Recently in Friday Show and Tell Category

Today was to be a great day. I was to meet with this lovely lady and this lovely lady and this lovely lady and this lovely lady. However, I had to cancel those plans because the financial institute (of the buyers choice) finally arranged settlement of our real estate sale for the exact same time as our outing. However, 1 hour before the appointment the financial institute dropped the ball. Settlement was changed to tomorrow at 4pm. There was no way I could get the meeting place by the appointed meeting time. :-( How much does that suck? ******* I missed Blackbird's Show and Tell Friday. She wanted to see our handwriting. Here is mine. This is the beginning of the planning list for Steven's Birthday Party on Saturday afternoon. His entire family will be present.

Blackbird's Friday Show and Tell is to show something bad. That's it. Just something bad. So here is my version of bad. These are my bad-ass hollyhocks. Towering today at just over eight feet tall. They have made the path out to the gardens and koi pond a small jungle of stems, giant leaves and flowers.They are scattered in huge clumps and are blooming in shades of pink, red, yellow, purple, and orangey-peach. This is a close up of those same bad-ass hollyhocks starting to bloom. These are my bad-ass wild roses. They are climbing almost 15 feet. There is honey suckle in there too. The scent is very sweet and lightly perfumed in the late evening. This is the bad-ass koi pond beginning to bloom. The lotus plant is nearing 4 foot in diameter. This is my bad-ass 7 year old on her last day of school with her bad-ass long hair flowing in the breeze.

I am posting this today while I have time to work with the photos. Yes, I know I am one day early. Blackbird's show and tell for Friday (tomorrow) was chosen by her son. He wants to see our front door knobs. Since I have old fashioned door knobs that are original to my house I thought I would show several of the different ones. This is my front door knob. It is in the Sears, Roebuck catalog listed as the "Emerald Design Lock and Hardware". It is a colonial pattern that was very popular at the time the house was built, 1909. It came in bronze metal finished in copper, antique copper, bronze, antique bronze or plain black. depending on the choice of color in the lockset it was priced at $9.95 -$10.05. The knobs cost extra and ran between $5.60 - $5.70. This is what most of the door knobs in the upper and lower front halls, linen closets, bedroom closets and bathrooms look like. The locksets sold in the mail order building catalog for $1.78 per dozen or as much as $4.98 per dozen. They are "Ivory Black Steel Cases" and "Japanned Iron Cases". The keys came in nickle plated steel. The door knobs were extra and cost .93 cents per pair for the pocelain knobs. Three doors have these brown porcelain knobs, the two in my bedroom and the upstairs bathroom. This door needs work. You can see it is out of alignment. This is my cellar door lock. The locks are called a "rim door latch". The door knobs cost .10 cents - .18 cents. The set cost $2.11. The enterior of the cellar door is a simple matching knob. If someone came along and slid the latch you would be/can be/will be locked in with no way out. These are the keys, original to the house, that opens these locks. Amazingly all the locks work. This is not a door knob but it is a fun feature and I thought I would share it here. This is the doorbell on the front door. You ring the bell by turning the key. It has a tinny sound, not quite like an old bicycle bell but close and VERY loud. In my house there are a total of 16 doors complete with working lock sets, 1 pocket door with just the porcelain knobs and 2 back doors with modern locks and knobs. We have 2 doors in the attic that were taken down when the 4 closets were converts to bathrooms -2 linen/storage closets made into one room each for upstairs and downstairs bathrooms. There is a doorway between the living room and dining room that needs a door. For some reason it was taken down. We will be reinstalling it but we have to find 2 of the old door knobs to match.

Blackbird's Friday Show and Tell theme is work in progress and souvenirs. I have photos of the work in progress. I have souvenirs but I am resting from a morning of working in the yard (read - taking down more of those overgrown boxwood shrub/trees). I don't feel like taking photos of them right now. Sorry, I am completely lazy at the moment sipping on lemonade. Mmmmm. Ice cold too. Want some? My work in progress is my second water garden just out the back door. You can find it here.

