Unfinished Business

I took a little time going through some posts on this site last weekend.  I discovered I had over 30 draft posts - posts I had written and never published for anyone to read.  My immediate thought was - Oh Goody - I can use some of these to fill in days when my mind is not on writing!

Have you ever tried to go back in your thinking?  Well this is sort of like that.  I read the posts, and try and figure out what I was trying to say, or what point I wanted to get across... and so far I have been completely unsuccessful in finishing even one of those draft posts!

Guess you really can't "go back" - even if the older I get the more "going back" I tend to do!

When I was young, it always bugged me that as people got older they tended to reminisce much too much about days gone by.    Guess what?  Here I am doing just that with alarming clarity!  It's not just me either, my younger than me brother and I can spend hours on the phone talking about days long gone.

Last night we were chatting on the phone, and as usual one of us brought something up that opened the door for a "In the old days" conversation.  Believe it or not we were talking about fabric and craft stores.  Sometimes when you talk about something from the past that you once had - it only makes it more clear of what you no longer have - like fabric stores and craft stores!

Thirty years ago there was a fabric store in every mall, as well as the larger stand-alone outlets like Fanny's Fabrics (my Mom's and my favourite Friday night outing).  I spent a good portion of my pay check at Fanny's every month and it was always so busy there... so how come they are no more?  What we have now cannot even come close to that particular store  - and even if it had four times as much material at half the price, it probably still would never come close to that store, because Mom is no longer here to share it with me.

That is why when we get older we dwell more upon the "good old days".  That is our best opportunity to remember loved ones who are gone, and the memories we made together...   If not for this, why would we "go back in time" at all.  After all, it's just memories, the time has gone, it already has been lived and cannot be re-lived - except in our memories.

I for one love my memories - I am happy to say my life has given me more good memories than bad... and yes, the older I get the more precious they become to me.  I don't ever want to loose my ability to "Go Back"...  so you see, the youth have it wrong... or at least I did as a youth!

Just Monkey-ing around - Cheeko Revealed - at last!

I thought that this monkey project was from 2014, but in actual fact it started in 2013.  Imagine my surprise.

Here is a re-post of my Just Monkeying Around post about "Cheeko" the monkey.  I finally got around to finishing Cheeko, this past spring.  His owner picked him up over the summer and was delighted with how he turned out....

Read on.....from the original post in 2013...

 
The friend that brought me Baby Dear to fix, also brought her monkey to restore.  She had told me about him in emails, and I really don't know what I was expecting, but certainly it was not quite what I got.

I guess I thought it would be an old sock monkey to something... Nada -

I must admit, I am a little bit out of my element  here!

But I said I would fix him so...I sat him on my work table and looked at him every now and again, but it took me awhile to get up the nerve to touch him.

The problem with this monkey was not really the condition he was in, but the fact that he looked nothing like the monkey my friend remembered from her childhood.  She described him as having a blue and white striped shirt, bright yellow overalls with big red buttons - and that's the way she wanted him to look again.

He was in pretty good shape, aside from a dirty face, there were no rips or tears in his body, so I wasn't sure what I should do.  She said he felt too solid, she also wanted him softer, so I decided in order to soften him up I would open a part of his side seam up and take out some of his stuffing... then maybe I'd just make him a blue and white striped shirt and a pair of yellow overalls with big red buttons - not so hard??

After a pretty stressful day at work, one evening last week I decided to take the plunge.  With seam ripper in hand I started to open him up...

And there the trouble began:

Are you seeing what I am seeing?  All of a sudden I knew this project was going to become more than I was expecting!

Each section of the new fur that was used to cover the obviously older body was put on individually, so very carefully I started pulling and snipping the really nice fur away, being careful not to tear any of the fragile material under the fur.  It took quite awhile to get it off. but once I had it off, I found the original monkey kind of sort of intact below the new fur..

He had  large open area on the chest of his body and the whole area across his chest was worn thin, and the top of one arm was completely gone.

