Category: Miscellaneous Musings

So much has been happening: 

G has just gone out of the house to get a hair cut and go to the post office.  He has gone by himself and I am beside myself with glee.  So apparently I am celebrating by writing a blog post.

Also under the tree was a new camera.  

Liana tagged me, and I have been remiss in responding.  Actually I wrote a long, lovely post last night, answering the meme and just rambling about languid summer evenings sitting on the deck watching the river go by and the sun set, but the evil cyber-gremlins got it and it is gone, gone, gone.  Of course I want to blame it on Typepad, because I am certain I pressed save just before everything disappeared, but I am really not that certain as I was still a little fuzzy headed after having Gin and Tonics on the deck so it may have been me.  Luckily I had dinner already in the oven as it appears I am a little out of practice with the summertime adult refreshments.

So I will do this again and this time I will make a copy before saving, just in case.

WHAT WAS I DOING 10 YEARS AGO?
At any given moment? probably much of what I am doing now.  DH had retired from his surgical practice by then and set up his consulting business.  I was the business manager, but we were still small, and as it was a retirement job, we weren't trying to be anything big.  The idea was to work enough to pay the expenses plus a little extra and spend the rest of our time traveling.  It didn't work out that way completely because eventually the business got incredibly busy and we traveled less.  10 years ago we were traveling a lot, about two weeks out of every month and most weekends we were either away or incredibly busy.  I spent the time in between catching up on home, laundry, and garden, and doing all the payroll, office accounting, personnel managing and keeping the computer network running.  I worked mostly from home, the office and my home computers were networked but it seems I ran into the office a couple of times every day. 

WHAT ARE 5 THINGS ON MY TO-DO LIST TODAY?
Now we are completely retired and the business is closed so my to do list can be pretty boring.
1.     walk around the neighboring Vanderbuilt Estate (3.9 miles) or ride exercise bike for at least 40             minutes. Do stretches and exercises:  lunges, squats, push-ups, curls, sit ups (done)
2.    cook.  It seems I cook a lot nowadays, usually three meals a day, but today I only have 2 because DH just grabbed a bagel and coffee before going to his gym this morning. (Lunch done, meat marinating for dinner)
3.     Figure out why a local hospital is billing us for something that should have been paid by DH's Medicare or supplemental insurance.
4.     Grocery Shopping  (after 6 for 10% "Family Night" discount at gourmet/produce market)
5.      Pull out coating fabric and write up plans for Great Coat Sew Along

SNACKS I ENJOY:
nuts
cheese
hummus
popcorn

THINGS I WOULD DO IF I WERE A BILLIONAIRE:
Invest it wisely and set up a foundation or trust to give as much of it as possible away.
I don't think I would make any major changes in my lifestyle now as I am pretty comfortable and like what I do, but it would allow me to worry less and would undoubtedly make many things easier.  Since I am not particularly looking for anything grand in life, it would be nice to know I could go where I wanted and do what  ever interested me. 

I would however buy out my neighbor, the one who antagonizes everyone and lives just above me so that I see the mess that is his yard and the bottom of his pool and deck right outside my front door and everytime I come in and out of the driveway; the one my DH calls sc****g.  I can rationalize this by saying that it would make my friend and other neighbor happy, and I would plant some nice shrubs on what would then be "our" property line, and it would give me the extra acreage I need so that my property is no longer "non-compliant" after the town rezoned this section of town for 2 1/2 acre lots to cut down on development.   My house is grandfathered, but I currently can't repair or change anything on the outside of the house without a zoning variance, and the addition of the neighbor's property would put me well over the limit so that I could enlarge the sewing studio if I ever wanted or put in a greenhouse, neither of which would be approved now as I am not allowed to enlarge any existing structures or build new structures on the property now. 

PLACES I HAVE LIVED:
Stephenville, Texas.  Lafayette, Louisiana, Pozuelo de Alarcon, Spain.  Pasadena, Texas.  Poughkeepsie, NY. Hyde Park, NY.

