Penny Sanford Porcelains

My New Name is Penny Le'Pew

Gordon and I are on the road to Taylorsville, Mississippi, to give a program this afternoon.  In follow up to yesterday's Permeating Perm Saga, I dug down in the computer to find this old silly that I wrote after another hair adventure right at two years ago, May 2, 2006.

The little salt and pepper skunks I photographed awhile back just to share with you when I shared this hair story. Daddy brought them back to me after some business trip.  I am told that I was mad for skunks when I was a little tyke. There must have been a skunk- related movie or cartoon between 1965 to 1967... an estimated time frame for my Skunk Obsession.

Oh, and I am still with the same beautician. She is an artist with hair, and I treasure her as a person. The story below was just her "Picasso Period", I guess.

My New Name is Penny Le'Pew!
May 2, 2006

Remember the cartoon character of  Peppi Le'Pew, the little skunk with the thick French accent that constantly chased black female cats that had accidentally been painted with a white stripe down their back, making them look like a skunk?

Wellllll..........

My long-trusted beautician suddenly, without provocation,  put in ALL blond highlights in my hair today, and she did not tell me until after the deed was done!

Either she lost her memory...... or her mind.... because her three year old was underfoot tearing down the beauty shop piece by piece....or she was out of auburn/red highlights, and she figured she could bluff and con me into the Striped Skunk look!   Maybe she was retaliating because I had to unavoidably cancel and reschedule my last appointment.

She told me of this drastic, dramatic, impending change in my life as she was rinsing me out.  "I have a surprise for you, Miss Penny,"  she brightly said.  "You look so cute with highlights, and you are so sassy and fun....that I decided to put all blond highlights in your hair.  You are just going to LOUUUVVVEEEE it !!!!

Gathering the courage to look in the mirror, I discovered that I look just like a multi-striped skunk!!!!  It makes me envious of Cruella DeVile's straightforward black and white "do"!

Some of the highlights are platinum blond to white!

The beautician even had the nerve to say that this camouflaged my gray hair!......HECK YEAH!!!!!.....It makes me look like I have three times as much gray hair!  Ya can't see my "real" gray hair for all the new fake gray hair!!!!!

YIKES!

We have laughed at it a good bit today.....laughed because I think I can salvage the situation with an all over auburn hair color that will at least turn the platinum and blond into light to medium auburns.....HOPEFULLY!....I did notice that Mama, Unc, Gordon and Dollie did more laughing than I did.... Hmmmnnnnnnnn

Now, I've seen some runway models and TV Talking heads pull off the strong contrast of blond/platinum highlights on average brown hair.....but not this 44-year-old-conservative-rolley-polley-skunk......At least a "dirty blond" job has layers of color over time that blend together nicely.

Think of well-defined brown with WIDE white and cream pinstripes...like wallpaper, and you have a picture of my hair!

Contrast this to what the hairdresser HAS been doing with my hair the past few years....
artfully blending some dark, medium and light auburn shades into my hair in a subtle pattern of little tiny highlights as if candlelight were flickering over the "natural" highlights of my hair...LOL..
At least that is my story, and I am sticking to it!

Friday and Saturday are DAR-do's, so I will let my hair rest until Thursday and then try to salvage the situation with a home all-over color job. 

Coming back home this afternoon, I called ahead to prepare Mama, Unc and Gordon.  This is the same mother who warned me against piercing my ears my senior year of high school because I was mutilating my body.  Hair color, she was convinced, was surely the creation of Lucifer himself!  Makeup was achieved one category at a time after serious negations over months....AFTER I graduated high school!
This afternoon, I knew I had to spend the 20 minute drive back home preparing Mama for what she was about to see on the head of her only child!

The dogs were not sure whether to greet me or chase me...but they sure did a lot of sniffing!  I guess Penny Le'Pew is a bit more odoriferous that plain Penny!

Ahhhhh, LIFE is never dull.....This is another one for the silly memories I will remember and chuckle over one day.

Let me hear your Beauty Shop Disasters and how you survived......

