Ted and I are finally finished with the contractor jobs we needed to update the interior of our house. We started in August 2022 and finished in November 2025. We never believed it would take this long, but life got in the way and we put things off until–in frustration–we just said, “Let’s get it finished!” And that was all it took. Sometimes, you just have to bite the bullet, or whatever.

Here are the 46-year-old pantry doors that came with our new house back in the 20th century. They’re “builder grade,” but held up well. Still, 46 years! It’s time for a change.

If you read my colorwashing story, you might remember that, when we finished colorwashing our new pantry doors, we set them up in the basement and marked them 1, 2, 3, and 4 with blue tape in the order we wanted them hung in the kitchen. We knew the doors were one inch too high for the pantry opening, so we painted the tops with the base color and left the bottoms bare because we knew they were going to be sawn off. In addition, I added a strip of blue tape with a message to “cut excess length from bottom.”

Sadly, good intentions can go awry. What’s wrong with this picture? I’ll give you a chance to look closely before you read on.

If you didn’t see the problems, look again and you’ll notice that (1) they are hung upside-down; and (2) the one on the left is hung backward with the plain side, rather than the colorwashed side, facing outward. I felt sick when I saw this.

Before speaking to Mike, the carpenter, about the problems, I went online and looked up all kinds of door images. Just as I thought, when there is trim on a door, the wider piece of the trim is always on the bottom. Confident I was right, I said to Mike, “You know they’re upside-down, right?” His response was a puzzled, “They are?” Then I mentioned that one was also backward, and he was equally mystified. To compound the error, he’d already cut off the extra inch in height at the tops of the doors, because he thought those were the bottoms.

The doors were shipped to us in pairs and were already hinged together. We removed the hinges to colorwash them. Mike must not have noticed the holes where the hinges could be re-attached, because he drilled new holes on the opposite side of each door to fasten them in this order. Now each door had three sets of hinge-holes (my term) on both sides. Since we’d had the doors standing as they should be installed, lots of nasty thoughts were running through my mind, but I managed to keep them to myself.

The problem was that Mike had only been working for Jimmy (the owner/contractor) for three months. Christopher, Mike’s more experienced mentor who was working on the laundry room cabinets, left for a short while to finish a different job, and instructed Mike to begin installing the pantry doors. Before Christopher left, he asked if Ted and I minded if they used our old door track (already installed) instead of the new one. I was puzzled, but figured, if it worked, it could be fine. Christopher went on his way and Mike kept working. Neither Ted nor I was feeling very positive at this point. In retrospect, I wonder if Christopher was trying to simplify the installation for Mike by not making him install a new track.

The installation was undone, the doors were turned to the right positions, the hinges were moved to where they belonged (at the original holes), and here’s Mike, drilling holes to attach the door pulls.

The final step (we thought) was to hang the door header. The edges on the lower edge were slightly rounded; the upper edges were cut square. At least Mike hung the header with the rounded edges at the bottom and didn’t have to re-do that too. (He apparently realized the value of my blue tape messages, so the arrows and words indicating “top” and “bottom” helped him this time.)

Unfortunately, the saga of errors continued.

(1) When the doors arrived at our house, all three hinges on one pair were bent. That package (a wooden crate) must have experienced trauma during the shipping process to shift the panels enough to bend the hinges. The guys couldn’t straighten the hinges, so they bought new ones. As it turned out, the replacement hinges were thicker than the original ones. When the doors were closed and the hinge plates on adjoining doors met, they made the doors too wide to function in the doorframe. The guys had to buy another set of thinner hinges. We were getting a lot of hinge-holes in our doors.

(2) The doors were not hung perfectly level, so when we opened and closed them, they rubbed against the outer walls of the opening and against each other in the center. Not only was this wrong; it was going to gradually wear down the wood and the walls at the contact points and scratch off our carefully applied colorwash on the center sides. Looking at the doors, it was easy to see a wider gap between the door and the wall at the top of one door and at the bottom of the other. It was also easy to see that one end was higher off the floor than the other.

(3) The new doors are much heavier than the old louvered ones. On the old track, the new doors opened too far and–the best I can describe it–backed up on themselves. They had to be pulled by hand from the wide-open position because the door pull had the wrong torque to do that. When they removed the old doors, the guys discarded the stoppers (spring-like things that fit inside the track). Without a stopper, the doors opened too far. The guys had also discarded the new hardware.

At this point, Jimmy brought in Tommy–a master carpenter–to see what could be done. Tommy did a better job of filling the extra hinge holes and he worked hard to level the doors. Unfortunately, to rotate the doors slightly to level them, he had to cut more off the top, which had already lost an inch that should have been removed from the bottom. Meanwhile, he was looking for something he could use that would provide a stopping point to keep the doors from opening too far, but he found nothing. Ted and I were becoming increasingly frustrated and unhappy. I was going to say, “Why don’t we just buy new hardware?” when Tommy said, “I think we should just buy new hardware.” He called Jimmy, who brought over some new hardware. Then Tommy rehung the doors, and made a few adjustments.

We thought the saga had ended, but the doors still didn’t work well. Jimmy came back to evaluate why they didn’t work as they should. After repeatedly opening and closing the doors using a variety of pulling/pushing touchpoints, he determined that moving the door pulls from the outer door panels to the inner panels would provide a different torque and would solve the problem. The downside: it would leave visible door pull installation holes on the outer door panels (more unnecessary holes on our doors!), but he thought he could fix that. He decided to try fixing one hole before drilling new ones. (Good idea.) Here he is, matching colors and applying them, blending them, smoothing them, etc.

In the photo below, he’s smoothing the lower hole. The upper hole is invisible, so he did a good job. It took him about an hour to get the right blend on the first hole; in another hour, he finished all three of the other holes. Twenty more minutes covered drilling new holes and re-installing the door pulls. Again, Jimmy is a good guy. He didn’t charge us for all those hours Tommy put in correcting and adjusting Mike’s errors, nor for the new door hardware. From what Tommy said (he was a talker), Christopher now knows that he should not leave a mentee alone on a job.

Everything works. The doors look nice. Ted and I are still disappointed with the process, but we accept the solutions. If you don’t know the saga (too late!), you won’t notice that anything was wrong. Ted and I have chosen to believe that, sometimes, things just go wrong, and this time it happened to us. Neither of us thinks it would be more fair if it had happened to someone else. Jimmy and Tommy did everything they could to make things right at the company’s expense, and it’s all good in the end. Don’t the new pantry doors look nice?

As long as we were going to have carpenters in the house, we added a little job to their list. Earlier this year, Ted and I shut off our landline telephone. The problem: the white phone plate was still attached to the wall and it covered the hole where the phone line came in from outside. Fortunately, we have extra tiles from our 2023 kitchen backsplash update. The guys chipped out 4 tiles and replaced them.

After the grout was applied, you’d never know we had a landline on that wall, except that, out of habit, when we come home, we still look at that corner to see if the answering machine light is blinking with a message.

Ted and I are old enough to remember having the first phone installed in our parents’ homes, party lines, crank phones, dial telephones, long distance charges that were cheaper after 7:00 p.m., collect calls, person-to-person calls, pay phones, princess-style phones, wall phones, phone cards to charge instead of putting change in a pay phone, finally being able to purchase a phone instead of paying “rent” to the phone company for it every month, having more than one phone in the house (we had six before dropping our land line), answering machines, car phones, cell phones, smart phones. . . . We must be really old!

When Ted and I updated our kitchen in 2023, we replaced all the cabinets, but we kept the original 46-year-old louvered pantry doors because we didn’t know what style of new doors we wanted. (The cabinet manufacturer did not make bifold doors.) If we could see the new cabinets in place, we thought it would help us decide what kind of doors would look nice with them. Unfortunately, that didn’t help at all. Searching websites for bifold doors didn’t help either. The doors we liked were not bifold, and sliding or swinging panel doors were not an option, given the space we have to access the pantry. As time went on, the old, louvered doors looked worse and worse to us and more out of place with the new cabinets, but we still hadn’t seen anything we liked.

One night, I was reading a book and descriptions of the house in the story kept mentioning shaker doors and shaker cabinets, etc. If “shaker” was going to come up so often in the story, I needed to know what kind of picture to put in my mind while I was reading, so I searched for images of shaker doors. When I saw them, I showed the images to Ted, and bingo! They were just what we needed to complement our cabinet doors. The problem: all the doors came primed, unfinished, or finished with a color we didn’t like. Before we could move ahead and order the doors, we needed to decide how to finish them. When we pictured a uniform coat of paint, it seemed like a huge, 4×8 blank, block-like look, and we didn’t want that.

As I was looking around our kitchen one day, my eyes fell on the light parts of this wall sculpture we have, and a light bulb went off in my mind. I held the light pieces over our louvered doors and against the wall paint, then against one of the kitchen cabinets, and it looked good. Whitewash, I thought. That’s the finished look we needed! It would be more visually interesting than solid-color doors.

It wasn’t that easy. We took the sculpture with us to select paint samples that would look nice with a whitewash over them, but we didn’t like any of them. I contacted some painters for guidance–and perhaps a quote to do the job for us–but they didn’t seem to know what we were talking about. How tough is it to put on a decorative coat of paint? Did we really think we could do this?

Next, we went to an art studio for help, but they specialized in decorative glass and metal pieces, not walls or furniture. No one seemed to have any idea who else we could ask, and we didn’t want to order the doors until we knew how to finish them. Lacking in-person guidance, I went to YouTube to look for whitewashing videos, hoping for a clue. There were a lot of videos about whitewashing, but except for learning that the paints need to be diluted with water, I didn’t see any finishes that looked like what I had in mind.

While I was searching, however, I came across a video with “colorwashing” in the title, so I clicked on it. It was closer to what I was looking for, but the lady was painting walls, and that wasn’t the look we wanted. Still, that gave me a new word to search: colorwash. Whitewashing videos far outnumber colorwashing videos, but I came across two that were doing what I knew Ted and I wanted to do. I played them, took screen shots, and made notes. (Once a student, always a student.) Feeling confident we could handle this, Ted and I ordered bifold, unfinished shaker doors. We wanted to finish the doors at least two weeks before the carpenters arrived to start our laundry room update so that the paint would be completely dry and wouldn’t chip easily if it bumped against something during the installation process. We had to get going.

And then the stress began. The doors were pretty expensive, and neither Ted nor I come close to being described as “artistic.” I can draw stick people, line outlines of a small house, and trees like first-graders draw them–a brown stem with a green cloud-like top. Ted might not be even that good, so I started getting stressed about how the responsibility of artistically finishing the doors might fall on me and how I might ruin expensive doors. Then I remembered something my mom used to say: “The only things I don’t know how to do, I just haven’t learned yet.” That’s a good axiom. I decided take Mom’s advice and to give colorwashing a try.

The videos mentioned that practicing before doing the real thing is a good idea. I definitely agree, so we went to Home Depot and asked where we could find a flat, naked piece of wood smaller than a 4×8 sheet of plywood. The man walked us to the back corner of the store, pulled a sheet of wood about 18 inches by 4 feet out of a large trash can, and handed it to me. There were no tags to scan, so I asked him, “How much?” All the wood in the trash can was scrap lumber, so it was free. Great!

