The Rolling Rally

George and his friend went down to see the Rolling Rally of the World Series Champion Boston Red Sox! Wow! He braved the crowds and got to mingle with thousands of fans who cheered and waved and did the Pappelbom jig. He had a great time and I got to see pictures and share them in my blog.

I love the Red Sox sky writing! You can just make it out in this picture.

Go Sox,...and they did!

Yay!

Sox Win the World Series and I get a new Coffeepot!

It just happens this morning, that I want to talk about my new coffeepot, but that the Sox WON the World Series last night, so now my coffeepot seems less important. But there are lots of wonderful sports writers who will tell you all about the World Series, and I doubt that anyone will tell you about my coffeepot, so...Yay Sox...Go Coffeepot!

My old coffeepot wasn't that old. I bought it within this year. It was a Braum, and within five days of bringing it home form the store, the lid broke off. I hate that. It made ok, not great, coffee, but that lid really bothered me. The lid would fall inside the water area, or fall behind the pot, or disappear all together. With a broken lid, even the Salvation Army wouldn't want such a pot.

Yesterday I went out to look for a new one. We went to several stores and had coupons and resolve to find a pot I would really like. We looked at pots that cost $175, and pots that cost $19.00. It seemed silly to spend more than $50 on a coffeepot, since I am the only one that drinks coffee around here, George doesn't even want to TALK about coffee. He gamely went with me from store to store (God Bless George) and we found this nice Mr. Coffee 20 feet up in the air at a Linens and Things.

I had a coupon. 20% off. The coffeepot was on sale from $59.00 to $39.00. Cheap! And the best thing about this coffeepot, other than the secure lid, is that it tells you when the coffee is done.

There isn't a voice, thank goodness, but a little beep...a polite little beep, when the coffee is finished brewing. That little beep got me. I love my little beep in the morning.

But the greatest feature is that it has a timer, so I can make the coffee the night before and have it ready at six in the morning. No more rinsing, dumping grinds, opening cans, filling water reservoirs, or spilling coffee grounds or water in the morning...now I can do all that the night before!

I love my coffeepot. I love the Red Sox.

What a great day! Have a good one!

@$$ over Teakettle

Today I had a wipe-out at work. I was packing up a box to send it out UPS and I ran out of tape. I was working at the desk in the reception area. I turned to go to the mailroom for more tape and forgot that the big red mail cart was behind me. I fell forward and went sailing right over the cart and landed splayed out like an upside down snow angel.

I skinned my hand. I laid there for a few minutes trying to figure out whether to be mortally embarrassed or just to lay there and take stock of whether my arm was broken. I was too hurt to be embarrassed, and as I struggled to my feet, I just wanted to feel better!

I went to the bathroom and washed off the bloody skinned part on my hand, and took stock of the situation. I was sent home soon after. George came by and got me and we went to the employee health clinic, where they gave me a tetanus shot and wrapped up my sore hand. Tylenol and Advil will take care of the rest of it. I feel a little like this tea pot. Battered up but still useful.

Have a great weekend. Go Sox.

Meet Jebu

Sox win again and Mike and Michelle get a new doggie.

Meet Jebu, Michael and Michelle's new doggie that they adopted from an animal shelter. If ever a dog had nice eyes, this one does. He just looks like he has a lot of heart.

And speaking of heart, we will all have to hope that the Red Sox do well in Colorado. I may even be able to stay up late to see them play.

Go Sox! Welcome, Jebu!

The Sox...what else?

The Red Sox are playing in the World Series. That, in itself, is great victory! What a show, what fun to be in Boston right now, and how exciting it is. We can hardly believe it. It is fun to see national TV coverage of the WB Mason sign and see the lights on the big green wall that Manny works so well. I am thrilled that we are playing in the World Series, and even if we don't win, what a long, strange trip it has been!

And we are going to win. I know it!

I am a little worried about the rain that is on it's way tonight, and whether that will cause a rain delay or a cancellation of the game. Doesn't seem fair to have come this far just to get our best pitcher sopping wet, but...we'll take what comes. Baseball in October is full of fraught and danger.

I am also a little worried about sending anyone to play baseball in Colorado, where the mile high altitude can make you cry. I once got off a plane in Denver and took a short ride to the mountains, where, within a day, I was gasping for air and feeling downright horrible.

The Red Sox are going to pull another miracle and win the World Series...come wind, rain, or high altitude!

Have a great night. Go Sox.

Pictures from my back yard

I enjoy seeing the mature colors of my yard and garden on this beautiful sunny Sunday.
The garden is old and seasoned by now, and the tomatoes are almost gone, and a few scorching hot Habanero peppers are still dangling on the vine waiting for their next victim.

A bee is settled into George's purple dahlias.

We drove to Maine and New Hampshire today to see the trees and they are beautiful, but maybe just as beautiful at home.

Have a great day. Go Sox.

The old fashioned way

George and I were shopping at the grocery store and I decided I wanted to make tapioca pudding the old fashioned way. I remember that my mom used to make it for us kids and it was wonderful. When I got to the packages of tapioca, I didn't read the directions on the back, and I chose "regular" over "quick cooking". Big mistake.