Penny Sanford Fikes  AKA Penny Le'Pew
(laughing at myself in Mississippi)

The Stinky Path to Beauty

Just a note between deadlines. I have a few more deadlines to meet tonight, but I need a break, and this chat with you is my refreshing break!

I have a real-life-hubby-should-be-in-the-doghouse-if-it-were-not-so-funny story to share with you.

I came back from the beauty shop this morning, and Gordon and I settled down to work on some screaming paperwork deadlines. This was icky business stuff that HAD to be postmarked before 4 pm today when our little local post office closes.

We started in the studio. You already know that I use the bed as if it is an office desk or a design table. 

If it can be done with pillows stacked high supporting my back and Westies snuggled all around, then I try to accomplish my little projects propped up like a Chinese Princess, from our comfy bed. Picture Shirley Maclaine in Guarding Tess.

Gordon sat down on the edge of the bed as we discussed the deadline.  He suddenly made one of those irritated, impatient faces and mumbled something about the dogs needing to go out. 

Out they all went in a flurry of white fur and happy yippey sounds and little nails clattering against the floor.  I did not smell any puppy poots, but I was pre-occupied with the leering deadlines.

Cut to about an hour later, in the den-turned-office in the farmhouse.  Gordon and I were wheeling around in our office chairs, barely staying out of each other's way in the area of our conjoined desks. Westies were finding safe nooks under the desks to nap and be clear of the desk chair wheelies.

Gordon suddenly hopped out of his chair, muttering with definite irritation and took the dogs outside again. Westie flurries followed with the added excitement of English Shepherd stomachs to race under. 

(I still hope to catch a picture of one of the English Shepherds looking down at the white Westies as one takes a short cut under an English Shepherd tummy. I promise you, those English Shepherds have expressions that clearly say, "I'm STILL not convinced you are all dog. There has got to be some cat in there!")

But back to Gordon.  He came back in, again with an excited frenzy of 32 furry paws (eight dogs) racing to the kitchen to see who would be first at the BIG enamel pan of water. He sat down at the desk and checks the bottom of each shoe.  Gordon grumbled with a good bit more animation, but I had no brain cells to spare to even listen at that moment.

About thirty minutes later, I asked Gordon to check my math, and he wheeled over to look.  Before he picked up the calculator, he examined the bottoms of both feet again and started to get up to take the dogs out.

Then it hit me.  He was smelling my new perm, but he thought it was something the dogs had done or something he had stepped in.  I asked Gordon to confirm the source of the smell by sniffing my hair.  He emphatically declined, and we had a big hearty laugh!

Now, Gordon and I have been married over four years...sneaking up on 4 and a half years.  In that time, my hair has required something like 14 to 16 perms, about one every three or four months.

One would think that my dear sweet husband might have encountered the dreaded perm smell once or twice in the last four-and-a-half years.

More to the point, just how many times must one smell a stinky perm before that smell is embedded in one's memory banks?  More than 16 times, apparently for my geeky-intelligent husband!

Aaaahhhh, men and their short-term memories are fun to play with!  This has had me thinking of the wide range of smells in female beauty products. I may have to torture poor Gordon some more...and very soon!

When did your man learn that "natural beauty" came at an expensive, painful and smelly price?

Why NOT To Bring Motorcycle Into The House

Well fiddle faddle! This is an urban legend! Thanks to Charlie for letting me know. Here is the history of this story with many incarnations. Sorry folks!

-------------

We had a wonderful, productive day on the farm. I even have cute pictures to share with you.

But a friend in Texas sent this via email.  Sorry I don't know the location of this newspaper.  The editor did a fab job of relating this story! 

Man brings motorcycle into living room to repair it.

Man cranks motorcycle up INSIDE the house.
.....I don't want to spoil the funny parts!

Gordon and I are still laughing; the Westies are trying to figure out what is going on!

Just click on the image to make the article easier to read!

 

The View Through a Lace Curtain

Sometimes I wonder if I only view life through a lace curtain of the past. As if I am trying to hide a little from the glare of reality? 

A distant cousin in our Hamer line died last night. She was in her 90's; she was eaten up with cancer; she is out of pain.

Our family is dwindling so fast, partly because of at least three generations of childless couples, including Gordon and me.

