A Quest & Making Stuff

Today's my last vacation day.  I had big plans for big accomplishments this last week.  I was moderately successful.  I never did get a full day of uninterrupted sewing but I did manage to get LC's tepee all sewed together and yesterday I went on a quest for the poles.  You'd think that every garden center would have 5ft. tall 1" diameter bamboo poles for plant stakes.  They don't.  Stein's didn't.  Green Bay Nursery didn't.  They all have 1/4" thick ones for tying up your dahlias but nothing beefy to hold up your tepee.  Next I tried Home Depot.  All they had in the garden department were some solid plastic things that were just wrong, wrong, wrong so I went in search of 1" thick dowels.  A home improvement center should have those, right?  Well, they do, only they're all sawed off at 48" which is a foot shorter than I need.  I even checked replacement mop or broom handles--too expensive and with a metal screw end.  My next stop was Fleet Farm.  They had bamboo, tall, kiln-dried bamboo but all of them in the size I need had split.  Grr.  All of their dowels were 4 ft. long too.  I asked about replacement rake or shovel handles--waaaay too expensive and too thick.  Everyone had closet rods but those are way too thick for what I need.  On my dispirited trudge out of Fleet Farm I passed the PVC aisle.  Hmm, PVC... that's like sticks or poles, right?  I found 10' long 3/4" lengths for less than four bucks each.  I could cut them in half to make four 5 foot-ers, and the end caps were only 24 cents each.  Not exactly what I was looking for but I was losing hope, so I bought them.  I almost came home but decided to go a couple more miles down the road to Menard's.  Menard's has 6' long dowels!  I got 4 of them, paid for them, returned the PVC and caps on my way home and got back to find Durwood convinced that I'd been killed in an auto accident because I'd been gone so long.  He was relieved to see me and had gotten the supper parts all cooked and ready to assemble.  After supper I went back downstairs to finish sewing the rod pockets onto the tepee and VOILA!  Now I just have to shorten the poles, drill a hole in each and get some Boy Scout... no, some Eagle Scout to help me lash them together.  Isn't it cool looking?

I got a recipe for Italian Stuffed Shells off the Taste of Home website and thought it looked like something we'd like so I bought the ingredients, figuring that we'd just use a jar of sauce instead of making it from scratch as the recipe calls for.  The cook didn't count the jumbo shells when he put them in to boil so we had half of them left when I'd filled all the shells.  Oops.  Good thing we had another pound of ground meat in the freezer, more of all the cheeses, and another jar of sauce.  He suggested that we add spinach to the filling, and we even had a package of that in the freezer.  (we are so ready for the zombie apocalypse!)  I'd divied up the first batch into 3 meals' worth--one to eat and two for the freezer--so while the first one baked I got the second batch (plus spinach) all ready to put together.  After we devoured what he made (it was so good we hardly spoke, just gobbled), I assembled the second batch, saving one for tonight.  (hey, we need to make sure it's edible)

Durwood has almost finished the first batch of breakfast burritos I made and froze for him so I whipped up another batch this morning.  This time I remembered to take a picture of the assembly line and what they look like before I roll them up in that nasty yellow Saran Wrap that Mom had.  (she had the other colors too--blue, pink, and green--I haven't been brave enough to use them yet)  I only got seven from this batch.  I used bigger tortillas so had to add more fillings and had not quite enough scrambled eggs with onions and peppers for another full one but too much sausage--so I made the supreme sacrifice and ate that one myself.  I put on most of the extra cheese too.  I'm just that nice.

June 14--Harry Bartlett, Communications Collage.  Peter could see the back wall of the storage room, see it but not touch it.  When Ms. Carson, his boss, assigned him to clear out the storage room at the end of the hall he imagined that it would be an afternoon's work, a whole day at most.  That was nearly two weeks ago.  She handed him the key and told him to recycle what he could and trash the rest.  His first impression was that an earthquake had jumbled the room so it had been locked and forgotten but when he got past the outdated manuals and boxes of broken binders he realized he had a gold mine of retro office furniture.  There were boxes of rotary phone and piles gray metal desks, things that sold for premium prices online.  He sold some of the vintage manual typewriters to a decorator for a hundred bucks each.  He'd been up front with Ms. Carson about the money but she just shrugged, thanked him for his honesty, and wished him well.  Already he had made enough to rent a storefront a couple blocks away and he was thinking of starting his own business clearing out other companies' storerooms for free if he could keep the contents.

Okey-dokey.  Time to go fire up the saw, shorten my tepee poles, and get some holes drilled.  I should probably fold wash today too since I'm wearing my last clean pair of undies.  TMI?

--Barbara