Happy 200th Birthday! You Should Of Been An E Ticket!

Happy 200th Birthday Mr. Abraham Lincoln!

(And shame, shame, SHAME on Google, again. Last year they didn't bother to give Lincoln's birthday a nod via a re-do of the Google logo.

Last year I wrote a whole post about that appalling disrespect.

But...I figured they would probably acknowledge the big 200th birthday though.

I was wrong. Today they acknowledged Charles Darwin's birthday instead.

Because, you know, Charlie D. has done soooooo much for mankind.

Grrrrr....)

Thinking about Mr. Lincoln brings back a memory that perhaps other my age share.

A time when we had to chance to sit before Mr. Lincoln, and see him stand up and talk about his dreams and visions for mankind.

An opportunity that most of us took mostly because it was hot outside, the room Mr. Lincoln was seated in was air conditioned, and because it didn't require any ticket to get in.
That memory came back to me the other day while I was chatting with B. about Disneyland "E" tickets.

Those of us who grew up in the '50's and '60's in Southern California know exactly what I mean by that phrase. To get everyone else up to speed, let me explain the significance of an E ticket:

It used to be, long, long ago, in a far away galaxy called "Disneyland" people would purchase ride tickets in booklets. The booklets had A, B, C, D, and E ticket which corresponded to the amusement park's rides.

E tickets allowed you to ride the really BIG rides, like the Matterhorn. There were something like eight E ticket rides in the park; the booklets only contained six E tickets.

You had to chose which ride you would have to miss.

Or at least most of us had to chose. The purchase price of an extra ticket was substantial, and "back in the days," parents had no problem staying in budget AND letting kids learn that you can't have everything they want. That was just part of life, and it was good to learn that fact at an early age.

Today Disneyland has one price entry fee for ALL rides, and you can even make reservations so you don't have to stand in line for an hour and forty five minute to take a ride that would last 45 seconds. (This is a true life experience: we did exactly that with our kids when they were little, and just HAD to go on the Dumbo the Flying Elephant ride.)

Now there were always more D tickets than E tickets, more C tickets than D tickets and so on. The most tickets in the booklet were the A tickets. The A tickets were to stuff that little kids would like, like the Merry-Go-Round, and a kiddy car ride.

And there was one attraction in the park that required NO ticket at all: Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, sponsored by Lincoln Savings.

Disney had just perfected the animation technique which would later be used to make those wily pirates come to life in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. But while we were kids, all that Mr. Lincoln could do was (amazingly!) stand up from a seated position, and talk, moving his head and mouth and hands as he "talked" through his famous speeches.

I (and most other kids) found the speech to be pretty dull. But as I mentioned before, it was a place where you could sit in a nice theater seat in an air conditioned room and take a break from all that standing in line stuff.

I can still see Mr. Lincoln's blue eyes opening and closing as he talked. I just can't remember a word he was saying.

The conversation with Bernie about E tickets drifted to the free exhibit of Mr. Lincoln. Why, we wondered, did Mr. Walt Disney feel so strongly about Abraham Lincoln that he dedicated an entire building to him?

Mr. Lincoln was originally present at the New York World Fair in 1964...right around the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. There were still enough folks around that had family members that had fought in the Civil War that it all must have seen pretty important still.

Our conversation drifted to today. If Mr. Disney was to create an entire theater to showcase just ONE historical figure, who would he choose?

Sadly I think I know. He likely would have chosen the man for whom a major street is named in every American town (unlike Lincoln...or even Washington for the matter.)

He would likely have chose the man for whom parades are still held, and in the City of Houston, TWO parades are held each year.

A man that has his own holiday day. Lincoln and Washington now share a single day designated as "President's Day." I'm afraid most school children would be unable to name the two people who were presidents and who used to each have a holiday for celebrating their February birthdays.

He is the man that children have told me WAS a president. (He wasn't...)

Yes, I believe Mr. Disney would have capitulated to popular culture and would have build a theater to present another assassinated historical figure: Dr. Martin Luther King.

