Fun Monday #9: What I Like to Curl Up with at Night

This week, the Fun Monday host is AOJ & The Lurchers. She wants a peek into the privacy of our bedrooms, specifically, she wants to see our nightstands and, if we're so inclined, what's inside them.

The little set of drawers beside my bed holds my bedside lamp, a crystal dish for my jewelry, a little candle the children gave me on my birthday this year, coasters, my booklight, and a stack of books that I am currently reading, just read or want to read soon. Really a bit boring, I think.

I'm reading The Queen of Subtleties, the one with my booklight tucked inside. The stack includes Middlemarch, On Chesil Beach, and Origin of Species.





The drawer is full of more books, magazines, some bottles of lotion, a hair clip and ponytail holder. There are stashes of books all over my house. Stacks on tables and shelves, drawers and cabinets stuffed full to the brim. I love books. I always have.



I find it very hard to part with most books, and even some of my magazines. In our other house, I had some beautiful built-in bookshelves with cabinets underneath them. The shelves and the cabinets were full of books, magazines, and photo albums. My built in bookshelves in this house are small by comparison, so there are books in my nightstand, on shelves in my closet, in cabinets in the half bath and even in the bottom of my large double linen closet. I continue to buy books, and I continue to hold on to them. I need our lovely daughter to finish growing up and go to college already. I need her bedroom for book storage!

Fun Monday #8: Coming and Going

I wasn't blogging a year ago when Fun Monday started, so I am showing you the views from the front and the back of my house. I even threw in a couple of street shots. Even if I had been blogging, the view would have been different. We've just been in this house since July.

This is the view from the front porch. You can see my porch light in the top left hand corner of the picture. I'm an excellent photographer. Not. For the four pictures you see posted here, I probably took twenty.




This was taken at the end of my driveway, looking west.

This is looking east. When I took these pictures Sunday afternoon, it was cold, clear and sunny.

For this picture, I stood on the patio, just outside the back door. The field just behind the line of trees is where we see squirrels, deer, and if you believe my middle son, the occasional coyote.

Here is the link to the first post on my blog. It wasn't that long ago, just from April, 2007. I don't think I've grown much since then, although I have learned to post clickable pictures thanks to Laurie. (Not that I always do.) Oh, and people actually read my posts now. That first post? Not one comment.

Go on over and see my fellow Okie, Vicki, to check out the rest of the list. It'll be fun!

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Here's something else I learned from Laurie: A gratuitous puppy pic. Maddy needs her sleep.

Fun Monday #7 is a Gem

This week's Fun Monday is hosted by Ann over at For the Long Run. She is one of my favorite blog buddies, and her idea to share a website that changed our lives is so clever.

My mother is a serious collector of antiques. Red kitchen items from the '40s, old cast iron, anything related to the Oklahoma frontier, furniture, several patterns of dishes, and so many other things I cannot remember them all.

One of her obsessions is a pattern made by the defunct ceramic and pottery company, Harker Pottery, U.S.A. The company was established around 1857 in Ohio and operated until 1972. The pattern is called "Dainty Flower" and is part of the company's Cameoware line. Mama collects the blue and white version. It is a popular pattern that began with a very art deco design and then morphed into something called the shell shape by collectors.

One year, probably about ten or eleven years ago, she was looking for this pattern and having a hard time finding it. Her mother, who died when she was three, had some pieces of this pattern and my mother had decided to collect a complete set. I started looking for a nice piece for her birthday. I went to all of my usual antiques haunts, hit the thrift stores, and even tried shopping garage and estate sales in older, established neighborhoods. Nothing. Nada. Not even one piece.

My husband is a techie and he had been using the internet for a good while by this time. I think it was probably about 1997 or 1998. He suggested I go online and do a search for the pattern or any information about it. I had no idea what he was talking about. He logged on to our (incredibly slow) dial-up connection and went to a search engine to teach me how to conduct a search. I think it was Alta Vista that we used.

What he found was this little gem of a site, a virtual store on the internet that dealt solely in antiques. I was shocked such a thing existed. It was a revelation. I could shop for my mother's hard to find antique collectibles at our desk! Without leaving the house! Without wasting gallons and gallons of gas! I was in heaven.

Since then, I've moved on to an array of online businesses that range from Amazon and ebay to clothing stores, toy stores, pet stores and little tiny places that sell vintage stereos, or golf equipment, or musical instruments or theater costumes. I even have a Harker pattern of my own that I collect and use for our every day dishes.

