Meeting a Saint

 This is not a story I tell frequently, or at all first off because it was embarrassing and deeply personal, second because no one would believe me, or at least not many people would believe me. so here it goes...

I got up early one mid 80's morning to go to work downtown, still wearing the cloths I was partying in the night before. To say I was hungover would be kind, I was probably still drunk and the way I was feeling I wouldn't wish on anyone. This is not the remarkable bit, this was an all too familiar Monday morning.

I caught my bus paid my fair, wobbled down the isle, collapsed in the seat and proceeded to vomit on the shoes of the passenger I had sat next to. I was mortified. There are some things you never want to be responsible for on a Chicago city bus, strange discolorations and not so strange smells are only a few and here I'd managed both, on some strangers new shoes. To my resounding horror I was about to do so again.

Now whilst every other passenger in the seats, before and aft of us immediately moved as far away as they could, She put a gentile hand on my back and said "Oh honey, that's ok, let it all out" I couldn't believe it! I started to cry quietly "but your shoes! I so sorry, I ruined them, please I can pay for them"  "Don't be silly, everyone is entitled to a bad day" she replied "they're just shoes, are you alright honey?" and in that moment leaning over her knee looking at my mess, I realized who's shoes I had just defiled, and the enormity of it was painfully awful. It was the kind of awful you feel when you know you have disappointed your grandma in front of the entire family.

And there she was, on a CTA bus rubbing my back, like I was her's and this was just an unfortunate thing that happened.

As I raised my head and looked into those blue eye's, did you know how blue they are? Like good denim.  All through my stumbling apologies she was just so kind and understanding, she wiped my mouth because of course she had kleenex in her purse, and dabbed my eyes whilst telling me it was alright she had lots of other shoes, I needn't worry about it. Then she got up and floated off the bus like the fairy-godmother she was. I watched her take off her shoes and toss them in a bin then disappear barefoot into the Hilton.

I scrambled off at the next stop and had to walk several blocks back to work, having missed my stop. I went into a McDonalds to wash off the shame and do my face, which had melted off. My god I looked a mess! I may not have the best luck in the world, but the luck I do have seems to pop up when I need it to, in small very strange ways. Of all the people who could be on a CTA bus at 9am I wasn't expecting, Dolly Parton, and really who would? 

Now You see why I don't tell this story to just anyone. So why am I telling it now, you ask? I tell it to illustrate just what kind of angel Dolly was in real life, because honestly you can't get more real life than that! Though I wish I could have met her under less embarrassing circumstances maybe even told her how much her music meant to me, but I would have to say the absolute kindness she showed me when she not only didn't have to but would have been justified in at least walking away in disgust, was all Dolly. 

Dolly Parton was a bright shining example to us all on how you should live a life through generosity, understanding one another and above all being kind to each other. I have never forgotten that lesson. 

Memories of Grama Ida

Quite literally this is one of her favorite stories to tell

I am 2.5 here, lower right

of me when I was a little;

One fine birthday when I turned 3 or 4, because only a 3 or 4 year old could get away with this. I received as a present a pair of shiny red rain boots, hat and clear plastic bubble umbrella.

I remember the umbrella as I had it for a good long while after that, but the boots and hat not so much.

Anyway, some adult told me in no uncertain terms, I was not to play with my gift, it was only for rain.

So with much pouting and childish outrage, and many questions of "why not!" and "what good is a present if you can’t play with it!", "it is mine after all!" They were put away in the sun room for a later time when the might be needed. For rain.

Needless to say when grama Ida was woken up at the crack of dawn, by one of the cousins Tom, who informed her that I had gone out to play in the rain. She didn’t even open her eyes.

“That’s nice” she said. But Tom wan’t finished “she’s taken her umbrella down the block” now this was LaCrosse Wisconsin in the 60’s, so safe as houses for these shenannagins.

“she’s wearing her hat”, said Tom “Mph” responded Grama, pulling the coverlet up a little more, no doubt hoping he was done tattling. “She’s wearing her boots too”,

“Yes Tom. it’s raining so I expect she is excited to show them off, now go play” Grama was getting a little tetchy by this time and wanted Tom to go away and let her sleep in a little longer.

All the cousins were visiting, for mother's day, staying in the house and as there were about 10 of us between the ages of 3 and 5, we made quite the raucous crowd when we were all together. I’m sure bedtime was just bonkers.

There was just one more little bit of information Tom had to impart, and he was hanging onto it.

For impact.

“Shes’ down the block, wearing her boots and hat and her umbrella” with a deep sigh, knowing there was no getting back to sleep, she rolled over and looked at my 5 year old cousin Tom “you said that” she said with growing frustration.

He looked up at Grama Ida with a big grin and said “and she's not wearing anything else”

Grama’s Eyes flew open in horror as she shot out of bed, not even stopping for her slippers, she grabbed a wrap on her way out the door, down the block and around the corner, where she found me happily jumping in large puddles in my shiny new red boots, hat and bubble umbrella and indeed nothing else.

On being societaly un-productive

 Despite being an atheist I can not seem to get rid of my judeo-christian work ethic, which demands I make money from something before I can enjoy it. Why am I like this??? 

