Christmas pictures...

Quote for the Day:

Christmas is not an external event at all, 

but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.
Freya Stark

If you've been wondering where I've been...well...between having computer issues, getting ready for Christmas, and frantically finishing up the Sunflower quilt to make room for Holiday guests, I've been busy!  :)  I didn't forget my readers, though, and I hope you haven't forgotten me, either!  :)

Erin, Dale and Sera came home from Tennessee to celebrate Christmas with us and we had a great visit!  :)  Since I got such a late start on Christmas decorating because kitchen construction items have been strewn about the house for month, now, I only put up the Christmas tree, and a couple of items on the porch... 

 

On Christmas Eve, Sera went outside and put "reindeer food" on the lawn!  Reindeer food consists of oats and red glitter.  The reindeer see the red glitter from the sky and know to stop at that house, and the oats for them to nibble on when they land!  :)

She was also sure to leave cookies and milk out for Santa!  It all must have worked, because there were plenty of gifts to open the next morning!  :)

This is Daisy...their dog...who kept on eye on all the activities!  :)

 

She was particularly interested in what Andy was opening...

 

All in all, it was a very nice Christmas and visit even if Erin & I did come down with colds on Christmas day.  

Erin, Dale and Sera left today to return their home.  The house is again quiet.   And I'm going to miss them all very much until the next time we get to see them!

Loretta

Book Review Time...

Quote for the Day:

"The worth of a book is to be measured by
what you can carry away from it." 

~James Bryce

I just finished reading "Zeitoun" by Dave Eggers, and felt that I MUST tell you about it!

• Synopsis:  Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun (pronounced "Zaytoon") run a house-painting business in New Orleans. In August of 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approaches, Kathy evacuates with their four young children, leaving Zeitoun to watch over the business. In the days following the storm he travels the city by canoe, feeding abandoned animals and helping elderly neighbors. Then, on September 6th, police officers armed with M-16s arrest Zeitoun in his home. Told with eloquence and compassion, Zeitoun is a riveting account of one family’s unthinkable struggle with forces beyond wind and water.

This book was RIVETING!  All I can say is WOW!  We all heard the "news" coming out of New Orleans during the time that followed hurricane Katrina.  This book debunks some of that news, but then gives a whole new view of the lawlessness that really did occur...part of which was perpetrated by those sent to enforce the law.  It's scarey to think that any of this could happen right here in the USA.  Aren't we supposed to be all about "human rights" in this country? 

NOLA Now: A trip with Zeitoun is a video interview with Mr. Zeitounin 2010 where he takes the interviewer to places that were mentioned in the book.

I cannot recommend this book strongly enough!  Trust me, about half-way through this book, you won't be able to put it down!



Loretta

Sunday Couponing...

Quote for the Day:

Negligient:  adj.

Absentmindedly answering the door 

when wearing only a nightgown.

This morning when I was getting my coupons and lists ready to go shopping, my printer decided that it was no longer going to respond to the commands of the computer.  I tried re-installing the software for the printer, but to no avail.  :(  

Luckily, everything is still under warranty and so a call to Dell technical service and 1.5 hours online with a really nice lady from India...and the printer is back up and working just fine!  

I love how they can do a remote access to your computer and do everything themselves!  How many of you remember the "olden" days...before remote access...when the technician would say, "okay, now left click the start button...now open the program...do you see a the word "file" at the top of the page...left-click on that..."  That was soooooooo frustrating because they never believed you when you said you had done what they had told you to do but you still weren't getting the desired results.  :(  And if you had to call multiple times for the same issue, you had to redo the first 15 steps EACH time.  "Yes, we tried that before...and it didn't work then, either."  GRRRR...it was so frustrating!  But now...BAM...you establish a connection with them and let THEM deal with it!  Soooooooooo much better!!!!

So now the printer is back working just fine...taking orders from the computer and printing out the way it should!  :)  

Last Sunday was the Christmas party for the Recovery Room dept.  I had someone take the group picture for me...the first one was good but very blurry...so I'm stuck showing you the not-so-good-but-not-blurry one...

That would be me, second from the right in the front row...with my eyes closed.  :(  And just to be clear...that little girl on the far left is NOT an employee...she is the daughter of the lady in red to her left.  We may be desperate for help sometimes, but we haven't resorted to child labor, yet!  :)

If you look closely, in front of the second person from the left, front row, is an "orb".  (The white round thing down close to her feet.) 


I've labeled it in this picture...

