Jenyfer Matthews

With the revelry of Christmas behind us and New Year approaching, many people are beginning to make grand plans for self-improvement in the new year. Most of these resolutions revolve around losing weight and / or getting healthier – and unfortunately too many people give up on these plans well before they make much, if any, progress.

I have written before about what I think of resolutions: I rarely bother to make them. It’s not as if there aren’t areas that could use improvement, but I prefer to tackle these things on a day-to-day basis.

This year, I do have one thing in mind however – a follow-up exam with a dermatologist. Last spring I had a small rough patch under my left eye that I didn’t like the look of. No one else seemed to notice it or think it looked odd if I pointed it out, but the minute I saw a dermatologist she directed me to peel my entire face and also chest area. The cream she prescribed was a chemotherapy cream that only reacted with sun-damaged skin and it was truly alarming to see the extend of the damage when nearly my entire face turned into a red, crusty scab.

My doctor suggested a follow-up in the fall which I was unable to keep, but I will be doing so as soon as possible in January. And if I have to do another peel, so be it. It’s unpleasant, but it’s better than the alternative – an alternative which is described in this video, Dear 16-year-old Me.

Watch it – and if you have any young people in your life, pass it on. There are so many things you can’t control in life, but using sunscreen? Not so very hard.

I wish so much I could go back in time and warn myself – probably age 10 would have been even better. Since I can’t, I’ll just have to continue to do my very best to protect my own children’s skin with sunscreen, protective swimwear, and good sense.

Stepping off my soapbox now. What goals will you set for the coming year?

I’ve been wondering lately why it is that we as a society pretty much systematically teach people not to take pride in their accomplishments?

It doesn’t really make any sense. On the one hand, we worry about building up our children’s self esteem, and yet if someone expresses pride in something that they have achieved, often that person is admonished for being full of themselves or conceited. A small child can show someone a picture they’ve drawn and be pretty sure that they will get positive feedback no matter what the quality of their art. When exactly does that change?

I’m proud of the fact that I taught myself to quilt and to cook and am pretty good at both now, and I’m proud of the fact that I learned to drive a stick shift at my advanced age and in a time of already high anxiety, but if I said these things out loud to anyone they’d probably immediately think negatively of me. You’re supposed to wait for other people to compliment you, not do it yourself.

I’m not suggesting we create a society of obnoxious, arrogant, blowhard jerks, but let’s think this through. If we could somehow foster a feeling of pride in accomplishments and a high sense of self-value in our children, we wouldn’t need to worry so much about their self-esteem or what affect advertising is having on their body image. Maybe girls wouldn’t fall into bad choices trying to please others if they only valued themselves more. Maybe boys wouldn’t engage in high risk behaviors trying to impress others if they were already proud of themselves.

There are no easy answers to this, but it is definitely something I’ll be thinking of with regard to my own children…

In spite of the fact that I didn’t bake anything except a pumpkin pie (our neighbors stopped by on Christmas Eve and brought some cookies which we set out for Santa), and in spite of the fact that I bought a duplicate DVD for my daughter which I realized in the nick of time and replaced with another and a video game for the wrong gaming system which I didn’t, I declare this Christmas a success. Everyone seemed pleased by their presents and there was good cheer all around. You can’t ask for much more than that.

Both the kids profess to still believe in Santa, though I think that time is running short – at least for my daughter. She’s asked me point blank about the Tooth Fairy (I evaded the question) but has not asked about Santa. One reason that I think that Santa survives scrutiny is because he is so much nicer than me.

I don’t buy my children things constantly – I’m pretty much a birthday / Christmas kind of mom. I’ll get supplies they need for school or sports, but other stuff? Special occasion or allowance. Santa ends up bringing all the things they children have been begging for all year that I have said ‘no’ to – like the Pillow Pets I have denied the all year. He also WOWS them with gifts that they didn’t know they wanted – this year he brought them a portable ping-pong table. How can mom compete with that?

Not only that, Santa fills their stockings with candy and goodies that Mom has to try and put the brakes on – after all, Santa isn’t here to pay their dental bills. Santa is a great guy, isn’t he? I kind of wish he still brought me things!

At any rate, we have all survived another Christmas, even if there wasn’t any snow. Bring on the new year…

Not even a MOUSE!

