• My second ‘unmade bed’ photo of the week. This from a girl who is a bedmaker. Like clockwork. But I show you this so that you can compare it to yesterday’s photo. Yes, the ugly mattress-turned-wallpaper is gone. I had a brief break during the day and came back to the apartment. Soon there was a knock on the door and it was the Company Manager, her assistant and a nice guy with a ladder. The guy with the ladder was there to rehang my curtain rod. Oh, didn’t I tell you? During my life as an I Love Lucy episode, I pulled on the curtains to close them and the rod came tumbling down, barely missing my head, the result of screws pulling out of the dry wall. They have now been secured with anchors. And the company manager didn’t mind at all that I had grabbed the other mattress. They moved the bad, cement-like mattress to the other apartment and then called my friend Bruce, who is an actor in the play. He likes a hard mattress. Indeed, he likes a hard mattress so much that he had been sleeping on the floor because he considered his mattress too soft. So he came upstairs, tried out the mattress and declared it just right. Into the elevator it went, on its way to Bruce’s apartment. See? Everybody is happy.

I slept much better last night. But then again, I was exhausted.

• I hardly ever buy new clothes; we are on a tight budget. The two items I did buy before I left were a pair of sneakers and new jeans. Do you remember the jeans I bought that smelled musty? I washed those suckers countless times. I soaked them in vinegar. I hung them outside. They reminded me of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry can’t get the body odor smell (from a valet parking attendant) out of his car. The musty smell never left my jeans. It hung on for dear life.

I had to have a pair of jeans without holes in them, which is the pathetic state of most of my jean attire. I trotted off to Kohl’s. Don came along because I insisted that he assist me in a sniff test of all jeans I might be considering. So there we were, pulling out jeans in my size, sniffing them and putting them in a yay or nay pile. I’m sure we looked rather strange and somewhat questionable. Nevertheless, I discovered that Lee jeans seemed to have a musty smell and Levis did not. Levis passed the smell test. So, Levis it is.

And, in the continuing strange saga of getting older, my shoe size has changed. My feet are a half to a whole size larger than they were. Great. Just what I wanted. So, none of my shoes fit. Hence, the new pair of sneakers.

It’s a sad state of affairs when a non-musty pair of jeans and a new pair of sneakers are exciting.

• When did the words feminist or feminism become something bad? I have been reading a few posts around blogland that seem to be saying just that. Perhaps from a religious perspective? Is this something leftover from the days of bra burning? Something about women being subservient to men? Hmmm. So I looked up the dictionary definitions. As an adjective:

     Advocating social, political, legal and economic rights for women equal to those of men.

     The theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.

As a noun:

     An advocate of such rights.

Sounds good and fair and right to me. There doesn’t seem to be anything outrageous in those words. Aren’t we supposed to have equal rights in this country of ours? Forget the use of the word men in the Constitution – that’s a product of the time in which it was written. Women couldn’t even exercise their right to vote then. Feminism is a positive thing. And I’ll take it even further: the equal rights of all our citizens are good and fair and right to me. I’m no more special than anyone else. Neither am I less than. Neither is anybody else. With all due respect to those of you that might disagree with me and I do respect you, I’m a proud feminist.

I have a feeling this could be a blog post in itself. Who knows what controversy I’m stirring up!

• My future projects:

Finishing the hand quilting on that quilt and binding it.

Starting my new quilt with the fabrics on the top shelf, except for the bark cloth on the right – that’s for a pillow cover.

Okay. I’ve rambled on enough.

Happy Friday.