Thankful

That’s me.

Irene sped up and moved further inland which was awful for those in western Massachusetts, parts of Connecticut and all of Vermont. But we were spared and only had torrential rains and wind gusts. We never even lost power and that right there is pretty amazing.

I thought the South End didn't get any damage, but when I walked home today after taking my car to the auto body repair place, I saw a lot of downed tree limbs.

The picture shows how Wally spent most of the day yesterday. He's in a box from Costco and he loves to sleep in it so much that we haven't had the heart to pitch it.

You're not invited

This is about as clean as our patio has ever been. Kent moved the table and chairs right up by the house and swept both levels thoroughly to get rid of all the seed the birds have scattered. Plus he put away the bird feeder and the twirly decoration which also hung from the deck above us. The yellow worm-like tube you see at the bottom is one of the Hydra-Barriers. All four are filled and in place except for that one. We'll put it up against the back door later tonight.

I've been tracking the hurricane since I got up at 5 AM; Ben lives in Smithfield, VA and lost power around 8 AM. As you can see in the picture, it's just now beginning to rain in Boston at about 2PM. I know Irene has slowed down a lot and also thankfully weakened. She can weaken right down to a light mist as far as I'm concerned.

We are having a Cocktails and Portraits party this evening. Kent's planned and organized the whole thing. He's invited our friends to bring appetizers, and we'll have those plus wine and he'll take lots of head shots of everyone. As it turns out, this is now a Cocktails, Portraits and Party-Crashing Irene get-together. Stay tuned for details when it's all over, plus some great pictures.

Yesterday, today and beyond

First, here are things we’ve gotten in preparation for Ben and Jen and the kids visiting next weekend. Rather than put labels on the picture, I numbered the items:

1. Small pillow made by me for Alison
2. Two sets of child-appropriate dishes—see the little glass that matches? That’s for Alison.
3. Two sippy cups for Eli.
4. A honking big container of all sorts of blocks for both of the kids. That was a Costco find and I especially like that it comes with a zippered container to keep it all together.
5. Grape-Nuts for Ben. Apparently he eats this for dessert.
6. A folding out barn and animal set from Ikea. Boy those Swedes are clever.
7. Diapers for Eli. Kent picked those up after I sent him an email telling him to add diapers to his grocery list. He said he never expected to get an email like that from me.
8. Coloring book and crayons for Alison.

Today someone from my insurance company will be inspecting my damaged car. You can sort of see in these two pictures how the other driver’s door raked almost the entire right side of my car. The damage was bad enough that it popped both doors ajar and my door open light indicator was on until Kent managed to smoosh them back into place. The side mirror hit the right passenger window hard enough to mar the glass and I can’t open the mirror out, although I don’t think the mirror glass is broken.

Looking back

Lots of people have been taking their children to college for the first time, or sending a child off to high school or heck, even taking their first born to kindergarten. Seeing these people hit big milestones like that with their children reminds me of what it was like for me when my children no longer lived with me.

That happened a few years earlier than usual because I got divorced. I barely made minimum wage so I couldn’t afford to pay rent on something large enough to hold me and two teenagers. I firmly believe that if a marriage fails, the kids shouldn’t pay for it with instability in their home life and getting swapped back and forth between homes is nothing if not unstable (I know from personal experience). Plus I had two sons who needed a good male role model. What all this adds up to is initially the boys didn’t live with me.

I won’t lie, there are times even today when I wish I didn’t agree to let Rick have custody. Sometimes I wish I’d fought like a she-devil instead. Even though both sons ended up living with me later on anyway, I’ve always feared that they felt abandoned by me. I hope not, because nothing could be further from the truth.

I cannot tell you how awful that time was for me, even though I believed it was the best decision for them. Initially I still lived in the same town they did, so I saw them a couple of times a week. The following year, I moved to Kansas City, about 40 miles away, for a job that paid a wage I could live on and dig myself out of the divorce debt. I drove back every week to have dinner with them or hang out with them and I went to their school activities, but I never made them come stay with me. They were teenagers with busy lives and a lot of activities.

