I'm in Stitches

Look at what I borrowed (stole) from the mammogram clinic today so I could copy it as a pattern for a wrap dress and a summer bathrobe!!!

(don't worry, she said I could take it.)

Look at what I whipped up today from my fabric stash which I am DETERMINED to reduce by half! (Don't look if you don't want to know what you are getting for Christmas, peeps!)

I must be manic. I made this skirt from start to finish in 2 and a half hours. That's less time than it takes to run my McAfee! Even the seams are finished and I don't own a serger!

(SPOILER: What you can't see from the picture is that this skirt has a 12 INCH waist and wouldn't fit a single soul living on this planet not even Barbie it's so tiny.)

(So let's just call it a prototype, shall we?)

How Many Miss Kitty's Does It Take to Screw in a Bug Light?

Ah, the Bug Lights Saga continues....

Yesterday was my 11 hour work day and believe me, I was tired beyond all Realms of Tiredness. When I showed up at Miss Kitty's to take her to the grocery she was out back rootling around in her garage. I watched her pull out her wheel chair and walk it over to the back door. There was no cane in sight which means she walked down her back porch steps and the 30 feet to her garage with no other assistance whatsoever than her own steam.

This is how I know she's a big Faker.

As we were gathering up her things to go shopping I noticed a burned out bug light on the kitchen table. I asked her what that was about, and she told me that she put it there to remind her brother to put a new one in the socket on her front porch light.

What this means is that she unscrewed the burnt out lightbulb, took the bad one and placed it on the kitchen table so that her brother could come along and put the NEW bulb in the light fixture for her.

Because although it may be a job for One Kitty to unscrew a bug light, its a BIG deal to put the new bulb in it's place. Besides, how could she remain a helpless invalid if her brother discovered she could damn well screw in her own lightbulbs?

What a Beautiful Mess I'm In

TODAY'S THEME SONG:

Going out of my mind these days,

Like I'm walkin' round in a haze.

I can't think straight, I can't concentrate.

And I need a shave.

I go to work and I look tired.

The boss man says: "Girl, you're gonna get fired."

This ain't your style, and from behind my coffee cup,

I just smile.

What a beautiful mess!

What a beautiful mess I'm in.

Spendin' all my time with you,

There's nothin' else I'd rather do.

What a sweet addiction that I'm caught up in. (Diamond Rio)

I just had to do it! I had to crawl myself from my bed of woe and make a couple new aprons. It's autumn, and those springy-summery pastels are not the look I'm cravin' for when I don my work attire each morning and head out to the salt mines.

Thank God for Walmart with it's last remaining bastion of the $1 and $2 a yard fabric selections! Most of it is crap but if you dig, you can find some 100% cotton. Sure, it's not flame retardant and I could go up in a kitchen fire like Poof! But new aprons I must have and this is how I can afford to do it!

Laying out the pattern that is most dear to me in the word! GGB's apron pattern from 1932. It's the only one I've ever come across that covers me up the way an apron should.

Cutting out two aprons at once is one of my many smart little tricks!

Getting those pocket placements just right is Easy when you have a handy-dandy reversible pattern.

Operating the sewing machine is more art than science! Take her out for a spin, Young Laredo!

Okay, making miles of bias tape by hand creates heat-blistered fingers and some very wavy tape, but it's soooo worth it in the end.

Click on this picture to see what I mean about the bias tape.
What a beautiful mess I'm in!


Hours of toil and it's finally finished.

The Padawan naps through the entire project!

No time to admire it for long, it's officially on duty and ready to go.

The Other Cat's Grass...

Mackie wants out and Spawn wants in. They can sit like this for hours, never making eye contact or acknowledging the other one's existence. Mackie will not go out as long as Spawn is on the stoop and Spawn will not leave for hours and hours; not until he's good and ready and ready to give up on the possibility of getting a treat from me.

I think there is a rap song like that:

I want what you've got
You want what I've got...

Anyway, I had a friend once who seemed to have it made. Her husband made oodles of money; she didn't have to do anything but work 2 hours a week at the local rubber stamp store so she could get their discounts;, she got to spend whatever she wanted on her Hall teapot collection and on slight acquaintance she seemed to have it all. I could have been envious but I just wasn't. And it was a good thing, too, because on further acquaintance I discovered she had a hoarding disease, and that paranoia thing where you never let anyone into your home or invite friends over, as well as a host of ailments and oddities that brought her 'lucky life' down in my opinion to a mere trickle.

Nope, I had already realized long before that, that I don't want to trade lives with anyone. Not for an instant. No matter how weird or hard or strange my life can be, I don't want the other man's grass! My problems are FAMILIAR to me. I don't want to adopt another life because of the problems that come with it. Foreign ones.

Anyway, I am pretty sure that Mackie knows his grass is the greenest, as well!

