Things I’m Loving

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Spring seems to go so fast here in Indiana.  No sooner than something blooms and poof! It’s gone.  The lilacs were so beautiful this year. Even the newer shrubs set on flowers and they smelled so good, but they are gone now.

The wisteria on our little cabin by the pool was just so gorgeous this year. I’ve been trying to grow wisteria for years.  Several years ago we went to a book signing of Susan Branch’s in Cincinnati, where she and her husband passed out wisteria seeds they had collected from their wisteria at their home.   So we brought those seeds home and planted them in pots and when they were larger, we transplanted them, one by the cabin and one by the house. Both plants took off, but this is the first year we have had such a gorgeous display of flowers.  The plant by the house is growing up the side of the house and birds are finding it to be a wonderful place to build their nests.  Birds also love this one on the cabin.  We watch them carrying nesting material into the shrub.

I finally have wisteria and I’m loving it.

For years I  tried to grow azaleas.  Once when we drove through the south and saw all the azaleas growing everywhere there, I wanted one, but thought our climate may be too cold.  Bought this azalea at Rural King a few years ago and this year it bloomed just like I was hoping it would.   I had another one in the front yard that bloomed so beautifully also.  It really must be a good year for flowers.

I have irises growing everywhere.  I love irises because they are so easy to grow and you almost can’t kill them.  They spread and you get a lot of flower for your buck.  I wish I had taken pictures of all the different colors of iris I have, from pinks, to rust, to yellow and these purple and white ones.

We made a trip to our favorite nursery where I bought a lot of flowers to plant in planters and I got this hanging basket for my shop.    Geraniums are another flower that is easy to grow.  You just have to dead head them a lot in order to keep flowers coming on, but they are worth it.

The snowball bush was loaded with snowballs.  Our old snowball bush wasn’t as pretty this year.  It needs a good trimming and I hope it will rebound next year as it looks a little puny right now.

My little garden in front of my shop has flowers coming up. Zinnias, lavender, nasturtiums, marigolds, cosmos and other flowers are coming up.  I just know this will be a thing of beauty later on in the Summer.

There’s even a chicken among the flowers.

I received these two hydrangea plants for Mother’s Day.

They were both set in this little planter, but I replanted them in the kitchen garden so they can grow big and hopefully have lots of hydrangeas in the future.

Speaking of blossoms.  Here are three of the sweetest ones.

Molly, Sugar and Lucy.  My sweet pups who keep me busy.  Lucy LOVES to play fetch. She’d do it 24/7 if I would play with her.   She has me well trained.

 

David finally got the pool opened and has taken advantage of it.  It’s still a bit too cool for me.

It makes me cold to watch him swimming in it sometimes.  Brrrr.  The water has to be in the eighties for me to go swimming.  We will have those days before long.

I have been mindlessly knitting two inch squares for one of my Christmas projects.  Let’s just say I’m loving what I am making with these and will show you closer to Christmas.

I am using a lot of my leftover yarn from knitting stockings.

Here is a little peek at some things I have sewn.  Oh, I love what is in those rolled up little packages.    This week I’m working on aprons.   They aren’t as fun for me to sew for some reason, but I have so much fabric I need to use that would make cute aprons.

That’s all I have for you right now.   David is looking forward to surgery this Summer which won’t be fun for either of us, so I’m getting as much completed as I can before he has it done.

Hope you are enjoying the warmer days.  We did have really bad weather go through our town this week and a lot of people were without electricity.  We weren’t, but our neighbor lost a huge limb out of a tree.  I’m thankful all we lost was the internet.  Bye.

 

 

 

Busy, Busy, Busy

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That headline pretty much says what my life is about right at the moment.  In a few days, I will not be as busy, I hope.  I’ve been trying to plant all the flowers and all the seeds I have received in the past few weeks.  Finally got most of the seeds underground except for pumpkins and some torch flower seeds.  To be quite frank, I’ve run out of room in my yard and garden to plant much more.   My cup runneth over.  I received two really pretty hydrangea plants for Mother’s Day which have not been planted yet.  I can’t plant them where the pups can get to them.  David told me the other day they had dug up something we had planted(it looked like a stick when we planted it) and he thought it was lost, but he found it in the yard and replanted it and didn’t tell me until he noticed there were leaves coming out on it.  I can’t remember what kind of plant it is so we will have to wait and see when or if it flowers.

