So just look at them and sigh.

When my Dad sent my picture in to Cheerios with a couple proofs of purchase and a few bucks in exchange for a rubber stamp of my 6-year-old face, of course I had no idea that 21 years later, I'd still be using it. I'm lucky I kept it. Much as I would love to continue using this thing in place of my signature, these days I use it to create tags for my homemade gifts. It's been getting a delightful amount of use.

There are few things more satisfying than to clutter up a large table with yarn, embroidery thread, Elmer's, felt in both large squares and tiny bits, patterns, sequins, scissors, cardstock, holepunch, inkpads, hot glue, stuffing, needles and pens, along with all the other debris from the box that you had to deal with to get to all the stuff you needed in this craft explosion, and THEN to put everything back where it belongs, and admire your new little creations on the now cleared table.

I considered naming these owl ornaments Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but since I won't be gifting them together, I thought they needed better stand-alone names. Instead, we have Zephyr (after the wind, not the RHCP song), Zuma (after a Neil Young/Crazy Horse album which I have never heard), Zora (after one of my favorite authors, Zora Neale Hurston), and Zelda (after the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald who was cah-razy! as well as my old car of the same name, which was also green). If I were able to give them all to my parents, I might just call them the Lennon Sisters, for giggles and old-times' sake.

Catching back up

This is how I feel when I've got a lot of stuff to do. I want to party and have fun, but sometimes I just need a little rest.

One of my resolutions for 2010 is to be a better blogger. So many blogs, mine included, are show and tell forums. Some of my favorite blogs are just that. But now that I've had this thing for a few years, I'd like to try some new things and answer the question of why I keep this blog, anyway. Perhaps what I'm wanting to do is focus on maybe just a couple aspects of life and get better at them through blogging.

I guess that's the theme for the coming year. "2010: Getting better at doing stuff."

And showing you how to do it, too? Or what I learned? Tips and tricks? Maybe selling some of the stuff I've made? Ooh, and maybe some music recommendations of what to listen to while you're picking up new hobbies?

I'll continue to post while I work on figuring out a more focused way to blog. In the meantime, I've asked this accordion boy to please smile and learn to play the "Beer Barrel Polka" in time for my Oktoberfest im Februar party.

Pasta Sunday; link happy

Cassano's is an Italian grocery store in Spokane. It's been getting a lot of business from us for the past few weekends. They have a freezer case with freshly frozen pasta, a deli with big hunks of cheese, and a little refrigerator that supplies Joel's constant hankering for Chinotto. It's been a real treat to counteract the cold, rainy Sundays of late with these yummy things. So we fix these fancy dinners (this was smoked cheese and sundried tomato tortellini, paired with turkey meatballs that I adapted from the chicken meatball recipe on Smitten Kitchen) and then bring it all to the coffee table and watch The Amazing Race 15. Makes for a very decadent, exciting hour.

Pumpkin pie

I told you I had a couple of rotting pumpkins on my porch. Joel's (right) began as facial hair: eyebrows, mustache, soul patch. Now it just looks like an old man with kind eyes who forgot to put in his dentures, with a soul patch. Mine (left) started out as an evil laughing Jack o'Lantern. Now it's an even evil-er looking one, probably with emphysema to accompany its sinister laugh.

Why have these not moved from their post in the last three weeks? Because I don't want to pick them up! Gross. I fully expected the punk kids next door to have smashed them by now; it was their job! After all, they did earn it by carving "Smoke Weed" into the freshly poured concrete right in front of the house (oh, but little did they know that by using our clever letter adding skills, we would thwart the call to drug use by altering the message with a simple "t," therefore calling all those who walk past this house to burn all of their dapper suits and smart skirts. [Smoke Tweed! in case you hadn't figured it out yet]). This dirty job is theirs. But every day it grows less enticing, I suppose. And these pumpkins just sit there, dutifully waiting for the next holiday to arrive, poor things, saying hello to the mailman as he delivers the Christmas cards.

Tea-ny tiny

In our world of cell phones and text messaging, on Saturday I was touched to watch my niece Rebecca pick up the home phone, squint up at a list of phone numbers on the wall to find the number of her neighbor friends, then dial and invite them to our tea party at 12:30.