At this point I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but I still needed to remove the stuffing, so I continued on.

 

The poor guy was pretty crushed by then... but I must admit he was starting to intrigue me -  just a little bit.  We then had a little photo shoot  while I tried to think of how I was ever going to restore this cheeky fellow.

I put him away, and actually kind of forgot about the little guy until early last summer his owner contacted me and said they would be in town in the summer, and could they stop over and pick up the Baby Dear doll, and Cheeko.

So I pulled him back out of his box and got busy.  Here is the restored Cheeko.  His owner was so happy to see him exactly as she remembered him, and I was more than pleased with the way he turned out after all my stressing over this project.

Happy New Year Everyone!

Well here is is, another New Year... Happy New Year everyone!  I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and New Year.

I am afraid I was in bed with a miserable flu for a lot of the holidays.  Started with a headache, then a stomach flu, and then the over all and everything aches, for days on end.  I am feeling better now, but kind of wondering what happened to a few days last week!

I am happy to report that aside from her blindness, Molly seems to be fully recovered.  She is quite bossy, and demanding at the moment, guess she figures she should be treated so wonderfully special all the time - and she is, but we try not to spoil her too over much.  That was my wish for Christmas, to have my beautiful companion well again, and so I did receive my very special Christmas wish... and I am so Thankful.

Now it's back to reality.  The weather has turned very Winnipeg-like.  We are in the deep freeze at the moment and expected to stay this way for a week or so.  We had some snow over the weekend, so now we are looking a bit more normal for this time of the year.  I got my boots out of the closet on Friday for the first time this winter, so up to now we have done very well, indeed.

I have been working in my "studio".  I have been designing sweater charts for doll sweaters, and have knitted 1 so far.   But the needles and hooks have been busy getting a jump on some other projects for dolls that I want to get up for sale.

Here is a bit of my creative mess on my desk - a wide angle lens wouldn't catch it all, I'm afraid!

You can see to the right, some of the things I am working on at the moment.  The graph on the desk is for a doll- sized Valentine's Day skating sweater, it is in the style of the Mary Maxim - type sweaters.  

My Mom made so many of those heavy wool sweaters over the years - we all had one.  They were made from a bulky yarn called Buffalo Wool... and they were worn from February until spring pretty much.  I wish I still had mine.

I have used and made graphs for crochet many times but I have never knit from a graph before.  Carrying different colours across the back of the piece is a new challenge for me.  The designing is the easiest part, I am afraid I am not entirely happy with my first attempt at knitting from a graph, but I will keep at it.  Practice makes it much better - I hope.

Over the next couple of weeks I hope to catch you up on some of my finished projects of 2014.  Even though it was a rotten year in a lot of ways, my fingers stayed busy.  That is my way of getting through things... working my hands in creating, and my mind in writing.

Tomorrow I will show you the finished results of my Monkey Business post from last year!

Till then....

A SCARY SITUATION.

I really did mean to have a post ready for yesterday, but my weekend didn't exactly turn out the way I planned and so I just never got the chance to write my Monday post.

My dog Molly is 11 and a half years old.  She is a healthy, active dog, very rarely is she ill, she never ever is cross or temperamental.
Molly went blind very suddenly this fall, which really shook us all to our bones - but in true Molly fashion she seems to have taken it in her stride, and she is dealing with it, sometimes better than us humans.

About 3 weeks ago she started drinking a lot of water, and having little peeing accidents on carpets and on her beds.  She hated this and was pretty crushed every time it happened.  It was getting to be such a problem that I had to remove all the area rugs on the main floor of the house.  We didn't think much of it except that perhaps she was reacting to the blindness, or maybe it was just age creeping up on her.

Then last Thursday she started vomiting, and then diarrhea, she stopped eating, and she stopped drinking and well it appeared as if we might lose our best friend.

She absolutely would not touch her dog food, so I made her a bland diet of boiled hamburger and rice.  She devoured it immediately, so for the past few days I have been feeding her small amounts of this and she seems to be feeling a bit better.  The diarrhea has stopped, she is drinking normal amounts of water again, and the piddling has stopped.

