At my retirement, I mused about getting back into teaching and expanding my crafts business.  And sure enough, it has turned out that way for me.  I think it is all about thinking positive on those things that I want to find opportunities for and ignoring those negative things that drain my energy without giving anything back.

In my working years, many peers who had come up to the retirement decision day either just kept working (until they literally died at their desk!) or retired and came back as a consultant doing the same job, mainly because they didn’t have anything better they wanted to do after they left.  Now, I want to tell you it was not always a money factor because of the great pension we had all subscribed to when we began our service; some people just never had a “life” outside of their career.  Many Baby Boomers seem to have that problem, running around staring into their Blackberry or I-Phones, waiting for someone to grace them with a task to give them a reason to live.  I think many are afraid to lose the esteem and purpose a responsible job gives them – their whole psyche is tied to the status of their position and without a “title”, they can’t define themselves.  They don’t want to be a “nobody”, AKA retiree.

Whoa, not me.  Yes, I gave it my all for 30 years, but I was happy and proud to walk away, leaving many others, who I had carefully prepared to take the reins.   I had started my post-retirement plans (I called it the Linda 2.0 Version) years in advance, and I was now free to go hog wild in the pusuit of my happiness – knitting and fiber arts.  My husband and I both saw our government careers as a great way to make a living covering all our financial obligations while planning/saving for a solid future.  He is now retired too and pursuing his love of photography, and I am growing into teaching/demonstrating/designing for  machine knitting.

I have got so many things going on this year already!   I will be a Guest Demonstrator at the Purls of Joy Seminar, 27-28 April 2012, in Minnesota and have been asked to appear at the Pacific Northwest Knitting Machine Seminar in Vancouver, Washington, 10-12 May.  Also, I have some personal travel plans putting me on the East Coast in August and Costa Rica in Jan-Feb (yes, in just a couple of days) and again back to Costa Rica later in the year.  Newton’s Knits has asked me to go to Stitches West with them in Santa Clara the day I get back from Costa Rica in Feb – I will be jet-lagging it, but I hope to make it there, too.  And of course, I have all my Spring and Fall/Holiday craft shows to plan and knit for, AND all my volunteer work/meeting with the Torrance Craftsmen’s Guild and the El Segundo Slipt Stitchers, so my calendar for the year is already FULL!!!  Oh, yes, I have some new designs in my head  and I need get on the ball to create those patterns.

Like I said, I don’t know how I ever got time to work a job 40-50 hours a week.  I always heard that some people are busier AFTER they retire than when they had to juggle a work calendar.  I am one of these lucky people!!

Keep knitting until all the yarn is gone!

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,800 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 47 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Here are some pictures of last night, Jensen’s 2011 Joyful Traditions Party:

Dinner Is Served !!

HoneyBaked Ham and Smoked Turkey

March Of The Olive Penguins !!

I like to keep the favorites for party-goers: The Hot Artichoke Dip on mini-slices of Trader Joe’s French Baguette bread, Hot Mulled Cider using Williams-Sonoma’s mulling spices and unfiltered, fresh apple juice, Hot Sausage Stuffed Mushrooms, big shrimp with tangy cocktail sauce, Waldorf Salad with grannie smith apples and cranraisens, assorted premium cheeses, veggies, and of couse, the HoneyBaked Ham and Turkey.

So this year, I added the Olive Penguins (labor intensive, but too cute!!), and Boorhead’s thin-sliced rare roast beef, on a French Baguette round, spread with a peppy horseradish sauce and topped with a sliver of roasted red pepper, then dusted with fresh ground pepper.   OOOOOHHHH!  This will put the Ho-Ho-Ho back into your Christmas Spirit.

THEN, you can’t miss the desserts:  Three-Berry Topped Cheesecake, assorted chocolates, mints and my popular, Rum-Raisen Bread Pudding, made with 12 eggs, 2 cups of Heavy Whipping Cream (and whole milk to thin it out), with cinnamon, plump tri-colored raisens (from Trader Joe’s), with one cup of aged Mogambo Dark Rum drizzled over the top as it comes from the oven, and finished with a flourish of whipped cream and dusted with cinnamon, served in shiny foil cupcake cups.  It is to DIE for.

All the guests ate and drank until they were ready to POP.  It is the one day of the year which is OK to totally throw the diet out of the door.  My Mother always told me, “Don’t trust a skinny cook!”, so you can see where I side on the equation.  Yes, I am told that I am a great cook, people beg me for recipes and look forward to next year when I will come up with some new delectable treasures.

So, gosh I only have 364 days to plan next year’s party.  And then I need to do all kinds of knitting too!   Just not enough time, even in a year to get everything I want to do, done.

For us more conservative knitters, the thought of “bombing” anything is abhorent, but there seems to be a new wave of anonymous knitters out there decorating trees, posts, bus benches, door pulls, you name it, with colorful expressions of our artistry.  So am I going to be left behind?  Of course not.   I am jumping on the bandwagon.  Here is a pic of my recent work.  I thought my two front trees looked like they could use some leg warmers:

Trees With Leg Warmers

My dog, Scruffy (she was female), and I were so close, I don’t really have words for it – maybe just unconditional love will do.  We got her from the dog pound many years ago after we suddenly lost another beloved dog, Julie, to kidney failure.  We waited about 3 months after Julie, then decided our lives would be better if we had another dog to love and enjoy.  So we decided to adopt a dog from the pound and off we went.