When I got home that evening, I decided to read the directions and make the pudding. The first line was "soak overnight". There went that idea. So, two days later, I did have time to soak overnight, and this morning I had soaked tapioca and more directions.

Next line. Put milk in top of double boiler and cook for one hour, watching carefully that it doesn't boil. An hour. Okay. So I hung around the kitchen for an hour this morning making sure that the milk didn't boil. Then it said, "beat egg yolks with sugar, add to mixture and stir for 15 minutes. Whew. Ok. I stood at the stove and stirred for 15 minutes.

As I was standing there I was thinking about my mother and how often she made tapioca pudding for us, and how many hours it must have taken her to make something and then watch her family devour it in a few minutes. I was getting grumpy about the stirring and I thought it was a good thing that I was doing this for myself and not because someone asked me to do it, or I would have been REALLY grumpy.

I got myself into this and I would get myself out. I beat up the egg whites, added the vanilla, folded the mixture into the hot pudding mix and ... voila...beautiful tapioca pudding that only took only a few hours to make.

Old fashioned perfection.

Have a great day.

We win!

We win! We win! I went to bed before the game was over and woke up early to turn on the radio and find out the news. Ok, I must admit that I said a little prayer for the Red Sox before I turned on the radio. I wondered if God really had time to take care of things like baseball games, and I decided that HE did. Red Sox win!

Maybe I am overly cautious when it comes to being a fan. Maybe I should stay up late and jump around the living room like I did when the Red Sox won the World Series. There was a lot of jumping around that night, and all Red Sox Nation remembers it well.

God is good. Red Sox win!

Have a wonderful day.

I'm too scared to watch

The Boston Red Sox have to win tonight to go on to the World Series and I'm too scared to watch. I have always been a scardy cat. Halloween is my least favorite holiday. Even when I carve a big pumpkin, it always ends up with a big smiley face...nothing that a mouse would be frightened by.

Boston is in the grip of worry. We are worried that we might lose, and we are worried that we might win. If we win, then we go onto several more nights of worry. It isn't that we aren't excited, it is that Bostonians are....seasoned worriers. So, tonight I am blogging, shopping for beads on Ebay, visiting with my friends online, and thinking about Halloween.

Anything but think about the Red Sox. I'm too scared.

Have a great night.

Gotta love Manny!

Runs and Pitches

This weekend in Boston it is all about The Red Sox. What a show they put on for the fans. I remember living in Chicago and being a Cub fan and it was never this much fun. Run and pitch they did last night, to a 10 to 3 win over the Indians. People are afraid to think that we might win the World Series again! It is a fever that is starting, and you can feel it around here. We all think we are that good!

George and I are going to have a nice quiet weekend. He has some work at the office and I have some work here at home. I'm making necklaces to sell at the gallery and I have to take some pictures to show folks what I'm doing. For the past few weeks I have had the home studio put away and haven't taken any photos at all. I need to do that!

The movie Elizabeth, with Cate Blanchett is out today. They say it isn't very good, but that the costumes are amazing. I have gone to see LOTS of movies just for the costumes, and I'm sure this is going to be a fine movie. I love historial films, I love Cate Blanchett, and I'm a sucker for period costumes. My kind of movie!

After the movie we are going out for Korean food...Bi Bim Bap. Oh yeah.

Go Red Sox.

Have a great day!

Nuts to you!

Maybe I am just hungry, but today someone at my office received a big box from a company called nuts online.com, and I had to take a look. It seems that a company that has been selling nuts since l929 can't be all bad. I have decided in fact, that all their products look quite good and that I want a big box to arrive in my mail too!

I am going to order some Christmas goodies from this company and maybe some Thanksgiving ones too.

Yum.

Have a great day.

Mission: Happy People

I created my mission for repairing other people's old jewelry several weeks ago and reported it here on this blog: make people happy by fixing something they love and making it useful and nice again. In other words, it is a labor mostly of love and only a little money.

This week I restrung a prized necklace for an 89 year old lady who lives in my town. She had gotten my card from the bead store. Her necklace was different colors of agate stones and gold spacer beads, and she liked it, and it was broken into several pieces. She said she liked it because it went with everything because of all the colors. The necklace was strung on the old worn out floss that I have seen on other pieces lately.

I restrung the necklace stones on silk thread and was able to make knots to put back the original screw type antique clasp. I polished up the stones, and added a few gold spacer beads that were a little shinier here and there. I called her today to say it was ready, and she doesn't drive at night, so George and I took it over to her house, just a few blocks away. We fix jewelry, and we deliver. It made me feel good.

So, when I decided that I would repair jewelry to make others happy, what I didn't understand is that it would make me happy too!

Have a great night.

Spinning Spinning

Yesterday George and Connie and I went to New Hampshire to the Wool Tour. It was great fun. I bought three large balls of pale gray Shetland roving to spin, enough to make a pair of mittens and a hat. The temptation is to buy one ball ($12.00), and when you finish spinning it, plying it and rolling it in a ball of yarn, you only have enough for a headband, or one sock. So it is important to buy enough. I did. The cost of that roving was almost $40.00. An expensive pair of mittens, don't ya think. And we don't even THINK about the time involved. Days and weeks.

