Flying A Flag

Yesterday when I was thinking about putting out my American flag today, all unbidden, a song from years ago in Sunday School popped into my head. I found myself singing

Love is the flag flown high from the castle of my heart,
From the castle of my heart, from the castle of my heart,
Love is the flag flown high from the castle of my heart
For the King is in residence there

So let it fly, in the sky so the whole world knows,
So the whole world knows, so the whole world knows,
So let it fly in the sky, so the whole world knows
That the King is in residence there.

I haven’t sung or heard that song in more years than I want to contemplate. But the memory of it makes me wonder … just what kind of flag am I flying in my heart now?  Does it tell others that The King is in residence? Is it tattered by worries and cares or does it fly bravely in the face of problems? What message am I sending to the world by the way I live and the flag I fly from my heart?

I like to fly the American flag from my porch on patriotic holidays to let the world know,  in the words of another song: 

I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free,

And I won’t forget the ones who died who gave that right to me,

So I’ll gladly stand up, next to you, and defend her still today

Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land

God bless the U.S.A.

Are you flying a flag today … from your porch or your heart?

Another Mini-Vacation

It wasn’t intended as a mini-vacation but last Saturday turned out to be one.  My house guests and I had a semi-leisurely breakfast before we set off.  The weather still was you-know-where hot.  After a spot of shopping, we headed for Pere Marquette Park in Illinois. We were going to have dinner there that night.

I took them downtown on I-44, pointing out the Metrolink train track, the Climatron at the Botanical Gardens (you can see it from I-44) and then out I-70 to Broadway to Riverview Blvd. Of course, north St. Louis which you go through is not very pretty looking with derelict buildings, etc., and prompted questions from Malcolm. But eventually we were on I-270 going across the river into Illinois. We drove to Alton where we stopped for lunch at a KFC.

From Alton we drove to Grafton, IL, where we visited the Tugboat Festival. I had read about this in the newspaper before we left that morning and thought it might be interesting. There was a flea market which Malcolm enjoyed walking through. Then we found the model boat booth and he chatted with some of the guys in there. There were several of the boats (radio controlled ones) being sailed on a pool of water they had made. While we watched, one man did something which caused his boat to belch steam. He then added it to the pool.

A big attraction was a tour of a working tugboat. We had to wait a short while before it was our turn to take the tour. I wasn’t sure I could manage all the stairs up to the bridge. The flights of stairs were short but steep. They were like climbing a carpeted ladder. We got up to the second level where the galley is and saw that plus the “living room” that belonged to the captain of the boat. The cook was in the galley and talked to us about cooking for the crew, what her schedule for getting the meal cooked was, how she got her groceries, how she worked 28 days and then was off 28 days, etc.

Then we had to stand in a hall and wait for an earlier group to move on so we could go upstairs again. I stood it as long as I could but my hips started hurting and I knew I had to get off that boat. Just about the time I started retracing my steps, the group moved on. At that point I wasn’t interested in seeing anything more; I just wanted off. So I found my way downstairs and headed back to the gang plank to get off. I was stopped more than once by one of the tour guides wanting to know where I was going, how I got where I was, etc. Finally they gave in and let me off the boat.

A visit to the restroom facility and a seat in the shade soon had me feeling better. I was invited to take the boat tour by several more people but I stuck to my guns and just waited for Carole and Malcolm to return. Eventually they did and we soon were back in the car headed to Pere Marquette Park. When we reached the park, we decided to visit the Visitor’s Center and see what kind of information about the park we could pick up. The short answer was none because the center wasn’t open. We had a chuckle amongst ourselves as we watched a young woman get out of a car, dash up the stairs and pull on the door which had a big “closed” sign on it.

I then drove the scenic trail through the park. I fell down in my tourist guide duties because I could not identify all the trees which shaded the drive. We stopped at a couple of the overlooks and eventually made our way back to the lodge.

The lodge was built in the years 1933-1938 by the Civilian Conservation Corps. The logs used were huge and the fireplace was built from native stone. We made our way to the dining room and learned that a prime rib buffet would open at 5 p.m. It was about 4:45 then so we went ahead and got a table and looked at the menu to make sure that the buffet was our choice. It was and the food on it was delicious. While we waited, Carole spotted one bride out in the hallway on her way to her reception which must have been in a conference room somewhere.

By the time we finished our meal, the dining room was full of people. There was a birthday party at one long table in one corner. There was a family reunion taking place that weekend which flooded into the room at 6 p.m. At that point we were very glad we had come early because if we had been much later, I’m not sure we would have gotten a table.

Dinner over, we headed back to St. Louis, this time crossing the Mississippi River at Alton on the new Clark Bridge and then the Missouri River on the Lewis bridge.  Although I hadn’t planned the day to be a mini-vacation, that’s exactly what it turned out to be.  It was enriched by sharing it with dear friends.

