Making my 80's costume happen

 My daughter invited me to an 80's themed theater event, and said we should dress the part. I was like, what does it mean to dress 80s?  I know I lived through it and all, but I'm not very fashion aware -- really, quite the opposite.

She told me, "leg warmers".  That's when I remembered seeing the movie Flashdance with my friends.  The song goes, "Take your passion; make it happen" -- but I thought the song went "Take your pants off; make it happen" (which also fit the plot of the movie, really).  My friends understandably ribbed me for that, so the movie sticks in my mind.

I never owned leg warmers that I recall, so I didn't happen to have an old pair lying around.  But I do have lots of hand-me-up clothes that other folks gift me.  One sweater was getting so loose around the neck, plus it had a stain, that I'd been thinking about turning it into rags.  Instead, I turned it into my 80's costume.

I cut off the sleeves and used rubber bands to help hold them up on my legs.  The top looked a bit like a work-out sweatshirt.  Add a neon-hued under shirt and some kicks that I'd rescued from the side of the road, plus a head band that was pretending to be a sweat band, and I had my costume.  

Take your sweater, and Make it happen!

Rescued Rainment

Each of these pieces of clothing had been abandoned on the ground somewhere.  

I walked past the winter coat pictured on the left and also the "Los Angeles 79" hoodie many times; they'd been rained on repeatedly before I decided their owners would never return to reclaim them.  The UnderArmor compression shirt was of more recent abandonment, but  it was in the middle of a grassy field where industrial lawnmowers threatened it if it hung out there much longer.  The grey hoodie was one my husband found by the side of an empty road and brought home as a gift to me.  (I tell people that he must truly love me if he's willing to bring me a gift that costs $0; most people I know would shudder at the thought, despite knowing me so well).

Aside from needing a good laundering, they were all in perfect condition.  Now they're laundered.  I'll release some of them back into the world via "Free" boxes and/or thrift shop donations.  The hoodie my husband gifted me, I'm keeping; it's become one of my favorites to cuddle up in.

A new leash on life . . .

I've got this song running through my head -- not your usual Christmas song, but a Muppets song.  Apparently, none of my kids nor my husband had ever seen The Muppet Movie, [how?! how!?], so this past Wednesday, when our family Advent calendar flipped open to reveal "Movie Night", we had to rectify that.   

Side note: my running buddy June was raised Mennonite; she says that the Muppet Show was the only show, besides Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons, that her family watched.  Her dad, however, didn't like the Muppet Show, because it was too irreverent.  Be warned. 

My husband was mostly impressed by the guest cameos: Steve Martin, Orson Welles, Richard Pryor, etc etc.   My daughter said, "I kind of recognize some of those people. but they look so much younger than I think of them."  Well, yess.

For me, though, I was almost disappointed by my favorite song from the movie, which comes when Kermit and Ralph commiserate over women.  [Of whom there are disappointingly few in the movie, I must admit].  I was disappointed because for years -- decades even -- I've been singing the song to myself, and then in the movie they left some of my favorite verses out!   

How could that happen?  How could I know more words than Kermit and Ralph did?  It turns out that the sound track I'd listened to while growing up came from the British version of the movie, not the American. 

Through the miracle of the internet, I tracked it down:  "This is a rare clip from the 97-minute UK cut of 'The Muppet Movie', shown only in British theatres in 1979 and once on VHS. This extended scene features additional lyrics not included in the US/international cut." (Available here, with a list of glowing and bubbly compliments.  I'm not the only fan of this song.)

Just feast your ears on these awesome lyrics:

 A collie that's classy,  A laddie needs a lassie;

A lover and wife . .  . gives you a new leash on life!

Merry Christmas and happy holidays.  I'm going to take myself for a walk now.  

My homemade canning jar lid rack for the dishwasher

And here -- because I don't apparently have anything to do -- is a project I've been contemplating a long time, and I finally just gave myself the gift of a half-hour in the basement and made it. 

Behold the canning-jar-lid rack,
sitting happily in the dishwasher,
with canning jar lids along for the ride.

We do a lot of canning jar lid washing, and our dishwasher has no good way to stand them up like plates (does yours?  does anyone's?  no idea).  Apparently, it's possible to buy these racks online, but of course I'm all to-heck-with-buying-stuff, so I thought and thought and thought, and finally came up with this design.  It's inspired both by the existing peg-up structure that the dishwasher already sports so jauntily, and also by the fact that I had a bunch of skinny dowel rods leftover from making soap dish racks last Christmas season. 

When I made this, I got to play with a bunch of my favorite tools:  the cordless drill (so much!), the circular saw to  slice down the base strips, a new orbital sander because -> fun <-, a mallet to pound dowel rod pieces into the holes, and a bolt cutter to snip the dowel rods.  (That last one was not exactly super professional, and it means that the ends of the dowel rods have a crimped appearance, but it's not like gazillions of people are wandering through my kitchen to look at stuff inside my dishwasher, are they?)  The bars along the bottom are held together with really short-snipped dowel-rod pegs.  I like that this is an all-wood thing that is just held together with wood.  

Canners all know that you're not supposed to reuse the metals lids for next year's batch of applesauce or whatever (and then, we confidentially tell you that we reuse them anyway . . . shhhh!).   But the metal lids are perfectly fine for everyday purposes, and the Tattler plastic lids are fine for reusing over and over again in canning projects for decades.    Because of that, and because we use canning jars for storing leftovers, yogurt, butter, pesto, . . . basically, for just about everything . . . we seem to have lots and lots (and lots) of canning jar lids in every load.  

And now, my canning jar lids are upstanding.  yay!