The first thing we had to do was select a color for the base paint and a color for the wash paint. We also bought the supplies the video told me we’d need: regular and feathering paint brushes, small containers to mix the paint and water, measuring cups/spoons to measure the proportion of water to paint so we could repeat it for the next batch, etc. We started with sample-size cans of paint in case we had chosen the wrong colors. (Remember, not artists.)

Spoiler alert: Step-by-step instructions of our mistakes and successes follow, just in case we forget how to do it another time in the future.

We started by putting two coats of the base color on our Home Depot practice board.

We tried different water-to-paint ratios and different brush strokes. Some on-line advice suggested a 3-to-1 ratio of paint to water, but that was too runny. After several tries, using a quarter-cup of base paint and gradually adding fractions of a teaspoon of water to the wash paint, we liked the look and the working viscosity of the paint with a wash ratio of 12 parts paint to 1 part water–a long way from 3-to-1!

When we thought we were close, we took the sample board to the kitchen to check the color match. Not good. It was far too yellow.

To get rid of the yellow cast, we decided to experiment with the extra-white ceiling paint left over from our 2022 house update. First, we brushed alternating columns of white over the dry base color.

That didn’t work because the wet paint couldn’t blend with the dry paint, so we got stripes instead of a faux wood-grain look.

Then we tried it again with a fresh coat of wet base paint.

The wet-on-wet was better, but still turned out too stripe-y, so we tried dashes made by tapping the end of the paint brush on the wood.

That also looked too much like white stripes and was too white instead of evenly blended with the base color. While that paint was still wet, we dotted the white stripes with some of the base color and blended that in.

Not bad. That helped. The color looks better, but the stripes are still too visible and the finished look is too white. We went back to the practice board, re-painted it with the base color, and tried some other techniques. We soon lost count of how many coats of trial paint we applied to both sides of the practice board.

We’d been wondering if it would add visual interest to the doors if we painted the inside of the door trim edges dark brown. We found a can of brown paint left over from another project and tried it.

After days of experimenting with methods of how much to thin the paint, how much of each color to use, how to apply the wash color, and how to satisfactorily blend the two colors, we decided we were close enough to give colorwashing a go, but to be safe, we’d begin by working on the back side of one door. The only way to see the color on the back of the doors after they’re installed is to remove them and turn them around. If the colorwashing didn’t work, we could just paint over it with the base color again–our original plan for the back sides.

Good-bye, practice board. We went back to the basement and put two coats of the base color on both sides of the doors.

Working on the back side, we decided to try staggering, narrower streaks of white to avoid the striped look we’d been getting.

Staggered wet white on the wet base color is looking good. Keep blending.

There we go! Success! Just a little more blending is needed.

Our practice board pattern and color looked good when we compared it to the kitchen cabinet doors, and the back of this door matches it, Great!

We wanted to try the brown trim in a more realistic form than the practice board.

We only did the upper half of the door–again, because it was the back side and it was going to be re-painted in the base color anyway. We took it upstairs to see how the colorwash and the brown accent paint looked with the cabinets. The conclusion: the colorwash is satisfactory; the brown trim is a no-go.

We went back to the basement to paint over that back side and to start colorwashing the front sides of all the doors. We decided to do the long, narrow outer trim strips first because we thought they’d be the easiest.

The blue tape left nice clean lines to colorwash in a sideways direction next.

When we finished the front of one door, we pulled out one of the kitchen drawers to check our color match. Awesome!

With everything figured out and working well, we could really get moving. Here’s Ted painting the base color on the inner trim.

My job was to paint a skinny white line along that raised edge and then to blend it with Ted’s base color to colorwash the inside trim.

It took us about ten days to get from our first practice board trial to the last of the colorwash. Once we figured everything out, we averaged about an hour per door (front side only), including taping, painting, and colorwashing. We did the same thing on all four doors at once, then let the paint dry overnight so we could tape off the next section. It took three days to finish all four doors–vertical panels one day, horizontal panels the next, and inner flat surfaces last at just over an hour per day. After all the stress I suffered, what a breeze! Another thing my mom used to say was that anything you know how to do is easy. Right on, Mom!

The doors are finished. Here I am, colorwashing the header that conceals the tracks from which the doors are hung.

This is the finished header trim. The camera picks up every detail. It actually looks far less striped in person.

We did a (slightly) better job of colorwashing in some places than in others, so we arranged the doors in the order we wanted them hung and numbered them. That put the less-than-perfect areas in the shadow of the island and the best areas in the daylight. (Clever, huh?)

The door on the left is a back side with the base color. The door on the right is colorwashed.

We’re finished! It’s time to put away the sawbucks and the painting tools.

When everything was cleaned up, we celebrated by taking a walk along the riverfront in St. Charles and stopping for hot fudge sundaes at Kilwin’s. Mm-mm good!

As Mom said, anything you know how to do is easy. Now Ted and I know how to apply a colorwash. Need help with your project? Give us a call. 🙂

The laundry room was the last room to update in our house. We started in the usual way: empty the room and put everything in the dining room. When carpenters are working at our house, we always park our cars on the street so they can put their tool-filled trucks and their saws in the driveway. They store the supplies–and, this time, our washer and dryer–in the garage.

We wanted to extend our cabinets to the ceiling, so after removing the old cabinets, the first job was to remove the soffit. We were all surprised to see that the walls and the ceiling behind and above the soffit were already covered with drywall. That meant a discount on our cost. Yay! At the end of the first day, the carpenters, Christopher and Mike, brought one of the new cabinets indoors.

The next day, they brought in the remaining units and started installing them.

This is what our old utility cabinets looked like. One side provided storage for brooms, mops, etc.; the other side had eight drawers, most of which were filled with DVDs. We made it clear during the design process that we wanted the same design in the new cabinets, but . . .

. . . this is what we discovered when we opened the new cabinet doors. We expected two tall cabinets topped by two short cabinets. Instead, we saw four identical cabinets stacked and fastened together with an installed shelf (the wide horizontal bar) between the two units. The installed shelf made it impossible to simply remove shelves to make mop and broom space or to add additional drawers. Even if we could have done that, the doors wouldn’t align with the taller spaces in the lower units.

The left cabinet was 6-8 inches too short for brooms. (The broom is standing on the floor, not inside the cabinet.) Then we were told that manufacturers are moving away from customized cabinets. Really? It wasn’t a problem ordering our 1999 kitchen and laundry cabinets to size, nor was it a problem to order our 2023 kitchen cabinets to size within a 3-inch range (30, 33, 36 inches, etc.). Could it be that this particular manufacturer did not build custom-sized cabinets?

What to do? Jimmy, the owner/contractor sells high-quality merchandise, and we’ve always been pleased with what we’ve had him install–until now. We told Christopher and Mike that these cabinets were not what we made clear we wanted and thought we had ordered. They were useless to us because the mops and brooms wouldn’t fit, and there weren’t enough drawers for our DVDs. Without that storage space, we didn’t need these cabinets.

Christopher and Mike didn’t want to start installing cabinets if they’d just have to take them out later, so they called Jimmy, the owner/contractor. He came to the house soon after that with his master carpenter (34 years of experience), Tommy, to see what could be done to customize the unsatisfactory cabinets. The two of them talked for about 20 minutes and decided they could make us happy. We didn’t understand all the technical jargon, but the idea seemed feasible, so we gave them the go-ahead and the other carpenters went to work.

The next problem appeared when I started thinking about how I’d arrange our stuff in the cabinets with the extra room at the soffit-free ceiling. I noticed then that the cabinets only had one set of holes for shelf adjustments in the lower cabinet and only three sets of holes in the taller cabinets. Each set consisted of three holes drilled three inches apart (six-inch total distance). That meant I couldn’t store my laundry basket in the lower cabinet, where it’s always been, because the shelf adjustment holes were only in the centers of the side panels.

Ted and I don’t place our shelves evenly in our cabinets; we adjust the shelves according to what we store on each one. One or three sets of holes per cabinet was not good. Fortunately, the guys had a template they could use to drill holes any size and any distance apart, as desired, for shelf brackets. Go for it, guys! Now my laundry basket fits in the cabinet. Problem solved. If you zoom in, you can see the set of three holes inside at the right front of the cabinet and the strip of closer holes behind them. Note: the second plastic box from the left on the upper shelf is my “essential” toolbox.

The upper cabinets are installed. Note: This was the day of the ICE raid. Christopher, working on the upper cabinets, looked out the window and saw the law enforcement vehicles parking across the street.

Next step: install the trim at the tops of the cabinets.

Door handles and trim: installed.

And now, the challenge. First, wait for the three additional drawers that needed to be ordered. When the drawers arrived, Tommy, the master carpenter worked to customize these so-called “utility” cabinets. The process sounds simple, but doing the job well to make it as attractive as possible took time.

Tommy started by cutting out the horizontal shelving between the upper and lower cabinets. You can see the grooves in the side panels where the installed shelves used to be and the now-flush vertical scar in front of the left groove between the installed door hinges. That’s where he cut out the wide board that anchored the shelf in place and stabilized the joints between the upper and lower cabinets. Then he had to do some work to re-stabilize the cabinets. I wasn’t “snooper-vising” him, but I heard pounding.

Next, he had to uninstall the top three drawers and remove the drawer slides. The bottom drawer was already as low as it could be to operate smoothly. Ted and I had previously figured out how far apart the drawers had to be placed so that our DVDs would fit in them without wasting space between drawers (see the blue tapes). To accommodate our measurements, Tommy re-installed those three drawer slides lower and then the three additional slides above them.

When that was finished, he used matching wood–from a shelf that was removed from the lower left cabinet that we knew we’d never use–to fasten the upper and lower doors together and to cover the empty space between them. The down side of this solution is that the upper and lower doors now open and close as a single unit.

Result: We have utility cabinets with room for brooms and mops, and drawers for DVD storage. The door arrangement is unusual, but it works.

Jimmy is a good guy. We’ve never had problems with his products or service before, so we had a private talk with him about how disappointed we felt. He apologized and told us it’s hard to find skilled carpenters, so he made the decision to hire younger carpenters and pair them with his more experienced carpenters, hoping the younger ones will continue working for him. He didn’t charge us for any of the extra customizing labor.

Here are photos of the c. 2000 laundry room and the 2025 laundry room. We definitely like the lighter, brighter new look.

The cabinets are new, but we still have our 30-yer-old Maytag washer and dryer. They just won’t quit working!

The laundry room and pantry door stories should come first, but the carpenters–who were doing all three jobs–finished the basement first, so that’s where I’m starting.

First, the basement bathroom. The sink in the next two pictures doesn’t look too bad but, in person, it had yellowed greatly and looked awful with the white tile floor, the white toilet, and the white shower. It was time for a new vanity top.

Our old sink was Corian; this time we chose quartz. While I was talking with the sales lady about the quartz top, she mentioned that the quartz used for countertops is not actually made of rock because quartz is not a rock. I tactfully did not correct her that quartz is, indeed, a real rock and that “quartz” countertops are fabricated to look like actual quartz rock. Here’s the not-real-quartz pattern we chose. It gives the bathroom a nice, fresh look.