Scruffy was the darling of the personnel at the pound.  She had escaped her former owners on New Year’s Eve, probably with all the noise going on, but sadly, she was hit by a car, and had just now recovered at the dog pound at Easter when we first saw her.  We knew we had a winner immediately, since she was in a cage with a pitbull.  After we adopted her, we found she had the sweetest disposition, never bit anyone, and barked only to alert us there was someone at the door.  She didn’t like being tied up (she would chew through the restraint) or closed into a room (scratched at the carpet until it was bare).  Getting her checked out and microchiped at the Vet, he said she was mostly a Schnauzer, with something else mixed in, because of her coloring, charcoal with silver what is called “feathers” on her eyebrows, whiskers and legs.  He also said that she was probably about 1 year old.  The Dog Pound manager said she already had a litter of two, but they were stillborn.  This led us to think she was about 1 year old when we got her in 1998, so that would put her at almost 14 yesterday.

We took her for walks, she chased squirrels out our small backyard and generally did everything a happy dog would do for about 8 years, and then we noticed she was stepping off curbs and bumping into things, so I took her to a specialist and they told me she was going blind, a congenital problem with Schnauzer’s called Retinal Degeneration.  Also, she had cataracts that even if we went through surgery to fix, would not slow the gradual blindness caused by the Retinal Degeneration.  So, over a year’s time, she slowly went blind, although I swear she could still see enough to determine night and day.  She became cautious when walking, slowed down, felt her way around the house by zig-zagging, hitting walls, etc. until she settled where she wanted to be.  Still, she was happy to be with us and memorized the paths through the house, the doggie door to go outside, so we just adjusted our routines a bit, trying to not move furniture or putting boxes in her memorized way and onward we went.  She still could hear and smell, so that is how she  made up for being blind.

Then she started going deaf.  We would call to her and she would invariably turn in the opposite direction because she was hearing only partially and could not tell where the sound was coming from, but we adjusted again and onward we went.  At this point, her walks shortened, she got slower and I started noticing that her hip and leg joints seemed to be stiff and bothering her.  We thought that maybe she tumbled off the two steps she had to navigate to get to the backyard, but it was really more like arthritis from her early days when she was hit by that car.  She started losing her footing and her legs would not hold her up on our wood flooring, so we put runners, mats, carpets, etc. everywhere we thought she wanted to go in the house.  She was OK on grass, carpet and brick, but wood floors and our deck gave her problems.

For the last few weeks, we have found her “splatted” in the kitchen, unable to get up and whimpering.  I had picked her up several times, but being the obstinate little girl she was, she would not avoid these areas.  Once I found her whimpering on the middle step of the deck, unable to go either up or down and this is when I started to get a huge ache in my heart.  How could we go anywhere if I feared we would find her helpless and in distress when I got home?

I knew she had been giving me signs that she was ready to go for about a year, but making the decision to let her go – when do you really know when that is?  For each case, a different answer.  For us, yesterday was our answer.  We were with her at the end and I know we will meet again in heaven, both in our perfect bodies, filled with the love that we will ever keep between us.  Yes, I cry and ache for the loss of my little girl, Scruffy.  No words can comfort, no good wishes can ease this ache of loss.  Life will go on, but with just a little less happiness.  This is what beloved pets give you – and I know it stays with you even into the next world.

I thank Sandy for sending me this poem she wrote and said it was OK to share with all of you.

Let Me….

Let me romp among the flowers,

feel His warmth upon my back,

with no locks on Heaven’s Gateways,

and no leash to hold me back.

Let me play among your memories,

bringing comfort and not pain,

open up your heart to others,

so I have not lived in vain.

Let me be the one to greet you,

when your days on earth are through,

for I wait among the flowers,

to spend Eternity with you.

-by Sandy Sherman

Christmas At Piecemaker’s

I will have all kinds of hats, scarves, coats, shawls and everything inbetween for your holiday selections.  See you there!!

We do have some Bah-Humbug types who don’t hand out the treats, but I am completely opposite that mentality.  Halloween is great fun for little kids and teens.  OK, I do spend a couple of hundred dollars on candy, but the look on those kids faces when I open my door and hear their gasps, and shyly say, “Trick or Treat?” is worth every cent!  Many of the parents want videos and photos with their kids and me, so I always oblige.   I never speak.  If a kid freezes up when they see me, eyes a-goggle, I just give them a wide-eyed look and make a gesture that I can’t hear them – then they squeek out, “Trick or Treat”.  OK, some of the young ones are too scared to approach me, that’s when Mom or Dad take over, giggling as they do, cellphones clicking pictures left and right.

Remember in the Christmas Carol movie there was a family called the Fezziwigs?  They gave a party each year just to spread cheer and happiness of the season, even though they weren’t exactly rich.  I kind of relate to them.  Halloween is for kids and I do my best every year to make it special for them.  Some remark that they come every year to visit the “Bride”.  One year, I didn’t have my act together and ran out of time to be the “Bride” and some people were actually disappointed!!  Well, anyway, here are some pics of Halloween Night 2011 where I handed one piece of candy to 1,200 visitors.  Can you believe it???

Baby In Dad's Arms

Baby's First Halloween - From Stoller

Scary Bride Of Frankenstein

Wall-To-Wall Kids Lined Up For Treats

Getting Phone In Picture Taking Mode