Christmas, Part 2

As I mentioned in a previous post, we had our Christmas celebration at Mom and Dad’s on New Year’s Day instead of Christmas Day because an ice storm we had messed up schedules. I went over to their house on New Year’s Eve to make the dressing and do a couple of other things for meal prep. To make the dressing you first make the cornbread, then eat a bit of cornbread when it’s done with lots of butter. When the cornbread is cool you break it up into pieces, add white bread (in this case, hot dog buns) and add the chicken broth, onion, salt and pepper, and sage to taste. I mixed it all up and didn’t even really have to add anything except a little bit of pepper after I tasted it. Mom declared it a triumph, so we put in in the fridge to cook the next day.

Mom has the timing down exactly right for all the holiday foods, so I kept going to her to figure out what to put in the oven next. We had rolls (they go in the oven last); mashed potatoes with sour cream, butter, cheddar cheese, chives, and bacon (The Hubs made that); turkey breast (that goes in first since it isn’t cooked), ham (made the glaze the morning of, didn’t have any cornstarch to put in it the day before); a veggie dish with broccoli, cauliflower, pepper jack cheese, sour cream, and other yums; chips and guacamole (always made first for an appetizer); and sweet potatoes with orange juice and marshmallows (put the sweet potatoes in under the broiler to brown the marshmallows — I didn’t do it quite right and the marshmallows melted into the sweet potatoes but they were still delicious). The we had chocolate pie and pumpkin pie for dessert, but everyone wanted chocolate pie so we left the pumpkin for Mom and Dad to eat later. It wasn’t the same as when Mom makes the dinner, but it tasted good and everyone enjoyed it as far as I know. The Girl and Her Fiancé weren’t able to join us because she wasn’t feeling well and he was scheduled to work.

The soft trivets were made by my Great Aunt Clara.

We had gift-opening time before we ate and that was fun as usual, I got some very nice gifts and I think everyone appreciated their goodies. I received this Garmin Venu smartwatch and I then modified it with a screen protector with a pink frame and a new black band with a lace design, because I enjoy making things my own, ha. It started out like this:

Original Venu Sq watch.

And now it looks like this:

Modified watch.

The screen protector just snaps over the whole front of the watch, and came in a set with many other colors. The band came in a set with many colors to choose from as well. I found both sets on Amazon. I also ordered a new RoadID with my pertinent information on it in case of emergency, it fits over the watchband. The one for my old Garmin watch was too large for this band.

Some other photos from our Christmas celebration:

Having dinner.

Another angle of the dinner eating.

Some of our goodies.

A nifty lantern snow globe Mom received from a friend.

I wish I had gotten more photos, but I was busy concentrating on the food.

We all had a great time visiting and I was sorry when we all had to go home. I went to Mom and Dad’s again this last Sunday and helped put away the Christmas decorations. They have been using a potted pine as a Christmas tree for the last three or so years and it is oddly doing well in its pot outdoors during the year. Dad says it is almost a bonsai tree at this point. Here he is taking it back outside to its place on the deck.

We had a great time together celebrating what God has done for us through His Son, Jesus. Amazing Grace, indeed!!

Washcloths

The other day I ordered three dozen washcloths, two dozen for us and one dozen for Mom. Our gray washcloths were looking pretty shabby, and when I was taking care of Mom a couple of weeks ago I noticed her drawer was full of a bunch of threadbare washcloths that wouldn’t do much good, and I thought she deserved some nice luxurious washcloths to wash her face with. I got the washcloths from Kohl’s, they were on sale and I had a nice coupon I could use on top of the sale.

My order finally arrived and I got the washcloths out to prepare them for washing (I always wash new towels before using). They came in plastic bags like this:

And they were rolled up like this:

After I took off all the plastic bags I had to cut off the ribbon around each bouquet of washcloths:

So I did that and tossed them into my laundry basket, thinking I was done.

But then I discovered one of these in each washcloth:

And I had to cut each one very carefully so I didn’t snip a hole in the washcloth:

36 washcloths and a zillion minutes later I finally had all the little plastic widgets taken out of the washcloths and the washcloths in the washing machine. All in all, much more of an ordeal than I expected, ha!