By the way, David has covid now.  I was really hoping we both had dodged the bullet, but he’s had a raspy throat and runny nose so he went in to the clinic at Kroger’s today and they said he had it and should stay home for at least five days and wear a mask around me since I don’t have it, yet.  Pray it doesn’t get any worse. He will be getting surgery on his shoulder sometime in the next few weeks.  Our Summer is really adding up to being fun, isn’t it?  Ha.

What keeps me sane is working in my shop on the Christmas projects for my sale on December 3rd.     I have made so many things and when I can get my pictures up again, I will show you. For some reason my computer is not cooperating with me and I can’t get my pictures onto my blog and I have a lot of them to show you.  Anyway, I spend at least three or four hours sewing and listening to talk radio and it becomes my calm and happy place.   I listen to Dan Borgino’s talk show. He’s not to everyone’s taste, but I like him.   I told David the other day I wonder what I will obsess about after I have all this sewing done and have had my sale.  There will be something, I know. Maybe I will obsess about cleaning my house.  It gets a lick and a spit once in a while.  It doesn’t really matter how often I dust, it always looks dusty and I don’t know why.  Just in the past year I’ve noticed things are dustier around here, even outside.  Our porch didn’t use to be dusty, but it is now.

I try to spend at least a half hour every day playing with the dogs.  I throw the ball so much my arm hurts at night.  You’d think I would finally have developed some muscle from all the throwing.   Lucy runs for a toy as soon as I open the door. She never wants to stop playing and if you want to see disappointment in a dog’s face, Lucy has it when I tell her we are through.   Molly has become fit as a fiddle where once she was overweight, now she is trim and muscular and loves to fetch also.  Just wish something like fetching would do that for me!

I have watched a couple of really good movies on tv.  I think they were both on Netflix.  One was  called A Walk in the Woods and starred Robert Redford and Nick Nolte as two old men who tried to walk the Appalachian Trail that runs from Maine to Georgia.   I never thought of Robert Redford as a comedian, but he has some pretty funny lines in the movie and Nick Nolte is hilarious as his alcoholic recovering friend he hadn’t seen in years.

Another movie which I found magical, but troubling at the same time was The Electrical Life of Louis Wain.  Louis Wain was an artist in the Victorian age who painted cats. He and his wife were some of the first people to ever keep cats inside their house at the time.   Cats were considered mousers and were kept to the barns.  He painted cats in some of the most magical settings and he became quite popular, but he did not copyright any of his work so he never made much money and died a pauper in an  insane asylum.  It sounds like a sad movie, but it really isn’t.

I find it hard to sit clear through many movies, but these two I enjoyed immensely. Right now, as I type, I have Hairspray on.   I’ve seen it before, but I love the music and it takes place in fifties so it’s right up my alley. There is a show like Dick Clark’s American Bandstand that the lead character, Tracy,  wants to get on.  I loved watching American Bandstand when I was a girl and I loved how the girls dressed and how the couples danced.  Many who appeared on that show became famous in their own right.  By the way, John Travolta plays the girl’s mother and he is hilarious.

I just wanted to stop in so you would know I’m still here.  I started an entirely different post the other day, but didn’t get it finished so maybe I will try to post that one soon.  Or I won’t. Not making any promises.  I had a nice Mother’s Day.  Went out to eat Saturday night with my daughter’s family.  Had phone calls wishing me Happy Mother’s Day and received those beautiful hydrangeas.

Hope your days are busy or not, if you prefer.  Summer is here. The temperature is climbing.  David has been in the pool already. Not me. The water has to be over 80 degrees for me to swim in it.   If the temperatures keep going up, it will be sooner rather than later.

I will leave you to watch the kids dancing in Hairspray.  Bye.

 

 

 

 

Glorious Spring

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Spring is like youth. It’s beautiful and fleeting. When you are young, you spend all your time trying to be older and then when you are really old, you wonder where the years went.  Youth is wasted on the young, one famous person once said.  Maybe not wasted, but we don’t appreciate being young while we are.

Spring is so like that. It comes  and goes so quickly, you hardly have a chance to enjoy it.  Right now everything is in its glory.

The Viburnum is especially pretty this year.

The Daffodils have been so pretty, but their days are almost over for another year.

I love PInk Flowering Almond.

