Yep, We Got Rain

It rained yesterday afternoon and evening, a nice, steady, soaking rain that we really needed and that probably rained out all kinds of fun holiday weekend plans for those who have that sort of thing.  And it looks like it's planning a repeat today.  Oh well, I got my grilling out done on Friday (remember?) so my plans were for sewing up and cutting out.

I got the sunbonnet sewed together yesterday afternoon.  It's a nice, simple, old pattern that I printed off the Mother Earth News site and enlarged the pieces onto the back of some cheap Xmas wrap I bought at Goodwill the day after Christmas.  (brilliant idea, DD!)  Mom was on my mind a lot while I was sewing yesterday.  I used her old Gingher pinking shears to trim the seam of the brim because I put 2 layers of heavy cotton canvas in as stiffener so it's really bulky if you don't trim it off.  I have a photo of her showing off one of her dressed dolls on the pinboard over my sewing machine, she's wearing her little scissors for snipping threads on an elastic and I have it and wear it all the time.  I'm confident she's overseeing my work and helping me do a better job.

I also did a little poking around on the bookshelves down there.  I want to weed out the ones I know I'm not going to read again or have on audiobook so probably don't need a paper copy of and I want to keep a box of them in the back of my car so when I spy a Little Free Library I can put in a book or two.  I don't want to donate them to Goodwill, they'll sell them and I want to give them away.  On the bookshelves I ran across some files of Durwood's mom's.  What treasures I found!  Old love letters from Pappy to Vi and back, letters Vi wrote home when they were on their BIG trip around the world in 1974 or 5, even one from Durwood's brother RJ from somewhere in the Middle East that's partly in Arabic.  My favorite has to be the one written on Shepheard's Hotel stationery from Cairo, Egypt because I've always been a big fan of the Amelia Peabody novels and she and Radcliffe always stayed at Shepheard's.  Now I really do need to learn how to use the "scan" function on my printer to make digital copies of it all and then send some of it to Durwood's brothers.

May 25--Carlos Alejandro, Gyroscope.  Minnie's world was spinning out of control.  Her children had moved on with their lives, lives that had taken them states away from home.  Her job in the plant office had been phased out when the company had merged with a bigger one.  It took her a while to get the hang of being retired but she took some classes, made some friends, and built a rich and satisfying life after all those years of work.  But yesterday Ed came in after work to tell her that he'd bought a cabin in the Yukon and planned to move there immediately.  He couldn't have picked a place she had less desire to move to if he'd tried.  Maybe that's why he chose it.

Just now I noticed that the giant spider has returned to spin her web across the top of the patio doors.  She and I will have a few days of awkwardness when I walk out and plow through some of her guy wires but eventually she'll figure out how tall I'm not and attach her web up higher than my head.  Hope you're enjoying your Memorial Day and I hope it's not raining where you are.  We had some sunshine within the last 15 minutes but it didn't last longer than it took me to walk from the desk into the kitchen--and that ain't long.  The timer's about to buzz that our leftover pizza's about heated up.  Sayonara.
--Barbara