Doorknobs

You GUYS, guess what? After 18 years living in our house I finally get to have all matching doorknobs!! Isn’t that the neatest? The Hubs started in this morning and asked me if I wanted to learn how to put on a doorknob, and of course I said I did. This is the new doorknob design – I got them at Lowe’s.

The Hubs began by taking the old doorknob off the hall closet door. There are five doors in our “hall” (a square area in the middle of the house). We had already replaced the bathroom doorknob, and while the two offices and stairs doors matched each other, the hall closet had a totally different knob. When he got the knob off the closet door, he discovered this on one side:

And this on the other side.

I think they shot at it from far away…

Um…ordinarily you would just make a hole with a hole saw or something, like this one in my office door:

So right off, there were some annoyances. This was not unexpected, since our house was formerly owned by a man who thought he was good at building and remodeling. Note the word “thought”. He was not good at building or remodeling. In fact, we would describe most of his work as “horrible”, and often “nonsensical”.

The Hubs (while making sure I knew that this isn’t the best way to do a doorknob, the best way would be to get a new door and then put on the doorknob, but we don’t have new doors in our budget right now) had to get out his Leatherman tool with the little saw and saw out some of the material to make the hole bigger. Then he realized that there were two little tabs on each side of the new doorknob that needed to fit in, and he had to get a pointy tool to dig out some space for the little tabs. (I don’t think The Hubs has a hole saw, so he just had to make modifications.)

Digging out for the tabs

See the little tabs at top and bottom?

The strikeplate wouldn’t fit in its spot properly, and then The Hubs suggested I sand and paint the area before he put in the new plate since it wouldn’t cover the brown.

The Hubs decided I should put on my office doorknob, so I got the screwdriver and started taking off the knob. The screwdriver was a bit thin and kept falling out of the screw, so that took awhile.

It finally was done and then I took off the faceplate and the innards of the knob, and then we found that the hole wasn’t big enough for the doorknob works to fit through. The Hubs got out a round file and filed the hole out so the knob workings would fit.

See how it’s too wide?

The Hubs with his file.

Then The Hubs just went ahead and put my office doorknob on himself, and later I started removing the doorknob on his office door. That one had to be filed out as well, so he did that and then went ahead and put THAT knob on, so I didn’t get to put any of them on, but that’s OK. We still have to put on the one that goes on the stairs door and the one on The Girl’s door, and the one on our bedroom door, but now we have to wait to do those until The Hubs has more days off from work.

Isn’t it nice?

So much more up-to-date!

But I just can’t BELIEVE I finally have matching doorknobs!! How awesome!!

Honor Book

This week I got a bunch of goodies from Facebook Marketplace. I got a large group of Hardy Boys books from one seller, and a lot of old magazines, recipe books, and other random books from another seller. One of the random books was this Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary with a publication date of 1925.

Honor Book

Mary Collison was such a good speller from Detroit in the 1928 National Spelling Bee that she won this dictionary. It was awarded to “one of the best spellers in the schools of the Detroit Metropolitan Area” by The Detroit News. The dictionary is three inches thick! (I’ve always enjoyed dictionaries. In middle school when I got caught talking and had to copy the dictionary, I didn’t mind a bit. I think the teacher knew it, ha.)

Lots of words in here!

It has nice little illustrations and is still very usable, although the binding is damaged and some pages are coming out.

I had never heard of a fulmar until I read this page.

Binding not in such great shape.

I found a surprise or two in there!

I have the dictionary for sale on Etsy, and hope someone else will think it as fascinating as I do! I’ll share some of the other goodies I got in a later post.

New Machines

We received our new air fryer yesterday. We have never had one before and wanted to try it out, so we put some two-day-old apple cider donuts in it at 350 degrees for 4 minutes.

New air fryer.

The donuts turned out quite well. They were warm and the sugar on the outside of the donuts didn’t melt, but stayed nice and crunchy. Here is a photo of…well, part of a donut after it came out of the air fryer:

Erm…oops, I ate them.

I might put them in for only three minutes if we do it again.

We got the air fryer because someone brought one to The Hubs’s work, and after he cooked a piece of pizza in it he decided that it would be good to have one as the pizza came out crispy and delicious. I have looked at recipes for cooking frozen chicken breast and fried okra in the air fryer so far. I think we (well, I) will be having okra for lunch today. Yum-O!

