Just add it to the list...

So around these parts we don't guess at gifts. It took me a while to get used to it, but my husband's family always asked (out loud!) what you want for Christmas and birthdays. Coming from a family where we played the guessing game and liked to spring a surprise on the giftee it took me a while to get used to this. But I have and I've gotten better at it. He asked me last week what I wanted for my birthday. I finally got around to writing a couple of items down on a piece of paper and left it on the kitchen counter where I figured he'd see it. Got home from work tonight and noticed he had added one more item to the list. So, I stroll over and pick up the list for a look-see. What has he added you might ask? "Shaving Cream". Hmmm...maybe I should have listed a depilatory. I can only hope he thought it was just a random shopping list rather than a birthday list. Or maybe HE'D better hope that I think that!

The Ticket Booth

We have this table. It's a cute little table as tables go. I believe it belonged to my grandparents. I know it lived for quite a while in the attic at my mother's house. I stumbled upon it one summer when I was home visiting from Dallas. Since I had recently taken a course in furniture refinishing I took possession of the wee little table with the parents' permission. I took it back to cow country with me to breathe a little new life into it.

The table was covered with a few decades of grime and grit and probably had been subjected to more than one blast of rain from a summer thunderstorm. Thunderstorms in Norfolk, VA can be quite ferocious with rain coming into the house slant-wise and the wind blowing hard enough to make you think the weatherman overlooked a hurricane coming ashore. Anyhow, the little table had weathered quite a bit and was in need of some TLC.

Now in this furniture refinishing class I picked up a little bit of know-how about all things furniture, not just how to make them look prettier. The one thing that our instructor emphasized was that if you had a nice piece with "good bones" then it was worth your while to refinish the piece rather than to purchase a new one. New furniture is often made of a combination of wood and pressed paper. Yep, even the stuff that looks like it's all wood. Pressed paper...much heavier than wood if you can believe that.

So, I took the little table with its good bones and intact glass and put it through the refinishing wringer. Stripped all the gunk off. Then sanded and stained it and added a little glossy finish. The top of the table is a glass tray with a wooden border that comes off of the base. I figured to leave it like that with the wooden base and the glass tray on top and be done with it. My husband had other ideas. He had a nice little collection of old concert tickets that he wanted to display on the table under glass. I was more than a little skeptical about that, but eventually gave in. To my surprise it worked...looked pretty good.

The fun has been in adding more tickets as the years go by and as we attend more shows and functions. It has a couple of good layers on it now. As I recall on the bottom row we have a pristine ticket to The Grateful Dead which ticket my husband had from the old days when they tore your ticket in half at the door. For some reason he got away with his in one piece and has treasured that one.

The ticket booth? Why that name? When I had refinished it and we had carefully arranged the tickets under the glass and had placed it carefully in the den in our house in Dallas it took on a new life for our daughter. Turns out when we were out and she was home with the babysitter and often a couple of her buddies they would play tag and hide-and-seek in the house. If you tagged that table (which SHE named The Ticket Booth) then you were safe. Guess that wasn't as bad on the furniture as what her father used to do with his mother's teakwood table and a ping pong net.

Ally Ally In Come Free

Today was one of those days when I wanted to shout to a clear, crisp January sky, "Ally ally in come free" and have all of my loved ones reappear. I'm not sure why it was that I missed them so much on today of all days. Usually these moments happen at an anniversary or a birthday. There were no birthdays for my dearly departed, nor was this the anniversary of the death of any single one of them. It was just a Monday. And yet I was overcome with a need to SEE them again. Not a picture, not in my mind's eye, but with my real eyes. I wanted to see, touch and feel them again. Have a hug, enjoy a smile, get a kiss on the cheek, share a moment.

I wanted to see them all. My sister and brother so recently gone and far too soon.

My mother and father-in-law who were such kind and generous and loving people who are so sorely missed.

My dad - that loveable curmudgeon with his sharp tongue and sharper wit.

My grandmother, a supurb seamstress and a talented Southern cook.

And my gentle grandfather who never knew the words, "no" or "can't".



I want just a day, just one more day with each of them. But then that wouldn't be enough would it? There would always be that longing for just one more day, one more moment. Ally ally in come free.