If you've ever watched "Long Island Medium", you'll know that an "orb" is supposed to be the spirit presence of a deceased person.  I've seen her show pictures on her show and this is exactly what they look like.  She says it is NOT just something on the lens.   It is not present in the other picture that was blurry...I went back and checked.  I had heard this about orbs in pictures before watching that show, too.   Hmmm...just makes you wonder.  Who's to say for sure?  I know that I certainly don't have all the answers, so who am I to say "yay" or "nay" on this subject?


Well...onto my couponing deals today...

At Walgreens....

I got $51.90 worth of product, paid $2.58 out-of-pocket, got $14.50 back in Register Rewards, making this trip an $11.92 moneymaker for me.  :)

At Rite Aid...

I got $27.97 worth of product, paid $7.34 out-of-pocket, got $3.00 back in +Up Rewards, making this trip a net cost of $4.34.  :)  

I think my Christmas stocking candy is purchased for the year!  LOL

Loretta

Picture Day...

Quote for the Day:

"Scientists now believe that the primary biological function of breasts

is to make males stupid."
~Dave Barry

Today was Picture Day!!!

I got all dressed up and took "the girls" to get their annual picture taken.  I thought the red bows I attached made them look particularly festive!  :)

I told the mammography techician to make sure that the pictures turned out nice because this was going to be our Christmas card picture this year!   She thought the idea of this being our Christmas card picture was funny and commented that some people might get more than they bargained for when they opened up the envelope!  LOL

For those young'uns of you who haven't had a mammogram, yet, here is a list of exercises that you can work on to prepare you for when you have to have the actual test:

How to Prepare for a Mammogram  

Many women are afraid of their first mammogram, but there is no need to worry. By taking a few minutes each day for a week preceding the exam and doing the following exercises, you will be totally
prepared for the test.

And best of all, you can do these simple exercises right in your home.

EXERCISE ONE:

Open your refrigerator door and insert one breast in door. Shut as hard as possible and lean on the door for good measure. Hold that position for five seconds. Repeat again in case the first time wasn't effective enough.

EXERCISE TWO:

Visit your garage at 3 AM when the temperature of the cement floor is just perfect. Take off all your clothes and lie comfortably on the floor with one breast wedged under the rear tire of the car. Ask a friend to slowly back the car up until your breast is sufficiently flattened and chilled. Turn over and repeat with the other breast.

EXERCISE THREE:

Freeze two metal bookends over night. Strip to the waist. Invite a stranger into the room.  Press the bookends against one of your breasts. Smash the bookends together as hard as you can. Set up an appointment with the stranger to meet next year and do it again.

YOU ARE NOW TOTALLY PREPARED!!!

 

Though I'm not sure one is ever "totally prepared" for this type of torture, I am thankful that we have the technology to diagnose breast cancer early!  So please, Ladies, get your mammograms!  :)

And I'll leave you with this final thought...

Loretta

Do You See What I See....

Quote for the Day:

"Do you see what I see, way up in the sky, little lamb?"

~Do You Hear What I Hear, lyrics

This is what I saw this past weekend...

...that's right...that white along the left side of the picture is the batting at the top of the Sunflower Quilt, which means that I am coming to the end of this quilt and only have about 14" left to quilt on it!    :)  I'm moving right along on it and should have it done and out of the frame before company comes for Christmas!  

That's a good thing!  Because then the roller part of the frame gets turned straight up and down and the whole frame slides up against the wall and out of the way...making room for the bed we put up for guests!   I can do this with a quilt on the frame, but it is easier to do, and you don't "tweak" the quilt top, if there is no quilt on the frame at the time.

Last July, when I went to the estate auction of the quilter and got a great haul, I ended up finding 5-6 pair of scissors among the items I bought.  Two of the pairs were Ginghers, which is an expensive brand and highly treasured by quilters and sewers.   This is one of those pair of Ginghers scissors...

Aren't they adorable?  They are a 4" pair of embroidery scissors.  They are razor sharp and have a nice weight to them, so you can tell right away that they are made with quality materials.  :)  I love the "fabric" design on the handles.

In fact, I like that fabric design so well, that lo and behold...I have some that is almost identical to it in this quilt! 
  

When I lay my scissors on that particular fabric, they become "camouflaged".  The design is almost identical but the scissors are slightly more peachy whereas the fabric is pink.  Still...I thought the coincidence was humorous!  :)

Okay, so it's the simple things that make me smile!  :)  As long as we keep smiling, I guess that's the important part!  :)


Loretta

It's the Little Things...

Quote for the Day:

"We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee."

