Sylvia's Simple Shots

We had the reception for the "It's a Tactile World" show this week. 

The pieces were from the Allied Arts Council and the Sculptors' Association of Alberta.

I loved the felted wool tea cup, the mobile of rice paper and a small ceramic vase with wax dipped nature. It is a great show and nice to have other artists share our space.

I added another Leslie Sansone DVD to my collection to offer me a lot of variety of routines for my areobic session.

I did some research about ones I would like and sure enough this one was at the thrift store this week.

I am sticking to a 30 minute areobic session as I want to add a walk outside as a warm up before the session and my regular shoulder and knee exercises following.  That comes to 1.5 - 2 hours of exercise activity a day.

Three Weeks in Paris by Barbara Taylor Bradford is my second by this author. 

Four girls attended the prestigious Anya Sedgwick School of Decorative Arts in Paris seven years ago.  They have been invited back to celebrate Anya's 85 birthday.  The girls had a falling out just before graduation and are unsure about how they will be received by the former friends. 

The four have flourished in their respective careers but some are struggling in their personal lives. Infertility, tragic disappearance of a lover, divided loyalties, and doubts about her work are some of the issues faced by the girls.  Anya wants the past conflict resolved before her party so she has arranged a get together to work it all out.

Once communication is restored the girls work on solving the problems they face. 

There are happy ends for each of the girls and a glamorous party for Anya.

I have started cooking pasta in my rice cooker.  What a game changer.  I no longer have to stand at the stove to stir and mind the cooking.  It's always whole wheat or whole grain for me so it takes longer. 

Pasta, water, and a bit of oil set it to cook and just check on it a couple of times during the time it is cooking.  

Loving it!

The Unfinished Garden by Barbara Claypole White.  This was a great read.

James Nealy has sold his business and moved to deal with the noise in his head. He has a plan to build a garden at his new house which will help him deal with his greatest fear.  When he meets Tilley Silverberg who has wonderful gardens and runs a wholesale garden business he believes she can help him.  She is not so sure.

Tilley returns to England due to a family emergency. The small village is pretty much the same but the characters involved prove challenging.  Her best friend, an ex lover, her mother, and suddenly James is in England too!

Once Tilley and James start working on a garden project together they come to see how they can help each other.  Very good book!

I was looking for some supports to raise the TV so that the music player and the DVD player could live below it.

These wooden crates were a great solution.  It adds storage as well which can be hidden but makes my exercise video readily available.  They will have to be sanded and oiled.

Sylvia's Simple Shots

I've been waiting for this happiness since I returned the Sunrise Stained Glass Art piece of mine to the window in the dining room.

One day this week the sun was shining brightly despite the temperatures this week.

This is the image on the wall in the living room being created by the stained glass piece in the dining room window.  This is exactly what I was hoping to achieve with this piece of art.  Blissfully happy with this.

The dried flower arrangement are the left overs from the bouquet for Mom's passing in January.  The leaves have dried very nicely, the baby's breath is good, the freesias are slowly falling off but that is okay.

I am back to my regular areobics routine along with the exercises from the physiotherapist.  I expect had I got back into my regular routine this fall I would not had the problems I experienced with my knee but such is life.

What I have learned is that you can not store up fitness.  It is something you have to do regularly or you just lose it.  

I am grateful the lesson was not more painful than it was.  From January 6th to February 25 I am back to about 95% on both the knee and the back.  I spend 1 hour a day between areobics and strength building exercises.

It is good to being feeling myself again.

Yes, it was a cold one again this week.  It has to end sometime.

I have stayed in most of the week. I did have a few commitments I had to do but in little sprints it was okay.

This little and mighty machine came to live at my house this week.  I picked it up from its service on Thursday.

I will be doing an in depth post on this machine later.

I had a conversation with my niece a while back who is a bargain hunter and thrift store shopper.  She had purchased this one and as she had 2 others this one was up for grabs.

With my recent sewing projects one of these will come in very handy for my unPaperTowel project.

I want to make some reusable make up remover pads as well.

I have to get new thread into it before I can use it so that is the next thing.

