A shoe rack: Order out of chaos

Wayne put up a shoe rack by our back door the other day, and it's made our life a lot more orderly! Who could imagine such a small simple thing could make such a difference?

In the interest of less dirt on the floors, we try to take our shoes off when we come in. Of course, up until now, that has resulted in a pile of shoes by the back door. And wow, what a messy dirty pile it was, with all this rain and leaves and mud on the bottoms. We could hardly get the back door open sometimes for shoes. Not to mention, in order to sweep I had to pick up all the shoes first and put them somewhere else (in a pile).

Isn't this cool?? So neat. So clean. So out of the way!

It was easy to make, too. I saw this video a couple of months ago and kept it with the intention of making just such a rack. First, I love it that the construction person making the video is Sawdust Girl - you don't get so many how-to construction things done by women, and why not?? We know how to do things too, right?

Anyway, I bought the pegs she recommended and then let them sit while all the holiday madness swirled around us. If they hadn't been out on my desk, I might have forgotten about them. The other day, we finally got around to it.

What a great idea!!

Winter from the train (I'm never sick)

Wayne and I just returned from a trip to Portland OR to visit my son Arthur and his family for the holidays. We took the train rather than drive (yes, W hates to fly!) because the weather is dicey this time of year and driving can be treacherous. It's an 11-hour drive, and an 18-hour train ride each way from Oakland. We like the train - it's relaxing and this was a very hectic December. Time for some down time. Here's an example of the scenery going by our window during daylight hours. Pretty! Cold.

It was a pleasant trip up. We slept and there was only one person coughing in our car. Poor guy, had a cold.

The week we spent in Portland was great family fun - board games, a giant puzzle, good dinners, great conversation! Arthur and I baked loaves of artisan bread from a new cookbook he had: Flour, Water, Yeast, Salt. Yum! We bundled up and went for walks in the the cold, although there was no snow until our last day there. The day before we left, I started to cough a little.

Now it's a fact that I'm never sick. I pride myself on it! I do have a good immune system and am overall very healthy, so I don't pick up things very easily at all. Besides, I grew up that way. There was no reward, no special attention, for being sick in my family of origin. If you were strong you got more positive attention, so that became a habit. I was sure my cough would be gone in a few hours. I took a couple of chewable Vitamin Cs.

Back on the train for the 18-hour ride home, I'm hacking up a storm along with half the car we're in. In addition, my sinuses are starting to block up and I am suddenly into a full-blown cold. So much for getting any sleep, which we didn't. So much for never being sick, which I definitely was.

I've spent the last week recovering - extra sleep, lots of supplements and vitamins, plenty of water, cough, cough, cough. Finally, I feel better. I did go to work over the weekend - short shifts both Saturday and Sunday. Wiped me out. I'll give it another few days, and then I'm done with it.

Hope that works!

Survivors

It's already November and my front yard tomatoes just won't give up! I can hardly believe it but I've got tomato plants with big ripening tomatoes and even flowers. I think the flowers are doomed, frankly, as it hardly gets above 65 degrees now. But the tomatoes that are already formed will ripen . . . slowly, slowly.

The taste isn't what it was in the heat of summer, but still. They're better than anything you'd buy at the supermarket. I'm using them for stews now, and chili. Yum!

The fall wreath

I was in Target day before yesterday, shopping for a few housekeeping necessities, when I spotted a medium-large door wreath of fall leaves. I thought it was pretty and went over to take a look. Well, I almost fainted - it was $90! And of course it was really only fake fall leaves on a circular wreath form made of twigs. $90. I don't think so.

Then I had a brainstorm, kind of born out of my stubbornness and dislike of being over-charged for something I know isn't worth that much. Michael's, the art and craft store, was just down the street. Bet I could make a wreath, maybe even a better wreath, for a lot less than $90. As soon as I was done at Target, I headed for Michael's.

Minutes later I walked out with a twig wreath, a spray of beautiful fake fall leaves, and a whole roll of really pretty wire-edged ribbon that had been on sale.

Home I went, fired up the glue gun, and 15 minutes later hung a beautiful wreath on the front door. It cost $11 and a few minutes of my time. My new wreath even has a bow, which the $90 model didn't have, plus I have extra ribbon for a later use.