When we were kids, we wiggled and squirmed and got very little out of the "Great Moment" with Mr. Lincoln. The adults that shepherded us around the park rarely made much of the speech or the man.

I wonder...if it was today, and it was MLK, would all children be allowed to give scant heed to what was being said?

I don't know. Perhaps by 2060, we will be over the popular culture greatness of MLK.

I just never imagined that by 2009, America (and Google...) would be so over Mr. Lincoln as well.

Looking back, I think a Great Moment with him should have rated an E ticket at the very least.

(You can experience the Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln via YouTube at this link. Good stuff, huh? Even when you don't need a place to sit in air conditioning!)

A Good Reason for Regretting Becoming a Librarian

I've just been asked to research what is precisely permitted by law in student esthetician clinics/classes in terms of practicing Brazilian waxing.

OMG.

(everyone sing along...)

Mama don't let your babies grow up to be librarians.
Don't let 'em pick titles and drive them book carts.
Make 'em be doctors or work at Walmart.
Mama don't let your babies grow up to be librarians.
They're always researching and they're always alone
Even with data they love.

Librarians ain't easy to love and they're harder to hold
And they'd rather give you information than diamonds or gold
Wearing big hair buns and old clunky shoes, each night begins a new day
And if you don't understand her and she don't die young
She'll probably just research away.

Mama don't let your babies grow up to be librarians.
Don't let 'em pick titles and drive them bookcarts
Make 'em be doctors or work at Walmart
Mama don't let your babies grow up to be librarians
They're always researching and they're always alone
Even with data they love.

Need work? Love animals?

Ever wish you could have more wild wolf interaction in your life?
Of course you do!
Well, did you know that with just a few short months of training, you could become a professional wild wolf massage therapist?
And best of all, there are job openings happening all the time, even in today's troubled economy.
Call you local massage therapy school and register for classes TODAY!

From: Massage Therapy Journal Winter 2008

Wendy Van de P*ll has answered the call of the wild in her practice. She runs a successful business in rural Sandwich, New Hampshire (....) She has been a licensed massage therapist since 2000.

Q: What inspired you to take up animal massage?

A: I used to be a wolf ecology professor. A group of us were studying wolf behavior in the wild, and one day an alpha male wolf woke up paralyzed. No one knew why. We brought in health care providers including an acupuncturist and a massage therapist. I saw how beneficial massage was for the wild wolf. He survived, walked and maintained his alpha status. At that moment, I realized massaging animals was my calling.

Q: Where do you work?

A: I travel to my four-legged clients...

Q: What are some common animal aliments?

A: It depends on the sport.

I just wish Wendy didn't live on the east coast. I think she would make one heck of an interesting dinner party guest. Can't you just imagine how it would go?

"Oh Steve, Mary...come over here. I want you to meet my friend Wendy. She massages wolves in the wild. Why don't you three chat and get to know each other a little better while I get the dinner rolls out of the oven."

Does the CIA know about this?

One of my tasks at work today was researching Aesthetic school's spa menus around town.

You know...the places where you can go to get beautiful, via masks and wax, manicures and pedicures.

Some of those menus made restaurant menus seem dull by comparison.

Vanilla Creme facials...Chocolate Raspberry Pedicures...Orange Spice Lymphatic Massage.

It was so hard to stay at the desk when such dreamy body care is available for a pittance at the local beauty schools.

On the other hand...one school offered eyebrow, upper lip, bikini, Brazilian, underarm, leg and arm waxing.

Not quite so tempting...

Nothing new there. They are just somewhat painful beauty treatments that are sometimes necessary to look well groomed.

Then I read:

Nostril Waxing.......$5.00

Just reading the words makes my eyes water.

How would they get the wax up there?

How would they get it OUT of there?

It occurs to me that at $5 a pop, perhaps this is the perfect solution to water boarding torture.

I can imagine how it could go at one of the terrorist holding camps:

"Tell us what you know about jihad...what is being planned...when, where...tell us NOW or we'll be giving you a spa treatment! Tell us or your ugly hair spouting nose is going to be

sorry, I PROMISE you. Hahaha haaaa ha! And you thought the chest waxing we did yesterday was bad...you haven't seen nothing yet!"

