Concerts, Cats, Commitments = Crazy week

Monday evening, Steve and I had the opportunity to usher at the Vienna Boy's Choir concert in the Basilica. I have posted about the Basilica before. It is a beautiful Catholic church in downtown St. Louis that is decorated inside with thousands of mosaic tiles. A gorgeous building. Having a concert in this space should be awesome, right?  WRONG! The acoustics have a nine second decay so a performing group has to play/sing with that in mind and the Vienna Boy's Choir, who was created to sing in the boomy cathedral in Vienna, sounded terrible. Weird. I could tell they sang beautifully and maybe if it sat in the premium seats in the front row, I would have heard better. I don't know. I told the volunteer usher organizer that I wasn't interested in ever ushering again. She encouraged me to try again with Stile Antiqa who are performing in mid-November. I guess they compensate for the echo so I will give it one more shot...

It was week of the first concert of the season for the St. Louis Civic Orchestra meaning three nights were involved: regular rehearsal on Tuesday, dress rehearsal on Friday and the performance on Saturday! I think we played well. The winds, brass and percussion are always rock stars but even the strings did exceptionally well on some really tricky passages. We started with Dvorak's Carnival Overture and a United States premier trumpet fantasy followed featuring a German trumpeter. We ended with a ballet suite composed by Rossini and arranged by Respighi. 

Finally, Sunday afternoon, Steve and I attended an interfaith concert that featured Lucy singing in the Rising Generation choir (a regional group featuring teenage Latter-day Saints) and Noah singing in the Sheldon All Star Choir (of which he has been a member for three years). It also featured performances from choirs from local Hindu, Buddha, Bahai, Sikh, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Protestant congregations. It was a great concert!

you can see Noah on the top right

Lucy is third from the left in the front row

here is the Hindu group and the Buddhist group. The Chinese violin player was amazing - professional level playing!

Saturday morning was Steve's and my date with Larkin and we went to a cat cafe called Mauhaus. I thought there would be more cats to interact with and I also thought they admitted too many people for the small space and scarcity of cats but I think Larkin had a great time. There was a pair of young tuxedo cats that definitely pulled at my heartstrings!

Here is Larkin looking at the reclusive long haired orange cat. Notice that she is dressed for the occasion...

Afterwards, we went to the nearby Menards hardware store to let her pick out a cat toy for Fiona 

and to buy some shelled walnuts that were on sale (yes, Menards is a hardware store but they also have a small grocery selection - weird). This particular Menards is two storied and they have an awesome escalator-ramp up to the second floor so Larkin enjoyed going up and down a couple of times. We ended our time at Panera for lunch before driving her back to Ballwin. 

The Kia had an oil change scheduled for Tuesday morning and, while they were working on it, they discovered that our front struts were shot so we didn't pick up the car until Thursday! Good thing we still have Leo, the Honda Element (and an auto repair saving account!)

Sally had a grooming appointment on Wednesday and she now has to wear sweaters because our weather has finally turned chilly.

This week, our library room was not only a place for books but also for sewing machines - broken ones - belonging to various Afghan women. I was supposed to take them to the repair shop last Thursday morning but, because we had just one car and because Steve had a doctor appointment, I rescheduled the repairs for yesterday, Monday. It was so nice to have more room in that already over-crowded space!

Our neighborhood is crazy about decorating for Halloween and below is one very clever house. We will be gone on Halloween so I am not sure I will blog until we return from Utah on November 10th. Let's hope life is less crazy then.....

 

A magical concert

Steve and I attended Noah's orchestra concert last night. Yes, he is wearing a crown - because the concert featured selections from various movies about magical things - Chronicles of Narnia, Kiki's Delivery Service, Lord of the Rings, Queen of the Night, Swan Lake - so the students were encouraged to wear appropriate costumes. The conductor certainly did! He put on wigs and robes appropriate to the number. It was a very fun concert and it was fun to see Noah doing so well on the bass!

 

Noah was lucky to have two sets of grandparents in the audience. Joe and Vicky came into town Friday evening and are leaving tomorrow. They have been staying in our guest room since Emily and Joe's house is pretty full. We haven't seen them much, though, because they have been in Ballwin both days and we were in Columbia all Saturday up until the concert and today, we were in meetings. 

The ward choir sang a beautiful Rob Gardner number called Fill My Soul in September and it was a shame to perform it just once so we offered to "go on the road" 😃and sing in the Tower Grove Branch this morning. Their meetings started at 10:00 and ours don't begin until 12:30 so it worked out timewise. We had a Self Reliance and Resource Center meeting at 3:00 so we just went from one meeting to another. We got home at 4:20 and I put on my comfortable sweats and haven't ventured out since then. 