We were talking about family history this afternoon, Mama, Unc and I.  William Hamer, the one who built the house in which they live, had ten children. William was one of eight siblings.

Then came the Civil War.  Some of William's girls did not marry. One of his sons died in bachelorhood of yellow fever while carving a new farm out of the Arkansas territory with two of his brothers.

The War itself had not killed the men of our family.  All the eligible men in all of our family branches of the family had signed up to fight.

My uncle told me something new tonight about my forefathers.  James Hamer, who had bought this land sight unseen in 1837 after the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek opened up this section of Mississippi territory, had taught his boys that after every two or three generations, a farm-based family like ours needs to move to new territory and open up a new farm.

The land would be depleted of nutrients after a couple of generations. This was long before manufactured fertilizers, folks.

That is what James had been taught by his father and grandfather.  So, after the death of his wife Ann Flowers Hamer (complications following childbirth), James took his four boys and embarked by wagons to the undeveloped Mississippi territory. 

William was eight, the oldest of the four boys, at the time of that life-changing trip from the Carolinas to Mississippi.

Can you imagine the impact that trip made on an eight year old little boy? Traveling hundreds of miles by wagon with all of the family possessions to a wilderness?

So even after the Civil War devastated our male population in Mississippi, and even after Reconstruction continued to inflict inappropriate torture on a defeated people, William struggled to scrimp and save and buy land in Arkansas and Texas for his boys to get a fresh start on virgin land.

But that seems to be where the emotional scars of The War stopped the Westward movement of that particular line of my family.

The reason that little tidbit of family information is worthy to ponder is because of how I was raised.

I am the sixth generation of our Hamer family to live and work on this farm...the sixth generation of the same adventurous family to stay in one place. England to Jamestown to Maryland to North Carolina to South Carolina to Mississippi...

From movers and shakers to survivors of a devastating war and then a surviving generation of people just hanging on by their fingernails to survive. Those crumbling expectations and experiences of life passed on to the next generation...and then the next. 

I grew up expecting to be the last in line to inherit this farm. By word of mouth and by example of those before me, I learned my role as keeper of the family name and keeper of the family stories and artifacts.

I readily accepted those expectations and added plenty of my own expectations. It can be a bit overwhelming, at times.

I guess, even as a child, I knew that there would be no seventh generation of Hamers with which to share the stories and artifacts and land. It seems I've always known I was the last in my line. (I just realized that while writing this post.)

This distant cousin who died last night was also a Keeper of the Family History. Even in her last week, she talked to my mother about family pictures and her genealogy research.

I think I've hit overload this week on pondering the past, seeking and absorbing information from the my family's past.

Who coined the phrase, "The past steps on the heels of the future?"  It is so profoundly true! How much of our present and future do we allow to be molded by the choices made in previous generations?

Deep stuff, I know. This is an equal part of my emotional makeup and my art.  It is not depression, I promise.

This is little wisp of introspection is like a spring breeze that stirs a lace curtain and tempts one with the sweet promises of the garden beyond.

Tonight I need to take a break from continuing kiln problems and porcelain deadlines and ..... and.... Sweet Gordon is washing all the dishes that had piled up from a dreadfully busy and tiring week.

Happy yellows and funny puppy stores will resume soon, I promise!

The camellias are from friend Emma Crisler's yard in Port Gibson, MS. She is also a Keeper of the Family History in her family.

My Latest Sewing Project!

Here it is... My latest sewing project. I've not picked up a needle and thread in over a month, literally.

Yes, I've been going through with -drawals from sewing.  I've been more irritable, impatient, trouble sleeping, headaches... all the stress that I would normally have stitched into fabric never made it out of my body.

So, my latest sewing project is a combination of necessity, genetic frugality (from my Scottish bloodlines), and eccentricity (from all of my Southern bloodlines).

Glasses.  That little screw has been falling out for months. One of my sculpting tools is perfect for putting it back in. I've glued the little little bugger in, but it is as tenacious in seeking freedom as one of the terriers!

Finally a piece of the earpiece broke at that hinge. No way to put the screw back in. Electrician's tape kinda, sorta, maybe held it together the latter part of last week, but my glasses would fall off when I looked down, leaving that ear piece sticking out of my hair like a pencil behind my ear. 

