Visible Mending. VERY Visible Mending

I went on ebay looking for cashmere sweaters with holes, specifically so I could do some visible mending.

I bought a lovely orange sweater with a few holes. More holes than they said, but I don't care:

I received the sweater and began covering the holes. First, I used a piece of vintage fabric to cover the one on the back. Then I picked out a few colors and used them to embroider some designs over holes. I was very pleased with myself.

I put the sweater down on the table, and turned around mere minutes later to find this:

Such a pisser. Boy kitten chewed a ginormous hole right next to the mending I'd done. I decided to see if I could salvage it. I used a piece of a tshirt from the free table (the same one I used to repair my "skirt") to make a patch. Then I used a little bit of it on the sleeve to make a teeny patch. It looks kinda nutty, but I'm really liking how it turned out, and I got unprompted admiration from my coworkers yesterday. They pretty much agree that boy kitten's work led to improvements.

Here's the patch on the back. Yes, I will iron it at some point.

I just bought another cashmere sweater on ebay yesterday. I'm having fun.

Never Again Will I Ever...Or Will I?

This was the prompt:
"Think back to a fiasco—a moment when you were helplessly, hopelessly human. A mistake, a misstep, a plan gone spectacularly sideways. Write about what happened, what you were afraid it said about you—and what it revealed instead."

We were on a work assignment in Hamburg. Our project manager had quit and hadn't been replaced yet. We didn't think we could get our crates (artwork, AV equipment) past customs for no good reason other than fear, and the registrar at the museum was cackling with laughter because this was her last act / responsibility before retirement. Also she made disturbing jewelry with glow-in-the-dark rubber zombie fingers. You'd think I would like that but I did not.

With great relief, in our penultimate evening in Hamburg the bulk of our work was complete and we'd passed inspection. We went out to dinner and we / I got hammered.

A guy tossed a colorful postcard on the table, advertising a nightclub. Cool! Before the guys could stop me I walked out of the restaurant and hailed a cab. They managed to jump in with me, and off we went. And thus, at the tender age of 50, I found myself dancing in a cage at a raging gay nightclub in St. Pauli. I had so much fun until I realized that someone had stolen my purse which contained my passport and a week's per diem. My more sober companion, an air force veteran, noticed it in the hands of a woman in the parking lot. He snatched it from her and returned it to me.

The next night at dinner I apologized to my workmates. My hero responded "THAT was AWESOME", which took away a tiny piece of my mortification, which I feel even now, for obvious reasons.

What did I learn? Nothing, to be honest.

Hot Dog Diplomacy

It's week 2+ of 5 in mrguy's radiation and chemo journey. He feels like shit. Wants to throw up, or he has diarrhea or he's constipated. He's sleep deprived and angry with everything.

On the other side of the fence our neighbor's beautiful wife died suddenly. He feels like shit and is being loud. Mrguy can't sleep with him acting out. I went to the wake on Friday. It was beautiful. But it's been days, now, of lack of peace. Kinda like when [name redacted]'s sister and mom passed away in weeks of each other. He acted out, I asked him to keep it down (not knowing the context) and that made things escalate.

Six months later mrguy saw him manning the grill at our block party, and told me "I'm taking one for the team." He does not usually eat pork or beef, but he sidled up to [name redacted], started a conversation and ate a hot dog. 

Hot dog diplomacy worked. We have been cool ever since.

Right now I'm at the place where I want to protect my man, but I don't want to ruffle any feathers. And mrguy just yelled at me, which made me cry. Mrguy tries not to bother people, and [name redacted] takes up so much space, as do all of the people in the neighborhood whose sounds and actions bother him. And the things that I do that he usually overlooks have also provoked him. Poor guy. I have taken refuge in the pasha lounge with some sewing and an audiobook.

Genealogy Updates

This has been soooo interesting. I am lucky that I got my mom to do a dna test. She's that much closer to the answer of who her ancestors are than I, right?

What has been answered definitively is that she is not related to her father's side of the family. And that she and her brother have the same father. And that a fellow who shows up as her nephew is an unknown son of her brother. My siblings and I have an unknown biological grandfather who was responsible for both of my grandparents' children. We are all related to my grandmother's side of the family. And all of us look like that side of the family including, very strongly, my newfound biological cousin.

What my mom's dna tells us is that in addition to the German roots in Saxony that I already know about and have researched, there are German roots in Bavaria. Recent german roots in Bavaria. I thought I knew everything about my Germans, and I did not.

The genealogists at Ancestry looked at my mom's dna and my own and her bio nephew. In addition to the recent Bavarian connections, they found other German genealogy matches in the "unassigned" areas of my mom's matches. With great effort they found ancestors that were in this additional German line. What they are seeing is that there was only one likely man who linked those two families together, and unlike all of his family, who lived for generations in Illinois, he lived 7 miles away from my grandmother during the time that my mom and her brother were born. I determined that he was in the automobile business during this time, which makes it even more likely that he would have come into contact with my grandmother and grandfather.

I am loving this.