Altering Books

I have this old book here I was going to alter, simply because I love the name "The Rum Seller's Daughter or Woman in the Temperance Reform" It is really old, and like I said I was going to alter it, until I looked at the copyright date, 1874, and trust me it looks old enough to be from 1874. The book has prints in it, which once upon a time were probably black and white, they are quite beautiful. The pages are now brown, as is the cover which I'm sure th cover was orignally brown. So I'm keeping it for my own collection, I may photocopy some of it's pages for altering.

Life is in the Details

Prairie

We went out the a local prairie marsh, no birds but there had been a controlled burn done recently.

The Love of My Life

making like a pez dispenser

Spring Cleaning

One thing about not having the housekeeper here bugging me on Fridays I actually got a very large section of junk cleared out. No this wasn't her responsibility, but since I'm stuck cleaning I took it the extra mile.

Oh the reason I had a housekeeper is I have degenerative joint disease adn really bad, I'm not supposed to pick anything up over 5 pounds. I'm going to have to get a smaller dog I guess, she weighs about 15 pounds.

Anyway... I have plans to clean out our bedroom later this week, the excess furniture is going to go to the attic. We have 5 dressers in our bedroom, three of which can go bye-bye. I'll put my dresser in the east bedroom, for the sake of not having clutter everywhere. I want a peaceful serene bedroom, and since my clothes are not in our bedroom closet anyway it doesn't really matter if my dresser is in their either.

Personally, speaking of our bedroom, I'd love nothing more than to rip out hte door and the wall going to our closet, it's huge actually, long and narrow huge, with the door at one end. This makes it impossible to get to anything that's any further back than the door jam. If I thought hubby wouldn't have a seizure I'd start tearing it out this week! Then we'd actually have some useful storage space in this house.

The house is a 1905 Queen Anne wanna be, it's goregous actually, but the closets in this house, well they are non-existant! And we have major major storage issues because of the lack of closets. And the ones we do have are most inaccessible, making my life miserable. I'd ask how a person could build a house with no closets but I do know why, they used to be taxed as rooms.

Housekeepers

Mine quit, she said that I was talking down to her. Yep I'm guilty! 100% pure de guilty. I guess she never quite got the message that I wasn't paying her $15.00 an hour to stand around and gab all of the time. And one would think that after a year she would know to come in clean the bathrooms, the floor, vacuum and dust and not have to ask every single time.

I thought the rules were simple enough but apparently not. Wash the kitchen and bathroom floors every week, and the wood floors throughout the house every two weeks. the week you don't wash the wood floors you dust everything!

Too hard??? Apparently.

So now I'm looking for a new housekeeper, preferably a crew that can come in and get it done in two hours, instead of four like the last gal. Hubby told me to start interviewing businesses that advertise cleaning services.

Kitchen Floors

Both dog kennels are in the kitchen, the part that is just bare plywood. I'm tired of it being bare plywood, and since I am the one who has to wash it now, the housekeeper quit last week, I'm thinking of sanding and painting it, to get rid of the ickies. The mop and the broom both get caught on the bare plywood shards, I'm not sure how the pets deal with this issue, I always seem to get splinters when I walk on it barefoot. No I wish I could say that this is a temporary thing but it's been like this for about 10 years now. Husband can't seem to make up his mind on what he wants to do. We have the flooring, 300 square feet of maple. Why he doesn't plane it down so we can install it is beyond me. He has his reasons, I just don't agree with them. So, in the spirit of having a floor that is easy to clean I'm going to paint the floor, probably in May sometime, cause I'll be using an oil based paint, I'm going for durability here, and I'm thinking some catty cornered stripes might be in store!!! :-)

Warning never leave a wife with 65 gallons of mistints and a roller brush alone, it could cause vertigo!

Wet Dog

Well today I spent part of the afternoon bathing dogs. I didn't photograph silky, well because a wet weirmeraner and a dry weimeraner look pretty much the same, she's blue either way. I did get a snap of Angel, before and after. She's wet in the after shot. She doesn't know it yet but she's about a half hour away from a good combing/brushing. I'm waiting for her to dry off a bit more first. I also clipped her nails, she's very shy about this part of grooming, and washed her bedding and her dog kennel tray. John pulled the trays out of both kennels for me. Silky's tray is too big for me to handle by myself.

Exercise Hell

I went shopping, my first mistake, for exercise clothes. I've come to the conclusion that obesity in America is a myth that needs to be perpetuated so that we can have someone to discriminate against.

If it were truly at epidemic proportions as the news claims it is, then there would be more in the way of exercise clothes for fat people. That's right I used that word, FAT!!!

I'm fat, and I can't find a lick of exercise clothing that'll fit me, and by standards of fat I'm not as fat as some, but more fat than others. In order to wear the exercise gear I'm finding at Target, and the sports stores in town, I'd have to loose a hundred pounds, but by then I wouldn't be fat anymore, I'd be what is considered normal wieght for my height and age.

From what I looked at today only skinny people have the right to have comfortable clothes when exercising.

I'm wondering are these companies embarrassed by fat people?

Do they believe that only skinny people have the rights to feel good when exercising???

Personally I'm tired of wearing my jeans to work out in, it's still too cool in central Iowa to wear shorts outside.

So I'm proposing a campaign here: I want all the fat people who read this to write the various sports clothing producers and complain.

And I really mean complain.

Tell them you want exercise clothing in your size that fits correctly. Maybe there wouldn't be an obesity epidemic if we had incentives to lose weight, starting with proper fitting clothes and shoes! And if they don't see a problem then maybe it really is a myth after all and I'm sol on finding exercise clothes that fit.

Signed - your local fat quilter who doesn't want to be as fat anymore