Victim Threat Level in the Yellow! (Elevated!)

Yup. I'm still the Vector for Nut Magnets and now it seems I'm attracting Victims like Quarks and Protons into a Black Hole!

Today was a busy one. I had to go get my annual TB test for work, pick up my meds. swing by the grocery for cat food and coffee filters and then try to find the nearest Safeway Gas Station because I get 10 cents OFF per gallon but only until the 30th of this month. Plus, I had to swing by the License Only Cosmetology store so I could get the stuff I need to turn my hair back to blonde from this weird Ash Head I've got now.

Busy times!

As I was tooling the aisle in the Safeway I happened to see this lady with the prettiest red hair. She had golden highlights and she had a layered mid-length bob. Very attractive! And it's my motto to compliment people because compliments don't cost me a thing and they sure do make people feel good!

So I told her I loved her hair and the next thing I knew, I was pinned between the Cocoa Puffs and my cart listening to her really looooooong tale about all her troubles. And believe me she had a few! Her husband is a cop and has a broken foot from chasing down a druggie. He has a bad rotater cuff from being yanked violently by a sex predator trying to escape his grasp; her twins have cerebral palsy; her daughter has scoliosis; her son is perfectly fine 'but it's just a matter of time!' she said; she herself had some kind of virus that drained every bit of potassium from her body, migraine headaches, fibromyalgia, multiple skin lesions, and the Black Plague.

Well, not those last two but I was just standing there trying to inch away while allowing her the space to vent her little heart out to somebody who would listen!

I told her to make sure she took a little time for herself no matter what. What I should have told her is to start a dang blog so she can vent all she wants to!!!!

I could have taken a couple of push-pins out of my feet and given her a quick acupuncture treatment, but I could tell she really didn't want anything to get better. Not just yet. Not until after her son becomes a helpless cripple or an alcoholic at age 7.

Finally, I escaped. As I turned around and headed for the check out stand, bearing down on me like a bullet to the bullseye was an elderly women in a whiplash collar, both arms bandaged, legs in plastic braces, wheeling herself along with her food basket precariously balanced on her broken knees...avoiding eye contact I ran as fast as my crucifixion feet would allow.

My main reason for going to the grocery was to buy coffee filters. Because I don't own any! I own a Braun with a permanent gold filter. This morning when I made coffee in my new/used Mr. Coffee I just dumped the scoop of chocolate vanilla blend coffee right into the basket. And YUM! Chewy coffee!!!

Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.

As most of you know, Miss Kitty likes to talk about BIG stuff and also likes to hoard things like Bug Lights in case of a nuclear freeze she will still be able to keep her porch light on.

But we haven't bought Bug Lights in ages, however we have started to buy Tweezers. We've purchased 3 tweezers in the last 2 weeks. And we are still browsing the tweezer aisle and talking about slant versus straight tweezers. Miss Kitty will not use a slant tweezer. And no matter how I tell her she has at least 15 pairs of tweezers in her make-up drawer at home, she insists that she has to buy tweezers.

I guess she's got a BIG, BIG, BIG whisker problem. And since her eyebrows are tattooed on, I just don't want to KNOW what she's tweezing.

And then there's the Coffee Maker issue. In the 3 years I've been with her we have purchased 6 brand new Coffee Makers. At first I didn't catch on: if she said she needed a new one I didn't ask any questions about why?. After the 3rd or 4th one I started to wonder what was up with that?

It appears she doesn't like a dirty coffee pot. And she thinks that might mean it is wearing out and she has to buy a new one just to have a backup. She's got 4 used Mr. Coffee's in the garage in case something happens to the newest one, and 2 brand-new-in-the-box Mr. Coffee's just in case. Obviously she's got a stockpile of coffee on hand as well.

Yesterday, after unpacking the new Mr. Coffee we just purchased, I asked her what she was going to do with the old one? On a rare whim she told me I could have it! But keep it on hand in case something goes wrong with her new one! Because it's a BIG deal not to have coffee. BIG!!

Meet BIG Mr. Coffee

(Look, Joy! Twinkly lights on my two tiered plate rack!)

Tool Time!

There is a cool country song out right now by Rascal Flatts that is my theme song and my motto and my anthem. It's called Every Day.

I come around all broken down and
Crowded out
And you're a comfort
Sometimes the place I go
Is so deep and dark and desperate
I don't know, I don't know

Every day, every day
You save me
Every day you save my life.

Okay, now some folks are singing that about Jesus and some are singing that about their significant other, but I'm singing it about the wonder drug LYRICA.

It's the definitive drug for fibromyalgia pain, which isn't affected by normal pills like Advil or Ibuprofin or Vicodan or Demerol or Opium. I love it and I say it saves my life. Every Day.