At the same stall in the big barn I bought a beautiful maroon and white handspun knit hat that is lovely and lovable, and that cost $30.00. Beautiful hand made things are worth the money.

We went to three farms and had a nice Chinese lunch in between. I got to see my friend Ann, and we sat at a picnic table and I taught Connie how to knot pearls. It took about 10 minutes to show her all I know, and she picks things up fast. She and I are good jewelry makers and it doesn't take us long to get the hang of a new technique.

We went to an alpaca farm and saw a hundred alpacas. They are brown, tawny or whitish, and remind me of a hippie poncho I had in the 60's which I wore for Chicago peace rallies. It was brown with white decorating going across and I'm sure it was made in Peru. It probably cost $10 at the most. It was very warm and wearable and I loved it. Those alpacas yesterday were the same color as my old poncho, bless it's heart.

The price list of alpacas was on the door of one barn. For $1000 you can buy a young female. For $2000 you can buy a young male. For $8000 you can buy a breeding female. We were wondering who would be in a such a hurry, since you can buy a girl alpaca for so much less and just wait two years or so. Of couse, I don't know much about alpacas. On the drive home we were adding up all the expenses we would have if we bought an alpaca. A heated barn, hay, hot water, food, a corral, vet bills, electricity, leather harnesses, wool shearing tools, advertising to sell the wool you just sheared, a pick up truck, a trailer...we went on and on. I think I will stick to visiting them once a year.

George and I are staining my spinning wheel and all the wooden accessories a darker honey pecan color. I bought my spinning wheel about 10 years ago, and although I stained it at the time, I bought too light of a stain, and it is white ash, and not that great. Pecan will be better. But it takes several coats, with a lot of wiping and waiting in between. It will take three days before we are finished. We set up lights and a radio in the basement and have been working on it for the whole weekend.

But, beautiful things are worth waiting for.

Have a great day.

Pictures from the Wool Tour

A niddy noddy

It's the Wool Tour Weekend!

Sometimes on Friday nights I get so excited about my weekend plans that I can hardly stay in bed to sleep. George and I watched the exciting conclusion of the Indians beating the Yankees, and when I turned off the lights, I started thinking of my blog, and how I had not written all week.

The week goes fast. This week we got a new furnace and a new water heater. George had to do a lot of prep work in the basement, and he worked hard. He had to take three days off to get the furnace taken care of. We had no hot water this morning, so we went over to the neighbor's house to take showers. I felt like a camper, standing outside my neighbors door in the early morning with my towel and my shampoo. It would have been embarrassing, except that the thought of a cold shower was just too awful to contemplate. So, I took my warm shower, and skedaddled back across the street to my own bathroom to dry my hair and get ready for work. By the time I got home again, I was back into my routine and all was well again.

I made one bracelet this week and spun some wool. My new spools and lazy kate and niddy noddy arrived from California. My spinning wheel is all oiled and running smooth and quiet. I'm all ready to begin spinning again, and I managed to spin about a spool's worth last Sunday. It is relaxing and fun. My friend at church said I must be crazy to pick up yet another hobby, but, the more the merrier as far as I am concerned.

Tomorrow is the New Hampshire Wool Tour, and George and Connie and I will head off at 9:00 to go to Antrim, and small towns nearby to go from farm to farm visiting with other spinners, dyers, and wool people. We will see sheep and sheep dogs and people playing bag pipes and the lady who spins from her rabbit that sits on her lap. We will see llamas and alpacas and all things wooly and woolier. And it will be fun.

It will be fun to see old friends and to meet new ones. Connie doesn't even knit or spin and she still loves to go with us. It is a fun time to catch up with our beading talk, and because I hate to talk and drive, George is being chauffeur. What would I do without him?

Have a great weekend.

Early to bed and early to rise...

It is 6:44 and I am in my jacket and ready to leave for work. George has a meeting this morning, and I carpool with him, so I am going in early too. I go to bed early, and jump out of bed rested and ready in the morning. 8:30 or 9:30 is my bedtime, and I'm going to be unashamed. That seems a little early, I know, but it is so much nicer to be wide awake in the morning than to stay up and watch some silly show on TV and wake up bleary eyed and tired.

I commute from work to home sometimes so that George can stay later at his office. Last night I caught the subway near my office in the usual time, and took it two stops to the end of the line. And then the world stopped. The bus is supposed to come every 20 minutes, but it was 45 minutes of standing on the cement before the bus finally showed up to take it's weary passengers on the final leg home. I was beside myself! 45 minutes on a boring train station walkway is way too long. So today I am carpooling again, and happier for it!

Rather than get on that darn bus again, George and I will stop at Dunkin Donuts for a nice coffee, get doughnuts for George to take to his 8:00 meeting, and I will arrive at work at least 45 minutes early. Sounds good to me.

Have a great day.