Quilters Show Creations and Eat Candy At the Same Time

Last weekend, my quilt mini-group held its annual Christmas party.   Some members brought quilts they're finishing up, and you get a preview in this post.

Most of these quilts will be shown in "Voices in Cloth," the East Bay Heritage Quilters show on March 19-20 next year.












Here we are, quilters ranging in age from our early sixties to 93:

The No Problem Quilters, 2015.  Missing: Claudia, who took the photo, and Marion, who couldn't make it.  Visiting: Sue and Alice, daughters of our oldest member

On to the quilts.

Here's Ann's latest masterpiece:

Ann is holding the right-hand corner.  On the coffee table but out of sight: a box of See's candy that served as an hors d'oeuvre.  (Why not?  It's Christmas).

Claudia with her latest top

 

Peg, our oldest member

Angie hiding behind her quilt, with a bird flying over it

Alice, Peg's daughter, with an applique quilt her mother worked on for years. Alice finished it, and Angie quilted it.

Detail

Mabry (standing) with a quilt she finished for her great-grandson.  He chose the fabrics.

Merry Christmas!

Daycor Trends You May Not Know About

For the past few months, I've been dipping into home decorating blogs.  Most are written by women in their 20's and 30's, so I'm dropping in on another demographic, and, boy, do I feel it.  It's all been news to me.

I've identified some trends.

1.  Beige is out.  Gray is very in.  In fact it's everywhere.

 Note the sign over the range.  More on that.

An example of a "before" room:

A color found all over my house.  The blogger replaced the beige paint with gray.

2.  You can use the word "décor" in a completely un-ironic way.  As in "I picked up a few things to add to my decor today."  Or "a lot of decor is on sale." 


3.  You can paint a chair:

 This chair went from crimson to gray with something called "chalk paint."

4.  Target, Pottery Barn, and Crate and Barrel are the stores of choice for home decor, depending on  income.  I've seen one gray and white  pillow from Target, below right, umpteen times.  (I bought it on sale in coral.)

At right: the pillow seen everywhere

5. Laundry rooms are tarted-up.  It's not unusual to see a chandelier.

 They'd die if they saw my laundry room.  We're talking bare bulb.

6.  Monograms are popular, especially in the South:

 Even on the front door

Multiple trends: Gray and a monogram

7.  Signs are big (see #1), always directive re happiness.

 

8. "Pops of color" are still in style:

9.  Pillows belong on any and every chair and bench:

10.  Everybody wants a mudroom (above), although sometimes it's just a closet with the doors removed:

That pillow again

 Boots as decorative element.  Chevron design appears on pillows, rugs, bed linens.

11.  Wedding dates can be converted to Roman numerals and used as art:

Even in the bathroom

I never leave comments on these blogs, but there's one I'd love to: "Could 'fun' be used ONLY as a noun?  Please?  Not as an adjective?"

Signed, Crone

A Wall of Denial

 Jerry and I still talk about an encounter I had in New York City in 2006.  He wasn't with me--I had taken a train from Washington, DC, where we were staying, to Manhattan to go to art museums.  First, to the Museum of Modern Art, then to the Whitney, and then, tired but game, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  All in one day.

Didn't quite trust the map

The Metropolitan Museum is only a short walk from the Whitney, but I hadn't been to New York for years, and I was a bit confused about where I was going (cross Fifth Avenue, turn right).  Walking up Fifth Avenue, I saw a couple who were easily identifiable as tourists:  Overweight and dressed in shorts on an October afternoon.

"Is this the way to the museum?" I asked.

"Yep, we think so," the woman said.

We walked along.  They were jovial and talkative.   They told me that they were from Florida.

I'd just seen Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," and I remembered that Florida was particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels.  I asked them if they were worried about that.

"No," said the woman.  "We're red-staters."

That was probably the first time that I realized science could be seen solely through a scrim of politics.

I offered that my husband was a scientist and that every scientist he knew believed that global warming was a fact.