The Redbud. One of the first harbingers of Spring. And they grow wild here in Indiana. Aren’t we blessed?  I did plant this one which came up in our back yard years ago.

Our Jeep goes right along with all the Spring colors!   By the way, the Jeep’s color is called Snazzleberry.

Our neighbors’ lilac is so lovely and we get to enjoy it, too.

I’m preparing my little garden outside my shop.  I find that if I plant things here, they won’t be dug up by pups.  They dug up three of the peonies in the back yard. We did replant them and put a fence around them, but peonies don’t like being moved, so it might be a few years before they do any good.

We went to Lowes yesterday and I bought two more large flower pots, some pansies and three other plants that I can’t remember their names at the present, but I will show you once they are planted.   One is a low growing, spreading grass and I don’t know where we will plant that yet.

Easter came and went so fast I can hardly believe we celebrated it. Our church choir sang a cantata which was lovely and then we had dinner with nine family members.

Our granddaughter and her husband(I still find that funny to say) were here. They have almost been married for a year already.

Our daughter and her family.  These are our “youngest” grandchildren now.

Our son and his wife and son were here as well. We didn’t get their pictures for some reason.  I always mean to get pictures of everyone and I always leave out someone.

David picked Daffodils for the table.

The Christmas cactus bloomed for Easter, too.

Our son and his wife had visited a nursery the day before and was I surprised when they gifted me with some presents.

This is the top of the garden stand.  Looks like angel wings, doesn’t it?   I could put birdseed in it, but it’s too pretty to have birds pooping all over it so I will probably just set it in the garden where I can enjoy it.

 O

Our son thought he got the best present for me, though.

A rooster windmill.   Yes, I do love it.

It’s been given a real workout with the windy days we’ve been having.

They also brought me a Russian Sage to plant. Or, as my son calls it, a Ukranian Sage.  He even printed it on the tag.  Our son, by the way is a Russian linguist and said he wishes he could go back into the military to help fight.  I’m glad he can’t because I worried enough about him while he was serving in the Air Force.

Miss Honey Sugar Dumpling,   Sugar, for short. She is such a sweet dog.

Cocoa Lucy Belle or Lucy for short is always and I mean always wanting to play. In fact, as soon as I finish this post I’m going outside and throwing her some balls.

It’s been a special time and now we are getting ready for all the work planting gardens and keeping the yard entails.  I’m also busy sewing for my Christmas sale. I know it seems far, far away, but the time goes so fast, it will be here before we know it.  I also got more fabric.  I don’t think I have enough. Ha!

Hope you are enjoying Spring or maybe it’s Fall where you live. Sometimes I can’t get my mind around the fact that when I am in snow, others are in Summer and when I am in Summer others are freezing.  Enjoy every day of Spring. I know I plan to. Bye.

 

 

 

A Day Out and Antiquing

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One day last week our daughter-in-love and her husband came to visit and take David and me to lunch. She is my son’s ex-wife, but we are still friends and she is the mother of my grandchildren so we keep in touch.   Anyway, they wanted to take us out to eat and asked where we wanted to go. I didn’t hesitate to say Cracker Barrel.  I don’t eat breakfast or lunch most days and usually am not hungry until mid afternoon, but I can eat at Cracker Barrel anytime because I can get French toast, which I love.

So off we went to Cracker Barrel.  I could not eat all my French toast, so I gave the last slice to David.  Then our friend could not eat all his bacon so he gave it to David.  David can eat a lot of food and still stays skinny. He ate his breakfast and parts of others’.  I just sit amazed that he can eat like that.

While on the way home we mentioned an antique store that would be interesting to go to so we went there next.  At this particular store, a lady has a booth where she sells fabric and other sewing things.  I always find some fabric there and I did that day.  I also found some other goodies.

I got these jars with what was inside them for under ten dollars. There are so many spools of perle cotton in the one jar it more than paid for me to get them.  The old clothespins will be used and I got the other jar because of the cute jar holder it sat in.

I bought this fabric which I will use to make bears.

I got this just because it was red and I am doing a lot of Christmas sewing right now.

David has been collecting buttons for years. He as thousands of them.  Jars full of them sit in my shop.  He found three more to add to his collection.

