Monthly Archives: January 2023

A Good Start to a New Year

If this year is to be judged by just its beginning , it’s been a good year already. David and I started it out by going to a gospel sing at our church where a few different gospel singers sang and our preacher gave the sermon. The night was titled, “It’s twelve O’clock Somewhere,” because as the evening progressed and some people would leave we could vote whether we wanted the singing to go on. Several people left, here and there and it got to be ten o’clock and they were going to vote whether to keep on going, but David and I were tired and decided to leave before the vote so we don’t know how late the rest of them stayed. When we got home we watched a little tv and I went to bed before the New Year’s. I’m a real party animal. Poor David didn’t even get his New Year’s kiss like I usually give him. I was sawing logs when that ball came down. Oh, well. Anyway, Happy New Year to you all. Hope it is going well for you.

I had to get another shot in my eye this month which would not have been a good start, but Dr. Shah said my eye looked normal and I no longer needed any shots. I was so happy to hear that. I have to go back for a check up in a few weeks, but I am praying all will still be well with my eyes. At my age I don’t have cataracts like some people my age do. David had them and had to have surgery a few years ago.

David took a week off work at Ralph Lauren to celebrate his 75th birthday. I told him I never thought I would ever be married to someone so old, but then, I’m not far behind him. We celebrated by going to the ear doctor to have our hearing checked and one of my ears looked at that had been bothering me. The hearing specialist told David he was slightly hard of hearing, but not enough to need hearing aides. And then he checked my hearing. No one wants to hear these words about anything to do with you health or body. “I’ve got bad news for you,” the man said to me. I have 50% hearing loss and certain words I can hear with my ears do not compute in my brain. I’ve noticed that when talking to some people. They can be right next to me and I can hear what they say, but don’t know what they said, if that makes any sense. Then he gave me the choice of the cheap or the luxury hearing aides. I told David since he didn’t need any I was taking the luxury ones! I sure hope they work. I’m getting them this week.

After those fun times we spent the rest of the week having fun. We went out to eat three times, one time at IHOP with some loved ones. I love IHOP and usually get the classic french toast but I tried the bananas and strawberry french toast not knowing they pour strawberry syrup all over it also. I didn’t like it as well as the classic so I will stick with that next time. I love IHOP coffee. Usually I don’t like coffee anywhere, but at my house, but theirs is really good. I took David out to eat at Olive Garden where we love the Zuppa Toscana with breadsticks and salad, all you can eat which means I can usually get through one salad and one soup and maybe three breadsticks if I’m really hungry.

We took our Christmas tree down last Monday. We kept it up so long because our granddaughter and her husband were going to come down and get their Christmas presents last Sunday, but we had several inches of snow overnight and they couldn’t come so we will have to plan another time. Maybe go up to where they live and eat at a really great pancake house they have not far from their house. Always an excuse to go there. One of our favorite places and their coffee is pretty good, too.

Anyway, after the tree came down we cleaned our living room from top to bottom, washing windows, dusting the baseboards, putting away my collection of Santa Clauses and our nativity. And we moved furniture around which is something I love to do. When I was younger and stronger, I use to move furniture all by myself and I did it often. David said he never knew where the furniture would be when he got home from work.

I’ve typed all this time and not a single picture.

Here’s where the tree use to be.

My Christmas cactus bloomed Thanksgiving, had a few blossoms at Christmas and here it is in all its glory now. I think it’s confused.

I think transplanting it to a larger pot and putting it outside last Summer, where it flourished, has given it a new boost on life.

Have I already shown you the three pairs of socks I’ve knitted since Christmas? This is just one of each pair. I used up yarn I had over from other socks and I’m thinking I like knitting socks like this better than just the one color ones.

I got this absolutely beautiful yarn from a shop out of North Pole, Alaska called Bad Sheep. This picture does not do the colors justice. They are so vibrant. The one that looks like it’s blue is actually a deep green and the one that looks rose colored is red in color. These will be knit into socks and I may mix and match them to make what I like to call my “patchwork” socks.

Have I shown you this quilt I have finished since Christmas, also? If I did, consider my age and ignore it if I already showed you! I’m ashamed to say I have spent very little time in my shop sewing ever since my Christmas sale. I plan to finish more of my unfinished quilts this years, so I better get cracking.

I followed the advice of Mary over on Country Threads Farm Life blog who only quilts in straight lines. She gets sooo many quilts completed this way and I’ve decided I am going to do that also and get some done. I probably have fifteen or twenty unfinished quilts laying around and I also have plans to piece some more. I can’t hand quilt them all, unfortunately, but I will get them completed and into someone else’s hands. I kind of enjoyed just straight quilting on the machine and it sure was a whole lot easier than trying to turn corners.