~Marian Wright Edelman

Erin, Dale and Sara are coming home for Christmas, so we are looking at how we can get some of the kitchen renovation materials that are currently sitting in the entry way and dining room out of the way as much as possible.  It's one thing for us to live "around" them, but they take up so much space that when you have company, they really decrease your amount of available space.  :(   Plus, we need to make a space to put up the Christmas tree!  :D

We are going to try to go ahead and put up the wall cabinets that will go on the opposite wall of the kitchen which will not only get them out of the entry way, but also provide us immediately with additional storage.  That's a good thing!  :)

In the meantime, today we attached the rest of the hardware to the cabinets that have already been installed since the end of May!  :)

I love the antiqued bronze pulls...they remind of of what you would find on a drawer in an old office, library, or hardware store!   :)

Close up of lower cabinets...

Close up of wall cabinets...

Don't they look GREAT???  I LOVE them!

After installing the hardware, we went through the old drawer-full of plastic lids and pared it down to fit the current drawer, which is much smaller.  We had a lot of lids that had lost their containers, so we ended up throwing out about 1/2 of a garbage bagful of orphan plastic lids.  So now we have removed 3 more of the drawers that were sitting in the dining room...(1 drawer had the plastic lids but we had it sitting on top of two empty drawers so we wouldn't have to bend over as much to get things in and out of it.)

I did my coupon shopping today at Walgreen's and Rite Aid and got some very good deals for my money!  :)

At Walgreen's, I got $56.34 worth of product, paid $33.25 out-of-pocket, got $32.00 back in Register Rewards, so all of this only cost me $1.25!!  :)

Walgreen's...

At Rite Aid, I got $58.59 worth of product, paid $5.35 out-of-pocket, got $11.99 back in +Up Rewards and SCR's, making this a $6.64 money-maker for me!  :)

Rite Aid...

Loretta

My First Quilt...

Quote of the Day:

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

~Confucius 

Over at Bonnie Hunter's Quiltville blog she posted about her first quilt and offered to let her followers link up a post about our first quilt, so I thought I'd do just that!  :)

Before I had ever quilted my first quilt, I had embroidered 2 quilt tops that my Aunt Priscilla then hand-quilted for me.  The first of those two was this full-sized sunflower quilt...
 

I started embroidering this pre-printed top in 1978 when I graduated high school...but with 5 years of college, a new marriage, starting a career and having 2 children...it didn't get finished till 1991.  It took Aunt Priscilla 3 weeks to hand-quilt it!  LOL

My dad came from a Mennonite family and quilting ran through their veins like blood runs through everybody else's.  LOL  

The second quilt top that I embroidered was a set of 6 blocks with animals pre-printed on them that I then joined together to make a quilt top for my then unborn first child, a son.  I did these while I was pregnant with him, sent them to Aunt Priscilla, who then added a border to it and then quilted it, along with 3 other of my aunts.  They each embroidered their name in the four front corners of the border!  :)     Because of the "specialness" of this quilt... having all the Aunt's names embroidered on it... I never did use it...it remained stored away where Paul couldn't spit up on it or have a diaper leak on it.  Today, this quilt is with my son and daughter-in-law, so unfortunately I don't have any pictures of it to post.  :(

Up till this point, I had only embroidered the quilt tops and had not actually "quilted" them. 

When I was pregnant with my second and last child, I decided to embroider a pre-printed top for her, too.  However, since I was working full-time, suffering with 7 months of morning sickness, maintaining a household, and raising a toddler, I didn't get the embroidering done till she was about 4-5 years old!  :(  

By this time, I was beginning to get interested in learning how to quilt and decided that I'd "learn" on this quilt.  I called my Aunt Priscilla and, over the phone, asked her a million questions about hand-quilting.  She was patient and answered them all!  I bought a simple round hoop for a few dollars at the local fabric/craft store, polyester batting, some hand-quilting thread, a package of "betweens" needles, and some fabric from the "$2 Fabric Store" for the border and backing!  No, really...there was a store that sold "seconds", etc, and the name of the store was "$2 Fabric Store" and all fabric was $2/yard or less!  I don't even know if the fabric was 100% cotton or not.  The fabric was NOT good quality, but I was cheap and I about fainted the first time I went into a true "quilt fabric store" and saw that in the early 1990's they were charging $6-8/yard of fabric.  (This was southern California.)  HOLY MOLY!!!  I had been fabric sewing since 1975 and had NEVER paid those prices for fabric!  HIGHWAY ROBBERY!  LOL

Anyway...my kids were past the toddler stage so I was able to spend some time hand-quilting this quilt, and was able to complete it over the course of a summer...

Nobody told me that you needed to have dense quilting when using polyester batting to keep it from shifting inside the quilt!  YIKES! 

By the time this quilt was finished...in 1993, according to my primitive label, LOL...Erin was 6 years old, so never actually used this quilt, either!  

Thanks for taking this trip down memory lane with me...oh, the things I've learned since then!  :D

Loretta