Jenyfer Matthews

We had our first big snow fall yesterday afternoon and evening. It wasn’t sticking when I went to bed, but we woke up this this lovely scene. (Click any image to enlarge)

I got up early on purpose because I wasn’t sure whether or not the driveway would require shoveling. My husband decided he and his AWD Subaru were just fine to get out, but what about me and my little VW? Doubtful. I got out the new, handy-dandy, ergonomic shovel.

I look happy don’t it? That was my first five minutes. It became less fun as I discovered that it was about 4 inches of light fluffy snow on top of a layer of slush.

Now I know why the schools gave us a two hour delay – so I would have time to clear my driveway.

I thought the basketball hoop full of snow was funny when I saw it outside. So glad all that didn’t fall on my head as I was passing by with the shovel!!

The service manager of the dealership where I had my car serviced recently told me that my tire tread was at about 60%. I asked him if that was good enough for winter. His response: “You’ll find out the first time it snows.” Guess I’m about to find out because it’s time for school!

This week I am thankful that yet another dresser has been successfully restored and is now in service.

It all started when I found this dresser at a garage sale for $10.

The beast weighed a ton and somewhere along the way someone had spray painted it silver, but I liked the curve of the drawers and I decided it was worth $10.

I might have even been able to live with the silver paint if it hadn’t been so badly done in the first place and so chipped up in the second. Take a look at these dribble marks:

I thought – mistakenly as it turned out – that it would be easier to remove the spray paint than regular paint. It would go on in thinner coats, right?

HA! Perhaps that might have been true in theory, but whether it was down to the metallic nature of the color or the person who did the job, removing this paint was a bit like trying to remove old, baked-on duct tape. A goopy, sticky mess.

Under all that messy paint was a layer of what was once probably a decent honey-oak veneer (over chipboard). Unfortunately, the veneer on the body of the dresser was in better shape than the veneer on the drawer fronts so I couldn’t just stop and leave it there.

You might wonder why I went to so much trouble for a cheap dresser I got at a garage sale that wasn’t actually solid wood anyway.

Check out this furniture maker stamp inside the top drawer. I don’t know that maker specifically but the font would suggest that the dresser is c.1960-70s. Though much of the body of the dresser is chip-board it is also solid. The drawers alone have more wood in them than most of the new dressers I’ve seen for $$$ in stores.

I had half a gallon of white paint left from the first dresser I restored so I decided to go with that. The paint job seemed to go on and on, but in in the end, I think it looks pretty good. I didn’t even need to buy new knobs.

There are already a few scuff marks on the white paint where the drawers slide on that middle bar and on each other, but I am going to just call that my contribution to the shabby chic idea. (And I still have a small jar of paint leftover for touch-ups if necessary!)

Not bad for $10 and a lot of elbow grease.

I’ve gone on quite a bit (translate that to whined) about what a stressful year this has been. I can’t deny it has been stressful, but I also have many things for which to be grateful:

I’m grateful that one of my best friends works for the US State Department and that she called me at home in Egypt and helped me make the decision to evacuate Cairo in February at a time when I was so stressed out that it was difficult for me to make any decisions at all;

I’m grateful that my sister and her family were able to make room for us in their home and put us up for nearly a month while we tried to decide what to do next – a month which gave me a rare and wonderful opportunity to get to know my two teenage nieces much better;

I’m grateful that I had a long-lost high school friend who had a big enough house and generous enough heart to insist that my children and I come to stay with her for as long as we needed – even though she and I hadn’t seen each other in twenty years;

I’m grateful that I found a gem of a used car when I really needed one and that my brain wasn’t too fried by stress and anxiety to learn to drive a stick-shift at my advanced age (I can admit it now – it’s kind of fun!);

I’m grateful that my father and step-mother were able to give my children and I a place to stay over the summer – and a bit of normalcy that the children’s lives were distinctly lacking this year;

I’m grateful that just when I was on the verge of buying tickets to go back to Egypt at the end of the summer, my husband was offered a wonderful job in a lovely, stable and safe Midwest community – which seems like almost a miracle in such a fragile economy;

(Just think – my family and I could be in Cairo right now, going through revolution part II)

I’m grateful for my two incredibly resilient children and for the fact that the pieces of our lives are finally falling back into place in a pleasant arrangement.

