Class Wars

While watching London and other parts of the world burn over the last few months, I'm sure there are a lot of complacent people who insist that "that could never happen here!" as if somehow we are morally superior to the rest of humanity.  Make no mistake - it WILL happen here.  All it will take is an incident to provide the flash point, and our cities will ignite faster than they did during the race riots of the Sixties.  Why?  Because the government, like Nero of old, fiddles while the economy goes up in smoke. 

The ink on President Obama's inauguration speech wasn't even dry before opposition leaders were publically vowing to make his a one term presidency.  And amid the mud slinging and name calling and blame assigning, one thing is clear - a failed economy is a victory for the opposition.  Because if the economy can't be fixed, everything can be blamed on the president (even though the seeds of this debacle were sowed during several opposition presidencies...) and that could lead to a change in the White House in 2012.  The big wigs claim they are working on the problems and that it's the debt that keeps all from being well, but that's just a front for what's really happening - they're waiting for this presidency to fail.  If they can just bluster and obstruct long enough, a fickle public will do the deed for them and they can sweep into the White House in a blaze of glory in 2012. 

But here's the rub - that won't fix the economy.  For one thing, the losing party in this farce will turn around and do the same thing, thus ensuring that the problems are never fixed.  And while all this happens, the unemployed and uninsured and disenfranchised population gets madder and madder.

We'll burn.  I have no doubt.

Heavenly Days

I often think about Heaven.  I have some definite ideas about it.  I believe that when our mortal bodies give out, it frees up our minds and we can access some of that huge mysterious part that scientists are always telling us we don't use.  With no physical restrictions, and the awesome brainpower that is now available, I believe that we can jump the constraints of time and space and go wherever and WHENever we want.  And I know exactly where I will go first.

Of course, before I go whizzing off, I'd like to think there's something of a welcome station where we start.  That the white light and the tunnel lead us to a celestial train which is pulling into the heavenly depot, where all of our family and friends are waiting to say hello.  Over there is Grama Nelle, with Grampa Loris puffing on his cigar...and there's my brother Steve, golf bag over his shoulder - he took time from his daily golf game to come and welcome me Home.  Oh, and there's my mother-in-law, Fran, saying, "Hello, hello, hello!" as she always did every time we arrived.  There are a lot of other faces, too, whom I don't recognize but I know instinctively are the ancestors who came before.  And frisking around getting under everyone's feet are the cats - Emily and Pooky and Charlie and Booger and Lady and Tigger and Tiger and little Jack.  

I've always thought that coming home, wherever home is, is one of the most wonderful feelings we experience on earth, and that makes me think it's God's way of showing us a little tiny taste of what we will find at the end of all things mortal.  You know what I mean?  The way your parents' house smells - even if it's not the same one you grew up in?  The way it feels to get out of the car, or off the train, or walk down the jetway towards those people you love best in the world.  It's His way of telling us that the best is yet to be.

And then...?  After we've caught up and eased those sore places in our hearts that have been there since these folks left us?  Then...we GO.  Wherever and whenever.  For me, it's a cottage just a little way out of a small town in Ohio, filled with love and laughter, and lots of children.  And I'm there - and I'm slender (a girl can dream, can't she?!) and there's my Scott and he can walk now and we can dance while the kids laugh and clap their hands.  And then the days just go by...the seasons turn... the world is never ugly and the kids never leave home and we just enjoy life as it ambles by.

The best thing of all?  That's MY heaven, but yours will be what satisfies your soul the most.  Only you, and God, know what that is.

Made in....Where?

Younger Progeny had to have minor shoulder surgery recently, and when I stopped by Walgreen's to pick up some supplies, I spotted bags of fall mallow candy - you know, candy corn and those fun and tasty shaped ones, pumpkins and moons and so on?  Anyway, both girls thrive on this stuff in the fall, so as a treat, I picked up two bags and as I was standing in line waiting to check out I happened to notice something on the label.  It said....Made in Mexico. 

What?  Okay, since when?  Has it always been made there and I just didn't know?  But Brach's is an old, old American company, right?  Since 1906, right?  (Okay, so I didn't know that 'til I looked it up on the website, but I knew it was old.)  Turns out they were purchased a few years back by a huge conglomerate called Farleys and Sathers, and they have five manufactories - three in the U.S. and two in Mexico.  I suppose it makes sense that we would get product made in Mexico because this little slice of boiling hot ick we live in is so close to it.

Look, I don't have anything against Mexico or Mexicans.  What I DO seriously hate is that practically nothing is manufactured HERE.  And, yeah, that means that we can go buy a lot of fun cheap crap, then give it away, then start over, on and on, ad nauseum.  But it seems to me that we, as a country, can't do that forever.  We're already way over our heads in debt, unemployment is still an ugly part of a lot of people's lives...and for WHAT?  CHEAPO CRAP? 

