Good to read coffee shop stuff. This time an eye infection prompted me to go to the ER. We live in the country, and my almost year=old puppies and their mom are so affectionate they occasionally lick my face. That ended today. They'll catch on in a few days. I wasn't there long, but just long enough to get an antibiotic to deal with my eye and the skin area around it that is red-pink and wrinkled as all get out and feels like sandpaper. My son came in from Portugal a couple of days ago and left late this afternoon. I didn't do any work on charity quilts while he was here, but it was fun looking at the pictures on his phone of his place that overlooks Spain on the other side of the river that separates Spain and Portugal. He also has a view of the Atlantic. But best of all, I got to see my son for the first time in at least 7 years, at my late husband's funeral in our church. We went to Denny's after picking up my antibiotics to ger rid of the severe infection. What got my attention this morning was a sealed up left eye when I woke up, and thought, oh, no, there goes my art quilts for tots charity work.
sigh
Hope everybody has a great weekend. I sent my son home with a new crocheted sturdy potholder made with popcorn stitches with two sides that gives a burnless feature when picking up by the handle an iron skillet. I keep about 10 of them around the kitchen, two by the store, two by the microwave, and the rest in the dish drying towels, some of which were hand embroidered in the early 70s when my late husband and I were newlyweds. I had crocheted a 4-ply cotton floor rug, and wondered what if I used the pattern with #10 lace cotton for a potholder. It took 17 rows per side in a hexagonal shape, and each row was a different earth color. The back Imade was solid brown. I restichedthe outside a couple of times through the years, and most recently added a couple of more rows to fit bigger hands. The experiment made them even less likely to yield a burn from hot iron skillets and dutch ovens. Trough the years, I made at least 30 potholders for family members, and today, my son got a brown and gold one to take back to his kitchen in Portugal, where he moved about 6 months ago. He's still an American citizen living in a foreign country, and he's still working free lance as a computer guru. He was saying the airline fees were awfully expensive, which means, that's probably the last time I'll get to see my son in this life. I love my little farmhouse, and I'm not ever going to travel outside of beautiful Texas except to visit my Quilt shop business in Wyoming when it's time to sell or close down. My helper is a wonderful person who had an eye for color, she loves the business, which makes barely enough to pay the salaries of her helpers, and has the same profit margin as when I ran the shop for 30 years, which amounts to next to nothing. At least it gives a small town 3 jobs for women, and they do a lot of charity quilts as I requested they do when they make samples. I made quilts constantly when no customers were around, and most of the quilts went to children who were handicapped at birth, and their mothers had to work, so they took their little ones to a city-wide child care facility that specialized in caring for children with handicaps whose mothers had to support them as single moms or dads. I felt honored to help the lady that started the handicapped child care center that started in our church nursery, but grew to the point where she petitioned for a government loan to build a facility especially for children with severe handicaps whose mothers couldn't find anyone willing to take them in for baby sitting. What a wonderful lady she was to undertake and fight for more space for her professional care of infants and small children whose moms were on hard times and had to work for a living.
Hope y'all have a great Sunday and a wonderful next week. It's so good to see those of you I don't get to see very often anymore. All the people in my family who died or moved far away, I don't get to see much of, so having my son here was truly happy for me. My brother's job transferred him to San Antonio earlier this year, and his wife is always busy with her special education teacher's job, Lucky for me I found the coffee shop that Foxfyre started, and people here feel like family. Well, I couldn't sleep because of a toothache, so when my eye infection clears up, I may have to visit a dentist to pull out the molar that has been hurting off and on for a week at least. Good'niters!
