T-minus Seven Days!

Only one week to go until we are out of here!

Caleb survived his time in the woods; he said it wasn’t that bad.  Now he’s doing stuff he can’t really talk about and he’ll be back this weekend, just in time to help finish packing, load the truck, finish out-processing and drive the truck with car-in-tow across the country.  Poor Caleb.  I’ll bet even all that hassle is probably sounding pretty good to him right now.  He told me the sweetest thing when he got back from the field: when he was out there sharing small animals with several other men for food, he was thinking about me and all the good food I make for him at home.  :-)

I’ve been keeping busy here between all the packing, cleaning, babysitting, and other diversions I’ve created to entertain myself.  Last week, I modeled in a charity fashion show on base and that was a lot of fun, despite the major hiccups that occurred during practices and the shows, such as the set-up staff forgetting to turn on...the spotlight on the runway.  I accidentally forgot to turn the flash back on for my camera before I gave it to my friend to snap some pictures, so with no flash and no spotlight...you can imagine the photography challenge.

Here I am in my “casual” outfit.  You can kind of see how they made the runway look like...a runway...with the white rope lights and big blue lights. I thought that was cute.

This was my “career” outfit...

And, after the show, with the flash restored, my “after five” outfit:

Considerably less fun than the fashion show was the other project I’ve been working on for the past three weeks: sewing a dress.  

Each year Columbus has “Pilgrimage”: antebellum mansions open for tours and base ladies help give the tours dressed like a Southern Belle.   Last year they had seventy or so volunteers.  They create new dresses each year, from donations like curtains, sheets, and old formal dresses, to replace the less desirable or more tattered pieces from the collection.  

I volunteered because I had free time and I thought I'd cut out patterns or maybe sew some nice straight lines piecing skirts together but instead I ended up constructing a dress almost entirely on my own(with much instruction, of course).  The result:

I ran out of time before I could finish the hem or do closures.  Heck, it took me the first two weeks to learn how to cut the fabric from the patterns and trace markings and pin stuff together.   In hindsight, I should have spent more time selecting a simpler pattern.  Oh well.  

For people like me who like projects that take a few minutes, not a few weeks, I also refurbished this darling old mirror tray that I took from my mom when I moved out--with her permission, of course!  

You can sort of see in this picture that the edges were getting pretty tarnished:

So I took out the mirror and applied a coat of one of my favorite crafty products: metallic gold spray paint:

...and I also cleaned the mirror. :-)  The gold paint really made this tray look like new.

Anyway, that’s a little of what we’ve been up to.  Next post will probably be from our new home(!!) and therefore not for a couple weeks.

In the Spirit of Moving in Two Weeks...

Tara’s Top Ten Best Things About Columbus:

10. Once you’ve done summer in the ‘Sip, you’ll never complain about heat or humidity anywhere else ever again.

9. If you’ve always wanted to see a tornado, or learn about emergency procedures for tornadoes, Columbus is the place for you.

8. The odds are you’ll feel skinny in comparison to much of the population in the country’s most obese state. (Now if you want to be motivated by comparison, move to Colorado!  Wow, everyone is so thin and fit there!)

7. If you’ve always preferred face-to-face or telephone interaction with businesses over the convenience of a website, or if you really miss the design of primitive, mid-nineties websites, just try to learn the hours of operation or an address for a business here!

6.  For those who enjoy spending one day’s wages on watching football players who’ll look like ants from your one-day’s-wages seats, there are two D-1 SEC football teams within an hour’s drive of C-bus!

5.  Once you’ve lived in the country’s poorest state for over a year, you’ll be AMAZED at how NEW and BEAUTIFUL and STYLISH all the construction and landscaping in most other cities seem by comparison.  (With the noted exception of the antebellum mansions.  Those are still gorgeous.)

4. On the off chance that you’ll be there for a snowstorm (like the blizzard of ’10--at least four inches), you will be straight-up heroic and brave for daring to leave your house to go to church, or the grocery store.  Although if you’re smart you’ll stay home, because no one knows how to drive on slushy ice.

3. If you ever participate in a TV game show and an impossible question comes up such as: “What is the birthplace of Tennessee Williams?” or “What is the birthplace of Elvis Presley?”, you will know the answer!!

2. For those who’ve ever wondered if it might be fun to wear a hoop skirt and a big dress for a couple days--and let’s be honest: anyone who’s read Little House on the Prairie or seen Gone With the Wind has--Columbus provides a perfectly socially acceptable answer to your curiosity!

1. If you’ve ever gone out to dinner with a couple friends and thought that the hour passed much too quickly, you would love Columbus!  In many of the restaurants here, it could take twice that long to get a table, wait fifteen minutes, someone says hello, wait fifteen minutes, someone takes your drink order, wait fifteen minutes, and so on.