We need to bring our companies back.  Then pay decent living wages to people - not crazy wages, because that's how the unions shot themselves in the foot in the first place.  Honestly, people pushing brooms in auto plants making $30+ an hour?  Please...  And why did the unions feel they had to force the crazy wages?  Because we are all DAMN SPOILED.  We want our three t.v.'s, our two cars, cable, fast internet, cruises....  Insanity!

Look, people.  I remember my 95 year old father-in-law telling me once that he had just two books before he went away to college.  They went to the library to get books to read.  He had one good suit for Sunday and special events and he had a mishmash of hand me downs and second hand stuff for everyday.  Now, I'm not saying that we have got to start living like that again, but we could rein ourselves in a lot more than we do.  We need to be saving our money, bringing our factories back home, paying for things in FULL before we start playing with them, living in houses designed for one family, not eight families...EP's science teacher did an exercise one day where they had to tell what square footage their house was.  We live in an 1800 sq. ft. house.  Most of her class lived in 2500 sq. ft. or more.  According to this teacher, if every family on Earth lived in our sized house, it would take the equivalent of THREE additional Earth's worth of resources to build and sustain them.  For the bigger houses it was anywhere from four to fifteen Earth's worth of resources.  Incredible waste!

We in the U.S. live better than 95% of the world's people.   And here's the saddest and scariest fact of all.  Even if the rest of the people on Earth could come up with the money to live like we do, they still COULD NOT because we've used up way more than our fair share of the resources.  What's going to happen to us when the rest of the world starts figuring this out?

Seasons and Paths and a Diver Figurine*

                                                                                     

When I graduated from Ohio State, with my newly minted teaching degree, some 5000 other people graduated with me.  Yet, I got a teaching position right out of college, and taught for ten years with a great deal of success.  I believe that it was the path God wanted me on at the time. 

Ten years later, I resigned and became - by way of a pair of twin girls - a full time mom.  Though insanely busy, I was often restless and wanted something besides mothering and housewifery, so I tried varying things.  I painted country wooden stuff and made wonderful cloth dolls, and sold them at craft fairs, but I was never very good at forcing myself to make a bunch of the same thing, so I wasn't all that successful, financially.  Then, when the girls were in kindergarten, I got a sub certificate and tried subbing...HATED that.  Nothing like being in a room with 25 or 30 kids you don't know, with at least 3/4ths of them trying to drive you nuts. To me, it didn't feel anything like being a real teacher (my apologies to subs - I know there are some really amazing ones out there and you ARE real teachers!)  Then a full time position opened up at a local crafts big box store.  I LOVED that job, but it was the wrong time - too many hours away from the children I had fought for almost seven years to conceive.  Finally, I became a Stampin' Up! demonstrator, and while I love teaching classes, the selling part just isn't my thing.  When our girls went to college, I kind of floundered, wondering what was next for me.

Well, what was next was selling on Ebay.  I have loved vintage stuff - 40's and 50's mostly - for quite some time, and the day came when I realized that I had too much stuff, but I kept running into fantastic deals!  The logical outcome?  Sell the stuff!  However, I was quite prepared to fail, since I haven't had any appreciable luck in selling in the last 20 years.

What a surprise I was in for!  I found a Gay Fad decanter and glasses at Goodwill for around six bucks - and they sold for over $50.  Ditto a set of canisters, a tray, and several other items.  All of a sudden, it seemed that God had opened the door for me.   I believe this is how I am going to be able to help the girls pay for college.  I'm sure there are challenges ahead - times when nothing sells - but for now, I enjoy the feeling of success.   To everything there is a season...

*The figurine?  I bought it for a quarter at a garage sale in Harbor Springs, Michigan, and sold it for over $63 dollars this week.  Thank you so much, Lord!

Tomatoes

I love to eat raw tomatoes.  As a child, growing up in Ohio, summer meant long, hot days playing with my friends under the big green trees out back, running through the grass with dirty, bare feet, then coming in to dinner to ice cold milk, and, if I was lucky, fresh picked tomatoes and hot corn on the cob.  Sometimes, that was all we had, and it was plenty, because a hungry child could eat all she wanted.  No one needed anything else to distract from the incredible taste of butter dripping down the chin, the sweet, crisp taste of the corn, and then, as a lovely counterpoint, the icy, salty, tangy tomatoes.

