April Fool’s Day 2021
Tag: Sometimes
early daffodils
These daffodils are always the first to open. This particular line of flowers came from bulbs that were dug up on the western side of the property when they built the horse yards several years ago. Originally those bulbs were planted by my late husband Bob a couple of decades ago on the perimeters of our property… (Photos ©Sometimes 2021)
about my new header photo…its not photoshopped
The photo of the heart-shaped cloud formation is one I took several years ago. It is an actual photo of the sky, taken from a parking lot. A glance at the clouds when I got out of the car suggested that two opposing clouds were on a “collision course,” so I waited until they actually merged into the heart shape. No tricks of photo manipulation.
just sayin’ 🙂
That particular parking lot is known (by me, anyway) to produce some great sky-scapes.
…good job on the inauguration
so far so good…
Happy days are here again…. yay! So far President Joe has reversed several of the worst issues (in my humble opinion, already President Biden: stopped the Wall, saved the Dreamers, put a plug in the Pipeline, and saved the Environment…rejoined the World Trade Organization; made Dr. Fauci a Happy Camper.
Granddaughters
The First- Granddaughters all made President Biden proud with their coordinated Inaugural outfits. oooh, and all but one of the granddaughters are over 21, so that makes them fair game for the Pick-on-the-POTUS-Kids-corps. The Biden Girls look like fun, probably not yet corrupted by fame and fortune…
Old Home Week
Like a family reunion, or Homecoming weekend, its always fun to see folks we haven’t seen since the last time: The former Presidents and other past and present dignitaries, not packed into the crowd as usual because of Covid-19… um, in hindsight they might have been warmer. It was 42-degrees in Washington D.C. during the inauguration ceremony. Mother Nature treats us all the same temperature-wise.
Entertainment
Wow….star studded indeed. Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, Garth Brooks: they all did their performances tastefully, appropriately, and relatively-briefly, considering the cold. I know there were others that contributed their talents to the event, I apologize for not mentioning them individually.
The youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman was excellent. We need to hear more about her.
One of my Favorite Posts: The Venerable Bede (re-posted from 2015)
[I am posting this poem which I wrote in 2015 as one of a series of I will call: Favorite Posts.]
The Venerable Bede
The Venerable Bede had a lot to read
in order to write the order and the
history of the medieval world.
He considered the matter of churches and cathedrals
and determined to add something new
in order to broaden the catalogues.
The Venerable Bede went out to the towns and the
countryside chatting with merchants and lords
searching for secular facts and bits of lore…
and made it known he was looking for more.
He went with his scribes, and trusty mules to carry the scrolls,
and collected History–words of men and their exploits.
The Venerable Bede explored the world
beyond the monastery walls.
He asked about roads and river boats
and the manners of insects and stars.
He sat with the old folks and shared a pint,
inquiring about all things, and morays, and techniques
and facts that were new…to him.
He wrote about travel and voyages, of builders and sailors,
of farmers…and of men who plyed the trades.
The Venerable Bede always took heed
of secular motive and deed.
He recognized the worth in History,
no matter how mundane.
But through it all, the main thing he learned…perhaps…
was the Source of it All remained with God
and he told his admirers who praised his work,
or detractors who disapproved:
God is the Author–only the scribe was the Venerable Bede.
©Sometimes, 2015
Dottie and Alice compete
I decided to do this little thing, as good practice for putting images into my WordPress blog. Still rather intimidated, but I’m beginning to experiment with the New Editor and Blocks. If you click on the first photo a slideshow will appear. My captions on the individual photo aren’t included in the slideshow. Anybody know why?
(All photos and content on my blog, unless otherwise noted, are my own work. ©Sometimes, 2020.)
Dottie, can you please move? Alice is being cute, you’re in the picture. 
No, I’m asleep. 
Ok, I’ll aim higher. 
She’s not all that cute. 
I’m just as cute as she is. 
Look at the position of her legs. 
You want cute? Check this out! 
Alice is acrobatic. 
I ‘m going back to sleep. 
Alice has three legs. 
Toby says be quiet, I’m trying to sleep.
