Sickening.

I could cry. At least if I weren't feeling almost in shock I could cry.

In May of 2014, after four years of college life; learning to drape and/or draft a pattern, sew it, do a fitting and re-sew it if necessary—all in one week or less; learning to tailor a coat, construct a bra, build a corset, design and make formal-wear; learning to illustrate fashion figures; re-learning how much I hate algebra; re-learning how much I like to write... It was a big four years...

one of my illustrations

Anyway, in May of 2014 I finished four years of college and earned two degrees from the Fashion Institute of Salt Lake; one in design, and one in technical apparel. My final, final project, the culmination of an entire school-year's work, was to participate in the Fashion Institute's fashion show. I designed, drafted patterns for, went to L.A. to purchase fabrics for, and sewed like a maniac for months, to create a ten-piece line of formal dresses, suitable for wearing to the symphony or the opera. I called my line Pianoforte.

my models receiving last-minute instructions

Fast-forward to today. As I was trying to find places to stash things in our new house, I unpacked the Pianoforte dresses. So, instead of doing the work I'd planned for today, I had Lindsey try them all on and model them for us. I have to say, they are quite stunning (I like them much better now than I did immediately after all the hours and all-nighters I spent making them—and I liked them pretty well even then).

But one dress was missing. In fact the dress that, in my mind, is the icon of my Pianoforte line is missing. I remember it was separate from the other dresses; it needed a small repair, and so I'd had it wrapped in a blue sheet in my bedroom, waiting until I could get to it—it had been stored with some rolls of fabric that were wrapped in that pellon-type half-paper-half-fabric that furniture sometimes is wrapped in for delivery. I remember the fabrics and the gown were among the very first things brought into our new house; they were put on my bedroom floor long before my bedroom furniture showed up. I remember unwrapping the fabrics later with Jessica so I could put them away. I remember telling her that the pellon-type fabric could and should be thrown away. I remember finding a place to stash my rolls of fabric, and Jessica throwing the pellon away.

And now, four weeks later, I finally remembered my dress and I can't find it. I've been over every inch of this house a zillion times over the last four weeks, trying to arrange and put things away, and I haven't seen it anywhere. I have a horrible, wrenching feeling that my baby was thrown out with the bath water. Did my beautiful gown get tossed out with the awful pellon? Has it been buried in the landfill for the last three weeks?

The dress.
Is it gone forever?
If it is, I will have to re-make it.

It makes me sick—almost literally—just to think of it, but I'm 90% sure, and 99% afraid that that is exactly what happened. My only pathetic hope is that somehow it got put into the garage with all the other stuff that's waiting to be gone through. But it is a tiny hope; I know that if it was in the house I wouldn't have put it into the dirty garage.

I could just die.

Aunt Beulah's Road-kill Overcoat

Living in Vernal—especially the last couple of days—has really been bringing out the fashion designer in me. Or maybe it's just bringing out the redneck in me.

Monday, day-before-yesterday, I went for a long, long drive. I had to take Jason back to Snow College after the Thanksgiving holiday—which was lovely, by the way (Thanksgiving was lovely; the drive was a little tedious). The trip to Ephraim is a three-and-a-half-hour drive through the desert, canyons, and general wilderness of Utah. In fact, to get almost anywhere from Vernal, you have to take a three-hour drive through the desert, canyons, and general wilderness of Utah. And whenever you take this excursion you are sure to see a lot of road kill. This used to really gross me out; now it only bothers me a lot if it's a skunk, or a scrambled deer. Or if it's a gory mess in the middle of the road where I am forced to look at it; that can be a little disturbing. Ew.

But lately—well, at least on Monday—maybe due to extreme tiredness, I kept seeing these dead critters—not the squished-to-a-pulp ones, but the ones lying on their backs with their feet up looking like cartoon animals playing dead... 

Anyway, I kept seeing these dead animals on the side of the road (mostly raccoons) and I would think, "I wonder if their fur is soft..." or, "I wonder what you could make of that fur..." or, "Too bad I can't just pick them up and take them to someone to skin and prepare the fur so I could use it for..." (Like I'd actually want to pick a dead animal up off of the road—and then drive home with it in my car! Eew!) At one point I even saw a dead pheasant and thought that the feathers would look great on a purse or something.

