Thursday, November 1, 2012

White Shirts - at last



I had spent much of Tuesday  wandering around Arizona MIlls Mall.  I was looking for white short sleeved dress shirts for Bill now that he is going back to work a day or so a week.  all the white shirts he had during his years of working had become rather grungy and starting to fall apart from use and washing.  No, I do not go down to the creek and smash the shirts onto a rock with a smaller rock as is portrayed in some pictures.  I do have a washing machine, but over time the white fabric just yellows and looks bad - especially when you wear a new white smock over the top of the shirt and tie you are wearing for work.  After all, you do have to look professional at all times.
I went into many stores that I thought might carry white short sleeved shirts.  We live in Arizona where it is hot almost all year and short sleeved shirts should be in abundance.  Or at least one would assume this to be the case.  But, in keeping with the rest of the country, they only have long sleeved shirts this time of year, so it can be said that the white short sleeved models are as scarce as hens teeth.  I wandered into the VanHeusen store and asked the stock question and lo and behold, they had a range of sizes and two of them were Bill's size.  What is even better is that they were 30% off due to the fact that they were out of season..............who cares about the season?  We have two white short sleeved shirts and my heart is happy.  Incidentally, 3 weeks ago I put all his white shirts in the trash because they were grubby and looked awful........and it was not right to give them to Goodwill or some other charity group.
As I drove into the parking lot, I noticed that the lawn was filled with doves pecking at whatever they could find to eat.  There must have been hundreds of them eating dinner on the lawn at the Safeway Headquarters.  I picked Bill up at 5pm after his training session, and we eased out into the 5pm rush hour and crept at a snail's pace towards I-10 and on our way to Tucson.  I have a quilt on display there and I wanted to see it.  We also had made contact with our friends Joe and Maryanne who had been in Pennsylvania the same time we were there.  It was wonderful to reconnect with them.  Their son Joseph has just returned from a mission in the Phillippines just two weeks ago.  The last time I saw him, he was a baby.  They now live in Oro Valley, just outside of Tucson.  We ate dinner together at their home and had a wonderful walk down memory lane, talking about the people we knew.  While they were in Johnstown, there was a quilting contest in the community and Maryanne had made a quilt representing family and that quilt still hangs in the Relief Society room of the Johnstown Ward.
We found our motel and gratefully fell into bed.  We really lucked out.  We had a two room suite that even had a small cooking area but we were not geared to cooking.  This particular motel had a wonderful desert landscape in front and in the courtyard. 
Wednesday morning we went to the Arizona historical museum to see my Slot Canyon Quilt on display there.  It is the first quilt that one sees when entering the area where they have hung the quilts.  That made me feel pretty good.  It had been entered into a quilt show some years ago and the category was "Original quilt".  I found out that it had been given the nod but that politics entered into the fray and one of the founding mothers of the organization received the ribbon for her 9patch quilt.  I asked how this 9 patch, a very traditional design, got the ribbon and they said, well, what makes it original is that she put a trailing vine around the outside.  I notice that her nine patch was not in THIS show.

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