Back in 2023, when we updated our kitchen, we had some of the old kitchen cabinets installed in our basement workshop. There weren’t enough kitchen cabinets in the sizes we wanted to finish the job, so we planned to add old cabinets from the laundry when we updated that room. These are the last of the original cabinets that came with our new house 46 years ago.

Now, those three (antique?) cabinets have been replaced with four (relatively) “new” 27-year-old overhead cabinets and a utility cabinet, plus another utility cabinet around the corner of this wall. The laundry room cabinets live on!

I didn’t like the seeing the three unfinished sides of the cabinets (they were originally against other cabinets or walls), so having learned how to colorwash (story coming up), I decided to colorwash the unfinished sides. Note: The crew replaced the missing ceiling tiles a few days later.

I got out my practice painting board, Ted and I selected paint colors that seemed to match the colors in the wood of the cabinets, and I went to work, trying a variety of styles and colors to choose which looked best. They were mostly awful!

A closer look at the top right sample on my practice board showed a possibility. The base color paint showed through the colorwash paint, creating a wood grain appearance. The idea seemed so simple after what we went through with the pantry doors (yes, coming up). Just put on two coats of the base color and paint over them with a single coat of the wash color? How easy is that?!

I had to remove a cabinet door to paint the upper strip on the utility cabinet. Then I taped all the edges and started painting.

Here you can see the start of the first coat of the base color. The second coat looked far more uniform, as second coats usually do.

Here’s the faux wood grain look of the wash color. I used a feathering brush to smooth out the streaks a bit.

And here’s the result.

The strip between the two cabinet doors in the photo below is colorwashed. I think I achieved a pretty good color match.

We like the finished look much better than those unfinished panels.

Now that the hardwood floor in the kitchen looks so nice, I decided we needed new coverings for the blind headers on the windows. Ted and I went shopping for fabric and found a piece with a design and colors that were perfect for our kitchen. There was just one problem: it was upholstery fabric, not drapery fabric. That means it was thicker, had an applied backing, and frayed more easily than drapery fabric. I’m an excellent seamstress, so I took on the challenge. I didn’t know it would turn out to be a bigger challenge than I’d expected.

Even though I only wanted to wrap the fabric around the blind headers, there were problems to solve. With drapery fabric, I’d cut a long rectangle, fold it in half lengthwise, sew that long seam together, turn over each end to sew hems, and slide the tube I’d made over the header. Upholstery fabric is a different story. One problem is that upholstery fabric is thicker so it can take the wear and tear of furniture use, where draperies and curtains simply hang against the wall–or window–and get dusty. My “wrap” (as I call it) also had to turn two corners from the front of the header onto the returns that attach the front piece to the window frame. The thicker fabric bunched up heavily at the corners and, if it fit the header, it was too tight to slide over the returns. My solution was to make the wrap slightly wider from the corners to the window frames to make it fit around the corners and the return pieces.

The wrap at the bay window was longer than the width of the fabric, so I had to match the fabric pattern at a seam. That seam was bulky where it folded over the top and bottom of the header. My solution? I notched it at the folds to allow it to bend more easily with less bulk.

Folding over a hem at each end was tricky too. I usually double-fold the ends, but that was far too thick with upholstery fabric, so I zigzagged the edges to prevent future fraying and settled for a single fold-over. The double layer of fabric at the hemlines made the wrap even tighter over the returns. That’s where my solution to make the wrap a little wider in that area really helped. My finished pieces weren’t simple rectangles; they were long rectangles with flared ends.

It didn’t surprise me that I triumphed over the challenges. I’d have given up if Ted and I hadn’t liked the fabric color and the pattern so much, and if we hadn’t agreed that a runner-up piece of drapery fabric would always be second-best. Still, making everything work was more frustrating than fun, so in the future, I’ve decided to avoid buying upholstery fabric for window hangings! That is, unless it’s this perfect for the look we want.

Here are before and after photos of the new wraps–old, then new.

We like the colors of the new wraps with the new cabinets. They look warmer and less “washed out.”

See how well that pattern matches our new light (part of the 2022 update) and the colors in the wall sculpture? I couldn’t say “no” and I’m glad it worked out.

Ted and I started updating the interior of our house in 2022. We made electrical changes (halo lights in the ceilings, a light wall in the family room, etc.), we had all the walls painted, and we replaced all the carpeting. In 2023, we updated the kitchen. After that, the only remaining jobs were to refinish the hardwood floor, update the laundry room, and get some new pantry doors. Our current pantry doors were in the house when we bought it new 46 years ago. They held up well, but their age was showing.

We started by going to our favorite contractor to start planning the laundry room update. Of course, working with his designer, making choices from samples, selecting the cabinet style we wanted, etc. all takes time. Then the stuff has to be ordered and the contractor has to find a place in his schedule to do the job for us. Meanwhile, we decided to get started on refinishing the hardwood floors, which would take less time. In fact, they did the job a week after I called and finished it in four days. Wow!

We started by emptying the pantry and the closets so the team could work on those floors.

We knew everything would get dusty from sanding the floor so, as long as we were taking down the blinds, we decided to wash them. There was lots of floor space to do it.

Everything got piled in the dining room, where it would be out of our way during the project.

We moved the kitchen table to the family room and took out the leaves to make it smaller. That gave us a window view while we ate meals during the work time.

Then the team of two arrived to start working. They spent a block of time protecting as much as possible from the dust they were going to create. They wrapped the refrigerator doors separately to allow us access to the refrigerator. We could also use the microwave.

The stove was moved to the family room.

They covered the doorways with plastic and wrapped one vertical edge of the plastic at each doorway around a spring tension rod. That allowed us to use other rooms–we just had to move the rod aside far enough to squeeze through, then put it back against the door frame.

Then the mess began. “Dusty” isn’t a strong enough word, although the plastic coverings helped a lot. After the entire job was finished, Ted and I cleaned the entire house, including wiping down the walls.

This is a view of the bottom of the sander. The large disk on the floor spins and each of the six smaller disks on it also spins. All that action prevents sanding strokes from showing on our herringbone floor pattern.

The edges and corners needed to have the old stain and varnish scraped off and sanded by hand. You can see some of the scrapings on the floor in the center right of the photo below.

When everything was sanded, it looked so light and clean that we hated to put a colored stain on it. It felt really smooth too, compared to our 27-year-old pre-refinished floor.

From an array of stain colors, we were allowed to choose four to be applied to the floor to help us select the one we wanted. From our four choices, we went for “natural,” the lightest one.

For the finish coat, we chose a low-sheen finish, rather than a gloss.

When the guys finished the job, they left a little gift for us–wood floor cleaner and a Bono mop.

The following are before and after pictures of the floor. We can’t believe how much depth and color are revealed with the lighter stain! It’s even better than the clean, sanded look.

This floor extends to every exterior door and to every first floor room, as well as to the stairways for access to the basement and to the second floor. On the day the finish coat was applied, we needed to leave the house for a few hours to let the finish dry enough to walk on it with socks, so we went out to dinner.

On our way home, we saw a rainbow–a good sign for a successful, beautiful project.

My dad was an outstanding mechanic. His gifts to me when I left for college were a flathead and a phillips screwdriver, a hammer, a pliers, and a 6-inch adjustable wrench. Unusual gifts for a college woman, to say the least.* I must have exhibited enough interest in helping Dad with little jobs and watching him work that he realized I’d want to keep my things in working order after I left home. I quickly discovered that those tools were some of the most useful things I brought to college, and I still have them. (Dad didn’t buy low-quality tools.)

Word got around, and my dormmates often came to me, asking to borrow one tool or another. The same thing happened when I worked in an office. Loose drawer handle? Picture to hang? My staff knew I had some tools, and they knew it was faster and easier to borrow my tools than to put in a maintenance order.

Ted has tools stored on the shelf below the workbench in our basement workroom as well as in some of the cabinets in that room. He’s less adept–but stronger–with tools than I am (his dad was not a mechanic), so I often say that I’ve bought him all the tools I need. All of Ted’s tools are useful, but many aren’t used very often. For those little fixer-up jobs that need attention, I keep a toolbox (actually, a plastic shoebox) handy in our laundry room so that I don’t have to go to the basement to get a hammer or a screwdriver for a two-minute job. My toolbox/shoebox is stocked with “essential” tools for little jobs. It has small, medium, and large flathead and phillips screwdrivers; a hammer; a level; a 4-inch and a 6-inch adjustable wrench; a 12-inch ruler and a pencil; a 25-foot steel tape measure; two sets of allen wrenches (metric and English); etc.

My toolbox/shoebox was getting pretty full, and it shouldn’t be (see “essential”), so I dumped it out one day to sort out my essential tools and those that could be stored with Ted’s for occasional use. During the sorting process, I discovered a second hammer that I don’t remember having. The hammer is small–only about 8.5 inches long.

But, . . . it comes apart and provides 2 flathead and 2 phillips screwdrivers as well. It’s a semi-essential tool kit in one unit. Nifty!

I can’t believe I didn’t remember that I had something this useful. Sometimes, you don’t know what you have until you find it!

* Dad was not a demonstrative man (huge understatement). On the day Mom drove me to college, Dad said, “I love you,” with the tools and with the words “Don’t get involved in any of those ‘Students for Lincoln’ or whatever clubs.” Translation: Those were the days of large, sometimes violent, student protests against Dow Chemical Company–the maker of agent orange–and against the Vietnam War. Members of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) were the most violent protesters. UC Berkeley and UW Madison were among the most active and vocal protesting colleges in the nation with large SDS memberships. Dad was worried that I’d be hurt in a demonstration and/or be put in jail like so many of the protesters.

Jeff was playing with an AI app one day and decided to make his dream of being in a band come true. He actually played the drum for a short while in elementary school. Look how far he’s come.

If his dreams can come true, I asked him to fulfill my dream of becoming a super model. He did it.

When I was a child (elementary school) growing up in Wisconsin, my friends and I often went ice skating or sled riding at night. One night, while we were sledding, I remember seeing the Northern Lights in the sky. I watched them for a little while, then went back to sledding with my friends. It was pretty, but I didn’t realize at the time what a remarkable event I had just witnessed.

The last time the Northern Lights were visible in this area was May 2024, but Ted and I were not able to see them. Thanks to a major sun storm this week, the Northern Lights were visible again as far south as Missouri. This time, we joined a crowd at a nearby park and saw a beautiful light show.

After leaving the park, we drove to the top of a hill in our subdivision and we could see the Northern Lights from there as well. Surprisingly (to us), no one in the neighborhood was outside looking at them.

On one of his weather-related websites, Ted found these pictures of rare white Northern Lights that were seen in Alaska during this solar event. Beautiful!

Jeff and La came from their Montana home for a visit at our Missouri home and–no surprise–we had a great time together. The weather was nice, so a bike ride was on the menu.

Because I know that La likes puzzles, I showed her the puzzle Kathy gave me for Christmas last year. It has the most unusual pieces I’ve ever seen. There are letter-shaped pieces (LOVE) and pieces shaped like hearts, bunnies, flowers, leaves, butterflies, animals, etc. The edges are irregular, so there are no “edge pieces” to start with. I’m not that addicted to puzzles, so I put it away.

