in the morning.
The weather was lovely today, with temps around 60, and the colorful leaves on the trees seemed to glow in the sunshine. Several times throughout the day, I stopped to gaze out the windows at the different trees in our yard and our neighbors’ yard. One of their trees is particularly beautiful, and my gaze kept returning to it. At one point, I almost cried at how beautiful the sight was.
But we sure could use some rain, as we are in a serious drought. Nightingale went two months between lawn mowings, and the grass did not get too high in the meantime. Very, very unusual for around here in the summer. There are brown patches in our yard.
About cats and their “slow blinking”. I had read the theory years ago, and try to remember to slow blink at my cats now and then. I’ll try to do it more often now.
I had a restful day, started reading Rod Dreher’s new book and re-reading ‘Brave New World;’ I almost napped but didn’t; neighbors got home from the desert and I handed off the heavy bag of mail I’ve collected over the last 2 weeks.
Kim’s dinner sounded so good. I won’t tell you what I had. But it came out of a box. 😦
My mom made her last two dresses for me when I was in eighth grade. I did wear hand-me-downs from some friends of the family. I started making my own clothes in ninth grade. I don’t sew clothes anymore, although I am sometimes tempted to do so for my littlest grands. I maybe would if I had them handier to fit things on.
If you have quilts in a chest, Kim, make sure you have them wrapped in some archival paper and that you take them out yearly and refold differently. There are lots of ways to display quilts. There was a picture shared recently on Facebook of an old gun cabinet made with glass re-painted. It had stacked folded quilts behind the glass. You wouldn’t want them in sunlight, though.
We were hearing fireworks here tonight and my friend suggested it was a ‘columbus’ day thing, maybe the indigenous peoples were arriving in the harbor by canoe.
Then we realized the Lakers won?
Got the dogs walked, there’s a house a few blocks away that’s doing a major Halloween production, every night they’re out working on it. Friend told me they worked in the film industry so they think big. 🙂 Anyway, they were out there again tonight, the newer addition is a lot of purple outdoor lights.
I remember going with my mom to Penny’s in the downtown area, walking down the stairs to the basement where they kept all those pattern envelopes, Simplicity, etc.
Morning! It is cooler here this morning. The winds have been terribly strong and the dead pine needles are everywhere! Praying for rain which remains elusive around here.
We took a drive out east yesterday in all that wind. It was rather pretty as we approached groves of aspen and cottonwoods. The leaves were blowing everywhere and we would pull off the side of the dirt roads and take in the scent of autumn…then we would sneeze!! 😂
My mother didn’t sew. Once she tried to sew a pair of pants for me. They were some red and green print corduroy. One leg the print went upside down. She didn’t sew buttons, hem, knit, or crochet. I can make window treatments and shower curtains, I can’t follow a pattern. I guess and by-golly it. I can smock and somewhat crochet. My problem is that my skill is in my right hand but my strength is in my left hand, It’s the curse of being left handed with an inclination to the right. I also no longer have a sewing machine. I can iron but not very well. My secret was to get my father to iron anything really important. I went 4 years without anyone to do that for me, but married Mr. P and now have someone to do the “good” ironing. It must be a military thing. I’m willing to exploit it.
I am a good cook, but have lost some of my skill in that area due to lack of practice and becoming dependent on looking everything up online.
I also shop like a man. I hate to shop and get overwhemed in department stores. I have to shop in small stores where they sell to me. I go and conquer. I spend too much when I go but don’t go often. I don’t spend much on shoes because I am too rough on them. I need to replace a few pairs but can’t bring myself to drive up to Shoe Station. It’s funny that I worked my way through college first in a Connie’s Shoe Store and then in a small local clothing store. You need your child fitted for a pair of shoes? I’m your girl. You need shoes that won’t hurt your bunions? I’ve got you. You need a pair of shoes that won’t hurt your toes where the Japanese shoved bamboo under your toenails? I can fix that too.
It’s funny when you sit down and think of the things you can do or have done.
Love that sneezy scent, Nancyjill. Maybe there is an essential oil for that —P’Achooey.
I still feel sleepy, like I have fall fever. No holiday here. The garbage trip came very early. I made Art’s eggs and he went to the office.
Our prayer call ended up lasting an hour and a half yesterday. Our pastor was under the weather so the youth pastor did the service yesterday. His subject was the God Who Sees You. He did a great job considering such short notice.
Chas was waiting for the Monday site to open.
Then LindaS came over and I got involved with other things.
But that is over and I’m here now.
Last night, I was asleep. The phone rang. It was some guy calling from a hospital. That got my attention, though I didn’t know who it was. But a call from a hospital is important. It took about two minutes for the two of us to realize that he had dialed a wrong number.
But it was now 10:30 and I was wide awake and it took me over an hour to settle down.
My mother and I spent many hours in fabric stores and bought many patterns. She was an excellent seamstress, and I learned from her how to make clothing. She made my prom dress, a lovely blue satin. She made an outfit for the older young lady/homecoming queen across the street for her going away outfit when she got married. She was quite talented in her abilities. I gave up sewing by machine because it no longer seemed practical when clothes of good quality were available at reasonable prices. I have always been able to find things that fit so I did not require special made clothes for that reason as some people need.
It only took three broken sewing machine needles, but I sewed eight masks for Adorables and their parents over the weekend. One tiny part of the downstairs chaos is done–machine, material, elastic, iron, and ironing board are put away!
Now there are eight boxes of photo albums to be scanned and a photo puzzle to finish–not to mention piles of books to read.
¡Feliz Día de la Raza! as they say South of the border. It celebrates the joining of European and indigenous peoples to create a new race: the mestizos. Brown Power!
Actually, though I am of Puerto Rican descent, I’m told my family is pure European, so claiming “brown” doesn’t apply here. But with curly hair, it looked like I had an afro back in the 70s and 80s. So when I moved to rural Northeast Missouri people asked if I was black or white.
I’m not arguing over whether Columbus was a good person or not. If he hadn’t landed in the Americas, someone else would have.
Ironing: we have not really done that since the military life. We did teach the children how to iron so they did some. A boy might pick his good dress shirt up off the floor and iron it every once in a while. A girl might decide it was time to look fancy and iron something or other. We generally had a rule of nothing on the floor but the feet of the furniture until about fifteen and then decided they were on their own. So they had to hunt for their good clothes periodically. I did suggest hanging them up might alleviated the search and the ironing.
Happy Monday. We’re short a reporter (recovering from surgery) this week so the couple of us who are left covering our immediate territories may have to fill in on some of his usual stories.
And I need to get the rental back before noon today. My neighbor volunteered to bring me home so I won’t have to call Lyft. I was grateful to have that as part of the insurance payout.
Maybe now I can settle in and try to adapt to the new Jeep.
Wind also denotes fire season danger.
What I really like is rain, the likes of which we seldom see anymore.
I’m starting off with a heating pad on the knee today, I’m really hoping this uptick in discomfort is short-lived.
And those are my random thoughts this morning so far. I had a very good and long night’s sleep.
I am enjoying a heating pad on the back, while tying not to lift granddaughter. And teach her to not touch the stove.
Last night I had a truly unusual experience. I did not sleep well. So unusual, I cannot recall the last time that happened. Got woken up by the youngest sheep baaing, then the wind picked up and the rain poured and I usually sleep well with that but not last night. But it is so rare, I might as well enjoy it! It makes me fit in better around here.
Re: hand-me-downs. My niece was the oldest of the three granddaughters, so my girls got her hand-me-downs, as well as clothes bought especially for them by us or grandparents. It was always a special thing when we would get a big bag of Niece’s outgrown clothes, as the girls loved her and looked up to her, although she was only eight months older than Nightingale.
Niece had high-quality clothes because her other grandparents were well-to-do, and her parents made pretty good money, too. So her clothes would still look nice as they went from Niece to Nightingale to Chickadee. Such a blessing, especially that the girls loved the clothes, and didn’t deride them as merely hand-me-downs.