Update

Well it’s been ten days since Caleb left for water survival and survival and it’s been busy!  Here’s  a picture of me helping Caleb pack:

Over Christmas, Delta completely mangled the zipper on our previous suitcase so I bought a replacement.  All the suitcases available seemed to jump from carry-on to this huge size.  I got it home and opened it up and thought: wow, I bet I could fit in that!  I thought of first grade when one of my classmates was going to Disneyland and my teacher said, “Oh, Zach, we want to go too!  Can we hide in your suitcase?” in that high-pitched voice many adults use when speaking to children.  Well, now I know that being a stowaway would not be a comfortable way to travel, not even for five minutes.  Best to buy your own ticket to Disneyland.

And here’s a picture of the pretty roses Caleb sent for Valentine’s Day:

To look at these now, you would not believe me if I told you that when they arrived, they were closed up so tightly they were only a little bigger than my thumb.  I thought they were mini-roses.  But, as you can see, they opened up!  I’d never seen that transition, so I was in awe.

I’m sure you’re all interested to hear about Caleb.  In fact, you probably wish I would stop blathering on about first grade and write about all the cool stuff Caleb gets to do.

So far Caleb has mostly been in the classroom, staring at Powerpoint presentations, about which I haven’t gotten much detail.  The two most interesting things I’ve heard so far were from “lab time” in the pool for water survival. They have one device that simulates being rescued from water by helicopter, so you have to get in whatever type of harness it has then sit there and be lifted.  I would think if you’d been stranded at sea for an extended amount of time, the least they could do would be to get down in the water and do everything for you, but I don’t know.  I suppose the circumstances vary.

The other device simulates a plane crashing into water, and you have to get out of the plane underwater and swim to a life raft, in your heavy uniform and boots.  I thought that sounded terrifying and miserable.  Caleb said it was no big deal.

Other than that, he did another Unarmed Combat course yesterday afternoon( I think he’s now done two at the Academy, one in Alabama, and one yesterday--so don’t mess with him!) and heads into “the field” i.e., the forest, today.  He says it’s been cold.  I told him to think about the soldiers at Valley Forge.  Come to think of it, I bet it gets colder in the Cascades than in Pennsylvania.

Copy Artiste

Earlier this week I was finally able to sit down and create two pieces I saw on Pinterest that I’ve been wanting to copy.  I feel as though I’m constantly plagued with undertaking projects that look easy but turn out to be difficult and result in a meltdown.  I’m actually pretty happy with how these turned out!

Project #1: Cute map.  Seen on Pinterest, pinned from this blog.

Basically you paint a background color that corresponds to a pack of scrap paper onto a canvas (I used a 16x20” canvas and cut up the U.S. map from the front of my free State Farm Road Atlas), trace the cut-out states onto pretty paper, and adhere the states, painted wooden letters, and buttons.

Getting the states to be centered on the canvas and fit together did take a few tries.

The original artist did this project to showcase all the places she and her husband had traveled together but I thought it would be cuter to demonstrate all the places we will live as we move around with the Air Force, so I was going to just have one button in MS and one in CA but they looked so lonely on the big map that I decided to add buttons for all the places we’ve lived so far, and as the places start to pile up, I guess I could always pull off the pre-marital buttons.  They’re only attached with hot glue.  I used Modge Podge as the original blogger recommended for attaching the states and shellac-ing over the top of the whole thing.  It is now my new obsession.  I even decided to use it in this next project, which did not call for Modge Podge.  (so fun to say! Modge Podge)

(Edit:  Apparently it’s actually called Mod Podge, not Modge Podge.  It probably should be called Modge Podge though; that’s a lot easier and more fun to say.)

Project #2: Crayons through a glue gun

I love love loved the way this piece looked the first time I saw it, through Pinterest, on this blog. I took this picture right when I finished, I think around 11 pm, when it was dark.  It looks a lot better in the light.  If you’re interested in replicating it, the above link explains thoroughly how to do it and also links to other links that explain how to do crayons through a hot glue gun.

I was going to take a picture of Caleb and me under an umbrella and try to transfer that image as a silhouette onto black cardstock but I decided that would be way too much work and he was already gone, anyway.  So I googled “couple under umbrella” and found this image that I think could be us, anyway.  Then, basically, you print and cut out that image, trace it onto black cardstock, and cover the original paper with tape on the canvas(I chose to do it that way instead of taping down the black cardstock image which is what the original people did but they said they had problems with getting the tape off without messing up the wax and the cardstock).  I ended up using about 15 crayons in shades of blue and gray(the original people said 20) and I thought even 15 was a bit much.  10-12 would probably be sufficient.

