What Passes for Crafting Around Here
Me: So, you want to do some art?
Boy Wonder: Sure. But I just need to finish this. I’m creating a computer model of my secret spy satellite.
Me: I don’t suppose that comes with a secret lair, eh?
Love Affair
No post or photos**. Just this to say: I’m in love with jersey knit and a presser foot I like to call “J”. Oh. My. Life is so rosy.
But, in my drunken state of love I kinda forgot to preshrink my fabric. It’s always so messy at the beginning of love affairs.
**UPDATE: Ok, one photo on a very stormy Monday. Better photos tomorrow when sun is promised.
Friday Night Dinner
Friday night’s typical fare is take-out. Usually Chinese or Japanese food and whatever Sci-Fi the boys can get their hands on. We set up shop on our comfy couch for the evening. I don’t mind, really. I won’t eat their food or watch their shows, but I still hang out—snuggled into what has become a Friday night tradition.
But tonight is an exception. One of Boy Wonder’s friends asked him to dinner and we gleefully said “Yes!” IZ and I wasted no time formulating a plan for our evening alone. He’d make fresh pesto and salad and warm crusty bread; I’d head to the store for a buttery bottle of wine. I set our table with a real table cloth, lit a few candles, put on my favorite opera on the stereo. I even broke out never been used vintage Vera napkins… I didn’t know why I’d been saving them, until now. Dinner for two seemed like the perfect reason.
We dined and laughed and talked about adult things. He’s an amazing cook and conversationalist. I snapped his photo in the candlelight and looking through the lens realized once again how blessed I am. He is and will always be my soul mate.
And then Boy Wonder came bounding in with tales of his own dinner. How much fun he had. What he ate. Who said what. Can he do it again?
“Yes” we gleefully agreed.
Thursday
What did you thrift today?
Can you believe it’s Thursday already? We’re 10 days into the new year, how are all of you doing on your New Year Resolutions?
In these parts, we skipped the traditional naming of resolutions. Like a lot of holiday traditions this year, it went by the wayside. I’m sure we’ll pick it up again next year, but this year, we were just relieved to see the calendar numbers flip, content to let 2007’s resolutions ride.
Last year’s resolutions included getting skinnier. Both in how much we consume and physically. (We also banned house-guests for the whole year. Oh, that was controversial. I lost a few friends who saw their free Bed and Breakfast close down. Personally, I’d like to be closed for business indefinitely!) I’m in no mood to chat about the weight loss stuff… as terms like BMI and the diabetes get me in a whole passel of trouble. Besides, you just have to know I have a REAL rant coming down the pike on that eventually. And without naming names, I’m won’t be pulling any punches either. Which might be the only New Year’s resolution I made, if you count the aftermath of December’s Debacle— no more mealy mouthed Wende. Some truths need to be said—malevolent lurkers be damned.
But that’s another day. Further afield, perspective in hand. Today, I can speak clearly about our reducing on the consumption side, specifically packaging. That’s been fun! Retail produces so much packaging, it’s shameful. There is only so much you can recycle—so a thrifting I have gone. Less retail, less in the landfill. It’s included so much Thrifting that somehow I started a small, not for profit (evidently, Oh!!Oh!!Oh!!), business that keeps me more distracted than I like. And again, another post.
The upside of all my thrifting is that it benefits my family in small ways. We are a family of three. Odd numbers are the Kabbalah of thrift stores; it’s why a lot of things get donated. Sets are missing members, fours become threes and in the process useless to bigger families. Their toss is my gain. I snatch up sets of three constantly—napkins, napkin rings, plates, cups. . . Holy Trinities of reusable goods.
We’ve used fabric napkins for ages. Down with paper, I say. I do have a stash of paper napkins—take-out refugees that I keep on hand for when masses of small children lay siege and demand sticky treats. But for family dinners, we use cloth. And to keep germs at bay, we keep our napkins marked with napkin rings. I picked up this little set of hand-carved wood rings for just 25 cents. A fish. A whale. A pig. We’ll argue about who has to be the pig later. When we’re done, we just tuck our napkins back into their markers and leave them in the yellow bowl. No fuss, no muss.
In the long term, it’s not a big deal, a small effort really. But as Mother Teresa once said, “We can do no great thing, but only small things with great love.”
Liquid Sunshine
Oh, January! Your lack of light is trying my patience and has me scrambling for any sunlight I can find. Much like my sunbeam seeking dog, I’ve been following the sun around the house, setting up shots in the strangest of places. This photo was snapped in my master bath! I was all excited too, thinking I’d found a new source of decent light. Smug and content, sure I’d discovered Nirvana or at least a solution, until I uploaded the photo. Cringe.
It’s not just my imagination running amok, January’s dim light has been pressing my photo editing skills to their limit too. No amount of tweaking seems to do the trick—and it’s making it hard to keep Thrifty Goodness stocked. I’m not complaining about sales, but every sale means I have to find something new to list, and listing something new means getting a few decent photos. Photos are everything on etsy and lately, the sunlight has been a black-market commodity. You see my problem? So, I edit and I tweak and I set up shots in strange places, hoping for a miracle in the rain.
Rain, rain, rain. That leaves a girl little choice but to pilfer her sweetie’s stash of tea, specifically his tin of Paris tea. Goodbye Vanilla Comoro, so long Chocolate Vitale. I drank it all. I had to; it’s dreary these days. And about the only way to deal with the constant drizzle is to be fully armed with a cuppa of something hot and fragrant. A girl needs to drown her misery some how.