I enjoyed sorting through them to see what was there.  I needed eyes and button noses for my bears.  Did you ever sort through buttons when you were a child?  It was one of my favorite things to do. My mother had a button jar and I loved getting them out and sorting them.  I wish I had that jar today.  If you have children, give them a pile of buttons and some string and they will entertain themselves for a while.

I collect old books, mostly for children, and I found this very interesting one.  Written in the early 1900’s  what boys did then compared to what boys do now is astounding.

One chapter told boys how to build a log cabin from scratch.

Another showed how to make costumes for Halloween.

Or how to dress up like the “goblin man.”

There was a chapter on how to create your own circus.

And how to make the animals for the circus.

It is a very interesting book, but it makes me wonder how many boys today would want to or could make these things shown.  Boys leisure hours today seem to be spent on their cellphones or being in some sport or watching television.  I hope I’m wrong.

It was a fun outing and I hope we can do it again sometime.

I will see you on the other side of Easter.  Remember it’s not all about the bunny and the eggs, but about the risen Savior who died for every single one of us on the cross so that one day we all could be with Him in Heaven.    He arose the third day and that is what we are celebrating.  A happy and blessed Easter to you all. Bye.

 

 

Spring Has Sprung

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I love Spring. My favorite months of the year are March, April and May.  My birthday was in March and it was a good one as usual, but the whole month just flew by like every one of the others have done lately.  The flowers are appearing. We have daffodils all over our yard and the peonies are peeping up out of the ground and will be beautiful if Lucy and Sugar don’t dig them all up. They have already dug up a few of my flowers this year, but as I have always said, our back yard belongs to the dogs, I cannot complain when they do what dogs do.  One hole was so deep, if I had fallen in it I would have probably broken something or landed in China!

All the flowering trees and bushes are ready to burst out and if we have a few warm days, they will.  And I must get out and enjoy every minute because their beauty won’t last long.  As for beauty……..

My Christmas cactus has surprised me and bloomed once again and has a few more buds on it.

Behind the cactus is the poinsettia I almost killed by forgetting to water, but now it’s got new leaves and I’m going to transplant both plants into larger pots with new soil in hopes that by next Christmas they will be beautiful again.

I spend many hours of most of my days in my shop sewing for my Christmas sale.  I keep thinking of more and more things I want to make.  And the fabric I ordered way before Christmas finally arrived. David had told me he would buy fabric for me for Christmas, so I pre-ordered some and it’s finally here.

I must have really loved this because I ordered four yards.  It will make nice aprons.

I am going to make pillows for my sofa that sets in a room I sit in and do handwork and I am redecorating the whole room this year.  We are going to paint it a pale green and I’m covering the sofa and a chair with white duck slipcovers.  I was going to buy a new sofa this year as our old one is over twenty-five years old, but it is still in good condition and it’s cheaper to slipcover right now. I bought a new rug also.  I hope we can get everything done before hot weather when I want to be outdoors swimming and playing with the dogs.

Anyway, back to fabric..

More aprons will be make from this.

I love this, but haven’t a clue what to do with it yet.

I love all things British and this is the first fabric like this I’ve seen for a while.  I’ll find a good use for it.

This is more Christmas material I will use as backing on small quilts.

This I will use to make a skirt if I can find the time.

Anything with chickens on it, I love.  This is the cutest fabric I’ve seen in a long time.  I just wish I had bought more of it.

This is coordinating fabric.  More chickens.  I never thought I’d become a chicken lady, but I have in the past few years.  My daddy raised hundreds of chickens when I was growing up. They provided us with lots of eggs that my mother cooked with and also sold to a little grocery store near us.  We would have big baskets of eggs sitting in the kitchen waiting to be washed.  The chickens also provided us our Sunday dinners.  I would watch my daddy wring off the chicken’s head, yes, wring off, it’s a technique, and the hen body would flop all over. Me, being a very curious  and rather devilish child, found this rather funny.  Not so much for the chicken.  After the chicken was dead, I would help my daddy pluck the feathers off and he would then take it to my mother to cut up and prepare it to fry the next day.    In later years, my mother taught me how to dress a chicken.  It really isn’t hard and I found it very interesting too.  My mother usually prepared two chickens each Sunday. She would get up early and fry the chicken, go to church and come home and finish preparing the meal.  I want to tell you, that was the best fried chicken I have ever eaten in my entire life. Was it because the meat was so fresh or the way my mother prepared it, I don’t know.  But it was so good everyone wanted to sit at her table and eat it.

