My fifth birthday. Momma made the cake and I swear I remember it.

The Youngest Sister blog turns five today so it’s time for the annual State of the Blog address, in which I explain what I have been doing that has kept me from writing the riveting missives that you all yearn to read. My hedonism reached a record high over the past year and I have plenty to show for it. Read on.

TRANSPARENCY

You know, transparency has been a thing for a while now, so I feel obliged to inform you that every time you click on one of the ads on this site, you are contributing to my retirement fund. Earnings are WAY up over last year, and I now rest easier knowing I can retire with $56.50 in the bank. Unfortunately, I can’t actually appreciate the fruits of my labor until I hit the magic $100 threshold. You see, there has to be at least $100 in your Google AdSense account before they will start to pay out. So don’t be shy - click on those ads! Then watch how offers for whatever you clicked on follow you across all of your platforms and devices. To be honest, it’s pretty darn creepy, but please don’t let that stop you. We all have to eat, you know?

This is my Google AdSense statement balance. Get busy clicking!

THE GARDEN

About once a year I make the mistake of showing Tony something that I think is cool and the next thing you know, we are investing in whatever it is. Case in point: the legendary swim spa of 2017. Last year, while half the country was busy baking bread, we got caught up in the whole pandemic victory garden craze. We have always had a garden, but it was down a steep hill and had a wonky gate that I had a hard time opening, and it always pissed me off too much for me to bother going down there. So I said, “wouldn’t it be nice if we had a really pretty garden closer to the house?” and, before you could say pressure-treated 10 foot 2 x 12’s cost $60.00 apiece at Lowe’s, we were digging the foundation for a raised garden. I went to YouTube (because we all know there is nothing you can’t learn on YouTube) and watched a bunch of videos, then drew up a plan.

Getting things all square is one of the few things Tony and I aren’t good at according to the architect who pointed out that the flower garden we laid concrete footers for is neither square nor lined up with the house. So we hired a guy named Jose to lay the garden out with a transit, put the corner posts in and help with the construction. Well, Jose never showed up again after that first day so I suggested to Tony that, since we are two of the most resourceful people on the planet that you definitely want to be friends with in a post-apocalyptic world, why don’t we just build the thing ourselves? So that’s what we did. And nobody lost any fingers or stapled her fingers or anything. I know, because I was in charge of stapling the landscaping cloth to the walls so that the dirt wouldn’t seep out. Not stapling my finger was a big accomplishment, judging by the fact that I have now sewn through my finger FOUR TIMES. Cringe-worthy, I know.

Get your mind out of the gutter. Its just a squash.

It is a lovely garden and you don’t have to bend over to plant, weed or harvest. The wire sides keep the pesky deer out, and the gate is very easy to open because I made it all by myself. When it was done, Tony installed an irrigation system to make it easier to water. Very clever.

My favorite thing we grew is center cut squash, because you can’t buy it in stores and it is great for spiralizing because it doesn’t have seeds in the long neck. I think you will agree that center cut squash has a VERY distinctive shape. Maybe one day they will carry it at Whole Foods and hopefully they will be able to sell it for less than the $400 per squash it cost us to grow them.

NEEDLEPOINT

Y’all know I am crazy about doing needlepoint, particularly in the winter in front of the fire. But I’m running out of things to make, since I have done a footstool of my house, a pillow and a bunch of belts for Tony. Lawler said she didn’t want a belt so I made her a pillow for Christmas that shows the important and favorite things in her life on it.

I finished the pillow in jig time, so my next project was a new belt for Tony. I have already made him one with lighthouses on it and another with all of the important things in his life on it, so it was hard to think of something else to do. I finally settled on a belt with all of the islands we have visited on it. Can you say pretentious? Oh well. It’s colorful and I have enjoyed making it.

People who see my needlepoint projects always say, “Did you draw that?” to which I answer, of course I did, you nitwit. It really is quite easy to do. Buy some graph paper and lay it on top of an image you want to needlepoint. Trace the outlines and use colored pencils to draw the design. I do mine in Photoshop and then I blow them up really big and use that image to count where the stitches go. So I don’t actually paint the canvas. It is so easy I think even you could do it.