This tin is nearly empty, too. Poor guy. If he was smart he’d hide his stash. I bought him this tea for Christmas and then I promptly drank it. Clearly, I’ll need to be replacing his tea and mine (don’t feel too sorry for him, his favorite tea is green tea and he has a year’s supply of that! Of course, I won’t touch the stuff, which is why he has a year’s supply of it.) and I would love a few suggestions on how to banish the rain. If you have a tea you adore, leave me a comment. I’m looking for other sources of liquid sunshine.
Our New Favorite
Sophie thinks she’s going to get a cookie. Sophie would be wrong.
Along with the lack of photos, I didn’t do much baking this holiday beyond our traditional chocolate pie. I just couldn’t get in the mood—and with the boys being sick with different viruses, the idea of sitting down and decorating sugar cookies sounded more like an experiment in swapping colds. I’ll pass, thank you very much.
But the New Year has arrived and while most people are resolving to tighten their waistbands, clearly I’m working on a different agenda! It’s nothing too outrageous, just a few cookies here, a pizza there. Enough to get back in the groove and feel at home again dusted in flour. It’s funny how easy it is to fall out the habit.
Recently, I picked up a package of Reese’s Premium Baking Pieces when IZ commented that he thought the boy would like them. But, the recipe on the back of the package didn’t appeal to me. In part, because at the time I started baking, it called for more butter than I had defrosted. Who wants to wait for butter to thaw? Not me! So, I went scrounging through my recipes and cobbled together a new bar cookie that has my family clamoring for more!
Boy Wonder: I really enjoyed these, Mom! They are my new favorite! Will you make more? Say, tomorrow??
Yes, yes, he really does talk that way.
As the second batch of these cookies are now cooling on the kitchen counter, I thought I would share the recipe with all of you. If you make them, come back and tell me what you think. M’kay?
And Sometimes I Make Things Up
It tried really hard to snow last night. Because we’re on the top side of this particular hill, our street probably saw the best of that attempt. Snow can only mean one thing in these parts: Snowball Fight!
I have no desire to get wet and cold and somebody needs to photograph the event, so I stayed perched on our tangy porch. Snow is so rare here on the Oregon Coast, we’ve never invested in snow gear. The boy just ends up borrowing a too-big-for-him pair of gloves and slipping plastic bags over his socks before putting on his shoes. I insist on the hat, because I’ve become my mother, “You know 90% of your heat escapes from you head, right?”
IZ and Boy Wonder are both very intense warriors. Not much smack talking goes down—but I suppose it’s hard to aim, throw, duck, and diss your opponent at the same time. Of course, I would never let that stop me from inserting an appropriate photo caption.
“Bring it you scruvey dog!” shouted Captain IZ Sparrow wondering why his head was so cold. Didn’t he used to have to hair?
“Oh, I’ll bring it all right. And I’m a homo sapien not a cannis lupus familiaris. Clearly you need to have your eyesight checked.” Boy Wonder hadn’t learned the fine art of smack talk and his parents won’t let him swear yet.
“Not the face, not the face!”
“Not the nutz, not the nutz.” (Narrator’s aside: Ok, I swear, I’m not making this stuff up!)
“That’s pretty good, Dad, for a guy mom says can’t dance.”
“You and your camera!”
“Hey, someday you’ll be happy I made you stop and take a photo. Somebody has to capture all this for posterity.”
“Not at the house!!” (Photographer’s note: check out that snowball in mid-air. That’s not easy people!)
“Seriously? I just told you Not. At. The. House!”
“Uh. . . seriously, no?”
Well now people, I think you’ve seen enough to know the snowball fight has come to a conclusion. I don’t know if it was the Great Snow of 2008, but we’re claiming it as great fun.
There’s only one thing left to do:
Sunday Sermon
What’s your purpose in life?
His Idea of Clean
This child and I are not of like minds regarding the definition of “clean and put away.”
Until Then
The wind is howling again. I’m sitting here at 8 pm with wet hair, tempting fate. If the power goes out, I’m in deep weeds courting a cold. I like to live on the edge.
Except, not all that much—living on the edge. Today, with the rain and the wind and the misery, OH MY, I’m not liking on the edge one little bit. There are other edges of the world, edges further South, edges with sun baked sand, warm mostly tropical edges calling my name.
After 2.5 years the novelty of living in the Wild West has worn off. December damned us all, I tell you. That’s a month I don’t want to relive—and I bet if the Baby Jesus had any idea it was going to be hell month, he would have been born in March. It’s not that I’m completely discontent here–because I’m not. It’s that my heart isn’t in the rain and the wind and the misery. It’s really not in the fact I can’t get a freakin’ contractor to come out and fix my roof. Which has caused us to coin a new phrase— every time we bump into another one of Astoria’s idiosyncrasies, IZ and I look at each other and say, “What are you gonna do? Freakin’ Astoria.”
It’s like that. And that’s the way it is.
But then there are moments. Standing on my tangy porch in the darkness of December ending, listening to an orchestra of ships sing in the New Year. Wind howling, blowing through my thin sweater, chilling me to the bone, and a warm arm around my shoulders. A crowded river on a clear night, the town a natural amphitheater, listening to a score that could only be written for a New Year. It could be a Dvorak symphony, this odd harmony floating up from the water. Everything glistening new. Everything promising hope. In that moment, all is well.
The trick is stringing those moments together. . . until I don’t have to any more.
Hello ~ Welcome to Evidently
- Introvert and word lover and Christ seeker
- Currently learning Swedish just in case
- ISFP... what are you?
No one really leaves comments any more. But if you did, you'd be my favorite. At least until someone else came along. I'm fickle like that.
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