Back to fabric..

I REALLY wish I had bought four yards of this.  I love it.

More sewing fabric.  Quilting fabric started to be big back in the 80’s and 90’s. When I first started sewing quilts in the 70’s, it wasn’t easy finding good quality quilt fabric.  We had a fabric store and we sold lots of fabric, but the industry seems to have grown by leaps and bounds since then.  It seems ideas for fabric have not run out and more and more cute fabric is being produced. The new designers have really outdone themselves.  I use to know who all the fabric designers were as I bought the fabric for our store, but there are some really talented men and women producing some beautiful fabrics now.

I use to make these little rabbits and sell them.

I still use them in my Easter displays.

This tray holds some of the toys my children received in their Easter baskets back in the 70’s and 80’s.  Antiques now!  Ha!

I wrote that I would show you some things I am making for my sale. But I will only show you little bits and pieces right now.

Pieces of something I am working on.  I have a bed piled high with things I have already made since last Christmas.  I sew three or four hours every day and I have gotten a lot of things made.  This is all I will show you right now, but be assured, there are lots of other things I’ve made or will make before December 3rd, 2022.

Do any of you watch Home Town?   It’s a show where a young couple redo and restore old houses in Laurel, Mississippi and it’s become one of my favorite shows.  You can find it on HGTV.  Anyway, on one of the show, they were demolishing a kitchen and on one of the cabinet doors, Erin, one of the stars of the show, found some recipes taped and she saved them and had one of the cakes baked from a recipe.  It was called Miss Dot’s Pound Cake. She contacted Miss Dot and Miss Dot baked one for her.  It looked so good.  The pound cake and Miss Dot have become rather famous. You can look up Miss Dot and the recipe online.

I made Miss Dot’s pound cake the other day and it did not disappoint.

The recipe makes a very dense and delicious cake that needs no icing although you could ice it if you want to.   It didn’t last long.

And because David and I love our desserts, I made a pineapple upside down cake a few days later.

It, too, did not last long.

Today David and I went antiquing with some good friends, but I will share that with you another day.

Happy Spring.  Bye.

 

Work in Progress

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I don’t have much to write about right now. I am buried in fabric and my brain is loaded with ideas that want to come out.  I will try to get some pictures of some things I am working on although I can’t show much as it’s all for my Christmas sale in December.  I have a bed already piled high with things I have sewn and/or quilted.  I’ve become rather obsessed, I must say and it’s a good obsession because it keeps me off the streets.

Today I went through yet another plastic box of fabrics and found some I really don’t remember every buying, but I liked them so they will be used.  I also found a lot of the fabric I bought when we were in Alaska.  Really bright, vibrant colors.  I need to incorporate them into a quilt.    As you can see, it doesn’t take a whole lot to keep me entertained.  Just give me a box of fabric and a sewing machine and I’m off to the races.

I will try to get some pictures next time and maybe not be so boring. But life is mostly boring with a little excitement thrown in, isn’t it?  Although I can honestly say I have never been bored so I must be the one causing the boredom in others!  Oh, well. Bye.

It’s a Miracle!

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So three days after calling the pest control man our skunk was caught.  Notice how I called it our skunk.  It was beginning to feel like a permanent, rather stinky member of the family for a while.  You know that saying guests who stay longer than three days start to smell like fish?  Well, this guy or gal did not smell like fish. I would have welcomed that.

David came upstairs before he left for work to tell me not to go out on the front porch as the skunk was in the cage.  I asked him to take some pictures if he could.  So he did and did not get sprayed in the process.

How can such a beautiful animal smell so badly?   Look at that fur.  Women would love to have a coat made from fur like that.   Glad they don’t have, though.  It looks much better on the skunk.   Poor little thing looked so sad, but a little angry which is why I did not go out to see it.

So the skunk saga was ended, I hope, although there is a chance there may be more under there.  The house doesn’t smell like skunk when you come in from outside and that’s a big plus.  Did I tell you the pest control man’s name?   I didn’t?  It was Mr. MIracle.  How about?  He performed a miracle for us because if David or I had tried to get rid of that skunk it was almost guaranteed one of us would have been sprayed.  He came, threw a cover over the cage, picked it up and off he went.  I called him later and asked him what he did with the skunk. He lives out in the country and he said he let it go.  I wonder if skunks have a homing instinct like dogs? Will that skunk return?  I hope not. He said to call him if we notice another one under there.

