Last Friday we went to a family reunion about 5 hours south, where it was even hotter than here.  I heard a rumor that the temperature on Saturday was a record high.  I believe it!  Visiting and laughing and eating with family more than made up for the hot weather.  I heard a couple good stories.  Here is one:

In December 1944, my aunt Odean went to help our her oldest sister (my aunt Mable) who just had her second child, Linda.  Linda's older sister Aleene was about 5 years old.  Odean and Aleene decided that they would decorate the Christmas tree.  It was common practice back then to take Ivory Soap Flakes and whip them up with water to make "snow."  The snow was then spread on the branches of the tree.  Odean wanted pink snow, but there was no red food coloring.  Iodine was substituted, and they ended up with orange snow!  They didn't like it and decided to start over.  Odean took the tree out to the front yard and washed the snow off!  They settled for white snow.

Too bad Ivory Soap Flakes were discontinued in 1978, or I'd give it a try.

I've been extra busy or tired the last couple of weeks, so I've neglected my blog.  I hope you understand.  I've been doing things like take the photos below.  I hope you enjoy the story!  Ha!

The end!

Wow, another beautiful color!  In 1990, eight colors were retired and replaced by eight new shades.  Cerulean was one of the new shades.  (For your information, the eight colors that were retired and enshrined in the Crayola Hall of Fame on August 7, 1990, were green blue, orange red, orange yellow, violet blue, maize, lemon yellow, blue gray, and raw umber.)

Sometimes on the Crayola website, people tell colorful stories about a color.  Here is what three people wrote: 

So many blues, so little time!  I love all of the aqua/turquoise/blue-green colors, but cerulean just has a pizazz about it that captured me.

Here is a photo of the necklace that I finished last month.  I shaped and painted the four large beads.  After they were fired, I put the necklace together with the red, blue, green, and gold beads, which I bought.  It is really colorful, and my husband calls it a "voodoo" necklace.  He makes his hands shake whenever he is close to it.  A couple of times, I've had to threaten him with it when he gets too ornery.

The day before yesterday, my husband and I drove south to where we used to live.  My hearing aids had an appointment to be cleaned.  It is free at the place where I bought them.  I get batteries for free, too.  What a deal!  While we were there, we visited our old work places.  I had a very nice, but too short, visit with the ladies that I used to work with.  I miss their laughter and joking around.

While at the hearing aid place, I picked up the doctor's business card.  It has the following quote from Helen Keller printed on one side:

Blindness isolates us from things, but deafness isolates us from people.

I agree with the quote, especially after forgetting to put in my hearing aids before going to help out a friend!

In September 2005, I wrote about recording all the books that I've read.  Here is what I wrote:

It was in England that I discovered the joy of reading.  I still love to read.  I read novels, true stories, mysteries, detective stories, romances, educational-type books, religious and inspirational books, and all kinds of other books.  My mother, two sisters, and I would go to the library on a regular basis.  To keep track of the books that I had read, I took an idea from my mother and expanded it.  I started with a little 6-ring, 5- by 3-inch, looseleaf memo book.  On top of each piece of paper, I wrote the name of the author.  Below that I wrote the title of the book and the date that I finished reading it.  Sometimes I wrote the names of the main characters or a little about the book.  If I read a book a second (or third or fourth) time, I wrote that date down too.

It is weird because I still do it.  I have nine of those little memo books.  I have recorded every book that I've read since 1960.   The number is now 1,631.  Okay, you think I'm crazy, but it is great idea because it has kept me from buying or reading books that I've read before.

 

I've had to buy another little memo book, making a total of 10.  Last night I finished my 1,800th book!  Of those books, I read 66 of them more than once, some several times.  I guess some things never change--I'm still weird.

Last week I went to the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibit in Dallas with my son and a good friend.  I enjoyed the exhibit and bought a poster at the end.  I have three other posters that I bought at other Egyptian exhibits.  I've waited about a year and a half to hang the posters.  I already had three posters, but couldn't decide exactly how to hang them.  Last year when I heard that the King Tut exhibit was coming to Dallas, I decided to wait because I wanted to go and then get a poster.  So after all that waiting, yesterday I hung the four posters up in our bedroom. 

Below is a photo of the four posters.  One the left is a poster from Egypt's Dazzling Sun: Amenhotep III and His World.  I went to that exhibit in 1992 at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth.  The top poster in the middle is from another exhibit that I went to at the Kimbell in 1999 called Gifts of the Nile ~ Ancient Egyptian Faience.  The bottom middle is my oldest poster.  I bought it at the Tutanchamun exhibit in Cologne, West Germany, in 1980!  The one on the right is the poster that I bought last week.

So I've been to two King Tut exhibits, 29 years apart.  I liked both.

By the way, the rest of the day was great.  We found a parking space (under the shade of a tree) just two blocks from the museum, there was no line at the will-call window to pick up our tickets, it wasn't crowded in the exhibit until the very last when a group of school kids came in, we picked up my daughter for lunch at a Greek restaurant, and we made it home before the rush-hour traffic.  Who could ask for anything more?!

I can't believe that I have been blogging for four years!  I thought it was only three.  I guess time really does fly when you are having fun.  Today is the day that my daughter set up my blog and my first entry was on April 30th.  I had given the whole idea a lot of thought before I started, and I had written out several entries.  So on the 30th, Amy sat me down and showed me how to do that mysterious, scary thing called "blogging."  In the past four years, I've posted 692 entries, or 0.47 entry per day, with 730 comments to those entries.  My husband would say that was a lot of talking!  I've gotten 449,992 hits.  Wow!  The entry with the most comments was the one about speisbraten.  I also received several emails about that entry.  Who woulda thought?!

Lately I haven't posted very much about my memories of the past.  I've been busy writing about my thoughts about the present.  Just before I retired at the end of March 2006, I wrote about my hopes for the future.  I haven't so much lately.  Again, it is probably because I've been writing about the present.  I hope you have enjoyed it all.  I especially hope that my children and husband and the rest of my family have liked what I've had to say and maybe even learned a little bit more about me.

Happy blogiversary to me!

Last week, I finished another ceramic piece.  It is almost like one that I did before--a black plate with colorful flowers.  I like the other one, but too much of the black shows through the flower petals.  So I tried it again, but with bigger flowers.  I put more white behind the flowers.  It looks a lot better.  The plate is presently in our second bathroom by the sink.  I guess practice makes me better, even if only a little bit.