The letters underneath each island shape are the airport codes, because how else would you know what the islands are? My friend Tracy will like this because she is an airport code aficionado and does a daily airport code puzzle called Airportle. Speaking of which…

DAILY BRAIN POWER PUZZLES

If you aren’t doing Wordle every day or, heaven forbid, have never heard of it, you need to get with the program. I do Wordle and Mathler every morning to keep my brain razor sharp. Here’s a pro tip for Wordle, because I am a giver: Start with SOARE, which is a legit word that uses three vowels and two of the most common consonants. Truth be told, I did not figure this out myself; I read it online somewhere. There are now a zillion more games like these, most of which are built on open-source code, which is why there are so many versions. I do hope the guy who invented Wordle got paid a lot when the New York Times bought it because it is crazy popular. Here are just a few of the more interesting knockoffs:

Taylordle - Taylor Swift

Birdle - Bird types

Marvle - Super heroes

Turdle - Different words for poop

Byrdle - Choral Music

Heardle - Music (You listen to it and guess the song. Quite impossible unless you are a millennial)

Lewdle - The bad word game.

Wordle But The Answer Is Always Penis - Like the title says. It’s pretty easy.

And here are some others I expect we will see soon because, as we all know, “if I am thinking of it, it has already been done:”

Curdle - dairy products

Hurdle - impossible situations

Fertile - pregnant celebrities and their baby daddies

Girdle - famous obese people

Nerdle - billionaires on the spectrum

Oh wait - Nerdle and Hurdle have already been done, albeit with different subjects. Because, see above quote. I do think my next needlepoint project might be a pillow that says, “If I am thinking of it, it has already been done.” And on the flipside it will say, “There is nothing you can’t learn on YouTube.” Or maybe, “Everything happens on Tuesdays,” because, see the following…

EVERYTHING HAPPENS ON TUESDAYS

My delicious Tuesday night Salmon and White Bean Salad

Yes, I still follow the Champagne and Bacon Diet

Am I right? I think it’s because you don’t want to schedule stuff on Mondays because people are still out of town from the weekend and it’s the start of the week so you have a hard time getting started, yada yada. Friday you don’t schedule stuff because people are going out of town. Thursday is a bad day for scheduling stuff because people are getting ready for Friday. And Wednesday is Wednesday - just so middle-of-the-week and hump day and all that. Ergo, we all must schedule everything on Tuesday. Tuesday is my golf day and my women’s a cappella group rehearsal day. That may not seem like a lot to you, but golf takes, like, six hours by the time you leave home, warm up, play a four hour round then maybe have lunch. Which gives me just enough time to get home, decompress, shower and go to my rehearsal. Except that, invariably, someone schedules a meeting I must attend at 5:00pm. Because it’s Tuesday (see above). I finally get home at 8:45 and usually have that fantastic white bean and salmon salad I told y’all about ages ago because I can make it all in advance and then just get Tony to cook the fish when I get home. If you haven’t tried it you should because it is a delicious high protein marvel that is perfect for a crazy Tuesday night. And it is a part of the now famous Champagne and Bacon Diet.

GOLF

When I said Tuesday is my golf day, it might have been a little misleading, because I made it sound like it’s the only day I play golf. I also usually play on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and often on Thursday. And sometimes Monday and sometimes Wednesday, but I do Step (yes, like in the 1980s) on those days, plus Monday I often play tennis. So I usually just go to the driving range on those days. You see why there is so little time to write blog posts? Oh and I still work for a living because see Transparency paragraph above.

Golf is not just a time sink because it takes four hours to play. There is also this whole wardrobe thing that, for me, has become quite time-consuming. Like all good elitist sports, golf requires a certain dress code. For men it is easy: Collared shirt which must be tucked in, slacks or shorts of an appropriate length, shoes and socks. For women it’s more loosey goosey, in that we can wear shirts without collars and don’t have to tuck them in, but we have to have cute skirts and they are just so hard to find because they are all made out of polyester and are just nasty. I have always leaned towards black and khaki but a couple of weeks ago Tony informed me that my costume looked a little frowsy. I blame this on my golfing buddy, Sarah, who has raised the bar to an unattainable level and has about 7 different pairs of golf shoes to go with her adorable little toile skirts and color-coordinated hats. So I took my favorite golf skirt and reverse engineered it to create a pattern and have made a couple of cute skirts that even have attached shorts underneath. Of course, I did none of this on Tuesday.

The original is on the top left. My tres adorbs creations are on the right.