I’m guessing my older brothers had a lot of hand-me-downs. In fact, my husband pointed out two photos in the book I made of family photos for our family reunion a few years ago (I made a copy for each sibling), my tall oldest brother in a long-outgrown striped jacket (it was tight on him and high on his arms) and a different photo of the same striped jacket on someone else. My dad was only five feet, seven and a half inches, but my oldest brother was six feet by the time he reached his teens and added another four inches. So in a household that didn’t have a lot of money to spend on clothes, I’m guessing he had a lot of clothes that didn’t come close to fitting him, and then younger brothers would still have to wait several years to fit them. (Since no one else was nearly as tall–my second brother ended up about Dad’s height, though the others added two or three more inches.)
But I was the first girl and didn’t officially have hand-me-downs. I felt a bit sorry for my little sister at times, since outfits that had been my favorites were very well worn when she got them. Occasionally we’d get bags of clothes from people at church, but I don’t remember ever getting anything good out of them. We’d go through and find bikinis (which we wouldn’t wear) and clothes with holes and clothes in weird styles that had been “out” for years and never did look good. Or we’d be in a larger size than anything in the bag. We’d try to claim one or two pieces just to get something, but we’d throw most of the stuff away and wonder why it got passed on in the first place. When I was a teenager I claimed two identical white shirts in a soft material from one such bag, but that’s all I ever remember getting from any of them. In theory we liked the idea of “free clothes,” but somehow it never actually worked.
It is Thanksgiving Day here. The autumn colours are gorgeous, the gardens are nearly harvested. A good time for some thanksgiving. Working today, but should be home in time for turkey dinner.
Peter, if you family is Spanish European, chances are you have some North African mixed in, and hence the afro-style hair. The North Africans I saw in West Africa looked liked Southern Europeans, about the halfway point in the gradation of skin pigmentation and hair texture and eye colour that exists among humanity.
As I recall, we had something like two pair of jeans and five shirts after the wear dresses to school requirement was ended. We never went to church so no special clothes. We did fine. My jeans were always boy jeans but not hand me downs.
I do recall when my brother and I were on a shopping trip with the folks, though we stayed in the car. They brought us two matching red and white striped shirts as we had requested. We wore those a lot with our cut off jeans. And I had my hair cut short so we could be twins. We still have the picture. People invariably point to my brother when trying to identify me. He is fifteen months older than me and we both had blondish brown hair. He supervised the haircut my mom applied. “A little shorter on this side. A bit off on that side.” Voila! It worked.
My brother got some clothes handed down from a friend the same age but who was just larger. Wesley had very nice hand-me-downs from the Pastor’s son at our former church where Art is still a member. Most of my clothes went to my cousins over in AL who were in a large family.
We received many bags of leftovers (oops, we were having a dinner discussion here), hand me downs when we began adopting. The children loved going through them and finding cool stuff. A lot of people donated good quality clothes and it was nice to receive.
Then we started regularly receiving the hand me downs from an adopted child from China who took a liking to our youngest. She got lots of nice clothes and nice toys.
People can be very kind and thoughtful.
My children also wore many hand me downs. We were very thankful. When son started kindergarten he had two outfits for the two days a week he attended and the rest of the week he wore sweatpants and scruffier clothes. Then a friend started giving me all her son’s outgrown jeans. What a blessing!!
I also remember heading to the fabric/pattern section in Simpson Sears 🙂
I would buy jeans on sale, figuring one boy or another would eventually grow into them.
We used to say Stargazer grew up wearing “prestained” clothing. I remember the shocked look on his face the first time I told him to “try on these pair of pants,” while he was actually shopping with me.
“Here?” He asked, aghast.
I laughed. “No, the dressing room!”
He was bewildered. He didn’t know stores had dressing rooms to try on clothing.
My jeans had those iron-on knee patches typically. I was the jeans-T-shirt-sneaker girl, I always identified with Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Hated fussy dresses.
I got wonderful ‘hand me downs” for my last pregnancy and the product of that pregnancy got wonderful hand me downs from her two sisters and another friend. This friend sewed a lot of fancy dresses with smocking etc. Her daughter hated them and they had a lot of fights over wearing them to school. My daughter benefited. One of her dresses was worn by my daughter in a photo when she was around three. She put her daughter in the same dress when she was around the same age and posed her the same way. It was a neat picture and they looked quite a bit alike.
One thing I gave away that I am sorry about was a couple of school back packs I had made for my oldest two daughters. One was of predominately red material and one predominately blue. They were made with strips of fabric in a quilting technique. I wish I would have kept them or had, at least, taken a picture of them. They were given to Salvation Army I think, so someone else would have bought them.
Does anyone else regret selling or giving something away?
I also did not sew much for my youngest daughter, since she got a lot of hand me downs and things were cheaper to purchase ready made if you waited for the right sale. Sometimes patterns cost more than the clothes! Fabric prices went way up. I could use one pattern for both the older two and just change length and elastic size.
When Chickadee would outgrow her clothes (both the hand-me-downs and new-to-her), I would give them to two other little girls I knew from families with limited resources. As for me when I was growing up, I didn’t have anyone to inherit clothes from, so I had new clothes, and my mom made some occasionally.
Kathaleena – Off hand I can’t think of any of my own former possessions that I regret giving or throwing away (although something may occur to me later), but I do remember how greatly disappointed my dad was to have to sell the lovely French Provincial vanity and chair he had made for me. They were going through a tough financial time, and selling some things to help make ends meet.
I had outgrown my affinity for the style of the vanity, so it didn’t bother me at the time. But now I think back to it, and wish we still had it.
Oh, yes, now I do remember a piece of furniture that Hubby and I bought when we were newly married that had to be discarded because it got ruined in the damp basement. We called it a “tea table”, but it might actually have been a cart for alcohol and glasses and such. That was tough to see it go.
My mom always regretted not keeping the armoire from her Iowa home. She and her sister were back there when their dad, my grandfather, died (in 1963, just days before JFK was shot) so they had to deal with all of the furniture, mementoes etc.
they had a number of ‘treasures’ shipped back, including the simple kitchen pine table (that’s now my dining table), 2 small bedside cabinets (split between them so I have the one now in my bedroom), an ancestor’s rifle (which I also have). The armoire was deemed “too big,” but later my mom said they should have just shipped it back to California, too.
Sadly, a number of things that had gone with my aunt wound up with her kids, and then the grandkids; the wayward grandson wound up raiding the storage unit they were in and, presumably, selling it all. So I think the other half of what came from Iowa was lost at that point, including the horse weather vane from the Iowa house.
But I love the pieces I have and they’re all being put to good use. (I have some smaller items also like my grandmothers antique rolling pin and other rather curious kitchen gadgets.)
Regretted sales:
my husband’s collection of record albums
my husband’s Ford Torino
In my defense, he said, “sell stuff, we are in the Army now and moving to Maryland before going overseas”. How was I to know all of his stuff would sell for a quarter and none of my Christian albums would?
We could not take the car and it would not have done well in a field on the mountain for four years.
We did take the Toronado. It was very big on European roads.
Sixty two years ago, half-dollars were common as change.
When Elvera got pregnant, we had no insurance. So we needed to save money to pay for him. So? We started saving silver half-dollars. We had a big coffee can we put them in. We had lots of silver half-dollars.
But when Chuck was born, we found a way to handle the bills.
What to do with the coffee can of silver half dollars?
We spent them.
Sometimes I wonder what those halves would be worth now.
But it really doesn’t matter. It would be a can of half-dollars sitting in a closet.
Our family rarely gets rid of or sells anything. “You never know when you might need it.” So the time that our father sold our hardwood baseball to an utter stranger who had stopped at our one attempt at a yard sale was a memorable occasion. While we often wish our father would be willing to get rid of things, the lack of that bat has been lamented. We rarely played baseball, but my mother, who taught her nephews to catch and bat, would have liked to teach her grandchildren.
I ironed-on patches on the boys’ jeans and when it was time to donate them, I was surprised when the woman in charge told me they wouldn’t take them.
“But they’re good, sturdy and clean?”
“They have patched on them.”
“My kids wore them.” Trying not to get insulted.
“Ah, but your children had a choice. The migrant’s children don’t.”
It still bothers me. The things I did to save money weren’t suitable for other people who needed to save money more than I did.
When I was a Navy relief budget counselor, I refused to ask my clients to do anything I wasn’t willing to do.
