Sunday Sundry 4-22-12

Let's pop the lid on another edition of Sunday Sundry, shall we?  It's been awhile.

Friends, I have spent a good deal of my spare time this past week trying to piece together something other than a quilt.

I've been doing some genealogy work, and it's led down some interesting trails, one that leads all the way back to the middle ages and a place called Shropshire in England.  Does anyone who reads this happen to live near there or have visited?  It looks like an entirely lovely place, there on the border of Wales.  Of course, things must have been somewhat less than lovely when the ancestor decided to shove off across the pond around the mid seventeenth century.

Whittington Castle, Shropshire (photo credit)

I have had some crazy dreams in the midst of this research.  One night, after clicking back and back and back and back on an ancestral line on the internet, I dreamed I was part of a relay team, but the hitch was that we had to run a 13-mile course backwards—as in literally running backwards.  If you turned around and ran any of it the normal way, you would be disqualified.  Speed was not as important in this race as was just doing it properly.  

Now, I am not a runner in waking life, never have been, but this navigating the course backwards thing?  I thought, I can do this!  In my dream, the other members of my team disappeared one by one, dropped out, or maybe got disqualified, I don't know.  As for me, I was into this running backwards thing and really putting the miles behind (in front of?) me.  It felt kind of...awesome.

But back in the here-and-now, in my non-REM hours, I am eager to move forward. On Monday, I am due to have a couple of relatives drop by who are also researching our family history.  The plan is to share what each of us has, and I am hoping to pass the baton, as it were, to the more willing and able.  This work is fascinating, but I'd rather be sewing and working on things for which the finish line is in sight.  First, though, I'm going to have to clean up the paperwork strewn across my sewing table, ironing board, and numerous other surfaces in the sewing room.  I can't even see my cutting mat at the moment, and that's a bit disturbing.

A pair of mallards dropped in for a visit.

It's been sort of cool and dreary this week, but the sun shone today and Norm and I needed to get out of the house.  We went for a drive to a Goodwill about a half hour away, where I spotted this. 

In all honesty, my first thought was that it was rather fugly, albeit in an interesting kind of way, which prompted me to turn it over and look for a mark.

Haeger!  I should have known.  It had a layer of schmutz and spider poo on it, but it cleaned up nicely, and now I think its true beauty shines through.  I mean, just look at that gorgeous glaze.  No, seriously, the glaze.  It'll take your mind off the stuff that looks like brain matter.

I thought it was perhaps a cookie jar, but on finding this grouping on flickr, it appears that it was part of a canister set.  I intend to look it up in one of my Haeger reference books, but that's another thing buried somewhere around here that I need to excavate.

I've also been in the mood to find some good, new (to me) music.  What are you listening to these days?