Economic Indicator

In the county where I live, it is legal to sell and shoot fireworks. There are fireworks stands at almost every intersection along the highway that I drive to and from my home. Now, this isn’t a major interstate; it’s just a state highway.  

Most of the stands offer four free fireworks with the purchase of one firework. Most of them have some sort of inflated character to draw your attention to their stand. One stand is even in an air-conditioned tent. The stands are prohibited by law from opening until June 20 and most of them are closed by the end of the week after July 4.

Normally, the people in my neighborhood buy and shoot a lot of fireworks during the period the stands are open. Some nights it sounds like I live in a war zone. But that’s not true this year. Basically, there have been no major fireworks shot off.

For years I’ve told the friends who were guests here last week about the fireworks. Well, really I complained about them. I thought they’d get to experience what I’ve told them for themselves this year. No … there weren’t any fireworks being shot off.

So, do you think it’s an indication of the economy that people aren’t purchasing fireworks? I know some of the civic displays are being scaled back or cancelled this year. Maybe people who do home displays are doing the same thing. Do your neighbors shoot fireworks? Are they shooting them this year?

A Message from the Purple Sweater

Well, I’m not a complete sweater yet. But Charlotte did attach one of my sleeves. I’m still missing the other one and my sides are gaping open. Hopefully she’ll soon close me up.

She did take me shopping this week. Her guests like to shop, especially at crafts type stores so we went to JoAnn’s where she bought some buttons for me. She took me along to make sure the buttons would fit my buttonholes.

The buttons are so cute! They’re bright green hearts. They make my green yarn stitches stand out. I’m sure some lucky baby will be proud to wear me.

Is This A Suburb of You-Know-Where?

It is so hot here it’s almost unbearable. It is so hot that I’ve begun to wonder if I’ve moved to a suburb of that well-known hot spot we all want to avoid in eternity.

To add to my discomfort, I have house guests this week. They arrived today. We have various outdoor activities planned and it’s so hot I’m not sure we’ll enjoy any of them. We cancelled one tonight and went to Captain D’s for dinner instead.

Please, God, send us some cooler air. Just 10 or 15 degrees cooler would be much appreciated. If that’s not in your plan, can you arrange for each drop of sweat to carry off a pound of excess weight?

Where Spam Comes From

I have a spamblocker program on my computer which protects me from having to deal with a huge amount of spam. Some, though, ends up in a segregated folder as “suspect” mail and I can view it to determine if it truly is spam.

I’ve noticed a rather interesting thing about the messages which end up in that folder. Most of them, especially the ones supposedly from an individual, come from a @hotmail address. Wonder if there’s something about that address which makes it attractive — other than that it is free — to people who send such wacky messages? I don’t read them but I can tell they’re wacky by the subject lines.

What have you noticed about the spam which finds its way to your computer?

Knitters’ Guild Potluck Lunch

Today was the annual potluck lunch of the Knitters Guild. At first it didn’t look like very many people would be there. But eventually probably 100 folks had come. As usual at such events, we had a wealth of food to eat.

This year the lunch was held at the Ethical Society. For some reason, we cannot use their kitchen which makes it tough to keep hot things hot. But there was a wide array of salads to choose from and some fried chicken which is good either cold or hot. The desserts were heavy on chocolate.

I took a Finnish Carrot Casserole, a recipe I found at http://kitchen-parade-veggieventure.blogspot when I did a search for carrot recipes. I had originally planned to take green beans with water chestnuts and soy sauce but discovered I already had carrots in the fridge when I came home from the store with a four-pound package of them. So I had to do something with carrots.

I put the casserole together last night and baked it this morning. It was tasty. The carrots still retained some crispness. I don’t know if it was meant to be like that, having never made this before, or if I should have baked it longer. About two-thirds of it was eaten and given the amount of food available, that was pretty good.

There was no entertainment at the luncheon. Those members who wanted to brought a “white elephant” gift and there was an exchange of those. I didn’t participate in that this year. Most times, I end up with something I truly can’t use. But at least I do better than my friend, N, who always seems to strike out. This year she got two balls of Sugar ‘N Cream cotton yarn in two different colors. She immediately gave it away. She only buys high end yarns so this cotton was not for her. One year she got an assortment of office supplies!

There were lots of people there I did not recognize or know. Some of the regular members who have attended for years were absent. N commented that we have a lot of new members. I remarked if I were a new member, I would not have come to that lunch because I would have been too shy. N is very outgoing so I guess she would not have had a problem.

Shoe Memories

The other day, Vicki (http://knitorious.typepad.com/knitorious) mentioned she really didn’t have a thing for shoes like Imelda Marcos had. But she could see that she would like/could have a closet full of one particular brand of shoes. Her comments brought back some memories for me.

