And now, FOUR months later . . .

My last post before this one started off “Two weeks later,” drawing attention to the fact that I had been steadily writing up until the two weeks prior. Imagine my surprise when I looked to see that my last post was four months ago. Yikes!

In my defense, Covid has brought a whole new element of chaos to my job – as it has most jobs. In addition, I have found that block scheduling requires a whole new set of planning magic, and doing that planning has kept me on my toes. Writing, of course, fell to the wayside.

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Tick . . . tock . . . tick . . . tock

Such is the sound of August – every year. School will be starting back up in a week and a half, and for the first time since I started teaching, I am mentally prepared to go back to school, probably because, well, I’ve been out of school since mid-March. While I always need a mental break after a hectic school year, this was a little too long. The school year ended with an abrupt karate chop, and it’s just not normal. I’m used to ending the year frazzled and exhausted, and while I was getting there in mid-March, I hadn’t yet hit the true craziness of the year.

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Little things

My husband and I decided to get out of town again and visit Spencer, Iowa, home of Carey’s Electronics, which is in turn the home of a wicked vinyl collection in their upstairs store. My husband found some great treasures, and I made off with a couple of albums as well. The vinyl collection is fun and easy to look through because of the clear rating and labeling on each album. I found a near mint condition Dina Washington to add to my collection:

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Antique store scores!

Yesterday my husband and I ventured out to Okoboji, Iowa, which is about 1.5 hours away from where we live. We had visited an antique store there a couple weeks ago, but because we had gotten there so late in the day, we did not get to visit all the antique stores that we saw. There is one store in particular that my husband fell in love with because of one simple reason: vinyl. Lots of vinyl. Even better, there was lots of mint-condition vinyl.

Actually, we both discovered stores that fed our little addictions because I discovered a honeypot of tablecloths in one of the stores. Even better, they were fairly priced. I had about 30 of them to look through, and I made off with 5 of them, including a Wilendur. It is has some faint yellow stains, but I am determined to get this baby looking like new by soaking and scrubbing until it gleams again. Once I saw the tag on this beauty (plus it was 50% off), I knew I had to have it.

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An Easter to remember

Well, this “stay at home” stuff is an introvert’s dream, but even introverts hit a wall, and I think I’m getting there. I mean, it would be one thing if the weather was consistently nice and I could get outside of this small house to get some exercise. I did – for a few days. I got all the remaining leaves out of my yard and burned them. I got my pond up and running, which is probably the earliest I’ve ever had it cleaned out and functional. But then Mother Nature decided to play a little joke on us for Easter Sunday, and this is what the pond looks like today.

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Kudos to Kleenex

It’s the time of year when I can easily be found wandering the aisles of Walmart with a glazed look in my eye, buying school supplies and about 842 other things that I really didn’t need but had to have at that exact moment.  I don’t know what it is about Walmart, but I think there’s some sort of tranquilizing drug that is piped into the entrance, causing them to forget their budgets and release any sort of remaining restraint that they have.

Perhaps this is why I found myself with a laminator in my cart just a few days ago.

I went there for two things: boxer briefs (not for me, obviously) and Kleenex.  I walked out of there $228 poorer. With a laminator.

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Life is short; use the good china

Yes, I know it’s been a while.  It took me a couple minutes to remember how to log back into WordPress.  THAT is how long it’s been.  I had to enter my password three times before I got it right.  Wordpress seemed to give me the stink eye when I successfully logged in, as if to say, “Oh, and NOW you want to see what’s been happening after all this time?”

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Vintage Cool

Every now and then I’ll go to Amazon and just type random words into the search bar to see what’s there.  One of my favorite words, of course, is “retro.”  I’m always curious to see what retro products are available now.  Sometimes it’s depressing, as in the case of one of my recent posts when I talked about the retro products that had to announce that they were retro by putting the word “Nostalgia” on them.  Seriously.  It’s like making a coffee cup and emblazoning “FOR COFFEE” on it.  We get it.  We know its style and purpose already.