So, yeah. Weird. But maybe you should watch out for my new Fall 2018 "Road-Kill" line, just in case...

Wish List 2017

Normally (to Kim's dismay) I post my Christmas Wish List fifty days before Christmas—so you have time to buy me everything I could ever want.

This year I've not really thought about a wish list at all. I got my biggest wish, which was to buy a house, and it's kept me very busy the entire two weeks we've owned it. However, tradition is tradition.

So here is my 

2017 Wish List:

A new hand-blender (and accessories). I use my almost-eighteen-year-old machine almost every day; it is pretty worn out.
(this one from Best Buy)





Anything you can use in the kitchen: dish towels, dish rags and hot-pads (especially with red in them), drinking glasses, cooking/serving utensils...

Bath Towels.

A food scale. Yes, I really do use these, but the display on mine met with a terrible death recently.
(this one from Amazon)


Well, just about anything you would give as a house-warming (or a "house shower"—we give wedding and baby showers, why not new house showers?)
...any house-warming-type (especially kitchen) gift would be fantastic.

And now, I have a room to paint!

The Deed is Done...

or

The Great and Dreadful Day has Arrived!

Last Monday, November 6, at 10:00 a.m., Bruce and I drove over to Farm and  Home Title Company and I watched Bruce sign paper after paper after paper...

...For our new house!!!!!

It's been a long time coming, and it's been pretty traumatic trying to get here. We looked at quite a few houses here in Vernal before we settled on this one.

And when we first saw this one, I wasn't inclined to like it or want it. For one thing, we were hoping for a large back yard, and this one has a pretty small back yard. (Although it is completely landscaped and has a sprinkler system, which is a huge bonus.) Then we walked in the front door and saw that the front entry is laid with goldie, silvery, gray-ish stone. I thought, "Ugly." I looked down the stairs to my left and saw this fireplace...

...which looks worse in person, and I thought, "Well, that stone will have to go, too."

My kids directed my attention upward to the cottage-cheese with silver-glitter ceilings. I don't like them much more than the kids do. It didn't bode well.

Then I walked into the front living room. I looked around.

It felt like home.

As Bruce and I looked through the rest of the house and talked about the possibilities I grew more and more interested, and more and more excited. This was our house!

So we put in a bid for it on September 13, and then we waited. The bid was accepted! We were already pre-approved for a loan, so we were in business. We hoped we could close on September 28, Bruce's birthday. But Shauna (our realtor) told us that wasn't possible; we could be OK with that. Then we thought we could close the second week of October. Nope. The following week. Nope. The week after that? No. Before Halloween? No.

The loan process was a Huge, Hairy, Harrowing Ordeal. We had turned in everything that they asked for, and we were waiting. And waiting. For over a week. Then we got an email from Shauna saying that the loan company needed fifteen items of paperwork or they would drop us, and we'd have to start over, and we'd lose the house. That was a bad day. (It turns out that someone had hand-written Bruce's email address, and someone else read it wrong, so he never got all the emails they sent him asking for all these things.) But we did manage to get them everything they wanted before closing time that same day.

Then it was something else, and something else, and something else. For a month. So it was pretty frustrating.  Also we had some substantial equity from the sale of our house in West Valley; we intended to put half of it as a down-payment on the house, and use the other half for some remodeling and renovations (like the kitchen appliances that have almost the same birthday as the house—1977.) In the end, to make our numbers look good enough to qualify for the loan we paid about 65% of our equity to student loans, and the rest went to down-payment and closing costs. No remodeling would be happening. Or not much, anyway. (The day we found out we'd have to pay off that much of our student loans all at once was a bad day too. But after a day or two of adjusting my thinking I decided it would be no bad thing to not have that monster breathing down our necks any more.)

And then, in the midst of all of this headache, our van began its death-rattle. Something inside the motor is broken, and will cost more than the van is worth to repair. So we found another van. A newer van. (1998 instead of 1997). A van we could afford to pay cash for.