 

And another miracle happened.  Or at least I like to think of it as a miracle.  After Christmas of 2020, I cut the leaves off an Amaryllis I had grown.  It had been so beautiful.  I didn’t know if it would rebloom again, but I put it in an upstairs bedroom and watered it sparingly all year when I thought of it.   I actually had completely forgotten it for months and then just the other day I went into that bedroom for something and there it was.

The amaryllis had grown tall and bloomed again and I almost missed it!

It was beautiful. So now I will trim the leaves again and mistreat it for another year and see if it will bloom again.  Miracles.  Believe in them or not, they happen.  Bye.

Stink, Stank, Stunk

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A few days ago I woke up and I thought David was cooking breakfast, but it smelled really bad.  I got up and closed the bedroom door and went back to sleep.  Later, when I woke up again, I went downstairs and asked him what he had cooked.  He said he hadn’t cooked anything. “What is that I smelled?”  I asked him.

All day long I kept smelling something bad.  Sometimes it smelled like something was hot and was burning.  I have a very strong sense of smell so anything different in our house, I notice it right away.  This smell really was bothering me. I was worried that maybe the furnace was getting too hot, but David said it wasn’t that. David has no sense of smell to speak of so he did not notice what I was smelling.

Later I was outside and came up on our back porch and there it was.  The smell, but this time it smelled like skunk.  I was worried the dogs had run a skunk under the deck.  But, no, there was no skunk there, but David did some searching around the house and found what looked like burrowing under our front porch and it smelled like skunk. That’s all we needed. A family of skunks under the house!  He said it looked like something was living under there.

Since we built the new front porch we have had two kitten litters from a feral cat and a woodchuck take up residence under there.  This was by far the worst occupant we have had under there.  The first kitten litter David caught the kittens and mother cat, who scratched him up pretty badly.  We managed to find homes for all of them except the mother cat who got away.  The second litter, the mother cat got hit by a car and we think the kittens died under there, we are not sure.  The woodchuck also got hit by a car so that problem went away. But now, we have skunks!

David did some searching online for pest control people and he had a man answer who said he would come out and try to catch the skunk or skunks.  He came out and brought his trap and set it up.  He was a retired minister and a jack of all trades now. I wonder if he had ever caught a skunk before.   The first night he caught nothing so he moved the trap to another location and still no skunk trapped.   This time something ate the marshmallows he had put in the trap. Marshmallows!  Who would have thought of that to catch a skunk?

Remember the cartoon Pepe Lapew?   He was an amorous skunk who was constantly going after this cat.  He had a French accent and was very debonaire.  I thought he was sooo funny.  You could always tell his odor put off the cat.  Well, the skunk under our porch is putting me off.

The worst smell is in our basement. David says there’s a tunnel under there something has dug.

So far no luck catching the skunk.  I’m hoping we get it gone before porch sitting weather!  Bye.

Dinner and a Show

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Yesterday was my birthday and it was a very nice one, indeed.  I told David I did not want a cake as I wanted to get tiramisu at the Italian restaurant we were going to.  So, instead, I awoke in the morning with fresh coffee brewed and Boston creme donuts with two candles on them with the number 7 and 3.   I let you guess how old that made me!    So right there the sugar intake started.   Even though I wanted to have less sugar.

David said I should do whatever I wanted to do on my birthday and I know this sounds boring to many, but I spent the afternoon sewing upstairs.  Sewing and listening to talk radio puts me in my happy place.  But it wasn’t to be for long. David came upstairs and said, “You need to come see something.”  Now whenever David says something like this to me, I never know if I should expect the Queen of England to be at the door or that the dogs have found a new toy.  I never know.   “Is it company?”  I asked since I wasn’t dressed for company.  But it wasn’t company.  I came downstairs into the dining room and there was a beautiful vase of flowers and a large box of Whitman’s Sampler on the table.  “Do you have a boyfriend? David asked me.  “I don’t know.” I replied.  You would think I would know.   I read the note on the flowers that wished me a Happy Birthday and called me Mom so I knew it was somebody who called me Mom.  So that narrowed it down.  They had not signed their name.

