Green Eggs and Chairs

So, say that you want to make an egg salad sandwich. You put three eggs into a sauce pan, fill it with water and set it on the stove. Turn it to high and let it come to a boil. Turn the heat down, set the timer for 20 minutes. We're fine up to this point. Then, say you go out to the garage where you're building a little workshop because you want to be able to work on painting furniture in the dead of winter so the garage needs to be tightened up. Holy schmoly, you forget about those darn eggs! Well, here's what happens...while you're in the garage, the water totally disappears. Then the eggs explode. Yes. Explode. Across the whole flipping kitchen. I had egg shell five feet from the stove. Egg shrapnel, if you will. Thank god there was no one standing in the kitchen. Of course, had there been someone there, they might have just taken the sauce pan of eggs off the stove and this all could have been avoided. Unfortunately, I cleaned it all up before I thought of taking pictures for my blog.

I've been a little remiss in my blog upkeep. One week! Without a blog! I will do my best to not let that happen again. I think it was the garage obsession that threw me off track. With my furniture painting going strong, I realized that with the coming cold weather, I'd have no where to work. I've been painting out doors and the garage was so filled to the brim with STUFF. Not wanting to give up the creative endeavors of late, I had to make some changes. So, I rented a small storage unit to put boxes in so I could set up a small workshop in the garage. Now, after four days of packing the car up, taking stuff to storage, spending hours going through boxes of pictures and cards and paper minutiae, sorting, re-boxing, throwing away, finessing the work bench where I want it, moving the scroll saw, I have a nice little work area. Many of the boxes were full of stuff from my dad and mom so I spent hours pouring over old pictures and letters and bouncing from elated to depressed and back to ecstatic. I was able to get rid of a lot that I hadn't been able to when I packed those boxes three years ago when my dad died so it was a good, purging-yet-keeping-the-meaningful-crap kind of experience. Just not one I'd planned on six days ago.
I am including a couple pictures of my chair, which started out as a bulky trash item in front of someones house and is now a piece of art (to me). I have a quote on it, of course, along the back (Earth's Crammed With Heaven by Elizabeth Barrett Browning), and there is a star hanging off the back rest. It's sturdy and comfy and I have no idea what I'm going to do with it now. I think I recently wrote about having too much stuff and now I'm in the process of making MORE stuff to have too much of. Next I plan on making a small end table and then, since I have a couple child size chairs, I thought I'd do a "time-out" chair (idea courtesy of Ms. K. Lasley, thanks!). Not that I have any small children around the house, aside from my wonderful/stubborn nine year old son, but I certainly could use a time-out chair myself on occasion. In the picture of the chair it's difficult, if not impossible, to see that all the blue is outlined in plum, along with the bottoms of the back rungs/pillars/whatevers. I have, and have had for years, this desire to paint furniture (where does something like that come from?) and I had the very best time sitting in the sun, painting, picking out colors, screwing up, and spilling paint on the driveway. I get immense joy out of the whole of it and it remains still another thing I can do and not get paid for. Wait, wait, I was not going to go there. I still have seven months of opus so I don't get to stress until then.

My mom is still my sweet girl. She's eating a lot of pudding and drinking her cranberry juice. Ahh-h-h, the real reason for my opus. Spending time with my mama. I took Jay up there with me on Sunday and she just held on to his hand. She's got quite the grip. Next time I go up I'm going to take a picture of the your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine lunches. I did taste a bit the other day and it's not too bad. I believe it's possible to puree anything. Not that I'd want to, just that it's possible.

"Keep on sowing your seeds, for you never know which will grow -
perhaps it all will."
Ecclesiastes, 11:6