I am the rare woman who absolutely hates to shop. But when I can do it in my pajamas from the comfort of my sofa, it's not so bad.

My husband is sorry he ever showed me how to use a search engine.

Fun Monday #6: From Zero to Four in Record Time

Our lovely hostess, Lisa, wants to meet the pets. A little more than a year ago, this would have been a hard one for me. We had no pets for a long time. Our house was full to the brim with our children and our possessions and our children's possessions. I didn't want to be bothered with feeding animals, grooming animals, or taking animals to the vet. I was busy. My husband was busy. The children . . . well, the children didn't get a vote.

I changed my mind at the most inconvenient time. Well, my mind was changed for me, but that's another story. Courtesy of my parents, we ended up with two little kittens. At the time, we were in the middle of moving. Our house was on the market and my husband was living in a three bedroom, two bath, third floor walk-up. The kids and I spent part of our time driving on the turnpike to see him, carrying these two little ones back and forth:





They are brother and sister. The little yellow one, the male, was so sick he almost died. He weighed fourteen ounces the first time we took him to the vet. His sister weighed eighteen ounces.





Now, this big guy is over eight pounds. Our lovely daughter, with her odd, dramatic streak, dubbed him Streudel.





And this pretty girl named Lucy now weighs just over four pounds. She's quite delicate. This is her favorite place in the house, right on top of our fridge. Her reasons will become quite clear when you see what we got next.


We enjoyed the cats so much and found they really weren't much trouble. One day, my husband and I watched as our then eight year old son kept his distance from the neighbor's dog. He was clearly interested, but watched from across the street as the other children petted the dog and played with him. Later on, we asked him why, and he informed us that he couldn't touch a dog because of his allergies. In a very pitiful way. That's when we decided to get a puppy for Christmas, one that wouldn't shed and cause the little guy to have allergy problems. That is how Jack came into our lives.





He is about four months old here. I can't describe how much he changed our lives. The children love him. I love him. My husband pretends he doesn't, but he loves Jack, too. Below is a shot of Jack, laying in his favorite spot: my husband's lap.

As Jack grew, we decided he needed a companion. Mostly to keep him from killing the cats. Lucy had taken to hiding somewhere high all day, not coming out to socialize with me until I had crated Jack at night. Streudel played with Jack, but spent a lot of his time jumping up onto railings and counters and furniture.

This is Maddy, the day we brought her home. She was eight weeks old. Jack went nuts. He barked at her most of that afternoon. It wasn't until the next day he figured out that she would play with him.

And this is Maddy now, about seventeen weeks old. She needs a haircut, but isn't she adorable?

Even though we've only had Maddy about two months, she and Jack are already inseparable. They nap together and play together. Most of the time, they forget all about the cats, which makes for much happier kitty cats. I'd say that we're just one big, happy family.

That's how we went from one pet to four in under eighteen months. I thought I'd lost my mind for a while, but we wouldn't trade them for anything now.

Fun Monday #5: Revealing My Shameful Addiction

Peter asked us to put the Fun into Fun Monday. However, I am revealing my terrible, hidden addiction to you here today. When I indulge myself, I sometimes get lost for hours. The breakfast dishes sit undone, the laundry molds in the washing machine, and back when I worked, I would occasionally close the door to my office and pretend to be in a meeting. Toward the end of my working days, I did this to cope. Sometimes for hours. That is how I became the pathetic user you find before you today.

It is a truly terrifying addiction, a time drain to rival all time drains. There is nothing else on which I willingly waste so much of my own precious time. It is a sick and twisted diversion.

Here are some of my favorites:























I couldn't pick just one. It's an illness, I tell you. Someone please save me.

On Fun Monday #4, I Break the Rules a Little

This week, our Fun Monday hostess is kitten. She is interested in finding out more about our homes. Her assignment is:

I think it would be neat to hear about the story behind your home and the road you live on. It doesn't have to be historical, maybe just something that stands out to you. It would be nice to have pictures to go with your little story. I also would like to know who has the oldest house. Whoever has the oldest house will get a little Christmas treat from little ole me.

I've written about my home before. In fact, finding a new home was a significant focus of my blog back in the early days (not so long ago). There are posts about searching for a place to live, and posts about the move. I even wrote about the day I found out we were going to have to find a new home. I think I've exhausted this subject.

Instead, I'm going to write about the little house that was our home for twelve years.

