This shot was actually taken earlier in the year.  Can’t remember if I showed you already. I’d driven up north to a farmer’s market in the city, expressly to find this woman – fought my way along through the freeway construction only to find, as I pulled into the parking lot at last, the market was shutting down for the day and people were actually in the act of packing their wares back into cars, ready to head home.  Luckily, LYNDA was still there!!  And I bought this sampler from her.  The reason why this is relevant is –

she had this same stuff –

at the Fiber Arts Show Rachel and I – in a fit of cabin-fever – drove to the city to find, the weekend just before Labor Day.  The show was housed in a kinda dark equestrian center, so I’ve got about three shots of it.  But the thing was really fun – so much roving and yarn and temptation – good intentions waiting to be adopted and carted home.

And we met a strange animal with wildly tufted ears – which you could see if Rachel weren’t waving them at you and getting them all blurred.

The eye on this giant rabbit was so startling. I think he found us startling, too, actually. She? He?

The next weekend, Rachel and I were headed out to Swiss Days, over the mountain in an even higher valley.  But she got sick, so I gave up hope of making the journey.  But into the vacuum left by my friend stepped – MY HUSBAND.  Who offered to go.  To a CRAFT FAIR. And go we did.  This is an old little town, populated by pioneer houses typical of the settling of this area.

The shots are dark because rain was threatening. Which cut down the crowd just a little as did our early-in-the-morning arrival.  See the gingerbread trim? Red brick and white gingerbread.  The house I lived in when I was in grad school was just like this – except it had belonged to a ninety year old woman who lived alone in it for decades before we student girls got to rent it. So the outside had been neglected, and the gingerbread was rotting away. An architectural tragedy.

This one is just gorgeous.  I shot these three houses in the three blocks we walked from our parking place.

It’s eight in the morning on a chilly, rainy day – in a tiny, sleepy town. See the crowds of cars and people and orange cones? This show is a BIG deal. It started off being a fund-raiser for an LDS stake, many, many years ago. Now the fair draws craftsmen and women from coast to coast. And the crowds are like Disneyland on a good day.

G runs into a client who is selling recordings he made at our place.

I haven’t got a lot of shots, but this booth always fascinates me.  Gourds for Halloween. There are booths for dipped-candle, wood working, glass blowing, jewelry, clothes, toys, metal-work, ceramics, furniture – holiday – educational stuff – all kinds of clever ideas here. We bought two wrought iron, open work pumpkins, a found-metal hanging bat, Christmas gifts, and a ceramic fish. We were very close to carrying home a respectably pricey and deeply gorgeous mirror made by Hudson River Inlay. But then, we thought about how we still had food to pay for this month.

The ceramic fish booth.  This man makes ornaments and bells and fish. Had I been rich, there would not have been a bell left on this table.

And the Bartletts.  These are the folks we go up every year to see.  We LOVE these guys. I think Rachel was faking the sickness because she didn’t want to be tempted to sell one of the children so she could buy something – anything – everything from Bartletts. You’ve seen my buckets and my Gone Fishing sign and my hanging stars. What a great family.

Their booth. I want more stars.  More flowers.  More signs.  MORE WHAT THEY MAKE.  Especially their wind-machines.  One of which I SHALL own before I die.

One of the first of their things I ever saw was (see on the very back wall?) this huge sculpture they’d made out of (I think) ancient spring harrow tines.  They take pieces of ancient American farm implements and re-purpose them. With GREAT eye – for fun, charm and detail.

Just a shot of the crowd.  This was probably nine-thirty.  Clouds were burning off.  There’d be no grass to see at all within an hour – lost in legs.

I don’t know who these women were, but they just looked so typical –

Lots of funny little cool corners in this town.

Read the sign on the side of the truck back there.

Traffic.

Parking – along the farm roads for miles.

On the way home past the reservoir.

The drought has made swamp places out of what should be a lake.

That was Friday.  On Saturday, after G’s race – the one I shot with Murphy – in the thundering rain, G said, “What do you want me to do for you today?”  And I, who had been looking forward to doing nothing more than doing a blog and reading a book, tucked up on the couch on this lovely thunderous day, found myself saying, “We’re going to clean out the pantry.”  And meaning it.

I’ll tell you what’s unfair: the slave labor grows up and goes away, but there are still just as many rooms to dust, blinds to clean, carpets to vacuum as there were before there were only the two of us.  And the pantry: all the things we MIGHT need some day, the sacks saved, the odd groceries that you only need once every five year—the things you can’t make up your mind about, so you put it on a back shelf till later—and all the cans, bottles and packages you buy, don’t get around to eating, but never throw out—and the specialty pans, pots and tools—all that crammed into the tiny space under the stairs, one of the only two storage places in our entire downstairs.

All of this came out of it.

Another angle.

This doesn’t count.  This is the craft mess and came outa nowhere.

The HUGE pantry, with all the floor stuff taken out, but everything still on the shelves. Not.  Not everything. The packages of napkins, the THREE (count ’em) big-box cases of plastic summer silverware (I kept forgetting I had enough)—things like that had already been taken off the shelves.  Two hours before this was taken, you couldn’t step more than twelve inches into the place.  All things had to be retrieved one handed (the other hand allowing you to hang yourself out past the doorway) and on one foot (the other used as ballast).

Cleaned out.  I so wish I’d remembered to do the “before” shot actually before. But you can see actual spaces here, right? And neatly stacked things.

Add to this job the following to-do boxes ticked off in the last week:  all wooden windowsills sanded and re-coated with five coats of Spar Varnish, the master bath wall (the one I had thrilled myself with my industry, stripping off the old wallpaper – a YEAR AGO – thus exposing a wall full of nasty wallpaper glue I had no idea what to do with – that wall) finally washed glue-less, sanded, masked and now painted a very happy fresh green, apples by the bushel gathered and taken to the barn, two sections of pasture stripped of about fifty pounds worth of nasty, spiny, thorny weeds (all done last week)—AND

every cursed, benighted white metal mini-blind (the kind that bend when you touch them?  The kind you can’t clean any way short of using a carwash?) brought downstairs (this was Monday’s job – another answer to G’s question: “What do you want me to do today?”  Do we think he will ask that again soon?) soaked, sprayed, scoured, hung up to dry and then re-mounted.  Eleven of them.  Some HUGE.  One – the kitchen one – required a jackhammer and hydrochloric acid. But all are now clean.  And they better stay that way.  Somehow.

You know how this feels? I’m setting myself up for the next five years here, and by then, I’m sure I’ll be able to afford new blinds, a gardener, a house keeper, some Round-up, and  – maybe a butler.  I mean, look at the strides the economy has made in the last four years, right?

I will add humbly that last week, I decided to clean a room every day till I’m finished – because I don’t want Donna to get lost in the house when she gets here – her husband wouldn’t like it, because – if she gets lost the way some of my quilt patterns have, he’ll never see her again.  But it took me one full day just to dust down the five windows—(wooden blinds) and furniture and go through all the drawers and hidey places just in our bedroom. The house will yet be clean.

I should live so long.