I’m especially grateful that I am not in Cairo right now. This latest uprising is not a surprise to me – how could it not happen? Ousting President Mubarak was mostly symbolic – who did they think was propping him up? And could anyone have really thought that the military would quietly go away or obediently heel to a new master? It isn’t always a happy thing to be right however.

It makes me sick at heart to think about the friends who stayed in Cairo and what will become of Egypt, whether the elections occur or not.

I prefer to remember Tahir Square and the surrounding area as it was one Friday morning when I took a walking tour with several others from the university. I hope someday soon it can be this way again…

Wherever you are and whatever you are doing for Thanksgiving, I hope you have many blessings to count.

I seek out the bargains and adopt things from the curbside mall in part because I’m thrifty, but also so we can afford to use our money wisely elsewhere.

We bought this chair sometime in the mid-1990s, at a garage sale (of course!) for $15. At the time we purchased it, the upholstery was still in good condition and it was very comfortable, though the inner foam was beginning to give out. A tag on the bottom frame of the chair labeled it as having been made in Michigan (ha!) in 1959.

By the time we got this chair out of storage in September, the upholstery was still holding up but was very dirty. We might have been able to clean that, but the stuffing had solidified.

I have thought from time to time about learning how to do upholstery but this was not the project I wanted to start with! I took it to a professional instead.

My first thought was do have it done in leather. His quote quickly put that idea out of my head. Ouch! I opted for cloth upholstery instead. I cannot complain about the results. How pretty is this chair now?

I think the fabric suits the style of the chair marvelously. The only problem? Hubby and I are going to be fighting over who gets to sit in it now.

I’m going to make this place a home if it kills me…

The furniture restoration goes on… and on…

I am in the midst of painting dresser #2 and had hoped to have it done by the end of this week. No dice. Looks like it will be sometime next week. (I am taking my time painting the sides this time!) When that is done, I still have dresser #3 to stain – a bit nervous about that one. It is the nicest of the lot and if I mess it up, I’ll be pretty disappointed.

Not everything I bring home is in such sorry shape however. Mr. Matthews and I stopped by an estate sale last Saturday and we found an absolute goldmine of Mid-Century lamps. We snapped them up – of course! I love lamps and absolutely could not resist this one:

The shade reminds me of an alabaster pot we have coming from Egypt. In addition to the above “rocket lamp”, we also found two floor lamps and a “flying saucer” table lamp with a metal shade, and two teak folding side tables. All the tables required was a bit of polish and they are both beautiful and serviceable.

(Note to self: buy coasters)

The floor lamp above has a label inside that suggests it was manufactured for a laboratory, which is perhaps why the lamp heads swivel up and around independently. Cool! I think it will be the perfect companion to look over my shoulder when I get back to hand quilting.

I found this coat at a different estate sale and didn’t even try to resist.

Secretly I have always wanted something in animal print and lucky me – apparently faux fur is “in” this winter. Can’t you just picture me prowling the aisles in the grocery store wearing this coat?

The next best thing to getting a good deal on something is getting it for free. It astonishes me what people will put on the curb. I can only assume that they put the things out because it is easier for them than either hauling it off to Goodwill or taking the time to sell it on Craigslist. I was on my way home from the grocery store when I found this sitting on the curb half a block down from my house.

Isn’t it lovely? (The glassware is mine of course.) The scallopy edge at the top made me think of you, Mama Pea!

Aside from being a bit dirty and the finish being worn on the front corner of the cabinet top, there isn’t a thing wrong with this piece and I wasn’t about to leave it sitting there! I hurriedly unloaded my groceries and folded down the seats in my car and went back for it – two trips. It’s amazing what you can fit in the back of a VW Golf and can lift yourself when you are determined!

Once upon a time, when I was living in the United Arab Emirates, I had a friend who was a bit older than me and also a quilter. We frequently took fabric shopping trips together, talked on the phone daily, and met once a week at her house for our local quilting group. We were as close as we could be so when one day, out of the blue, she attacked me with an accusation of taking shortcuts in my quilting and doing shoddy work it really stung. She was going through a lot in her own life at the time and was under a lot of stress, but her hurtful comments were enough to damage our friendship enough that it never recovered.