Later, when confronted by the media about possible torture, the captors can say with a perfectly straight face:

"We treated them well! We even gave them spa treatments!"

Basement: Before, After and a Surprise

Before: Dark gloomy basement: View to the west.

Low loop pine green carpet.

Ewww...

After: Not gloomy now basement: View to the west.

A tad bland, but pictures on the walls and furniture will jazz it up later.

The new carpet: beige with fireplace rust flecks and sage green flecks.

(and it is super soft....)

Basement before: view to east.

Basement after: View to east.

I've been researching a lot about 50's ranch houses. The basement was usually used as a recreation room.

With very specific elements.

As the carpet guys started tearing up the old rug, I watched and waited, hoping....

And my hope was not in vain.

A true 50's style entertainment center: an INLAID shuffle board court was under that dismal old carpet.

Ahhh...one of the joys of discovery that comes with remodeling an older home.

Can't you just picture it now?

A roaring fire, bottle of soda pop and chex mix...

The kids all dressed like Richie and the gang from "Happy Days"?

Cool!

It just broke my heart to have to cover it all up again.

But since floor tiles are made of that oh so popular '50's style asbestos...

(which is fine is you don't scuff or buff or break it in anyway...with scuttling shuffle board pucks for instance)

it had to be safely covered again with wall to wall carpeting.

Sigh.

At least I know it is there.

The packers will be here in the apartment in an hour, gotta run.

It is moving day again...the third time in five months.

One more 'moving day" to go, when our Houston household furnishing gets moved into the house in March.

After that, I just want to find a good (safe surface) shuffleboard court and play away the day.

Monday , Tuesday, Happy Days....we're gonna rock around the clock tonight!

Ranting For Our Future RNs

I am livid.
Stark raving pitch a fit in the front office ranting until my eyes bug out livid.

One of our employees is signing up for a skin care program now being offered by our school.
Why is she doing that?
She figures that with that training, along with her massage therapy degree she will be able to make enough money to fund her true academic goal:

Getting a degree in nursing.

That is, of course, if she can get into a nursing program.

She is plenty smart. The problem is that there are not enough nurses who are willing to become college faculty at $20-40 thousand a year (after getting a Master's Degree) when they could be out there making twice that much money working as a nurse with just a basic degree.

So selfish of them....

Now why does this girl's plan to "Mask and Moisturize for Moolah" make me livid?

Because if she was a guy who wanted to go to college to play a sport, her entire tuition would likely be paid for.

And if she was good at her sport (in the same way that she currently is "good" at nursing related skills) she would not have to worry about not having anyone available to teach her required course work at a greatly reduced salary.

Why is that the case you may ask?

Answer: Because the "Faculty" for a degree in football get paid...are you ready for this?

Typically One MILLION dollars. Or more. Per year!

For "teaching" a goofy sport for five months a year.
Other kinds of sports "teachers" get paid almost equally well.

(oops, there isn't really a degree called "football" or "basketball" or "golf" , but there is money given to people who go to college to PLAY those games.)

Of course people (and by that I mean MEN) would argue that a good sports team brings lots and lots of money into the school.

So true.

Call me a sicko, but frankly seeing the owner of the Utah Jazz having a double amputation makes me wonder: was it important to him that he had nurses available to assist him as he recovered?

Or would it have been enough to have a couple of B-ball boys hanging with him until his stumps scabbed over?

Was the owner of the Carolina Panthers appreciative of the nursing staff following his recent heart transplant, or did he really wish the RN could have been a RW or QB instead?

Those guys make a living from the those sports scholarship folks that brought lots and lots of money to their schools. Money which in turn mostly gets used to build bigger and better sports programs which will bring in more money to build...you guessed right, more sports programs.

Once, just once, I'd like to see universities give all their sports program dollars to build their nursing programs, and pay nurses a six figure salary to teach LIVE SAVING INFORMATION for a change.

I'd like to see ALL aspiring nurses be PAID to go to school. A stipend, which they would get in addition to their "Paid in Full" tuition, just like the sweaty (but useless in an emergency) jocks get.