Running crayons(paper removed, of course) through a hot glue gun is a ton of fun.  I’m already combing Pinterest for some more hot-glue-gun-crayon project ideas. :-)

Ode to the ’93 Accord

Well, a couple days ago we bid adieu to the green ’93 Accord.  It had been on the market for a while and we received what I considered to be a surprising number of offers.  We finally found one that suited us and sold it to the five-kid family of a simulator instructor whose two older daughters are getting their driver’s licenses this summer.  It was nice to sell it to someone excited to have it.  For a while we thought we might to sell it to someone who just buys Hondas to turn around and sell them.  When Caleb got off the phone with the buyer and told me he sold it, I cried silently for a few minutes and thought about my silly sentimental attachment to the little green lump of metal. 

I remember when it belonged to my aunt and uncle and cousins in North Dakota and going for rides with new drivers Ann and Jane when we came to visit.  I remember Jane doing this:

inscribing the name of her favorite band in the fabric of the seat back.  When my family purchased it several years later, I would write “Avalon” and Paul would write “P.O.D.”(they were this Christian rap/metal-ish band).  

I remember buying it from the North Dakotans and driving across Montana with my mom, singing oldies along with the radio and thinking it was the most beautiful piece of luxurious machinery I had ever seen.

Several years later, my brother and I both learned how to drive in it.  Here I am after passing my driver’s license test in it:

In those years the ’93 Accord was mainly my mom’s car and I didn’t drive it much, until I was permitted to take it to Hillsdale in the fall of 2008.  There I occasionally cursed it for its inferior antenna and reluctance to start in the Michigan winter, but I took on a new pride of ownership when my parents gifted it to me for my college graduation.

Fast forward another couple years: the Accord met Caleb, who also had a green Accord.  Little newer, little darker than mine.  We both meticulously cleaned our green Accords in the days of first dates and picking up Caleb from the airport. 

I think November 20th, 2010 was the Accord’s most glorious moment: it served as the “getaway car” after our wedding, and was displayed as such via Christmas card photos that year:

Not one week ago, the Accord rolled over 200,000 miles as Caleb drove home from Nashville, returning from house-hunting in our next home, California.

I've learned all about checking the oil, flat tires, dead batteries, running out of gas and getting pulled over, but ultimately I’ve learned what it’s like to have a great, reliable vehicle.  We've been through a lot of changes together, and shared a million other memories in addition to the ones detailed above, like driving with my cousin Kate across Wyoming after my brother died, singing our favorite hymns and Christmas carols.  

Anyway, we love you, little green Honda, and we hope you like your new family. 

3-2-1-Move!

Hello, readers!  If you’re wondering why it’s been a while since you’ve heard from us, one reason is that I recently got a new primary email address and blogspot won’t let me switch to the new email address, so in order to write new posts, I have to log out of new primary email address, log into old one, write post, and then log out of old one and back into new primary and it’s just a bit more hassle than I’m used to.  

This is the other reason: 

This is what ninety-two unfluffed tissue paper pom-poms look like.  My spellcheck says “unfluffed” is not a word but I think it is a word.  Anyway, each one takes 10-15 minutes to make.  That’s nearly twenty-four hours of counting sheets, meticulously folding, measuring, cutting, and twisting wire, and rounding ends.  I may never make another one again.  We’ll see.

In other news, we have begun to prepare for the move!  We’re planning on leaving in about four weeks.  I started packing up some things about two weeks ago, due to excitement more than necessity.  My mind is now occupied with timing the consumption and usage of food, laundry detergent, toilet paper, lotion, etc. so that we can use it up right before we leave, then have that many fewer things to pack and move.  It’s kind of a fun little game.  Also, I gave my spatial reasoning skills a thorough workout last week by seeing how efficiently I could arrange our books into  boxes.  It’s nice to have the luxury of packing gradually and just work on a few things everyday.  Also, I have to paint the walls back to their original white, blah.  White and I have a love/hate relationship: I love it in appliances, cabinets, and furniture, but not so much on walls.

And what is Caleb doing to help with the move, you ask?  Well, he has to handle all the paperwork of out-processing from this base(which is really extensive!), he’s been working on selling the two older cars, and last week he went to California for some house-hunting! You all probably know that buying a house is less fun than I thought it would be.  We’ll keep you posted.  Suffice it to say that we’ll eventually end up in one of the nice homes that we’ve been looking at.

Then, for the next month, while I’m packing and painting with glee(in earnest!), Caleb will head to practically Canada for survival training, which everyone who gets in a military aircraft attends.  As far as I can tell,  they teach them how to wander around the woods, then they wander around the woods and start fires from rubbing sticks together and eat rabbits and try to evade capture.  Then in the end everyone gets “captured” and they simulate being a prisoner of war.  I won’t go into further details but it’s pretty intense.  Caleb says it’s no big deal.

Wanted to leave you with what I consider to be a funny picture, en-captioned: “In Mississippi, January showers bring February flowers.”  Quite different from what most of us are used to.