Saint Fiberica

This morning the Rev came over, and we went to an Italian bakery that I'd never heard of. It's on a frontage road, in a business center of warehouses that surrounds a giant parking lot. Not the place you'd come to look for Italian pastries. 

But we did. Oh man, I had a salmon and cream cheese plate on focaccia. Not very on trend for this restaurant but I hadn't had a bagel plate in so long that I really craved the flavors.  I came home with a strawberry camel puff pastry for mrguy.

We had parked in front of a quilting store, so we decided to check it out after our nosh. It did not disappoint. I bought some beginners' embroidery needles, asking for help from the people who were working there. I recognized one of them. I had had two cups of coffee previously. The conversation went like this:

Me: Did you go to [name of University]?

Her: Yes

Me: Did you own iguanas?

Her, eyes wide: Yeeees?! At [name of housing unit]

Me: I lived in your apartment right after you. OMG that is so wild. I'm here with my best friend from freshman year at college. Rev! You remember the iguana apartment? This is the lady who owned the iguanas!

They introduced themselves. From this point I will identify the woman as "G". I think that the other lady working in the store might have been her daughter or granddaughter, as they shared the same big blue-green eyes.

Me: I think the last time I saw you was right after the earthquake. We moved chairs out of a truck into a building for people. It was a Red Cross thing.

G: I worked for the Red Cross at that time.

So she is now retired, but had a great career managing the communications department at the university near where we both now live.

The story of the iguana apartment is epic. I had never lived with other people before living in a shared apartment at school. After my first quarter at school it was clear that sharing a room was not a good idea. So I looked for a single room in a different apartment. G was going to PELP, so she wouldn't be needing that room. PELP stands for Planned Educational Leave Program. It's a way of leaving school for a period with a way to ensure you can come back to school later.

Anyhoo, before I moved into it I remember that you could recognize her apartment because her iguana liked to bask in the sun while clinging to her window screen. You could see it from the first floor. She lived on the third. When I moved into her apartment she'd left a few things behind. There was iguana poop and mashed banana baked into the shag rug. There was a refrigerator containing frozen newts in the freezer compartment. And a phone bill.

We didn't know what to do about the phone bill. We figured out which number was her mom's and called it. Mom was unsympathetic: "My daughter is an adult, and she can manage her own finances". So we had to eat the cost. But one day I realized that she was in a different section of my entomology class. The way they returned your test results was to toss them in a pile on the floor outside of the lecture hall. I rooted through the pile, wrote "Pay your phone bill!!!" on her mid-term, and a while later she repaid us.

She was delightful today. I love seeing someone who is retired and doing what they truly love. The shop was filled with every sort of gadget that you could want or need for doing needlework. And there were crafts. Rev ended up going home with a dog toy. I bought needles and a thimble and got some fabric from a scrap bin that had big lip prints on it. She gave it to me for free because she'd brought it in herself. I want to applique it on a cheap top that I bought on ebay that is unsatisfying and did not arrive in time for our trip to Hawaii.

Here is the candle in honor of Saint Fiberica. Like I said, they have everything.

We had planned to do other things, but this was such a satisfying jaunt that we stopped there. Plus rev was having an allergic reaction to something she was wearing. 

We wound our way back to my house via points of interest in my town, including my old singing teacher's old house. It was bought by hoarders. There is stuff crammed onto the porch, and her beautiful garden is completely overgrown. To their credit, the current owners do a good job of watering.

And that's all there is to say for today. We really did it up. Now that my phone is charged, it's time to go to Safeway and do a big shop.