Bring Her Home by David Bell is a book I finished early in the week. 

This was quite a thriller of a story with a few tense moments and a couple of turns which one is not expecting.

The 2 teenage girls Summer and Haley are missing.  The search finds one girl severely beaten and just barely alive and one dead.  They had been looking for 2 girls and 2 appeared so it was assumed they were the ones being sought.  

Later, we discover another girl was involved and parents grieving received a shock and now there is still one girl missing.

Bill Price, a recent widower, is looking for his daughter Summer.  Tiny clues start adding up to behaviors he could not have anticipated his daughter would have engaged in.  Summer is grieving the loss of her mother.   It was a very good book.

I made a trip to the ReUse Center on Friday and found some goodies.

Some quilted fabric for my sister who has been making casserole carriers. 

This tiny blown glass snowman is just the cutest. No chips at all.

From the plastic I collected I want to make toggles for the bags to wash make up remover pads in.  They need to be plastic because they will go in the laundry.  They are small pieces so it was recommended that they be washed in a laundry bag.  

The cardboard rolls are for the UnPaperTowel project. 

The piece of embroidery is a huge piece of linen.  Yes I checked with a burn test.  I would like to make use of the stitched segment in some what but not sure yet what.  Can it be incorporated into a blanket?  Maybe. There is 2 meters so the other half from the stitch segment would make nice dish towels.  We shall see. 

The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks follows the tried and true formula for another successful story. His male are really good guys.

Logon Thibault find a photograph while he is on tour in Iraq.  The photo is a beautiful girl with a ferris wheel, 3 large pines and 3 marines in the background.  He experiences getting out of some pretty tight situations alive during his time with the marines. His best friend Victor believes the photo is a good luck charm that is keeping him alive.  After their tour is over and they are back in the USA they get together after a few years of trying to piece their lives back together after seeing combat. Victor suggests that Logan try to find the girl and thank her for keeping him safe. 

Logan finds the girl after a very long walk but does not disclose the reason he has arrived in Hampton.  He gets a job, they fall in love and then disaster strikes and the things he hid come to light.  It does not go well with the girls and he gets ready to head out of town once again.  Through a difficult situation he redeems himself in her eyes.  And as always they live happily ever after. 

Sylvia's Simple Shots

 As women we need to pay attention how our body is feeling.  Symptoms are often ignored or not considered as heart symptoms.  Back pain is common in women having a heart attack.  I wore red to our first meeting in 3 years of the quilting group.

I finished this book recently Kinsey and Me by Sue Grafton.  It is a collection of short stories with her famous female investigator - Kinsey Millhone.  

As the author puts it - it is a challenge to set up the characters, the crime and solve it in a short story.

A Little Missionary Work was my favorite of these short stories.

There is some autobiography information on Sue Grafton's early growing up years which was difficult with alcoholic parents and all the comes with that.

It was a nice change of pace with Kinsey and enjoyed the stories.

If you are a fan of Kinsey it is definitely worth a read.

I headed out to the north end drugstore because my local one did not have any inventory of these bands. With the increase in the amount of leg and arm exercises I have been doing I needed some bands in different tension strength.  I am using the blue one for some leg exercises.

I was lucky to have decaf tea on sale - 2 boxes for $10.00 which a savings of $6 so I picked a couple of those as well.  I have not been able to get this tea at my regular grocery store since before Christmas. 

I finally did a Google search and my drugstore carries it.  I am there regularly so I will just keep an eye for the sale again.

I underwent a vertigo assessment by my physiotherapist this week.   I had about 10 days of bad dizziness around mid January. It started right after my big pain in my knee. I felt it was musculoskeletal and it was related to extreme tension between my shoulders.  There was a spot on the right hand side that I just could not release the pressure in that spot.  I passed the vertigo assessment.

I had a deep muscle massage which addressed the knot in the middle of my back.  That is exactly what I needed.  The pain is gone and I feel so much better.

I was also given cupping massage which felt great.

Back exercises were added to the leg ones to address the tight back muscles.