And if that is not possible, then I would suggest an alternative strategy:

Everyone involved with college sports and professional sports will not be able to have nurses available to them when they need them.

Just like the rest of us won't be able to have nurses when we need them either in a few years.
Maybe it will all even out: No nurses to care for sports injury = no sports.

It would be a lose-lose, but we can take comfort in knowing that if we won't be able to see professional football games, we can just tune into porn instead.

Lately, between Janet Jackson and this past SuperBowl, I'm not sure we could tell the difference anyway.

(Aside: Comcast apology: We are mortified by the incident and we apologize to our customers.
Apparently, like the child molester who was mortified by being caught but not actually mortified for molesting, we can be sure Comcast will continue to deliver porn with nary a twinge of guilt. Isn't the Super Bowl the only time that men aren't paying to view the stuff? That free sample was probably a great idea to get the guys back to it after the game was over!)

Learn more about the nursing shortage here.

And the next time someone wants to talk about sports, talk about nursing instead.

(This post is dedicated to LauraRN and RunningWildlyRN, PG and all the other nurses out there who should actually have their very own trading cards, Bowl Games, cheerleaders and product endorsement deals for fancy cars and nursing shoes. You go girls!)

somebody...please...help us....the colors...aggghhh!!!

So on Friday we figured out PERFECT downstairs carpeting.
Easy peasy, after one trip to Home Depot and Lowes who assured us carpet could be delivered in three short weeks.
Oops...want NEW carpet BEFORE taking up residence downstairs.
Headed over to a local carpet company, found just the thing, and dragged a sample home, just to be sure.
It was PERFECT!
Great price, great color, great texture, love how it feels...so happy are we!

Jeff dropped by.
"You are getting that carpet? Everyone has that carpet."
(No Jeff, actually everyone does NOT have that carpet. We don't have that carpet...yet. After we get it, THEN everyone will have that carpet.)

The carpet folk will measure on Tuesday and the new carpet will be deliver on Friday.
That means we've got to get the downstairs painted NOW!

So you tell me: what wall color goes with this?
$75 per hour interior decorator suggested very dark grayish green.
(Dark grey green for a basement room with one window???)

As you can see, those wacky '50s folk have knocked themselves out with combining pinkish mauve mortar and orangey red bricks with dark brown speckles.

This is the pit of heck where I am trying to get the "naughty pine" to give up it's nearly black brown bottom paint and white white top paint.
We went ahead and painted the rest of the room a color called Friendly Beige.

Or maybe it was named Light Beige.
Whatever.
Something fairly blah.
You can see it on the wall beyond the fireplace.
It really made the room look great, except where The Paint That Will Not Be Stripped lives in the corner.
Today I made progress on it using a hair drier and sand paper with grit the size of bird gravel.

After painting the walls and the rest of the panelling, we needed to paint the baseboards some color.
White seemed too pure next to the fireplace, so we dropped down three tone on the seven chip paint sample stick to stay in the same color grouping.
Bought a sample jar, and B. painted up the baseboards and door casing.

I was very suspicious of the color which was called Toasty. It looked like baby poop golden brown to me, and oddly it clashed with the somewhat pinkish Friendly Beige.

B. said he needed to see more of the baseboards painted to decide.
After two more hours of painting down on his hands and knees, he was sure he didn't like the color either....

And that, boys and girls, is why God made hot tubs.

Going Green: Jeff is from Mars, Jill is from Venus, and Algore* is totally nuts.

Green tea wall, take one.
A golden bright clear green color, with just a hint of olive.
Monitors vary, so in the interest of tapping in to collective color memory, the wall is the shade of the golden green you see in some variegated apples. Not that I think that description will help much either....

To me, it looked good. I could picture it balanced with the brown upholstery, and a dark green area rug that had other colors as well.
But...I also knew that the color would cause emotional discomfort to the 80% of the population that prefer blue based colors.

Blue based Bernie was OK with it.
Blue based Jeff recoiled.

Out came the color swatches again.