Frilly aprons and Floating Island…remembering Home Economics
Back in Junior High School days 1940/50s most American girls were required to study Home Economics. Boys had Shop Class, which familiarized them with tools like wood saws, screw drivers, hammers and drills other Man Tools used for building cool objects like birdhouses, candlestick holders, bookends and the like. Their sisters and other girls learned sewing skills like hemming, threading needles, and taught them their way around the Singer Sewing Machine…a wonder that was already familiar to housewives. The girls got to choose fabric yardage, buy a variety of sewing equipment like seam rippers and pincushions, and embark upon the adventure of sewing an apron. The making of the apron introduced the girls to cutting, pinning, basting, gathering, seam-sewing, and attaching pockets.
The girls also learned about kitchen appliances and acquired cooking and baking skills…and soon were capable of producing a delictable dessert called “Floating Islands.” The lesson involved making vanilla pudding, then adding a dollop of Merinque “floating” on top…which, to refresh the memory, involved separating egg whites from the yolks (without breaking the yolks!) and whipping the whites into a frothy cloud of topping…then browning the merinque under the broiler in an oven. (A valuable skill for learning to be a wife 😉
Girls also learned the art of washing clothes…sorting, washing, hanging on a clothesline, (no dryers yet) and proper folding….or ironing, which involved additional skills. I used to like ironing. In fact I liked it so much I may write a blog about it.
All this reminiscing about Home Ec class…and its joys or horrors for young girls, depending on their point of view…brings us to the point of this particular blog post—making homemade masks for use during the COVID19 pandemic.
Immediately the internet was flooded with pictures of masks, patterns of masks, sewing instructions, news articles from the likes of CNN, Washington Post, New York Times — in addition to all the DIY online shows, magazines — even the government produced demonstrations, patterns and tips for making masks.
So immediately upon getting everybody excited about making face masks….the fabric stores ran out of elastic; then they ran out of dark color fabric, and plain prints suitable for a small garment in place of lavender unicorns and smiling flowers. The biggest outrage of all, there was suddenly a shortage of sewing machines. All the stores were sold out. But undaunted, I decided to order one online. I found a Singer Sewing Machine site, which had numerous heavy-duty machines, each $84.00, no tax or shipping, and the promise to “ship the next day.”
So I cleared a place on my kitchen table for the new machine, and waited…and waited…and finally after about three weeks, did a USPS tracking check. Ah ha! My sewing machine had arrived from China at the USPS distribution point in Akron, Ohio. I waited for it to be shipped on to Cleveland, where it would then go to my town, North Ridgeville. About ten days later I did a PayPal search, and discovered that although my sewing machine had been indeed waiting in Akron …it had disappeared. Someone stole my sewing machine. I got my money refunded immediately, but still…
By this time I had discovered that my little Singer that I had had for maybe 20 years worked just fine once the top thread was threaded correctly. Duh. It wasn’t that I had forgotten how to thread sewing machines, a skill I learned when I was about eight years old…”they” had altered the threading sequence ever so slightly over the decades since Home Ec class.
Same point of view, two days later:
Same Yellow Tree….taken on Saturday, November 15. Same vantage point, view out the window of my office room. Then scroll down to see what three days and a brief, but mighty windstorm did to the neighborhood:
Taken Tuesday, November 17. The Tree, as I call it, is seen as actually at least two individual trees, as is obvious from the second photo. It took only two Ohio November days, a touch of thunder, rain and hail, and high wind to completely change the scenery. Nature at work. (Photos ©Sometimes, 2020.)
Eugi’s Week’s Word: “bewitched.”
The favorite old song:
“Bewitched, Bothered, & Bewildered”
perfect for my Psyche
(©Sometimes, 2020)
Me and The War, reblog, Part 2 of Who am I to have an About Page?
[This post was the second installment of the life history of… well, Me. The first time it appeared was in 2015. For my VCBs: Very Cool Bloggers, this post will be a re-run, please bear with me if you’ve read it before, and please enjoy it if its new.]
In the first installment of this feature, Who Am I to have an About Page? https://mumbletymuse.com/so-who-am-I-to-have-an-About-Page-?/ I started out as a newcomer to the world on a Friday the 13th, and by the end of Part One I had been to California and back, eaten part of a persimmon and part of a gourd, and had finished Kindergarten. Which pretty much sets the stage for the second part of my life story.