That was a bleak time. All of a sudden I had no part in their daily lives. I was in their lives, sure, but not part of the daily, mundane details. Moreover my opinions about those details weren’t wanted by their father. Even though our divorce was about as civil as those things can be, we both still had raw feelings so it’s not surprising he didn’t want to hear from me. I’ve never felt more helpless as I did when Rick told me he was letting the boys stay at home while he and his new wife and her children drove to Texas for spring break. I was appalled and also positive that my boys would go a little nuts while the house was empty. Sure enough, they did—and Rick was surprised. I wasn’t, what do you expect when you leave two teenagers alone like that? I guess he forgot what he was like as a teen.

I kept a journal then and I wrote over and over again about feeling as though I were a mother with no children. I felt entirely disenfranchised as a mother, almost as though I’d been stripped of that title. I began to realize how little control and influence we parents have. We think we have a lot even when they are teens but we don’t. I saw clearly that I hadn’t lost it when the boys went to live with their dad, in reality I hadn’t had it nearly as much as I’d thought I had. If I were to be entirely honest with myself, those days had ended as the boys left their toddler years behind.

But Rick still thought he had that ability—almost that right—and I watched from the sidelines of our children’s lives and saw his frustration with them grow. People talk about the teen years as being so awkward and difficult and I think that’s because so many times the parent struggles with realizing that molding/controlling/guiding role is ending whether they want it to or not. The relationship has to change because the child is becoming an adult and some parents struggle with making that shift.

The only benefit (and I hesitate to call it that) is that I started to see my sons as the adults they were becoming while they were in their teens. But I think I paid too high a price for starting the lesson early.

I *heart* Tim Gunn

I’m reading A Guide to Quality, Taste and Style by Tim Gunn and am absolutely enjoying the heck out of this book. Here’s a sample sentence from the chapter called Diagnosing the Common Closet that rang utterly true for me and made me laugh out loud as well:

Clothes do not exist to humiliate their owners. Please do not force garments into performing psychological tasks for which they were not designed (page 57).

I don’t know about you, but I do indeed force my clothing into the role of psychological torture devices—I worry that the color is wrong, or it makes me look fat or old or whatever. I’m letting the tail wag the dog. My clothes should be things I wear and feel fantastic in, not things I got on sale or thought maybe they’d work if only I *fill in the blank here*

This is all part and parcel of my determination to have far fewer clothes that also fit me as perfectly as possible in colors that are amazing for me. Of course I have a ton of doubts regarding my ability to execute any of that, but I'm sure going to try.

UPS delivered some of my fabrics yesterday and the serger I ordered is out for delivery today. Sewing knits still scares the snot out of me but the serger and all the online tutorials and articles I've found will help a lot. Wish me luck anyway, I think I will need it.

Niphead

You may remember the cats were not at all interested in the Ping-Pong balls (part of our efforts to keep the cats entertained), so I followed Jeanne’s excellent suggestion and put them in our catnip container for a couple of weeks. We remembered we put them in there this weekend and got the balls out to see if the cats were more interested now. They were, at least until the catnip smell wore off.

Eddie

Wally is a nut and gets a lot of well-deserved attention. It’s not entirely surprising he has 197 fans on Facebook. But Eddie had a lot of personality too.

For example, he likes to play fetch with us. He’ll bring one of his mice to us, meowing the whole way as he carries it in his mouth, drops it at our feet and starts crying. That’s our cue to pick up the mouse and toss it down the hall so he can scamper after it. He’ll play that game for 20-30 minutes at time. He’s also the cat who prefers to sleep under the covers with us and will head-butt us and cry at us until we let him in.

So here’s a short montage of a few typical Eddie moments.

Historic

We don’t really have a dining room in our apartment, although we do have a small dining nook. Previously the pass through was open the entire width of the kitchen; during reconstruction we added a wall on one side in the corner which allowed us to put a longer upper cabinet on the kitchen side and also provided a spot for a tiny table on the living room side.

And our table is tiny. We got it at Ikea, the masters of efficient furniture for small spaces. The table has two drop leaves; unopened it measures 28 inches by 31 inches (the 31 inches being the space across between the two diners). You could call it crowded but I prefer to say we experience intimate dining.

Each leaf adds another 11 ½ inches to the length of the table—the 28 inch side—so when it’s fully open it measures 51 inches long and can hold four people who better know each other well. When Ben and Jen and the kids come, we will need to either park the kids at the coffee table or pull out the craft table. There’s no way six people can fit at our table.

We rarely eat at the table. Honestly, our desk chairs are very comfortable so mostly we eat together at our desks. But when we have people over, we open up the table and pull out the two folding chairs we have that look like proper chairs (ours are black, not cherry).

