Life here at Chez Wombats has been drifting along. My Winding Ways quilt is nearly done, yay! A large amount of bias binding was made and machined onto the front, and is now being hand-sewn down on the back - right now it is three-quarters done. Once that is finished it will be immortalised in a photograph for the world to admire.......after such a long time it's good to be so close to finishing; the first blocks were made in a class late in 2007.
Some hand-sewing will be packed to take along, and a book of crosswords, and of course a ukulele (that goes without saying), and my tablet loaded with who-dun-it mysteries. We don't have TV in our little van, the space it would use is taken by a microwave which, in my opinion, is far more useful, and if we get bored we can always watch our dinner go round and round......and round......a radio/CD player is our entertainment, we can usually pick up a local station somewhere.
There are always new acquaintances to be made in camp grounds, if we hit it off that's good......and if we don't, we can always console ourselves by remembering that it will be a brief acquaintance.
In recent times I have read biographies of two women, one born in England who lived a lot of her life in Australia, another who was born in Australia but lived for a while in England. "The amazing Mrs Livesey" was about young Ethel Livesey, born in England in 1897, who married as a teenager and had a child to her first husband who was reported killed in World War I. Her parents took the newborn boy to give her a chance to mourn and gather her thoughts, whereupon she packed her bags and took off for pastures greener and 'Husband' No. 2 - to whom she wasn't legally married, but that didn't stop her claiming his army money. Forty (forty!) aliases later, eight husbands (many married bigamously), four children, living in several countries, young Ethel was never one to let the grass grow under her feet. Although the book ends with her death there is even a question about that, because no one knows what name she was using at the time. Ethel learned as a young woman to always speak well and to dress well, both skills which helped her along her merry way of scamming people......because who would ever believe that such a well-dressed and well-spoken woman could be a confidence trickster?
The second book is "Rosetta", written by Rosetta's great-granddaughter. Rosetta caused a great scandal in 1905 when she left her prosperous businessman husband and young daughter to run away with a fortune teller......and not only was he a fortune teller, he was half-Chinese, someone who would have been well out of the social circles in which women like Rosetta moved. They moved to Europe and numbered among friends many of the nobility and even royalty, quite a step upwards fro their earlier life in Melbourne! The author has woven truth and possible truth together to tell Rosetta's story; much of it is documented in reports of the time, and some from her imagination. From the day Rosetta left until she died she and her daughter never met again, although it turns out they lived not far apart.
We tend to think of ancestors and people of earlier times as living dull lives, but obviously that wasn't always the case!
"Manners and personal appearance.
A charming manner not only enhances personal beauty, but even hides ugliness and makes plainness agreeable. An ill-favored countenance is not necessarily a stumbling-block, at the outset, to its owner, which cannot be surmounted, for who does not know how much a happy manner often does to neutralize the ill effects of forbidding looks?"
Obviously Mrs Livesey and Rosetta were both possessed of charm.......it certainly lubricated their way through life.
Until we meet again - no matter where you live or what you celebrate, best wishes for a season filled with peace and love.
Enjoy your days!