I also bought myself a Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. I have been wanting one for quite awhile and found this nice one on the Kohl’s website, on sale with a 40% off the last sale price coupon.

Roomba.

It isn’t the fanciest one they make, but it does have the capacity to empty its dirt bin by itself if I bought the attachment for that, which I may. You can control it from your phone, and once I finally got that set up I let it out into the living room and it cleaned and cleaned, but then took itself back to its charging station because the dirt bin was full. I was overdue on vacuuming myself and decided that I had better vacuum the carpets thoroughly before letting the Roomba go, just so it wouldn’t fill up its bin so quickly and would keep on cleaning. It rolled around back and forth from my office to the living room, and certainly picked up a lot of dirt. I plan to have it go again today, and maybe set it to go every Monday or Tuesday!

Great Junk Hunt

Today I attended The Great Junk Hunt, a vintage show and flea market held at the Oregon State Fairgrounds. It is, according to their website:

• Voted top traveling vintage market in the USA by Flea Market Style magazine!
• Recently named one of the TOP 5 2019 Flea Markets in the U. S. and voted one of the Top 15 Flea Markets 2016!
• Listed as a must attend Flea Market in America by Flea Market Decor magazine!

I’ve been to the market once but it has been a few years. Marnie had other plans today so I went (gasp!) by myself! I wore my fall black cat/pumpkin shirt to be festive.

Last time I wore this shirt I received many compliments! Today not so much.

I paid $12 for a ticket for the early bird entry (an hour earlier than general admission) and got there at 8:20 to be in line for the 9:00 opening. They had even earlier-bird entries available yesterday, but those were even more expensive and in the afternoon, and I prefer to go places in the morning.

I waited in line and listened to the ladies around me talk about their teenagers and lawyers and other things. It started to rain a little and people ran to their cars to get coats and umbrellas, after which it promptly quit raining. It was definitely very chilly and my eyes were watering from the cold! I’m glad I got there early because there was quite a line behind me as 9:00 rolled around. The show encompassed two fairgrounds buildings and since I was in the right-hand line I went in the building on the right first.

Here are some things I saw that I found interesting (obviously there were many more interesting things, these are just a few of the things I saw):

A large fungus – we see them on trees quite often on our hikes. I didn’t see what the price was.

$35 is a bit steep.

Adorable Racoon Family metal sculpture. I’m going to see if The Hubs can make something like this.

Super neat “ferris wheel” plant holder. It was $110 or I would have snapped it up. I saw that later someone had bought it.

This is from the Rusty Birds metal artists. They make many cute birds and lots of other garden art, including the little kitty peeking over our fence you can see in some of our yard photos.

This lady added weird things to paintings. I guess that is Boba Fett(?) added to Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. I prefer the original Blue Boy myself.

I have some lamps like these. They came with plastic ruffled shades with a fabric overlay. I didn’t know they were worth this much, ha!

Plastic dinosaurs with candle holders. What a fun idea! There were also some dinosaurs made into bookends. This was in the booth where I got my treasure 🙂

Lots of children’s books at this market, but no Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys. I did see a couple Bobbsey Twins.

Someone’s old floppy disks made into notepad covers.

One booth had a lot of this pottery. I can’t remember the name of the maker but it is vintage and very expensive. This vase had no price tag but the one below it was $245. It has a wonderful, soft feel and beautiful pastel colors.

I got a couple of frames like this at the Mama Roost yard sale for $5 each. This one was $32.

I should have grabbed a couple more of these old keys, but I couldn’t get past the $4 price tag. Although, that is the going price for these.

Old paintbrush with case.

Back of paintbrush jacket. Isn’t that interesting? The man who had this booth was telling me he was running on only 4 hours of sleep in the last few days, after we literally bumped into each other. It was their first time selling at a show. I told him I had an Etsy store and he asked for my info, so I gave him a business card I cleverly had with me. 😀

Why did it never occur to me to make magnets out of my Scrabble tiles?

I could make a garland like this with all the scrap fabric I got a few weeks ago at the Mama Roost yard sale.

I thought it was a fine idea to make a little storage space under a chair cushion.

I have three little chairs like this.

