Rainbows and Tarts and Finished Stuff

I saw the most amazing thing this morning – a full, complete, perfect double rainbow, arched over a group of trees turning gold. It started as just the left-hand leg, and as I watched for several minutes grew more complete, and then the secondary rainbow started and it too make the full arch. I’ve never seen this before. I so wanted my camera to be able to share it, but sometimes our cameras keep us from really seeing with our own eyes.

I know a lot of us dread the coming of winter, the gray skies and rain and snow and cold. I’m sure I’ll be less and less enthusiastic about getting the dogs down to the dog park each day, but my reward today was this amazing sight. Oh, and two well exercised dogs who have been asleep for several hours. Zoë was quite puzzled about why I was standing there staring up instead of throwing her ball. But she was patient with me while I gawped at the celestial show. Yes, gawped. I’m sure my mouth was hanging open!

As I was leaving the park, it started to rain (again). But an Oregonian cannot let rain keep her from her appointed rounds – especially when she’s appointed herself to check out a sale just a few blocks from home. I got to chat for a few minutes with the elderly lady who’s moving into a new stage of life – and she’s not altogether sure what that will bring. Her home of 34 years is for sale, but many houses are staying on the market for a long time here. But she is going ahead with her downsizing. She told me her husband used to be a trial lawyer in Los Angeles, but (just like me) they grew tired of the traffic and crowdedness and came back to Oregon. He sounded like an interesting guy. Besides lawyering, he was a sculptor and painter, and when I picked out these pans to buy, she told me he used to bake something special in them, she thought it was Yorkshire pudding.

Sure enough, these are Yorkshire pudding pans. I’m going to try making little tarts in them; I think they’ll have a nice ratio of buttery crust and shallow filling. Little individual pecan pies, and lemon curt tarts, and…uh oh, I’m making myself hungry!

Perhaps I can serve my little tarts on this very MCM tablecloth

made back in the days when everything Californian was glamorous.

I gambled a dollar on a dog seat belt, hoping it would fit Miss Z. It’s former owner was a pug. Must have been a biggish pug, because it turned out to be the perfect size.

My last find was a set of 6 vintage Christmas ornaments with the most delectable sheen. They appear to be silver inside, so I’m thinking they may be mercury glass.

I’m hoping I’ll get to use them this year. We may not do an actual Christmas tree, because of young miss dog. Last year at Christmas she was a mere babe in arms.

She’s going to be a year old in a few weeks (where does the time go!) and even with two runs a day at the park, she’s pretty energetic in the house. I may resort to an strategy we used when Edward and Noll were babies, which was to swag greenery over the windows and hang all the ornaments up there. Still festive but safe, and the season will be far more relaxed if we’re not worried about the tree.

I’m still working on actually using some of the great stuff I’ve found in the past, and finished a couple of biggish projects this week. I mentioned last week it only took me six weeks to get my little train case refurbished, and yes, that was really fast for me. It’s been over a year since I bought this sweet little Danish rocker at a church rummage sale.

It now has a new seat and we can actually rock in it! The caning will darken in time.

Putting in the new seat was harder than I anticipated when I so blithely bought the chair, but now it’s done. Even better, I learned a lot doing it and will be able to do it better should there be a next time.

My other completed project has a sort of dual timeline. Back in 2006 I bought this amazing 5-yard piece of fabric for five bucks.

You’ve never seen such heavy material; I bet it weighed twenty pounds. So I had this fabulous piece and no idea what to use it for. Thought about reselling it, but we both liked it (and lordy, the shipping would have cost a bomb). So every once in a while I’d take it out and we’d look at it and then put it away again. Then a couple of weeks ago we brought it out, and happened to drape it over our Sixties sofa that we found exactly a year ago.

The sofa is rather worse the wear from our household, but when that fabric hit it we went, That’s it! So I picked up some plain black for the back and created a throw for the sofa. I love it.

It’s so heavy that it stays in place amazing well. Of course it’s so heavy we’ll have to find a Laundromat with a huge washer when it needs cleaning – or we can just turn it over and use the black side. Think how great it will look with little white Zoë hairs decorating it!