My huge project this past week was getting the civic orchestra program ready to go to the printers. I spent almost all of my time on Tuesday working on it, sending pages to Jayne, another cellist and an amazing editor, for proof reading. We continued doing this back and forth Wednesday morning until finally everything looked good to both of us and I was able to send everything to the Ink Spot that afternoon. Whew!

My continuing project is the Afghanistan women sewing. This week, it was looking at three sewing machines to determine if the problems were more than just a thread tension issue. They are and I have three machines sitting in the library waiting to be taken to the repair shop next week. 

Steve and I had our flu and covid shots on Wednesday. For some reason, Walmart Pharmacies in the state of Missouri - or maybe just the city of St. Louis - were not offering the covid shot. BUT, Walmarts across the river in Illinois were so we made our appointments for the Fairview Heights store. It was a 30 minute drive away and we took Fred with us to get his shots, too. Both Steve and I had little to no reaction to the shots (we got one in each arm) aside from my arms feeling tender for two days. Fred, on the other hand, was laid up for three days! Poor guy. Since Wednesdays are our usual grocery shopping days, we just did it over in Illinois. Aldi is right across the street from Walmart. And, there was also a Culvers in the same parking lot so we three had lunch there before heading home. 

Our trip to Columbia was packed with visits - Melanie, Elizabeth (we drove her to a "No Kings" protest), Steven and Tamara (lunch at Culvers again - yummm), Wendy Remus to get sewing supplies for Days for Girls which I am going to sew for again, the Amish stores (Steven joined us), and finally Elise before we headed back for the concert. Missouri finally got rain yesterday so we drove all the way home in a fairly heavy downpour. Construction and an accident caused us to come to a complete stop twice which added an hour to our drive and we got to Noah's concert ten minutes before it started! While driving in the rain is not fun, I am SO THANKFUL for the rain.

The full and the free

Our neighbor brought over this box of a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts Tuesday night. TOTALLY gluten full (sniff). Steve, Fred and the Southerlands got to enjoy them.

And I made this double batch of lemon poppy seed muffins on Friday. COMPLETELY gluten-free. Most of them went to the church for the light supper in between leadership meetings Saturday afternoon and the evening session that night but I got to keep a few for myself.  

In two sittings throughout the week, Steve and I watched The Force Awakens. Aside from daily Jeopardy, that was about all the viewing we did. (Well, Steve does watch Perry Mason every morning from 8-9 on ME TV.)

I guess I blew out our six-year old scanner with all the photo scanning I have been doing for my dad's history book so I had to get a new one on Saturday. And, I broke the wheel on the rolling office chair in the library so I got a new one of those on the same Walmart trip. Last night, when Steve and I got home from our stake conference meetings, he put together the new chair and I set up the new printer/scanner. 

Throughout the week, I was able to crop all the photos I scanned and now, I just need to put everything all together into the Blurb book. My deadline is Black Friday when Blurb has 50% off printing prices so I think I will make it. A more urgent deadline is the program printing for the orchestra concert on October 25th. I gave the director and assistant director this weekend as their deadline to get program order and notes to me and, as of 9:30 Central Savings Time, my email inbox is still waiting. I emailed the treasurer some clarification questions three days ago for the contributors page and have heard nothing back from him. So, maybe I will have everything by this Tuesday when I have a large block of time to finalize everything???

Weather has warmed up again and we have had no rain all week, again. Autumn color is hardly a thing this year.  BUT, I did manage to put October decorations up around the house so it sort of feels like autumn...

Adventures with food, sewing, and scanning

 Three food adventures this past week:  On Sunday, the 28th, Beckie came over and cooked tuna steaks for us for dinner. She seared it, leaving the middle part raw, and she sliced it up on a bed of rice and then she added pickled cucumber and carrots, ripe avocado and green onions topped with an aioli sauce. It was delicious! I would never have attempted such a thing on my own. Yay for Beckie...On Tuesday, I tried a new chicken nugget-type dish that was way more work than it was worth. That recipe was tossed into the trash. On Thursday, on the other hand, I tried a honey sesame chicken recipe that was a keeper. However, I re-wrote the instructions to fit my learning style - bullets vs. narrative.  I get so lost in narrative recipes that it takes twice as long to follow.  

