Random Wednesday

How about a random post?

What? All my posts are random?...hmmm.... :)

Well, my grandparents are off to Oregon to visit my aunt and uncle and cousin...they left this morning at 7 (excuse me: 8) for a 1:00 (1:30 even??) flight from Charlotte. It only takes a little under two hours to get to Charlotte, so they'll certainly have plenty of time! Mom and Colin went over to say bye to them before they left and Mom came back looking slightly amused. "They've become hobbits," she said, "they wanted to get down there with enough time to have their second-breakfast." :p

A couple weeks ago, one of the days I was working I took the baby out for a walk and ran into (not literally) a couple Jehovah's Witness ladies. I'm not sure whether I was better off to have the baby with me, or not. Since I had the baby with me, they just handed me a tract and then went on and on about the baby and how cute she was. One of the ladies just kept talking and talking about how much she liked babies and about when she was a new mother. They seriously didn't give me a chance to get a word in edgewise and explain that this was not my baby! :p Good grief...and if they happened to notice that of course I have no ring on my left hand, they probably thought I was all the more desperately in need of their "gospel" tract! I wonder how old they thought I was...maybe they assumed I must be older than I look, but I don't know.
When I was up at camp I was telling a lady that I have one little brother who's twelve years younger than me... "So, he's about 3 or 4, right?" "Noo...he's 7" "Oh, honey, you're older than you look then!" *sigh* Yes.

Mom's birthday was a couple weeks ago and we went out to eat with Grandma and Grandpa. I'm not sure how the subject came up I think Grandma must have been talking about shopping or something, but at some point in the conversation, Grandma says that she wants to get a nice white blouse (which isn't unusual, she's usually looking for the perfect "white blouse") and she'll wear it with her jacket and spread the collar over the lapels like Sarah Palin wears her shirts. Cue silence while everyone chews slowly and digests this fact. "Oh! Hmmm..." I can't find a picture of Sarah Palin with that sort of outfit on, but I know what she means, because I think that's a common style with female news anchors as well. Not that Grandma fits into either of those categories...

So, my fair entries. I got the baby afghan I was working on finished and the apron.











The sweater and the paper mache pear didn't do so well! The sweater is going to take a lot more messing around and figuring out than I had time for before the fair. And the pear kind of, well, something happened to it. Plus I wouldn't have had time to get it painted nicely.

The sweater I was going to add sleeves to, but I need to wash it first and see if it will shrink any, because the way it is now, the sleeves are going to have to be huge, and that will look funny. I'm looking for another sweater pattern at the moment because I got some nice burgundy, bulky yarn on sale and I'd like to take a break on the pink sweater and work on something else for a while!

The pear had problems. The good thing is, I know exactly how I'll make it next time. I started out with a balloon and I shaped it with masking tape. So it had pieces of masking tape all over it, which made the layers of newspaper strips bumpy. So I ended up making a paper pulp to put all over it and smooth it out. And it did smooth it out, unfortunately the balloon had already deflated, so when the wet pulp got through to the newspaper, the hard newspaper which was the only support at that point got all soggy and crumpled.

From this angle it doesn't look too bad...












But this side doesn't look so good:












Oh well, when I try again I'm going to use the same base, except I'll use the really cheap masking tape that's more papery, and I'll start with the pulp, and that should work. Because the pulp dried really hard, it just smooshed the newspaper.

Here's the apron I made, it's reversible:




















Here's what happens to your shirt if you don't wear an apron while pan-frying pork chops!:











The smudgy spots up at the top are where I started putting stain-remover on it. It certainly looked polka-dotted though!

We had a church fellowship this past Sunday at the Beasleys' house and they have a new puppy. I'm not much of a dog person, and I prefer big dogs like German Shepherds or something, but this little puppy was awfully sweet. He didn't want to hold still for a photo:










He's obviously part basset hound and so cute! And I didn't realize dogs did this too, I thought it was just cats, but I didn't really want him on my lap all over my nice dress, so of course he came running over to the couch and hopped up in my lap and settled right down. :)

Finally, here's a video I took a couple weeks ago. It's awful quality, but I wanted you to see the weird cackling sheep baby toy. I don't know why it doesn't scare babies!



Now I need to go find a sweater pattern. :)