When La saw the pieces, she started looking for ways to put them together. It wasn’t long before Jeff and I were helping her. It was challenging at first because the picture of the puzzle was printed on a larger scale than the finished puzzle, making it hard to judge the perspective of where a particular piece should be placed. (Compare the small group of tiny pieces on the table with the large picture in the photo below.) With three of us working on it, I think it only took about an hour to finish the puzzle.

Look for those specially-shaped pieces in this close-up of the finished puzzle.

We spent the following day at Kari’s house with her family. Theo’s girlfriend, Lizzy, joined us and we all had a good time playing some games together.

To stretch our legs, we went to a nearby park and followed a circular path (1-2 miles) around the park.

Ted took a picture of our group.

One day, about a month before Jeff and La’s visit, I wanted to use my laptop computer, but when I turned it on, I saw a screen filled with (to me) gibberish. I tried all my (limited) tricks for rebooting a computer, but nothing worked, so I took it to the Geek Squad. The Geek’s verdict was that either the hard drive or the battery was kaput. My laptop could be fixed, but the cost of a newer laptop would be comparable to the cost of the repair. I decided to replace my 9-year-old laptop with a new one.

Ted and I had an exceptionally full schedule, so I had to fit loading my new laptop with my own software and files in between all the other things that were going on. It seemed to take forever, so I just decided to wait for Jeff to come, hoping that he could show me a faster way to get the job finished. He helped me with that and suggested I give up my (also aging) PC tower and simply connect my larger monitor, my keyboard, and my mouse to the laptop. I liked that idea and I like working with my new setup.

While Jeff and La were visiting, Jeff spent some time having lunch and catching up with friends one day. While he was gone, La, Ted, and I enjoyed a delicious salad lunch. We also had family gatherings that included Kari’s family at two of Ted’s and my favorite restaurants–Fratelli’s and Dewey”s.

The federal government was shut down during Jeff and La’s visit, and there were a lot of airline delays. The day before they left, Jeff and La learned that their flight home had been cancelled, but they were able to reserve seats on another flight. They had a class to teach in the evening and didn’t want to miss it, so they needed to choose the early morning flight that required us to leave for the airport at 4:30 a.m. None of us was thrilled about that, but it worked. Ted and I went back to bed after we returned from the airport, Jeff and La had a safe flight home, and they taught their class that evening.

I love family visits. Here’s a photo Jeff took of all of us.

One day, while I was sitting on the patio, I saw the brightest-colored caterpillar I’d ever seen.

I searched “neon-yellow caterpillar” online and learned that it’s a Polyphemus moth caterpillar, a member of the giant silk moth group. The moth is one of the largest moths found in Missouri.

I don’t remember ever seeing a moth that looks like this, but I admit that I don’t generally spend my outdoor time looking for moths. Still, it’s good to learn something new every day and now, if I ever see a spotted moth like this, I’ll know its origin. If I catch one, maybe I can make silk. 🙂

A few days ago, Ted and I were shopping at Lowe’s. It was hard to know which seasonal decorations we should place in our yard–Hallowe’en on the right or Christmas on the left.


On another day, we were shopping at @Home and saw the largest display of Christmas decorations we’ve ever seen. @Home is a huge warehouse store and everything we could see from the entrance (this view) was on aisles that extended nearly to the back wall ahead of us and to the the outer wall on the right. Is this The Land of Plenty or what??

Jeanette was the first staff member I hired when I became an administrator at the community college. It was a great choice! She and I have been good friends since we first met. Other staff members used to joke that we shared a brain because our ways of doing things were so similar. Although she’s Hispanic and I’m blonde, we often came to work wearing the same colors–not something you’d expect from people with such different coloring.

Two years ago, Jeanette had a double-lung transplant. It was a tough recovery (h-u-u-u-ge understatement), but she’s doing well and, except for still tiring easily and wearing a mask outdoors to avoid contaminants in her lungs, she’s back to normal. We’ve been meeting for lunch since she became strong enough to do that, and we had a recent get-together at Panera’s.

We missed the third member of our trio, Gail, who moved to Virginia two years ago. We were “tres buenos amigas.”

Family and friends are the greatest gifts in life.

Kari invited me to an event at the library that sounded like fun. Two local women recently published cookbooks–one on soups and one on pastries–and were the guests at a book signing event.

The moderator had excellent questions and the two women had interesting answers. The hour-long event went by too quickly. Both women have always loved cooking. The “pastry lady” has a local bakery; I don’t remember if the soup lady works at a restaurant or not. Some of the interesting things they said in the interview portion of the evening included the following:

–When people ask me how long it took to write my cookbook, I tell them “30 years.” It only took 4 months to get the book published, but she had perfected her recipes over a 30-year period.

–When you write a cookbook that you want people to use, you have to be very clear in your directions. You cannot assume their knowledge of cooking matches yours, so you need to define terms like “simmer,” “cream,” “fold,” “dice,” etc. If they don’t understand your directions, their end result will not be successful and they’ll never open the cookbook again.

–You can’t take a recipe you’ve made at the bakery in a batch that yields 5 dozen pastries and divide it by 6 to yield only 10 pastries for a home cook. The proportions of the ingredients change with the size of the batch of dough.

–When asked which ingredient they could never do without, the two women looked at each other, laughed, and simultaneously said, “Butter!”

Kari and I each bought a soup cookbook and had the author (pink sweater) sign our copies.

As you can see, I’ve already selected the first 5 soup recipes I want to try.

A few days later, Kari was shopping and saw the pastry book on display (“Made. by Lia”).

It was a fun night out and we’re both looking forward to some new items on our home menus.

For many years, Ted and Kari have observed two fall traditions: (1) they wax her car together; and (2) they mulch her leaves together. 2025 was no exception.

This year, however, Ted added an event–he invited Theo to come over for a car waxing afternoon.

Ted also waxed our cars and mulched the leaves in our yard. The car waxing event repeats in the spring. If Theo participates again, that will count as a new tradition. Long live family car waxing and leaf-mulching!

For years, our friends and family members have been telling us how much they love their toaster ovens, so Ted and I finally decided that we ought to buy one. It wasn’t hard to find one we liked (Breville), and it didn’t cost a fortune, so we drove to Target, picked it up, and joined the toaster-oven crowd–just like that! The board didn’t come with the oven, but Best Buy had the matching board. It’s really handy for the hot pan when we take it out of the oven.

Our excuse for not buying a toaster oven sooner was that we don’t have enough empty counter space for it. That problem was solved by rearranging a few things in one of our island cabinets. Now we can simply pull out the drawer, lift the (not heavy) toaster oven up, plug it in on the side of the island, and do any of the 10 functions we choose. It’s definitely faster than heating the oven, and it doesn’t warm the kitchen as much.

It’s been very convenient to bake just a few cookies at a time and to eat them fresh and warm. Although we’ve already used our toaster oven for a lot of things, this is the first thing we made.

It was delicious! All those people were right: a toaster oven is a good thing to have, and now we’re part of the toaster oven lovefest group.

The northern states seem to have only two seasons annually: winter and road construction. Ted and I hit a lot of road construction on our way from visiting Ted’s brother to seeing our grandson in Rockford, IL. As a result, we arrived about an hour later than we’d planned. It was fun to see Sky’s Star Wars-themed apartment. If there’s Star Wars merch, Sky (named Anakin Sky) probably has it. Ted took a picture of Sky and me. Check out the coffee table–and underneath the coffee table–and the helmet on the right. And this was just the beginning of the themed décor.

We had a nice visit with Sky and then went out for dinner together and visited some more. We arrived later than we’d expected, and stayed longer than we’d expected, so it’s all good. I love having independent adult grandchildren who stay in touch and welcome visits from Grandma and Grandpa.

After dinner with Sky, Ted and I headed for I-39 and home. At a rest stop, we saw this truck with a very long load. The big question: How does it turn corners? Surely it needs an escort vehicle.

When we arrived at home, the first thing we saw was a pretty “Welcome home” garden bouquet from Kari.

As I was putting away our “real” Wisconsin cheese, there were more welcome home items. We didn’t have to go to the grocery store first thing in the morning–we had hamburger for our hard rolls, bread and fruit for lunch, cookies for fun, and milk to go with them.

You know you did more right than wrong when you were raising your kids when they grow up to be as thoughtful as this. It was wonderful to spend time with some of our friends and family, and it was good to be home again. Long live the American road trip!

When Ted and I visited Jeff and La in El Centro, CA last spring, we saw what used to be the World’s Tallest Flagpole in Calipatria, CA. A little while after that, I accidentally learned that the tallest freestanding flagpole in North America is now on the Acuity Insurance campus near Sheboygan, WI–right along our route to visit Ted’s brother.

Calipatria is 184 feet below sea level, and its flagpole is 184 feet tall, so the top of the flagpole is at sea level. The flagpole on the Acuity Insurance campus, dedicated in June 2014, is 400 feet tall. It is billed as the World’s Tallest Symbol of Freedom. (The tallest freestanding flagpole in the world is in Cairo, Egypt.) The flagpole is anchored in 680 cubic feet of concrete reinforced with steel rods and weighs 420,000 pounds. The flag is 70 feet by 140 feet (9,800 square feet) and weighs 250 pounds. Each stripe is over 5 feet high, and each star is over 3 feet across. While driving on I-43, you can see the flag for about 10 minutes before you reach the site. At least 5 people are needed to safely lower the flag and to keep it from touching the ground. Acuity keeps six flags on hand at any given time.

Ok, been there, seen that.

We continued on to Ted’s brother’s home and spent several days visiting with him. You probably have to be from Wisconsin to know how to play sheephead, and you’d have to be a member of our family to know that I’m a pretty decent player, but I get a greatly unfair number of horrible hands dealt to me, and I usually lose. Well, this time was different! On our first evening together, I was the big winner! I had at least one queen in every hand, and several hands with three or four queens. Awesome! It’s almost embarrassing that it’s so rare for this to happen to me that Ted felt the need to immediately text the kids to let them know that I was the winner. Also, maybe embarrassing that they were probably all surprised. I guess I proved it could be done–just not very often. Things evened out, which is good. Ted won on the second evening, and Gary won on the third evening.

In addition to playing cards, we also spent time in conversation and exchanging/sharing family news. For meals, we visited some of our favorite restaurants in the area. Here’s a photo of the brothers.

Of course, Ted and I took time to pick up some real cheese from a local cheese factory (enough of Missouri’s grocery store cheese!) and some of our favorite pastries and hard rolls from a local bakery.

Again, you might have to be from Wisconsin to know what “hard rolls” are. When Ted and I lived in Maryland, we asked bakeries and grocery stores for hard rolls. Most just said, “No, we don’t have them,” but one grocer told us he thought they had some buns left from the day before, if we wanted them. Let me just say that “hard” is not equivalent to “stale.” In fact, the rolls are quite soft, so I don’t know where the name came from. They are made without eggs and become stale (hard?) very quickly, but they are perfect with hamburgers.

The next morning, we packed our luggage and bakery into the car and met Gary for one more lunch together. We all ordered breakfast, and it was delicious, as usual.

On the way out of the restaurant, I noticed this decorated tree in the lobby. It looks fall-themed, so I’m guessing they let it stand in the corner all year and change the decorations seasonally.