I have seen neither ears nor tail of my mouse visitor, dead or alive. (Yes, I choose to continue to think of it as a “mouse” though a few people have suggested that it sounded too large to be a mouse – I don’t wish to follow that train of thought!) My holiday wish is that s/he has vacated the premises never to return.

I hope that wherever you are, whatever you are doing, you have a wonderful weekend full of joyful surprises.

Apparently my standards of clean with regard to my home are fairly high, judging only on the last several homes I’ve moved into. If my mother were alive, she’d shake her head in amazement because I’m sure she despaired of me when I was a teen living in her house. I never left dishes sitting around, but my room was pretty cluttered to say the least. (My own turnaround gives me some small hope for my own children’s habits!)

When I first move into a house, I have to give it a thorough cleaning. However it may degenerate after that initial cleaning is beside the point because at least by then it is my dirt (I’m sure all the former tenants of my homes have felt the same, ha ha). I know that I’m totally settled in and comfortable in a new place when I’m willing to walk around barefoot.

Not that I actually go barefoot that often, but it’s the idea of it. When we lived in Cairo, I made everyone take their shoes off at the door to try and keep from tracking so much dirt and muck off the streets into the house. People are constantly spitting and sometimes worse out in the open, so it just pays not to wear your shoes in the house. I typically would switch my outside shoes for flip-flops in the house. I don’t like walking on grit and the floors seemed always to be covered in sand.

When we moved into our house in Michigan, I wore flip-flops around because the house wasn’t clean. I washed the walls, had the carpets professionally cleaned, and was just about approaching the point when I might have gone barefoot when the weather turned cold and I switched to slippers. After yesterday, I not only don’t wish to go barefoot, but I don’t even want to take a shower. I may in fact switch to wearing workboots.

I saw a mouse in my kitchen.

It was early in the morning and I had just gotten up to make the children’s lunches for school. All the lights in the kitchen were out so I flipped them on and made my tea and booted up my computer. I had completed packing lunches and was sitting and looking at my email when I thought I saw a flash of movement from the corner of my eye. I turned to look and saw nothing so returned to my email. A few moments later I heard an odd noise. I looked up and saw the mouse sitting on the back burner of my stove eating something.

Never have I wished more for a remote control gas stove so I could have fried his little furry butt!

I saw the mouse clearly from across the room. I couldn’t see its body because it was behind a lunch bag, but its head seemed pretty big and it didn’t seem particularly worried about my presence as I stood up and walked around to the stairwell to call my husband upstairs. I opened the front door, somehow thinking that I would shoo it out of the kitchen and that maybe it would be scared enough to just run outside.

My husband came upstairs and he looked in the kitchen to see the mouse licking a smudge of peanut butter off a piece of paper I had just pulled off a fresh jar in the process of making lunches. When the mouse noticed my husband, he dove behind the stove. My husband pulled the stove out at my direction, me still hoping to scare it out. Not even banging the stove with a broom handle produced results so the mouse was either hunkered down or gone. I did the only thing that I could do and went straight to the store and bought some “mouse chow”, aka rodentcide on my receipt. I put some behind the stove and under the sink, but concentrated mostly on the garage which is probably where the furry beast got in.

What am I, the Pied Piper? The mechanic just pulled a second wad of mouse nest out of the AC vents in my car, which I had chosen to believe was a leftover from the country mouse I spotted in my engine as I was leaving Minnesota this summer. I’m really hoping that it is the cold weather that brought the mouse inside because I haven’t seen any evidence whatsoever of gnawing or droppings. Maybe my banging on the stove with the broom will have given it the message that it isn’t welcome!?

There’s no way I’m going barefoot now – though it’s not as if I plan to step on a mouse either!!!

There is a makeover reality show I first saw on the BBC where they transform someone who looks old beyond their years by fixing up their teeth and skin (sometimes with plastic surgery) and also style their hair and teach them about fashion. The results they achieve can be startling at times. It’s amazing what a little preventative maintenance, moisturizer, and the right clothes can do for you!

Seems to go for furniture too

I finally finished the last of the dressers I took on for rehab this fall. I went back and forth about how I wanted to refinish this dresser, the nicest of the three that we bought. No, it didn’t cost us much, only $20, but that didn’t mean I wanted to do a bad job of rehabbing it either.

(Click any image to enlarge)

This is how the dresser looked when we bought it – note the dull mocha-colored paint on the dresser top.