"We live 30 miles inland," the man laughed.  "If it happens, we'll have an ocean view."  

There was really nothing more to say.  We climbed the steps of the museum and went our separate ways.

When I got back to Washington, I told Jerry about it, and he was both disbelieving and amused.  It was one of the best stories he'd heard yet on the subject, he said.   Over the years, we've joked about that couple getting their ocean view.

 Now it doesn't seem so funny.

This came to mind when I read Paul Krugman's column  today's New York Times.  The deniers are still out there, even with shrinking polar ice packs, extreme weather, and rising oceans.  Sometimes I wish I could ask the Florida couple what they think now--is it still a political ploy?

Something tells me they'd still say yes.

* * * * *

I can't even address the matter of gun control.  Guns kill, but that's something to be denied, too. 

A telling fact: I've had a frivolous post ready to publish for over a week, and each day I plan to click on "Publish," there's another mass killing, and it seems insensitive and utterly beside the point to go through with it. 

I'm taking BART to San Francisco today,  and, honestly, I'm a little worried about being on public transportation.  Is this what it's like to live in a war zone?

Travel of any kind feels more perilous these days

Clinging to November

 It's still fall!  It's not Christmas!

Right now, I'm having no problem holding out against The Season, but I know that around December 15th, my defenses will crumble, and I'll pull out a few decorations from the boxes in the basement, buy a wreath to stick on the front door, and order a (very) few gifts online. 


Until then, the world seems mad.  This rush to spend money!  To buy TVs and notebooks and every other sort of toy at 30%, 40%, 50% off! Consumerism run amok.   

I'll be happy if I hear from a few college roommates and my English cousins. Those would be welcome Christmas treats.  Another one:  We're going to Suzanne's house for Christmas dinner, and I'm trying to talk her into renting a karaoke machine.  Anyone have one we could borrow? 
 

* * * * *

I'm sick about the shootings at Planned Parenthood.  I'm still puzzled and outraged by Donald Trump.  Turkey and Russia seem embroiled in a temper tantrum a deux.   Obama's coming into his own, but I'm thinking that God Him/Herself couldn't impose gun control in the USA. I've taken to re-reading PD James's autobiography, "A Time to Be In Earnest" and watching "The Vicar of Dibley."  Good thing we have tickets to England next year.  Apparently, peace lives there (except the Brits have now embraced Black Friday).

Onward.  

.

How Scared Do We Need to Be?

Yesterday our travel agent sent an e-mail saying that Business Class tickets from London to San Francisco, free with frequent flyer miles, just became available for next October and did we want them? 

I'd been dreading this.  A few weeks ago, Jenny has managed to get us free tickets to London, and I knew that it was about time for the return tickets to become available.  In the meantime, ISIS had blown up a plane in the Sinai, killed 43 people with a explosives in Beirut, and massacred 129 in Paris in a multi-pronged, nightmare attack.

No time for dallying.  She needed to act right away if we wanted them.

What I really wanted to do was to agonize with Jerry, but he wasn't available by phone, and the travel agent was going out at 5 pm.   After that, the tickets almost certainly would be gone.

Keep in mind that I didn't fly for five years after 9/11.

I started traveling again in 2006, because I was tired of missing out.

I paced around the house.  I thought about an interchange I'd had with my neighbor, Laura, last weekend.  I told her that between terrorist attacks and the impact of thousands of refugees (increased security and other possible logistic hassles), we were thinking of cancelling the trip.

"Oh, no," she said.  "We have to go on with our lives."  She's a therapist, and she just got back from Africa.

That very morning,  Paul Krugman had written a column in the New York Times titled,  "Fearing Fear Itself."  He was addressing the larger issue of military retaliation, but he also said, "The point is not to minimize the horror. It is, instead, to emphasize that the biggest danger terrorism poses to our society comes not from the direct harm inflicted, but from the wrong-headed responses it can inspire."