After our lunchtime breakfast, Ted and I headed south toward our home and Gary went north toward his. We had another good family visit.

I always look forward to getting together with my college friends. During my first three years of college, I became good friends with four members of the future Orchard Street Gang (OSG). Three of us (Eileen, Lin, and I) and a friend of Eileen’s (Lin), decided to live together off campus during the summer following our junior year. During that summer, we made plans to move to a larger house (located on Orchard Street) for our senior year, and we needed two more people to cover the rent, so Barb (another dormmate) and Carol were added to our group. Can you believe we each paid $50/month in rent and chipped in $5/week for groceries and the telephone?! We had a free subscription to the campus newspaper, but that’s an undercover story that I can’t tell here. We paid $150/semester for tuition, and books ran about $50/semester. The minimum wage at the time was $1.25/hour and an annual starting salary of $5,000–more, if you were lucky–was good pay, but even so, I can’t believe how much college costs now!

Only Lin had a car, and we all grocery shopped together. I have trouble now picturing six of us with a shopping cart, but that’s what we did. If we had money left over (more often than you would think), we stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts for a treat on our way home from the grocery store. The food we bought was for us and for our guests. Breakfast, lunch, and weekends were on our own for cooking and kitchen clean-up, and we had a rotating schedule to cook dinner Monday-Thursday. If you didn’t cook, you were on a rotating team of two to do the dishes. We each cleaned our own bedrooms (two of us per bedroom) and rotated cleaning the kitchen, dining room, living room, and two bathrooms. It was a great system, and we never had an argument or a fight. We all married our senior-year college sweethearts within a year of graduation, so we were well-acquainted with each other’s husbands too.

As young marrieds, with small children, we kept in touch, but we didn’t see each other in person as a group until 2018, 49 years later, when we met in Madison. Eileen suggested a group reunion and addressed her email to the “Orchard Street Gang”–and that’s how the OSG was officially formalized. I had seen Eileen and Leila several times because they live in WI where Ted and I regularly visit our families, but I hadn’t seen Lin or Carol in all those years. None of us was surprised that it felt like we’d just left college. We were still BFFs, and we laughed when we learned that we all used the Orchard Street cooking/cleaning rotation with our children as they grew up. Here’s our 2018 reunion photo.

Barb lived in FL, and I didn’t see her until 2020, when four of the OSG members had a Zoom reunion.

Leila, Eileen, and I have met in Madison a number of times–together or in pairs–since our college graduation, and we planned to do so again this year. Fortunately, Lin, who lives in MT, was in WI at the time, attending a workshop for two weeks, and could join us; unfortunately, Leila, who has Parkinson’s disease, was unexpectedly hospitalized for a minor Parkinson’s-related issue, so she couldn’t meet with us. Lin, Eileen, and I had a wonderful time together for a few hours, and here are the OSG-25 reunion attendees in the big chair outside the Great Dane restaurant. (See the logo on the chair back.) It goes without saying–but I’m going to say it anyway–that we’re looking forward to our next get-together.

It was nice to have an open day on Ted’s and my visit to Wisconsin. We slept late, had lunch followed by those fabulous desserts, and because the weather was so beautiful, we decided to stop in Wisconsin Dells for a boat tour. We’ve been there several times over the years, but the Dells boat tour is always beautiful. (Full disclosure: Several people and groups we wanted to spend time with were only available on certain days during our visit, so we had to schedule around them, giving us one extra day. This was it.)

The city of Wisconsin Dells is a huge and kitschy tourist trap with a lot of hotels and resorts, each of which features some tacky thing to make your kids want to stay there. For example, here’s some information about and a photo of one of the hotels. (Another source mentioned that it takes 10 minutes to tour the “White House.”) I saw these transformer figures at a different hotel, so they were probably added to the upside-down White House photo.

If you skip the tourist trap area like we did and go directly to the river docks on the “quiet side” of the city, you can take a peaceful, leisurely two-hour cruise through the Dells, a unique area on the Wisconsin River. No transformers included.

The dells (originally the “dalles”) were created when a huge glacial lake in central Wisconsin breached its ice dam about 11,000 years ago. The water rushed free in a catastrophic flood, and the force of the water and the sediment it carried and dropped formed the dells in less than a week–perhaps in as little time as three days. It is hypothesized that the noise of the fiercely rushing water could have been heard as far away as in the five surrounding states.

George Crandall’s family moved to the dells area in 1892. Over the years, whenever farmers wanted to sell their land, the family bought it, tore down the barns, and planted trees. It is said they planted over 37,000 trees in the area. The family failed in their effort to make the riverbank a national park, but they turned the land over to a foundation, which later sold it to the state DNR on the condition that it will never be developed. As a result, 11,000 years after the ice dam broke, Ted and I spent a wonderful two hours enjoying the beautiful scenery in the Wisconsin Dells.

Here’s the dock where the Dells tour begins and that’s our boat in the center.

While we were waiting to board the boat, this woman sat beside me, and I asked her if I could take a picture of her shirt. She told me she bought it when she went to Ben & Jerry’s in Vermont.

This was the beginning of our tour.

This rock formation is called “Black Hawk’s Profile.” Surprise! It’s also informally called “The Old Man of the River”–maybe by those who don’t know who Black Hawk was and can’t remember his name.

This is Witches’ Gulch, the first of two shore stops on the boat tour. Gulches like this were quickly carved by tributaries rushing out of the glacial lake when the ice dam broke. Deep in the gulch, we saw “Witches’ Falls” that empty into a pool named “Witches’ Bathtub.” Witches’ Gulch is a popular place for evening ghost tours.

Some of the rock formations were very narrow.

We felt pretty relaxed on our extra day.

As we walked back to our boat, the sun created a pretty scene in the gulch.

The second land stop on our boat tour was at Stand Rock. That would be the tower-like rock on the left in my photo. Stand Rock is 46 feet tall.

H.H. Bennett owned a photography studio near Wisconsin Dells. Due to the low demand for portraits, he decided to do landscape photography, and he took numerous pictures of the sandstone formations in the dells. He didn’t think two-dimensional pictures did justice to the scenery, so he started making stereoscopes. He sold them nationally, and that led to large numbers of people who wanted to visit the dells in person.

Meanwhile, Bennett worked on inventing a stop action shutter to take clear pictures of moving objects. His best-known stop action photo is an 1886 image of his son jumping across the Stand Rock formation. The gap between the two rocks is about five-and-a-half feet. It took 17 tries before Bennett successfully captured his son mid-air between the rock formations. When Boston audiences saw the photo below, they gasped!

The cost of insurance became too high to have humans jump between the rocks for tourists, so a dog makes the jump now. Rescue dogs are specially trained to do this, and you can see the net below that will catch the dog, if necessary. The dog does only one jump–right to left and then back, where his human counterpart has a treat for him. The dog is fast!!! He jumps over, turns around, and jumps back in only a few seconds. I cut this frame from my video. Those who tried to catch the dog mid-air on their stop action cameras missed it.

The dells come to an abrupt end and look like an ordinary riverbank beyond Stand Rock. This was the end point for our boat tour, so we headed back to the dock where we boarded the boat.

This is how the riverbank looks if you turn your head to the right of the above photo. We’re heading back into the dells.

On our way from the boat to our car, we saw this Corvette in a free parking lot. I told you it’s a kitschy tourist town.

It was a lovely, relaxing afternoon. We had a light dinner before leaving Wisconsin Dells and then we headed for Madison, our next stop.

The first stop on Ted’s and my visits to friends and family was the GC 25 event; the second scheduled stop was a visit with my Aunt Ruth. She lives in the LaCrosse area near her daughters, Lara and Linda, who are two of the six GCs (girl cousins), so Ted and I were loosely following Lara and Linda across the entire state from the east to the west. Aunt Ruth had a busy Sunday, but said she’d be happy to see us Monday afternoon.

Lara had to go back to work on Monday, but Linda was available to spend some extra time with us. We met her at her new house, and she gave us a tour. It’s a beautiful home in a brand-new subdivision. It’s so new that her yard is not yet sodded and her retaining wall is still under construction. It’s instantly obvious that, unlike Ted and me, she is a talented home decorator. After the home tour, we went to a local restaurant for lunch. Look at the delicious food we ordered.

After lunch, Linda went home, and Ted and I went to visit Aunt Ruth. She has always been my favorite aunt–maybe because she’s the aunt closest to my age. My mother was the oldest of six children, and Aunt Ruth was the youngest. She was 12 years younger than my mother and is only 13 years older than I am. Uncle Ken, Aunt Ruth’s husband, was always my favorite uncle too. I remember when they became engaged. He was movie-star handsome, and I was thrilled that she was going to marry someone like him. Sadly, Uncle Ken died 2 years ago at the age of 98.

Jessie, one of Aunt Ruth’s granddaughters, visited her at the same time we were there, so she took some pictures of us.

Aunt Ruth recently moved from her house to an assisted living facility where she has a very nice apartment, including 2 bedrooms, a living room, and a full kitchen and bathroom. She showed me her bedroom with the bedspread that was always on Grandma and Grandpa’s bed. Grandma crocheted the bedspread and now Aunt Ruth has it. Look at the detailed crochet work Grandma did. She loved doing what she called “handwork”–embroidery, crochet, knitting, etc. I wonder how long it took her to finish this piece of handwork.

After our visit with Aunt Ruth, Ted and I went to a local Italian restaurant for dinner. Ted’s lasagna, my spaghetti, and the desserts–cheesecake for Ted and spumoni ice cream for me–were out of this world! We had the entire following day to ourselves before we had to be in Madison for my Orchard Street Gang reunion (upcoming post) so, just for fun, we decided to stick around for a light lunch and then go back to the Italian restaurant for dessert. Neither of us could decide if we wanted the same thing again or if we wanted to order the opposite. Our final choice was to order one of each and split them so that we could both enjoy two great flavors. The waitress said that she was fully in tune with customers who ordered only dessert, and she insisted that it was easier to put the ice cream in two bowls than to have us split one. Doesn’t the picture below make your mouth water? This was the best spumoni ice cream and the best cheesecake either of us has ever had.

We ate every bite and had to remember our manners to keep from licking the dishes clean. 🙂

From LaCrosse to Madison is only a two-and-a-half hour drive, so we decided to stop in Wisconsin Dells for a boat tour along the way. Vacations with open schedules and family/friend visits are great!

For years, our friends and family members have been telling us how much they love their toaster ovens, so Ted and I finally decided that we ought to buy one. It wasn’t hard to find one we like (Breville), and it didn’t cost a fortune, so we drove to Target, picked it up, and joined the toaster-oven crowd–just like that!

Our excuse for not buying a toaster oven sooner was that we don’t have enough empty counter space for it. That problem was solved by rearranging a few things in one of our island cabinets. Now we can simply pull out the drawer, lift the (not heavy) toaster oven up, plug it in on the side of the island, and do any of the 10 functions we choose. It’s definitely faster than heating the oven, and it doesn’t warm the kitchen as much.

It’s been very convenient to bake just a few cookies at a time and to eat them fresh and warm. Although we’ve already used our toaster oven for a lot of things, this is the first thing we made.