I took this video one night when we were having some friends over for dinner. The table is so rarely open that all the cats felt the need to investigate what was going on. The rest is history.

Squished

Normally just one cat sleeps in the box. This time, Wally was in there first and Eddie wanted the box. So he jumped in. Even though it's a big box, it's not quite big enough.



After I took this video, Eddie started what I call offensive grooming, which is designed to annoy the cat receiving the grooming enough that he leaves. It worked and Eddie gained sole ownership of the box.

Adventures in duct tape, part two

So mini me is now stuffed. I call it mini me since it’s just half of me. It’s a bit crooked at the moment and I need to figure out how to straighten things out. If you look carefully, you can see some black lines near the bottom of the form. The tiny ones are for the length from there on me to the floor (38"). The longer mark on the right side of the dummy  is my natural waistline.

I ended up not using expanding foam but the poly stuffing you use in things like toy stuffed animals. Not that I can make those with any success. I’ve tried a couple of times and they looked like mutants.

Anyway—my fabric orders should be here in the next week so I’ll have a chance to do some crash testing with my dummy. If it doesn’t work, well then I guess I’ll track down a dress form that isn’t ridiculously expensive and give that a try.

Wardrobe ramblings

I dislike looking at my full closet and thinking I have nothing to wear. That offends every obsessive/compulsive part of me along with the clutter-hating side of me. I’ve gone through and purged lots over the years and of course I got an inadvertent purge in 2010 when we got our clothing back from the restoration company.

You’ve probably heard of the whole color me beautiful concept which slots everyone into one of four or 12 seasons depending on the system used. My mother had the book in the 80s which used four seasons and we had a lot of fun trying to figure out our colors. But I was always frustrated by the four season concept because while I most definitely look best in the cool colors—which indicates winter or summer—I look wretched in a true red or pure white. The few times I've worn red (and yes, it was a cool red not an orangey red), I got asked if I was coming down with something. Under the original system, that’s supposed to mean I’m not a winter but a summer. Well the summer colors are far less saturated than the winter versions of the same and I look really washed out in those. Over the years I loosely pegged myself as a winter but one who couldn’t wear red or white.

Since I’m really motivated to get back into sewing for myself and stepping up my tailoring ability, I’ve been doing a lot of reading both about creating wardrobes from the patterns I pick and about making sure everything goes with everything in ways that flatter me. The Stitchers Guild has a six-pack challenge going on (basically sew six items that all work together and do it in the third quarter.

Then I found this website where the author pulls together capsule wardrobes based on a single color (I linked to the post about navy blue). Well now that got my attention. And then I read this post (again on the Stitchers Guild) about how the color me beautiful people have expanded the seasons. In reading the list of colors for the three kinds of winter, I realized I always and I do mean always have navy, stone and some sort of magenta/aubergine/pink in my wardrobe. I also always get complimented on those colors.

So my plan is this: create six new items based on those three colors. I’ve got all my patterns and I’ve ordered three of the fabrics which you can see here:

How do you plan your clothing purchases? Or do you? What colors do you prefer?

Do I look like I know something?

I ask because Saturday while waiting for the train I had three separate people ask me (not Kent) if they were at the right spot for their train. And then it happened on the way home again—the guy next to me kept asking me which stop it was at almost every stop.

This happens a lot. In addition to people telling me personal details of their lives, they also ask me how to get places, how much something costs, what are the hours, etc, etc, etc.

I think I'll start giving cryptic Magic-8 ball style answers.

Mish-mash

Let’s see. After spending six hours on the train Saturday and then six hours again on Sunday, I’m ready to not see a train for a while. I liked some aspects of train travel more than traveling by plane (no TSA being the biggest one) but man those bathrooms got nasty really fast.

I’m determined to become good at adjusting my sewing patterns so that I get a really good fit in my clothing. Over the last week, I've looked around online for how-tos, book recommendations, forums about sewing and also blogs. I’ve discovered a handful of well-written sewing blogs with nary a cutesy project in sight and let me tell you, these women can sew. What did we do before the internet? How did people with similar interests find each other??

I still haven’t stuffed the duct tape me yet. I need to get over to Joann’s for the cotton batting along with some other sewing supplies, but I really don’t like to go there. The crafter moms scare me. Plus Joann’s isn’t really a place for getting good fabric or patterns any more. These days the store is full of little knickknacks and Look! No Sewing! kinds of projects.