Good Morning Deer

We live out in the country along with what seems a thousand or so deer within a hundred yards of the house. I'm sure there are more than that within a mile's radius. They must breed like rabbits, so to speak. Beautiful animals, I love watching their graceful movements. I do have to remind myself how annoyed I get at them when they eat every living thing in my garden. Their inconsiderate munching has gotten so bad I never bothered to plant a vegetable garden last summer. Undeterred, the deer just proceeded to eat my flower gardens. So, I have to keep telling myself that no matter how beautiful and graceful they are they drag tons of critters and diseases along with them. (Hello, deer ticks and Lyme disease anyone?) They also have a tendency to have encounters with cars that end up being bad news both for the deer and for the car owner. When ever I catch them nibbling on my plants I threaten to get out John's driver and turn them into Bambi Burger, but I could never do that. They are definitely not intimidated by my threats. They just look at me and only dart off if I get within a few feet of them. I do enjoy seeing the little ones playing in the yard in spring and early summer. I took some pictures Wednesday morning as they were feasting on the neighbor's field. If only they'd eat the neighbor's plants and leave mine alone. We'd all get along so much better. Sigh...

Just Wait Five Minutes...

Seems to me no matter where I've lived the locals liked to say the same thing about the vagaries of the weather: "Don't like the weather? Just wait five minutes and it'll change." Well, it wasn't exactly five minutes, but on Friday and Saturday we had temps close to 70 degrees. On Sunday the high got into the 60's. Today we had snow and sleet showers. By my reckoning that's about a 40 degree change in temps from Friday to today. Since I was without a camera I'll post one of the local weekly pictures of the downtown mall. Obviously not much snow fell and none accumulated. All the better. Now, if the Farmer's Almanac can only be wrong about that blizzard they're predicting for the end of the month...
Here I was hoping that we would skip winter altogether and slide straight into spring. Oh, well. One can always hope.

The Queen's Visit

So I got curious about just which Queen was visiting Suriname when I was posting the pictures from our Grandfather's South American trips. Turns out it was Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. Suriname is also known as Dutch Guiana and was a Dutch colony back in the day. I remember seeing invitations to a dinner with the Queen of the Netherlands that my Grandmother had framed and mounted. I guess it was during the visit the Queen made to Suriname. These are the shots from that visit. Must be the royal procession through town that was captured here:



Queen Juliana of the Netherlands and Prince Bernhard

 Hmmm...I guess you can't really call it a "motor" cade when the mode of transportation is on horseback, now can you? I read up a little on Queen Juliana. She was quite a favorite of the Dutch people. She apparently didn't go in for a lot of pomp and circumstance and rode her bike around town. Not what you'd expect of royalty now is it? I rather like that approach...and so did her subjects. I get the impression that they thought she was the real deal.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

A couple of weeks ago my email got hacked. Fortunately it was over the weekend so I was able to spend much of the following day cleaning up emails. I must have deleted 4,000 ancient emails. Not sure why I had so many other than hotmail gives me a boatload of space and I never use most of it, so I just got lazy.  

I also had not cleaned out old emails from my sister and brother. I knew there were a few I wanted to keep, since they're gone and I won't be getting any more emails from them. My sister wrote rarely. My brother was a prolific writer. He was also the keeper of our family history. I was delighted when he began publishing pictures of us, our parents and our grandparents either in emails or on his blog. I miss his stories as much as I miss him.

When I was cleaning up emails I came across some pictures of our grandfather (Pop) in Surinam. Pop had a degree from Moo U (aka NC State) in agriculture. He worked as a local extension agent in Raleigh and eventually worked his way up to the big show in Washington, DC working for the Agriculture Dept. As a part of that job he was selected as one of a group of men who would go to South America and teach the locals down there how to better farm their land. No doubt they took DDT and all kinds of other stuff which is now banned, but was state-of-the-art back then. All this went on in the late 1950's and early 1960's. In fact my grandparents lived in Surinam during the first two years of my life - 1954 - 1956. Later, although Pop retired in 1960, he was still asked to go on some of these junkets to South America as a consultant. I can remember my grandmother bemoaning having to find him a winter coat in July since he was going south of the equator and the country he was going to was in the middle of winter.



Pop always came back with a bunch of slides he would show for us and some neighbors who were good friends of theirs. These pictures were a tad racy as some of those Surinam ladies went nekkid from the waist up. That was shocking back in the early 60's. So, join me for a trip down memory lane as I share some of Pop's exotic adventures.