Though she and I are no longer in contact, I still think of her every time I am working on a project and I think of a way to make it easier – am I taking a shortcut that will ultimately compromise the integrity of the end product?

I have to admit that on this particular project, the answer is probably YES.

I recently visited a blog where the writer challenged all the readers to make an apron. I have never been much of an apron wearer and have only more recently become interested in vintage aprons. But I got sucked in so what could I do but figure out how to make an apron?

I have a sewing machine but it hasn’t been used in 12+ years and probably needs some attention (my Bernina is on a ship en route – I hope!). Given the fact that I am much more likely to toss a dish towel over my shoulder while I’m cooking (in order to wipe my hands a hundred times) it was a natural choice to choose to make a dish towel apron. It didn’t hurt that I happen to have a stack of vintage dish towels from my antique mall shopping sprees this spring. I used an apron from my grandmother as a pattern:

This apron is in such good condition that I doubt my grandmother ever wore it either!

I folded in some pleats, bought some ribbon, and tacked on a tie – voila!

Turned out pretty cute, if I do say so myself.

I don’t know if you can see it in the picture, but I added some rick-rack to the tie just for you, Susan

So what do you think? Shortcut or not, did I do okay?

When I was young, some of my favorite books were the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. When my family took road trips – usually from Louisiana up to Wisconsin / Minnesota – I used to look out of the window and imagine how it would be to travel by covered wagon and live out on the grassland.

I used to have an obsession with hoop skirts too. I sometimes think I was born out of my time. A homesteader without a homestead. Then I go stay in the country and realize I like modern city conveniences just fine!

Maybe it was that early influence that has me trying things like making jam and cooking from scratch. I hate to waste anything. One of my closest friends regularly tells me I must have lived through the Depression. Whatever it is, I usually think I’m just being smart.

This weekend I decided that I wasn’t going to let the pumpkins I bought as Halloween decorations go to waste. There were three that didn’t get carved that I decided to convert into pulp for muffins, pancakes, and pies.

I read about it first, I went into this knowing that jack-o-lantern pumpkins were not necessarily the optimal pumpkins to make into smush. I did it anyway. There is so much sugar in muffins that surely it won’t really matter? I doubt the children will notice.

Smart or not, I stared with the largest pumpkin first.

He looks pretty cheerful lying there, doesn’t he? I had to use the largest baking sheet I had. I put the other half in the crock pot, on a suggestion I saw on the web.

Looks really gruesome after an hour in the oven at 425F, doesn’t he? Great thing about the blistered skin is that it peeled right off!

This isn’t all of the pumpkin puree I “harvested” – I ended up taking some pieces out of the crock pot and putting them in the oven because baking it was faster. NOTE: This picture does not show all of my measuring cups – I have a bit of a problem in that area…

(Please don’t judge my cramped kitchen!!!)

I ended up getting nearly 10 cups of pumpkin puree out of this particular pumpkin!

Did I let the seeds go to waste? Not on your life!

I have two more pumpkins to process. I’m planning on making pumpkin pancakes and pumpkin muffins soon and possibly some soup, but I think that before I bake anymore pumpkins I need to aquire a chest freezer…

Here it is, already November and nearly the end of the first marking period for the children’s schools.

My little man seems to be settled in nicely. He’s been happy and comfortable pretty much since day one actually. In the past he’s always given me a hard time about going to school and has had frequent, vague “stomach aches” in the mornings. Those are a thing of the past. He still enjoys the weekends more, mostly because he has a couple of school buddies who live in our neighborhood and a patch of woods off the back of the house to explore. What more could a nine-year-old boy ask for?

My daughter has had a rougher transition. For one thing, she started sixth grade: the dreaded middle school. Not only did she have to learn to use a combination locker (I still have nightmares about forgetting my combination!) but she had to figure out her schedule and switching classrooms / teachers. That made her nervous but at least that change in system was new to every sixth grader. The transition has actually been much harder socially.