Yesterday my husband went on some forums to research food.  The first one he went to was the food she has been eating ( and loving) for the past few years.  What he read was shocking.  The food we were feeding our dog has made hundreds of dogs ill with exactly the same symptoms as Molly.  Some have died, some have been left with permanent liver and kidney damage.

I think we might have been lucky, but what of the millions of other people who are feeding this food to their beloved pet, unaware of the danger to their family member.

It makes me sick to think we were inadvertently harming our beautiful Molly.  I could cry - and I did!

I am seriously going to research making her food from now on.  I need to do a lot of reading to make sure this is what is best for her.  In the meantime, pet owners please go on the sites of the foods you feed your animals - read the forums, the responses, the complaints.  This food was recommended to us from a pet food store owner we have known and trusted for years...

And you can bet that I am going to be looking into this pet food company as well.

In the meantime, Molly is getting lost of special treatment.  I hope she is going to be okay, I am cautiously optimistic.  I just can't and don't want to imagine life without my Molly girl in it.

MAYBE -

I can't tell you how happy I am to be writing my blog again.  I have not written much, if anything in so long, that I forgot what pleasure it brings me to just sit and write.

Writing is a solitary activity, and for me it does not always happen when I am sitting in front of the computer.  In fact usually long before that happens, I have already written whatever I am going to type in my head - or the majority of it anyway.

That part is the real curse.  Having stories and ideas chasing each other around in your head all the time when you are supposed to be concentrating on something else entirely can be so frustrating.  Rarely do really great ideas for a story happen at a convenient time.  I loose track of time, I loose whole parts of conversations because I am thinking about something that I want to write.  I have composed whole poems on a short walk from one hospital to another at my work... well not lately - but definitely in the past.

I have only been back to writing on here for a little over a week, and already I am thinking about my future.  I have four novels written, one was published a few years ago but the publishing contract is now over.  These novels sit on a shelf in my craft room in big brown envelopes, and I completely forget about them until I am cleaning in that room.  The most I have done on any of those stories in the past ten years is move them from one pile to another.  I have several others started and in various stages of completion - I am not even sure where these ones are at the moment.

I had a long conversation with my eldest brother a few weeks ago, and I was  whining to him about how much I really want to retire, but how I actually feared not going out to work every morning.  Strange isn't it - I don't want to go out to work every morning, but I am fearful of not going out to work every morning.  Am I alone in this?  For 40 years this has been my norm - I don't know anything else, so I guess it is understandable.

My brother is seldom warm and fuzzy - he tells it like he sees it, and he pretty much told me to get over myself and take a plunge.  He softened it somewhat by saying how much talent I possessed, and what a great opportunity I could make for myself if I used my talents and abilities and did something for myself for a change, instead of working so hard and futilely for someone else.

That was nice -

I have been thinking.  I have been asking for a sign, I have been praying, and maybe the answer is right in front of me.... Maybe it starts right here somehow.  Maybe the answer is linked to my decision to start back writing my daily blog after being dormant for so long.

Sounds like a lot of maybes to me, but two weeks ago those maybes were nowhere in my thoughts.  Maybe that is progress...

Talk to you next week....

Pray for Peace - People Everywhere!

Is Peace Possible?

Peace On Earth - Goodwill To Men.  Let There Be Peace on Earth, and let it begin with me....  We hear songs like this so often at this time of year...  on the radio, TV, The Internet - in Churches, schools, workplaces... but is Peace really in our hearts?

You have to really wonder about that when you read news about terror such as what happened in Sydney, and other such happenings around the world.

Have you ever felt Peace?  I don't mean contentment, I mean true Peace. 

I have, but only once, and at a time in my life where it should have been impossible to feel it.

It was several years ago, and I was lying outside an operating theater waiting to have my breast cancer surgery.  I was scared beyond scared.  I lay there imagining every wrong thing that could happen to me in that operating room and wondering if I would ever open my eyes and be normal again.