The Cat Cow yoga pose works well then I was given a deep stretch for that area which feels better now that the knot in the muscle has relaxed.

The shoulder rotation is very good.  I used pillows for my head and my knee.  

The back squeeze feels good as well.  I wrap my elastic exercise band around the door handle, wrap the two ends over and above the latch and shut the door.  Now I can pull really hard on the band and it will not let go.

I bought myself another African Violet at the garden center last week.  I am hoping to keep this one alive.  The last one was just too close to the window during the deep freeze and it succumbed to the cold.

I used to grow these in my twenties when I did not even have to try.  They sat in a large north window and bloomed and flourished.

I have set this one on the shelf near the window and hopefully just a little less light and much less cold will be the magic formula.  

I will keep an eye on it and always water it from the bottom and keep  my fingers and toes crossed.

Nice to have a bit of life in the house until spring returns.

Sylvia's Simple Shots

I made Raspberry Bavarian to remind me of my wonderful Mom.  This was my favorite of the desserts she made with the raspberries in her garden patch. Used frozen berries.

I did grate a bit of dark chocolate on top and added a Simple Pleasures Cranberry and Citrus cookie.

You can find the recipe in this post - Raspberry Bavarian.  

I miss her a lot!

On Monday, I walked to Fabric Land while my car was at the dealership for services.  It was great to have decent weather I could walk 20 minutes.

I needed sewing machine needles because I broke a couple working on my ReUsable bags.  While I was there I came across these Bobbin Mates which help to keep the spool of thread with the matching bobbin. The price was good for 12.  I would use these for my regular thread that I use often - white, black, grey, navy and brown maybe. 

They work great.

Fabric Land was having a huge sale on mask elastic.  This is perfect for the elastic on my ReUsable Bags so considering it was 70% off I bought 10 yards of each color - black and white.  

I had worked out that I could use the elastics off disposable masks which easily break and I had a few in my stash that I had not thrown away.

That elastic was for sale at the fabric store as well but I thought is narrow stuff would be more versatile and stronger in the long run.

It was a week of doctor visits, blood work, xrays, ECGs, IV lines and a ride in an ambulance with a visit to Emergency. Answering a lot of questions and trying to remember what happened when.  It's been a bit of a time since Jan 6th and I hope the worse is over.  I still have specialist appointments to come.

The results were negative and I was lucky to have my aunt give me a ride home.

Thanks so much!

I bought a few music CDs for the hospital where Mom spent her last hours.  They gave us a big room and a CD player with a couple of CDs.  They were Mom's favorites. Fortunately, my neice was able to find stuff on line.

This is more of the type of music which we chose for Mom.

I will drop them off next time I am there.

This is a small flower vase which was Mom's.  All summer she had a small vase of garden flowers on the table.  Cosmos was one of her favorites and they are a great cut flower.

She grew Pansies, Nasturtiums, African Daisies, Impatiens, Lavetera and more I am sure.  She used carrot tops for a bit of green foliage in her bouquets. 

This is a Vintage 1960's Avon urn jar for bath product - my web research tells me.  I see that it once had a stopper.  I am not sure when Mom got it but she liked it and used it every year.

Will I ever have a cut flower garden?  Sure would like that very much.

We shall see.

I finished this book this week.  Jinnie by Josephine Cox.   I think this is my third book by this author.

It is set in England in 1963 with some events having taken place 10 years earlier.  A great story of tragic events and the love of a woman for an abandoned baby.  Sister who are polar opposites and grandmothers who step into the gap for their families.

I mostly enjoyed this book.  The grandmothers one was Sarah and the other Sally so I often confused them.  The story was all concluded in the final few pages of the book which seemed incongruous with the timeline and pace of the first 90% of the story.

Always enjoy England as a setting.  The story took some pretty steep curves at the end but all things turned out well after all.

I started back with areobics this week now that the knee is improving.

This is the easiest work out I have.  When I worked a groups of us girls would close up the board room and do this 1 mile 30 minute routine then have our lunch.

I started again with the 1 mile this week. Taking it easy but at least getting back to my life before my inactivity took a toll on my body.