WHAT TYPE(S) OF WORK HAVE I DONE?
Babysitter.  Lab technician, sorting, counting and identifying insect larvae from Texas streams. Library assistant.  Sales clerk at Montgomery Ward.  File Clerk.  Classified Advertising Sales.  Teacher's aide.  ESL teacher.  Sunday School Teacher.  Baby Nursery Manager.  Secretary.  Programming Assistant fixing bugs in APL programs.  Production Manager for a computer time-sharing firm. Systems Analyst.  VP of Sales for a computer software firm. Teaching software training seminars for businesses.  Adjunct professor at a local community college.  Medical billing clerk.  Medical transcription.  Office Manager for a medical practice.

SIX (6) “PEEPS” I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT
Shannon Hungry Zombie Couture
Marji Fiber Arts Afloat
Materfamilias
Cennetta The Mahogany Stylist
Mary Beth The Stitchery
Mary Mary, Mary Quite Contrary

We have returned from our travels and I am busy doing laundry, sorting through buckets of mail and generally trying to get life settled back into some semblance of normality — when I figure out whatever normal is supposed to be.

I had intended to post while I was away but the portable computer is down, I think I probably did something stupid one night in a sleep-deprived state of frustration — but fixing that is yet one more thing on my to do list.

I did finish the robe before we left, and it proved to be the perfect companion to the pajamas. 

At first I had great, over-ambitious, plans.  I was going to use French seams and make everything just so perfect, but the reality of a certain lack of time brought me to my senses.  It is quilting cotton after all, no reason to go crazy.  So this ended up being simple sewing, serged edges, simple seams, no fuss. 

I traced off a pattern from a favorite robe so I pretty much knew what to expect, except that the cotton fabric has much less drape than the rayon of the original robe.  I made all the narrow tubes for ties and sash loops then turned them at the doctor’s office when I was playing chauffeur one day only to find that in the end I didn’t really need them all.  At least they entertained me for a bit.

I decided I liked the robe better without the sash.  The cotton is stiff enough that the robe was not flattering belted and tied, but it hangs gracefully on its own.  I ended up using a simple hidden hook and eye and leaving it at that.

We came home to find the irises in bloom, apparently the only bit of springtime cheer going on up here.  Although it was warm in Tennessee, I am told it remained cool here the entire time we were gone.    Despite the fact that the pool was opened before we left, and the solar heater is running, the water is still a chilling 63 degrees.

It looks like summer is still a little ways away.  But of course that could change tomorrow.

It does however strike me as somewhat funny that although I am still hoping for warm weather and don’t yet have my summer clothes out and in circulation, the new Harper’s Bazaar has arrived and is filled with predictions and plans for fall clothing (despite the Nicole Richie’s summer frock on the cover).

Right about now joining Marji’s coat sew-along sounds like a good idea.

I finally got out to work in the disaster area that was formally known as my front yard today and it was a joy to be rooting about the leaves and twigs, unearthing the dainty green tendrils.

The fritallaria are blooming:

They are hiding between the iris  and a few stalwart tulips that have ventured up for a second year’s bloom.  I had been a bit worried about the irises after a few of them thought they were going to go for a third bloom last year in early December.  They were caught by a frost and a snowstorm just a day or two before they would have opened and I remember how the warm January of 2007 fooled my poppies into thinking it was spring and they were fully leafed out and blooming when we got the February snowstorms. Only two of the poppies survived, a fate apparently not shared by the irises.

I also neglected to plant tulips in the front bed last fall; in fact I didn’t even pull the spent tulip bulbs and I was thrilled to see so many coming back up with buds. Of course they are much smaller than new bulbs, but I don’t usually expect more than one year from my tulips. I did learn that the Ropell dip I gave them when I planted them in the fall of 2006 is apparently good for only 1 season, as quite a few of the tulips have been nibbled down to the ground, but I am hoping that a few of these buds will survive long enough to give me a few blossoms.

Between gardening adventures I have been knitting — I’ll update you on that tomorrow, and have absolutely been avoiding the UFO pile.