I had just turned twenty-seven a couple of weeks before we moved in. It was the first home I'd owned in Oklahoma, my home state, since moving to Kansas at the tender age of 22. We had moved frequently, making our home in places as diverse as Topeka, Kansas, Lee's Summit, Missouri, Newport News, Virginia, and Aiken, South Carolina. The older two children were small, my little boy still in a crib. Even though they were small, the moving was already becoming difficult, and it was time to settle down.

The little house was painted a garish, 1980s country blue when we bought it. Inside, the walls were covered in wallpaper in the style of the time, with even the light switch plates covered. The paper in the kitchen was done in two matching prints, a large version below the chair rail and a smaller one above it. There was more country blue in the background for the wallpaper of the main bath, which was covered in dusty rose colored posies. It was hideous. The wallpaper in the master bathroom was the only one I could stand, and even that was outdated, a cream colored paper printed with flowers and a shiny stripe. It looked like a country magazine had thrown up all over the walls.

The house was located in an excellent school district. It was on a large corner lot, with trees in front and back. The high vaulted ceilings made the living areas and the master bedroom seem larger than they were. I loved the bay windows that looked out into the back yard. The open floor plan was exactly what I was looking for, and despite the horrid wallpaper, the bones of the house were good, with upgraded countertops in the kitchen and baths, gorgeous built in bookshelves and woodwork and a lovely master suite. I moved in thinking that we'd stay a few years, maybe five, tops.

I got to work, stripping wallpaper, painting, and replacing light fixtures that dated from about 1986. They were uglier than the wallpaper. There was a large dog run along the back of the house that I tore down one summer day while the children napped. My husband tore up carpet in the main bath and linoleum in the kitchen. He replaced it with tile he laid himself, learning how to do it from a book we bought at Home Depot. We ripped ugly, neglected bushes out of the flower beds in front of the house, enlarged the beds and reshaped them. We replaced the bushes with lovely double flowering azaleas. Then replaced them again with something else equally ambitious. And finally settled on boxwood,crimson barberry and a little ornamental peach tree with a carpet of creeping jenny.

Our lovely daughter's room went through several incarnations in that twelve years. The ones I remember most vividly are her garden room and her "grown up" room. I can't find a picture of the garden room, but imagine white French furniture with gold accents, linens reminiscent of a Monet garden painting, palest pink walls and a rose vine trailing its way from the base of the door up to the ceiling and around the whole room. The grown up room, which she loved, wasn't very girly at all.

The boys' room started out life as a red and white nursery for one and ended up a jungle room for two. My little guy still asks to see pictures of their jungle room and has selected animal print linens for his new room here.

We put our hearts, our sweat and our tears into that little house. Up until we moved in August of 2006, it was the only home my children had ever known. Our youngest came home from the hospital to that house we had remodeled and reshaped with our own hands.

We never did get around to replacing the horrible carpet. When we first moved, my lovely daughter told me the thing she missed most about the house was the old, ugly blue carpet. It was our home. We still miss it. But now I think it's just the idea of the house we miss.

And I, for one, don't miss that blue carpet at all.

Fun Monday #3: I blew my whole Christmas decorating budget on one little train

This week's Fun Monday is hosted by katyabug. It is a fun and simple assignment:

In the spirit of the season I would like to see your favorite Christmas tree ornament. Not to be confused with the WHOLE tree. I want you to zoom in and show me one or a few(you know I can't choose just one!) of your favorite ornaments. If you don't decorate a tree, show me your menorah or dreidel, Kinara, or Yule Log. I want to see your favorite decoration for this holiday season.

I went with a decoration rather than an ornament. This is my favorite Christmas item. I must have been about twenty years old, maybe twenty-one. I was working in the human resources department of a large employer in Tulsa. It was the late eighties, I was going to put up my first Christmas tree of my own, and I didn't have one ornament. I had allowed myself a budget of about fifty dollars for the tree and decorations. One of the ladies I worked with was selling Christmas decorations that she had made. They were beautiful and I fell in love with them. One in particular caught my eye. It was lovely, seven pieces, all hand painted, with a Christmas tree that actually lit up. The price was $50. Because each item was hand made, she required orders to be placed in October and payment up front. I had never spent $50 on anything outside of my wedding dress before. Back at the time, my weekly grocery budget was just $40. I ordered it anyway. I'm so glad I did. We still enjoy it today as much as I did that first Christmas, when it was the only Christmas decoration in my house.

My First Fun Monday

Karisma is hosting Fun Monday. All my blog friends have been participating for weeks and it looks like fun, so I decided to join in.