Isn't life grand?!

Amazing Upholstery Adventure # 3

Just because I haven't written recently about the chair I'm upholstering (with the help - I should say he's doing most of the work, I'm learning - of my Upholstery Guru Rolando), doesn't mean there hasn't been progress. You would hardly recognize Wayne's grandfather's chair. Here are some recent photos:







                              The chair in its underwear:





The chair getting dressed:






 Here's Rolando adding yet more stuffing, even over the underwear. This chair is going to be a nap magnet!!









Here's the chair with half its dress on. Oh my, it's going to be beautiful!

So far away

Wayne's daughter Marja just left after a weekend visit. She lives in Los Angeles and is driving home as I write this on Highway 99 through the central California farming countryside - Modesto, Fresno, Chico. Marja's mom Mary also joined us and now she's gone too, back to her home in Santa Cruz. Our house is awfully quiet, and we're a little depressed after a full three days of chatter, eating, drinking, and laughter.

Two weeks ago we flew to Portland for a quick 3-day visit with my son Arthur and his family. It was great fun as they had made a lot of changes in their backyard and inside their home. Wayne helped Arthur re-wire a ceiling light in the basement. Jack, my grandson, was leaving for his first day of 7th grade as we were getting ready to go to the airport to return home. Two days later, Arthur called. "Hi Mom, I just wanted to know how you two are doing. We miss you." I think his house had become awfully quiet, like ours is today.

Why do we live so far from those we love so much? Our children have chosen to build their lives in places we don't really want to move to, except that they're there. But they're not in the same place. We live in the middle, between them. Not close enough to have day-to-day contact, but close enough that we can fly or even drive occasionally without too much trouble. It's the day-to-day stuff we miss. They seem to miss it too.

When we were young, we couldn't wait to "get out of town" and find our own lives. Wayne moved to California from New York, and I moved from Minnesota. We were really far from our families and yet we didn't feel any pull back. It has never occurred to me that my parents might have missed me in the way I miss my son, who lives considerably closer to me than I did to them.

Undoubtedly we and our children are closer emotionally than we were to our parents. Our kids are in their 40s now and we're still close. It's to be enjoyed, in the bittersweet way of enjoying something you miss and wish you could have more of.

Amazing Upholstery Adventure #2: The naked chair

We finished the first posting of the AUA (Amazing Upholstery Adventure) halfway through deconstruction. Of course, I finally succeeded in stripping all layers of the old upholstery and padding off the chair. In doing so I learned several important things:

• You find various levels of expertise when you deconstruct a chair that has been upholstered and re-upholstered. In my case the top-most layer was done by someone who was not an expert. Although I'm sure it looked good enough - after all it was used for years that way - it was not well done. The upholsterer put the new stuff right over a lot of the old stuff and didn't really know how to nail properly. Many nails were in crooked and/or misplaced on top of one another. They were hard to get out!

• The second (bottom) layer of my chair's upholstery was done by a master. Every nail was placed just as it should be. All the parts that hadn't decayed were intact and I paid close attention to how they were done. When someone years in the future pulls apart the upholstery I'm doing right now, I hope they feel the respect I felt for this person, probably living in the 1800s, who did this expert and careful work. I can only hope mine will be nearly as good.

• I would much rather be using a staple gun, as we do today, than hammering nails, as they did when both the first and the subsequent upholstering were done in the past. What a lot of work! So many nails, and having to pound each one in! Did I mention in the last post - there were hundreds of nails?!

• The original nails used in the first (the expert) upholstery were irregularly shaped, and I believe they were hand-forged. This makes the chair a bit older that we thought, maybe 1860s to 1870s. After all it was Wayne's grandfather's chair, and Wayne's mother was born in 1901, so her father could easily have bought the chair in the 1800s. It may have even been in the family before that. We don't know, but wish we did.

If I was going to spend the money to have a chair upholstered by a professional upholsterer, I would take all the old upholstery off it myself first. This is so much work, it's easy to see why it costs so much to have professional upholstery done. It makes sense that you'd save a lot of money by doing this part yourself.

Here's our chair, naked at last!! What's next in this Adventure?