It was delicious! All those people were right: a toaster oven is a good thing to have. What took us so long to get one?!

There are six girl cousins on my mother’s side of the family. I’ve never heard of the six boy cousins getting together as a group, nor do they all attend every family event, but we girls have so much fun together that we go to extended family events and plan getaways just to see each other. In fact, we identify ourselves as the GCs. Here we are at Lara’s wedding in 1991. (A few of the boy cousins were present, but not all of them.)

Our next full-group gathering was at Aunt Katy and Uncle Gibby’s 50th wedding anniversary party in 1999. (Only two boy cousins were at this family event.)

Although we each see each other at various times, the next time the GCs gathered as a full group was in 2013 when we spent a weekend in Door County Wisconsin. We planned this getaway for the six of us because, as our extended family ages and people move to different parts of the country, large family events don’t happen as often as we’d like to see each other. Not to mention that all of our children were grown up and didn’t need us at home. Here we are on the hallowed ground of Lambeau Field in Green Bay. Go Packers!

While we were shopping in Egg Harbor (Door County), Lara found “our” sign.

Our most recent gathering was this one in early September–the GC-25, which stands for Girl Cousins-2025. Donna and her sister, Nancy, hosted us at Donna’s house in Lake Geneva, WI. On Friday evening we were greeted by the most beautiful charcuterie board I’ve ever seen, arranged by Nancy, who is the definition of “the hostess with the mostess.” She loves hosting parties and making gorgeous food displays. Even better, she’s good at both.

With a glass of wine and charcuterie to eat, the next order of business was to take a group photo. Judi is missing because she took the photo. While we ate, Nancy (waving at the end of the table) kept us laughing with a few party games and the weekend was off to our usual start–lots of chatter and even more laughter!

We started Saturday morning with brunch at Donna’s house and then–what else?–went shopping on the main street of Lake Geneva. The street is lined with boutique shops.

Nancy is deliberately picking her nose to photo-bomb my picture (above). Linda is not in the photo because she’s trying on a pair of jeans. She bought several articles of clothing and, as she tried things on and modeled them, we always took a group vote to decide whether or not she should buy the item. Linda won the prize for most purchases. On Saturday afternoon, she purchased so many things that a shopkeeper asked her if she’d like a large shopping bag that would hold all of her smaller bags. Then, before leaving, we had to return to two stores where she had left purchases that were larger than she wanted to carry for several hours.

Actually, Linda started shopping before she arrived at Donna’s house. As she and Lara (they are sisters and live near each other) were driving from their homes near LaCrosse, WI to Lake Geneva, Linda saw a car at a dealership along the way and stopped to buy it! She has/had two cars–a high-end Porsche and a Mercedes–but a driver made an illegal left turn as Linda was approaching an intersection and the other driver hit her Mercedes, totaling it. She’s been looking for a replacement vehicle, and the BMW caught her eye, so she bought it. She’s widowed, but says she needs two cars because the Porsche tires are over $1,500 each, so she doesn’t like to wear them out on long trips. (The rest of us have never had that problem.) Lara drove the new car the rest of the way to Donna’s house and Linda drove her Porsche.

But back to the shopping . . . We went into a candy store that featured freeze-dried gummies. I took a picture of one. They are very light and fragile. The shopkeeper offered to let us try one and it was delicious! They immediately dissolved in our mouths, leaving the sweet flavor of the gummy. I wanted to buy a bag to bring home, but the shopkeeper said they won’t travel well, which I believe, given how fragile they are and the fact that that were in cellophane bags.

After about two hours of walking, we were ready for a break, so we stopped for a beverage. Left to right, that’s Judi, Nancy, Linda, Donna, me, and Lara. Pay attention to how happy we all look in all of our pictures. We have so-o-o-o much fun together!

Nancy is a hoot and is probably the only one of us who would want her photo taken with a flag-draped bear. We all agree that Donna, Lara, and I are the “good” cousins. The other three–Linda, Nancy, and Judi–are the “bad” cousins. They don’t do anything illegal or immoral, but they are far more daring and extroverted than the “good” cousins. If any of us ever needs to be bailed out of jail, it will be one (or more) of the “bad” cousins. We “good” cousins have agreed to post bail if necessary. Together, the six of us are in perfect balance.

The downtown streets of Lake Geneva are punctuated with hanging flower baskets. Lake Geneva has been a retreat for extremely wealthy Chicagoans since the Gilded Age. One of them (I don’t remember his name) regularly hosted well-known celebrities. Donna (our resident cousin) said that, before the man died, you could be anywhere in town and say, “Is that a look-alike, or is it really Fill-in-the-Blank?” and it was really Fill-in-the-Blank. That man also hosted theme parties and sometimes invited members of the community to attend them. One party had a Wizard of Oz theme, complete with costumes and a yellow brick road. He hired little people to play the role of munchkins. For all of his life, the man was a philanthropist, contributing large sums of money to a variety of community needs. When he died, the man also left a large sum of money to the city, designated to purchase flower baskets like these every year for the central area of the city.

The shopping district ended at the shore of Lake Geneva (yes, the name of the city and of the lake), and we needed another group photo to add to our collections.

Here’s a picture of part of the lakefront. Oh, how I miss the glaciated sand-bottom lakes and rivers of Wisconsin! I never swam in a mud- or rock-bottomed lake until I moved away from Wisconsin. There’s no comparison.

I found a plethora of humorous signs along the sidewalks and in the stores. Here are some of them.

I guess every state needs something to brag about.

It’s no longer true, but when I was growing up in Wisconsin, the legal age for drinking beer was 18, and the legal age for drinking alcohol was 21. As a result, there were “teen bars” for the 18-20-year-olds. Once you aged out to 21, you didn’t go back to the teen bars. You were far too “adult” for that–and you can buy beer in a “21” bar if you want it. The teen bars were rowdy and, on the weekends, were usually filled to the fire code limit with standing room only and a waiting line to enter. The first time I was in a “21” bar, I was amazed at the nice seating (no one standing) and the quiet (you could converse without shouting).

After our shopping expedition, we attended a magic show. As you can see at the stage, there were smoke and mirrors and bright flashing lights. Naturally, we recognized that these are distractions so the audience doesn’t watch the magician’s hands. The theater was built by the magician and his wife (also his assistant when he needs someone to cut in half) and is small by design–only about 150 seats, with no bad seat in the house. It was a very good show, and the magician had a constant engaging patter of talk. Audience members participated in some of the tricks.

Yet another group picture of the GCs. The empty seat is Nancy’s.

After the show, the magician (left) and his assistant wife (right) go to the lobby to sign autographs and to stand for pictures with audience members.

Then it was time for dinner, including Jon and Ted.

Linda, Lara, Judi, and Nancy all traveled alone for the weekend, but Donna’s husband, Jon, lives at her house and Ted was with me for a nine-day trip to visit Wisconsin and Illinois friends and family. Jon and Ted enjoy each other’s company, so they spent the weekend time together. I’m sure they enjoyed that a lot more than listening to the GCs’ constant chatter and laughter. We all have (or had–two of the GCs are widowed) great husbands who like each other. We were talking about our wonderful mates at dinner and decided we needed a toast. We raised our glasses and said, “To our men!”

It was a long and fun-filled day so after dinner, it was time to relax.

The constant talk and storytelling continued, and we definitely exemplified Judi’s belief that “nobody knows your crazy family better than your cousins.” There were so many hilarious stories to tell! My favorites were those about Grandma Drott, Nancy’s and Donna’s other grandma. We all knew Grandma Drott because we all grew up within about 15 miles of each other, and Grandma Drott lived within that radius and was a regular visitor to Nancy and Donna’s home.

At one point, we started talking about the magic show and tried to figure out how the magician did some of the tricks. This is one of them and we had lots of suggestions about how to do it.

I surprised myself by figuring it out, and then we needed a teaching session. Nancy didn’t believe it and started searching Google. I thought magicians’ secrets were never, never, ever shared, but somebody tattled to Google, and the trick worked exactly as I said. Yay for me! Now I know how to perform one magic trick. We also figured out how to do three of the magician’s other tricks–even without Google’s help.

Everyone except Ted and me stayed at Donna’s house. Donna (a “good” cousin) told me she and Jon went to bed after Ted and I left to go to our motel (at past 1:00 a.m.), but the other four had a pajama party before they went to sleep.

From the time Ted and Jon joined the GCs, the two of them hardly said a word because, as I’ve mentioned, the GCs together don’t stop talking or laughing. I apologized to Ted for his having to endure the entire evening with “my” group, but he said it was actually fun to watch us in action. I told Donna this the next morning, and she said the same thing about her and Jon. Yes, we all found wonderful husbands.

We had brunch at Donna’s house again on Sunday morning, and then it was time to leave–but not before taking another group photo.

As all of us were gathering up our things and heading for our cars (Donna and Jon were going to their granddaughter’s soccer game), I heard Jon tell Ted, “Now comes the Lorenzen farewell and that’ll be another half-hour.” Yes, that’s true. (Jon and Ted have been married to Donna and me for many years, and have been through these farewells many times.) Good-bye hugs were followed by more family stories, which then required another round of good-bye hugs followed by another round of stories, followed by . . . You get the picture. It took about a half-hour, spot-on for Jon’s timing, before we got into our cars. As each car left, the driver gave two quick horn toots in memory of Grandpa, who always tooted his horn twice after he backed out of the driveway and started down the road.

We have so much fun together and we look forward to our group gatherings so eagerly that we decided to do this more often. The consensus was that two years will be good, with hostess duties rotating. I was chosen as the next hostess and I’ve already been given a list of activities that the others want to do at GC-27–STL. What a wonderful group we are! Let’s hear it for the GCs!

Yesterday was a memorable day in our neighborhood. It started when Ted went to Huck’s to get his daily cup of coffee. As he was leaving the parking lot to come home, the exit he regularly uses was blocked off. He turned to use the other exit and saw a long stream of cars rushing out of a nearby parking lot (that we now realize was a staging site) and speeding down the road toward our house. Because of the road barrier, Ted had to take a longer route home, changing course repeatedly, due to more barriers, including one at the street behind our house. He parked and decided to walk the short distance home. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), a county police officer stationed at the corner told him to get back into his car and wait.

Meanwhile, I was at home with two carpenters who are installing new cabinets in our laundry room (which faces the street) when I heard one of them say, “What’s going on??!!” I got up to look out the window. We saw a stream of cars (the same ones Ted saw a mile away a few minutes before) rapidly passing our house without even pausing at the stop sign at the corner. The cars–at least 18 that we could see–lined the curb across the street from us, and law enforcement officers–at least 23, including FBI, ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations), St. Charles County police, and two medics–jumped out of their cars and surrounded the house across the street from us where our friend, Peggy, used to live.

All of this was done in silence–unmarked cars, no sirens, and every officer running directly to his previously designated place to cover every side of the house and property. There are five officers on the side of the house in the photo below–two behind the tree (one on each side of it), two clearly visible, and one behind the officer in the right center of the photo. The two officers beside the white vehicle are the drone operators.