Sewing adventures: wow, where do I begin??? Angie, a woman who used to live in our ward but moved further south (she is still in the stake) reached out to me last week asking if I was interested in sewing a wedding dress for her (this is a second marriage - she is about 15 years younger than I am). Oh, mercy, where on earth did she hear that I might be able to do that for her??? I don't want anything to do with a project like that - the pressure alone to get it right, much less the time involved. I told her I knew some Afghanistan women who were tailors in their own country who could do it for her (with translators, of course). But, she still wanted my input as to what kind of dress and how it could be modified to be temple-appropriate. Over the course of a few days, she kept sending me links to dresses. I finally sat down and looked at all of them and talked to her about her specific needs and I created a list of needs. (see photo below)

I also identified a possible person to do the work. Shakila, who was a trained tailor in Afghanistan. I asked her to bring a sample of her work to class on Thursday, which she did. She does satisfactory work but I wasn't blown away with her precision and attention to details. Nevertheless, I sent her home with the paper shown above. Then, I got home to a text from Angie reporting that she reached out to the company who made the dress and they told her they could accommodate all her needs! All that time and fuss for nothing. Sigh.

I spent Monday morning taking photos of Afghanistan women sewing projects which will be put onto the Kindness Begins With Me website to sell. I set up my "studio" in one of the entryways to the church that had the best natural light. You can see I taped up a paper backdrop. 

Then, I started clicking away with my phone camera (Emily advised me on all of this. She said the phone camera was just fine). I was only able to get through about a third of the items so I will continue tomorrow. 

Here are some of the items I photographed:

In other sewing adventures, on Monday, I dropped off a broken Singer sewing machine belonging to an Afghanistan woman at a place up on Delmar in the Central West End. I had looked at it on my own and it was not a "simple fix" . The repair woman, Nita who is about my age, opened it up and two gears were stripped and she ordered parts for the repair. She sells refurbished machines so I bought a used Jenome machine for Kindness. Since I have acquired the role of sewing "guru" with the Afghanistans, Miryam reached out to me early in the week to see if I could diagnose a broken Kenmore sewing machine that belongs to her landlord. I brought it home and, aside from a bent needle, it worked just fine. All this diagnosing takes time because I have to find an online user manual to figure out how to thread the machine and where all the adjusting knobs are. 

Wednesday morning was Happy Hookers and I donated nifty knitter hats I had made throughout the summer plus some zippered fabric bags. I gave Karen Bazdresch a ride and she had two bags of fabric for me - one for zippered bags and one full of clothing-type fabric. I brought home additional clothing fabric from the donation table at Hookers.  Thursday night, I spread out all the clothing-type fabric on a table for women to take after English class and it was gone within five minutes!

During General Conference yesterday, I sorted and organized by color and size a bunch of fabric scraps I had purchased at the City Sewing Room. Tomorrow, I am in charge of the women making the little yoyo Christmas tree below so I was getting all my fabric for that.

 

I have enough sewing projects for Happy Hookers, for Kindness, and for myself to keep me busy for months!

And, now we come to scanning adventures....I am at a point in my father's history book (to gift to family for Christmas) where I needed to find photos to scan and insert.  I have two large tubs of photo albums from my mom to pull from. Happily, she was very organized and all the photos were labeled and inserted by year so all I needed to do was identify what I wanted to scan and then get to it. My goal was to finish scanning by the end of this week and I got about half way through when the scanning app I was using on the laptop stopped working! The printer worked fine but I kept getting the message that the scanner was not available. I rebooted and trouble shot without success. Knot in the stomach stuff. We bought our Hewlett Packard printer/scanner back in the summer of 2019, just after we got home from our mission, so maybe it was time to get a new one? I was planning to do that yesterday but I noticed another scanning app on the desktop that I had downloaded before the one I was currently using and, lo and behold, I was able to scan with it!!! I was not only able to complete all my scanning projects but I was also able to scan all the photos of Steve's mom that he will be inserting into his book. Success!  As I think more about it, I might just need to uninstall the non-functioning scanning app and reinstall it?

I have had to resume watering outside. I cooked up a bunch more pumpkin. I am doing all the driving these days as Steve still doesn't have complete vision in his left eye. The gas bubble that was inserted at his surgery is gradually dissipating but, until it does, the bottom half of his vision is blurry and the upper half is clear. He does not feel comfortable driving with that situation.

We watched the tribute to Russell M. Nelson Wednesday evening. We watched the movie Escape from Germany on Friday night. It was based upon the true story of pulling all the Mormon missionaries out of Germany before the start of World War II. It was interesting to watch but rather poorly done, sadly.