(The poor guy has yet to be wed; any seasoned married male knows better than to deliver negative comment on female paint choices: doing such is pretty much a guarantee of being dragged into a re-painting event. I asked the stream of married electricians, carpenters and drywallers about the color; they all delivered award winning performances of considering the wall color, and color sample #2 before solemnly voting for the color already on the wall.)

The swatch square second from the edge of the above picture is pretty close to our next attempt.

Currently the walls are paint what I would call mint green ice cream with a bit of yellow gold mixed in.

It turns out that the house has a talent for shifting color tones hourly.
I have to see each color in morning, noon, sunset and evening lamplight.
I'd swear each time that the room has been repainted a different color as the day progresses.

The current shade I have only seen in afternoon, sunset (when it went technicolor crazy green) and lamplight.
This morning we'll take another look and decide if this really is the right one.

To clear up some confusion: We will be moving into the house next weekend.
By that I mean we will be vacating our apartment, and moving our apartment furnishings into the ranch house basement.
The furnishing that graced our Houston house will remain in storage here in SLC until the upstairs of the ranch house is finished in early March.
Paying apartment rent, house mortgage and household goods storage (a sizable chunk o' change proposition) added up to a decision to rough it for a month in the incomplete house.
Pictured above: My kitchen in progress.
I'll be cooking with a camp stove and using the snow and an ice chest for refrigeration for the next four weeks.

I'll be walking around the boxes in the living room that hold my spiffy new appliances until the kitchen cabinets arrive.

We women type often show off our latest crafting project that include fancy stitching, beads, baubles and occasionally glitter (looking pointedly at Dawn here.)

In terms of household coziness, you really can't beat a nicely wired sub panel. Isn't it lovely? Isn't it doubly lovely as it is providing what is needed to run the hot tub?

Oh yes, it certainly is.
I may be without a kitchen, and only have one sink and bathroom for a month, but Saints Be Praised, at least the hot tub is bubbling merrily beneath the deck.
That and a glass of wine will smooth over any inconveniences that must be endured.
And probably will make the shade of green on the walls become completely irrelevant after all.

*RE: Algore. Check here for more information about the correct Biblical view about to "going green", which isn't exactly what Al Gore has claimed.

Random Views from the Rambler

The front picture window, living up to its name.

Dawn breaking as viewed from the deck.

Mt. Olympus with fog rainbow

The enormous fir tree in front, covered with powder clots.

A foot of snow fell; all as light as air.

Nine more days until we move in.

What Our Eagles Are Really Doing Up in Canada...

It pays to keep up in blogdom.

Otherwise you wouldn't know what is really going on out there in the world.

While our "friendly" neighbors to the North chirp merrily about "our" bald eagles perching on their property, those of us in the know "know" that actually our eagles are on patrol.

As they should be.

Read more about why here!

(grin!)

Friends Don't Let Friends Strip Knotty Pine...

I've put another four hours into the five feet of knotty pine paneling stripping. We've gone to using toxic stripper, and it is still just barely moving the gummy paint around. Apparently when the can says "works best at between 65-85 degrees" it really means "this stuff DOESN'T work when it is colder than that, so don't even think about trying to use it in winter!"

The suggestion to use a heat gun is a good one, and I have used those to strip wood in the past. My hands are not as young as they were when I last used a heat gun; I'm positive I would be nearly crippled if I attempted the project using that option.

After removing the chair railing and seeing the original unpainted knotty pine beneath it I was convinced that I would rather not have the rather orangy bare wood anyway, since the fireplace bricks are pinky red with almost orchid colored mortar (those wacky 50's folk and their colorful choices of mortar!)

I've picked out a nice neutral/slightly gray greenish white paint color for the panelling if we can ever get the gloppy stuck paint off the five feet in the one corner. I suppose we could just paint the rest of the room and frame the glop...and refer to it as modern art. I've seen worse sold at six figure prices in art galleries.

At least the green tea paint job looks great in the living room. I'll post a picture of it was soon as a second coat goes on.