So, we basically lived on a much lower salary, except for the fact I paid a house payment, rather than rent.
I used cloth diapers, we owned only one car, I nursed my children, I had a garden we ate out of, I cut everyone’s hair, and our older son slept in a sleeping bag on the floor for several years (his choice).
When I would work through budgets with people who made such a small amount of money and suggest some of the things I did, they never considered them. Savings like those were beneath them.
I never had a store-bought dress until I was 16. I wore my cousin’s hand-me-downs–and she was five inches shorter than I am. I didn’t know long sleeves were supposed to come down to your wrists–I thought they all ended mid-forearm–until I discovered Land’s End clothing at 37.
I’m thankful my parents raised me to be frugal. It allowed my husband to make all the generous allowances he wanted: “Feel free to buy as many canned mushrooms as you like!”
When I worked at a department store, we had Silver Dollar Days and if the department sold enough, the employees in that department were given silver dollars. What does one do with those except save them? And the two dollar bill? I may have one of those tucked away somewhere.
I’m stuffed. Roast turkey, my mother’s sausage and bread stuffing, buttercup squash and potatoes from the garden. Then a (small) slice each of the apple and pumpkin pies made by the Seconds (Second made the fillings, and Second in-law made the pastry).
Speaking of cornbread, Nightingale recently made a Sweet Potato Cornbread that was so moist and delicious! I remarked that my southern friends would not approve, because it was sweet. (We Yankees like our cornbread on the sweet side, the way it’s supposed to be. 😀 )
Kizzie I don’t mind adding sweet potatoes (are you calling yams sweet potatoes?). I just mind you adding sugar. That is an abomination and cringe worthy.
I made johnny cakes tonight. Art had maple syrup with them. I use a cup of organic corn meal, a cup of all purpose organic flour, 2 tsp. baking powder, 1/2 tsp. baking powder,
1 1/3 cup watered down plain low fat yogurt, and two eggs. If too thick, I mix in extra water. I warm a layer of extra light olive oil on the griddle and they cook quickly like pancakes. We will have enough for another meal. Not vegan with the eggs and yogurt, but not too far off course.
Talked to Carol, she sounds so much better now that the doctor is using some different medications. She even stood up for 10 seconds today in PT, which is a record. Next is to see if they can get her to move forward. Oh, and she spent two hours reading and catching up with her devotional literature today.
I was surprised to see that Tess had peed on the thick throw rug in front of the doggie door in the kitchen — but then I finally realized that the gardener didn’t remove the sliding closure that he puts in from the outside while he’s here. I usually double check that as he does forget to remove it from time to time but it didn’t occur to me today.
Get that guy a dictionary. Pretty scary! Maybe more effective to throw a couple of rocks rather than the same ten words. And he does know of course, the cat probably has seen him many times before if he runs out there regularly. I have no idea what I would do in such a situation. Probably trip over the rocks as I was retreating and become another statistic.
I looked at the quarters in my wallet tonight. There was one commemorating the War in the Pacific and Guam. It took a lot of work to be able to read the tiny letters for Guam.
Yep, DJ, pretty convincing that that that one isn’t a bobcat. I kept thinking maybe it had been hand reared and didn’t see him as prey or an enemy–until it started doing those little aggressive moves. I did wonder if throwing a large rock would be effective.
My great grandfather was a carpenter. He built my grandmother a “kitchen safe”. My dad ended up with it. One day he was burning limbs and such in the back yard. He dragged out the kitchen safe, chopped it up with an ax and burned it with me begging him not to.
After he died I was so overwhelmed with his stuff and my stuff that I am positive I got rid of some things that if I knew what they were I would regret. I also sold most of his guns. I wish I hadn’t.
Roscuro- My family is descended from the Spanish Sephardim, and my Grandmother’s family came to PR from the Canary Islands, so there is definitely a Mediterranean/North African connection.
Wandering Views 
Good morning everyone.
I hope everyone else is OK
She wants to “go home” I finally discovered where “home” is. It is the place we lived in Annandale, Va. Those were “good” days. We moved there in 1972 and raised Chuck there. And we lived there ten years after I retired. It was good. But I’m glad I don’t live in Virginia now.
But she is having a hard time. Which means that I am too. .
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Morning Chas, praying for you
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Chas- That reminds me of my brother’s step-son, who ran away to Santa Cruz, CA, from
Arizona because that’s where he last felt happy. I think he was 17 or 18 at the time.
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I don’t know why that line jumped down where it did.
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Good morning.
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I suppose it was only a matter of time. 🙂
The mask smiley. 😷
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Good Morning. The surgical drain pump has not worked. Thankfully Mr P’s Baby Boy is friends with the surgeon. A call from the doctor this morning avoided a trip to the ER.
Amos is on some pretty strong meds as well and is confused by being off of his schedule. Twice this week he has pooped in the house. Add in the BG trip to the ER and I have had quite the exciting week. I am ill equipped to be a caregiver. I do have a schedule and rotation on the ice packs. There are other things I have had to do that are waaayyyyyy out of my comfort zone, but I won’t bore you with that.
I have been to the store already today and have everything lined up for Sunday Dinner tomorrow so that Mr. P can see Little Miss. He isn’t happy about that because she will be with her parents and will go home with them. Ummmm…..that was the plan. He is all I can handle right now and HE doesn’t need to be handling her either.
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I see that mask “chains” (like those chains you wear around your neck to hold glasses when they’re not in use) are now being sold.
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Ha! I feel so much safer now.
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Chas, take the moments when she remembers the past, sit and listen to her reminisce, and talk to her about them.
In my work with those whose brains were aging and forgetting, those times of reminisce were some of the times I saw them come back to who they must have been before they needed my care and I learned more about them by listening then. When I took my Writer’s Craft English course I had to write a poem in free verse (modern style), and I wrote about those encounters I had when those with dementia remember:
“Dementia”
I’m back
From my drifting journey
For a moment,
Maybe days,
Hard
To say.
What do you care?
My father cared.
He was wounded, you know,
In the War.
Yes, he had a hole in his head,
I put my finger in it.
Can you help me?
I was ill.
My father and my mother
Left me at the hospital.
Too far to travel,
Alone.
Where is this place?
It makes me feel
Like an orphan
With no one I remember.
Returning
To an empty house.
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If you enjoy clean, hilarious comedy, I would like to recommend Nate Bargatze. He has a special on Netflix, which I would recommend you watch first, but not necessary. He has also started a podcast that is on YouTube called “Nateland.” Every episode is funny but best to start with the first one because they refer back to stuff from prior episodes. I especially enjoyed number 13 because he had his father on, who is a professional magician and as funny as Nate is. I sit here and watch them on my computer and do, literally, LOL. If you check him out, let me know what you think.
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Phos: She doesn’t remember places and events. She remembers people and thinks they are still around if she can go to see them.
I don’t think she has pleasant memories from childhood. Her mother died when sh was eleven. Her older sister raised her. She loved her older sister as if she were her mother.
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I made it through the Word Weavers group although I went to bed last night between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m. That was when I finished geting my article, Prayer Walking 101, on the computer for critique. I need to work some on the structure. I may take a nap later however that probably won’t work because we are suppose to be under a tornado watch or possible warning around 4 p.m.
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We had some wind and rain and possibly a few tornadoes from Hurricane Delta around 4 this morning. I wouldn’t know. I was asleep. I only saw what others had posted on FB and then the morning news. The sun is shining now, so I may go outside and read in a little while.
Since I checked in with you last, I have had lunch, baked All-Bran bran muffins for Papa and Little Miss. Friday, a week ago she declared them “Yummy”. Now I am on to the oatmeal, dried cherries, chocolate chip, walnut, coconut cookies. They both like those as well. It is only 10 of 1 here now.
Football is on TV and Mr. P is napping, I mean watching, it.
We have left over Chinese food from yesterday, so that will be late lunch, early dinner.
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We had some potatoes that needed using (I’d been removing sprouts for too long for the second half of the bag) and steak that needed using, and a new wine we hadn’t yet tried. Some broccoli added since I need something besides meat and potatoes, and we are now both sated, with leftovers for the next couple of days.