I love my hobbies, every, single, one. has brought me the joy of creation, learning, expanding, extreme time loss, beauty, knowledge, whether I am any good at it or not.

What precipitated this little bout of unhelpful self-reflection? 

why my credit card bill, of course. duh

I am determined to kill my JDC work ethic, to death. It's throwing off my groove.

The Baltimore Album Quilt

I also finally put this together, thAt only took 27 years....0.0!

This was my third applique quilt.

I made a Noah's ark quilt from a kit, for my son, 3 years before which, I have no Idea what happened to,

and a Sunbonnet Sue quilt, that I drafted the Sue's myself, while on a family driving trip in 1994.

I started this whilst pregnant with my second child.

And it's not done. I wasn't expecting it to be so tiny! It measures in at only 36" x 48"

I think it needs 2 more rows or maybe a top and bottom row..........I don't know.

9 of the blocks were sewn between 1995 and 1997, the last three, blocks the baskets were sewn in 2000 And the Ship which I also drafted a year later. All the blocks come from one of Ellie Sankowicz Baltimore album quilt books.

New Stove

So this is what I have been staring at since June 14th

Lovely right?

Yes, I did cover it with a stray piece of  wood, but still.

4 months without a stove is.................Difficult

Isn't she pretty!!

There are so many little things you do on a stove that you just can't duplicate anywhere else.

I now have a new appreciation for the humble stove

I did not have before and in fact took it for granted 

to such a degree, it took a month to not be surprised it was no longer there and another month to readjust my cooking to reflect its loss

I ended up, after a week of boiling water in a microwave, buying an electric kettle.

Eggs become vEry difficult

Don't get me started on sauteing, melting butter, searing and browning meat.

All things I do so regularly that not having a stove was crimping my style, not to mention my menu!

Thank goodness we went on a 3 week vacation, in the middle of this or I would have been driven spare!

Though the story is still fraught with OMG. This is nOt the stove we ordered from Lowes.

ThAt stove has yet to arrive, is still vaoprware, as far as I can tell

 because its delivery got pushed out yet another 2 weeks.     O0!!!

So! Needles to say We got fed up. When needs must Amazon to the rescue!

Lowes called remanded our deliver two more weeks on Sunday, so we sat in front of the computer for a couple of hours contrasting and comparing what amazon had and got our stove 3 FREAKING DAYS later on Wednesday promptly at 1pm.

A trip to the hardware store, not lowes or home desperate because they are useless, we are all set up and cooking! Yay!

This is why Amazon is eating peoples lunch. When the local's you try to use, give you no recourse and no feed back, both customer service departments on line, on phone and in store, suck hairy balls, I will truck with the evil empire.

 

Some day my stove will come

** Rant Alert *** Rant Alert **

 So my hypothetical stove,

That we bought July 14th

Has a new delivery date 

Which has been moved back,

 Again

From the original of August 14th, 

Which is why we bought the stupid thing in the first place!   It's availability.  In august.

 to August 28th,

 September 11

(I know, great date huh, what could go wrong?)

 and to now September 28th.

Now, I was willing, to buy a stove I knew they didn't have until late august, that seemed understandable, given the supply line issues the country is experiencing.

But this is getting ridiculous

It begs the question; Why are stores selling vaporware?

Why are they allowed to sell and promise items, in their stores, that they clearly don't have on hand?

Why are we, as consumers, letting the big corporations get away with this shit, with nary a whimper?

 frankly folks, I am desperate for some over easy eggs,

That I don't have to go outside and make on a camp stove, is that really too much to ask?

Kitchen katastrophy a saga in several parts

 So around july 1st-ish My 30 year old gas stove top decided it was time to unalive itself. 

 After a couple months lighting it with matches, because it's first symptom, was the automatic spark stopped working. Needless to say, we needed a new one for a while. We were just avoiding the inevitable.

Yes, it had symptoms, multiple. Over several months.

We thought, as you do, If this is the worst that happens we can live with it....

It wasn't 

Every once in a while you would get a whiff of gas and go make sure all the burners were off and the furnace and water heater were ok, 'cause they're gas too. It would go away and everything would be fine for a while.

Until it wasn't 

We were smelling more gas, more often and then the gas bill came. It was twice as high as it usually was. sooooo, this needed better investigating shoes. 

So I did what you do, I took everything apart washed it all good, because it may be last time I did this, I didn't connect something right, put it back together again, making sure everything was connected right, turned it on and it worked just fine, for a few days, starter and all........OK, then....

A few days later, the starters stopped and a few days after that, we smelled the wafting, again. *sigh*

So that wasn't it.

We took it apart more, switching the burners around and, again a few days of works just fine, followed by the same deterioration. Ungh!

FINE! 

During this time I had not been idyll, I had been researching new stoves , wow are they expensive! And on what planet, do they need to be connected to the internet?

One more attempt to take it apart fiddle with the electrical connectors. This is in the DDH's wheelhouse, My electrical expertise is limited to rewiring lamps and dusting the insides of the sewing machines,  so I sat and watched. This where we discovered there was a limit to the amount of apart we could take the stove. the top and bottom are riveted closed, how annoying!

