OH, HELP!

I'M BEING HELD CAPTIVE IN MY OWN HOME AND FORCED TO DO HOUSEWORK!

Okay, actually I'm only getting much-wanted house guests, and having to do some much-needed housework, but it really is NO FUN. So don't send in the police, they would just take one look at the house and issue me one of those house-arrest ankle bracelets until I pass some sort of inspection.

My cousin Donna came to visit last week, and helped me a lot. The weather was uncooperative, and our one major trip out of town resulted in absolutely nothing. It was funny, we drove an hour and a half to go to a nursery for blueberry bushes, and after getting lost and adding another half hour to the trip---THE ROAD WAS CLOSED AND WE COULDN'T EVEN GET THERE. So we headed off to another nursery we passed on the way which had a big sign that said "Blueberry Bushes," only to have them close the gate and put out the "Closed" sign just as we pulled into the driveway at 3:20 in the afternoon. Seriously, who closes at 3:20 in the afternoon? It was such a misadventure it was funny--but I still don't have the blueberry bushes.

I had a black eye for a week from falling down the stairs, but the bruises are all fading and other than a big lump on my shin all the physical effects are gone. I don't recommend falling down stairs. And if you have to fall down stairs, do it someplace where there is cushy carpet at the bottom, not a hard concrete basement floor.

Back to work.

More Trouble Than Its Worth

I tried to upload a photo. This was greatly complicated by the fact that both my kids now have Flickr accounts and I din't realize I was sending photos to my son's account while the computer was logged into my daughter's account. Then Flickr wanted me to verify everything to access MY account, and I've been so spoiled by it just automatically taking me there, I didn't remember my password. Then I went to Blogger, and since I hadn't already "upgraded" to new and improved Blogger, it made me do it now, before I could access anything. Humbug.

I spent the last week or so wrapped up in Valentine Grams for the middle school. The Valentine Grams are basically valentines the students can buy and send to their friends, which are then delivered right before the kids go home. We did this for three days, but there were multiple days of assembling the "grams" themselves, because they were fiddly.

Last year I bought 1500 Valentine pencils on post-holiday clearance. My thought was to keep it very simple, maybe have cardstock hearts, each with a pencil taped to it, and let the students use markers and stamps to personalize them, and sell them for a quarter. That's not the way it worked out, because it was decided that wasn't appealing enough---we had to have CANDY. So, they ended up being a 3" by 4" plastic bag filled with three kinds of candy and a sticker, attached to the pencil with three different colors of curling ribbon, which the students then addressed with their choice of 6 different designs of full-color labels. We did them assembly-line style, but we still could only average about 30 finished grams per person per hour. We sold over 800 of them (in a school with 450 students) for 5o cents apiece, and we were still stuffing and curling until 20 minutes before the last bell on Valentine's Day, as the DJ for the Valentine Dance set up around us. I guess the good new is that we more than paid for the DJ by selling the valentines, and the kids really seemed to have a good time with them.

There was no crafting at my house while this was going on because my hands were tired from tying 2-4 knots per "gram." Yesterday was my first non-PTO volunteering day in over a week and a half (because last week I was there every day running the Scholastic Book Fair.) I was looking forward to getting housework done in preparation for the 3 weeks of houseguests coming up, and maybe picking up some knitting when I unwound before bed. HAH! I managed to fall down the basement steps and land on my head on a concrete floor, wrenching my back, bruising my knees, and spraining (fortunately mildly) both my right wrist and ankle. Sigh.

It's Monday and All's Well

Busy.

Scholastic Book Fair all last week. (I was chairperson.)

Frenetic Saturday starting with the kids' orchestra competition in Rochester, WA (an hour north,) and ending in Eugene, OR (two hours south,) where John's band played at a medical group function.

Valentine Grams this week at school. There is no rest for the wicked, or for the PTO.

Naughty dogs. SERIOUSLY naughty dogs.

Company coming.

Yup. Busy.

Caldonia!

I have not been doing much crafting. Acutally the two trips to the vet left my hands bruised from two STRONG dogs pulling on their leashes, and I haven't been in much of a handiwork mood.

I picked up the dogs on Friday and they were supposed to stay mellow and dopey. They had just had their spaying surgery and were not supposed to do ANY jumping---not even up on the furniture (though this almost caused me to have a most unseemly outburst of laughter right in at the front counter of the vets' office.) Well, Callie-Dog said "Hah! We'll see about that!" And her first afternoon post-op she jumped the 6 foot tall back fence for the first time. Audrey was walking down the alley on her way to a friend's house, and if one of her people was on the other side of the fence, that's where she wanted to be, too.Sigh. Here's a favorite picture of mine of Callie from the archives. She's so much bigger now.

Callie is the athlete of the two (though they are both lean and muscular,) and Cozy is the brains (we suspect she's plotting to take over the world.)

My charming neighbor has asked me to keep them in on Wednesday afternoon, as she has someone coming to look at their house to buy it, and she doesn't want them scared off by the dogs. Sigh. Number one, it's not going to help her that we had to go and tack up a two-foot extention on our back fence which I don't think the potential buyer could miss. . ."So why do the next door neighbors need an 8 foot fence?" (John has told a couple of people that we are getting a cut on our property tax to house low risk overflow prisoners from the county jail.) Number two, they are only 7 months old (just big puppies,) though they have lots of energy (backed by all that muscle,) and their manners aren't very good (although they've had 6 weeks of obedience classes and will sit like a dream, providing you are holding a dog biscuit.)

I have scary, 50-lb lap-dogs and an 8 foot back fence.

February 1

It's a brand new month. January wasn't that great, but I think January has kind of a bad reputation for being kind of a BLAH month. New month, new possibilities, and February comes with it's own color scheme:

This is what cupcakes typically look like at our house. We like our vanilla buttercream in it's natural state. I was looking closely at this thrifted luncheon cloth for the first time as I was ironing it. It is done in two different colors of red thread, and when I bought it I wondered what the story was. Lazy embroiderer? Poor planning? Poor embroiderer? The Great Depression? War-time rationing? As I was ironing I discovered this:

It's signed! It was made by "S.P." in 1943 (war-time!) And a new mystery, in the opposite corner it says AJW and son? 5 am? I wonder what it was that SP was commemorating.

And speaking of commemorating, February is also Black History Month. I happen to believe in the importance of Black History Month. When I got to college I was shocked by how much was glossed over in the history books I had in high school. And if Hispanic Americans and Native Americans and European Americans, and Asian Americans want to lobby for their own history months, that's fine with me, too. I will totally support that. But for now I'm just recommending "47" by Walter Mosely on CD for Black History Month this year. Not in print, it has to be the audio version. The late, great Ozzie Davis narrates, and one of the reviewers on Amazon calls it one of his best works. It's a great book, not a comfortable book, but a great one.

Audrey is home sick today and when she saw me getting out the "47" discs she said "OH! That's a good one! Except I don't like the part where they. . . ." It's like that.

I think it's going to be a good month. It's already showing signs of promise:

It's awfully quiet at our house. The Puppy Girls are off getting spayed. I've already heard from the vet, and they both came through the surgery just fine. They got weighed for the first time in a while and they are officially 48 (Cozy) and 52 (Callie) pounds. A HUNDRED POUNDS. That's a lot of dog!