Am I Clever or What?

I used to cross stitch all the time.  Then I quilted all the time.  Then I baked all the time.  Then I made cards all the time.  What goes around comes around, right?

So, now I am cross stitching again.

I am working on a chart of St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square in New Orleans, Louisiana.  I bought the chart at a cute little needlework shop in the French Quarter.  I am enjoying working on it except for the thread deficit which has been shipped now and will be here soon.  And, I decided to work it on Carolina linen Aida which is a speckled beige fabric.

This is where the clever part comes in and I am being sarcastic.

The fabric is beige.  The threads are various shades of beige, except for what is green.  It is 14 count which isn’t too bad but after just a few rows it has sort of all become beige.  Lots of beige.

I might go blind.

But it isn’t nearly as bad as stitching on black.

Anyway, here it is so far

It isn’t a big chart and I would have been done had I not run out of thread.  However, tomorrow I am going to work around the missing threads and continue with the beige.  I think it is going to be cute even if it is a bit.......beige.

Anyway, I will give an update as I progress.  I also found several unfinished projects that are going to give me grief — you know, must finish before I can start anything new.  I hate that about myself.  But, anyway, I hope to get this one done quickly so I can add it to my collection.

Shopping Online

I almost titled this “Shopping Online in the time of Covid” but the reality is that online shopping has become the norm for me.

 I don’t know about anybody else but I am finding that retail shopping has changed.  In my childhood we had large department stores and, for the most part, those large stores provided one stop shopping from clothes, to fabrics, to hair products — one even sold saddles!  Going “downtown” on a Saturday (which we did every two weeks) would result in a lot of shopping— so much that many times we used a delivery service called Merchant’s Delivery (little dark blue vans) that would deliver our purchases to our homes.  We never had a problem finding what we wanted.

Fast forward to today.  I don’t like shopping like I used to — blame it on the mobility issues — so when I go I want to go in, get what I need, and leave.  I am finding more and more that I am having difficulty finding things — while there are things in the store, there isn’t the variety that we used to have and not necessarily the brands that I use.  So, I turn to the internet and search until I find what I want.  I was beginning to think that a lot of things I use have just been discontinued but that isn’t the case — they are just not available in stores.  I understand that stores don’t have “back rooms” like they used to where they kept more stock — there is no more stock — what you see in the store is what is in the store — period.  It is sad and disturbing.

 I miss those large, glamourous department stores.  I remember the smell when we would walk into the air conditioning from the hot street.  Many times we entered the store through the small leather goods department, where my aunt worked, and the lush smell of the leather would seem so strong.  We walked through the cosmetics and the perfume departments and those heady smells would take our breath away — sometimes almost literally.  We ate lunch in the small cafe called The Chuck Wagon because the formal dining area — The Camellia Room — was reserved for fancy things like bridesmaids luncheons and debutant brunches.

Joske’s — the Biggest Store in the Biggest State until Alaska became a state then it was the Greatest Store in the Greatest state — We had to adapt!

The Camellia Room — I only ate there once when I was an adult 

Had my hair done there several times.  My aunt worked there and  used the salon — the stylists name was Larry.  He wanted to cut my hair into a pixie.  I didn’t let him.  I was about six.

But, we are living in the time of Covid and I no longer have the energy or interest to plod through stores these days.  These large department stores are a thing of the past — Neiman-Marcus is declaring bankruptcy as I type — gone are the smells and sights that invoke those wonderful childhood memories.  My blue delivery vans are now gray with a turquoise swoop that says “prime” or are brown and say UPS or maybe they are a plain truck that says nothing.  But, they bring me my goods — and now dog food and some groceries. — and they do provide a bit of excitement — like waiting for the mailman.

Will things go back to the way they were before?  I doubt it.  Retail was suffering to begin with and I don’t think this situation is doing it any good. I can’t imagine the department stores are suddenly going to morph back to MY past and become something like Joske’s or Frost’s or Neiman-Marcus again.  I think that is a thing of the past, something that can’t be explained to our children — the products, the smells, the very feel of the places.  It was a thing of past generations and our grandchildren are going to reminisce about Prime trucks and browsing the internet to shop.  So sad.

New Attitudes in the time of Covid

This quarantine is inconvenient.  It is also a little comical.