Soon he’ll take a nap and I’ll take a walk (I need to digest a bit first), and sometime this afternoon we’ll probably reconvene for ice cream (raspberry dark chocolate chip for me, and he’ll probably keep working on the rocky road). Little pleasures.
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Chas, people are what I remember from places too. I have met seniors who had a parent die in childhood. I have not found that the loss of a parent makes their memories of childhood inherently painful. In fact, any loss does not seem to make the memories inherently painful. Unmitigated evil committed against them (i.e. abuse), yes, but not loss. My grandmother spent her childhood moving from place to place as her father struggled to find work, and lost her twin baby brothers in her early teens, but she remembered the good and the bad together, and found the good outweighed the bad. She wrote us letters, Youngest and I, who were the youngest of her grandchildren, for our birthdays, in which she remembered, good and bad, what happened in the year she was the same age.
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Husband is cooking with his new essential hot air cooker deal. Something about chicken and butter and seasoning. I am off to my walk in the rain to get the mail.
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Phos, it isn’t that she lost her mother. It is that there wasn’t a female adult. She had an aunt who naught reams of cloth and made three dresses, exactly alike from it. Three of the girls looked alike.
Elvera wore the :”same” dress for years. She went to school and worked (picking cotton, etc.) after school. There was no adult in the house except the father. Though some aunts “looked in on them”. her father later married and Elvera has (had, he died some years ago) a half-brother. She liked the lady her father married, but she was grown and about to leave by then.
Two brothers went off to war and a sister went to live with an aunt & Uncle.
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Roscuro @11:09 That’s a beautiful poem. I’m glad you were there to hear the memories .
Debra
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My house downstairs is a disaster. I look like a hobbyist gone amuck.
The photo albums MUST be scanned before returned to their rightful places–upstairs.
I’ve got a puzzle going.
My Adorables need masks, so the sewing machine is up, along with the ironing board.
Paper everywhere. Craziness.
So, I’m upstairs for the day scheduling my Utmost Responses onto Facebook and Gmail. I’ve announced my anticipated fast and have to prepare for that. I didn’t realize Advent is six weeks away, which means 42 Utmost Responses . . . !
14 down . . . it takes a while. 🙂
I’m supposed to be at a writer’s conference, too, but I bought the premium pass so I can watch it later. Too much going on here!
Oh, but, so lovely. There’s a soft gentle rain outside. Just what we need. 🙂
Except, the scorched hillside, when wet, smells like a doused campfire.
The windows are closed. I’ll take even that.
🙂
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Chas, many in your generation have similar tales to tell. Second recently got a book to read to her children called ‘Home in the Woods’ (https://www.amazon.com/Home-Woods-Eliza-Wheeler-ebook/dp/B07NKNXH3X) based on the author’s grandmother’s experiences, another of that generation. It tells the story of eight children and their widowed mother during the Depression era, who were evicted after their their father died and went to live in an abandoned shack in the woods, living off the land in order to survive. The afterword of the book states that the siblings in later life would often reminisce about their life then, and how the obvious hardships of such a life seemed never to darken the memories of how they pulled together as a family. Remembering the hard times does not mean there is only pain in the memory.
My great grandmother, mother of my maternal grandmother, lost her mother when she bled to death in childbirth. The children were all separated. One was adopted by wealthy relatives, the eldest had a mental breakdown and ended up in a mental institution, my great grandmother ended up in an orphanage, until she was 13, when she became a nurse maid in an upper class British house. She worked her way into the position of cook, the highest a person of her class could go in service, before marrying her husband, a brother of friends also in service, and coming to Canada with him. She wrote about her life in her senior years, and she finished her account by thanking God for how he had brought her through her life. Remembering the past can help us see the pattern God weaves in our lives.
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I went to return the rental only to discover they “close” at noon on Saturdays. What?
But I double-checked the paperwork and it’s not “due” back until noon Monday. I assume they’re closed tomorrow.
I spent some time this morning going through a pile of junk mail and other “paper” that needs sorting, I usually do that regularly but the last two+ weeks, what with the accident and all busyness and confusion that followed, it’s just kind of piled up.
I continue to be surprised by the passage of this year. I noticed tents up on the vacant corner a few blocks from my house, on the main highway, and it took me a few minutes to realize it must be pumpkin patch time. At first, I thought it must be still summer fruit stand time …
Annie’s asleep in the cat bed on the floor and is making very cute noises.
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It looks awfully dark out and tornado warnings are in town. We have a gentle rain so far. I hope my brother escapes the worst of it as he travels home from the office.
Miss Bosley just ate two garbanzo beans on the way to become a vegan cat. Not.
I did get in a much needed nap. I hear a freight train or is it a tornado? That’s a definite negative about living by the rails.
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Janice – You were joking about Miss Bosley becoming a vegan, but I have read of people who actually did put their cats on a vegan or vegetarian diet. The poor cats died because cats are carnivores and need the meat to survive.
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To add a little to yesterday’s conversation about how Jo should reply to her grandchild (I think it was) who posted something unkind or nasty about Vice President Pence. . .
There are two issues that could be addressed. The first, and most important one, is that we should not insult people by saying nasty or snarky things about them. We should protect people’s reputations (“name”, as the Bible would put it), and give them the benefit of the doubt. I think that would be the most important thing to try to get across to a young person.
The other issue, which could end up derailing the whole discussion, would be about defending Pence’s character. That could end up turning into a futile debate/argument that would overshadow, and possibly negate (in the other’s mind), the first matter.
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Do any of you have the problem of homes with crumbling basements or foundations in your area? That is something that has come up in my area over the last few years. An area company that put in basements and foundations used a different kind of concrete with something in it that ends up breaking up the concrete many years later. It costs something like $100,000 to $200,000 to fix.
My neighbors (with the daycare) have that problem, and they are now in the process of having their foundation/basement removed and re-poured (at least, I think that’s how it is done). Their house is up on a jack-like thing, six feet above the ground!
If I have this right, the Connecticut legislature ordered insurance companies to cover much of it. At first, the companies were refusing to cover it at all, and there was a huge controversy about that, and about what, if anything, the state should do to help the affected homeowners. My neighbors will end up paying $25,000 out of pocket, while their insurance covers $150,000.
We may have a lot of repairs needed in this house, but I am so glad that our basement is 120 years old, way older than those affected.
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That would seem to be something the company that used the faulty concrete should pay for unless they were mandated to use it by government. I can understand why insurance companies would object.
Roscuro, I have seen a review of that book in World Magazine twice and have it in mind for some granddaughters.
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Chas, it’s the nature of the thing that children who lose one parent in childhood either end up with only one adult in the house or with a stepparent, either of which can be a less than ideal situation. In my family alone, my mom was 15 (her younger brother 12) when her dad died; one of my dad’s brothers died and then his wife died a couple of years later, and their children were something like 12 and 14; I was 16 and my younger siblings 15 and 13 when our dad died; my brother’s second wife had a baby and a toddler when her husband died; my daughters were 12 and 14 when their mom died; and my sister’s five children were 14 and under when their father died. Losing a parent while you are a child or a teenager is a very hard loss, and even a life-changing loss . . . but not as bad as having one parent walk out, which many of today’s children face.
If Elvera’s older sister loved her and took care of her, that’s more than many young children experience after the loss of a parent. And I’m sure she has many happy memories if it was a loving home.
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I can commiserate with Elvera on wearing the “same dress” for years. Mom always made my sister and me matching dresses so as we grew I always got her hand-me-downs. The worst was when it was a dress that had itchy lace on it. First I suffered in mine and then suffered in my sister’s. I’m glad there were only two of us 🙂
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Kare – There was a funny photo thing on Facebook a while back showing a big sister and little sister in matching dresses. The older one is frowning, looking very unhappy and saying, “I’m wearing the same dress as my sister.” The little sister says the same thing, but has a big, happy smile on her face. My daughters related to that. 🙂
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Kathaleena – Unfortunately, the company went out of business, and “belly up”, I believe.
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Foundation up ?
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Stop it.
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We have a winner (and perhaps a whiner).
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My mother died when I was 7. My sister (the oldest) was 14 and filled in where she could. Dad didn’t remarry until In was almost 16, so most of those years there was no adult female in the house. An aunt and neighbor watched out for us.