This weekend has been General Conference and it has been wonderful!

The end of September

First of all - the good news that Steve doesn't have to keep his head down anymore! He gets to sleep in a normal position again. Weirdly, though, the muscle cramps have returned (Charlie horses in his legs) now that he is not sleeping on his stomach. He got the "green light" at his Thursday morning doctor appointment. 

Second of all - we have had some good rains to quench our parched earth. I have not had to spend a single moment watering this past week.

As for news of the week, it was a fairly normal week: Monday morning Afghanistan women's meeting, lessons throughout the week including lessons with Quinn and Larkin Tuesday evening (they are not a weekly occurrence) , orchestra on Tuesday night, English class on Thursday night, grocery shopping Wednesday morning. 

I attended a Holly Hills neighborhood meeting Monday evening and it is always interesting and informative. Steve stayed home because he was still under his restrictions.

I had lunch with two other sewing friends (Karen and Mary) on Thursday and we made a little "field trip" to the City Sewing Room. I came back with about 25 spools of thread to give to the Afghanistan women and more fabric for zippered bags (to donate to schools to load with food for the weekends) and other random fabrics - mostly for the Afghanistan women to sew. It is always a fun treasure hunt to go there. 

On Friday, my ministering companion, Sam Carpintero, and I took a cupcake and zinnias from my backyard to our friend Carol who had a birthday Thursday. She is a little bit younger than I am and a very lovely person. We had a great visit. Friday evening, I attended a concert featuring the Bach cello suites 4, 5, and 6. They were played on a cello that was in the Baroque style meaning it had gut strings and no endpin and the bow was not a modern design. The cellist - born and raised in Springfield, Missouri, was extremely talented and it was an amazing concert. In my almost 70 years, I had never heard a complete Bach suite performed (each suite has 6 movements) much less three suites performed live. It was a rare treat! Five of the seven cellists in the St. Louis Civic Orchestra attended.

Below is Steuart Pincombe...

left to right - Nancy, Jayne, Jennifer, me, Emma

On Saturday, we were up bright and early to pick up Quinn and drive to Onondaga State Park (about 80 miles southwest of here off of I-44) to take a 10:00 tour of Onondaga Cave. The tour was fascinating - it took an hour and a half - and I couldn't stop taking photos. We ate a picnic lunch afterwards and then took a short hike before driving back home. 

Below was my favorite area of the cave called the Lilypad Room...

A stalactite and a stalagmite on their way to become a column..

Cave Bacon....

There was a river that ran through the cave...

Steve and I watched a hilarious movie last night called The Man With One Red Shoe that featured a very young Tom Hanks (it was made in 1985). Steve had caught just the last 20 minutes of the movie on television about a month ago and wanted to see the whole thing so I checked it out from the library. It did not disappoint. 

Beckie came over this afternoon and cooked a delicious dinner featuring tuna steaks. I didn't feel brave enough to try to cook them and she is an excellent cook. Yum!

I am closing with a shot from the ophthalmologist office Thursday morning of downtown St. Louis. 

 

NOT an average week

Monday started out normally enough - I had the Afghanistan women's meeting in the morning and my piano student/vacuumer that afternoon. Steve and I watched Mr. Roberts in the evening. Because it was in the same DVD set at No Time For Sergeants, I expected a comedy and, granted, there were some humorous moments but it also had a serious side, too, with a rather bittersweet ending. It had a large cast - Henry Fonda and Jack Lemmon and James Cagney but there were also secondary stars that would be seen in television series throughout the sixties and even seventies. 

Tuesday was the BIG DAY - when Steve would have his vitrectomy to repair a hole in his left retina. His surgery was early in the afternoon and we were home in time for Jeopardy at 4:30! Because he has to keep his head down most of the time for at least a week, he totally cleared his calendar and I scaled back on mine. For example, I did not attend civic orchestra Tuesday night just to be around in case of any complications (there were none). I did not walk in the neighborhood the rest of the week but I think I might start up tomorrow. Steve has to sleep face down so we bought a special pillow to accommodate that. It is helpful but he is not able to sleep for long periods of time in that position. So he moves into the TV room and sits in the recliner with the pillow resting on a TV tray. That works for about a REM cycle and then he is back face down on the bed. Thankfully I am a heavy sleeper so all his movement doesn't bother me. He has a follow-up appointment with his eye doctor this coming Thursday and hopefully, he will give the green light for holding his head normally! Happily, his eye is not painful. (but his back and shoulders hurt)

Wednesday morning, bright and early, I drove Steve back to the eye doctor for a 24 hour follow-up and everything looked good. The rest of the week has been hanging around with Steve at home - with me making solo trips to the grocery store, to teach piano lessons Friday afternoon, to rehearse a musical number to play in the Tower Grove Branch today and a trip to IKEA to pick up a small narrow table to hold my sewing machine.  Here it is.....