David’s birthday cake. Not one of the prettiest you will see, but it was good and yes, it’s almost gone. We have candles for every age now and I rustled up these to put on the cake. At one time someone in our family was seven and someone was once five. They are all grown up now. Boo hoo.

Here’s the birthday boy. He’s looking pretty good for three quarters of a century. I think I’ll keep him for another 75(if that were possible!) He does love his sweets and he wanted a chocolate cake.

Because I have NOTHING else to do, I ordered a couple of paint by number pictures to paint. The paint by numbers aren’t like they were when I was a girl where you got maybe ten paints and one brush and that was all you needed. Now the pictures are very intricate and I got 24 paints and five brushes with each picture. As you can see, there are a lot of parts to this painting. I really don’t know how a real artist figures out what and where to paint to paint a masterpiece.

This is what the painting should look like when I’m finished. I’m going to put it on the wall by my owl floor lamp I bought myself. Ahh, look at Mr. Snowman peeking around the picture.

I’m still loving this lamp. I have it on all the time burning electricity and I don’t care. I’m going to do a blog about my love of eclectic lighting in my house. I always buy what I love, not always what I should and my tastes have changed through the years, but that’s another blog one day. The little light you can see behind the chair is one of my finds at an antique store that they were using for lighting and I talked them out of it.

Back to my painting. Here is the next picture I will paint. If you have been reading my blog for any time, you know I love my Labs. I have a chocolate one and a black one. Never have had a golden one. I would love to have a silver one and we tried to get one, but they are hard to find. This will go well with my Lab table I got for Christmas.

Here is what you get with the kits. I’m thinking about buying some better brushes to do the dog picture because the ones that do come with the painting are not high quality and don’t have fine points and there are a whole lot of teeny tiny things to paint in these pictures. Which is why I use this….

David surprised me and ordered me a new magnifying glass on Amazon. My old one had a bad place in it right in the middle and it was not easy to paint with. My new one is wonderful and I can see every tiny thing.

I’ve rattled on long enough. Just didn’t want January to go by without checking in. If the rest of the months are like this one, it’s going to be a very busy year and for that, I am grateful. I hate being bored and I never am because I’m always looking for something to do and I’m thankful I have a man who tries to keep up with me and helps me in many of my endeavors.

Here’s to new years, things to do, and husbands to love. Bye.

Settling in for Winter

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Christmas came and went in a flurry of decorating, baking, gift buying, church services, family gatherings and I loved it all, but now it’s time to settle in for Winter. We have almost three months of it to go and no matter where you live, it’s time well spent if you will do it.

I use to really love Winter as a child because it brought Christmas and sledding and making snowmen and snow angels in the snow. The cold didn’t bother me hardly at all even with my stocking gloves(I had no others) and wearing my brothers’ old buckle artic boots. I didn’t care how I looked because I got to go outdoors with my older brothers and go sledding down the big hill just down the road from our house. Winter meant hot tea and cinnamon toast on snowy school day mornings, piles of blankets on the bed where my room was so cold frost formed on the inside. Winter was my daddy making popcorn balls and bringing armloads of wood inside to fuel the big stove in our kitchen. It was my mother’s delicious suppers eaten around the table with all my family, snug inside while the weather roared outside.

Now that I am an old lady( I don’t feel like one) the cold weather really bothers me. Right now I have three heavy blankets on our bed and a mattress pad that has duel heat controls and mine is always on the highest temperature these cold, Winter nights. Sometimes I think it would be grand to be like the bears and hibernate all Winter snug in my cave. But I would have books to read also so as not to be bored. I’d lose weight like the bears do and come out in the Spring slimmer and ready for the warmer seasons.

But, alas I must just settle into Winter and enjoy it the best I can. Hot baths, snug beds, lots of reading, sewing quilts, making hot soups and baking delicious things. Going out to care for the dogs and the chickens who have to endure this weather the same as I do. The cold weather doesn’t seem to bother the dogs or chickens at all as long as they have a warm place to sleep and they do. Feeding the birds and watching them flock to the bird feeders almost running over each other in their greed for the sunflower seeds and cracked corn I leave out for them. I love watching them from my big chair while I have a work in progress on my knitting needles.