This happened during speeches, meetings, etc. People SHOULD have laughed, but their good manners restrained them.

I DO have another pair of glasses, bought at the same time and put up to wait for the day I had scratched these lenses with porcelain dust.  Er... but I can't remember where I put the extra pair of glasses. 

I'm TOUGH on eye glasses, or rather, the porcelain dust is TOUGH on glasses... like a pair every six months!

SO, I'm rather proud of my hand-sewn glasses (in a laugh- with- me way).

I did a button -hole stitch all around the little circle where the screw would have gone if the itty bitty piece had not fallen off.

If I had a little time, I think I would like to re-do it in a pretty yellow embroidery floss.  Maybe a little beaded thingy to dangle down from it. 

I do recommend using betweens (needles)... the little bitty ones I use in needle turn applique... if you ever have need to customize your own pair of glasses. *wink*

Now I have time to continue the archaeological dig for my other pair of glasses, and the money saved can go toward a new photocopier. 

Yes, the photocopier that has been with me since 1992 when I established my studio, has passed away.  Today.  That was 16 years from one heavily-used photocopier!  I have been quite proud of the little girl, churning out the copies year after year, tirelessly... long after I had paid for her in full. Sixteen years should be some kinda record for a heavily -used photocopier!

I'm really bummed about it. Like losing a friend or a pet.  I wonder if Unc and Gordon could be talked into digging a BIG hole out with the pet graves so that I can plant a tree on top of the copier grave. 

That does have something of a poetic ending to it... tree planted to commemorate the death of a photocopier that processed a gazillion little pieces of trees (paper).

Here's a bouquet of the latest daffodils to start blooming in the yard.  We have three or four varieties of pink and white daffodils. I'm not sure which one is in this picture. Salome and Pink Surprise are two names I remember planting.

The first daffodil picture is of Salome, I am pretty sure.  It opens as a pinky coral and matures into a pale peachy pink with a yellow halo at the base of the trumpet.

If I have time, I'll look in the external hard drive where we store all the archived digital pictures and scans and find a pretty picture I set up back in 1993 or 1994 in the parlor with these pink daffodils. I had planned to paint it in oils.

Yes, one day, I WILL get back to oils and canvas!

The second bouquet of daffodils, picked one week earlier is not Professor Einstein... and I can't remember the name.  Do you know?

Consider either of these to be a bouquet for you from the farm.  I wish you could all drop by and pick big armfuls of these happy flowers for yourself... especially on a typical Monday like today.

Self Portrait

Waking Up With the Giggles

The birds woke me up about 15 minutes ago.  Not Alfred Hitchcock's Birds, but happy, bustling, pretty little songbirds. They were singing in such a glorious impromptu concert, worthy of a royal command performance!

Then I squinted, sans glasses in the half light, to check on the inside furry court jesters.  Mackie is SO tired from his nocturnal patrol duties.  He has become our own personal Delta Force soldier, except his white fur totally destroys his stealth mode. Maybe that is why he gets dirty so fast. He is covering himself with mud or dirt in his attempt at Westie Camoflage.

Annie has taken over a pillow I knocked off the bed during the night. She only stretches when I scratch her neck and rub her back. I don't think she has even waked up when I have petted her this morning.

Elvis was too dirty to get up on the bed last night, so he is still a bit miffed. He has lifted his head to look at me clattering away on the laptop, but then he did his Westie teddy-bear-stretch imitation and collapsed again on his pink flannel blankie.

Oh, and the giggle part.  Lillibeth (our Southern Belle Westie)is having a bout of painful hips and knees, Dysplasia.  She saw me spread the heating pad out over her spot on the bed last night, and she made a bee-line to get on it.  It is one of those heating pads that shuts itself off after a certain length of operation, so the first thing I did after the birds woke me was look at the controls and note from the red light that the little hip warmer needed to be turned on again.