Sixth grade is a rough year and can be a nasty age. Whether they acknowledge it or not, everyone is so insecure about themselves and their position in the social pecking order that they will do just about anything to anyone to make themselves feel more powerful and “seem cool”. Not a fun age at all. You couldn’t pay me to go back to sixth grade.

My daughter is new to public schools and is a real marshmallow inside. She’s also used to being fairly popular and is having a tough time figuring out how to fit into this new, much larger school with its unfamiliar social currents. She’s a girl who is a superb athlete and has a tom-boy’s fashion sense which sets her way apart from the majority of the girls in her school (according to her anyway). She’s starting to grow her hair out and is demanding braces.

But more pressing, she’s not fluent in US-speak.

She came home very down one afternoon this week, feeling stupid because there are so many things she doesn’t know. Like what a 7-11 is – or a “slushie.” Someone offered her a “pixie stick” and they were astonished when she asked what it was. It is all so minor that I find it kind of amusing, but she. does. not.

I tried to comfort her by pointing out that none of her classmates knew how to call someone a donkey in Arabic, had taken a school field trip that required a flight and a passport, had gone snorkeling in the Red Sea, or had been inside a pyramid. She smiled when I reminded her of all the things that she had already experienced in her short life and also pointed out that all of this is relative – none of this will matter in a few years.

But it’s tough when all you want is to blend into the crowd and you stand out so much.

Also funny for me to think that she did pretty much blend into the crowd in Cairo because her school required uniforms and her friends were doing all the things she was doing and more… and on that thought I guess it isn’t surprising that the girls on her soccer team who she liked best are the ones whose parents are immigrants…

Literally!

Over the years I’ve gotten used to not being able to return things. In all but the biggest stores, where I lived in the Middle East it was next to impossible to return anything once you had bought it. If you did try to return something, the transaction was always treated with extreme suspicion and usually required a manager’s approval – all done while everyone was giving you the stink-eye. In short, if you bought something, you should be prepared to keep it or put up a fight to take it back.

That also applied to anything that I purchased on my summer trips back to the US since it is awfully difficult to return something from halfway around the world or a full year later even if you do have the receipt!

Since moving back to the US, I’ve been totally bowled over by the level of customer service most stores provide. The merest whiff of dissatisfaction and the store personnel are bending over backward to make things right.

I am a receipt keeper so I have been loving the ability to buy things, mull it over, and then take it back if I change my mind. I still get that tight feeling in my gut when I approach the Returns Desk as I prepare to be grilled as to the reason for my return, but that is easing with every successful – usually totally unquestioned – transaction. I am sure that some of the customer service clerks are beginning to recognize me.

I decided to take it to another level this week. I took my car in to the dealership for a check-up in the middle of October, at which time they recommended I do a fairly expensive maintenance job. I waited a couple of weeks, then made the appointment for the work and had it done. The day after I completed the work, I got a coupon in the mail for 10% off the recommended work. I was miffed – 10% off that particular job was the equivalent to almost two tanks of gas for my car! I wasn’t sure that there was really anything to be done except express my dissatisfaction, but I decided to call the dealership anyway. Much to my surprise they told me to bring in the coupon and they would refund my 10%.

I guess it does pay to be the squeaky wheel.

This level of customer service is refreshing and I love it, but having lived abroad I can tell you that it is definitely not the norm. It is also probably the reason Americans get the reputation for being rude when traveling outside the US – because we just get used to a much higher level of customer service.

This year really didn’t go as I expected it to, and so neither did all my writing plans. I got some of the things I wanted to get done, but the big one left undone was my work-in-progress. I had really hoped that I would have that one nearly done by this point, but you already know how that went.

On the other hand, all of the upheaval and moving this year did give me some great ideas to use in my work-in-progress so perhaps there is a silver lining after all.

Instead, and to make up for the lack of a new book in some small part, I put together a digital collection of my three romance novels. Not only is money tight right now, the holidays are coming up. What could be better than one book with three three novels for one low price? Check out my home page for information and buy links.

In other news, it’s another freakishly warm November day so I am going to take advantage of it and try to get dresser #2 sanded and stained. Can’t wait to get this part of the transition to a new home over with!