I'm wandering around the house with a color sample fan book, trying to imagine what colors to use in the master bedroom, guest room and office. Currently they are painted vivid lime, avocado and taxi yellow, in that order. Hard to imagine other colors when surrounded by those shades.

My interior decorator came and dropped a handful of color swatches in my hand and a list of rooms and numbers to match up.

Not exactly how I was taught to present decorating suggestions when I took interior design in college.

She favored gray: deep blue gray for the living room, dark grayish blue for the master bedroom, deep purple gray for the guest room, gray with a bit of brown for the hallway...most of the rooms are north facing rooms with small windows under deep eaves.

Oh and deep deep gray with a hint of sage for the kitchen. To balance all the woodwork...

In the initial interview with her the only color that I had said we did not like was gray.

At that time I told her that both B. and I work in windowless offices that are painted gray. No gray, please!

Apparently I will soon receive a bill for the two hours of work that were put into grabbing every shade of gray color swatch and handing them over to me. At $75 per hour.

It amazes me that selecting an assortment of gray is billable at such a rate. Needless to say, I won't be using her expertise any further.

Right now we're thinking a midtone coral pink for the master bedroom, lavender blue for the guest room and soft yellow for the office. Or maybe lobster red.

Anything but gray.

Dreaming about Green Tea Ice Cream

We're still on the prowl for color schemes for the house. This article about a 1953 house had the above picture of a flagstone fireplace (LOVE that triangle shape!) and green tea ice cream colored walls.

I like green, and am going to give the color a try today. I think I can see it with a brown Ikea Karlstad loveseat, which could be slipcover changed out to a linen color in summer:




Then two Karlstad side chairs (probably brown or a print) in front of the picture window and a huge ottoman in the middle.(maybe green...)Not sure about lamps and end tables...oh well.



Another helpful resource has been the blog called Your Home and Color Coach. I had been trying to figure out what color the front door should be painted or stained, and posted a question on the site. The suggestion is a dark mahogany color to balance the yellow and coral stones with gray mortar and the red with pinkish mortar bricks. We'll be giving that a try too.


The funky news is that I work for 4 1/2 hours stripping the knotty pine paneling in the basement, and only got about 5 feet of the paneling done in that time. It is a royal mess and my hands and back clearly are not game for the other 20 feet or so of this.

It is possible that it was too cold inside for the non-toxic stripper to be effective (the label suggests using in at between 65-85 degrees, I was in the low 50's.) Since we will be moving into the basement in two weeks, I want new carpeting more than I want knotty pine, and know that stripping the stuff after we get new carpeting is a very bad idea. So I guess I will just prime the area I stripped and paint the whole room instead.

*Maybe* I can still strip the knotty pine in the little sunroom though. The paneling in that room had just a single thin layer of paint.
Anyone heading to SLC who has a yearning to paint feel free to grab a roller and join in!

Slumber Party Fun

Remember when you were a girl and got to go spend the night at a friend's house with a bunch of other girls? Oh yeah, slumber party fun.
Playing with nail polish and hair dos, giggles and secrets to the wee hours of the morning?

Tiggie found himself in the middle of a slumber party this weekend.

He got a new 'do too.
A hair band is a great fun accessory, don't you think?

You just never know what kind of fun will be had when "Sister" Laura comes town.
A blow up mattress and two cats: what could possibly be better than that?

Kitchen Planning: Head v. Heart

Mid Century (or what normal people call "The 50's") kitchen cabinets usually were a simple slab style of door, if the cabinets were made of wood, such as seen in the picture above.

Often the cabinets were either painted, or birch or a knotty pine.

I have spent two months looking at various styles of kitchen cabinets now, and as I looked I reminding myself of these facts:

A slab door is 1.) the least expensive option 2.) easiest to keep clean 3.) keeps within the style of the house's era. 4.) can be dress it up with hardware.

The "easiest to keep clean" fact speak especially loudly to me.

For the past eight years I have daily dealt with cream colored cabinets that showed newsprint smeared fingerprints and coffee drips from blurry eyed breakfast preparations. The raised panels called for never ending gyrations of spritz and wipe moves on my part to keep the kitchen looking clean.