What I have been spending my indoor time with today is the new issue of Gourmet, which arrived yesterday and is devoted to cooking vacations.

I am reading all the descriptions of the various locations and courses and filling my head with dreams of new skills, wonderful flavors, and exotic locales.  There is not  a one that does not sound interesting to me.  I always want to cook when I go to new places and look at the markets and the food, and I would love to go somewhere and learn to cool regional or local dishes.  Although France and Italy and California sound wonderful, so do the more exotic climes.  I would happily travel from village to village in Soviet Georgia and milk cows to make my own fresh cheese, I would love to explore the cuisines of Turkey, or Laos, and I would probably try the Buffalo stomach too, it can’t be that much different than the pig stomach we had in Chinatown once, when DH pulled over the waiter and said we wanted what they were having at the next table, despite the protestations that the dish was not suited to American tastes.

Anyway, it is a great magazine for dreaming, and of course there are recipes (not for beef stomach) to try,  and even a discussion of a culinary vacation right in my own backyard.  The CIA offers a culinary boot camp, an intense one week course in basic skills and techniques.  I have taken simpler, one day classes and learned a lot but I would still love to go to boot camp.  As a self-taught home cook, there are wide gaps in my knowledge.  Lucky me I wouldn’t even have to leave home and DH wouldn’t have to milk cows or wander around strange locales while I cooked.  Of course he might still miss me when I’m in cooking school from dawn to dark or beyond.

A sailboat on the Hudson is a clear sign that it must be spring.

Although it is cold today, with a chill wind, we finally had a few warm days and I was able to spend a little time in the yard.  A few new flowers are peeking up although they seem to be few and far between.  But  the hyacinths are up, looking a little chilly, but they are braving the cool weather. 

I wish I could have shown you the crocuses, but they were a little shy this year.  The blossoms were up, but stayed tightly closed most of the time.  Occasionally they would open up, most likely only to be hit with a chill and wilt before my eyes.  Still it was nice to see their bright little bits of color, just as these hyacinths are quite welcome  peeping up through the sea of brown.

The yard has suffered through a few years of workmen trampling on my flower beds and my own failure to give them the attention they need.  There is much to be done and I was happy to be out in the yard a little bit this weekend.  I don’t see how I will manage to tackle everything, but it is really not something that I worry about that much.  Increasingly it seems that life is not to be measured in the number of things that are done but in the joy of doing.  That will be enough.

Still it was nice to see little bits of green here and there.  I tried to grow primulas for years  without success and it tickles me no end that these two, which were picked by DH about 8 years ago when he accompanied me to a local greenhouse, come back faithfully year after year.  I was convinced they would be another failure, but they keep coming back, reminding me to keep trying.

There were few fiberly activities over the weekend.  Yard work and a concert took up much of Saturday and Sunday found me possessed of a seasonally inspired need to clean, refurbish and refeather the nest.

I did find time to peruse the new Vogue Sewing:


I love the articles and information on the new Chado Ralph Rucci patterns and details about the garments and their construction. I have been a fan of Rucci’s for a long time and have taken advantage of the opportunity to study his garments whenever possible.

Of course I bought the first two patterns, although I don’t intend to make the dress right away.  I hope to start the shirt soon and have the pattern on a stack of things that I must make muslins of VERY SOON,

There is also, unfortunately, a rather large stack of UFOs that must be completed simply because they have grown to be such a burden on my psyche.  I am really hoping that I can work on both the UFOs and the muslins simultaneously……kind of rewarding myself for working through the stack, but you know that is not really likely to happen.  Still, it is a lovely dream, and looking at the pattern will hopefully encourage me to wrap up those pesky projects.

It is still a little early around here for spring produce, but  I just have to show you these beautiful  mushrooms that were delivered this week.  I know I am very fortunate to have a specialty mushroom grower near me and to be able be one of his customers.  Although he grows mushrooms much of the year, this week the oyster mushrooms were incredible.  Often when they are big like this they get a little thick and tough.  In that case I usually roast them.  But although these are large, they are also tender and delicate so I wanted to take advantage of their more subtle  flavors.  They were perfect for a quick stir-fry with a little chicken breast and some crisp snow-peas on the side.  And that is the perfect way to end a spring weekend.