Years ago I went on a binge and I bought every shade of DMC thread there was — all three million colors or whatever there are.  I patiently wound all the thread on the little bobbins and put them in the cases — about 8 cases.  They looked like little jewels.

Over the years I have pulled out bobbins for projects, put them in ziplocks with charts, just generally messed up my thread.

When I bought the chart of St. Louis Cathedral, Jackson Square, in New Orleans the girl asked if I needed thread.  I assured her I had all of it.

I don’t.

I am missing four colors out of the list on the chart.  I have torn all my craft stuff apart looking for those colors.  Well, the part of my craft stuff that didn’t get torn up looking for elastic. The dog even got one of my bobbins and tore up the thread — good doggy!

I found charts I love and never made, I have found new skeins of thread that never got put on bobbins, I have found embroidery scissors I forgot I had but I can’t find those four colors of thread.

So, I decided to go get the thread — oh, wait, nope, can’t do that because the store is closed except for curbside pickup.  Curbside pickup — I can do that!  Well, Michael’s process is so complicated, and my items might not be eligible for pickup — I gave up and ordered it from an online store.  It will be shipped Friday.  Poo.  That means it will be Monday before it gets here, at least.  I won’t have worked on the chart for over a week and in that time I could have had it done.  It isn’t a huge chart.

Annoying for sure but a small thing at this time.  We are blessed, we are healthy, our family is healthy, we have food, the ever elusive toilet paper, a roof over our heads and the good sense to stay in the house.  I have a new vision of things — I am finding humor in things that would have aggravated me at one time — like the dog and the thread.  I am putting things in perspective — like, so what that I will have to wait for the thread — such a small thing when other people are waiting for food or medicine.  I am quieter and more introspective and I am seeing beauty in lots of things around me that I had just quit noticing and it seems like my priorities have changed a lot.  I am not rushing (no where to go), I have lifted my self imposed demands on myself and therefore am actually enjoying cooking and cleaning more than I ever have — who says it all has to be done in one day — take your time, shine your sink, and enjoy the process.

Who knew that at my age I would learn new things.

How Are Things Changing For You?

They keep talking about how life will be different when this is all over.

Say, what?  Life is different NOW!

I don’t know about you but while things are the same in some respects, they have changed a lot for me.  I have morphed back to my childhood.

Second childhood, you might ask? Ha! No, not yet but without a doubt I have fallen back on the things of my childhood that were comfortable.  I wonder if you have as well.

Food is what comes to my mind most readily.  For years now I have been trying to be more natural, more ‘green’, more non-toxic, if you will.  Less processed.  Enter pandemic and my pantry now consists of copious amounts of canned goods — not Amy’s — Green Giant.  I have cornbread mix rather than the raw ingredients to make it from scratch, cans of soup, store bought cookies, frozen breaded fish rather than the fancy schmancy ready grilled salmon from the fancy schmancy HEB store.  All of a sudden my paradigm has shifted — clearly quantity over quality.  The need to stock the freezer rather than hitting the store every two days for the freshest of the fresh.  Frozen fruit and vegetable — and — frozen garlic bread.  These are all things my mother bought, things I grew up with — grilled cheese sandwiches on white bread with soup — and I have completely gone back to my happy place.  How about you?

Reading.  Reading is a great escape for me and now is no exception EXCEPT I had progressed to the new era — reading on devices.  Love them— have several — love being able to buy books at the click of a button or check out library books without the library.  But, I am having difficulty reading on the devices.  I keep going back to reading books — physical books — because I am taken back to when I was a kid and would go to the library, get a stack of books and curl up through the winter, through the thunderstorms, through the bad days at school.  I feel like I am in that chair or on that couch reading through this storm.  How about you?

Hobbies.  I have dabbled in hobbies all my life, from the first set of embroidered dish towels when I was five (disaster by the way).  I have quilted, I had done paper crafts, needlepoint, regular embroidery, cross stitch, tried knitting — and I have lost interest with all of it at various times.  Now I have picked up the needle again.  Cross stitch.  Not because I have this huge desire to cross stitch images for which there is absolutely no use but because it brings back memories — like when I had pneumonia and I cross stitched a pillow top for my mother for Mother’s Day, the times I would carry small projects with me while hospital sitting with parents — it gives my hands something to do beside grab those store bought cookies.  How about you?