When I graduated from high school, I got a job working as a secretary in the women’s shoe department of a local department store. While I had grown up with basically two pair of shoes — church shoes (dress shoes) and school shoes — with maybe an extra pair of sandals for summer, I fell in love with shoes. Lots of weeks found me buying a new pair of shoes, especially if I could get them at a sale price and then deduct my employee discount. At one time, I had 32 pair of shoes! An unheard of wealth of footwear.

My bedroom was just a small hall bedroom over the front stairs. Just outside the door was a railing above the stairs. I’d come home from work and kick off my shoes — high heel, pointy toed, thin soled girl shoes — next to that railing. Mom said she could always figure out what I had worn to work just by looking at the shoes which collected there during the week. Saturday was house cleaning day so they found their way back into my room.  If I got a new outfit, I almost always got new shoes to coordinate with it.

I can still see some of those shoes in my mind’s eye.  One pair I dearly loved was a black patent with white leather buckles on the vamp, sort of a Pilgrim style.  The heel on these was a mid-high chunky heel.  They were made from a new imitation leather which I seem to remember being called Corfam.  The problem was the stuff wouldn’t stretch.  The shoes were tight and miserable to wear.  But I loved them.  They went perfectly with a spring suit Mom had made me from a white/black/tan plaid with white being the predominant color.

I also remember a pair of pointy toed flats, guess they’d be called skimmers today.  The thing I remember about them was that they were made of silk and were a wild harlequin print with yellow, orange and other bright colors.  I kept those in the office to wear when my high heels got too uncomfortable.  My bosses, the shoe buyers, liked me to walk around the selling floor wearing them because it prompted lots of sales.

The other thing I remember was that I had four or five blocks to walk from the bus to the office.  The sidewalks downtown had these grates in them.  They had something to do with the steam heating system of many of the buildings.  What they really were was shoe traps!  It was oh so easy to catch the heel of your pointy toed, high heel, thin soled girl shoe in them and snap the heel off.  I did that at least once and probably more than that.  If you didn’t snap the heel off, you scuffed it so it always looked shabby after that.  There was no way to smooth the leather covering down and gluing it to restore the new look to your shoe.  A stacked leather heel was never the same once the grate had caught it.

Some habits don’t change. I still have a lot of shoes. But now, instead of wearing a different pair every day, I find I wear the same one or two pairs over and over. Sadly, they are no longer high heeled pointy toed girl shoes. Now they’re more likely to be low heeled older woman shoes. But at least I’m not in those granny lace-up oxfords yet!

Purple Sweater is Annoying Me

This little purple sweater must be for a boy … it’s getting on my nerves just like a hyperactive two-year-old boy!

I knit both fronts and was relatively pleased with them. Then I set about to seam the shoulders and knit the neckband. I discovered anew that multiple yarn ends — because of changing colors/yarns — aggravate you when it’s time to seam. They get in the way of sewing the seam. They still have to be worked in neatly once the seam is sewn. That would have been bad enough but no, this sweater had other mischief up its yet-to-be-knitted sleeve.

It created problems when picking up stitches for the neckband. Then when I’m knitting K1P1 ribbing, it had the audacity to create holes right where the band joined the seams. One was fixed by picking up an extra stitch and knitting two together. The other hole waited to reveal its existence until I was about half-way through the band. Then a “dropped” stitched poked its head up.

I’ve no idea where it came from but one of those pesky yarn ends came to the rescue. I threaded it through a yarn needle, ran the yarn through the dropped stitch and anchored it to the wrong side of the sweater front. Worked that yarn end through stitches in two or three directions and, hopefully, that stitch has learned its lesson and will stay where it belongs.

I just hope the front bands are better behaved.

Would a baby boy wear purple?

A week or ten days ago, maybe two weeks now that I think about it, I started a new knit project. It’s a baby sweater in a 12-month size and will go in my gift closet until the stork brings a new baby. Ideally, I like to have a girl and a boy sweater in there but seldom manage that. More often, I’m frantically knitting right up to the moment of the baby shower.

This sweater is the Patty Cakes pattern which was a free leaflet I picked up somewhere. It has a slip stitch pattern worked in two colors on the front. One color is a solid — in my case purple — and the second is a variegated.

I’m working from my stash and found that at some point I had purchased two balls of Paton’s Look At Me in purple and two balls in a coordinating variegated. Viola! Yarn for the new baby sweater.

I really like the way the slip stitch pattern is working up but I’m concerned about the variegated. In some spots it’s an almost exact match to the Dark Lilac main color. It also has a medium to dark blue in it, a darker reddish purple, and then a shot of lime green. This produces a sweater front that looks a little “dark” to me for a baby girl.

So, would you put a Dark Lilac sweater on a boy? The back, sleeves and bands are in this purple color. Not sure what I’ll do about buttons. I’m kind of thinking maybe I can find some in the lime green. What do you think?