I swore I would NEVER have raised panel cabinet doors in a kitchen EVER again.

Slab doors were the doors for me!

Yet...even knowing the truth of all those statements above, I would stand and look at slab doors and feel like I was signing up for a "Plain Jane" kitchen.

Oh I have had beautiful mahogany slab doors before and loved them for their simplicity.

And in my head I really wanted to simplify my life...but my heart kept yearning for something different.

Early in the kitchen cabinet style hunt I had several times admired a finish called Whiskey Black.
Each time I had told myself that since it was a finish only available on certain doors with extra detailing, I shouldn't chose it, since I was determined to keep the kitchen cleaning time at a minimum.
Well...the other day we were sent to a show room by our contractor to select some items for the renovation, and B. saw this model kitchen pictured above and...

fell...

in...

LOVE!

Well, actually they aren't really raised panel.

Interestingly, the style and finish is very similar to our 32 year old bedroom set, which B. also selected just before we got married, and which I have always loved.

And yes, I have had to carefully dust those little inset details on the bedroom set about every other month or so too.

The show room had created a custom crown moulding that looked spotty and rather heavy.

We will pass on that feature, but may have a dark smaller crown and toe board created instead.

The cabinet style is by Diamond, the style is called LaGrange, created out of maple, and the finish is a glaze called Whiskey black.

Our oak floors will be close to the same color, but with more grain, which will create more high and low lights.

I don't know whether I will eventually regret not listened to my head, which insisted on either plank or simple frame doors.

All I know is that both my heart and B.'s heart just loved this fussier style.

(It did help in my head that B. has agreed to help with the cleaning...and that while I know the drips and smudges will still happen, at least they will not show so much on wood!)

Sparkles galore!

Isn't this hat fabulous?

I know it must seem like I have forgotten about the part of "my world" that includes research, reaction and millinery.

Let me just say, no, I still very much love millinery, but a lot of other things have been going on lately.

Doing research on Mid Century Style for instance...

Witness: A vintage 1955 bridal gown, part of a historical gown display shown at the Salt Palace Convention center two blocks from our apartment.

Isn't it fun to see the "back then" style, including a picture of the 1955 bride herself?

A 1978 wedding gown...ah yes, the flounce at the bottom, full sleeves.

Yup, I'd recognize a bridal gown of that era anywhere.

Then there was a gown from just a few years ago. I looked closely at the hand sew flowers tucked on one shoulder and on the hip of the gown.



Wasn't this gown pretty? Apparently it was the gown worn by the daughter of the bride married in the 1978 era gown, who in turn was the daughter of the bride who married in the 1955 gown.

What fun to see the three eras represented.

Isn't it interesting to see how bridal fashions have changed over the years?
I wonder what bridal fashions will look like in the future?
Wonder what a Bride who is getting married, say, in late April of 2009 will chose to wear?
Maybe I should do a little research to see what I can find out.
I'll start by asking a future bride about what she plans to wear.

Maybe it is too soon to really know the answer to that question.



Less than 24 hours after becoming engaged on January 9th 2009 really is a tad soon to be sure of exactly what kind of dress one will be wearing on one's wedding day four months from now in April.



I'm not sure about what kind of dress she will be wearing, but I do know this:
This particular soon to be bride is about to become my daughter-in-law!

Rachel and Jeff...

Seven months ago they met at church.

They fell in love...they prayed...they considered....

they agreed that they want become one in the sight of man and God.

It will be a church wedding in her home town of Santa Rosa California.

We'll have to wait till then to see what kind of dress this 2009 era bride will be wearing.



As well as what kind of cake will be served, and flowers, and invitations and music...things that seem to change with each passing era.

At least the most important part of the bridal wear has already been donned.

The most important part.

The one thing that makes bridal gowns of any era so delightful:

The bride-to-be's smile.

The distinctively radiant smile of joy.

Congratulation Jeff on choosing a lovely bride to be.
Rachel: thank you for agreeing to marry our son!
Mazeltov!
God blessing on you both and all your upcoming wedding plans!