I don’t hate Winter. I think it’s good we have a little time to slow down and adjust our bodies to a slower time table while we await Spring’s warm weather. Sometimes, when I have a lot of quilts I want to make, I feel like Winter isn’t long enough. And it’s good we have to slow down our driving and take care. It’s not always rush, rush, rush everywhere even though there are a few who still drive on ice like it was eighty degrees out and the roads are dry as the desert. I just hope they don’t hit anyone in their haste.

We can’t dodge Winter so we may as well enjoy it as much as possible. The one really good thing about this time of year is that the days are getting longer little by little. Soon we will notice it stays lighter much longer in the evenings again. We will stay up later. I don’t know about you, but in Winter I go to bed a lot earlier than I do at other times. Like as I write this it feels like it should be about 9:00 and it’s 7:00! A hot bath sounds good about now. Then warm pajamas and turn up the heat on the mattress pad and I’m ready to settle in for the night.

Just think of Winter as God’s gift to us telling us to slow down, watch the snow falling, give our loved ones some extra attention. I use to love having my children home from school during the Chrismas holidays. They would play games all day or play outside in the snow. Monopoly games could go on for days. I loved every minute of it. But I also was glad when they went back to school and I had the house all to myself for a few hours.

Here’s to lovely Winter. The snow, sleet, ice and all. It’s ours to settle with and we will. Bye.

2023

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Christmas has come and gone. Already a week ago and time marches on. I hope you had a very nice Christmas. We did at our house. Kind of lowkey, but pleasant and even though, for me, it’s not about the gifts, I did get some nice ones. I asked David for only one thing this year that I really, really wanted. I saw a dog table with a glass top and the dog’s nose pointing up to a butterfly that is on top of the table. It was a Lab and looked so much like Sugar. I knew I was getting it because of the big box that arrived soon after I asked for it, but I had to wait until Christmas morning to see it and it did not disappoint.

It was better than I expected and larger than I thought it would be.

This is the butterfly on top of the table.

As if my cup doesn’t already overflow, I bought myself something after Christmas that I have been saving for and looking for for a couple of years. I love Tiffany lamps. I have one hanging in my shop. It use to hang in our kitchen and then when we remodeled the kitchen,it was installed in our dining room and then when we bought a new lamp for the dining room it got put in my shop where it will stay. I have wanted a floor lamp and have been looking at them on Amazon. There are pages of them and they all are so pretty I was having a hard time choosing one. Then, the other day, after searching for a while I came upon a page that had the most wonderful lamp I have ever seen and I could afford it!! I didn’t waste time looking any further. I clicked on it and told David it was on its way and would need to be put together.

Here it is.

So wonderful in the window.

The lamp itself is beautiful, but it is what is on it that made me fall in love.

The little owl nightlight. It sits on what looks like a tree branch. In fact the whole lampstand looks like a tree limb. I could not have found a more perfect Tiffany lamp for me if I had continued to look for months. This is just the perfect lamp for me. You can have the lamp on or just the owl nightlight lit or both at the same time. It’s so beautiful and I love it so much! Did I tell you I love my new lamp?

So the owl lamp sits next to my dog table and I am in bliss. I can look at them both as I knit or quilt or watch television and they will just make me happy. Almost like having the Christmas tree up all year with my new lamp. And I am feeling kind of sad the tree has to come down in the next week or so.

I wasn’t the only one who got what they wanted for Christmas. David wanted a new razor. Now weeks before Christmas David starts to let his beard grow. Now at his age it comes in snowy white so he kind of looks like Santa Claus. He enjoys taking peppermints to the store and handing them out to children, with their parents’ consent, of course. He has had children walk up to him and ask him if he’s Santa. He always tells them he’s Santa’s helper, but I don’t think some of them believe that and just know he’s the real one. I think it’s funny to see the looks on children’s faces when they see him. Oh, to be a child again and believe in the magic. I don’t think there is anything wrong with letting your children use their imaginations in believing there’s a Santa Claus, but I do believe children should know the real reason why we celebrate Christmas, also because without the birth of Jesus, none of us would be celebrating the holiday. It would not exist. Anyway, back to David’s razor. I took this picture of him Christmas Day.

Santa and his razor! You know, he cut off his beard Christmas night and I didn’t notice it until a day later! Better than last year. His beard was gone for two days before I noticed he had cut it off. He said his new razor was a dream to use. And I’m glad to have my clean shaven husband back.

Here is another picture of my dog table. It looks like its tilted, but it’s the angleof my camera that makes it look that way. I’m a terrible photographer.

So the holidays will be officially over tomorrow and then the stores will start pushing the next one on us. Valentine’s Day. But I’m way ahead of them on that.