Ramblings of a rural(ish) geek

Finished DB's coat & vest on Friday. Well, I sewed the buttons on the vest Saturday AM, but that was 25 minutes. The handwork on the coat took 3 hours -- knotting/clipping/running ends, sewing buttons, etc. Part of that is that the coat is just ssooo big -- a lined calf length duster with a capelet and bucket cuffs on the sleeves -- that it's hard to handle.

Finished my jacket (bright red sateen cutaway tailed coat) Saturday evening, but I wasn't in 'must-get-it-done-NOW' mode or I would have finished it earlier. I realised on Wednesday that I didn't really have a suitable white shirt to wear underneath -- all of my white blouses have white buttons! But I do have a white polo shirt with dark shell buttons, so I wore that. I had to borrow white gloves from the bell choir box at church because my box of costume gloves (doesn't everyone have one of those?) had nearly everything except short white. There's no lack of gloves in the box at church -- the dad of one of the members is a mall Santa, and has access to lots of barely worn white cotton 'elf' gloves every January. I used to borrow short white gloves from the kids, but DB hasn't marched in 3 years, and it's been 5 for SR. Their band gloves are long gone (not that they're very white by the end of the season).

The Halloween concert went pretty well, I thought. Only a few bobbles, but nothing we didn't recover from fairly cleanly. The Looney Tunes Overture still bothered me - I had the TSax part memorised in college, and the BSax part is quite different. We just got notice that tonight's rehearsal is cancelled due to a "building issue", which is probably related to the broken water main that's had that corner of Farmington under a Boil Water advisory for a week.

SR is settled in Melbourne, Australia now. She got her first Care package last week (well, and she asked me to send her some of the dress trousers hanging in her closet - she wore jeans/capris most of the time in Taipei).

I've actually been watching the World Series -- not nearly as bad coverage as in the past, and the games have been really good.

Roper posted about his game of furniture tetris, which reminded me of our next match. (to be accomplished RSN, but I need to finish an Edwardian skirt & jacket costume* first, and get either J or DB to help).

1. shift the storage boxes away from the basement wall about 8 inches


2. move the cheap mattress and bunkboard from the bed in the upstairs nook into the newly cleared spot; shift the boxes back up against them


3. disassemble the bed and put it in the garage attic


4. move the futon from the den up into the nook


5. move the recliner from the basement into the den


6. move the printer & its stand from the master bedroom into the den

Eventually, the plan is to be able to open the closet door in the den all the way, and make both the bedroom and the den feel less crowded. With SR gone, we can use her room as a guest bedroom, and the futon in the nook will be the extra guest bed it is now, but in a less central area of the house. (the basement is clean and dry and fully habitable (if a bit chilly), and is thus a safe place to store a mattress)

* Last Thursday, I got a call from the lead cat-herder for the historical cemetery walk -- one of the ladies had backed out, could I fill in? Sure. And then I realised that my Victorian peridot taffeta skirt would be a bit too fancy for a 1901 midwestern farmer's wife on market day. I have a skirt & jacket pattern, and the fabric (and a couple of white blouses in my closet that will work). I just need to put them together. But yesterday was picture day for the church directory, and J was doing pictures and I was doing data entry, which pretty much killed the day. Today I'm working on layout for a newsletter, and there's FCB rehearsal tonight.