THE INDISPENSABLE EYEBROW

Eyebrows do have a purpose besides defining the face.  They keep sweat and rain out of one’s eyes and are great for verbal communication.  Over the years cosmetic methods have been developed to alter the look of one’s eyebrows.  However you treat them it would be difficult to do without eyebrows.  Some observations: some scientific, some firsthand.

Eyebrows can convey emotions like surprise, joy, anger and sorrow.  Difficult to keep your emotions in check; eyebrows will give you away every time.

However, you can Botox your forehead.  Smooths out lines and the eyebrows don’t move.  I don’t recommend that, though. 

Eyebrows do help to keep moisture out of your eyes.  Visualize mowing the lawn on a hot day with sweat dripping in your eyes.  Says a lot for bushy eyebrows!

As a bleached blonde back in the 80s my darker eyebrows didn’t match my hair.  How to bleach one’s eyebrows back then?  I didn’t attempt that.

Eyebrows thicken at puberty.  

Unibrows have been favored by cultures through history.   In Roman times the men favored unibrows.

In ancient Egypt when a cat died in a private home all inhabitants of the house shaved their eyebrows.

Elizabeth Ist plucked her eyebrows and hairline to non-existence.  It was the fashion and high foreheads were greatly prized.

17th century society women wore mousehide brow wigs.  And in the 1920s movie actresses favored mouse fur to enhance their eyelashes.

In the past 100 years there’s been a great variation between thin and thicker eyebrows.

Dark, skinny eyebrows were big in the 1920s and Madonna epitomized the bushy eyebrow look in the 1980s.

A word to the wise, though.  If you continuously pluck your eyebrows they don’t grow back!  If you “want to re-route your eyebrows” (a male’s words)  proceed cautiously!

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Thanks for stopping by!

Joan

FOOD REDUX

Food preferences change over the decades.  Depending on what part of the country you come from and how old you are now, you probably have different food memories than I do.  

What did long suffering parents feed a large family back in the 1940s and 1950s when my six brothers and sisters and I were growing up?  A lot of stuff, actually. Comes down to whatever they would eat!

We had a “victory garden” during WWII.  The Ohio summers were hot and vegetables grew well.  No deer to be seen but the rabbits thought the garden was their own supermarket.

Photo credit: x-ray delta one / Foter.com / CC BY-SA

My three little sisters didn’t have epicurean tastes.  Looking back it seems they were raised on scrambled eggs, applesauce and macaroni and cheese.

Because of rationing during WWII a lot of foodstuffs were difficult to come by. An old recipe for Butterless, Eggless, Milkless Cake was revived. A strange conglomeration of ingredients were substituted.  My mother was not an adventurous cook and didn’t give it a try.

We raised chickens.  As the oldest I was designated to feed the flock before I left for school.  Years later I had a pet chicken with a real personality but a flock of chickens and hungry ones, at that, were something else.

The cafeteria lunch at school seemed to be mainly Sloppy Joes.  Lunch brought from home would be a peanut butter and shredded carrot sandwich. It sounds weird but it was good!

Fresh fruits were not available all year long as they are now. Our Christmas stockings always had a tangerine or an orange tucked in the toe along with some walnuts.

I don’t recall ever eating out at a restaurant.  Dinners at home included such staples as meat loaf, mashed potatoes or chicken.  My mother liked using a pressure cooker. Her specialty was meat balls mixed with rice. We called them porcupine balls.

Always a turkey or baked ham at Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Ordinary fare included tuna casseroles(really tasteless), and tomato cheese rarebit.  We all referred to that as tomato cheese rabbit.

We drank a lot of milk and eagerly awaited the parents coming home with bags of groceries. They’d be torn into before they could be unloaded.  I was especially fond of whole heads of lettuce!
We never ate hamburgers, yoghurt, spaghetti or pizza.  Not that they were forbidden: we didn’t know they existed.  We did eat a lot of white bread though.

“Butter” was fortified margarine.  It came in a block that looked like lard with a packet of yellow food coloring to mix in.

Essentials for a good life were cornflakes, peanut butter and cookies.  We all had a sweet tooth.

New products were introduced during the 1940s: Cheerios, Tootsie Rolls, frozen orange juice, Dannon yoghurt and something called SPRY which was pure vegetable shortening.