It is pretty much the same van, only a darker blue.
And a cargo door on the side, instead of the hinged doors that I like. :-/

Although the process was very stressful, the people we worked with were great. Shauna Harding, our realtor, was willing to put up a fight for us when needed; if you want to buy a house in Vernal, go see her. And Cary, at Academy Mortgage, the frequent bearer of bad tidings (none of which were his fault), was very kind, very personable, and easy to work with. HUD, who was selling the house, on the other hand was... a government agency. The final insult from HUD was that they wouldn't give us the keys; they would take them and destroy them and we had to put new door-handles/locks on everything. Which we intended to do anyway; we just didn't expect to have to do it on the very same day we "got our house keys."

So, here are more pics of the house:

the kitchen—looking in from the dining area
To the left of the ancient ovens is, yes...

...a bathroom. In the kitchen! 
I am used to people coming into my house and saying,
"Ooohh! What's that smell?" I do not want anyone to come
into my kitchen and say, "Ewww! What's that smell?!"
This tiny bathroom has to go! Fortunately that is a remodel
that will cost almost nothing but time.

the dining area
The door on the left goes to the two-car garage,
the living room is straight in front of you, and
the kitchen is to your right.

the main bathroom (upstairs)
This bathroom is 15 feet long. The photo kind of fools you because that door on the right looks like the entry door; it is actually the door to a closet inside the bathroom. There's another big closet (in the bathroom) to your left, and the bathtub is beyond that (in front of the toilet). All of the bathrooms in this house are just a little weird (with the kitchen-bathroom taking top prize).

one of the upstairs bedrooms
This fantastic room has one wall covered with peel-and-stick cork tiles, checkerboarded with gold-veined, smoked mirrors. Underneath that is this fantastic wallpaper that has 60's-style line drawings of boys playing football, baseball, etc. I actually kind of love the wallpaper for its very vintage/retro look. But I don't love it enough to keep it. I have spent most of this week taking all that stuff (including the dresser, which is attached—probably a great selling-feature, back in the day) ...I spent a lot of this week taking this stuff off of that wall. Another inexpensive remodel.

our favorite room—the family room
This room is an addition on the back of the house. If you go back up to the dining-room picture and imagine turning around 180°,
then you will be looking into this room. It is really as big as it looks—21 by 26 feet.

On Monday, closing day, we got our very first piece of mail at our new address—a gift from Academy Mortgage: a tiny bamboo cutting-board, with North etched/burned into it. It's really cute, but I'll have to post the picture later. Too much house-cleaning and house-fix-upping to do.

When we get moved in—or mostly moved in—I'll post more pics.

For now, congratulate us! We have to make large payments to a bank for the next many, many years! Dreadful!

No,no, no...just kidding!
Congratulate us! We are homeowners! And it is GREAT!!

Write to Brandon!

Well, I have lots to talk about, but I'm not ready to talk yet.

But I did get a text message from a complete stranger yesterday! Brother Wagner said he had served his mission in Hungary in 1993. He and his daughter were visiting there last weekend, went to church, and met Brandon and his companion. And he sent me this picture!

Norris Elder and North Elder
(in Hungary they say it backward from the way we do)

And I heard from Brandon today. I think he's been a little discouraged; apparently the people in Hungary just don't want to hear from missionaries. They tell him (and his companion) that they are foolish; they tell them that they are already Christian, so they (the missionaries) don't need to be there; Brandon says the people won't even smile at them.

Today's email was pretty short, but not too sad. Here's what he said:

I don't know why, but this last Sunday I was wondering what I should do. I felt at a loss and decided that probably the solution was to go tracting. But as I thought about it and felt that I should pray. So I did and I felt strongly that what I needed to do was make dinner for my companion. I don't know for sure, but often I feel like what God uses me the most for out here is uplifting other missionaries. It is hard to say, but it has certainly felt that way.

Also, how do I make Icing, glaze, and Frosting?

Love you, 
Brandon

So here is my BIG plan: Everyone write to Brandon (or email him). Say something cheery. Send him your favorite icing, glaze, or frosting recipes. Then he can keep cheering up the other missionaries! ;-)

Here's his mailing address:

Elder Brandon North
UNSZJKE
Budapest
Hajnóczy u. 14.
1122
HUNGARY

And his email address is:

brandon.north@myldsmail.net

Make a missionary's day!
Thanks!