I was doing my own imitation of a mini sit-up scrunch, trying to reach the controls of the heating pad... remember those diabolical exercises where you are already in a scrunch and you make small movements to hone those abs? They are a major pain which is why I don't do them. *sasssy grin*

Apparently Gordon woke from the scrunch disturbances on the bed, only to see his wife making some really weird movements and sounds in the half light. He started giggling, trying to ask me what in the heck I was doing...and that started us both giggling.

Giggle fest finally over... the birds are now silent.  I think they stopped singing to listen to us giggle, or they have flown off to work on their nests. 

The Always Vigilant Westies did not even stir to see what was going on.  Lillibeth has sneezed in approval of the warmth that is radiating out of the magic blanket beneath her.

I rolled over to share these happy thoughts with you, and Gordon is checking his email, after a failed attempt to discuss prescription medicine prices and whether we might save a few bucks by moving the prescriptions to drugstore.com. phhtttttttt~~~

We have a No Business Talk Right Before Sleep or First Thing in the Morning Rule, but he forgot.  He really does not understand why I established that Rule in the first place. Men are so WEIRD!  *grin*

Sweet, forgetful hubby is not going to dampen my happy housewifey mood this early morning! He should order up one of these amazing bouquets of flowers for me today... tout de suite! Aren't they adorable?

Special family friend Honey Johnston in Columbus, MS, sent these email pass-along pictures to me recently. No attribution, but I suspect this is an idea out of Japan where there is a much greater cultural tolerance of sugary cuteness.

The flower bouquets look just like our Westies! I wish they were available locally or even online!

I washed and trimmed Lara yesterday. Six months after rescue, she is finally looking like a properly loved Westie. She was so cute outside, prancing around with her new "do"!

But lickety-split, by the time Gordon retrieved the camera to snap a picture to share with you, she was already covered in fresh mud, and she was absolutely de-lighted with herself! That is just as it should be.

All those years of being in a Puppy Mill cage, and she is free to dig in hot pursuit of moles or roll in the rain soaked back yard or race to the bird feeders just to see the birds take flight in a thunderous whooosh of feathers and bird reprimands. 

Yes, all is right with our little world on the farm this morning, whatever might pop up today. I love mornings like this.

Wish I Were More Like A Dafffodil

This is my favorite flower. The old fashioned, humble ubiquitous yellow daffodil that outlines the ghosts of old house sites...like chalk around a dead body. 

This little flower gives itself away completely in a long-lasting, rich, heady perfume... so memorable.  This modest beauty is far more giving of its scent than the flashier hybrid bulbs on the market.

Most of the scents I wear throughout the year have notes of this fragrance in varying quantities.  That was a curious realization the other year.

This simple harbinger of spring often emerges from the cold, soggy Mississippi soil in January or February, only to be frozen, covered with ice, its growth restrained, and forced to wait to show off its true talents.

I am so inspired by this flower. Every year it infuses me with fresh creativity and stamina. 

It is a leader of spring, a leader of other flowers.  It sets a high standard of giving... giving beauty and giving in fragrance and giving with stamina.

Under cover of topsoil, the bulb is dividing again and again, sharing itself over and over so that after a few years, the clump of bulbs can be dug up and shared. Continuing to give.

This is a tough little beauty.  I'm not sure when this variety was first noted in known botanical references, but I suspect this little inauspicious bulb has traveled by wagon to most of the states in this country.  I'll have to research the history and specific name of this variety.

I'd like to be as hardy and indefatigable as this simple daffodil. In the third photo, you can see that one stem held three equally beautiful blooms.  So many of our bulbs of this variety produce triplets like this!

The bulbs that mark long extinct farm buildings here are never fertilized.  In the days my uncle kept cows, a nutrient-rich paddy might have dropped near some clumps of these bulbs, but for the most part, the nutrients that sustain these flowers on the farm come from rain.  Nutrients from Heaven.

How does this lowly little daffodil do its stuff year after year after year?

It's looks up and grows toward the sky, absorbing the warmth of the sun, being fed by the rain.

Gordon and I should be in Texas this week. He should be enjoying time with his family; I should be learning and sewing and growing artistically in a week-long Ruth McDowell workshop.

Something happened that required us to stay here. Since last Wednesday... for over a week... we have spent at least half a day each day peeling back the layers of untruths in order to protect Mama and Unc and the farm from an unscrupulous businessman.