One of the things that made it difficult to choose how to finish it was that I had no idea what kind of wood I was dealing with. After stripping and standing it, I was pretty sure that it was a decent hardwood of some sort, but that’s not really that specific. I could only guess at the age of the dresser and surmise that it was one of half a dozen varieties of wood. And from what I could tell, the dresser was not made as a high-end item therefore it might actually be constructed of multiple kinds of wood. The heavy cherry stain that I stripped off was applied to make the wood look uniform, something I don’t think they would have bothered with if they had thought the wood looked good as it was.

The paint came off pretty nicely, but the dresser top had a couple of water rings on it (upper left), which is why, I assume, they painted the top.

I was prepared to apply Borax and bleach if necessary to get rid of the rings, but I was lucky – the water marks pretty well came out with a little industrious sanding.

I don’t have a dedicated workshop space and I was reluctant to start trying to do a good job with things you have to brush on and worry about dust marring what is intended to be a glossy finish or products that give off a lot of fumes. In the process of reading about different methods of finishing, I came across a description of Danish Oil. It’s advertised as a one-step finish that both protects and hardens the wood from inside. Hmmm… I liked the sound of that.

Of course I didn’t leave it there – I did more research about Danish Oil specifically and how to get the best results. Some of the methods depended on the kind of wood you were working with, which I still don’t know, but at the end of the day what it seemed to boil down to was that it was a method of finishing that was pretty difficult to screw up and was both easy enough for novices and gave good enough results that even professional woodworkers liked it. Foolproof good results? That was good enough for me. A bonus was that the end result would very likely be similar to the finish of a couple of pieces of wood furniture from India we purchased in Dubai, one of which is also a dresser.

The hardest part of using the Danish Oil was quite literally opening the $%^&#$% can!! It was not only child-proof but defective.

The instructions on the Danish Oil can say that the first application should be fairly liberal. This time I turned the dresser on its side and started there – I wasn’t going to have any runny streaks on the side of THIS dresser like I did with the ones I painted! I chose a Danish Oil with a medium walnut stain in it. Basically all you have to do is rub the oil on liberally, let it sit for about half an hour, reapply to any areas that start to look “dry”, then wipe it all off. That’s it. After a couple of coats, I was already quite pleased with the way the wood was looking.

I did decide to keep going however. A couple of the sites I’d looked at said that the wood would look pretty good after a couple of coats, but that if you kept going eventually the wood would “pop” and really look nice. That’s where I got after about 5 coats. Wow. I have since determined that whatever sort of wood this is, it must be fairly closed grain because I got none of the oil “creep” that others warned to be on the lookout for in the hours after application. If you miss any spots when you are wiping it off and it does get sticky, all you have to do is put on some more with a little steel wool, wipe the sticky bit loose, and then wipe it off.

The stain in the Danish Oil gave the wood a really nice color, but still allowed for the grain pattern to show through. Yes, now all the flaws in the wood and the abuse that has been inflicted over the years show. I don’t mind a bit. In modern marketing terms all of those marks are called “distress” and you have to pay big bucks to get that look from Pottery Barn

The process did take longer than I expected because I let it dry for 12 hours between each application which is 5 days per surface, but it only takes about 30 minutes a day – most of which is letting the oil sit on the wood. Easy.

Isn’t it lovely? I am still having trouble getting my mind around the fact that it is the same dresser and that I was the one who was able to make it look so nice!

The hardest part of this entire project was first stripping and then sanding the dresser and then just making a decision about what product to finish it. Good preparation made the finishing part simple. In hindsight, I’m not sure what I was so worried about!

Week before last, my daughter’s homeroom teacher sent home a note asking permission for the children to participate in an optional Secret Santa activity. The kids would need to draw a name and then bring in one small gift each day this week, the cost for all five gifts totaling no more than $10 for everything.

My daughter was very enthusiastic and started shopping with her own money at a craft fair we attended last week, where she got a tube of red and green M&Ms and a bottle cap necklace. We got the rest at the grocery store: a pack of gum, a chocolate Santa, and a small ornament.

All together, the presents may have cost $8. Tops.

Monday, my daughter stayed home from school sick, but asked me to take the card and M&Ms to the school so her Secret Santa giftee would not be disappointed in not getting anything. Tuesday the school was closed due to a gas leak. Wednesday school resumed and my daughter brought two presents to school for her giftee, and was naturally looking forward to collecting her three goodies.

