Merry Christmas From Me...

... to me!  I flung caution to the winds last week and bought 2 knitting gifts for myself and they came.  The first is a gray felted wool bag with leather handles.  It's a good size, thick and sturdy, and absolutely gorgeous.  It'll last the rest of my life and probably the rest of my daughter's and granddaughter's lives too.


 

I also treated myself to a new set of interchangeable needles made to look like driftwood.  They come in a wonderful case with a couple pockets and in sizes from US 4 to US 17.  They're beautiful.  I don't know if they'll last as long as the bag but I hope that I can hand them down as well.





I have been sad all week and the things that I've stumbled upon in my "toss" quest haven't really helped.  Oh, I've loved finding things but it has been a melancholy finding.  At the very bottom of the bin with the swimsuit and lingerie fabrics were three lengths of cotton batik that I bought when Durwood and I vacationed in Malaysia and Singapore about 35 years ago.  If you look closely at the blue fabric on the left you can see that the Malaysian fabric dyers used a tire to apply the wax resist.  I made Durwood a "Hawaiian" shirt from it that he took out of town as his pool coverup for all the rest of his traveling salesman days.  DD took that home after the funeral and I'm happy to find a bit more of it.  The yellow and gray fabrics we picked out in a fabric store in Singapore.  The woman shop owner asked where we were from and we said "Wisconsin, which is north of Chicago" because most Asians at that time seemed to know about Chicago "where the gangsters live."  (yeah, they watched American movies a lot.)  She persisted, asking us where in Wisconsin because her daughter had married a man from Wisconsin.  When she said that a light went on in my head.  I said, "She married a Krause from Oconto.  I know because I saw your daughter's picture in our newspaper in the middle of a big family reunion photo last summer."  She reached through the curtain into the back room, pulled out a picture frame, turned it around, and said, "This one?"  There it was, a clipping from our hometown newspaper in a batik store in Singapore.  What are the odds?  We had a lovely chat over cups of tea.



The other fabric find is a pair of pieces of Durwood's ancestral wool tartan that his mother brought back from Scotland the year after we got married.  I was always going to make something for him with it.  That never happened.  Sorry, Dear.




Today's toss is the two boxes of baby clothes I've kept all these years.  It made me sorry that LC was a winter baby because these clothes would have fit her in the opposite seasons as DD who had originally worn them as a summer baby.  Oh well, someone's baby will wear them and her mama will love them.


This morning I went out to the Y to meet with Megan, one of the trainers, and get acquainted with a few of the strength machines.  She told me that the reason the muscles of the outside of my thighs have been aching is because I need to strengthen the muscles of the inside of my thighs.  So she showed me that machine and I paid special attention.  Once she had toured me around I went back with my workout card (where you write down the position of the seat and how much weight you use and the reps so you can remember that stuff the next time you work out) and did some reps on each machine.  Funny, even only doing about 20 reps with just a little weight, almost the least amount of weight, made my thigh muscles a little happier.  I do believe I'll go out there again tomorrow and have another whack at it.  We will meet again next Friday for a full physical assessment which will help her tailor a program for my fitness level and goals.  I'm determined to be in better shape for snowshoeing (if we ever get snow this winter) and for Yellowstone and the mountains.  I have come to realize that I'm not going to be back to eating right until after the holidays.  Today the only healthy things I ate were a banana and an orange, the rest of my consumption consisted of the delicacies I have made over the last couple weeks.  And ice cream.  Comfort eating at its finest.  At least I don't drink.  I'll get back on track but not right now.

21 December--Stamped "H Jacob," Directoire-Style Chair.  The chair they gave Lynn in the reception area was a beautiful chair of painted wood with a Chinese brocade seat.  It was not a comfortable chair.  The rosette in the center of the crest rail dug into her spine right between her shoulder blades.  The seat was too deep and the brocade was slick so she felt like she would slide off.  The depth of the seat meant she could either sit back so her feet didn't touch the floor and went numb and the rosette gouged her back or sit forward with her feet on the floor and be in danger of sliding off.  Oh, when would they call her name?

Happy solstice!  Tomorrow the light starts creeping back.  I commiserated with a codger in Aldi yesterday who was reassuring me that the light would surely be back today even if it was only a half of a minute at a time.  I agreed that more light even in tiny increments is better than less light.  This morning I noticed that one string of lights on the tree didn't light when I turned it on so I pulled out my LightKeeper Pro, plugged a socket into the gun, clicked a few times, and nothing happened.  I examined the lights and every one of that string has the telltale burned out black mark on the glass.  *sigh*  So now my tree looks odd but I can live with it for another week or two.  I have to wait until Epiphany to take it down.  It's tradition.  For sure the Nativity has to stay out or the kings and camels won't ever arrive.  They're too lovely to never hit the limelight.  Night all.
--Barbara