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There was 4 1/2 inches of rain at the Atlanta airport. We hit a new record. Should that be ‘was’ or ‘were’? Is it related to inches or the quantity as a single whole amount?
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Janice. We are getting it now.
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Anyone know about “flour sack” dresses? I have some quilts made by my great aunt She and my grandmother hand quilted them back when the goal was to make something sturdy and warm not prettily quilted.
Unfortunately they are not big enough to be useful on a bed now so they are packed away in a cedar trunk.
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Post surgery swelling hack. Drink lemon water.
Bulgarian style probiotic yogurt? By itself the first couple of bites were -tart isn’t a good description. Maybe acidic? Anyway, some blueberries and a drizzle of local honey fixed it. Also probably negated the probiotic benefit.
Anyway. 2 1/2 miles this morning. Listened to a podcast. Chatted with a neighbor and it’s just now 8 am.
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Kim, the local honey has some sort of antibiotic properties (or anti-something anyway) and blueberries are a superfood (if that means anything–not sure it does), and I doubt they hurt the probiotic since it would all end up in your stomach together anyway. Sounds like a good, healthy breakfast.
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Morning! It is a beautiful morning in this forest. Cool temps but oh so dry….we need Janice’s rain!
My Mom would tell stories of the underwear her Mom made from flour sacks. Mom said they were soft and well made. Her Mom made all of her clothes. My Mother in law lamented over the one dress she had and that being fashioned from a flour sack by her Mom. My Mother in law was determined that her one daughter would never have to experience that “humiliation” …. my sister in law had one mighty fine wardrobe of very nice clothing! Now the six boys she birthed wore hand me downs and unfortunately my husband was the sixth boy…by the time the clothes got to him they were rather rough and tumbled by their previous owners!
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Kim, the quilts sound like they could drape over the bank of a rocking chair. A crafty person could put hand embroidery on them to add color but you might want to keep as is for historical value.
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I have flour sack tea towels my grandma embroidered for our wedding. I still use them 36 years later, although they are now quite thin 🙂
Grandma was a talented sew-er and embroiderer. I have a dresser scarf set and one time as I was taking it off the dresser to wash I realized it had been put on upside down!!! The back of her embroidery was just as neat as the front! You had to look very closely to find the knots. She made doll clothes for the whole town’s dolls. Mothers would drop off their daughter’s doll and grandma would make a beautiful wardrobe for it. I still have a doll that is only 2 inches tall that she crocheted a little outfit for.
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It’s a gloomy day here. I’ve had to turn on lights in the house 😦
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Good morning. Done with church in Virginia. It was especially good today, still in Ephesians. In celebration of world church or some such thing, they had several of their congregants sing How Great Is Our God in sections of their native languages. Cool! Another picture of Heaven.
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It was neat how flour sack manufacturers started printing them with nice patterns when they learned that mothers were using them for clothing fabric.
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I had planned to get to our sister church’s outdoor service this morning but was completely worn out and slept too late. Along with the emotions from the past few days, my knee was really bothering me again last night. I think I just needed a lot of sleep. Knee feels better (not great), but I’m using the heating pad on it this morning.
We’re heading into another unseasonably warm week again, no rain in sight.
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No rain in sight here, either, and my little pond is all but dry. It’s normally an acre or two (? I don’t really know how far it extends back, since the only real viewing area is from the front), but it’s down to a patch maybe the size of a car or a little bigger. What’s left is full of frogs and turtles, but they can’t be very happy ones.
We didn’t use flour sacks growing up, nor did Mom make our clothes or do needlework or any such tasks. But Mom nearly always bought a fabric calendar. One year we didn’t have money for a new one, and so we cut out all the months, moved each date one day forward, and glued it all back together. But usually at the end of the year we would cut off the dowel rod on top, throw the calendar in the washing machine, and it would become a dish towel.
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I cannot leave 49 just sitting here waiting to be noticed. It is an important number. Just think of what the Gold rush did for the west coast..
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Tim Challies wrote what I have been thinking on the common advice to cut negative people out of our lives. I wish he had used a different title, though, because this one seems to be in favor of such advice, but it is not.
“But what Hollis and Osteen and others teach goes far beyond this. They teach that we need to reject and avoid people who cause us to feel negative emotions or think negative thoughts. Why? Because according to the principles of positive thinking, our thoughts are the power that change and shape the world around us. To get ahead in life we need to get rid of anyone who holds us back. I am convinced this principle is abhorrent and will offer three reasons why.”
https://www.challies.com/articles/the-cost-of-surrounding-yourself-with-negative-people/?fbclid=IwAR2OfzEhd5yduTyjLwcn60kyZGOUE6As-a-kkJ5W1UdrCdVAvRm7LvOetIE#.X4D855EzfpI.facebook
Of course, there are times when we need to separate ourselves from someone who may be truly abusive, but that is not the kind of thing this kind of advice is usually about. Another buzz word these days is “toxic”, and I think many people use the word merely for others that they merely strongly disagree with.
Nightingale and I somehow were talking on this subject last night, and I was proud to hear her mature views, which were similar to what is in the article (except any Christian stuff).
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Hollis just got rid of her husband.
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You okay, Michelle?
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Cryptic
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I’m wearing that decompression sleeve again on my knee today, I’ve not worn it for a while. I went out to do some exercises, used both heat & ice on the leg this morning. I really hope this isn’t “kicking up” again, esp now that i’m out of PT.
Good online sermon on Colossians this morning. Our pastor also talked about how much he still enjoys heading for the beach (they live pretty close and he grew up on the beach for the most part) for solace and prayer. I may start doing that myself, we have a pretty quiet beach in town that’s easily accessible. I think feeling wet sand between my toes would feel really good again, it’s been a while.
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during the Q&A session after today’s service, our pastor jokingly referred to texas as ‘the promised land’
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Sermon: Acts 18:1-17, in Corinth. Encouraging, especially Paul’s vision that reassured him he was in the right place despite the difficulties.
Sewing and childhood clothes:
We were out of fashion all our childhood. We wore ’79s clothes in the 80’s, and 80’s clothes in the 99’s. When my older sisters babysat, they earned money for a couple of my ‘fashionable’ outfits, but the way we really pulled ourselves out if the outdated clothing rut was by learning to sew ourselves.
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hi
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Responding to Kizzie’s post about “getting rid of uncomfortable people in your life,” in which Rachel Hollis and Joel Osteen were being quoted.
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If I were to cut out the negative people in my life, I would avoid my neighbors to the left and my neighbors to the right. I would have had to distance myself from my own mother rather than be available to accompany her to all her medical appointments and other things. I certainly would not have been taking care of my MIL (the most negative and critical person I’ve ever known, and that was even before Alzheimer’s) for several years.
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Ah
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Sunday Dinner is done. London Broil, toasted veggies, mashed potatoes, corn bread, and Mari ages tomatoes onions and basil.
Little Miss got her Christmas pajamas and wore them the whole time and wore them home. Bitty Baby still has on her Christmas pajamas. The dogs got table scraps. Everyone is fat and happy. Papa is icing his knee and I am about
To take a shower. I am exhausted but happy. I had all but 2 of my chicks in the nest today. One is in Australia and who knows where my Baby Chick is.
Baby Girl(Chick) has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow and Papa has PT.
Life is good and full.
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That’s great Kim. I”m happy that you are happy.
I”m sorry I haven’t participated much lately. But nothing is happening here.
Absolutely nothing. But that’s good. I can’t imagine anything good happening now.
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Granddaughter’s husband in Florida went in last week for an appendix operation.
He was in one day, out the next.
I stayed in the hospital for two weeks in 1936 with a ruptured appendix. Nearly died. WE lived in Winnsboro, SC. about 30 miles from Columbia.
Thirty miles was a long way in those days. I was sick for two weeks before they took me to the hospital. I almost died.
Dad tells this: “We were sitting in the waiting room and the doctor came out grinning from ear to ear. They could hear me crying. They asked the doctor why he was grinning with me crying. The doctor said, “He’ hungry”.
They knew, then, that I would pull through.
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Great story Chas.
