Memorial Day 2023

It always seems wrong to say "Happy Memorial Day," so I'll just say that I hope you take some time today, if you're in the US, to remember those who gave the ultimate sacrifice so that we can be free. Lots of people are camping, picnicing, swimming, etc. today, but we're just relaxing today. We haven't done much relaxing for weeks so it's nice not to have big plans. I did make a broccoli salad this morning and we'll probably grill some hamburgers or hot dogs for dinner. Dennis has been puttering around touching up the paint on walls where we filled in nail holes from the previous resident. Thank goodness they had left paint for our use. 

I did finish another prayer shawl a few days ago. This one was made with small balls of yarn I have. When I looked at the bins when it was finished, it doesn't even look as if I used any of it! I really do think it's multiplying. It's a bright and cheerful shawl that I think will make someone very happy.

Can you see the price on this ball of yarn? It's $1.00. I got it at Michaels last summer. It's one of those giant balls of Lion Brand baby yarn. Someone had torn the label in two so they had it in the clearance bin for a dollar! I snatched it up as soon as I saw it and wish I could find more deals like this. I have a crocheted "Every Which-Way" baby blanket on the hook. It will go to either the hospital or a crisis pregnancy center. I think I'll be able to get two blankets from this bargain ball of yarn.

I have a pair of socks on my double points. I usually only work on them during Sunday School, but I think I'll just take sock yarn with us on our trip next month. It would be nice to be able to get several pairs done while we're gone and it doesn't take up much room in the trailer. This is one of the skeins of Opal yarn I bought while I was in London in January. It's Opal, Cat's & Dog's and came directly from Germany. I love how the colors are unfolding from the skein.

I thought I would show you my Mother's Day presents from two years ago from Miss Piper. I always sang this song to her as a baby and she remembered that when she chose my gift. 

The same thing is printed on a dish towel.  Brad's Moms special song was, "You are my Sunshine." And amazingly, Piper found a hot pad and dish towel with that embroidered on it. I thought that they were wonderful gifts.

The flowers on the island are from the high school graduation party Saturday of a young man from church. They brought about 15-20 small bouquets of flowers to decorate the front of the church and told people to fell free to take them home and enjoy them. Wasn't that kind of them?

I saw this and I just had to laugh. It is very true isn't it?

Thank you to everyone who sent me links to the pocho pattern that I want to make for Piper. It is called the Ramble-Poncho-Light. I have purchased the pattern on Ravelry but now I'll need to find the yarn I want to use. It does call for bulky weight which I don't use very often. I may end up getting Knit Picks Brava Bulky.

This verse is my favorite verse from the Bible. It gives me hope and always has. 

I hope you all have a wonderful Memorial Day if you live in the US, remembering those who have given their all for us. For everyone else, wishing you a wonderful day too.

Blessings and love,
Betsy

Settling In

We’ve been busy settling in over the last couple of weeks. We really love our condo and all of the neighbors we have met have been great. I still need to find out about activities. Dennis was out walking Zoey last night, and one of the neighbors told him that he thought there were knitting and crochet groups, but he didn’t know when. I need to investigate how I find out more information about that. The aerobics classes in the pool should be starting soon too. That sounds pretty interesting.

I’m going through my worsted weight scraps and trying to find colors that will go together for shawls. I have two different scrap bins and I’m trying to use up as many as possible. Here is the blue stripe shawl

And here is a green stripe.

Right now I’m working on a multicolored shawl. It has every color you could imagine in it and I’m using up all of my little tiny scrap balls. It’s not exactly to my taste, but I know someone will love it. It’s almost done so I’ll have it next time to show you.

Last weekend Brad needed to take his plane down to Beatrice, NE to have some work done on it. What is normally a 2 1/2 hour drive only took them about a half an hour in the plane. Piper went with him and was able to fly part of the way. He said she did very well at keeping the plane level. She’s a natural! This past weekend, they flew down with another friend to pick the plane up after the repair. Then Piper and Brad flew back home to Omaha, again, with her flying part of the way. She’ll probably have her pilots license before she has her drivers license! Look how pleased she is with herself. When she was first born, Brad  bought her her first pink pilot headset and a pink pilot logbook. 💜 Brad is a certified flight instructor so why not get free flying lessons from your Daddy?

Have any of you seen a pattern like this? I would love to make one of these for Piper, but I haven’t been able to find a pattern anywhere. It has slits up the side and I think the back is very similar to the front. If I could find a small enough pattern, I would also like to make one for Baby J.