It’s hard to see in the photo below because of the tree branches, but there are nine officers lined up in front of the garage and every one of them has a rifle. All those weapons definitely boosted my heart rate and blood pressure! Three other officers had already breached the front door (standing open) and were inside the house. Two drones were sent into the house as well.

Because the carpenters are using our driveway for their vehicles and saw, Ted and I are parking our cars on the street. That’s my one-year-old car that the armed officer is using for protection. I couldn’t help picturing the driver’s side of my car riddled with bullet holes. It was time to take cover. I went to a back room on the other end of our house–out of the direct line of fire–and one of the carpenters decided to do some of the work on the agenda for our basement. The other carpenter, Christopher, shrugged and started his video recorder. Part of his video is at the end of this post.

Fortunately, no shots were fired, and handcuffed residents were peacefully escorted out of the house. I counted 18 people in handcuffs, three of whom also wore leg shackles.

This is the drone officer preparing a second drone to send into the house, . . .

. . . and here he goes, ready to launch Drone #2.

Roughly three hours later, everything was under control. The handcuffed people had been taken away; others were no longer restrained and were standing around, chatting with the officers, like the lady at the rear of the van in the driveway. The officer bending over in the lower right of the photo is going through some of what could be evidence or supplies in the box. I didn’t go outside to ask her. I’m guessing that the man (St. Charles County police) and woman (FBI) in the left center are congratulating each other on a well-coordinated mission. The streets were opened to traffic again and pedestrians were walking by, no doubt wondering “What’s going on here?”

After the enforcement officers left the scene, the reporters arrived and knocked on doors (including ours), asking for information from neighbors who witnessed the activity. Channels 2 (and their sister station, Channel 11), 4, and 5 were all here. I think only one neighbor agreed to speak with a reporter. Ironically, she was at her exercise class during the operation and–like Ted–was only allowed to access her house after the danger of civilian injuries was past. Christopher offered his video but refused an interview.

A few hours later, local TV channels played Christopher’s video and reported that this event had been a triple sting. Two homes with about 20 residents in each, as well as the nearby, very popular Golden Apple Buffet were raided simultaneously. The residents of both homes were employees of the Golden Apple Buffet. I have seen five of the residents coming and going from the house across the street since the law enforcement personnel left, so I assume that not everyone who lived there was guilty of whatever illegal activity might have been going on. I’m sure we’ll learn more details in the coming days.

Note: I had to cut Christopher’s video to make it fit this blog, and the cutting app takes credit at the end, as you’ll see. Around the 20-second mark of the video, right after the line of officers enters the house, you can see the drone flying across the center of the screen from to right to left. It has two headlights.

Kathy and Annette came to visit Ted and me and Kari’s family. It was a one-day visit, and the plan was to have a relaxing afternoon in the pool and on the patio, enjoying an August summer day. The reality was that the weather was cool and raining. As a result, we spent the afternoon indoors and never ran out of things to talk about. In fact, I don’t think we ever left the kitchen table after doing the lunch dishes until we went to Pizza Hut for dinner. Annette’s birthday is in September, and Kari had a little gift for her–a handheld fan. Annette had fun playing with the fan while we waited for our pizzas.

Kathy and Annette left for home after we finished our pizza dinner, but first we took some group photos. I took a picture and then Annette insisted that I had to be included in a picture, so she took one.

Whenever our family gets together–whether it’s all of us or some of us–it’s always a guaranteed good day with good times and good memories.

The Mid Rivers Mall parking lot was the setting for the first One World festival in our county–a Friday-Sunday weekend event. Ted and I thought it looked like fun, so we decided to see what it was like. The only free time we had that weekend was near the closing time of the festival on Saturday, and the crowds had thinned, but it looked like it had been a success. Here’s a photo of a family looking at the picture they took at the entrance to the event.

Just beyond the entrance, we walked through these colorful arches.

There was upbeat music. I assume these were local performers, because of the lack of publicity and the little girl you can see at the lower right corner of the stage. She had some solo parts with the two men beside her (relatives?). Maybe she’s an upcoming star like Michael Jackson, who started singing with the Jackson Five at the age of five. The music had a happy sound and helped create a mood of celebration.

There was also a skating rink. Only these two people were skating while we were at the festival, but I’m sure there were more during the peak afternoon hours.

When we passed this booth, the Wisconsin State Fair flashed through our minds. The two most popular “had to have” foods at that event were roasted corn on the cob and cream puffs. The husks were pulled back on the corn cob to provide a handle, and the entire cob was dipped in Wisconsin butter before it was handed to the customer. The cream puffs were filled with whipped cream and covered with a heavy dusting of powdered sugar. Don’t inhale before taking a bite. If you do, you’ll have to cough out the powdered sugar you inhaled. Healthy food, no. Highlights of the once-a-year fair, definitely.

Then we saw this booth and knew we were in Missouri. Funnel cakes. Present at every outdoor public event. (Not as good as roasted corn followed by a cream puff.)

Here’s another colorful attraction. There were lots of booths selling a variety of items–jewelry, hats, purses, T-shirts, food, trinkets, etc. Ted and I hope this was the start of an annual festival and, if it was, we’re going to go during the peak hours next year.

Jeff texted an interesting question today. He and Zack occasionally recommend songs to each other and, today, he sent a song recommendation to Zack to “cue it up on his playlist.” Zack responded that he would “be sure to queue it up.”

“Cue” refers to a signal or a prompt that triggers an action; “queue” refers to a line or sequence of people or things waiting for something. Jeff’s thought was that either could be correct in his exchange with Zack because Zack could “queue” the song in line to play later, or he could “cue” the song whenever he’s ready to listen to it. Jeff asked for my thoughts.

I checked with Grammarly and Google, and I have to fall in line with Jeff. If Zack has a string of songs to play, including the one suggested by Jeff, he could “cue” (prompt) the “queue” (line) when he wants to listen to the song.

Fun times with English. 🙂

Kari and I have attended the St. Charles City-County Library Book Fair regularly on our own. After the pandemic ended, we started going to the book fair together and have made it a tradition. The first weekend in August is the annual date for the three-day event (Friday-Sunday). It caught us by surprise this year with the first day of August on a Friday, but luckily, it was easy for us to make plans to fit it into our schedules. Last year, we went on Saturday and discovered that the books were already well picked over, so this year we went on Friday afternoon, when it opened to the general public. (Library members may shop on Friday morning.)

As usual, I did well and came home with 35 new-to-me books. Unfortunately, I needed a small loan from Kari because of inflation. I brought $100.00 in cash, assuming that would be enough, as it was unlikely I’d find more than 50 books to purchase at $2.00 per hardcover book. Well, this year the price went up to $3.00 per hardcover book, so my 35 books cost $105.00. Still a great bargain over the bookstore prices, but $5.00 more than I brought in cash. (Another good reason to go to the book fair with a partner. 🙂 ) Here’s my haul for this year, already on the closet shelves that I keep empty for my annual collection of book fair books.

In the years we’ve been going to the book fair together, Kari and I have made it a tradition to have ice cream and conversation at Kilwin’s on Main Street in St. Charles after we have all the books we want. Today was no exception. We spent about an hour at the book fair and another two hours at Kilwin’s. It’s a great tradition, and it’s already on our calendars for the next book fair on the first weekend of August in 2026.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

–Cicero

Ted and I have been working on updating our house and yard for two years, and we’re almost finished. In late July, we finished the outdoor updates with some tree trimming and thinning.

Tulip tree

This tulip tree is special. When our children were in elementary school, every fourth-grader was given a tree sapling on Arbor Day. At the time, the saying was that the best survival rate for these saplings was at the homes of the kids’ grandparents. Our kids’ grandparents did not live nearby, so we planted them in our yard.

Jeff and Kathy each received an evergreen. Both of those died within a few months. Thom was given an oak tree. He named it Fred, and it lived for a few years until bunnies chewed off all the bark at the bottom of the trunk. Kari’s sapling was a tulip tree. She named it Paul, in honor of her Grandpa Paul. Roughly 40 years later, that tree still lives. Unfortunately, a disease struck it a year ago and our arborist has been working with us to save it. It looks much better now than it did before the treatments.

Now that the tulip tree is healthier, we decided that it’s time to prune the formerly-diseased, now-dead branches. The workers needed a cherry-picker to reach the high branches.

Here are the before and after pruning pictures. The “after” tree doesn’t look as full in this photo as it does in the above “healthier” photo because I took this picture earlier in the year, before it was fully leafed out. The tree looks better without the deadwood.

Magnolia trees

Long ago, in 2010, Ted and I hired a landscape designer to beautify our yard. He must have been amused at our naiveté. We don’t have strong gardening skills, so we took his word for everything and paid him a small fortune (in our terms) to install what he’d planned. Some of the things his team planted were very nice; most of them were overdone and/or overplanted; and about one-half of them died within 2-4 years (after the one-year survival warranty, of course).

The designer placed three trees in stupid (my opinion) places: two beneath the pergola and one beside the pool deck. After (I think) 9 years, one of the trees beneath the pergola died. For the 15 years since they were planted, we have tried to keep the other two trees trimmed to fit under the pergola and beside the pool. Although we enjoy the magnolia blooms every spring, we decided that those plants just want to be trees, not shrubs. They’re growing almost faster than we can keep them trimmed back. We were starting to feel a little claustrophobic with a tree closing off half of our view on one side of the pergola and of skimming leaves from the other one out of the pool. It was time for them to become “giving trees” and to give mulch to gardeners, so we had them removed.

Here goes magnolia tree #1. Surprisingly (to us), it took less than 30 minutes to make these trees disappear. That’s a tiny fraction of the time we’ve been spending to keep them pruned away from the pergola and the pool!

Because of the (idiotic) places these trees were planted, the tree company could not get a stump grinder in place, so we have low-cut stumps now. We’ll have to think of a way to enhance them. Any ideas?

And here goes magnolia tree #2.

Our patio view no longer feels claustrophobic. Here’s the before picture, followed by the after picture.

As you can see, we still have plenty of trees without those two magnolias.

Burning bush hedge

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that, when fall arrives and the burning bushes turn bright red, it looks like nearly everyone in the area has at least two burning bushes in their yard. We have six–four in a privacy hedge, one beside the storage shed, and one at one end of our house. The burning bush hedge reached a point where Ted and I could not trim it without a tall stepladder, so we decided to take it down and keep it shorter. Here’s one of the tree guys beginning to do that for us.

The worker has part of the hedge trimmed, but hasn’t yet done some of the back side. You can see how much he’s taking off.

Here’s the hedge at a manageable height. With air and light, the bushes will fill out by next spring. A four-man professional team with professional knowledge and tools, completed all this tree/bush work in under 3 hours. I’m looking forward to the time we’ll save next spring when we’ll only have the now height-accessible burning bush hedge to trim.

Japanese maple

The landscape designer put a Japanese maple in a dumb place too. It’s one of his plantings that has survived and we’ve continued to trim it in the shape it had when it was planted. Over time, however, it’s getting to be a challenge to keep it trimmed away from the sidewalk so that we can walk past it without ducking. It’s also reached a point at which we can’t reach any higher with our electric trimmer to keep it trimmed back. Like the magnolias, we decided this little tree also wants to be a real tree, so we trimmed it from the bottom up. The carpet roses along the front porch (again, planted by the landscaper) have also survived, but they never look very good and can barely be seen from the road. In addition, Ted is tired of deadheading them all the time. We took them out this year.