Today's show and tell theme is the view from your pillow by Blackbird. This is the view sort of straight up. I am propped on 2 pillows. With the tooth thing I am not supposed to sleep flat, which I never do any way! We plan to replace this light fixture with a Hunter ceiling fan. I have my eye on an cherry finish and am waiting to see if it will go on sale before the heat of summer grips us. This is the view to the right. My husband's pillow. Complete with his box of snack's sitting on his nightstand. This is the view to my right. My nightstand. The panel in the wall is the entrance to all of the plumbing in the house. The big box is my oldest daughter's birthday present. Her birthday is the 18th. I have to keep her out of my bedroom! I have made it off limits to all children until then! This is looking straight ahead from my perch on the bed. The large mule chest is my 'dresser'. I love that the center door has a full length mirror. In the corner is the roll of toile fabric I will be making our bedroom drapes out of. This is sort of a lower left view. This is my husbands chest of drawers. The top pieces are a butler's box, which has his 3 class rings (high school, RIT and GWU) tie tacks, and little things he has collected from his childhood to now. The large chest is the box I bought for him to use as his "landing pad". He has a bad habit of emptying his pockets anywhere he pleases, leaving little piles here and there. When we clean I put his things away and he cannot find them because they are not left in piles everywhere. This is the answer. He is supposed to unload his pockets in the evening into that chest. Most of the time he does. The paint colors for the room do not show well. We have not painted this room since we moved in. The walls are a french vanilla color named Williamsburg Parlor Cream. The trim is Williamsburg China Closet Red. I do plan to keep the paint colors. I really like them. It is not a bright red. It is deep muted red the exact color of toile crimson fabric.

Bedside Tables Blackbird's Show and Tell Theme Courtesy of Pomegranates and Paper My bedside table is one of two in a matching set of furniture my husband and I purchased when we married. It is solid cherry in the "Savannah" style. I love the way it is 'aged' so as not to look brand new. On the top of my nightstand are: My Bible, a candle, an antique pill box of silver with a knights head in relief which contains a lock of my husband's hair from our time of courting, a crystal clock given to me by my daughter when she was 7 and an only child as a mother's day gift, my wedding ring because when I am home I bang it around when I am doing projects and it begins to irritate my finger, the cord for charging my cell phone, my address book, a notebook and a small box of note cards, a horseshoe given to me by my husband on Valentine's day for good luck in our new house and farm, and a metal basket filled with the cards and letters from my husband and homemade cards the children have given me that touch my heart to its very core. In the first drawer you will find, a small heart shaped dish with an old key, a heart shaped shell from our beach vacation last year and a pair of diamond earrings, a small container of blistex, a barrett, the handkerchief I carried at our wedding, the small bible from my babyhood from Rev. and Mrs. Love and a tin of altoids. In the second drawer is a small selection of thank you cards and two new candles scented of rose and sandlewood which are a gift from a very dear friend in a far distant land. The bottom drawer contains magazines I have not read completely and need to cut out a couple recipes, the first CD my husband burned when he recorded the kids on the DV camera, and the chore chart that I sometimes fill out and post when the children slack in their tasks of keeping their rooms neat and tidy as well as their bathroom. This is the table on the other side of the bed. Inside the innersanctum of the drawers is my husbands secret stash. He is a snacker in the late evening and I keep things in there for him because if you have kids you know they will eat everything and leave nothing for anyone else, so this is his private stash. There are nuts, sunflower and pistachio, beef jerky, slim jim's, meat and cheese sticks and his favorite reese cups. It also comes to my attention that his stocks are looking low. I need to replenish. He will agree that he is spoiled rotten.

Blackbird's Friday Show and Tell theme is by MaineLife. My gardens are here. The sun is up and very bright this morning. The temp is only going to be 60 today. The air is cold. My daughter wore her winter coat this morning, it was 39F this morning. Brrrrr! I long for the heat of summer. Last night I worked on the links to my about me pages and my faq. I am sorry it took so long to get them working. Some days I plan to spend a few hours just working on getting my website back to what it once was and find I have far too many other things to do and it gets left to last. Posted by Angie at 08:14 AM | Comments (6)