So I went to Amazon and put in my favorite search terms and came up with some gems.  First up — a retro condiment set:
71wcP3y2mNL._SL1500_It’s something so simple, yet they did it right this time.  Three bottles — one for ketchup, mustard, and a clear one that you can do pretty much whatever with — are included with retro pictures.  The only way they could have improved this product was if they had used a retro font and varied the pictures on each one.  Still … these are cool. They are normally seven dollars from Amazon, but as of this writing, they are on sale for just under six.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Just in case you need a place to put your new retro condiment bottles, you could always get a condiment caddy to easily put everything on the table at once.  (Sadly, your clear miscellaneous bottle will be left out, but I think it’ll recover from the disappointment.)  Since I’ve obviously gotten stuck on a theme here, let’s explore the next item:

Condiment caddy with places for salt and pepper as well.  I love the little details on this item that make it truly retro: the little ball decorations at the top and bottom of the frame pieces.  As of this writing, this item was also on sale for fourteen dollars.

 

 

 

 

 

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I was given this next item as a Christmas gift.  Although it normally wouldn’t have been something I bought myself, I am here to say that these things have a purpose in life.   (The same cannot be said for any of the Kardashians, but this phone rocks.)

This retro handset plugs into your cell phone.  While you may look like a dork using it (I keep mine in my car), it provides a much more comfortable way to talk on the phone for an extended period of time.  With modern phones, there’s no good way to grip the phone while talking.  You either a) press it up against your face until your words sound like mhphmphmphphphrmphmmmph, or b) you grip the phone along the sides with your fingertips until you get spasmodic cramping, or c) you use the spearkerphone feature, which is just an awkward way to talk on the phone because of those wonderful times when two people are trying to talk at the same time and the phone can’t handle that kind of excitement, so you get those awkward pauses when no one is quite sure when to talk.

In short, this handset is an answer to most of your worldly problems.  Plug it in, grip it like a man (or a woman), and feel confident that people are definitely laughing at you while they pass you on the interstate.  Someone’s gotta liven up that interstate driving; it might as well be you.  The best part is that as of this writing, this handset is majorly on sale!  Eight bucks ….  a huge discount off the normal price of around thirty-five dollars.  These handsets come in a variety of colors.  (Mine is pink.)

 

 

61j5ppdLSWL._SL1500_If you are a fan of vintage metal lawn chairs and you happen to see someone selling them at a decent price, let me give you a bit of advice:  jump on those suckers like they are trying to smuggle your TV out your front door.  I’ve learned this one the hard way; this is a trend that has started to come back into style and the “real deal” vintage models are incredibly popular.  Just a couple weeks ago I saw some on one of those local “garage sale” groups on Facebook, and I made the fatal mistake of taking a few breaths before thinking about getting them.  Poof!  They were gone.  Who knew lawn chairs could be such a hot commodity?

Just in case you don’t have the luck or the patience to try to find the real deal, the next best thing is definitely these chairs from Amazon.  They qualify for Amazon Prime shipping as well!  Judging by the “only x left in stock” warning, these are just as popular online as they are locally.

 

 

 

 

This last product isn’t from Amazon, it’s from Retro Planet.  As I’ve made clear before, I am a sucker for retro fonts and images.  Not the chintzy ones that seem to be put on a million metal signs and held up as authentic vintage decor, but for things that seem genuinely retro — not cartoonish reproductions.

Enter the rooster.  On a towel.

26428-vtMr. Rooster here has that goofy 50’s vibe with great retro colors.  I have a special weakness for that color green in the background.  I have such a weakness for it, in fact, that I painted all my kitchen walls that exact color.

These are kind of spendy towels, about six bucks, but I imagine the average person would only have a handful of these to decorate their kitchen.  It’s retro without being contrived, and in my book, that makes it perfect.

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The Daily Grind

Yep, I’m aware that I haven’t written for two months.  That little nagging voice in the back of my head wouldn’t let me forget it.  As much as I would love to be disciplined enough to be a daily (or at least multi-week) blogger, I had to accept long ago that it just wasn’t going to happen.  Something had to give, y’know?  And the truth is, I’m not that interesting.  I run out of things to talk about.  I don’t have time to scour the internet for interesting things, even the things I love to talk about.  During the school year, the majority of my time is spent on school and kids and all the chaos that goes along with school and kids.  When I’m not dealing with the chaos of school and kids, I’m enjoying a leisurely bath. Like I said, something had to give, and I wasn’t going to give up my baths.  After all … blogging while in the bath might prove to be a bit, ah, dangerous.