The details are not important to share at this time. 

When I took the dogs out this afternoon I was once again irresistibly drawn to the happy yellow that looks as if so many gallons of vivid yellow paint has been splashed over the meadows around the house.

That is when I was struck by the significance of this flower in my life... the inspiration, the survivability, the generosity, the leadership, the steadfast reliability of this lowly common old-fashioned early daffodil.

It has been a rough year for our family, so far. There are more challenges ahead this year... challenges we can call by name and even more challenges we cannot anticipate.

Restoration, rest and even good health for our family will have to come from God.  We are in a season of personal growth, strengthening through troubles, trial by fire.

This daffodil reminded me today that God may allow some painful events that knock us back to the ground, but like this brave little daffodil, we can choose to re-emerge from the ground, bloom again, give away every molecule of the scent (talent) God has given us, bring color and refreshment to others, and trust God to nourish us... so that we can continue the cycle the next day, the next week, the next month... the next year.

Thanks to a fragile little flower, this evening I am refreshed, uplifted, calm, happy, encouraged, and I even enjoyed a therapeutic giggle as Lillibeth decided to eat her daffodil!

Must Regenerate

Every year since I opened my studio in 1992, I've worked against some wicked deadlines, especially for Christmas.  Our Christmas "rush" begins in mid to late summer.

Every year, my physical batteries have run down.  Each year, the degree to which my batteries are depleted has increased... until Gordon.

When Gordon and I married (four years ago as of December 31, 200 7), he started making me rest during crunch times.

Gordon is absolutely right, I admit. I'm just unable to make myself rest.

The last four  years, I have been able to work longer, sculpt more, etc., until after Christmas when it is time to crash and rest. 

You know how it is...you reach the point where you just can't afford to feel tired, so you just ignore the physical and mental fatigue so that you can meet deadlines.

This year, I crashed on Christmas Eve.  I slept like I was in a coma. Same on Christmas Day and the Day after Christmas.

We did get out in the glorious sunshine on Christmas Day to go put flowers on family graves, and I took a long nap when we got home! LOL

Today, two days after Christmas, I still slept until noon, but the spark is coming back.

My sweet Gordon guards this much-needed hibernation time each year, not letting phone or anything else wake me.

The Westies do their part in regenerating Mama Penny. Last night, I drifted to sleep with five little white dogs snuggled against me, in such a way to have maximum surface contact. It is a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Thank you, my thoughtful husband, for protecting your wife in this loving way.

Holding Hands at the Movies!

Somewhere on the Internet, I read recently a woman's complaint about going out for dinner and a movie, AGAIN, with her significant other.  She longed for something more interesting to fill their evenings!!

GEE WHIZ!!!!

Gordon and I have been married almost four years, and we had not seen a movie in a movie theater in the entire time!

This abstinence from movies has not been our plan. To the contrary, we have planned countless times on doing the Dinner-and-Movie Thing, or even just the Movie Thing, but some complication has always popped up, usually at the last minute.

Well, last week, after a meeting in the Jackson area, we zipped by the fancy, new-ish theater in Madison, and we were thrilled to learn we were just in time for one of the afternoon showings!  We were as excited as a couple of pre-teens on their first date!

Yes, it is silly, but we even captured our date with the above phone photo of us holding hands.  That plane on the screen is part of one of the previews. 

I was so intent on capturing the momentous occasion on the PDA phone/camera that I totally blotted out all the previews...plus, I was a bit nervous about being caught taking a picture of the big screen!  Do you think I have a future as a fearless, hardened criminal?  *cheeky grin*

So, what did we see?  American Gangster with Russell Crowe and... some other folks!  *wink*  Denzel Washington gave a superb performance, as usual.

Oh, the joy of losing all track of time in front of the big screen!  I can fully understand why Hollywood enjoyed a boon during the Great Depression!

Gordon and I had the best time discussing our different impressions of the film on our drive home! 

It was a total escape, for three to four hours at least, from deadlines, responsibilities and other stresses!

How could one EVER become blase about that?!?

When was the last time you and your hubby did dinner and a movie, or just went to the big screen to see a flick?