Confessions of a Grandma

I have been working on two different quilts and have finished the tops to both.  That is the easy part. I went to the community center to work on the large scrappy quilt.  I set up several tables so I could lay out the three layers and get them pinned together while keeping each layer as wrinkle free as possible.  It was hard work.  In the process of either setting up or taking down those tables, I did some damage.  My knee cap is black and blue and my shin too.  I managed a small cut just below my knee.  All on the left leg. It looks like I have taken up a rough and tumble contact sport instead of a sedate activity like sewing. And let me tell you, maneuvering a large quilt around a small machine to do the quilting is labor intensive as well.  First of all, it involves setting up extra tables to hold the weight.  Then there is all the adjusting and readjusting to keep all the layers smooth.  I'm hoping my arms will muscl...

Those who keep track of such things are predicting a huge influx of tourists this season.  Cold winters in the north are good for the Florida economy.   I have already noticed a big increase in the traffic around town.  Today there was a big car show at the airport and we had to take the long way around to get to the beach.  Damn Snowbirds! I can get away with outrageous statements like that because--when I am not driving around in my car with a Vermont license plate--I am often taken for a native.  That is not necessarily a compliment, but I do plan to check out the Cracker festival this year to see how far I can push it. Even before the tourists get here though, there is plenty of what the Allstate commercials call mayhem on the roads.  In fact with the number of three wheel cycles, golf carts, and those scooter things, there is plenty of mayhem even off the roads.  Those ride-in grocery carts?--mayhem in the supermarket aisles. I did hear that...

On Thursday, we made a trip to Pine Island.  Mike has an old and dear friend who bought a house there so we visited him and went out for a lunch.  Later we went to visit another friend of ours, a neighbor from Jericho, VT, who also stays on Pine Island. Venice is about thirty miles to the north of Fort Myers. I forgot to take my camera, so the pictures are from google.      You go there to fish or to grow palm trees.   I love these day trips and exploring the areas around us. 

Mike and I had our evening out at the Venice Theater.  We went to a sold out performance of Intimate Apparel, a play written by Lynn Nottage.  I might add—very well written, too. Images of from various productions of the play can be seen here. There was a certain amount of buzz as we stood in line about the play being based on a true story. A lonely woman being taken advantage of by an unscrupulous man—really not to hard to believe! It is about Ester, a 35 year old woman who makes her living sewing fine lingerie for New York society matrons and less reputable ladies of the night.  She longs for love even as she diligently stashes dollar bills in a crazy quilt.  Her savings are to be used to fulfill a dream of opening a beauty spa for black women.  In the meantime, she visits her customers and Mr. Marks, a purveyor of fine fabrics and a devout Hungarian Jew. It is set in 1905, but the themes are truly timeless—what brings us together, what keeps us apar...

I am in the middle of Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.   Perhaps you can tell from that title that the bias is strongly in favor of introverts.  Since I happen to clearly be one of the introvert persuasion, that is quite okay by me. I like my quiet time and Mike absolutely has to have his quiet time and would prefer for it to be about twenty-three and a half hours out of his day.  He loves to talk (quietly) but to one or two people at a time. I can tolerate about ten minutes of social chit chat and then I want to get down to business.  I do not mind public speaking although that did come with thirty plus years of teaching experience desensitizing me to it. So when there was an all New Englanders’ dinner last Saturday night, I surprised Mike by saying I wanted to go and he surprised me by saying he would go as well.  There was a lot of food—clam chowder, NE boiled dinner, Boston Crème Pie, apple pie with V...

Whoops.  Not alive.  Dead. As some of you may know, there was a python hunt in the Everglades a week or so ago.  Pythons have become an invasive species in southern Florida, having escaped from parks and zoos over the years.  So of course when I saw this tail sticking out from under the lanai screening, I screamed calmly called Mike to come outside and deal with it.  He thought it was probably definitely not a python. He tugged on it with a pair of tongs. And tugged some more.  It was quite stuck and already dead. It must have been trying to follow one of the lizards that can squeeze through those little drain holes with no problem at all. We looked in our Audubon book and identified it as a red (scarlet?) snake—harmless.  Unless you are a lizard, but the lizard won this time.

I am slowly but surely becoming frustrated with the spam that accumulates daily in Comments. I tried turning on the comment moderation which seemed to have the effect of letting more spam through the so-called filter.  And then there is my tendency to hit the "delete" instead of the "publish" button for legitimate comments.  I hate that!  My apologies to those whose comments did not make it into print. And why does Blogger tell me it is "saving" when I hit "delete" I wonder? Of course there is always the dreaded word verification option.  Surely there can be a better way? The one good thing I can say about it is that it does always prompt me to clean my glasses.  Sometimes that helps. Connie at Family Home and Life does a link-up where I read this post: Please Turn Off Captcha . I have decided to tweak my settings a bit.  I turned comment moderation to "sometimes" (for older posts) and I disallowed "anonymous" co...