My part of Iowa is currently under a Winter Storm Warning.  The Weather Channel has named this one Saturn.  Their storm-naming trend has me chuckling in a way; having lived in the Midwest all my life, I know that winter storms are anything but an oddity in these parts.  They happen pretty regularly, whether it involves snow, ice, or a mixture.  The Weather Channel has already come up with some awesome names this year — Thor, Gandolph, etc. — but I know that eventually they’re going to run out of cool names and they’ll be relegated to normal names like Bob and Frank and Sharon.  In fact, giving winter storms these comic book-like names suggests that their appearance is an oddity; a supernatural event that deserves a grand name.  In reality, it’s snow.  We get it all the time here in the Midwest.  The last three Christmases have involved blizzards.  Snow is about as odd as seeing a cornfield as I drive down the highway.

But hey — Winter Storm Saturn is here and I’m sure it will run circles around the other storms (punny, I know).   Having just enjoyed a snow day last week, I think I’ll take another.  Keep ’em coming until spring break, and then I’ll burst into tears because I realize that we’ll be going to school until July.

Not much happening in the Retro Find department, I hate to say.  My youngest son and I stopped by the local antique store a couple weeks ago.  I brought him in there last year but got the feeling that he was not very impressed.  This year, I tried again, and I think I’ve made a little convert out of my 8-year old.  He eagerly went into the store with me and started puttering around, picking up this and that and asking me questions about the items he found.  I quickly discovered the value of having a short 8-year old in the store with me; whatever I could not see of the stacks of stuff piled under the tables, my son was sure to see something cool.  He found three little framed pictures with frames made in Italy; the pictures are nondescript but the frames were charming.  He found two matching ones and then pulled out another one with a different frame pattern, but the three went together so well that we bought them all.  He found a hotel bell that he begged me to have, and wanting to encourage his treasure hunt, I obliged, knowing that I would be sentencing myself to weeks and months of hearing DING! repeated constantly.  However, I drew the line at the “dogs playing poker” tapestry.  He thought it was cool, and I …. did not.  I did find a neat little wall-hanging lamp that has a total Art Deco metal edging on it.  I bought it thinking that I could hang it over my bed as a reading lamp — forgetting, of course, that my bed has a WINDOW above it.  So the lamp got stashed on a shelf until I can find a suitable place for it.

Needless to say, I think I’ve converted my youngest son into an antique hunter.  My oldest son, however, still rolls his eyes and says, “Mom, why do you have to fill our house with 50’s stuff?  Why can’t we have NICE stuff?”

Someday, I hope he realizes that those things mean the same thing.  🙂

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Hello, 2013

Despite all the hype that we’ve had to listen to for the past two years (at least), there was no apocalypse; no massive power outages; no need to buy wind-up radios and generators.  Don’t get me wrong — I didn’t do any of those last things.  I tended to believe that if people were able to exist before electricity, then we’d figure it out now too.  I’m also not a “prepper,” as if there were a major catastrophe on earth and life was absolutely miserable, why in the world would I want to stick around?  But hey … we’re all still here and now the History Channel will have to dig up some more experts who will be freely sharing their other theories about how the world will end.  Personally, I think there’s a lot of danger in media hyping end-of-the-world scenarios to a young generation of kids who already don’t really believe that they have a lot to live for.  But that’s just me.

It’s been a great Christmas break and I am trying hard to ignore the fact that school has started back up.  Back to the grind.  Back to the chaos.  Good-bye, leisurely mornings drinking coffee and puttering around.  Goodbye to making lunches for the kids and taking the dog for long walks.  Goodbye, sanity.

Ok, so perhaps I’ll hold onto my sanity for a little bit longer.  Time will tell.

This Christmas was a good one.  Despite being a drought, we received a 6″ snowfall just before break commenced.  I packed up the kids, the dog, and all the presents and headed to South Dakota for a week-long stay.  I was able to spend quality time with my family, along with time with my boyfriend and a great friend from my high school days.  The recent snowstorm made for some pretty walks with the dogs in the morning, and a layer of frost over the landscape on the 29th helped me capture some nice shots.

I did get some great retro treasures for Christmas.  The man in my life found the perfect things for my house; it’s evident how well he knows me.  The evidence:

magazinerack

A star-adorned magazine rack that looks right at home in my 1953 house …..

radio

… a pink and gray Zenith radio that is so many kinds of awesome that I just love to look at it.  Oh, and it works! ….

clock

 

A Seth Thomas clock!  Oh, how beautiful it is ….

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and New Year’s.

 

 

 

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