Tied through time

People don't wear pocketwatches anymore. It's a shame. I looked high and low to find a chain that was the right length and weight for this beautiful watch with special history. The front and back are engraved with delicate flowers and the initials J.E.W.

Julia Etta (Saal) Wallace was my great, great, great grandmother - born in August 1857. Our names are similar, so are our birth months. And we sorta look alike:


Okay, maybe not. But the watch is lovely. The inscription inside says "JEW to MEW."

At some point, Julia Etta Wallace gave the watch to her daughter Mary Elizabeth Wallace (born 1884). That's my grandpa's maternal grandmother.

My mother had the watch but didn't wear it, so I asked if I could. The hands are slender, the tick-tick-tick hypnotic and the connection to women who came long before me is priceless.

Do my nephews have great taste, or what?

My sister says these awesome knee socks were my 9-year-old nephew's pick. Colby knows a good pair of toe-warmers when he sees one! I'm always in need of long socks to wear to bed in the winter - and around the house and under boots. I also got some psychedlic ones with flourescent skulls. They put a spring in my step.

Water torture

I was minding my own business Sunday afternoon, watching a funny new British TV show I discovered on Hulu when I heard the sound of water dripping aggressively onto metal. The good thing about living in a shoebox is it doesn’t take long to notice strange noises and locate them. Water was pouring out of the light fixture in my tiny washer/dryer closet. I grabbed a plastic bowl to catch the flow and ran upstairs to warn the guy who’s been remodeling my neighbor’s bathroom. (You’ve heard me talk about the elephant who lives upstairs. Well this past year she’s been living somewhere else so I’ve had a blissful reprieve from upstairs noises, until now.)

The contractor quickly shut the upstairs apartment’s water off and that solved the problem. He and his two sketchy plumber friends spent the next hour traipsing back and forth between my condo and the one upstairs, scratching their heads (and bellies) in consternation.

“We ain’t done nothing to cause this. All we done was change out one little drain and move the pipes over a bit.”

“I got no earthly idea-r why the water’d be coming down clear over here across the hall from the bathroom.”

They cut a hole in my bathroom ceiling. They found nothing.

The main plumber’s sidekick (possibly his son?) was clearly lacking a few marbles and had an impressive smoker’s hack that left me reaching for the Clorox wipes.

My neighbor’s contractor is apparently just a weekend remodeler because he can’t come back until Friday to fix the hole in my ceiling . . . and cut a much larger one above my washer/dryer so he can poke his head up in the rafters and try to figure out where the water’s coming from.

Adventures in home ownership. Tell me, why did I buy this shoebox again?

You can see the hole in the ceiling - I taped a plastic bag over it this morning because dust and insulation would fall out of it every time I opened the bathroom door.

P.S. You should check out "Spy" on Hulu.com. It's a much better version of the "Chuck" concept on American TV. Fun watching!

The dress makes the day

It's been 60 degrees all weekend and I'm sure in the scheme of things that's bad news for Spring and Summer weather forecasts. But it's great news for my wardrobe. I found this darling vintage dress at the thrift store a few weeks ago and figured I'd have to settle for admiring it in my closet until Spring sprung. Mother Nature must have been just as eager for me to wear it, though, and today's mild weather proved the perfect opportunity. This picture doesn't do it justice - the whole dress is a gauzy viscose, sheer black with pearly buttons on top and flowy off-white printed with delicate black flowers on the skirt. Dresses in this style make me so happy - especially when they cost $5.99 at the second-hand store!

One, two, cha-cha-cha

I had a nightmare last night about learning to dance from Louis Van Amstel – one of the professional stars on Dancing with the Stars.

Don’t get me wrong: I like Dancing with the Stars as much as the next fan of “there’s nothing else on so we may as well watch has-been Hollywood types make fools of themselves” TV shows. But I am not a fan of exercise classes that expect me to work up a sweat through dancing. I can never get the steps right fast enough – or remember the sequences long enough – to do more than get frustrated. It’s a brain workout, not a body workout. And when I’m at the gym, I want to turn my brain off and just let the legs pump.

So yesterday I saw a notice that this Dancing with the Stars expert Louis has a new workout program that incorporates dance steps and that he’s coming to Charlotte to debut it.

I shuddered at the thought - and then rather inexplicably had a nightmare about going to the class. All I can figure is that sometimes my subconscious fixates on stressful scenarios that play out in my dreams. Trying to keep up with a ballroom dance workout class certainly qualifies for the girl who misguidedly enrolled in Social Dance her first semester of college because she heard it was an "easy A" and ended up flunking.

Nurse, we're gonna need the paddles for this one.

Hello there.

I'm ready to try and resuscitate this blog. No promises, but I'll do my best to post regularly. I just spent a week hanging out with family in Utah and it's hard to imagine I could have anything even remotely interesting to post all the way out here in Charlotte - away from all the niece and nephew action. Here are some pics.

Party time

I love it when adults break out the party hats and streamers to celebrate their birthdays. Me and my dear friend Jenny were the first to don hats at a party on Saturday night. The goggly eyes were an unfortunate side-effect and only lasted as long as the camera was pointed our direction. Thank goodness!