Kent is in London this week. Last week I told him I was not at all pleased he and his co-worker were heading over while those riots were going on. I asked him to make entirely sure the important meetings they were flying in for were really going to happen. He also realized that where they’d planned to stay was not a great spot since some of the unrest had been going on there. So they moved their hotel to one by Heathrow. Kent said if rioters come out there, then they are beyond bored because truly there’s nothing out there except the airport and a couple of hotels.

I'm very low energy today. I’m still wiped out from the weekend and also from the unrelenting rain that we’ve got in Boston right now. The cats have been sleeping most of the day too and that’s always a snooze-inducer.

An adventure in duct tape

Which also ended up sparking a lot of thought about things like body images, food issues and how those things affect daily life.

First, here’s me in duct tape. I look exhausted because I am. The process really did take about 90 minutes. And to avoid painful hair removal, I have my hair up in a clip with a headband for the stragglers at my neck. Although the comments on the website directions almost all said the wrappees got hot and had trouble breathing, I did not. In fact, Kent was the one who got hot.

We may need to redo the process with a longer t-shirt because I think the form would be better if it were longer. And we’re not sure how to get her cinched up—she’s actually bigger than I am which the comments also said would happen. I need to go back and reread how people solved that issue. I think Kent was afraid to pull the tape as tightly as it needed to go, plus my sacrificial t-shirt wasn’t really long enough.

Plus we still need to fill her. That’s going to be a chore and I am a little concerned the expanding foam will distort the form. But at least we’ve given the cheap method a try first.

Now the rest.

Kent will tell you when he’s stressed, he eats for comfort. Generally I don’t. I’ll know I’m hungry but food becomes almost something abstract to me and so I don’t eat.

I mostly know my triggers. I’ve found that certain kinds of emotional stress or having utter chaos in my personal or professional life or getting weighed and told the weight or counting calories usually means that dragon rumbles back to life.

But I also gained some weight the last six-eight months while working at DMT and would like to lose it. There’s nothing like sitting on your butt two to three hours a day for your commute to ruin an exercise plan! And that’s the issue: how does a woman with a known food issue drop a few pounds without triggering a sort of scorched earth policy toward food?

I also have a completely unrealistic idea of what my body actually looks like. I use work out videos pretty regularly and I always pick one of the people in it who looks like me. Or I think she looks like me. I told Kent about that and pointed to the woman in the video I thought was my body double and he about choked on his coffee. Apparently she is much larger than I am. I could have sworn we were the same size.

So I dragged my feet this week in getting the duct tape dress form made. You can see the potential pitfalls, right? Creating a tape form of me might be OK or it might be a swift wake up call to the dragon. The jury is still out on that but at least I don’t look at the form and think she’s a fat cow.

Bird watching

After reading Animals Make Us Human, I realized we need to do more to get our cats moving and using their brains. Otherwise, much as mischievous toddlers, they tend to find their own destructive entertainment.

We didn’t have any bored cats in Kansas City but our house was also three times bigger with three floors all accessible by the cats. Plus that house had a lot of windows looking out into the yard. We had a real yard with grass and trees so the cats saw plenty of birds and squirrels and even the dog. Here we have one floor that’s 1/3 the size, a stairway that leads to a blank door, and only three windows in the entire place. I’m sure they’ve been visually deprived. Outdoor living is not an option for me—I had a cat get quite sick from being an outdoor kitty (he picked up something from another cat) and he ultimately died. I’m just not willing to take the risk. Plus we live in urban Boston and if the rats didn’t get them, the cars or dogs would.

So I looked online and found a couple of websites with suggestions for providing a more stimulating environment for cats. We have always done a few of the suggestions (toys, the cat tree, the water fountain for example), but some were new to us and were inexpensive enough that I gave them a try.

The ping pong balls have been a dud so far. Neither of the boys were interested in them in the bathtub and they’ve only half-heartedly batted at them elsewhere. Jeanne suggested putting the balls in our catnip container (thank you again, V, for the catnip) so they are in their dry marinade. We'll try again in a few weeks.

I’m considering making a forage box although I’m not excited about having bits of kibble underfoot.