Anyhow, we put it all back together again, AGAIN, aaaannd you guessed it, same glide path of worksjustfine followed by badness. Well Poo! 

With one BIG exception, One fine morning, I went to boil water for coffee and flames started shooting out of, not just the burner, but the knobs too. EEP! O.O!!

Quick as a bunny, I turned the gas off at the main connector under the stove........... HONEY!!!!

After testing this experience for himself, we finally decided it was dead. I had decided this at chapter FINE! but, well, you know. Anyway, a complete disconnecting and dismantle later we discovered the body of the stove, you know that riveted closed part we couldn't get to?, was full of water !!!!! (insert Flora looses her shit here) WTAF!. Which then proceeded to bleed all over the kitchen floor, Lovely.  -.-

*Grumble Grumble* 

One has now to assume the trouble with the stove started here, with the rusted out bits in the part of the stove that was inaccessible, and nOt where we were trying to fix it. 

*Fuss fuss fuss*

So we have this hole in the counter,where the stove is, now, not. and are waiting for it's replacement. With baited breath.

August 15th. This was the soonest we could get ANYTHING close to what we wanted,as  everything else was October.....November..... when hell freezes over..... this all happened around july 1st, so -.-

14 more days. 

I bought an electric kettle to boil water for coffee......

I finally did it

The culprit

 Don't get all excited, it's nothing good,

 although it had a good outcome.

So at 55 I have finally sewed myself to my work with the machine

Ungh

I have always been cautious about this eventuality as most of the women in my family sew in some capacity and they all have "War" stories about putting the needle through a finger.

And I distinctly remember having to help my Mother, pull the needle out of her thumb with a pair of pliers, when she did hers

So I knew this was a possibility

It is quite a shock when it happens you though

At first I couldn't understand, why had the machine stopped?

What could it have possibly hit?

There was no pin to hit there

Pro-tip: don't try to yank your hand away, it's attached.

As I realized what had happened, at first I was astonished, It hadn't yet begun to hurt.

Then worried about the piece I was sewing, no blood YAY!, Yet.

Unscrew the needle from the machine, look to see the damage, 

Wow! good machine it went clear through the finger, thread and all!

poke it, ow, OK don't poke it

Grab a pair of pliers on the way to the bathroom, find the bandaids and the gauze, 

now where did I put the damned things?

Try to pull it out myself........................Herngh!.........................nope it's stuck

*Sigh*

Go look up the nearest urgent care facility

call doctors office and see what they can do, go tell DDH

who react's like It's baby time, It's just a needle honey, Icandrivemyselfdon'tbesilly. 

Needless to say I did not drive myself

By the time we got the "so sorry we're booked you need to go to the urgent care facility"

20 minutes had come and gone, we were already on our way down the hill, and the finger started to hurt

I'm adding the gory details for those who are interested but if you are at all squeamish, don't look.

you have been warned

Yep that's the tread I was using

OOOwuie!

The two dots down by the knuckle are from the lidocaine shot, much better.

Good thing I'd taken off my Wedding ring the day before to clean it and hadn't gotten around to putting it back on yet! Otherwise it too would be stuck and I was informed they might have had to cut it off!

The nice doctor and nurses fussed over me for about an hour and a half giving me a lidocaine shot.

AAHHHHH! Much better! 

It ended up taking two of them to pull the needle out, with hemostats (Not the tool for the job)         turns out my pliers would have been better! Then got my hand x-rayed 4 different ways to make sure It wasn't through the bone, it wasn't.

Bones are surprisingly sturdy things, I love my skeleton!

Anyway, back home again, with a bottle of hydrocodone which now that the initial trauma and swelling are gone I don't really need. 

This morning you can barely see where it happened and it doesn't hurt unless you poke it hard,             so don't do that!

Just a little bruised, poor thing

It's that dot on the 4th finger

I asked a simple question

At least I thought it was a simple question

 You can see what I'm trying to do here can't you? 

Magic 4 squares.

I know there are charts, but I was lazy

And I can never find the one I keep by my sewing table

And I didn't have my tablet to look it up online 

(that it was less than 20 feet away on the couch, is beside the point. Shuush! I'm telling a story!)

So I asked my dear darling Husband, who was 5' away at the table finishing his morning coffee, if there was an easy formula to figure out.

how big a square I need to start with if I want 4- 2.5" halfsquare triangles out of it.

2 hours later, a demonstration of what I  wanted and why, how I got there and a discussion encompassing, Pythagorean theorem and the square root of two later.................>

 

I'll go look up the chart *sigh*

 

The other solution, that I remembered later (Its always AFTER isn't it?), that a 3"x 6" rectangle marked on the diagonal and sewed on either side and no major maths needed.

Note; I said EASY. 

You know, something the non mathemegical can understand and maybe even, throw in a calculator for the answer.

Aaaand now he is writing code to do the math for me, because he realizes I am not mathly. I dont have the heart to tell him I have a work around. This simple question has kept him busy for two days now. 

Who would I be if I squashed his fun now?  

This is why I love this Man.

A continuation as seen by the man himself