Oh, it was so fun. Everyone put on their dresses, brushed their hair, and arrived promptly for tea, which turned into a bit of a luncheon. My niece (on the right) nailed the part of dainty tea drinker. Doesn't she look like a 1930s deb?

Okay, so I kind of forgot how tiny this tea set was. But who cares when it means you can have 4 refills of our special tea? We had tea sandwiches, fruit salad, brownies AND cupcakes, which we made with homemade buttercream frosting earlier that morning together, in four different colors, per Rachel's request.

I taught them how to hold out their pinkies, and even without my suggesting they use their finest manners, they politely asked each other to pass various items around the table. I humored them by offering, "More tea, mademoiselle?"

So sweet.

And you remember how I mentioned the spilling stuff on the tablecloth thing in my last post? While I wasn't looking, these sweet children spilled sugar all over the tablecloth. They didn't even try to hide it. "We had a little accident," one of them said as I stood in the kitchen, preparing the fruit salad. William was suddenly at my side, asking for a napkin to clean it up. So civilized, these children!

And what a good sport, that William. But when your aunt is letting you drink pure sugar to wash down the brownies, cupcakes and peanut butter and jelly, you'd probably put up with a bunch of girls, too.

Kindred spirits

Starting around age 12, I developed an obsession with tea parties. I thus formed The Tea Party Guild, which also speaks to another healthy obsession I had with my Roget's Thesaurus. I came up with the name after looking up synonyms for "group." I considered "society," "gathering," and then ultimately decided on "guild" for the simple reason that it made me think of the Lollipop Guild in the Wizard of Oz. Which is a ridiculous leap, especially when you consider that I was truly aiming to be like Anne of Green Gables. I wanted nothing more than to gather my kindred spirits, use big words I didn't quite understand yet, and have an occasional afternoon of all things fanciful. If we happened to spill a little tea on the nice table cloth, launching us into an elaborate scheme to clean it before an adult noticed that evolved into a complicated web of not-so-clever cover-ups that ultimately led us to being caught red-handed, so be it. It would be such an Anne situation. And believe me, at that age, whatever I could do to be more like Anne Shirley, I did it (though I never found myself in any particular sticky situation).
"It's so easy to be wicked without knowing it, isn't it?" Oh Anne, you're adorable.

Fortunately, I had 4 very close girlfriends at the time who bought into my love of Green Gables and tea parties, and boy, oh boy, did we have fun. We dutifully rotated hostess responsibilities from house to house, and for each party we wore dresses andhats. I even scored a pair of short gloves from the old Emporium in Boise. As part of the guild membership, we banded together each Friday in wearing dresses and hats. Looking back, I'm not sure whether I was more blessed to have friends who did this with me, or classmates who did not ridicule us to our faces.

For our tea parties, we generally stuck to the simple Bigelow and Celestial Seasonings variety packs, but we also made goodies, like those fancy crustless tea sandwiches with cucumber and cream cheese, not to mention sweets like lemon bars, merigues, you name it. My parents had the perfect antique-y dining room, too, with plenty of mismatched tea cups featuring dainty gold embellishment. My mom helped by ironing one of her nicest table cloths, and even boiled the water for us once we had sat down adn began chatting (though don't think the trappings of the occasion were any indication of civilized grown-up talk; close your eyes and you could just as easy picture girls standing around their lockers, gossiping about crushes and who's going through puberty fastest).

ALL THIS IS TO SAY, I gave my 10-year-old niece a tea set that she could paint herself as a birthday present, and it is now all decorated and ready to use. She has requested a tea party on Saturday. We're spending the better party of the morning and afternoon together and my mind is already swooning with ideas of all the things we can bake and assemble and talk about. I am so excited, feeling like I was born to be an aunt with nieces to have tea parties with.

I. Can't. Wait.

What shall I give you?

Here are your options:

1. Two rotting pumpkins on the porch steps

2. A one-pound bag of dirty Kleenex

3. Expertly stacked (empty) mini boxes of Junior mints

4. Vegetable soup I've eaten so much of I can hardly stand the sight of it (and there's so much left...gah)

5. A photo taken before the sickness took over, displaying the only Halloween costume I've put any effort toward in the last 10 years.


Option 5, you say? Fine by me!