I got to drive today

I needed (needed??) to buy some good fabric, and I had been invited to a reception associated with the Hat project, so David decided that I could go alone.  If you remember, last summer, I had the opportunity to re-design/make a felt hat.  There had been about forty ( I think) of us to start and thirty hats ended up returning for the exhibition.She has had trouble finding somewhere to exhibit them, and working with the exhibit has been a problem, as she lives in a small apartment, and most of them came complete with hat boxes. She had received grants and was able to rent a room in the basement of Maison Gabrielle Roy Museum ( the house where she was born) for a month.  This gave her time and space to fully put the exhibition together and it has been on display there.  Today there was a closing reception that will last until about 8:00 tonight, but I chose to attend this afternoon.  She is still working on other venues for the exhibit.

That's the back story.  What I'm writing about is my opportunity to visit a part of St. Boniface where I've never been before.  I had to park about a block away and walk down an old, old street.  Most of the houses must have been over 100 years old.  Well settled in their gardens, and very much a French flavour to the area.  This was a quiet street and completely residential.  Loren's house is over 100 years old and in part of old St. Boniface, but the flavour is different, perhaps because so many of the houses on his street have been "gentrified".  I also think that his street is either older, or originally  not an middle/upper class area, as the  houses are smaller and don't display the type of windows and roofs that I saw today.

The other task I had today was to attempt to buy a new silk plant for my bathroom.  Yesterday we bought wallpaper and towels to re-do the room, and this will mean that I need a new plant.  The wallpaper is a cheap one--a white and beige old brick pattern.  We looked in books etc and found that the paper alone would have cost us about $300, and that it came un-pasted, so we would have to pay someone to put it up.  For a bathroom??  The towels etc are a grey/green, instead of the Hunter Green I've had before.  I will miss my old wallpaper, but we aren't looking at putting the new up until after the dust settles at the lake.

As well as the new towels we bought a new set of sheets for the bed.  We have only had one, and sometimes it's a bit of a pain getting them washed and back on the bed quickly.  So today we washed the sheets and towels getting them ready to use--NOT!  The towels shed lint in the washer quite badly, and the lint got all over the sheets.  Re-washing and drying etc didn't help at all, so David and I had to tackle cleaning these huge sheets up with a sticky roller.  By coincidence I had found an old brush in a drawer just a few days ago.  These were sold by K-Tel or someone, years ago.  They were red with a plastic handle and if you brushed one way it picked up lint, and then you would brush the other way, and the lint came off the brush for disposal.  At one time everybody and his dog had one. So we hauled that out and it did the job quite nicely. Within about an hour the sheets were ready to put on the bed.

Tomorrow we head for the lake to met Gail and start making up a list of everything we plan to leave behind.  Since David and I have already had a couple of lively discussions about it, I anticipate some very emotional and distraught times.