But there's just this one thing that bothers me about Lyrica: THE COMMERCIALS.

The ones on television depict a spiffy middle aged woman prancing around in a flea market with a big heavy bag slung over her shoulder. Or dancing into the wee hours with the ubiquitous grey haired man who in real life would just be GAY he looks so good. Or standing in a windy field of daisies leaning on a white rail fence jabbering on about how she has just hoofed it over 40 acres with her mule. That's right, 40 acres and a MULE.

I think they should show it like it really is: Every day it's like somebody took one of these:

and pulverized the hell out of every soft tissue and muscle in my body. Every day. And I mean beat me up good, too, not some light percussion massage.

So when I saw this latest print ad I laughed in Wild Peals of Angry Mirth...

Because I'm like: PUSH PINS????? PUSH PINS????? Is this somebodys idea of an understated joke? Because for ME, what is sticking into my feet all over are THESE:

And it feels like THIS:

And what's worse? I have to WALK AROUND LIKE THAT.

The Slime of Miss Green Moldy

Hey, what can I say? I can't remember why I'm standing in the kitchen spinning in circles with the water running, the tea kettle boiling, my Sim peeps hollering for help while sweat trickles down the middle of my back and pools in my butt crack, but I can STILL MAKE UP SILLY TITLES FOR THINGS!

For those of you who were not born before the Flood, that title is a take on some old movie: the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

I thought of another one, sure to go right over the heads of the less aged and/or historically savvy: "Would you like some Menachem Bacon with those eggs?"

Okay, today was one of those days. Up at 3:30 for no reason at all except I could tell my body was done sleeping for the night. Exhausted by 10 am with a mounting headache, I decided to pop out to the grocery store really quick for some laundry detergent and the super duper bottle of quick-release Advil. My hair was wet from the shower, I had on baggy clothes that are stained and frankly not fit for the charity barrel, and the worst shoes on earth: old red tennies that I spray painted pink once upon a time on a whim.

Because, you know, I'm just popping out for 15 minutes. I'll keep my head down low. I won't meet anyone I know. I won't be talking to any strangers. There won't be any dangers, dramas or emergencies between there and back again.

At the grocery store I successfully avoided the cute produce dude that has teased me for years that he is my husband because once, a LONG time ago he was sweeping the floor and I jumped over the broom.

I avoided going to my favorite checker because I felt too badly to make eye contact.

I made it all the way to pulling out my debit card when two ladies behind me raised a fuss about the cute little card holder I made out of paisley paper to keep my card from losing it's swipe. It's just like an old library card pocket, back when library cards were made of paper and needed to be protected. You know, kids, before PLASTIC was invented.

They kept insisting that was my hidden talent and where my fortune lay! I wanted to hang down my head and cry because, frankly? If that's my hidden talent? and where my fortunes lie? Then I'm a lost goner. Because I could probably sell them at 5 cents apiece and once I'd saturated the market I'd have made a quarter.

Finally I made it out of that store without too much fuss and as I pulled into the alley behind my building I almost ran smack dab into a downed power wire! Or, it could have been a telephone wire but how would I know? Like the Good Samaritan that I am, I whipped my car across the alley to block all other traffic and threw on my flashers.

I asked a nearby parishioner of the church, congregating in the parking lot like always, if she had a cell phone and explained the situation. She debated whether it was a 911 emergency or not while I had time to take stock of her bling, her perfectly coiffed hair, her designer shoes and the fact that her ear robot was the best quality shiny Star Wars model available on the market, I just KNEW she had time to take stock of my shoes, my hair, my air of desperate downtroddenness, and my trembling need for a big fix of Advil. Which, by the way, was all I could do to keep from whipping that bottle open right there and gnawing through the plastic in order to down a couple of them.

It's a shame, but I felt ashamed at my absolutely demented appearance. And why didn't I have my cell phone with me? What good does it do me at home when I'm out and about?

Nevertheless, I was not about to be thwarted in my quest to be a hero, so I stood my ground while she dithered about the phone. She finally decided to call the church administrator and see what he thought. I decided to handle it myself, quickly ran upstairs and called 911. I told the dispatcher that it might not be an emergency but it might be a sizzling smokin' hot 400 million volts of blue steel molten electricity just waiting for the hapless victim to come along and touch it, but it was her call whether to send out an officer or not.

Then I returned to my car hoping the cop was cute and single and over 75 otherwise he'd not be attracted to me unless he had full blown cataracts; firmly determined to have saved at least a dozen citizens from being reduced to charred ash heaps.

Alas, the cop was about 5 foot 1 inches tall, 23 years old soaking wet, totally oblivious to my flashers or my peepers, who calmly pulled up, got out of his vehicle and proceeded to roll the wire up and toss it out of the way.

Well, REALLY!