She came home pretty disappointed. What did she get? A crumpled up notebook paper containing an old eraser, a used pencil, and one dice.

Are you kidding me? This was an *optional* activity. You don’t sign up if you can’t do better than the trash you find lurking at the bottom of your backpack. It does not take a lot of imagination to buy a candy bar or a pack of gum (and I guarantee my daughter the candy hound would have been thrilled with either). I can only assume that the boy (yes, it was a boy, how did you guess??) did not have support from home, but I’d be surprised if he didn’t have enough spare change to treat himself to something from the vending machine.

I’d like to think that if she found out about this, his mother would be embarrassed. Even if the kids forged the note and did it on his own, with gift giving skills such as these I feel very sorry for his future wife!

My initial reaction, aside from Mama Bear Fury, was to try to make it up to my daughter in some way, perhaps by bringing her little presents after school myself. One of the hardest things that I have faced as a mother is dealing with my children’s disappointment when people / life lets them down. In the end I decided that it wasn’t my job or in her best interest to smooth it over. There is a lot to be learned by disappointment. For one thing, it surely does make you appreciate the good things in life more, right?

Instead, I wrote her teacher an email to express my daughter’s disappointment and ask that she try to emphasize the expectations of this activity a bit better in future. Then I talked to my daughter about the point of the holiday, which is giving. She is getting great pleasure from seeing how pleased her giftee is with what she has been given and that will have to be enough.

Doesn’t mean that my heart isn’t still bleeding or my blood boiling.

It’s not easy being a mom…

Last week I mentioned a few projects I’d thought up for myself. Here are the results.

How happy was I when I went to Joann Fabrics and found a plain wreath form 50% off? Add a couple of bags of ornaments from the thrift store / garage sales and it looks very festive. I’d like the ornaments to be a bit more dense, but the beauty of this project is that I can just keep adding to it when I find appropriate ornaments. I have gobs of tiny globes coming in my shipment from Egypt and I’m sure I can spare a few for the wreath!

This is currently hanging inside, at the bottom of the stairs next to the laundry room door (where I get to see it all the time, LOL). There is a storm door over our front door and I don’t think the gap between the is wide enough for this full figured wreath and glass ornaments. Can’t you just imagine what would happen the first time the door slammed?? Maybe next year we will have a different house and it will get a more glamorous location.

And what do you get the man who has everything? Well, you can do what I did and just repackage something he already has! When we were going through all the things that we got out of storage, we found a bag full of beer coasters my husband had collected here and there over the years. I decided that they would be better appreciated on display than forgotten in a box and voila! Cool, unique present.

I got the frame at Goodwill and arranged the coasters using poster putty – that way they can be repositioned if necessary. Also, I didn’t want to GLUE any of these in case any of them did actually have any value! I was so enthusiastic about how it came out I almost gave it to him early, over the weekend, but I resisted. I can wait two weeks more

(Don’t worry – I got him another present too!)

I’m pretty much done decorating for Christmas. I bought a couple of small, prelit, table-top trees last week – one for upstairs and one for downstairs. I have to admit that it is absurd how much pleasure looking at my little green tinsel tree, hung with ornaments I’ve picked up at estate sales, gives me. The children were slightly less impressed and somewhat worried about where we would put “all of the presents”. (Just how many are they expecting??)

Like most things, this tree looks better in person! Clicking on the picture to make it bigger helps too

I normally would get a larger tree but I was going back and forth on the idea of real vs. fake trees. I like real trees but they are messy and my daughter has a lot of allergies; fake trees are more convenient but the ones I liked most were $$$. My procrastination paid off this week because I got a great fake tree for 70% off between the clearance price and a register coupon I had.

You know it is pre-lit because I would never take the time to string all those lights! And it’s a good thing I settled for the 7′ tree because it’s nearly brushing the ceiling as it is!

How are you all doing with your holiday preparations? No cookies here yet, but there is still time. And if all else fails, I know where some Girl Scouts live!

Though I love to collect kitchen items – measuring cups and spoons, good pans, dishes – and I enjoy eating good food, I do not necessarily love to cook. (Who wouldn’t have a personal chef if one were available??) I do however derive a certain amount of satisfaction from making tasty and well-balanced meals for my family – a task that takes both time, forethought, and some skill – which is why I don’t appreciate it when my children make faces when I serve something for dinner they don’t care for.