Laundry and house work.  I am really bad at housework however, I am finding comfort in cleaning and doing laundry and “feathering the nest” so to speak.  For some reason vacuuming and dusting and decluttering and putting things in order is making me feel good.  When I was first married I kept a very simple, mid-century house and I kept it well, it was always clean (down to the baseboards) and I didn’t have a lot of clutter.  Over the years, with kids and stuff and aging and less energy things aren’t as easy as they used to be.  The house I live in is three times larger than that little first house and sometimes I dream of that little first house with it’s ONE bathroom — green and brown tiles — so much littler so much easier.  But, I am working my way through it one room at a time and it is comforting — I am putting things out that I used to have out in that first house, I am not trying to be modern and sophisticated — I am going back to my roots.  How about you?

The yard.  I am not an outdoor person.  I don’t do yard work, I don’t like gardening for a variety of reasons but in the last few days I have been looking at the yard (which is quite large) and making plans.  We don’t have flower beds because neither one of us wants to maintain them, it is just a big lot with grass and a lot of trees.  I am longing for a fire pit, a swing of some sort, a few chairs around the fire pit.  A picnic table would be nice.  Family playing in the yard would be great — I hope to see that again soon.  I think about how during my childhood we spent lots of time outdoors — and I long to go out after dinner and just sit in the yard, just sitting and talking, having a cup of coffee or a soda — just enjoying the yard and the stars and the stupid June bugs.

So, I guess the question at the end of all this musing is — how will things be at the end of this?  Will I go back to being a foodie, will I go back to shopping every couple of days, will I decide I don’t need to dust those baseboards and will I decide the Kindle is superior to a book?

I have to idea.  I had no idea this pandemic could ever happen here.  It doesn’t seem possible, it doesn’t seem real and I can’t get my head around it.  Since I never had to deal with anything like this before, as an adult, I have no idea what the lasting effect will be.  Is this going to be our “depression”? I am sure my lifelong dislike of crowds will not change and will serve me well because I don’t imagine I will ever go anywhere full of crowds again and I will probably always have hand sanitizer with me — if I can find some!

How about you?

The Last Dogs — A book series

Caroline and I are reading a series called “The Last Dogs”.  It is four books telling the story of three dogs — Max, Rocky and Gizmo — on a quest to find their packs, their people.

A while back the people disappeared.  People in hazmat suits picked them all up and took them away leaving all the pets.  Now these three — Max, Rocky and Gizmo — want to find their people so they are going through all sorts of adventures to discover what happened to them.  It has been a rough go and not much progress was made until the last few chapters of the first book — “The Vanishing”.  In “The Vanishing” we see the pups leave their town and go to the city where they encounter packs of rats, cats and wolves.  They get hurt, chased and hungry.  They learn about The Corporation and how the animals left behind are trying to cope with being on their own.

The first book is exciting, cruel in places, humorous (thanks to Rocky and Gizmo) and just really leaves you wanting more

Then comes the second book — “Dark Waters” — same cast and crew and more adventures.  I won’t spoil it except for one thing —

The three pups ventured to the Zoo and met The Mountain (Mortimer the Elephant) — and that is where they heard about the virus.  Apparently there was a lab — The Lab — where experiments were done on animals and the Praxis procedure was performed on the animals making them super intelligent.  The procedure involved injecting a virus into the animals and then zapping them with electricity to activate it.  Seems the virus escaped the lab, mutated and started infecting the animals and then infecting the people.  Because of that, the people evacuated and left the pets behind because even though the pets weren’t getting sick, the people were.

UH, HELLO!  What a book to be reading right now! What kind of coincidence is that? We are half way through the second book and it is becoming disturbing.  Caroline is loving it and since they don’t watch a lot of news I don’t think she sees the comparison of what is happening right now.

But I do.

That’s all I have to say.

Easter Sunday Freak Out

Ok, this may come as a surprise to everyone but I am not a calm person.  Even in the best of times.

For several days last week I had been having allergy issues.  My ears especially and my eyes were bothering me a lot.  We have at least 50-75 photinias planted in the back yard — not our doing — and they are blooming to beat the band.  We are allergic.  The wind has been blowing a lot.  I have been standing out in the yard with the dog that doesn’t want to do her business out there, she just wants to chase bugs and roll in the grass.  I knew it wasn’t a good combination.