We keep their toys in a basket and had been putting the truly treasured ones away at night. We still put away the noisy ones (those that have bells or make rattling noises), but we leave the Velcro strips (Wally's absolute favorite toy in the universe) and the brightly colored fur mice (Eddie's favorite but they must be bright—he prefers orange or hot pink) out at night. The basket doesn't have a lid and they will go get their toys out, sometimes by hopping right in the basket to find exactly what toy is required. The basket isn't all that big, so as you might imagine, it's full of cat at that point.

And I got a birdfeeder and a stand on Friday and put it up. The birds didn’t notice it until Saturday and it was a hit with the birds and the cats. Unfortunately because it was on a stand, it got knocked off sometime Saturday night and broke into unfixable pieces. So we got a second feeder and hung it under the deck above us. It’s working beautifully except that it leaks massive amounts of seed onto the patio below. In turn that’s attracted squirrels which are not my favorite animal and I know the rats will be there too. So we need to figure out how to stop the seeds from just spilling out like crazy.

This video is condensed down from about five solid minutes of filming where the boys did exactly what you see here. They are enthralled by the birds and run from the window to the back door (all glass) to carefully watch the birds. I really love it when they engage their butt wiggles.

OK I'm bragging

But click through to this link and you can see the clothes I made for Alison and Eliot actually on them.

It really makes my day when Jen takes time to wrangle the kids into clothes I've made, take their pictures and post them on her blog. She's a super sweet daughter-in-law and I'm really glad she's in my family. Thank you, Jen!

Those were the days my friend

I’ve discovered a new blog that I really like and I hope the author keeps writing. I know Rob because he was our amazing photographer for our wedding—I didn’t know he was also a gifted writer.

He posted something on Saturday that got me thinking back on what it was like for me raising children. Being a stay-at-home dad, he deals with a sense of isolation and a lack of understanding from those who choose differently. I get that because I stayed home with my own sons when that option was frowned on by a lot of society, especially other women. So even though the reason for why I felt like an oddity wasn’t due to my gender, in a way it was.

He also wrote about the idea of when things will get better, about looking forward to an easier time. His examples were all ones I got: when the baby walks, goes to pre-school and so on. I experienced it in a little bit different way, probably because I’m such an impatient woman.

All my life I looked ahead to the next milestone: when I turned 16 and got my license I loved dangling those car keys as I ran errands for my mother. Look at me, those keys said, I’m 16 and can drive! But I couldn’t vote yet, nor buy alcohol and so I didn’t really stay in that enjoyment of hitting a major teen milestone. Even as I dangled the keys, I was thinking ahead to the next one: being a junior, a senior, graduating, maybe college. Anything but where I was right then.

When I turned 21, I happened to also be eight months pregnant and staying with my folks (my ex and I were stationed in Germany but didn’t want our child born there). So sure, I went out and bought liquor (as I recall it was a giant bottle of some cheap Gallo red for my mother), but even though I got carded (Yay! I'm 21!) I was too busy looking ahead to the next milestone of having that baby.

And then I had the baby and suddenly my life was full of upcoming milestones: sleeping through the night (a very long time in coming, like over a year), the first tooth (way too early at three and a half months), rolling over (six months), standing (six months—he was in a hurry too I guess), walking (eight months) and so on.

In my mid-30s, my life changed dramatically and I was forced to stop doing, doing, doing and just start being. That process lasted about three years and at the end of it without trying, I had changed fundamentally. I was still a goal-oriented woman, absolutely. But I had learned to live fully in the moment. I was present, fully present, for the first time in my life.

My son Ben likes to give me a hard time because he says I tell a lot of stories from when he and his brother were young. He’s right, I do. And I think reading Rob’s blog helped me piece together why I do that. I’m not actually interested in living in the past, not at all. I have a very good present, the best I could ever imagine having—and yes that’s even with the job loss, the floods and how unfriendly I find Boston. But telling those stories is the only way I have to be present in my own past.

So Ben will have to endure the stories, even when I repeat them. He and Jordan were really neat kids and I like remembering that. I wish I had been present then when they were little, but I wasn’t. I was too busy looking ahead. I’m present now in the only way I can be.

An experiment

If you’re friends with me on Facebook, you already know I had problems with a princess seam yesterday in a dress I’m making.

Even though I’ve sewn for years, I’ve never really learned to tailor fit my clothing. I took the easy way out by choosing patterns that were more boxy in style—boxy by design so I didn’t have to adjust much. I’ve always adjusted things like where the waist falls (I am a little short-waisted) but I never did anything else to alter a pattern.