Part Two: ME AND THE WAR
That would be the Second World War, WWII, The Big One– the catalyst for the rise to world dominance of the United States. I was eleven when the war ended in 1945, and I must say that I was one patriotic little girl. I was so proud of the accomplishments of my country, in which we had emerged mostly safe and sound (those of us who had not been killed during the war years, of course) and had the distinction of being THE leader of the Free World.
But let me skip the rhetoric and get on with MY part of the War, which began in 1941…along with the arrival of my baby sister when I was eight and a half years old; my brother was six. It was just us three until near the end of the war in 1945, when another sister joined our merry band.
One thing I recall about grade school is that there was a Congresswoman who regularly was permitted to leave fliers advertising her prowess in the U.S. Congress on our school desks. She would come in and talk to us about how important it was for our parents to vote for her. Despite having been told, on my very first day of first grade, by the teacher to “go home and never come back again,” as I explained to my parents when they picked me up walking home from school about an hour after classes began, I did indeed continue with my education. I remember well the adventures of Dick and Jane, Baby, and Spot, the stars of our first level readers.
The main thing going on everywhere was THE WAR. We went to the movie theaters, and were treated to black and white newsreels showing bombs dropping from airplanes, Hitler’s marching troops in huge showy choreographed formations, and in-coming shipments of USA- flag-covered coffins. We recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, and read The Weekly Reader, a newspaper produced especially for school children at various levels. My grandfather taught me about television. He had a floor-model radio, which had a large window area for tuning various stations on the radio, and he said that some day, after the war, we would be able to look at windows like that and see actual movies and real people talking and singing and the like. I was properly impressed…this was undoubtedly the source of my great love of electronic stuff.
Then the newspapers, The Cleveland Press, The News, and The Cleveland Plain Dealer told us every day how many soldiers had been killed in battle, and kept us well informed about the terrible evil enemies of the United States on all areas of the world. Toward the end of the war there was news about Hitler’s atrocities, and the Japanese cities evaporated by TWO atomic bombs. The pictures were everywhere in magazines and newspapers. The newsreels at the movies were relentless in presenting the horrors of war, and these were incomprehensible to American kids, who had thankfully never had bombs dropped on them.
Movies themselves, presented on monster screens in huge movie theaters that always reminded me of palaces (not that I had ever been in a palace) also presented the great block-buster films of the 40s…complete with horror stories about the war. So this brings Me to the end of the Great War, and the beginning of the phenomenon known as THE COLD WAR.
The newspapers treated us to daily headlines screaming of annihilation and pending doom. A particularly horrible series presented by the newspapers contained in part a huge bulls-eye, with segments indicating the extent of the death shadow that marked Cleveland…with its four NIKE missile sites forming at once a horrible defense capability of retaliation. The center of the bulls-eye, of course, meant instant end to everything…out in the suburbs the threat lessened sequentially until by a distance of thirty miles out some percentage of life might survive.
BUT that survival would depend on bomb shelters, which might delay death by radiation by a couple of weeks. As children we were conversationally proficient about hydrogen bombs, pros and cons of including guns among bomb shelter supplies, and just how bad radiation poisoning was. So that was pretty much what one little girl knew about THE WAR… The next era of MY ABOUT PAGE will be coming up soon: THE 1950s
please stay tuned…
piggy-back grasshoppers
(photo ©Sometimes, 2020)
(I was sitting outside, minding my own business, when this critter ran into me and landed on the pavement nearby. I didn’t get a good look at it until later, when editing on my mainframe some snaps taken with my camera phone. Actually my subject was cats…so this grasshopper shot was a bonus.)
Memorial to Aborigines, photo by my Cousin Greg
My Cousin Greg Towner posted this photo on his facebook page. Thanks Greg!
Chatting with an Australian friend this morning, I mentioned this memorial and she asked if I could post it on my blog. It strikes me as humorous that I am a go-between two Australians, here literally on the other side of the world. Greg has written and published some excellent accounts of our family and history of Australia.
At this point I have been trying to mention the kinship of Greg and Me. After several stabs at it I decided that we are second cousins. Close enough…these family relationships get complicated, and no one really cares about it anyway. 🙂 I have a family tree someplace.
SOMETIMES 