We’ve had gorgeous weather this week. No air conditioning at all. We sit on the balcony most afternoons and evenings. Zoey loves it and so do we. I particularly love to listen to our little fountain but it has developed a leak. We’ve had it since Brad gave it to us when they lived in Portland. It’s survived several moves and I would like to be able to repair it, but we can’t find the actual leak. We don’t want to have the water dripping onto the patio of the people below us, so I think it’s time to say goodbye to it.

Here are the flowers Mandy, Brad and Piper gave me for Mother’s Day. My favorite color!

This is the view from our Balcony. The roof on the bottom is our garage. We’re on the second floor. You can see the garden patch that is pretty popular. There are limited spots. So many people want a spot that you have to put your name in a lottery to get a space. The sidewalk winds around to the community building and pool.

Take care and enjoy the lovely weather that it seems most are experiencing right now.

Blessings and love,

Betsy

Tour Time

Good morning! I’m going to try this again. I had written this entire post last night and when I hit publish, blogger must have glitched, and it deleted the entire thing! Are you ready for a very photo laden post? I think there are over 20 photos here and I’m sorry in advance for that, but I couldn’t figure out which ones to leave out. For those of you eagle eyed people in my last post, yes!!  We were able to figure out a way to bring the china cabinet! Guess who measured wrong? Well, it was me of course. I left off a whole 12 inches of the wall when I measured the first time. Duh! I’m so happy we were able to bring it along. Sit down, grab your beverage of choice, and here we go!

The door on the right in this photo is the front door. To the right of it is the laundry room that I forgot to take a photo of. I really like the dining room light fixture.

The kitchen with its granite countertops, and island. I have missed the island in our house in Spokane, so it’s nice to have this again. We’ve moved a few of the pictures around and they are now hanging on the wall instead of leaning as they are in this photo. 😍 The jury is still out on those glass fronted cabinets. I don’t like how you can see inside of them. It’s really the only cabinet I have for our every day dishes, so I’m a bit stumped as to what to do there.

This is the wall that you see to your left as you walk in the front door, and the guest bathroom is to the right of the wall.

The guest bathroom.  Not a lot to see here. It’s a bathroom.

As you can see Piper’s toothbrush is waiting for her first overnight at Papa and Grandmas’s new house.

The guest bedroom. All of the bedrooms are very large here. We had just given away the headboard and nightstands a few weeks ago, thinking that we would be in the apartment for the duration. We are watching Facebook marketplace for replacements.

Another view of the guest room with its big closet. That’s my teddy bear you see there on the dresser that’s missing his eye.

And yet another view.

The living room with the balcony. You can see that Zoey enjoys laying in the beams of sunlight. She has made herself right at home here.

We love the fireplace. It will be great for chilly winter evenings.

The buildings have the balconies staggered so you’re not directly overlooking another persons balcony. Plus we have this tree right outside ours. I like to listen to the birds singing in the morning. Mandy bought me the basket of pansies for Mother’s Day in my favorite color, lavender.

Looking across from the living room into the kitchen and dining area and you can just barely see the front door on the far right. All three rooms are open which will make it nice for having people over. We did need to buy a new rug for the living room and we found this one at Lowe’s. We both really like it.

The office/yarn room. This is the only room that still has a few things left to unpack. That’s OK. We’ll get to them eventually. Dennis has his big desk set up again which is really nice. He can have his double monitors to work with again. Since there really wasn’t room for my little desk, I’m going to use the end of his where you see my small chair.

My sewing machine has its own spot and the magnet board that Dennis made for me gets to hang up again. We didn’t have a place for it in the apartment. Most of you know that we collect magnets when we travel because they don’t take up much suitcase space and we can have them out where we can see them and be reminded of our travels. The refrigerator ran out of room for them, so he made me this board. It’s perfect!

The yarn wall. I actually unpacked this before anything else because the bags were in the way of people carrying boxes and furniture. In the space between the cubbies are some of my treasures. The picture on the far right with the deer is the very first thing I ever hand stitched. I made this for my mom when I was 15. To the left is a picture of a window and above it to the right is a picture of an embroidery scene. I made both of those for Dennis’s Mom when I was about 17. The beautiful round crochet artwork was made by my blog friend Amanda in Alicante, Spain.

The door straight ahead in this picture leads to the attached garage. From the garage is a man door with a wheelchair ramp into the main building hallway. There is an elevator in the building. This is truly a place we can grow old in. With the wheelchair ramp and the elevator, we wouldn’t have to use the stairs that go directly to the condo from the garage. 

