Comments...
Thanks, y'all, for the good wishes on the new job! I'm very excited and more than a little nervous.

Nancyj said: We love stopping in Shipshewana...Shipshe is a great town to shop! This is the second time I've worked there. The first time was in the late 80s-mid 90s. I managed a cluster of shops on the north side of the feed mill, called Quiltmakers/Shaker Legacy/Depot St. Shop. Later they added a Christmas store, too. Shaker Legacy was my favorite. We sold beautiful custom-built Shaker-style reproduction furniture that was built in an Amish woodshop north of Shipshe, and my husband built some here in his woodshop, too. Lovely, lovely stuff, in cherry, oak, and maple. Sad to say, those shops are long gone now. I can still weave traditional Shaker chair seats, though, if you ever need it done!

Jayne said... I love your cat (a siamese was my first ever cat and I am so tempted to get another one -...It's an odd thing about that cat. There are no Siamese on the place, and never has been one anywhere near, as best we can tell. We live in the house that was my grandparents until they both died in the 70s. There was a barn cat here named Cherryl Kitty (named by Grandma after my sister, who rescued the cat and brought her out to the farm in the mid-70s) when we moved to the farm in '79. She had a couple of litters every year, and a few litters had kittens with Siamese markings in yellow, grey, or tan. We've never kept one long enough for it to breed, but the markings keep showing up in Cherryl Kitty's descendants! It's funny how we never get a pretty gray/brown/white tiger like Cherryl Kitty any more, but we keep getting these.
The kittens with these markings are usually born a sort of dirty-white color, and the markings begin to show when they're a week or two old. As they get older, the colors get darker. Hershey is the first one we've kept this long -- people always want the 'siamese-y-looking' ones, so we end up giving them away. When Hershey was born I laid claim to her and wouldn't let anyone take her.
Time to go clean something or knit something...hmm...I wonder what will win out???