Wrong-headed responses, even on a personal level.  If we didn't go on the trip, I'd miss seeing my English cousins for possibly the last time (due to age, finances, and hassle, our Europe-going is nearing its end).   I'd probably never make it to Spain and Scotland. 

 With my cousins at a family reunion in 2013

Just before 5 pm, I e-mailed Jenny and told her to go ahead and reserve the tickets.

Within minutes, she e-mailed a receipt and e-tickets for tickets for next October 12.

When Jerry got home, we made a pact.  If any transatlantic planes are blown up between now and September 14, when we're supposed to leave for London, we'll cancel the trip.

"What if British intelligence heads off a terrorist attack on a plane between now and when we leave?" Jerry said. "Will that count as a deal-breaker?"

 "Maybe."

"What if a plane's bombed while we're in Europe?"

"We come back by ship?" I suggested.

We agreed that we'd do that, even if it meant a week at sea, which we'd hate.

So that's where it stands with two thoughtful (?) Berkeley liberals at the moment.  Are we being prudent or paranoid?  Any number of terrorism experts have predicted attacks on transatlantic jets heading for the U.S.  But there are hundreds that fly every day.  What's the likelihood of ours being targeted?

Does logic have a chance?

Maybe.

11-13-2015

No words.

Greenbaggers, Not Having Children, and Those Jeans

On Saturday, I had a tea party for six friends who donate food to the Berkeley Food Pantry through the Berkeley Neighborhood Food Project.  I call them "the greenbaggers," because everybody gets a green shopping bag to fill every two months.  I collect the bags and take them to the Pantry.

Oh, we had fun!  Two cakes from Masse's Bakery (flourless chocolate cake and spice cheesecake, which was much lighter than it sounds) and a bunch of age 60+ women, all liberal, each with a gratifying sense of humor, and all of them generous. Some of them had never met, but no matter. The party lasted three hours.

Did I think to take a group picture?  Yes, but you can't see much.

The greenbaggers:  Ann, Anne, Suzanne, Valerie, Claudia, Karen.  Plus cakes.

The neighborhood food project now provides about half the food distributed by the Pantry. It's so satisfying to see the food I bought in from the group on a Saturday given out to clients on Monday, when I volunteer. Last month,  I sent out an alert to the group about the need for dry cereal for families, and they donated so much that our combined-weight total was the lowest it's ever been.  Cheerios aren't very heavy.

* * * * *

Yesterday I had one of those lightbulb moments when you wonder why in the hell it took you so long to figure something out.

I was lying on a massage table having my neck and shoulders kneaded.  The young woman with the magic fingers was talking to me about some issues in her life and mentioned that she and her husband have decided they won't have another child (they have a two-year old).  She said there are many reasons, some financial, and it just isn't going to happen, which makes her sad because she's 40, and this is it.

Grieving the loss of a child you might have had is something I can relate to.  I have no children, by choice (my temperament,  lack of patience, desire to focus on other things), but occasionally I feel sad about the loss.  For a while, maybe right up until yesterday, whenever I felt a twinge of sadness about it, I'd think I might have made the wrong choice.

But yesterday, listening to this young woman, I realized that you can feel sad about something and still know that your choice was the right one.  In my case, I've revisited that choice periodically when I'm around small children, and never have I come away thinking I would have been well-suited to being a mother.  Even the adorable girls next door (now 24 and 26), who so enriched my life, were never mine to be responsible for 24/7.  Their mother, Laura, did all the work.

The young woman and I commiserated.  I told her that for me, the hardest time was when I was 38-42, when I knew window of opportunity was closing.  It would get easier, I told her.   You can have a fine life without children or with only one.  Not that you sometimes won't feel sad about the loss of what might have been.  But it doesn't mean you should doubt your choice.

Driving home, I could breathe a lot more deeply, in part due to the massage, but also: Why had it taken so long to figure this out?  Maybe because I'd never talked to a younger woman in the throes of making that choice, and I'd never articulated what I already knew, on some level.