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Interesting day. Since all the pastor’s daughters (he has no sons) were visiting, we had an outdoor meeting at the farm house at 2. t’s the first time we’ve met there since March. The weather was perfect: ~80 with a breeze, no clouds. We sat in the shade of a very large oak tree. I joked that we might need hard hats in case the acorns start falling (they can hurt!). We have been meeting at a park, but since 3/4 of those attending today were staying at the farm house, we met there.
And, since the meeting was at 2, we were able to go to our other church in the morning.
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The weather was lovely today, with temps around 60, and the colorful leaves on the trees seemed to glow in the sunshine. Several times throughout the day, I stopped to gaze out the windows at the different trees in our yard and our neighbors’ yard. One of their trees is particularly beautiful, and my gaze kept returning to it. At one point, I almost cried at how beautiful the sight was.
But we sure could use some rain, as we are in a serious drought. Nightingale went two months between lawn mowings, and the grass did not get too high in the meantime. Very, very unusual for around here in the summer. There are brown patches in our yard.
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About cats and their “slow blinking”. I had read the theory years ago, and try to remember to slow blink at my cats now and then. I’ll try to do it more often now.
https://www.sciencealert.com/you-can-build-a-rapport-with-your-cat-by-blinking-real-slow?fbclid=IwAR2o-F-LgQShcjgULers-nyzGjOcZtvS4ukNHzR6zgFFIj7wJGXkPZfxHNc
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I had a restful day, started reading Rod Dreher’s new book and re-reading ‘Brave New World;’ I almost napped but didn’t; neighbors got home from the desert and I handed off the heavy bag of mail I’ve collected over the last 2 weeks.
Kim’s dinner sounded so good. I won’t tell you what I had. But it came out of a box. 😦
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Kizzie, lots of brown in my front “grass.” But that’s typical through the summer here. I’m hoping we get some decent rain this fall and winter.
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Tomorrow is a holiday, so I’m thinking I may just take the day off, or sleep in at a minimum. 🙂
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My mom made her last two dresses for me when I was in eighth grade. I did wear hand-me-downs from some friends of the family. I started making my own clothes in ninth grade. I don’t sew clothes anymore, although I am sometimes tempted to do so for my littlest grands. I maybe would if I had them handier to fit things on.
If you have quilts in a chest, Kim, make sure you have them wrapped in some archival paper and that you take them out yearly and refold differently. There are lots of ways to display quilts. There was a picture shared recently on Facebook of an old gun cabinet made with glass re-painted. It had stacked folded quilts behind the glass. You wouldn’t want them in sunlight, though.
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Tomorrow is Indigenous Peoples’ Day, AJ.
We were hearing fireworks here tonight and my friend suggested it was a ‘columbus’ day thing, maybe the indigenous peoples were arriving in the harbor by canoe.
Then we realized the Lakers won?
Got the dogs walked, there’s a house a few blocks away that’s doing a major Halloween production, every night they’re out working on it. Friend told me they worked in the film industry so they think big. 🙂 Anyway, they were out there again tonight, the newer addition is a lot of purple outdoor lights.
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I remember going with my mom to Penny’s in the downtown area, walking down the stairs to the basement where they kept all those pattern envelopes, Simplicity, etc.
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I remember that as well, DJ; just a different Penny’s in a different state.
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We did that, too, in Idaho.
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Well, looky there, seventy five.
I see the real took his vacation. Unlike the rest of us, who still need to work. That is okay, he does us a good thing.
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Morning! It is cooler here this morning. The winds have been terribly strong and the dead pine needles are everywhere! Praying for rain which remains elusive around here.
We took a drive out east yesterday in all that wind. It was rather pretty as we approached groves of aspen and cottonwoods. The leaves were blowing everywhere and we would pull off the side of the dirt roads and take in the scent of autumn…then we would sneeze!! 😂
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My mother didn’t sew. Once she tried to sew a pair of pants for me. They were some red and green print corduroy. One leg the print went upside down. She didn’t sew buttons, hem, knit, or crochet. I can make window treatments and shower curtains, I can’t follow a pattern. I guess and by-golly it. I can smock and somewhat crochet. My problem is that my skill is in my right hand but my strength is in my left hand, It’s the curse of being left handed with an inclination to the right. I also no longer have a sewing machine. I can iron but not very well. My secret was to get my father to iron anything really important. I went 4 years without anyone to do that for me, but married Mr. P and now have someone to do the “good” ironing. It must be a military thing. I’m willing to exploit it.
I am a good cook, but have lost some of my skill in that area due to lack of practice and becoming dependent on looking everything up online.
I also shop like a man. I hate to shop and get overwhemed in department stores. I have to shop in small stores where they sell to me. I go and conquer. I spend too much when I go but don’t go often. I don’t spend much on shoes because I am too rough on them. I need to replace a few pairs but can’t bring myself to drive up to Shoe Station. It’s funny that I worked my way through college first in a Connie’s Shoe Store and then in a small local clothing store. You need your child fitted for a pair of shoes? I’m your girl. You need shoes that won’t hurt your bunions? I’ve got you. You need a pair of shoes that won’t hurt your toes where the Japanese shoved bamboo under your toenails? I can fix that too.
It’s funny when you sit down and think of the things you can do or have done.
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Love that sneezy scent, Nancyjill. Maybe there is an essential oil for that —P’Achooey.
I still feel sleepy, like I have fall fever. No holiday here. The garbage trip came very early. I made Art’s eggs and he went to the office.
Our prayer call ended up lasting an hour and a half yesterday. Our pastor was under the weather so the youth pastor did the service yesterday. His subject was the God Who Sees You. He did a great job considering such short notice.
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NancyJill, we had that wind last night as well. I love the wind. Maybe not if I lived in hurricane land or tornado land.
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https://mailchi.mp/16dfe44dc2da/free-ebook?e=23f7f2d4c0
The link for a free ebook.
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Where is Chas this morning?
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Chas was waiting for the Monday site to open.
Then LindaS came over and I got involved with other things.
But that is over and I’m here now.
Last night, I was asleep. The phone rang. It was some guy calling from a hospital. That got my attention, though I didn’t know who it was. But a call from a hospital is important. It took about two minutes for the two of us to realize that he had dialed a wrong number.
But it was now 10:30 and I was wide awake and it took me over an hour to settle down.
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Good question, Mumsee.
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Since it is still up, I will no longer resist the temptation to”
10+10=20
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My mother and I spent many hours in fabric stores and bought many patterns. She was an excellent seamstress, and I learned from her how to make clothing. She made my prom dress, a lovely blue satin. She made an outfit for the older young lady/homecoming queen across the street for her going away outfit when she got married. She was quite talented in her abilities. I gave up sewing by machine because it no longer seemed practical when clothes of good quality were available at reasonable prices. I have always been able to find things that fit so I did not require special made clothes for that reason as some people need.
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It only took three broken sewing machine needles, but I sewed eight masks for Adorables and their parents over the weekend. One tiny part of the downstairs chaos is done–machine, material, elastic, iron, and ironing board are put away!
Now there are eight boxes of photo albums to be scanned and a photo puzzle to finish–not to mention piles of books to read.
The downstairs is practically picked up! LOL
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Wait. I didn’t see that ironing part in the Navy contract. Could you highlight and send? 🙂
I’ll spend today getting my social media shut down tomorrow. Sigh. Honestly, why is it always so complicated?
I also have to figure out how to cook/eat for three weeks of sort-of fasting. I think I’m going vegan. Maybe.
High hot winds expected Wednesday. Potential power outages. Honestly. [Submit your own whine, why should I share mine?]
Off to freeze water.
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¡Feliz Día de la Raza! as they say South of the border. It celebrates the joining of European and indigenous peoples to create a new race: the mestizos. Brown Power!
Actually, though I am of Puerto Rican descent, I’m told my family is pure European, so claiming “brown” doesn’t apply here. But with curly hair, it looked like I had an afro back in the 70s and 80s. So when I moved to rural Northeast Missouri people asked if I was black or white.
I’m not arguing over whether Columbus was a good person or not. If he hadn’t landed in the Americas, someone else would have.