So, Easter was not quite the day we had hoped — no ham, no family, no eggs hidden, it was just blah.  So, we watched church online at 1 p.m. and then I fell asleep.  When I woke up I was having a chill, I felt awful and I had a FEVER!!!  Nothing scares me like a fever.

I was so scared I even called the doctor on call for my doctor asking if I should go to the ER or get tested for the plague.  He said neither.  He said it didn’t sound like Coronavirus — no cough and not short of breath — although it could be something brewing but not that.  He said just manage the fever, he would send the report to my doctor and my doctor could decide if I needed to get tested. I have yet to hear from my doctor.

I was completely terrified which probably helped the temperature climb.  I finally calmed down, the fever came down, I took some tylenol and went to bed fever free.  At some point it came back as a low grade, I didn’t feel good on Monday but the temp went away on it’s own and didn’t come back.

I have stayed in all day yesterday — no doggie walkies outside — either Daddy had to take her (which isn’t a good solution) or she had to use the potty pads.  Since she does that 85% of the time I didn’t feel bad about explaining to her that I was not going out in the pollen, the wind, and the spurt of winter we have had in the last couple of days.  I am sure she understood every word.  But, the more I was in the less my ears hurt and the less my eyes were bothering me. So, I think rather than Coronavirus I was having an allergy attack.  I think the temperature was probably some inflammation and total unadulterated fear.  In any event, it seems to be gone — crossing my fingers.

So, that is panic in the time of corona and I do it so well.

Art in the Time of Covid

I love art.  I love doing art. I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler but I admire those who can.  I come from an artistic family although that gene clearly skipped my generation.  My own personal art comes in the form of card making, quilting, and needlework.  Right now I am involved in revitalizing my interest in cross stitch.

When I travel I like to acquire certain things from the area I am visiting.  Books are a must, Christmas ornaments are highly sought after and prints depicting the area I am visiting are always a welcome addition.  Our latest trip to New Orleans was no different.

So, in this time of quarantine I thought I would share some of the art I have acquired from other places and one other that is really special to me.

 These are prints that I obtained in New Orleans.  The one on the right is a painting of the riverboat we rode down the Mississippi.  We also ate a delicious dinner there as well.  It was a lot of fun.  Too crowded which made me worry about the virus but after dinner we sat out on the deck and relaxed as we enjoyed the Mighty Mississippi!  It was great! The one on the right is the famous St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square and the French Quarter.  I will go back again because I just didn’t get enough!

Tower Bridge in London.  I purchased this in Covent Garden on our visit to England in 2005.

This is the one that is truly special to me — it is our church.  A drawing done by Michael Pavlovsky, a well known local artist and fellow parishioner, as a fund raiser for a project.  I smile every time I look at it.  Sorry for the light shining on it.

Arneson River Theater in San Antonio, Texas.  It is a unique open air theater that is used extensively through the Fiesta season for Ballet Folklorico performances.

Big Ben, phone box, mail box, double decker bus — all the ‘things” of   London.   England was the one place on my bucket list and I enjoyed it immensely.

That is not all the art I have in the house but I only have one piece that I bought just because I liked it.  Everything else was either a gift or done by somebody, mostly relatives.  

I am funny in that things that I surround myself with have to have meaning whether the art on the wall or the jewelry on my body.  I guess I am a traditionalist and love the coziness that things give when they have meaning.  I will share other things another time — I even have a collection of Bean’s work that I would love to share.  Another post, another post.

What A Mess

What a Mess and no, I am not talking about the Coronavirus crisis although that certainly does qualify as a “mess” of epic proportions.

What I am speaking of, however, is my craft area and most specifically, my craft stash.

I have been making masks which forced me to go into the craft closet.  Everything is a hodge podge, clearly just thrown in with our last move almost 3 years ago.  I haven’t been doing much crafting, except for card making, so I haven’t entered the closet of doom.

Ok, so I managed to locate all I needed for the masks and used up some of my stash which is good — well, it doesn’t look like a dent was made in the fabric but I did manage to use up all the elastic.  I am done with masks for a few days because, while it was fun in the beginning, it turned boring and I got a terrible backache from bending over the machine.  And then the machine had a temper tantrum which made me all tense so I made it happy, finished up and decided to move on for a few days to something else.

