Darn it!

I like this top.  The colors are nice.  It has some built in bling.  It’s unstructured and kind of flows over the body in a rather flattering manner.   I wore it to work today.  Unfortunately I also wore it while cooking dinner on my glass top stove. That’s where the unstructured, flowy-ish nature of the top went from being an asset to being downright hazardous.  

The problem arose when a hot pan (containing stir-fried turkey) was moved off the burner to another part of the stove.  After messing around for a minute with the rice and vegetables  on the counter,  I looked back at the stove and noticed some goop on the burner.  “Now what in the world is that?” I wondered.  “Was something stuck on the bottom of the pan that I didn’t see until it was moved?”  All of a sudden, I knew.  That wasn’t  smeared food on that burner—that was a chunk of my shirt!  And sure enough, when I looked down at my lovely flowing top, a 3” by 4” hole met my eyes. 

Rats!  Hopefully some creative cutting and sewing will enable the shirt to be salvaged.  (Or it will sit unaltered in the sewing room until it finally gets thrown away.)  Bummer.

 

Bothersome Things

1.  When you wake up to a beautiful sunny day, but by the time you get your “work” done and go outside to enjoy the weather, the sky has filled with clouds and there’s no sunshine to be found anywhere.

2.  When you sacrifice your evening to drive one of your kids to (and then back again) a party/school or church activity/sporting event/etc.,  and at the end of the evening he/she says he/she had a rotten time.

3.  When you carefully nurture a favorite euonymus shrub and a little stinker of a dog named Cambridge comes along and tears it to bits.

4.  When you plant ivy in the front yard in the hopes it will grow down the hill and fill in the spots where the grass looks like the top of a bald man’s head, and it grows up the hill instead.

5.  When you sit down to watch a certain movie you really wanted to see, but you just can’t keep your eyes open.

6.  When a cashier acts like he's/she’s doing you a big fat favor by ringing up your items.

8.  The fact that people vote even though they haven’t attempted in any way to learn anything about the issues and where the candidates stand on those issues.

9.  When it takes two years for the next book in a beloved series to be published.

10.  When people complain about “bothersome things” when they live such a blessed life that they should thank God every day that they have it so good!

Heretofore Unacknowledged Decorating Genius!

I might be a decorating genius!  Here’s the back story:  The Man and I inherited an ancient mattress many, many years ago.  It was already very old when it took up residence with us.  But it worked, the price was right ($0), and it was actually quite comfortable.  I remember lying in our bed thinking, “Boy this is a cozy bed” until the herniated disk thing happened.   The soft mattress that was once so inviting now made the bed feel like a torture rack.  Firmness was what was needed!  So we bought a new mattress set and passed the soft cuddly mattress on to one of our boys.  That was nine or ten years ago.

That old mattress came to my attention again when recently  taking on the Herculean task of swapping the furniture in Josh’s room with the stuff in the sewing room.  Josh’s bed frame had to be dismantled to make it out the door.   Off came the comforter and the sheets and the mattress cover and the foam topper.  And there was that old mattress.  The ticking was torn and the padding underneath was matted and flat.  It looked like a cast off from  a 1940’s flop house.  It was time to say goodbye.  Somehow I got that heavy thing to the top of the stairs and with one mighty heave, down it went.  It lay in a heap at  the bottom, so I crawled over it and grabbed hold where I could (the built-in cloth handles were long gone) and managed to drag it through the entry hall and into the living room.  It looked even more pathetic lying there.  

When The Man came home and saw it on the living room floor, the protestations began.  The usual comments were made about me “getting up a head of steam” and “how are we going to get that out of here”, and blah, blah, blah, so I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll just cut it up and put it out into the garbage.”  So while The Man was at work, that’s exactly what I did.  As I hacked away at the mattress carcass, I tried not to think of all the dead skin cells and other nastiness that was undoubtedly swirling around in the air and being sucked into my lungs.  It took 7 large yard bags to contain all the pieces. 

 

By the time all the ticking and batting and hayish-looking stuff was stripped away and bagged, all that was left were some springs.  They would have to be taken to the “transfer station” to be recycled, so got propped against the side of the garage for the time being.  

As I looked at them, however, I noticed that they were actually pretty interesting looking.  “It seems like a person could do something with those,” I thought.  “But what?  Maybe they would look good on the wall as a piece of graphic art!”  Boy wouldn’t The Man just loooove that!  Uh ----NO.  I wandered back into the house wondering why there seemed to be so many untapped possibilities in objects that most people consider “junk.”

Well, imagine my surprise when two days later, I opened the “Your Good House” supplement included with the November 2012 issue of Good Housekeeping, and saw this:

Apparently I’m not the only one that sees possibilities in “junk.”  That’s somehow very comforting….