Do a Little Dance

The Jig is Up

There are some interesting people in this world, a slice of which you may very well encounter at your neighborhood big box store.  You've all seen the pictures and know the joke about "the people of" the store that starts with a W.  Like the woman using her ample cleavage as a cell phone holder, while she's talking on said phone and pushing her cart with her freed-up hands down the cereal aisle.  Or the guy in the bright pink baseball cap, short denim skirt and heels, with way nicer legs than mine, to note a couple of visions etched in my own memory.

So yesterday, we're at this particular W-world in a long, slow line.  I don't know if half the checkers called in sick or what, but all the lanes were stacked several carts deep each.  We happened to be in line behind a very nice-looking young woman.  She had her hair in a loose up-do, which struck me as a little odd for the time of day and season, and just above the collar of her shapely fitted white wool coat, at the nape of her tanned neck, was the beginning of what looked like a fascinating tattoo.  She was wearing jeans and brown suede high-heeled boots, unloading a mounded cart full of fairly unremarkable stuff, including cat food and a red plastic snow shovel.  Then she cordoned off a second, separate order of personal-type stuff:  Disposable razors, baby wipes, mouthwash.  In retrospect, I imagine these may have been work-related expenses.

You have time to notice this stuff when you're in line for 15 minutes and they're out of People magazine, which you would otherwise be perusing.

So she gets everything checked out and the cashier tells her it's $249 and some odd cents.  I'm thinking she'll be swiping her debit card, but no.  No, no, no.  She starts pulling cash out of her purse by the fistfuls.

And not just any cash:  All one-dollar bills.  Loosely gathered stacks of them.  She starts handing these to the cashier, who, after mouthing the words "I'm sorry," to me and those behind me in line, has to then count out piles of 10 bills each, layering them in a particular way they must be taught at cashier school.  I don't know; she had a system, is what I'm saying.  (Later the cashier tells me that $91 in one-dollar bills had been the most she'd heretofore had to count from a customer; and before I've paid, a store manager has had to come and switch out the cash drawer, because apparently $249 in singles makes it really hard to close.)

At this point, I turned to Norm and rolled my eyes at the unforeseen delay.  And I may also have muttered something about somebody having had a particularly good night, as well as something about making it rain.

"I get a lot of tips," the customer offered the cashier voluntarily as she forked over another wad.  And then she added, maybe a bit too quickly, "I'm a bartender."

The cashier looked up from the bills for a moment and said, "You must be a really good bartender."

At which point it was physically impossible for anyone to stifle a smile.

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Do the Hustle

After shopping, we decided to catch a movie.  We saw American Hustle.

Loved it.  Best film I have seen in a long time.  (Before that, it was Silver Linings Playbook, which coincidentally is by the same director.)



I love character-driven movies, and this was all that and a bucket of popcorn.  Fantastic performances, and funny too.  Christian Bale?  I leaned over to Norm at one point during the film and said, "They should just hand him the Oscar right now."  He WAS that character.  Amy Adams, Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper (with a perm), Jeremy Renner (with a pompadour), Louis C.K., Robert DeNiro were stellar, every one of them.

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Step by Step

I spent time over the weekend doing all the ditch quilting on the Ironwork quilt from a year or two ago.  I've had the quilt basted together since September.

Meanwhile, I needed some of my basting pins back for other stuff, so I reckoned I could do at least all the straight line quilting around the brown parts to stabilize the quilt.  I also put the binding on, because the narrow edge was starting to fray.

I need to practice a bit before I go back and quilt the large open spaces.  I've never put a binding on before finishing a quilt, so it'll be interesting to see how that works.  Will the additional quilting pull the quilt out of square?  We shall see.

Every quilt seems to be a learning experience of some sort.  I learned that I probably should go back and knot and bury my thread ends instead of just relying on backstitching to anchor them when straight line quilting.  I have never done that before and did not do it on this one either, but probably should have.
Live and learn.