Karisma says:

I want you to take a trip down memory lane, and keep right on going, right back to your childhood. And I want to hear "THAT STORY". You remember the one? Yes, you do! The one your parents, siblings, extended family or friends, would never let you forget, live down or get over!"

Dead laptop equals no pictures of Kaycie as a kid.

But, there is absolutely no lack of embarrassing stories. In fact, I am having difficulty deciding which one to tell. The one where I fell from the swing set while showing off and cut my back open then cried, not because I was hurt, but because there was blood on my brand new sundress? Or the one where I ran up the stairs into the very clean, very closed sliding glass doors and did a somersault backwards . . . in a skirt . . . on Christmas Eve . . . in front of my father's entire family? The one where I told my parents the Sonic reached out and hit my truck? Or maybe the one where I put a hole into the hollow core bathroom door with a kitchen knife trying to get to my brother? No, definitely not that one. Hmmmm. I know.

I was eighteen years old and a senior in high school. My father had just bought me a new car. It was a Volkswagen Rabbit to replace the incredibly cool but ridiculously dangerous fiberglass Bradley GT Daddy gave me the summer I was sixteen. He wanted me to have something reliable to drive to college. It was blue, had a stereo and I could get more than one friend in it. I thought it was SO cool. There was just one problem: it had a standard transmission and I could not drive it.

I had been driving almost two years and drove about as well as any other teenage girl. Which means badly. My father never rode in a vehicle with me if he could help it. It always ended in him yelling and me crying. However, my mother did not drive a standard, so it fell to him to teach me.




The Rabbit was parked in the driveway. I got into the driver's seat and my 6' 2", 225 pound father folded his big frame into the passenger seat. I remember being amused because the top of his hat touched the ceiling and even with the seat all the way back, his knees were almost touching the dash. He told me to start the car. Without depressing the clutch (!), I turned the key. The car lurched forward and died. It came to rest on top of the air compressor that was between the car and the house, the front bumper pressed against the siding on the house. It was a miracle nothing was damaged. I immediately asked Daddy why the car was in gear. In a snotty, teenaged girl kind of way. For some reason I thought the car should have been in neutral because the parking brake was set. Choice words came out of his mouth and there was something said about me being ignorant of driving and a smart ass on top of it. Anyway, we went around the block a couple of times without me killing the car and Daddy called it done. I am sure it was to keep from murdering me.

Later that evening, my mother sent me to the store to get some cheese for the tacos she was making for dinner. Daddy decided I should take the Rabbit for practice and sent my brother with me to help me through shifting gears. My fifteen year old brother. Yeah. That didn't work out so well for us.

After much fussing (me) and threatening to walk (my brother), we finally made it the six or seven miles to the grocery store. My brother complimented me on driving through the parking lot without killing the car. It was most definitely sarcasm. The grocery store was just south of the Sonic and they both sat right off Interstate 169 which ran through the middle of town. After successfully buying cheese and starting the car, I turned out of the parking lot headed north, and just as we were passing the Sonic, an enormous rendering truck ran the stop sign on the other side of the street and hit the Rabbit right in the driver's side door. The impact of the accident threw the car into the driveway of the Sonic. I'd had the Rabbit three days.

My brother remembers having his eyes clenched tightly, afraid to look. Without opening his eyes, he said my name. I didn't answer. He said my name again, louder. Silence. After a few seconds, he got the courage to open his eyes to look my way. The door was standing wide open and I wasn't answering him because I was gone. He got out of the car, stood up, and looked at the truck that had hit us.

I was about 5' 4" then and 110 pounds soaking wet. I had climbed up onto the running board of the truck and was furiously yelling at the guy who had hit us, waving my finger in his face. My brother says it went something like: "Don't you know what that stop sign means? I have had that car three days! Three days! My Daddy is going to kill you when he gets here, you just wait!"

I yelled at him until someone came up and gently led me away. Nowata is a small place, and the people who owned the Sonic knew who we were. They called Mom and Dad who were there in no time. The police barely beat them. The guy driving the truck tried to blame me for the accident. Shrinking violet that I am, I began yelling again.

Anytime that anyone in my family talks about accidents, sooner or later (usually sooner), someone tells this story. My parents seem to take special pleasure in telling it now that I have a teenager driving. My brother, of course, laughs with glee, then tells anyone present how he was scared for his life anytime he was forced to get into a vehicle with me. The jerk.

My husband takes this story as evidence that I have never been smart enough to be afraid of anything or anyone.

Hey, at least I can take care of myself.