The door on the left is a huge closet. All of the closets in this condo are very big. We don’t lack storage space at all.

Standing in the same spot, but turning to the left is our bedroom. We have a shelving unit with family pictures on this wall.

Just inside the bedroom door is this huge closet. The shelves are about 6 foot long and hold bathroom supplies, extra towels and linens, and on the bottom there’s even some freeze dried food.

This is the master bathroom. Both bathrooms were done by re-bath last November. The paintings that you see on the wall were done by another blog friend Cindy in Florida. She had hurt her right hand and was trying to see if she could paint with her left. I think these are beautiful paintings and the bubbles are perfect for a bathroom.

The shower is amazing, almost like being in a spa.

Looking from the bathroom into our bedroom.

Someday, I’ll tell you the story about the painting above our bed. It was painted in France by our friend Fabrice Pucheu. It’s too long to go into on this already long post. 

I’m watching Facebook marketplace for a little table to go between the two chairs. Just something big enough to set a coffee or tea cup on would be perfect.

We brought the fan up from the garage because we were having trouble figuring out the ceiling fan when we first moved in. Each of the bedrooms and the living room has a ceiling fan that is run by remote. We ended up having to reprogram the remotes. Thank goodness for Google and YouTube!

The master bedroom closet is huge. About 6 x 12’. Those are all of Dennis’s shirts on the left a few T-shirts of mine on the very end. On the top shelf is a pillow I used after one of my surgeries and on the bottom is a shoe rack with our winter boots, rain boots, hiking boots, and ice grippers for winter time. Two of Dennis’s three hats, and my sun hat are on the shelving unit.

Those are all of my dresses hanging up and Dennis’s dress slacks, and suit. On the shelves, we have a backpack, a bin with my three purses and a bag with our swimsuits and towels. The top shelf holds a box of clothes that I would love to be able to fit into again someday. 🤣 Other than a couple of pairs of jeans in a drawer that Dennis has and our underthings, this is the full extent of our clothes! We have truly learned over the past couple of years and lots of moves that you don’t need lots and lots of clothing. Now yarn? Of course you need lots and lots of yarn!🤣

Dennis made this necklace holder for me shortly after we were married. It works great and it’s hung in everyone of our homes since then.

I hope you enjoyed this little tour of our new home. I think we are going to be very happy here. Everyone seems very, very nice. I have been going back to our apartment both weeks we’ve been gone and joining in on crocheting mats for the homeless, and for the church service on Thursday afternoons. I can continue doing that as long as I want. We’re hoping against hope that the apartment will rent soon, but of course, there isn’t much incentive for them to rent ours when we’re paying rent anyway for the next five months and they have several empty units already. We’ve offered to pay the first month rent if anybody there has a friend that’s interested in moving in.

I hope you all have a wonderful Wednesday. Dennis is down puttering in his garage which he has missed doing very much. We’re planning to walk over to Lowe’s in a little while. He wants to look at some things for the garage and I would like to look at some standing planters to put on the balcony that I could plant some flowers in. I’ll be back soon. Take care!

Blessings and love,

Betsy 

Moved…well almost

Happy Saturday morning to you all. Well, we have almost everything moved to the new condo. Dennis is on his way right now to the storage unit to get the last load from there and then everything will be done. We cleaned the apartment on Thursday and are hoping against hope that they can get it re-rented. We’re pretty sure that won’t happen though and we will be paying rent for another five months until our lease is up. There are so many empty units because they raised the rent so much this year, that I can’t imagine they would try to rent ours with guaranteed rent before the empty ones.

It has been an exhausting week, and although I have been reading your blogs, I haven’t even had the energy to comment. We work from early morning until about 7:00 at night when we both collapse into our chairs. It doesn’t help that it’s been very warm and humid this whole week. Last night there were tornado warnings all around us, but we didn’t have anything serious here. Just a nice rain during the night.

This was how the kitchen and dining area looked earlier in the week. The boxes, tubs and books that you see are all gone now. Every single box has been unpacked. There are only two garbage bags of bedding in the guest room that are waiting to be put on the bed. Right now we have pictures laid out on the bed while we’re trying to decide where to hang them. The kitchen counters are all cleaned off and I’ve actually cooked a few meals here! It’s amazing the difference a couple of days makes.

We did have to buy a new rug for the living room. I really like it. We have it laid out, trying to get the ripples to flatten out. it isn’t quite as dark as it looks on the right part of this photo. It’s more of the color of the left side.