Unfortunately, though we go to the midwest every year, Beloved Spouse's current school calendar insists on us being home by the end of July so he can go back the first week in August.  Those of you from the midwest know that the good, local corn and tomatoes don't show up until (at the earliest) the first week in August.   That leaves us, every year, coming home too early for corn and tommy-toes feasts (as my dad would say!)

Fortunately, this year a farm near Petoskey came to the rescue with locally grown hothouse tomatoes.  They were AMBROSIA.  I am not exaggerating.  I couldn't wait to get back to the cottage and slice one up.  Plus, they looked so pretty in the old pottery bowls in the cottage!  See for yourself:

Doesn't that make your mouth water?  It sure does MINE, though I'm also starving, waiting for Elder Progeny to make homemade spanish rice and pollo asado, from scratch.  She is COOKING this summer.  All the time.  I have the hips and butt to prove it.

I've heard that some of the organic farms around here are now doing heirloom hothouse and garden tomatoes.  I'll keep you posted, though somehow the idea of eating them in February or March isn't quite the same.

Serendipity

One of the things I love about life is how little delights pop up when you least expect them.  Case in point - we emptied the van the first night we were home and I immediately started unwrapping bundles and rediscovering all the neat things I found this summer in Michigan and Indiana.  I really found a LOT this year, so once it was all out of the paper and wrap I separated it into "sell" and "keep" and began the process of cleaning, weighing, photographing, and listing the items on eBay. 

The next day we went to the grocery to stock up and when we were unloading back at home, I looked across the expanse of the cargo area and noticed some bags slightly under Elder Progeny's seat.  Thinking they were trash left over from the trip, I grabbed them up to pitch them...and nearly dumped a solid, tissue wrapped object onto the garage floor!  Upon investigation, the bags turned out to contain a lovely vintage figurine I had purchased at a new thrift in downtown Richmond, Indiana, and a delicate, gold painted, porcelain tray with daisies which I found at a Goodwill...somewhere!  Perhaps in Bloomington, Indiana....

Anyway, I thanked the good Lord that either hadn't ended up smashed on the concrete, and took them inside to clean them up and decide what I was going to do with them.  I have a cheerful, blue and yellow daisy-spangled tablecloth - mint! - I got on eBay last spring on the kitchen table right now.  It represents summertime to me - makes me think of Black Eyed Susans and the wonderfully fragrant stretches of verge alongside the woods and fields at home...don't get me started, or I'll be crying over my keyboard and messing up my laptop....

I don't have a matching napkin holder for this cloth, nor a set of salt and pepper shakers, so on a whim I grabbed up the tray, plopped the figurine and our plain old shakers, and set the whole shebang in the middle of the table...and stood there, happily surprised by how great it looked together!

Serendipity: (noun)  luck, or good fortune, in finding something good accidentally 

Yep, that sums it up.

Home Again

We're home from our annual five week trek back to the Midwest to see family and friends, and boy, do we have a LOT of junk to deal with!  One of the highlights of the trip for me is all the wonderful garage sales and thrift stores in Indiana and Michigan.  You can still get amazing vintage collectibles for a quarter back there!  I came home with a pile of stuff to try and sell on eBay.  So, am I taking pictures and putting things up?  NO!  I'm writing to you!  But it's been a long time and I hate letting so much time go by.  We don't have internet for most of the trip (something I'm determined to rectify next year). 

I found an adorable 17" hard side suitcase, probably 50's or 60's, at a garage sale and it reminded me of this tabletop tableau I set up last spring.  I have a LOT of vintage travel stuff - I'm trying to get a plate for every state, for instance, and I was running out of room for some of the extras.  I had a table free in the living room, so, as part of my quest to leave no surface uncovered (ha!) I set this up.  I think it's pretty cute, myself.

I found everything here at garage sales or Goodwill except the photo albums.  My mother-in-law called those "Kodak books" and she had them for each child, chronicling their growing up years.  These are the traditional black paper, b & w photos, and pen-inscribed captions.  Last year Beloved Spouse went through and re-stuck-down all the pictures (using up at least four of my tape runners...grrr....) and now we can look at them without pictures falling out left and right.

You can't really see the London tray - here's another picture:

I believe this may be pre-WWII, or maybe just after.  On the back there's a sticker which states that  "...it is better not to put hot vessels such as aluminium teapots directly on to the tray."  Such a HOOT - I love it - alu-MINIUM.  So British!  Plus the irony is that someone quite brainless or forgetful, like me, obviously did exactly that, as you can see by the perfectly round heat stain in the center of the tray....  That's one of the things I just love about vintage stuff - it has history! 
Okay, enough dinking around...off to get some things up on eBay.  If you're interested, my "name" is niftiefifties.  Don't laugh.