Long before I learned to sew or knit I was a reader.  I have fond memories of summer afternoons walking to the local library and bringing home stacks of books, devouring them and then, and then repeating the entire process the next day.  I think it was because I repeated this process so frequently that my parents had me write book reviews of every book for a while one summer.  I don’t recall that the book review assignment lasted all that long, but I kept reading.  It was not a big step from reading to acquiring books, although I do truthfully know several people who read constantly but have no urge to possess the books they have read.  It is too bad I did not acquire that gene.  I have managed, over the years to divest myself of many books, and I do read many more books from the local library system, but still the piles of books accumulate.

So now you
know the truth about me, I am a hoarder of things despite all
protestations to the contrary that I like things neat and clean…..no minimalist
I. But I do accumulate specific
things: books, fabric, yarn, patterns — too many patterns probably, especially given my pattern buying the last week or so, but they do take
up far less space than the fabric or the books. 

 
This week
has been preoccupied with the books. We have converted one of the spare bedrooms into a workout room/library and most of my "spare" time this week has been spent putting up the shelves and filling them with the books slated for this room.  It is by no means the entire collection:  our new library houses only  the gardening books, oversized art books (both very small collections) and the fiction/literature and cookbook collections (much larger).  I had in fact hoped that there would be a little more blank space on the shelves for future growth, but that growth will have to be achieved somewhere else in the house, or curtailed.

The room is small and makes maximum use of the space.  This is the long bookcase, on one end of the room, about 9 feet long by about 9 feet high.  There are 8 shelves on each wall; you only see glimpses of the top and bottom shelves in this photo.   I had hoped to get all the fiction on this wall, and I probably would have had I not used the bottom shelf for oversized art books.  As a result some of the fiction wrapped around the corner to the shorter wall, as seen on the left side of this second photo:

Here is the corner view.  It is difficult to get a good photo in a room that is only about 9 x 11 feet, I can’t get far enough from the shelves to include a complete shot.  The books on the right are on the long (9 ft wall) and the ones on the left are the shorter shelves (about 5 1/2 feet) There is a pair of file cabinets and a doorway to the left of the shelves.   

The short wall contains my cookbook collection, with the exception of that top shelf just under the ceiling, which is the beginning of the fiction and literature section, authors beginning with "A".  In the end it works out as that shelf is 8 feet up from the floor, effectively out of reach without a ladder and probably more appropriate for literary volumes than cookbooks, which will be used more frequently. 

That is Penelope Ann in the corner, my DSD’s dressform.  She is in desperate need of a new, more flattering outfit.  DSD stripped Penelope of her clothes last time she visited and I haven’t yet made her anything new, poor girl.  Penelope Ann would be about 5’6" if she had a head, so that gives you a relative sense of height in the room.

There is more to do; there is a walk-in closet in the room, out of view in these pictures, it would be behind the photographer that still needs to be cleaned out but I have had enough for now.  Even the prospect that this may become at least a partial fabric closet isn’t enough to keep me slaving away at it right now….although I have enjoyed putting away my books, and revisiting a few of them, I have been neglecting my sewing and knitting and miss them terribly.

Happy New Year!!

The end of 2007 got a little out of hand.  Life intervened in a really big way but I did get a fair amount of gift sewing done.  Unfortunately none of it was documented and I have decided not to begin this new year by itemizing the successes and failures of the past.

Actually 2007 went fairly well considering there were some pretty big upsets, and although I did not accomplish as much as I would have liked, and who ever does, I still met my goals in the most minimal of fashions.

So 2008 looks bright and I have high hopes.

