Church Ladies

The winter clothes are officially out of storage, all our summer shorts and tee shirts are hidden away until the next heat wave begins. In Minnesota, that could be anytime between May to July. While unburying all of the winter stuff, I was rather happy to find some old but well-loved sweaters in a box that I couldn't find last year. I even have a couple that my mother gave to me several Christmases ago. Do sweaters ever really go out of style? I don't think so. At least as long as they don't have shoulder pads.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/31733144@N04/ / CC BY 2.0

I used to laugh because my mother seemed to dress so frumpy. Polyester pants with turtlenecks were her typical winter wardrobe. I hated her plaid wool skirts, worn over heavy knit opaque tights when the temperature dropped near freezing. I swore I would never go that route. I would wear denim until I was well into my eighties, and party like a rock star even if I needed a wheelchair or a walker to get around.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/playingwithpsp/ / CC BY 2.0

I think that started to change once my job required me to awaken at 5:30 am. Once you start going to bed each night around 9:30, the partying boat has all but sailed. My friends who still go to the bar don't even arrive there until then. I'm lucky if I can make it through the 9 o'clock news, which in my book is probably the best thing since sliced bread - stay up for the 10 o'clock news? no way!

As I go over my mental checklist of action items for tonight's Ladies Aid meeting at church, I realize that I am turning into my mother.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hadesigns/ / CC BY 2.0

Not just a little, I mean the good, the bad and the ugly. There are a few exceptions, but they seem to grow smaller over time. The Ladies Aid is part of it, I find myself rather looking forward to going to our monthly meetings, just like my mother always did.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/10413717@N08/ / CC BY 2.0

Although tonight I really wanted to stay at home to finish crocheting the turtleneck sweater I started a few weeks ago. It will really go well with my polyester dress pants. Well, maybe they're acrylic. Whatever. They are much more comfortable than my jeans.

Speaking of Ladies Aid, that reminds me. I happen to like this website, http://www.biblegateway.com/. I've found it so helpful - anytime I need to know where a verse is, if I can't remember where to find it, this is where I go. On their homepage today, there was a little snippet that mentioned they had taken a poll:

"If you were given the chance to have dinner with someone from the Old Testament
who would you choose and why?"

I thought that was a good question. Pay them a visit if you'd like to read some of the answers, some of them were pretty good!

So who would you choose, and why?

Ice Cream For Dinner? Anyone?

ice cream / gelado
Originally uploaded by lilivanili

Toasted marshmallows just don’t taste like they used to. Maybe I’m getting old. It doesn’t take forever to get them the perfect shade of brown without lighting the whole sticky mess on fire like it used to, and they seem way too sweet, now. When I was a kid I could eat the entire bag, even if it meant staying up past bedtime to get each one toasted.

I could never figure some things out, when I was a child. Like why the adults preferred sitting in the shade rather than playing in the sun on a hot summer day. Or why they didn’t find getting splashed by others while swimming at the lake or the pool as fun as I did.

Why can’t I have ice cream for dinner? I still haven’t figured that one out. Maybe I’m not so grown up, after all.

P.S. to the Last Post...

Did I mention that I can smell my sister's sandalwood and patchouli incense burning when I listen to this playlist? She burned it so our mom wouldn't know what else was burning in our basement. I can even smell that incense while I'm at work - odd. I guess ghosts tend to live on in the music they listened to.

I Love Widgets!

I found a really cool widget at www.playlist.com. If you want one for your blog, mine's at the bottom of my blog - go ahead & set one up. I've found it's way better than plugging in my headphones to my radio at work and hearing commercials, and of course I never remember to bring my iPod with me when I leave the house (even though it's as portable as it can get). Otherwise, just check it out. My song for this morning is 'Summertime' (Live), perfomed by Janis Joplin. Suits my mood today.

Turns out I will be going back to school - again! Even though I've got 4+ years of college under my belt and have studied all sorts of odd things: business, art, history and interior design, to name a few, I still have yet to acquire a degree in any of those subjects. I will still keep posting, although my post my be shorter, to the relief of some, I'm sure. My posts may also be a bit more sporadic, but I love to write so I know I won't give up blogging altogether.

Great-Grandma Hilda & Charlie, 1993

Great-Grandma Hilda & Charlie, 1993
Originally uploaded by suzukiQ

My Grandma Hilda was my dad's mom. She always loved children, and she babysat for a lot of people. I am glad she was around long enough to see my kids.

My husband found some old photo negatives in our storage unit, so I brought them to Target and had a CD made. I'm really glad he found those, since Grandma passed away several years ago and we never took as many photos as we should have.