I have this exact same light fixture globe for sale in my Etsy shop but mine has the fixture and chains that go with it. I am selling mine for quite a bit more though. Perhaps I should lower my price.

This was already sold or I might have grabbed it up too. Isn’t it fun? It’s made out of an old door like the one I have in the storage room.

And FINALLY, here are the treasures I bought, including the most bestest one, a rolling pin with green handles! That’s what I was searching for and I found it for the right price. Hooray! The little Christmas tree was only $5 and it has lights! The books are just for color to decorate with, since we are doing a black/white/blue/silver theme for Christmas this year. I think I will use the drawer and basket to put on my kitchen decor shelf to make “levels” so I can display things better.

Treasures!

These tiny ornaments came with the tree, the booth man came running up to me after I took the tree and said that the ornaments and garland went with it. I think they were anxious to get rid of them, ha! The garland is in bad shape with the paint coming off, so it had to go “the way of all things”. There is an interesting assortment of tiny ornaments, including 4 Bratz doll ornaments with a hanger that says “Bratz” on it. I’m sending those with The Girl to take to The Youngest Girl, who enjoyed playing with her Bratz dolls when she was little.

Odd assortment of ornaments.

Tiny Bratz ornaments. I might use the little snowflakes since they are blue and white.

After the show I went over to see The Boy and take him a couple of things. I visited with my grandcat, Basteta, and The Boy’s roommate’s cat, Piglet. Basteta is a fluffy gray kitty, and Piglet is a big cat with a curly tail.

I’ll say that if you want to go to The Great Junk Hunt, it is worth the extra few dollars to get in early. By 10:15 there were so many people that I could barely get through the booths. Much nicer to be there when it wasn’t so crowded!

Eggbeater!

I looked in some storage bins this last week in order to consolidate things, and found this vintage eggbeater I had bought awhile back. I completely forgot about it! I think I put it away because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it.

I like green-handled vintage kitchen implements because my kitchen color theme is green. The green theme came from this green secretary desk I bought at a second-hand store a few years ago.

Vintage Secretary Desk – chippy and shabby

I asked The Hubs to figure out how to hang the eggbeater on the wall with my other kitchen things, and he decided to make a hook:

Eggbeater hook.

Eggbeater on hook.

Here it is on the wall with some of the other vintage kitchen things. The ads for canned fruit and cookies came out of a 1922 Ladies Home Journal. All I need now is a vintage rolling pin with green handles and my wall will be complete! Well, maybe… 😃

Storage

(Or: Tetris With Furniture)

As I mentioned in the bench results post, I recently brought this desk/dressing table to my house from Mom and Dad’s, and I needed to move it into the storage room.

Grandma’s dressing table.

In order to fit the desk into the storage room, I had to take almost everything out of one side of the room. There are two sides of the storage room, one for miscellaneous furniture, etc., and one for my hiking/backpacking/camping things and vintage treasures. I don’t have a photo of what the room looked like before I took everything out, but here’s what the bedroom looked like after I emptied the storage room into it:

A lot of stuff, and that isn’t even all of it.

Some things just got moved over to the other side of the storage room.

That’s Consuela the Mannequin. She helps me with my Etsy shop. The Sis-In-Law gave me the giant bag of packing peanuts.

I keep a lot of empty boxes to ship my Etsy items. They take up about 1/3 of the room. I have many ceramic Christmas village houses selling on Etsy that will need the large boxes to ship them.

Here is what the storage room looked like when I got most of the stuff out of that one side and after we moved the desk in. We bought one of those 4-wheeled furniture dollies at Harbor Freight and rolled it in on that, and then just left the desk on top of it.

I like empty frames, as you can see by this frame wall in my office.

I bought many of the frames below at an antique mall in Aurora, Oregon, that was having a parking lot sale. They were all $1.00 and $2.00 apiece, which is ridiculously cheap. I bought most of the pile at the sale. Some of the others I got at the Mama Roost yard sale and they were ridiculously inexpensive as well. In order to fit everything back into the storage room, the frames had to go upstairs to a newly cleared spot in the hall. (The upstairs “hall” is also a storage area.) I didn’t realize how much space they actually take up.

I like frames.