Then my surgeon stopped at my side, and spoke quietly to me as he started to wheel my stretcher into the operating room.  I remember feeling like I was suffocating.  My heart was pounding, and I felt more than a little sick to my stomach.

The operating room staff lifted me from the stretcher to the narrow table that I was to lay on for the next 4 hours or so.  All I saw was kind eyes regarding me above green face masks... little words were spoken.

One nurse placed a leather strap across my legs, while another covered me with several heated blankets.  They were positioning my arms for the surgery - one was to be over my head and the other close by my side.  There was activity all around me, and I remember thinking that really - I wasn't ready for this at all.

And then it came.  I was lying there thinking negative thoughts, and then all of a sudden I felt Peace.  I can't explain it... it just happened.  I felt like everyone in the room had stopped moving, all was calm, warm, soft... I had no fear, no thoughts really, and I was happy.  I felt Peace... perfect Peace!  I didn't expect it -  and I have never forgotten it.

I believe in Peace, but I also believe there will never be Peace on Earth - at least not on the Earth as we know it now.  Things have to change, major things have to happen, people have to change... we all have to Believe that Peace IS possible.

Pray for Peace - People Everywhere.... Let There be Peace on Earth, and let it begin with ME!

To Bake or Not to Bake - IS THIS THE QUESTION?

I whipped up 2 dozen of those Cranberry-Orange muffins last night - OMG  they are so good!

I haven't done any Christmas baking yet.  I keep thinking I should  - because I always have... but really - do we need all that lying in the freezer tempting us to indulge, when we know we shouldn't?

In years past my Christmas baking much resembled my Mother's Christmas baking.  I guess this is pretty normal of Mother's and Daughters.  I would make Anise cookies - which was the Swiss tradition of my Paternal grandmother and my Mom would always bake these on the eve prior to Christmas Eve... so I did too.

Mince-meat tarts... a favourite of mine and my Dad.  Mom's were the large ones, made in a large muffin tin - and so are mine!

Refrigerator Cookies - the ones with the tiny pieces of candied fruit in them.  These were the cookies that always were left over long after Christmas - I guess because they were the least appreciated.  Funny - same thing happens at my house - although I do love them.

Mom always made two kinds of fruit cake - dark and light.  Personally I love the dark one.  The white one, which also was Grandma Fischer's recipe was made mostly for my Dad.  I made the dark fruit cake for several years, but no one in my family likes it, so that left me to eat the whole thing myself... not good.  And with the price of the ingredients for fruit cake being as rich as the cake - well, it has been taken off my list altogether!

Mom never made Shortbread - but I usually do - everyone in my family loves it.  Same with Sugar cookies and ginger cookies  - they are favourites in my house.

I have tried various other cookies - date pinwheels - yeah - these weren't well received.  Anything with Coconut - not so much!  My son doesn't like nuts - so where does that leave me?

No wonder I don't have the urge to bake.

So - I have made a decision as I have been typing this - I am not going to do any Christmas baking... nope - for sure, I am not!

But I do have an idea I want to try for Dessert Christmas Day.

RED VELVET TRIFLE!

I saw one in a magazine recently and it looks so beautiful, simple and festive that I decided right then and there, it would be my Christmas Yum!

What could be better after a heavy meal than crumbled Red Velvet Cake layered with fresh strawberries, Raspberries, red currant jam, frozen whipped topping, maybe a few crushed candy canes for extra special holiday flavour?

Pinterest has dozens of recipes for this  - some even with chocolate added, blueberries..

What I like about this dessert is the way it can be served.  Individual servings in wine classes or crystal water goblets would be so pretty and festive.

So there you have it - my baking dilemma has been solved.  Too bad I already bought a 10 lb bag of flour, and 3 lbs of butter.

Maybe I will make some home made bread - I have Mom's recipe for that too - and it is awesome!

Happy Baking!