Specifically cross stitch.

Here is the little Old North Church I mentioned in an earlier post.

It is leaning up again a wooden block that you can see through the fabric.  It was a lot of fun to make and it is really tiny.

I am going to start on of the kits I brought home from New Orleans.  It is a chart of the St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square. It was such a lovely church.

Of course, by that time things were beginning to be cancelled due to the plague so a concert that was supposed to happen didn’t but we got to tour the church.  Since it is such an iconic part of the French Quarter, I decided a chart of it would be an appropriate souvenir.

So, I went upstairs to gather my supplies and I was really annoyed.  At one point, in my craft hoarding life, I managed to buy all the DMC threads.  All. Of. Them.  Well, I couldn’t find about half the colors.  I finally realized they were packaged in other half done kits.  So, I gathered what I could, searched other stuff that was half done and I think I have it all now but there needs to be some serious Marie Kondo -ing of my sewing stuff.  

Well, else do I have to do, right?  I guess this will teach me to quit being so sloppy!

Time for a nap.

Playdate

Be careful who you let your kids have play dates with. This is how she left

And this is how she came home

Nuff said

Palm Sunday

Easter is my favorite religious holiday.  I love the mystery, I love the drama of it and I love the happy ending.  I love Holy Week.  The lead up to the great finale is just thrilling.

Last Easter Sunday I was in the ER with my husband. He was fighting a war with his body.  His blood sugar had dropped dangerously low.   He was almost in a coma.  He rode in an ambulance.  He recovered well and fully and we even went on to have Easter dinner that evening.

This Easter finds us fighting a war with an enemy we can’t see.  We imagine it at every turn.  We are spraying and disinfecting indiscriminately to thwart the demon that is wrecking our very existence.

We have been told to focus on Jesus and not the storm.  Even though Easter as we know it is cancelled, it is almost a blessing that we are going through this during the Easter season because it helps us to put the focus where it needs to be.

Our bishop has asked that we hang palms, or greenery, on our doors to commemorate Palm Sunday.  I have no palms and my husband just trimmed up everything and disposed of the branches so I have no other greenery.  So, what is a paper crafter to do?  Improvise.

Wishing you a wonderful and meaningful Palm Sunday!  Stay in, stay well and stay safe!

Learning New Things in the Time of Pandemic

As we forge ahead during this very odd, uncomfortable, sad, infuriating time I am learning a lot of things.  Not new hobbies or doing things I have been putting off but things of life.

I am learning that being frugal is a good thing.  I am so fortunate when it comes to material things — I have never really had to worry about where my next meal is coming from or if the lights are going to stay on or if I have a roof over my head.  In the past I have been a bit wasteful — I would throw the leftovers away because my husband doesn’t like leftovers.  I always felt bad about it but did it anyway.  Now?  Uh, no.  He will be seeing those leftovers again.

We don’t need nearly as much “paper” as we think we do.  A few months back I bought, on a whim, a package of 50 cheap, unhemmed microfiber towels. I can’t find a photo of them and am too lazy to get up and go take one but they are very basic with pinked edges.  I didn’t have a reason to buy them at the time but I am glad I did.  Trixie is a messy little doggy.  She is always making some kind of a mess or another and I have never been shy about pulling off a bunch of paper towels and going to town.  Now I have determined these towels to be used for those messes — and I am not using paper towels.  I am also using cup towels for more kitchen things rather than paper towels.  It is amazing how something like this changes your habits.

I am learning that sleep is a good thing.  Now I haven’t gone into some sort of weird hibernation, escape thing — I don’t feel depressed or denied or frightened — but I am adhering to my usual schedule and I look forward to crawling into that bed at night and getting all cozy!  I am also getting up at the same time too and that is good.  Our meal times have stayed the same and I because of that I haven’t lost track of the days.

I have learned that you can have too much of a good thing — like the news.  I only watch a little of it because I am certain that if you watch too much you will really get sick.

I have learned that people are crazy.  Long story but it seems that a lot of old folks have launched into our second childhoods and it isn’t pretty.  People, get a grip.

Have a great Saturday!