I did manage to integrate a lot of parts of my life that seemed disparate and disconnected.  I also rediscovered my sense of style and my love of clothes and pretty things, something I was actually surprised to have lost and despaired of finding again.  I know now that everything else, including my creativity will return in its own good time and I am not worried.  In fact I am dreaming a lot.  I am dreaming of colors and fabrics and yarns and music. The ideas are tumbling around, more fragmented at the moment but occasionally falling into discernible patterns.  Eventually some of these fragments will coalesce into actual projects.

I hope that the year is filled with dreams, and that some of those dreams become realities.

Oh, and the vase?  That was a Christmas gift.  It is felt with a glass liner and I think it just so cool.

This is what I love about winter:

View from the front door in the (fairly) early morning light, about 7 AM.

It looks like it was only about 10 inches, or that is what I have this morning at our snow-measuring station.  It is possible it might have settled overnight, but it is fairly light snow.  The official measurements are 6.5" in the town south of me, and 8.2 north of me.   Both of those measurements are taken about 5 or 6 miles inland from the Hudson River.  Our location , on the river with the cliffs behind us, seems to always have more or less snow than the official measurements indicate, this time slightly more, although there have been days when I had but a dusting and I went over the hill and onto the highway and saw 3 inches or more.

After 30 years I still love the snow.  Although it was even nicer before the house you see in the picture was built (about 10 years ago).  Before, there was one property owner between me and a large National Historic Site and I could cross country ski from my front door all the way across.  No more.  That neighbor had to sell off part of his property because the taxes were killing him — he had over 20 acres and the area was zoned for 1/2 acre lots.  He had to pay 40+ assessments for fire and water taxes.  The laws have changed now, but too late for that neighbor.  Now I have to get in the car and drive 1/2 mile in order to ski.

I truly did not realize it had been so long since I had posted anything here.  October seems to have just slipped through my fingers, there was a luncheon I really wanted to attend but it came and went before I even managed to get onto Kayak to look up airfares.  Sometimes I think I need a minder.

Anyway, when life gets really really busy it tends to be my way to just withdraw into myself for a little bit and cut out all the extraneous communication.  Not that this blog is really extraneous, just that when "me" time is at a premium, those quite reflective moments get first dibs.  Otherwise all is well, just busy.

My clothes came back from the cleaners on Friday and they are NOT all put away.    Friday night I managed to sort and fold or hang the scarf and shawl collection because they had been piled on the bed and we were in danger of suffocating if I did not get the huge pile of dry cleaner’s plastic, much less the scarves, out of the way.  It is amazing how in 30 years of collecting, even at an average rate of  only 2 scarves a year, a huge collection can be amassed. 

Today was reserved for getting the fabric out of bags and off the hangers so that I can then have space to hang clothes.    As I had previously mentioned there was quite a bit (although only a small portion of the entire collection):

This is a portion of the bill from the cleaners.  There were no blankets, sheets, or pillowcases.  What would I do with 32 pillowcases anyway? Although I suppose that they might have been appropriate for pricing some pieces of fabric although there were few I would consider as small as a pillowcase, well maybe a skirt length.   

We are actually most tickled by the idea of "Fabric, very Medium".

At any rate,  putting away the fabric seems to be a day-long activity.  I had all the fabric indexed on 3×5 cards.  But of course, it does not come back in the order it was sent out.  So first I had to pull out all of the cards for fabric that was stored in the Master Bedroom Closet.  This took a while as the index cards are stored in shoe boxes and sorted by color, requiring me to sort look through the entire filing system, looking for those pieces labeled with "MBxx".  This of course lead to a few delays as I was occasionally distracted by a particular piece of fabric and spent time revisiting fabric-shopping memories and dreaming of future garments.

Here are the cards and the  storage boxes that house the fabric collection master list.

Now, after arranging the index cards by color, I am pulling the fabric, removing it from the hangers, folding it and storing it in the appropriate box. This way a fabric will still be in the appropriate box when I go to try and find it, although there are a few fabrics I am rearranging as I see new possibilities for coordinating outfits, and as I see a few pieces that may want to be made up this fall.

Although this all takes some time, spending time playing with fabric is always fun.