When I bought my new machine, I just set it on the cabinet that held my old machine that I got when I was married but it was not ideal. This is a much nicer set up. And, the cute little chest of drawers that holds all my sewing notions was able to fit perfectly underneath the table

I was planning to teach my English class Thursday night until I got a text Thursday afternoon saying that class was cancelled due to flooding from a burst pipe at the church! Below are photos that came with the text. Yikes! that is a lot of water!!!

     

Surprisingly, the leak was fixed and the water was all cleaned up by Sunday meetings today!

So, with all the extra time, Steve and I have watched movies ....well, Steve listened and I watched. We inadvertently had a Jodi Foster festival by watching Anna and the King and Contact from our DVD library.  

I altered a cute white dress that all my girls wore for their baptisms to fit Alice for her upcoming baptism photos. I put it in the mail for Spanish Fork on Friday.

I made some cute fabric Christmas ornaments. The green tree, made of cloth yo yos, is something that the Afghanistan women will do in a couple of upcoming Monday mornings. 

Our heat wave/drought has broken, finally. Cooler temperatures arrived mid-week. We had rain yesterday, more is predicted for this evening and in the coming week. I harvested five more pumpkins and the tomatoes are having a small renaissance. My second lettuce planting is big enough to start harvesting so I picked a bit for a salad tonight. 

Below is NOT a flower, but a mushroom I spied on Monday, on the only morning walk I did this past week. I thought it looked pretty cool....

Honestly, I have felt like I was on vacation this past week with so much spare time. It has been rather nice....    

Second week in September was pretty average

What do I tell you about my week?  It is back to being stupid hot and we still have not had rain. I guess morning glories don't care about that because they are so pretty right now!

I did a lot with Kindness Begins With Me this week:

- Monday morning women's group resumed

- I continued to collect and price handmade items from the Afghanistan women 

- I visited the City Sewing Room to get more materials for the women

- I taught my English class Thursday night

- I opened up the church Friday morning for some training with girls from a local Catholic high school.

- I spent all Saturday morning at a nearby park where a fund raising pickle ball tournament was held. I helped at the station where we sold the handmade items made by the Afghanistan women.

We didn't sell very many items, sadly. I think the main culprit was the heat. People were just not wanting to be outside or, if they were, they did not want to linger. And I don't blame them. I came home and had to take a second shower, I was so yucky with sweat!  We are thinking we need to just sell them on-line....

Wednesday morning, Emily called me around 8:00 to ask if Larkin could hang out at our place since she was not feeling well. Emily had medical file extraction to do quite close to us so she dropped Larkin on her way to work. Whatever ailed Larkin early that morning dissipated at our house and she just spent the time watching Monster's Inc. and Monster's University and doing some drawing of birds (she is really GOOD!). We dropped Larkin off where Emily was working in time for our 3:00 dentist appointments (routine cleaning - but I have to say I am not a fan of the high powered water pic!!!). Wednesday evening, Steve and I hopped on our bikes and rode to a nearby snow cone stand for a refreshing treat to beat the heat. 

Steve and I were at the temple two times on Friday. In the morning, we did sealings and we brought along our friend Cinnamon Ontiveros so she could do baptisms. I have been seeing quite a bit of Cinnamon lately. She has no car - her ex wrecked it - and recently she had hip surgery so I have been in the pool of individuals driving her to and from P.T.  I also drove her and her kids to their eye appointments Monday afternoon.  The second time at the temple was in the evening to take Lucy and Quinn to do baptisms. Afterwards, we met Emily and Larkin at Oberweiss Dairy for ice cream (and to see Noah who was working there)

Sorry, no photos of Quinn :(

Steve and I watched the season finale of Strange New Worlds and I loved it so much, I watched it again the next night!

We had our neighbors, the Van Voorens, over for vegetarian lasagna last night. Then we got a tour of the progress they are making on the remodel next door. It is going to be beautiful when it is done, at which time, they will sell it and move to their villa in Greece.

I got a happy piece of mail yesterday - my We Rate Dogs order. In case you can't read backwards, the shirts say "tell your dog I said hi"