If you take lots of photos, you will remember things that you may have forgotten if you didn't see them often. Don't shy away from the camera - even if you don't think you photograph well. And don't give up on those people who run from the camera! If you are the one shooting, just think of it as a challenge. You will be glad you caught them on film :)

School Supplies

Over the weekend, an old neighbor of mine posted a picture to her Facebook wall that made me smile. Have you ever seen a picture that makes all those forgotten memories rush back in an instant? This was one of those. I saw the photo and could smell the chalk dust and hear the sound of the morning bell. I could once again feel the squish of finger-paint craftily concocted from soap shavings and tempera paint between my fingers.

In the photo stood two little girls, waiting for the bus on their first day of school. They wore plaid cotton dresses with scalloped, lace-trimmed collars and patent leather Mary Janes; large rectangles of construction paper pinned to their hand-knit wool sweaters stated their grade and teacher’s name, along with their own full names and addresses. The bus driver would know where to drop us off if we had those papers pinned to our shirts. If perchance one of us were to get off the school bus in the wrong part of town, some helpful adult would surely call our parents or get us home safely. Wow. Times really have changed, haven’t they?

Too soon, the new school year will be starting for my boys. At least I don’t have all the hassle involved with having children in elementary school anymore. Now our list of school supplies has been whittled down to the basics: note books, a few folders, 3-ring binders and pens. I no longer have to purchase 2 full 8-packs of dry-erase board markers per child, color crayons in a wide array of multicultural colors and an assortment of gadgets that will no doubt have disappeared within the first month of classes: scissors, ruler, protractor and the required daily planner (required, but available for purchase for $10 from the school store).

I think the only supplies required when I was little were a single pack of crayons, two pencils and a pencil box, an old shirt of my dad’s to cover my clothing during art class and a pair of gym shoes to change into in case I wore my Mary Janes with the slippery soles. My pencil box was an old cigar box that came from my dad. It was the perfect size, but it had a picture of Anthony with a naked Cleopatra on the inside of the lid. I was mortified to think someone might actually see that, but I don’t think anyone ever noticed.

Oh yeah – we had to bring our own paste, too. One thing the smell of paste will always remind me of is that in second grade, a little boy named Eric ate half my paste and part of my eraser, too. How bizarre is that? Who on earth would ever think to eat paste and erasers? I was so angry over that, to think that he wasn’t just taking them to use, but to eat them? I think he must have been pretty hungry. Yuck!
Do you have any funny grade-school memories to share? I want to hear them!

Our Old Green Chevy

1977 Chevrolet Impala Picture by owner Matt Hubbard of Mount Airy, MD

I overheard part of a conversation the other day; what I heard made me chuckle. The man speaking was probably just a few years older than I. When he was a kid and his family would go camping, the family station wagon would be packed to the gills with kids, sleeping bags and camping gear. His mother would have to throw his food back to him from the front of the car if they went through a drive-thru for lunch, since he had exactly 2 square feet in the far back of the station wagon to squeeze into. It brought back memories of our brand-new, green 1977 Chevy Impala station wagon.

Thinking of that car reminds me of the email that I see every so often, I’m sure you have probably seen it too – the one that reminds us how lucky we are if we were born before 1980 and survived to adulthood. Funny as it is, to a certain degree it is correct. We never wore our seatbelts, and sitting in the “way back” was cool because it allowed you to make funny faces at the old people in the car behind you.

That car had a built-in toolbox compartment, and once when my dad was packing the car for a camping trip, I thought it would be really funny to play a trick on him by climbing into the toolbox (yes, I was that skinny once) and then jumping out and yelling, “BOO!”

I waited, crouched beside the car where he couldn’t see me, until he went back inside the house. Quickly, catlike, I slipped in through the open tailgate. A moment later I was carefully wedged in the tool compartment. To my surprise, when I pulled the door of the toolbox shut, it locked. I was trapped. I was curled into the fetal position in a plastic box that was only about a foot square in size, waiting for my Dad to come back, hoping he would find me.

What seemed like hours passed, Dad still wasn’t back. That was the one time my dad packed the car well in advance of our departure. I was sure he must have gone back into the house to read the morning newspaper. That would take forever! I started to panic. I couldn’t breathe, and it was really hot in that little black plastic box. With all my might, I pounded on the compartment door. Crying, sweaty and feeling like I was going to die, I screamed for my dad to help me.

And then, he heard me. Turns out I was only in there for about 20 minutes, but it scared the hell out of me. When he finally opened the compartment door, we were both so happy! It took a while to get un-wedged from my little black prison; my knees were stuck and my feet had fallen asleep. He made me promise I would never hide from him again, and I eagerly swore I never would.

I guess it is a miracle some of us did survive to adulthood!