 * * * * *

The jeans I mentioned in  the last post are continuing to be terrific.  They have ample stretch and the added benefit that they don't crease! Yes!  No crease marks from sitting.  I may go back for more. Now, if I can just stay away from the leftover cake.

 Thank-you, Not Your Daughter's Jeans!

Didn't We Just Do This?

Red and green!  The holidays are here!  Is  anybody looking forward to it?   Or let me put it this way:  Is there anyone without grandchildren who's looking forward to it?

Sigh.

Gump's has been flogging its Christmas-ornaments-for-tourists since October, little Golden Gates Bridges and Coit Towers.   Starbuck's is doing both pumpkin-spice and peppermint-chocolate drinks--which holiday are they exploiting, anyway?  The catalogs are arriving, even the Shaker Workshops.

Oxymoron, somehow: what happened to simple-and-free?

I'm doing Thanksgiving dinner for my family this year.  There's no way out, because my sister's birthday is on T-giving Day and asking her to wrestle with a clammy-cold turkey that morning is too much to ask.   I think.

My friend Mabry says a woman has only so many dinners in her.   My quota of holiday dinners was filled about 25 years ago.  Also, my quota of Christmas shopping, although the internet makes it a lot easier. 

Onward.  Can't leap forward to January 1, so might as well make the best of it.

* * * * *

Retail:   I just bought a pair of clogs!  Yes, I did, despite wearing size 41 (11 US size).  They are surprisingly comfortable.  I clomp, but there you are.  I feel taller and more confident when I'm wearing them.  Only with pants, though.  With skirts, they make me look like a cartoon character, all feet.

On Tuesday, for the first time, I deliberately bought a pair of fat-jeans.  My closet is full of semi-skinny jeans I've been talked into by salespeople.  I can't breathe in them!  Can't sit down!  To hell with it.  So I bought a pair a size up, not skinny (see photo, above).  They're baggy, but so what?  AND they were on sale.

I also bought a couple of pairs of my usual size because Not Your Daughter's Jeans has slyly figured out how to incorporate an invisible maternity panel at the tummy.  Oh, yes!   They must have, because these jeans  are quite comfortable, extremely forgiving, even a bit skinny.

Style M10K43B4337, if you're interested.

It's getting to be the time of year when I can wear a scarf without triggering a hot flash.   I took a look in my scarf drawer:  total disaster.  I can never find what I'm looking for;  I rummage around frantically, and then give up because if I find one I want to wear, it's always a wrinkled mess that needs ironing.

So, I took a handful of 20%-off coupons to Bed, Bath & Beyond and bought two of these:

$4.99 each

They are splendid! I ironed my scarves and looped them through. 

 There's so little left in the scarf drawer that I can actually find things:

Did you know that BB&B coupons are good indefinitely, even if there's an end date printed on them?  Also, you can use one for a group of things, instead of one per item.  Learned that yesterday.

* * * * *

For months,  ever since Jerry found out he'd have to vacate his campus office in Wellman Hall, we've worked a few hours each weekend packing up books and reprints to bring home.  Or, better yet, to leave in a big sloppy stack outside his office door to be recycled.  We owe the Recycle Gremlin a great big bottle of bourbon.

Here we were last weekend:

My role is to badger and direct.  I read the Sunday New York Times until I see that he's bogged down and putting way too much stuff aside to be saved.  Then I'm ruthless.  No, no, and no.  He pretty much goes along, mostly because his home study is already full.

He's a big fan of old oak office furniture

Acres of books and reprints removed...

...almost removed, anyway.  To go WHERE, is the question.

My favorite sign

Half the room is empty.  But the other half:

Worse than my scarf drawer

Left for the Recycle Gremlin at the end of the day.  Week after week, it disappears like magic.

 We're aiming to be finished with this by the end of the year.  Stay tuned.