Random thoughts on my computer co-dependency

I once went to a talk by a philosopher/psychologist who studied the way that tools can become an extension of our bodies: canes, glasses, scissors . . . if we get good enough with them, they begin to feel not like separate objects, but extensions of ourselves, he argued. Today my computer went through one of those required software upgrades and had to shut it self down and then reboot, leaving me with 15 or 20 minutes in the middle of the day during which I could not do anything with my computer. I had pored over my to-do list, and the only thing -- the only thing that I could do with my computer inaccessible to me there in the middle of the day -- was to go bug other people who were hard at work and tell them bad jokes. This is an indication that my relationship with my computer is perhaps a little bit too intense.

But at least I know a bunch of bad jokes. 

With my husband off in Madrid, I'm trying to get to bed at 8 and wake at 5. I try to finish up my email at 7 so I have one hour with no blue light, although I don't always succeed. One morning this week, I woke up and had 31 new emails waiting for me at 5 AM. Another morning I woke up and I had 24 new emails. Oh. My. Goodness.

My to-do list as an associate dean is getting so long, and so convoluted, that my paper planner method has become insufficient. Today, I combined my various to-do lists into an Excel spreadsheet, so that I could sort based on urgency or category of the tasks. I had 39 items at the beginning of the day. I had 45 at the end of the day. Well, at least I'm grateful for spreadsheets.

I love my "start dictation" button, and the fact that I can just speak aloud and have my computer write down mostly what I say. When my brain starts dribbling out my ears, I become a terrible typist. Huzzah for dictation!

Ugly shoe patches, preliminary success

It's that time of year again: the time when the weather turns chilly and when my toes turn colors.  I love going running with my friends, but that danged poor circulation in the metatarsal region of the body makes long runs problematic.  Even if the rest of my body is sweating, a long cold-weather run often means my toes are white, yellow, purple, or all three by the time I get home and remove the socks, and then the toes ache and throb for a half-hour.  Youwch.  

The solution is not better socks, or thicker socks, or more socks.  The solution, I'm sure from vast experimentation, involves a different kind of shoe, one that doesn't have mesh right across the toes.  The problem is airflow, not lack of insulation.  A shoe that has a solid upper, rather than [$@$#] mesh upper, makes such a wonderful, wonderful difference.

Alas, running shoes with solid uppers seem to be hard to find.   I have a *great* pair, one that I bought for $1 at a yard sale back in 2009.  The shoes are still useable -- in fact, this past September, I ran my half-marathon in them (whoop!).  But, y'know, shoes that I got in 2009 might not last for another decade.  Maybe not even for another winter, frankly.  And those shoes have a great upper, but the lower has little traction, so they're not great when the snow arrives.

Hunting through the several so-called Thrift Shops in my town, I've found a few other shoes with solid uppers, but they tend to be twice as heavy as my regular running shoes, and when I'm going out for a 1-to-2 hour run, that tiny bit of extra weight makes a big difference.  

So, here's this year's experiment:  shoe patches.  I have a pair of comfy trash-picked running shoes.  They're serviceable, but not my favorites.  Eh, the price for this pair was right, and I figured they'd be exactly the shoes to experiment on.  Here, pictured below, is the experiment:  shoe patches.  

The patch is material from a canvas bag/bag pack that had seen better days.  It was fun trying to lay pieces down across the shoes to get a good shape.  I tried various ways of attaching the patch; I'd run out of shoe-goo, and the hot glue gun technique was a Fail.   So then I grabbed a heavy needle and some button thread, and sewed the patch into the mesh itself.  

The result?  The shoes are definitely less pretty than before, and that's saying something right there.  But the real test is about airflow, and THAT result is much more agreeable: I've had a couple of long-ish cold-weather runs with them, and -- so far -- my toes have finished the runs pretty much the same color as when we all started together.  I'm going to declare preliminary success, and continue the experiment.

If these shoe patches do the trick, I will probably try to uglify some other shoes I like a tad more, ones that are in a little bit better shape, and that would be happy to head out onto the run and meet other shoe friends who are thumping up and down the same hills with us.  

Fixing a screen

I've neglected the "making stuff with other stuff" genre for a while, so to make up for lost time, here's a little whoop-de-doo about fixing a screen with another screen.   Not super creative, I admit, but satisfying nonetheless.

This was a screen in a door; people* had pushed on the screen to open the door instead of the frame to open the door, and so the screen ripped right at the edge.  

[* "People" could be named, but -- side eye in the direction
of husband --won't be named nonetheless].

Duct tape was not an effective fix, by the way.

Fortunately, I happened to have a screen from an old storm window.  I'd saved a few of these out in the backyard for use in my solar dehydrator, and was very happy to sacrifice a large one to do new duty in the front door.   I had help from a neighbor, the bald-faced hornet who'd been so busy building a residence in the eaves next door.  

Little baldy was actually deceased, poor critter.
I knocked her off the screen.  

The mesh of a screen is held in place in the frame with a string of tubing -- in the picture below you can see a bit of this white tubing I've pulled out from one corner as I start to remove the old screen.  Prewash enjoys the porch in the background. 

I borrowed this tool (below) from a handy friend; it looks a tad like a pizza cutter, but is actually used for squooshing the tubing into the groove.  You can reuse the tubing (at least, that's what I did, and it worked just fine).  

Here's the screen I'm repairing, on the ground, with some of the tubing lying around, and empty screen frame standing, and the replacement screen obviously still way too big for its new frame.   A bit of trimming with scissors fixed it all up.

And that was all!  About 15 or 20 minutes of work, and about $0 spent, and done.  Better yet, the only trash was a bit of left-over tubing (I had the tubing from both screens,  but only needed enough for the one front door screen). The old frame will go to a scrap metal collector we know.  I've rolled up the old nylon screen, and we'll see if Habitat Restore wants it.  Someone with a smaller door than mine might be able to use it, after all!