There were things my own mother cooked that I liked better than other things and a few things that I didn’t like at all but I ate whatever she cooked. It just never occurred to me to complain about dinner (at least not to her face and until I’d moved out!)

I don’t think it is too much to ask of my own children that they extend the same courtesy to me. I don’t make them eat things that they have tried and genuinely given a fair chance but don’t like. Not everyone is going to like everything. (My mother did not make me eat acorn squash for instance) If I choose to make something for dinner that I know ahead of time is going to be more pleasing to the adults in the house than the children, I will make an alternate selection for them (doesn’t happen much!) But if I make something that the children have eaten 100 times before without complaint and they just aren’t in the mood for it? Tough. Have a bowl of cereal or go to bed hungry. I’m not a short-order cook.

I made it pretty clear a few years ago that I wasn’t going to make macaroni and cheese every night and that I wasn’t interested in hearing negative commentary either. My daughter got the message and rarely if ever says anything negative about dinner. She is a good eater and the way to judge her enthusiasm is whether or not she takes a second helping.

My son on the other hand can be a real pain. If it were up to him, we would only ever eat macaroni and cheese, pizza, and bean burritos. He has no problem making faces or pouting at the table, particularly if I serve chili. He too is a good eater (quantity) but lately his range of acceptable choices seems to be shrinking. Last week he made a big fuss about a meal I have served many, many times before and that he has always liked. I was fed up so I sent him to his room with nothing. He was mad and stubborn enough that he decided to stay there even after I told him he could return if he liked. Eventually he came back to the table, after the rest of us had finished eating, and ended up eating two big platefuls.

When I remarked upon it he said, “It’s good. I forgot that I liked it.”

All that drama because he forgot he liked it? Oy-vey! He’s only 9 years old. If this is going to be a battle of wills, then I’m probably going to be entirely gray by the time he is old enough to move out. I sure hope that he learns his lesson or it might one day his wife be sending him from the table hungry!

I learned something about myself this week. I guess I always knew this, but I am happiest when I have lots of things to do. Too much down time and nothing to do just brings me way down.

Isn’t that kind of sad? I had two days this week where I didn’t have much on my agenda and I couldn’t even really enjoy them because I was mopey. Clearly I need help.

(Actually, I’m sure that I’ll get over it when my quilts and DVDs arrive and I can spend an afternoon hand-quilting and catching up on House)

I ended up making a to-do list for myself for the remaining days this week. Even if I don’t get to everything on my list, I do feel better when I can look back at my day and see what I did get done.

I came up with a few small projects to entertain myself. One is to make a present for my husband using some things he’s been collecting for years. I won’t be more specific than that for now but I’ll post a picture soon. I also decided to make a new Christmas wreath. I really like the looks of the ones that include glass ornaments but I didn’t want to pay what they were asking for them at the store. Since I have bought a few boxes of vintage ornaments at estate / garage sales this fall, I have more ornaments than I need. I went to the store and bought myself a wreath form to which I will attach the extra ornaments. Voila! What could be more fun than that?

I will also admit that though I am now in possession of TWO cookie guns, a new-to-me vintage rolling pin purchased at an estate sale, and have been browsing cookie recipes frequently, I have no desire to bake any cookies.

I am still working on finishing the last dresser and all I can say is WOW. So far, it is looking really, really nice. I am taking my time with it so I don’t expect it to be picture worthy until sometime next week, but don’t worry – that is one project I will enjoy showing off.

One funny note on the painted dressers: the paint on the top of the dressers is a bit sticky. I don’t know if it is the finish (satin) or if it is too applied too thick but not only do certain things (like paper) stick to the paint, but some things leave impressions – like the teeth of a beaver skull my son has sitting on top of his dresser. Ha! Talk about adding unique character to a piece!

Otherwise, I have also finally starting tinkering with my latest book again. There was more written than I remembered and I am starting to add to it bit by bit as well. While looking for that file, I found some notes on another book idea and that one sounds really fun! I also thought up two other ideas for black comedy / mysteries. If only I didn’t need to sleep at night maybe I could get some of this stuff done faster…

Oh well – guess I won’t run out of things to do anytime soon!