It was not a wide spectrum of fascinating foodstuffs back then but I think it was typical Midwestern fare and we all survived pretty hardily on it.

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Thanks for stopping by!

Joan

COLLEGE DEGREES

If you don’t have a college degree what does the lack of one get you in life?

I don’t have one.  One and a half years at Kent State Univ.  was enough for me.  At the age of 19, “life” was calling.  The years passed and I have never suffered boredom behind a corporate desk but I have also never made much money.  If I could do it all over again I’d probably do the very same thing.  

In the past 60 years of my working life these are some of the jobs I’ve had.

At 19, I was a saleswoman at William Kitt in Cleveland Ohio, living in the YWCA and fending off advances from Asif who wanted me to go back to Pakistan with him.

My family moved to Florida and I modeled for the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota for $2.75 per hour.  That paid for a hitchhiking trip in Europe.

I was a “board girl” for F.I.duPont & Co, a stock brokerage house in Sarasota.  I would change prices on a big blackboard as they came through on the screen.  A lot of cigar smoke there!

In 1969 McDonalds Corp started hiring mothers with kids in school from 11 a.m. til 2 p.m., so the mamas would be home when the kids got out of school.  This was in Winston-Salem, NC and thanks to Big Macs I gained 10 lbs  while working there.  Back then McDonalds paid $1.20 per hour.

I lost the 10 lbs and bought a steakhouse in Winston-Salem. Really!  I had to try it.  NC had just gotten “liquor by the drink”  and my bar was a busy place. I quickly got over the notion that owning a restaurant is like having a house party for all your friends.  Too many long hours, the kitchen help walking out the back door with food, etc.  I moved on.

A route dispatcher for American Wholesale Beverage in Greensboro, NC. It was the early 80s and Americans were just becoming familiar with European wines. It was an education for me. The only alcoholic beverage we had at home was my father’s Rolling Rock beer

A housekeeper in a Victorian Bed & Breakfast in Winston-Salem.  The Jacuzzi tubs had nothing to do with Victoriana but they were immensely popular and hard to clean.  Once, Maya Angelou was a guest, and she asked the owner and me to join her in celebrating her birthday at breakfast.  We drank champagne. 

A move to upstate NY, and I was the marketing person for Syracuse Colour Graphics.  I commuted every day from Oswego and was there for 9 years.  Another education-commercial printing. I learned all about blueprints, matchprints and Heidelberg presses.  Folks from out of town would fly in to check their work on press  and I would drive them back to the airport with 10 minutes to spare before their plane took off.  They always made it!

My partner (now my husband) and I started a yarn shop and weaving studio in Oswego called Northwind Yarns and Weaving. He’s a weaver and I learned to weave years ago in NC.  The location of our shop looked very European, through a gate and down a long brick walkway.  We came into the business at the beginning of the “scarf craze.” The yarns were gorgeous and even if you didn’t knit,  a couple of these yarns in a bowl made a great decorative accent!  The yarn shop was a learning experience but after 8 years it was time to move on.

TJMaxx is a fun place to work.  Designer clothes coming through and all those purses!  I’ve had a fixation on clothes ever since wearing a uniform all through high school.  It’s a wonder I ever draw a paycheck!

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Next Post, Next Monday.

Thanks for stopping by!

Joan

NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS FOR THE RESOLUTE

New Year’s Resolutions.  We start out with the best of intentions but they are seldom kept.  But if they should last even a whole month into the new year that’s better than not trying at all.  Coming from a realist who has tried most of these: some of these work and some don’t.  Give them a try!

Get enough sleep in 2014. Five or six hours a night isn't really enough.

Keep a journal listing what you eat each day for a month.  If you think you’re eating a balanced diet you might be surprised.

Brush the dog more often.  Cuts down on dog hair everywhere.

Take off your makeup before you go to bed.

Give up smoking.  Life is short enough as it is.

Keep your wardrobe under control.  When you buy something new give something away.

Read a book.  A real book.

Learn something new this year.  Anything.  Keep your brain occupied.

Read to your kids.  That’s really important.

Walk more.  Humans were not made for sitting.

Texting while driving is dumb.  If people had eyes like a fly that might work.

Resolve to pay down your credit card with the highest interest.

Be realistic.If you can manage one or two out of these twelve you are good!

Have a marvelous 2014 and I’ll be back again next Monday.

Joan