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Pink Saturday

December 5, 2009 at 1:05 am by Claudia

Happy Pink Saturday! I found these vintage ornaments in a little shop earlier in the week. I always try to add some vintage ornaments to my collection every year. Confession: I haven’t even begun to decorate yet. I don’t like to start until the second week of December. One of the ornaments is in my favorite color combination of aqua and pink.

Beverly has asked us to share one of our favorite memories of Christmas. Mine involves the magical world of Muirhead’s, our local department store in my hometown of Dearborn, Michigan. There were four children in our family, but for several years it was just my brother and me. Every Christmas, we would go there to see Santa. Muirhead’s designed this wonderful icy wonderland, rather like a giant igloo, with a train and all sorts of wonderful treats. You can see us on the train in the photo. My mother passed these on to me several years ago and they are very dear to me, especially since I lost my brother to cancer in 1991. Last year, I had them framed. My sisters came along later and their visits to Santa took place at other stores – I don’t know why. Maybe Muirhead’s stopped doing the Santaland? Eventually, Muirhead’s closed and went out of business. Luckily, I have these photos as a wonderful souvenir of those Christmas visits.

Please visit Beverly at How Sweet the Sound to see a list of everyone participating. We’ve got our first snow coming today and I am helping out at my friend’s shop but I promise I will visit all of you.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Cleaning Up & Cats

December 4, 2009 at 1:05 am by Claudia

Well, the time has come. I have to do some cleaning. The little pumpkins must go – goodbye. The porch must be cleaned and everything stored away for the winter. I’d like to blame it on the relatively warm temperatures; I have never waited this long to tackle the job. I wrote about it last year – I think there is a part of me that thinks if I leave all the pots and cushions and hanging plants on the porch, I can stop the oncoming cold and snow. Never mind that the plants in the pots have been dead since that first hard frost or that the hanging plants look pathetic and forlorn. I try to deny that my beloved summer is gone for this year. I put my blinders on until I am shamed into packing it all up. I was going to do it the other day, but my excuse was that it was “too windy.” Yesterday I was “too tired.” Today, I will do it. Hopefully.

Husband and I have to deal with the moss on our roof, too. This is a job we really dislike. Don has to get up on the roof and spray it with a bleach and water mixture. Then we wait a while and loosen it with a brush, eventually hosing the whole shebang off the roof. The moss is tenacious, however, so we do the best we can. Our trees are wonderful, but they do shade portions of the roof and it has been so rainy here this year that the moss is worse than ever. Every time I am ready to force husband out the door and start this task, the weather gets crazy and we have to postpone it.

I had to add this photo of one of our neighbors’ cats:

I shot this through our kitchen window. I haven’t seen the cats in a long while and suddenly I see them all the time. They are descendants of the cats that used to live in MHC when the ‘Cat Lady’ lived here. All the older residents of the town know who she was. Let’s just say that she loved cats and had many of them. When she died, the house was sold and it had to be taken down to the studs so that it might be ‘refreshed.’ If you know what I mean.

Have a great Friday!

The Dresser

December 2, 2009 at 6:45 pm by Claudia

This is my dresser. I’ve had this piece for almost 20 years. Walking along the street one day in Cambridge, I saw this dresser sitting at the curb. I was pretty sure it was free for the taking. Just in case it wasn’t, I thought I would finish my errands and if it was still out there when I returned home, I’d find a way to get it up to my apartment. I didn’t own a car when I lived in the Boston area because I could get everywhere via public transit. So when I walked back toward my apartment and saw that it was still sitting there, I had to think fast. Luckily, my neighbor and good friend was home and I enlisted her help. We lugged the dresser home in the summer heat, a distance of about 4 city blocks. Then it was hefted up 3 flights of stairs.

I didn’t like the dark wood, so I painted it gray. It followed me out to San Diego when I moved there to take a new job. Eventually I painted it yellow and replaced the knobs with green glass knobs from Restoration Hardware.

When I painted the legs, I left some of the gray paint untouched because I liked way the contrast highlighted the carving.

The soft yellow (a shade by Ralph Lauren) makes me smile. Truth be told, it has become a bit battered, the drawers don’t close right and sometimes I want to replace it. I may do that in the next couple of years. I don’t know if I could let it go entirely, however. I’ll have to hang on to it, even it it means storing it in the shed. It reminds me of the streets of Cambridge, my wonderful apartment on Harvard Street, a time in my life when I was having all sorts of adventures. I had embarked on a teaching career, I loved Boston and teaching at Boston University, and I finally had an apartment with more than one room. It was a very special time in my life. I eventually moved to San Diego, met Don, fell in love and married. I left my single girl days behind. Happily. But I treasure those Boston memories…and the dresser is part of them.

Some of my favorite things are here. A McCoy dish with a bird whose tail feathers are broken (I have one just like it with the bird intact downstairs,) two pieces of Roseville Pottery, and a photo of my husband. There are several necklaces draped on the photo’s frame – Don says it looks like a shrine.

This is my favorite piece of Roseville. It is the Bushberry pattern – a cornucopia. Lovely.

Little did this dresser know that day as it was forlornly sitting out at the curb, that it would find a new home and cross the country not once, but twice!

I’m experimenting with making my photos larger – after pouring through all the tips online, I think I’ve found something that works with my template – what do you think?

Pink Saturday

Cleaning Up & Cats

The Dresser

Lambs Like to Party

A Note

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