And more sweets!  I was not going to eat sweets except for the Tiramisu, but I ate two chocolates, one being a caramel which, while I was chewing it, made me remember this was exactly how I pulled the bridge off a tooth a few weeks ago while eating a Sugar Daddy.  “Idiot,” I said to myself, but I didn’t do any harm this time except for adding a few hundred calories to my day.  The day I wanted to eat tiramisu.

My daughter-in-love called me to wish me a Happy Birthday and she said she had not sent the flowers and candy.

My very best friend from school where we went from first grade to graduation together, called  from Florida where she and her husband were spending a few weeks.  We had a nice talk.  She and I can get together after years and it’s like we have never been apart.  We went through a lot of things together while growing up and she will always be my friend.

I received a few cards one of which is from a lady in my church who always includes the most wonderful prayer for the recipient of the card.  She is so awesome and her prayers are so heartfelt.  I cherish them when I get them. She had sent David a birthday card and prayer also.  She hasn’t been to church for a long time because of Covid and she is not in the best of health.

Later we went to my favorite Italian restaurant to eat. We went kind of early because I was hungry having already eaten a donut and two pieces of candy!   We had the cutest waitress. She was tiny and elfin like with short hair and the prettiest eyes.  She wore two rings in her nose which kind of bothered me, but it’s her business. I don’t know why people wear rings in their noses. The only ones that wore rings in their noses when I was growing up was an old bull we had or the pigs.   So I have never had the desire to wear a ring there.  But if you do so, it’s your business and if it makes you happy.  Anyway, she took our order and was very efficient in getting us our drinks and bread.  We were having a good time talking while I was facing the kitchen where I like to watch the cooks as they toss the spaghetti and cook on the grill. But suddenly I saw smoke coming from there and all the cooks and waiters and waitresses stopped what they were doing and watched what was happening as one of the cooks struggled to get the fire under control.  “The kitchen is on fire,”  I told David and he turned around to look. The smoke was billowing.  What a show!  No one was running for the door, so I thought it couldn’t be dangerous.    As fast as it began, the fire was out and everyone, the cooks, the waiters and waitresses all disappeared.  David said, “It must have been the spaghetti and sausage I ordered.”  We laughed and the manager came to our table and said it was going to be a while before we got our meal and we were okay with that.  By that time the restaurant was filling up with people and no cooks in the kitchen.  Later our waitress came to the table to apologize that our meal would be late and I said, “It’s not your fault.”  So we waited about an hour and the cooks finally came back and started cooking again and we got our meals and let me tell you, the chicken penne gorgonzola was delicious. It was such a huge serving, I took a lot of it home in two cartons and ate it today.  I also ordered the Tiramisu to go as I was full.  We were there for two hours and it seemed much shorter because we were having such a good time. Then I went home and ate another donut.  I know.  I was lost by that time.

Today I finished the chicken penne and ate the Tiramisu and it was worth the wait.

Our daughter called us that night and it was she and her husband who had sent the flowers and candy.  So mystery solved.  I am so blessed.

It was an amazing birthday and I look forward to more, but I don’t know how they can be any better than this one was.

Here’s to Happy Birthdays, may you have good ones always.  Bye.

 

A Time to Celebrate

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After my last post perhaps you wonder if I’m still around.   After having my leg banged by the pups, it looked pretty bad for a few days, but now it’s healing well and I never had any pain.  David’s arm is doing better. Today he shoveled out the chicken house, so I guess he feels okay to do it.

This is my birthday week so we are celebrating.   David made me some more flower boxes since I just ordered 21 packages of flower seeds.  Yes, I went overboard, as usual and I always am looking for places to plant flowers.   I had a really nice flower garden in raised beds last year and this year I will have more!

So I’m going to make this short today.  My days are so busy sewing, sewing, sewing with my Christmas show and sale in December which seems like a long way away, but with the way this year has already gone, it will be here before we know it.  I don’t sew as much in warmer months as I like to be outside so I’m trying to get as much done as I can before it warms up. I’ve made about fifteen pillows, a couple of small quilts, a table runner, a few pot holders and twenty or so pin cushions and that’s just a start of what I want to make.  I have aprons, more quilts, more pot holders and mug warmers in mind.  I just make what sounds like fun to me.  I will be giving sneak peaks through the coming months at what will be for sale.

So I will see you on the other side of my birthday. We are going out for the day and then dinner and Tiramisu, one of my favorite desserts will be on the menu.   Bye.