CRICUT

I have seen these machines at craft stores for years and always thought it was pronounced CRY-cut but it’s not. It is pronounced CRICK-uht. I never really knew what it was until my friend Shetal (like petal, only with sh instead of p) said she was going to a scrapbooking workshop where they would be using Cricuts. Shetal is an endocrinologist, so the image of her sitting at a table with a bunch of calico craft bag carrying, gum chewing women listening to lectures like All About Adhesives, Bubbly Backgrounds and New Ways with Tissue Paper! sent me into a fit of laughter. Then Tony gave me a Cricut for Christmas. He asked my friend Ashley what he should get me and she gave him the idea even though she didn’t know what it was for either, only that it was a crafty thing that I didn’t have yet. I opened it and thought What the f***?, except that, in my mind, it actually came out as What the fuck?, because my mind is not censored AT ALL and has absolutely no filters. Whatsoever. I was wondering what I was supposed to do with a scrapbooking device because one thing I guarantee I will never be instructing you on in this blog is anything to do with scrapbooking. I am more of a treasure box sort of girl — when you have something you can’t bear to throw away (whether or not it is worth keeping), you throw it in a box. When it is full, label it “Treasure Box” along with the year and throw it in the attic. That’s my version of a scrapbook. Save the treasure box for about 25 years and then make a T-shirt quilt out of the 47 shirts you saved.

Well, it turns out the Cricut can be used for many more things than scrapbooking. I think most people use it to make gift cards and iron on stuff for t-shirts. I personally have become obsessed with making 3D pop-up cards with it. Making pop up cards was always on my bucket list and the Cricut is a good way to make them. Cricut is really just a cutting machine. There are a zillion patterns you can download, or you can make your own on the computer. You attach your laptop to the machine, stick a piece of paper on this special tacky board, insert it into the machine and then watch while it cuts perfect designs and scores the card. Then you take it out and assemble the parts. It’s easy peasy but the results are pretty amazing and, as always, everyone will say, “You MADE that?” Hmm. Maybe I should needlepoint a pillow with “You MADE that?” on it because, goodness knows I have heard that enough. And on the back I could put, “Yeah, and if you had an ounce of creativity and would get off of your lazy ass, you could too.” But that would be snarky and I am NEVER snarky.

Here are some things I have made with my Cricut.

Left to Right:

1) My first pop-up birthday card, made from a downloaded Cricut pattern.

2) A pop-up card I invented all by myself for my son who is fixing up a purple Porsche.

3) A technology gig bag I made for my friend Sara, because I think everyone should have one.

I was obsessed with my Cricut for the first three months of the year and did little else. It is so much fun but, as always, I have started to run out of ideas for things to make. I think that is the biggest conundrum that crafty people face. Or maybe it is running out of friends to give the shit to. I need to start taking pictures or keeping notes whenever I get an idea because I forget them so quickly. Like this, which I think is so funny and plan to use one day on someone with a very good sense of humor. Like my sister Norah.

Isn’t that a riot? © AmericasBestPics.com.

I know these sound like a bunch of the-dog-ate-my-homework excuses, but I hope you understand that I am just too busy to write blog posts right now. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that I am too busy with all of my very blog-worthy activities to blog about them? I have some topics in mind for the future, which are mostly rants, but rants have been some of my best work in the past. I think I changed traffic patterns in Charlottesville with my Left Lane Closed Ahead Debate but am sorry to say that How To Use “Lie” and “Lay” Correctly has fallen on deaf ears, because I still hear, “Lay down on the mat,” every week in fitness classes. And don’t even get me started with the “I Could Care Less” Rant which has gone nowhere but it did feel good to get that off my chest.

Some topics I am stewing over:

To Back In or Not to Back In - Nothing makes my sister Norah crazier than a man backing into a parking space, so it’s a very juicy subject about which people have strong opinions.

Don’t Call Me Mary - The Woeful Lives of People With Double Names

Reply to All: Is It Ever Okay? - My short answer is NO, but I have more to say on the subject. So much more.

I do hope to be in your inbox again before this time next year. Meanwhile, what you should do, especially if you are a newcomer to the blog, is go to the Archive by Month section on the left side of the home page (see below image for assistance) and go all the way back to 2017, when I was enthusiastic and wrote every other week. My cousin Lynn did that a couple of weeks ago and said, “I have been reading all afternoon and realized I have missed so many of your blogs.” Thanks for the plug, Lynn. I hope you clicked on all of the ads!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Love,

The Youngest Sister

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Happy Fifth Birthday!