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Michelle, there may be a clause to the contract. I
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Ironing: we have not really done that since the military life. We did teach the children how to iron so they did some. A boy might pick his good dress shirt up off the floor and iron it every once in a while. A girl might decide it was time to look fancy and iron something or other. We generally had a rule of nothing on the floor but the feet of the furniture until about fifteen and then decided they were on their own. So they had to hunt for their good clothes periodically. I did suggest hanging them up might alleviated the search and the ironing.
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Good to see you up and at ’em, Chas.
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Happy Monday. We’re short a reporter (recovering from surgery) this week so the couple of us who are left covering our immediate territories may have to fill in on some of his usual stories.
And I need to get the rental back before noon today. My neighbor volunteered to bring me home so I won’t have to call Lyft. I was grateful to have that as part of the insurance payout.
Maybe now I can settle in and try to adapt to the new Jeep.
Wind also denotes fire season danger.
What I really like is rain, the likes of which we seldom see anymore.
I’m starting off with a heating pad on the knee today, I’m really hoping this uptick in discomfort is short-lived.
And those are my random thoughts this morning so far. I had a very good and long night’s sleep.
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I am enjoying a heating pad on the back, while tying not to lift granddaughter. And teach her to not touch the stove.
Last night I had a truly unusual experience. I did not sleep well. So unusual, I cannot recall the last time that happened. Got woken up by the youngest sheep baaing, then the wind picked up and the rain poured and I usually sleep well with that but not last night. But it is so rare, I might as well enjoy it! It makes me fit in better around here.
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Since the soil is quite wet and soft, I dug up some ageratum to share with a friend. With the high humidity I did little to work up a sweat.
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Re: hand-me-downs. My niece was the oldest of the three granddaughters, so my girls got her hand-me-downs, as well as clothes bought especially for them by us or grandparents. It was always a special thing when we would get a big bag of Niece’s outgrown clothes, as the girls loved her and looked up to her, although she was only eight months older than Nightingale.
Niece had high-quality clothes because her other grandparents were well-to-do, and her parents made pretty good money, too. So her clothes would still look nice as they went from Niece to Nightingale to Chickadee. Such a blessing, especially that the girls loved the clothes, and didn’t deride them as merely hand-me-downs.
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I’m guessing my older brothers had a lot of hand-me-downs. In fact, my husband pointed out two photos in the book I made of family photos for our family reunion a few years ago (I made a copy for each sibling), my tall oldest brother in a long-outgrown striped jacket (it was tight on him and high on his arms) and a different photo of the same striped jacket on someone else. My dad was only five feet, seven and a half inches, but my oldest brother was six feet by the time he reached his teens and added another four inches. So in a household that didn’t have a lot of money to spend on clothes, I’m guessing he had a lot of clothes that didn’t come close to fitting him, and then younger brothers would still have to wait several years to fit them. (Since no one else was nearly as tall–my second brother ended up about Dad’s height, though the others added two or three more inches.)
But I was the first girl and didn’t officially have hand-me-downs. I felt a bit sorry for my little sister at times, since outfits that had been my favorites were very well worn when she got them. Occasionally we’d get bags of clothes from people at church, but I don’t remember ever getting anything good out of them. We’d go through and find bikinis (which we wouldn’t wear) and clothes with holes and clothes in weird styles that had been “out” for years and never did look good. Or we’d be in a larger size than anything in the bag. We’d try to claim one or two pieces just to get something, but we’d throw most of the stuff away and wonder why it got passed on in the first place. When I was a teenager I claimed two identical white shirts in a soft material from one such bag, but that’s all I ever remember getting from any of them. In theory we liked the idea of “free clothes,” but somehow it never actually worked.
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It is Thanksgiving Day here. The autumn colours are gorgeous, the gardens are nearly harvested. A good time for some thanksgiving. Working today, but should be home in time for turkey dinner.
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Peter, if you family is Spanish European, chances are you have some North African mixed in, and hence the afro-style hair. The North Africans I saw in West Africa looked liked Southern Europeans, about the halfway point in the gradation of skin pigmentation and hair texture and eye colour that exists among humanity.
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As I recall, we had something like two pair of jeans and five shirts after the wear dresses to school requirement was ended. We never went to church so no special clothes. We did fine. My jeans were always boy jeans but not hand me downs.
I do recall when my brother and I were on a shopping trip with the folks, though we stayed in the car. They brought us two matching red and white striped shirts as we had requested. We wore those a lot with our cut off jeans. And I had my hair cut short so we could be twins. We still have the picture. People invariably point to my brother when trying to identify me. He is fifteen months older than me and we both had blondish brown hair. He supervised the haircut my mom applied. “A little shorter on this side. A bit off on that side.” Voila! It worked.
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Mumsee got 100!
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Happy Thanksgiving, Roscuro!
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My brother got some clothes handed down from a friend the same age but who was just larger. Wesley had very nice hand-me-downs from the Pastor’s son at our former church where Art is still a member. Most of my clothes went to my cousins over in AL who were in a large family.
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We received many bags of leftovers (oops, we were having a dinner discussion here), hand me downs when we began adopting. The children loved going through them and finding cool stuff. A lot of people donated good quality clothes and it was nice to receive.
Then we started regularly receiving the hand me downs from an adopted child from China who took a liking to our youngest. She got lots of nice clothes and nice toys.
People can be very kind and thoughtful.
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My children also wore many hand me downs. We were very thankful. When son started kindergarten he had two outfits for the two days a week he attended and the rest of the week he wore sweatpants and scruffier clothes. Then a friend started giving me all her son’s outgrown jeans. What a blessing!!
I also remember heading to the fabric/pattern section in Simpson Sears 🙂
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Roscuro, happy Thanksgiving!!
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A Happy Thanksgiving to you, Kare!
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I would buy jeans on sale, figuring one boy or another would eventually grow into them.
We used to say Stargazer grew up wearing “prestained” clothing. I remember the shocked look on his face the first time I told him to “try on these pair of pants,” while he was actually shopping with me.
“Here?” He asked, aghast.
I laughed. “No, the dressing room!”
He was bewildered. He didn’t know stores had dressing rooms to try on clothing.
I think he was about 9 . . .
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My jeans had those iron-on knee patches typically. I was the jeans-T-shirt-sneaker girl, I always identified with Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Hated fussy dresses.
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So I returned the rental, got the toll lane transponder transferred to the new Jeep. I guess I’m moving into some sort of acceptance.
Happy Thanksgiving, Roscuro. It’s 84 degrees here.
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Now it’s 88, going to be an October warm spell for us; certainly not unprecedented but it’s not really welcome this time of year either.
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I got wonderful ‘hand me downs” for my last pregnancy and the product of that pregnancy got wonderful hand me downs from her two sisters and another friend. This friend sewed a lot of fancy dresses with smocking etc. Her daughter hated them and they had a lot of fights over wearing them to school. My daughter benefited. One of her dresses was worn by my daughter in a photo when she was around three. She put her daughter in the same dress when she was around the same age and posed her the same way. It was a neat picture and they looked quite a bit alike.
One thing I gave away that I am sorry about was a couple of school back packs I had made for my oldest two daughters. One was of predominately red material and one predominately blue. They were made with strips of fabric in a quilting technique. I wish I would have kept them or had, at least, taken a picture of them. They were given to Salvation Army I think, so someone else would have bought them.
Does anyone else regret selling or giving something away?
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I also did not sew much for my youngest daughter, since she got a lot of hand me downs and things were cheaper to purchase ready made if you waited for the right sale. Sometimes patterns cost more than the clothes! Fabric prices went way up. I could use one pattern for both the older two and just change length and elastic size.
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When Chickadee would outgrow her clothes (both the hand-me-downs and new-to-her), I would give them to two other little girls I knew from families with limited resources. As for me when I was growing up, I didn’t have anyone to inherit clothes from, so I had new clothes, and my mom made some occasionally.
Kathaleena – Off hand I can’t think of any of my own former possessions that I regret giving or throwing away (although something may occur to me later), but I do remember how greatly disappointed my dad was to have to sell the lovely French Provincial vanity and chair he had made for me. They were going through a tough financial time, and selling some things to help make ends meet.
I had outgrown my affinity for the style of the vanity, so it didn’t bother me at the time. But now I think back to it, and wish we still had it.