Now the Japanese maple can grow to be a tree and the annuals we planted along the porch have brought us numerous compliments from neighbors and passing pedestrians.

That completes our outdoor updates–at least for a few years. We still have a little bit to do inside our house. Watch for the coming changes. They’re in progress as I write this post.

Theo, Ted, and I saw Superman yesterday. In my opinion, it was a combination of any current adventure movies (lots of noise and action, and the hero won), Jurassic Park (dinosaur-like super-creatures), Star Wars (weird, robotic super-creatures), the original Superman, and updated Superman. (Lois Lane is no longer pining for Superman. The two now obviously have a G-rated relationship and she knows Superman and Clark Kent are the same person.)

Yes, Kelly Anne Conway, the word “immigrant” is mentioned, but the three of us agreed there was nothing preach-y about it, nor did we think the movie was woke–no matter how you define that word. It was just fictional fun. The surprise of the movie was the number of laugh lines.

It’s still hot outside, so the three of us headed to DQ for treats afterwards. It was an afternoon well spent with our grandson.

Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Look up in the sky! It’s bird! It’s a plane! It’s. . .Superman!

Eighty-seven years ago (1938), a baby arrived in America from a home in turmoil.  A family in Kansas raised him, and he struggled to balance two identities.  This was the beginning of Superman comics and has been the backstory ever since.  The first Superman story stated he was sent to Earth from Krypton, a fictional doomed planet.  His origin provided a convenient plot device:  it explained his superpowers.

The comic book Action Comics No. 1, published in June 1938. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Superman’s motto was to fight for “truth, justice, and the American way.” James Gunn, the director of Superman, told the Times of London, “For me, it (Superman) is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.”  The first page of the Superman story describes Superman as a “champion of the oppressed.” 

The image above was originally produced in 1949 and distributed to schools by the Institute for American Democracy, an offshoot of the Anti-Defamation League.  The art team at DC digitally restored the poster in 2017.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, wrote Superman’s story as World War II loomed.  While fascism rolled through Europe and echoed in the United States, Superman’s early adventures show him fighting “for the little guys, for abused women, for exploited mine workers, and against corrupt politicians,” said Danny Fingeroth, author of Superman on the Couch:  What Comic Book Heroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society.  Throughout his adventures, Fingeroth tells us “Superman is the immigrant embodying the best of American qualities, even though he’s from somewhere else.”

Like Superman, the large majority of superheroes are outsiders.  That’s the common thread that gives them staying power for people from many walks of life.  Other immigrant superheroes include Green Lantern (beings from various planets), Wonder Woman (from a fictional island), Star Wars characters (from a galaxy far, far away), and even Deadpool (Canada).  Check Google for more.

Unfortunately, in these divisive times, everything seems to be political and, with immigration crackdowns ramping up, right-wing media is referring to the new Superman movie as “Superwoke.”  My CNN newsfeed today reported that Kelly Ann Conway, a former Trump adviser, said, “We don’t go to the movie theater to be lectured and to have somebody throw their ideology on to us.”  In contrast, Define American founder Jose Antonio Vargas and narrative strategist Andrew Slack wrote in The Hollywood Reporter, “You can’t politicize the truth.  Superman has been an ‘illegal alien’ for 87 years.” 

It’s not surprising that, last week, the White House’s social media accounts shared an AI-generated image of the movie poster depicting President Trump in the title role.  Sadly, however, that post was soon followed by one from the Department of Homeland Security, which shared the iconic image of ET’s bicycling silhouette with text superimposed over the moon saying, “GO HOME.”

Superman is a fictional and thus, an imaginary, character.  Does everything have to be political?  Still, Kelly Ann is partially right:  We don’t select movies based on our political ideologies and we don’t go to the movies to be lectured or to politically analyze them.  We go to the movies to have fun, to find adventure, to feel thrills, and to laugh—and maybe during this heat wave, to stay cool.

Dean Cain, now a conservative commentator, said the Superman director’s decision to invoke immigration while promoting the film could be a costly mistake.  So far, he’s wrong.  The movie finished in the Number One position on its opening weekend and continues to draw large audiences.  It topped the box office again in its second week.  It has now grossed $235 million in the United States and $406.8 million worldwide.  It looks like a lot of people just want to have fun.

The Superman comic books were my favorites when I was a child.  I remember buying them for 10 cents each and re-reading them over and over because I enjoyed them so much.  Ted and I are going to see Superman, and we’re going to have fun watching it for 2 hours and 9 minutes with no political commentary. 😊

Author’s note: To provide full disclosure, I based this post on an article in CNN. It incensed me to read that people are slamming an imaginary character, with a reputation as a champion of the underdog, as being woke (according to their definition of the word). Even worse, in my opinion, they are trying to take the fun out of a fictional movie by describing it as pro-immigration propaganda. Someone had to speak up for Superman, and because I’ve always liked him–fictional or not–I decided it should be me.

I recently had lunch with my friend, Cindy, whose sister was on the last plane that took off from the St. Louis airport just before the May 16 tornado struck. Cindy’s sister said the pilot used the gate microphone to say, “They’re closing the airport for storms. Get on the plane, stow your luggage, sit down, and buckle up. We’re taking off!” The photo below was taken by a reporter from Fox 2 TV, a local station. Cindy’s sister had a safe flight.

There’s a house near ours that Ted and I refer to as the “party house” of the neighborhood. Those folks have a swimming pool and a lot of friends and relatives. It’s not unusual to see a dozen or more cars parked on the street in that area on weekends. It’s never a problem–no vandalism, no kids running in the street interfering with traffic, no loud music, no late hours–just a lot of people having fun.

In the last few years, our neighbors across the street from our house have yielded their position of “Best Neighborhood Fireworks” to the folks in the party house. The party house fireworks show typically lasts about 30-40 minutes, and the fireworks are non-stop. Frankly, it’s as good a show (and longer) than any public displays (usually about 20 minutes) in the area, and we have no traffic or parking problems to watch it.

This year, several families gathered in one neighbor’s driveway to watch the fireworks, and one member of the group counted 60 cars parked on the street and more that she couldn’t see around the curve. When I say “party house,” I mean it! We non-party house folks assumed that all guests contributed to the cost of the fireworks, but that’s really not our problem–we just enjoy the show.

I took some videos of the fireworks this year, starting when the first one of a group was launched. The long series lasted a full two minutes, and there were at least 6-8 long series. Just like at the public displays, there’s a brief pause between series, while the group lines up the next display and sets it off. To stay within the space limitations of this blog, I took some 30-second videos. Here’s one–and remember, this is only one-fourth of how many fireworks went off in a two-minute display. There’s sound of you want to hear the bangs.

Here’s a shot in which my camera must have auto-corrected for the darkness, but I think it’s an interesting picture. The time stamp of the photo is 9:42 p.m., and it was dark at the time.

Several political scientists have outlined the process of democratic institutions declining, as witnessed by norms that can lead to autocracy. The following is a generalized outline of the ten potential steps that could contribute to a country becoming autocratic.

  • Exploiting crises and polarizing rhetoric. Leaders exploit economic or social insecurities to gain power, often using populist and nationalist appeals and blaming external forces or minority groups for societal problems.
  • Weakening of government institutions. This includes measures like extending executive power, abolishing term limits, or enacting regressive constitutional reforms to grant greater authority to the executive branch at the expense of legislative or judicial checks and balances.
  • Repressing dissent and controlling information. Restrictions are placed on civil society organizations, protests, and independent media. Surveillance and censorship technologies may be used to control the flow of information and to stifle criticism
  • Crippling the opposition. Opposition parties are weakened through infiltration, co-optation, and scare tactics to diminish their ability to challenge the ruling power.
  • Capturing elite support. Leaders secure the allegiance of influential figures in the military, business, or other sectors through patronage networks, financial incentives, or intimidation.
  • Manipulating elections and undermining the electoral process. While retaining the façade of democratic elections, leaders may engage in gerrymandering, change voter eligibility rules, or place allies on electoral commissions to ensure favorable results.
  • Undermining the rule of law and judicial independence. Courts are reshaped through ideological appointments or other means to ensure they align with the ruling party’s agenda and do not independently challenge executive actions.
  • Concentrating power in the hands of an individual or a small group. Authority becomes increasingly centralized, often bypassing constitutional constraints and reducing the accountability of the ruling power to the people.
  • Cultivating a cult of personality around the leader. Leaders promote an image of indispensability and charisma, often through propaganda and control over state media, reinforcing public allegiance to the ruling power.
  • Maintaining power through a combination of co-optation and repression. The regime balances distributing state resources and benefits to loyalists with the suppression of dissenting voices and opposition.

Peggy’s birthday is in the summer, and the women in our neighborhood have made it a tradition to bring a luncheon party to her house. It’s fun for Peggy, who’s widowed and doesn’t drive, and it’s fun for the rest of us because we’re a happy group of people. This year, we couldn’t walk across the street or next door. We had to drive about 15 minutes to Peggy’s new home. She sold her house last spring and is now living with her daughter.

I visited her at her new location in late spring, and she gave me a tour of her daughter’s house. Peggy has the entire finished walk-out basement to herself, including the patio. Of course, she wouldn’t move without bringing some of her John Wayne collection with her. John Wayne is her favorite movie star, and she loves watching old westerns on TV–especially those starring John Wayne.

Before I visited Peggy in person, I asked her what she misses. Her answer: hot fudge sundaes. On the way to her daughter’s house, I picked up a hot fudge sundae for her and put it into an ice chest to keep it cold for the last few minutes of the drive. She was thrilled!

For Peggy’s 94th birthday this year, the neighborhood group decided to surprise her with an afternoon visit. We all contributed something, and brought paper plates, cups, etc., beverages, chocolate macaroons, a fruit salad with coconut in it (coconut and chocolate are favorites of Peggy’s), and a dessert. The dessert was my contribution. You can see a piece of it on the plate in the lower left corner of the photo below. Peggy’s daughter and son-in-law were out of town, but her granddaughter was staying with her in their absence, and she joined our party. She took this picture of us.

Peggy was totally surprised when we showed up. If you’re wondering how we knew she didn’t fake it, look closely at her in the photo. When she knows people are coming, she puts in her front tooth, but it’s missing. She jokes about the tooth and will say things like “I knew you were coming, so I put in my tooth!” Yes, we’re a fun group!

The word “recession” keeps appearing in the news these days. Will there be a recession or not? Here are some recession indicators to guide us.

Theo and I both like to bake. We’ve talked about baking something together for a long time and we finally set a date to do it during his summer vacation from school. Theo wanted to try baking something with a yeast dough, so we made caramel-pecan rolls. They rose beautifully and looked great going into the oven.

They looked even better when we took them out of the oven.

Kari and Ted were also at our house, and the four of us all thought it would be a good idea to have a warm caramel-pecan roll, fresh from the oven. It was a great idea, and they tasted delicious!

It was fun to do this with Theo, and we want to do it again. Next time, I’ll go to his house and Theo will teach me to bake something he likes that I’ve never tried. Yummy!