The Hubs suggested putting the old door on top of the desk (with a carpet remnant under it). That allowed more space to put things on top of the desk. The door came off a “shed” that was in our yard when we moved into this house. In order to build the shop, the shed had to come down, as the city only allows 600 square feet of outbuildings total on a property. Now, if you attach your shop to the house you can go as big as you want, but The Hubs didn’t want to take the chance that his welding would burn the house down. The door still has both doorknobs and the robe hook. I think it might have been one of the original doors to the house, as there is one just like it that they used for the upstairs bathroom. The doors in the rest of the main house seem to be from the 1970s when the house was remodeled.

I gradually moved the rest of the things in:

Finished product.

You’ve probably noticed that I also like tall vintage lamps. Well, lamps in general. Someday I will have a place to use them. This is my OTHER bag of packing peanuts. I have enough for quite a lot of shipping. And I have enough boxes as well. I have over 100 things for sale on Etsy right now, plus bins of things that aren’t even listed yet, so I need to have a variety of boxes for shipping. I wish I had some sort of box closet so they wouldn’t have to be in the storage room, but that won’t happen until The Girl moves out and I can move half the stuff up to her room, ha.

I was happy that I did the whole job in just a couple of hours and was feeling all proud of myself and everything, until later I remembered that the mirror to the dressing table was left behind the cedar chest in our bedroom. Arrgh! Now I have to move things out again to find a place for the mirror so it won’t get broken. Can’t have a dressing table without a mirror!

Porch Bench Results

(Read parts 1 and 2 of the bench saga!)

After church today I put on my painting clothes and went out to dry brush the bench. I chose a small and not very fluffy paintbrush and used a door and trim paint by Sherwin Williams called Whitetail. (I forgot to take a photo of the can.) It’s the same color of the walls in our kitchen and laundry room.

I dipped the paintbrush just barely into the paint, scraped the paint off on the sides of the paint can, and then dabbed it on a paper towel to get most of the paint off for the dry brush look.

Dry brushing technique.

Then I brushed the paintbrush back and forth lightly over the bench. There were a couple of spots where I got a bit too much paint on, but I started on the back of the bench to make sure I knew what I was doing before I got around to the front, so most of those don’t show.

It really brings out the wood grain.

Finally, here is the finished bench in the sun:

And in its place on the back porch:

I think it needs a pumpkin and a pot of fall mums…and it looks a lot neater in person.

The Girl, Marnie, and The Hubs (in that order) have all approved of the bench, yay!!! It will look better after the house is painted, whenever that happens.

No more painting projects for awhile, it’s on to work-work and writing for me, along with rearranging the storage room so we can put my grandma’s desk/dressing table/mirror in there with its matching head/footboard and dresser. It is in the waterfall style, probably from the 1940s. When Grandma passed away in 1992 the bed and dresser came to live with me, but I didn’t have room for the dressing table and little bench. It has finally come (with some dead spiders) to my house after 30 years in Mom and Dad’s garage. Dad needed the space for a worktable.

Grandma’s Dressing Table (Excuse everything else in the photo. It is our laundry room/furnace space.)

The dressing table and its siblings will probably need to be painted someday unless I can get someone to refinish them. Right now I don’t have the skills to do it properly, but I suppose I could learn. The wood is so pretty it would be a shame to cover it up!

I’m sure I’ll post something about the storage room clearout as I’m going through. Cleaning out and rearranging = good fun!!

Ferris Wheel

I got this vintage Fisher Price Little People music box ferris wheel for just $1.00 at the jumble sale I went to last weekend. I could tell it was in good condition, it was just filthy. Here it is just after I bought it:

Ew.

Blargh.

But here it is now:

And here it is in action:

The song is the chorus of “In the Good Old Summertime” and the lyrics are as follows:

In the good old summer time,
In the good old summer time,
Strolling through the shady lanes
With my baby mine.
You hold her hand and she holds yours
And that’s a very good sign
That she’s your tootsie wootsie
In the good old summer time.

George Evans and Ren Shields

The song comes from the 1949 movie “In the Good Old Summertime”.

There were a few spaces with dirt on the ferris wheel that I couldn’t get to with a Q-Tip. I have some long cotton swabs somewhere, I think, but couldn’t find them. It is much better than it was though, and all the important parts are nice now. Amazing what a simple wet rag and some elbow grease can do! Don’t you just love to see something dirty come clean? 😃