This pattern is a McCall’s pattern; I have a long-standing dislike of their patterns because the directions always seem a bit off to me (and yes I know, McCall’s owns just about all the pattern names now). I loved the old Simplicity patterns and also Butterick or Very Easy Vogue. As a quick aside, Vogue rates their patterns easy, average and advanced. I think I’ve made just one average pattern. It was a Ralph Lauren dress and while it turns out beautifully, it was very hard for me. So if that’s average? I won’t bother with advanced.

Anyway I ran into two problems with the bodice: the fabric from top to bottom of the bodice in front isn’t really long enough. I had this problem in a bikini I made when I was 16. I know my parents still don’t believe I added almost two inches to the top but I did and it was still on the skimpy side. Well that and it was almost the exact color of my skin. I was really naïve.

So the bodice needs to be longer in front and the second problem is that my back is narrow. That means the bodice back is too big. This is something that’s hard to fix by yourself, you need another pair of hands to pin and fit the blasted thing.

Enter the dressmaker’s form. Now you can buy these things and some of them can be adjusted a lot of ways and some very little. But none are cheap and I’m watching my pennies. So I looked around online and found directions for making a dressmaker’s form out of duct tape.

Kent’s agreed to help and with luck I’ll have a dressmaker’s form this weekend. I got the duct tape already (black for the two under layers and the cool almost tie-dyed tape for the outer layer), but I still need a long t-shirt that can be sacrificed to the cause plus a lot of stuffing to fill that baby up. I’ll post pictures and a postmortem of the final product.

I have a bored cat

I just finished reading Animals Make Us Human by Templin Grandin (thank you Jeanne, by the way where shall I send it now?) and I’m convinced the reason Wally gets into so much mischief is because he’s bored.

Here’s a partial list of what he does to get attention:

• Bang kitchen cabinet doors (any time of the day or night)
• Flush the toilet (any time—very freaky if I’m home alone)
• Close a door from our bedroom into the bathroom or the hall (prefers to do this at night). Keep in mind both doors require him to move another object which is placed there specifically to thwart him from closing the door. He just laughs at our feeble efforts.
• Attack his brother but only briefly, just long enough to get my attention
• Drop cat toys in the water dish
• Get into the cat toy box and loudly root around looking for new toys
• Shred toilet paper or paper towel (I think which he chooses depends on his mood)

Here’s a video of today's trick—with my apologies in advance for the camera wobbles. He got up on the machine this morning and wouldn't leave once I started sewing. I thought for sure the noise of the machine would be enough like the vacuum cleaner which all three cats fear. But no, he stayed. So I got the camera, held it with my left hand and continued sewing:

Tsk tsk

Oh athletic clothing makers, do you not realize there are those of us who actually wear sports bras and have zero interest in your useless shelf bras you put in every single athletic top? And that in fact your shelf bras only add another layer of heat-trapping cloth?

And while I’m at it, did you not realize that some of us intensely dislike the plastered-to-your-torso effect in said workout tops? Also, did you know that not all of us are long-waisted waifs?

I dream of a day when I can buy a yoga or running top without the stupid shelf “bra,” and that doesn’t come down to the tops of my thighs, and isn’t imitating cling wrap. Until then I will use my el-cheapo tank top from Target and my decidedly not el-cheapo sports bra that actually works. And if I stay unemployed much longer, I may tackle workout clothing as a sewing project.

More sewing

This is a picture of the pair of aprons I made for some newlywed friends. They've told us they want to cook together the way we do, so our wedding presents to them had that in mind. In addition to the aprons, we gave them a microplane and a really good vegetable peeler plus a jar of our hot red pepper flake-infused olive oil. We've found the peeler, the microplane and oil indispensable in the kitchen.

He's an interesting guy in that he has very clear ideas of what constitutes girly and therefore inappropriate for men. So even though I found some really cool fabric that was more kitchen-y, I didn't buy it because I figured he would think it was too girly, and he wouldn't use the apron. So they each get a nice, neutral seersucker fabric instead!

Supervisory duties

Any time we print anything Wally is right by the printer watching the entire process. I was a little slow getting the camera for this video but pretend it's 20 seconds longer because he can and does just sit there for pages and pages of printing.