Oh, yes, now I do remember a piece of furniture that Hubby and I bought when we were newly married that had to be discarded because it got ruined in the damp basement. We called it a “tea table”, but it might actually have been a cart for alcohol and glasses and such. That was tough to see it go.
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My mom always regretted not keeping the armoire from her Iowa home. She and her sister were back there when their dad, my grandfather, died (in 1963, just days before JFK was shot) so they had to deal with all of the furniture, mementoes etc.
they had a number of ‘treasures’ shipped back, including the simple kitchen pine table (that’s now my dining table), 2 small bedside cabinets (split between them so I have the one now in my bedroom), an ancestor’s rifle (which I also have). The armoire was deemed “too big,” but later my mom said they should have just shipped it back to California, too.
Sadly, a number of things that had gone with my aunt wound up with her kids, and then the grandkids; the wayward grandson wound up raiding the storage unit they were in and, presumably, selling it all. So I think the other half of what came from Iowa was lost at that point, including the horse weather vane from the Iowa house.
But I love the pieces I have and they’re all being put to good use. (I have some smaller items also like my grandmothers antique rolling pin and other rather curious kitchen gadgets.)
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Regretted sales:
my husband’s collection of record albums
my husband’s Ford Torino
In my defense, he said, “sell stuff, we are in the Army now and moving to Maryland before going overseas”. How was I to know all of his stuff would sell for a quarter and none of my Christian albums would?
We could not take the car and it would not have done well in a field on the mountain for four years.
We did take the Toronado. It was very big on European roads.
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Happy Thanksgiving, Roscuro and Kare!
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Sixty two years ago, half-dollars were common as change.
When Elvera got pregnant, we had no insurance. So we needed to save money to pay for him. So? We started saving silver half-dollars. We had a big coffee can we put them in. We had lots of silver half-dollars.
But when Chuck was born, we found a way to handle the bills.
What to do with the coffee can of silver half dollars?
We spent them.
Sometimes I wonder what those halves would be worth now.
But it really doesn’t matter. It would be a can of half-dollars sitting in a closet.
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Neighbor kid apparently is making money hand-over-fist buying and selling classic rock (vinyl) albums.
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My dad used to save dimes, he always had a jar filled with dimes in the cabinet behind his favorite dining room spot.
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I remember what a big deal it was when the JFK coins came out — were those actual silver dollars?
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Our family rarely gets rid of or sells anything. “You never know when you might need it.” So the time that our father sold our hardwood baseball to an utter stranger who had stopped at our one attempt at a yard sale was a memorable occasion. While we often wish our father would be willing to get rid of things, the lack of that bat has been lamented. We rarely played baseball, but my mother, who taught her nephews to catch and bat, would have liked to teach her grandchildren.
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I ironed-on patches on the boys’ jeans and when it was time to donate them, I was surprised when the woman in charge told me they wouldn’t take them.
“But they’re good, sturdy and clean?”
“They have patched on them.”
“My kids wore them.” Trying not to get insulted.
“Ah, but your children had a choice. The migrant’s children don’t.”
It still bothers me. The things I did to save money weren’t suitable for other people who needed to save money more than I did.
When I was a Navy relief budget counselor, I refused to ask my clients to do anything I wasn’t willing to do.
So, we basically lived on a much lower salary, except for the fact I paid a house payment, rather than rent.
I used cloth diapers, we owned only one car, I nursed my children, I had a garden we ate out of, I cut everyone’s hair, and our older son slept in a sleeping bag on the floor for several years (his choice).
When I would work through budgets with people who made such a small amount of money and suggest some of the things I did, they never considered them. Savings like those were beneath them.
I never had a store-bought dress until I was 16. I wore my cousin’s hand-me-downs–and she was five inches shorter than I am. I didn’t know long sleeves were supposed to come down to your wrists–I thought they all ended mid-forearm–until I discovered Land’s End clothing at 37.
I’m thankful my parents raised me to be frugal. It allowed my husband to make all the generous allowances he wanted: “Feel free to buy as many canned mushrooms as you like!”
I do.
🙂
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I just saw that October 15th is Global Handwashing Day. Huh?
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When I worked at a department store, we had Silver Dollar Days and if the department sold enough, the employees in that department were given silver dollars. What does one do with those except save them? And the two dollar bill? I may have one of those tucked away somewhere.
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I keep getting alerts from YouTube for minimalist wardrobes.
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This just in from the scientific front. DNA confirms my line really IS related to Abraham Lincoln–extremely distantly. 🙂
Whew, now I know where these crazy eyebrows came from! 🙂
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I’m stuffed. Roast turkey, my mother’s sausage and bread stuffing, buttercup squash and potatoes from the garden. Then a (small) slice each of the apple and pumpkin pies made by the Seconds (Second made the fillings, and Second in-law made the pastry).
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I made corn bread yesterday and froze pet of it for dressing at Thanksgiving.
I intend to have a BIG Thanksgiving this year.
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Speaking of cornbread, Nightingale recently made a Sweet Potato Cornbread that was so moist and delicious! I remarked that my southern friends would not approve, because it was sweet. (We Yankees like our cornbread on the sweet side, the way it’s supposed to be. 😀 )
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Kizzie I don’t mind adding sweet potatoes (are you calling yams sweet potatoes?). I just mind you adding sugar. That is an abomination and cringe worthy.
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Some people add sugar to tea. Speaking of abominations….
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I made johnny cakes tonight. Art had maple syrup with them. I use a cup of organic corn meal, a cup of all purpose organic flour, 2 tsp. baking powder, 1/2 tsp. baking powder,
1 1/3 cup watered down plain low fat yogurt, and two eggs. If too thick, I mix in extra water. I warm a layer of extra light olive oil on the griddle and they cook quickly like pancakes. We will have enough for another meal. Not vegan with the eggs and yogurt, but not too far off course.
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My brother makes cheesy brocolli cornbread to carry to pot luck dinners (his church does not like the word luck so those are providence pot dinners).
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I hate sugar in coffee.
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Talked to Carol, she sounds so much better now that the doctor is using some different medications. She even stood up for 10 seconds today in PT, which is a record. Next is to see if they can get her to move forward. Oh, and she spent two hours reading and catching up with her devotional literature today.
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I was surprised to see that Tess had peed on the thick throw rug in front of the doggie door in the kitchen — but then I finally realized that the gardener didn’t remove the sliding closure that he puts in from the outside while he’s here. I usually double check that as he does forget to remove it from time to time but it didn’t occur to me today.
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Wow, this was linked by a coyote researcher I’ve dealt with, not sure it’ll work if you’re not on instagram —
and there’s a language warning! Lots of language, the guy was pretty freaked out, understandably.
A cougar close encounter on one of our trails, very scary.
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CGOjQXhl3eV/
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Get that guy a dictionary. Pretty scary! Maybe more effective to throw a couple of rocks rather than the same ten words. And he does know of course, the cat probably has seen him many times before if he runs out there regularly. I have no idea what I would do in such a situation. Probably trip over the rocks as I was retreating and become another statistic.
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Braves just won against the Dodgers. Art is happy.
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I looked at the quarters in my wallet tonight. There was one commemorating the War in the Pacific and Guam. It took a lot of work to be able to read the tiny letters for Guam.
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Yep, DJ, pretty convincing that that that one isn’t a bobcat. I kept thinking maybe it had been hand reared and didn’t see him as prey or an enemy–until it started doing those little aggressive moves. I did wonder if throwing a large rock would be effective.
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My great grandfather was a carpenter. He built my grandmother a “kitchen safe”. My dad ended up with it. One day he was burning limbs and such in the back yard. He dragged out the kitchen safe, chopped it up with an ax and burned it with me begging him not to.
After he died I was so overwhelmed with his stuff and my stuff that I am positive I got rid of some things that if I knew what they were I would regret. I also sold most of his guns. I wish I hadn’t.
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Roscuro- My family is descended from the Spanish Sephardim, and my Grandmother’s family came to PR from the Canary Islands, so there is definitely a Mediterranean/North African connection.
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It must be interesting to be be of such descent Peter. Me? I’m just Southern Heinz-57 Mutt which means Scotch-Irish-Indian and who knows what else.
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