Don’t let this relatively serene side of the room fool you…

The other side still has photos on the couch and a bag of the couch pillows. But you can see that the kitchen is looking much, much better.

I did find time to finish another shawl for the hospital. In the evenings, when we finally collapsed into our chairs, I would crochet a few rows. It took me almost a week and a half to make this shawl when I can usually finish one in a day or two! The energy just wasn’t there.

We are both ecstatic that this is hopefully our last move ever. We wanted to get the apartment cleaned quickly on the off chance that it would rent and we also wanted to get our storage unit cleaned out so we wouldn’t have to pay rent there anymore. It went from $111 per month when we rented it last October, to $151 now. Everything costs so much more.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and have good things planned. We will be working around here, hanging pictures, and moving where we have put things. Dennis has been a workhorse. He has loaded our truck so many times I have lost count. Up and down the stairs at the apartment and then up and down the stairs here at the condo. We’ve had help from other people on one or two days, but he has done the majority of the moving himself. I packed the boxes and then unpacked them once they’ve arrived here, but he has done the heavy lifting. My back has been protesting the last several days with spasms so bad that I’ve had to stop and rest for a while. 

So far the people we have met here have been wonderful. The complex seems to be mainly people right around our age with a few younger families. After last nights tornado warnings all around us, one of our first priorities will be finding out where the tornado shelter is. I was a little concerned about that last night.

The Lord has certainly been very good to us over the past few years with all of these moves. I sincerely hope this is where we are to stay. Take care everyone and I’ll be back soon.

Blessings and hugs,

Betsy 

Moving!

We signed on the condo today! We’re so excited. We sure have been busy since then. We had the car loaded with Dennis's computer equipment when we went to the title company to sign papers. We went straight to the condo and unloaded it and walked through the place and oohed and awed over our new home. Back to the apartment we went to fill the car with plastic bags, the truck was already full. We unloaded both vehicles at the condo and then back to the apartment we went for 12 boxes of BOOKS! How? How do we still have have 12 boxes of books when we got rid of hundreds of books in the past two moves? I needed those boxes emptied so I can pack the kitchen tonight. At least as much as I can. Tomorrow we have friends with three more pick-up trucks coming to help us move boxes and little stuff. We've hired a company called "Firefighters on the Move," who will move the big stuff. Dressers, fireplace, bookcases, table and chairs, etc. 

My china cabinet won't fit on the wall it needs to go on, so we're going to have to try to sell it. We'll have the firefighters move it to the garage at the new place. There is a small possibility that the lady across the hall here might have a friend that wants to rent our unit. If so, we'll see if she wants to keep the china cabinet and we would just give it to her. We are still under a lease for five more months that we have to pay rent, electric and insurance until, or if, it's rented. The building has a lot of empty units because they raised the rent a lot at the beginning of the year.  If Karen's friend moves in here to be closer to her, that would help us save a LOT of money. 

Here are a few photos of our apartment today! I had seven huge black bags of yarn!

This is what it looks like at this moment. We have 12 empty paper boxes that we took books out of at the condo this afternoon. Now I'm filling them with dishes and food. Isn't that cabinet pretty? I'm sad to leave it behind.

I started my fall diamond painting on Tuesday and finished it late last night. I wanted to get it done before we started moving so it wouldn't get damaged. A great way to store them is to roll them up and put them inside of a paper towel roll. This really is pretty, especially from a distance.

I also started another crocheted shawl with "I Love This Yarn" in the Jazz Stripe colorway. This was some  of the clearance yarn that I got last month. I only paid $1.24/per skein.

What a fun and exciting weekend we're going to have. Ha! One of the residents at the new building came over this afternoon while we were unloading and explained the secure entry procedures and showed Dennis about the furnace, water heater and water shut-offs. It sounds as if everyone in our building is around our age and he said it's a very quiet building. I think we'll fit in well. He told me about a ladies tea that is being held next Tuesday. Although that's the day the firefighters are moving us, so I won't be able to go. So there will still be some things going on at our new place! That's nice to know.

By the way, the "Firefighters on the Move" moving company was founded by two paramedics.  They hire only firefighters and police officers who work on their days off. They have wonderful reviews and I guess you can't be any safer can you? They even tell you to make sure you keep essential medications and a first aid kit readily available! :-) You can tell they're paramedics.

I'll be back again soon. Take care!

Blessings and love,
Betsy