September 2010 Archives

             Guess who was all grown up?  Saly was now 16 and Matthew's travel plans changed when the couple married on March 2nd 1928.  Turns out March 2nd is sort of a big date in our family.  My great-grand parents and my father's parents were also all married on that date.  Weird, isn't it?  My brother and I were baptized on that date as well.  

            The couple would have five children, my mother being the baby.  The only Schiefer child born in a hospital in 1951, Phyllis was born just four days after Saly's 40th birthday.  Matthew was 51-years-old.  Fast forward 27 years later and I came along in January 1978.   Matthew passed away from a heart attack later that same year, at age 79, just months after he and Saly had celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.

            My mother and her siblings had Matthew's name put on the American Immigrant Wall of Honor several years ago but had never seen it.  Our mission in NYC was to find it.  By the time we got to it, we felt like we had crossed an ocean to get there.  Matthew Schiefer was proudly listed on panel #559 and it meant more to us to see that name than anything else.

             It was so hard to believe walking through the Ellis Island great hall that my grandfather had been there before.  After learning about what the immigrants had to go through to enter the U.S., we found it even more amazing considering he didn't speak a word of English when he came from Austria.  Translators helped him make sure his papers were in order, pass multiple medical evaluations, mental tests and even determined if he was financially sound enough to not become public charge.  Had he failed any of these tests, he would have been deported back to Austria and things would not have happened the way they did.  Which means you totally would not be reading this right now...wow, feels like a moment in Back to the Future II for a second doesn't it?!? 

            We grow up thinking our parents are the biggest, baddest, bravest people we know.  Sometimes that remains true and sometimes we outgrow those ideas.  I didn't know my grandfather Matthew Schiefer but I would like to think his courage lives on.  My mom sure has it because she never even flinched when we next hauled her across the city to the middle of a very crowded Times Square...and she swears she caught some kind of rash on her ankle from the subway.  I just told her that everybody needs a souvenir to take home with them from NYC.  

I Heart NY Y'all & my momma!

Once a sorority girl, always a sorority girl!  It was the good ol' college days at Southwest Missouri State University and the memorable years of cramped living in the Alpha Delta Pi house on Elm Street where I learned the valuable 'glue gun skills' I have forever appreciated.  My days as Spirit Chair for ADPi developed my organizational, creative and artistic skills as I presented sisters with "Shinin' Diamonds" for their outstanding achievements during our weekly meetings.  Always creative, my college sorority was a great place to channel that energy into craft time at the looney bin!  I remember once going to Mardi Gras and coming back with bags of cheap beads and glue gunning them to everything in sight...I made bead covered picture frames, mirrors and even a trash can!  Fast forward today to post graduate life and I've gone through phases of cross-stitch, painted stained glass, dress making (I could only do just one pattern though) and scrapbooking.

Most recently, this super ambitious sorority girl is channeling her 'glue gun skills' and is learning how to quilt.  In 2008, my interest was first peeked in quilting after I did a news story that took me to the Eddie Mae Herron Center in Pocahontas, Arkansas.  There, my photographer and I shot video of a 'Freedom Quilt' that was used by slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad to the North.  Every block on the quilt served as part of a map that led the slaves to freedom.  House slaves would clean the quilts and hang them on the front porches to dry and as the escaped slaves traveled through, they would know where to go.  The quilt was beautiful and the concept was amazing to me! 

It wasn't until we were in Tupelo before I finally took a quilting class.  Just by chance I found a "Beginner's Quilting Class" at Hobby Lobby and spent every Monday night the youngest of about 10 women.  (Where are the Hobby Lobby's up here?) Our move to New York left me a few classes short of finishing my project, so I'm not real versed on much past doing the topper.  Fortunately, my mom found a woman in Mt. View, Arkansas that machine stitched the top for only $20!   Imagine my surprise when my mom entered it for me in the Butler County Fair in Poplar Bluff, Missouri and it won third place overall in the miniature quilt division!

 Third place overall?!?

If I had to say I had one regret in life, it would be not taking Home Economics when I was in high school.  I could just kick myself for passing on that class.  To this day, it still takes me forever to remember which is bigger, the tablespoon or the teaspoon and I usually call my mom for the majority of my cooking and sewing questions (fortunately she has a Masters in Home Economics, University of Arkansas '74).  One of the hardest parts about moving to New York is being so far from my family in Southeast Missouri. 

So when my mom was scheduled for a business meeting in Portland, Maine, she arranged to stop by and see us before heading back home to the Heartland.  That meant getting the guest room ready would be a challenge!  The sorority girl in me decided rather than buy new bedding, I'd just make it!  (That white ribbon was going straight to my head when I cooked up this idea!)  My apologies to any other quilters in the Clifton Park area, I was the person with all the books on quilting checked out from the Clifton Park-Halfmoon Library for the last two months.  Even with yards and yards and yards of fabric, I still had to go back for more after I totally jacked up half of the quilt...apparently being off a quarter of an inch is a big deal.  Thank goodness for those coupons at Jo-Anns!

I ended up making a duvet cover for the guest bedroom.  One (very complicated) side was the pattern 'Blue Lagoon' taken from the book Jelly Roll Quilts and the other side was an easy 9.5" x 9.5" block pattern.  

My version of "Blue Lagoon" in Black

The easy side!

My little stint as Betsy Ross also produced a throw pillow, which turned way cuter than I would have ever guessed!  

No throwing of this pillow please!

I couldn't get the matching shams done before my mom got here, but there are tentative plans for those in the future and maybe some curtains too, but we'll see what happens.  I figure we'll probably be snowed in all winter and have plenty of time to get to all of that!  Of course, this sorority girl might be using her 'glue gun skills' for a new project by then...who knows?

It's September and have you thought about your New Year's resolutions? No, not the 2011 ones, the ones you promised yourself you'd keep for 2010.  Whatever happened to those?  Well, believe it or not y'all, we still have a grasp on ours!

The Mississippi Garretts pledged the same old routine

"let's get into better shape" in 2010.  But with a twist: we decided to hold ourselves to participating in a 5K every month in order to keep with the resolution.  We rang in the New Year running huffing and puffing through a course that took us around a Piggly Wiggly in Killen, Alabama.  In arguably the most ironic thing that has ever happened to me, I actually won third place in my age division!  With a turtle pace finish time of 41:52, turns out there were only three women in our group...whatever, it sure looks nice on the shelf next to the Emmy. 

Sometimes we train for our runs, sometimes we just fall out of bed and show up.  We're not really that hardcore, but we like having a goal.  Honestly, my favorite part of the 5K is collecting the t-shirt!  A side resolution developed out of this: I took a beginners quilting class while in Tupelo and am now inspired to make a t-shirt quilt from our running shirts.  The cool thing about our move is now we have a collection of shirts from states all over the country.  I am going to enjoy wrapping myself up in accomplishments when winter comes up here!

We've noticed that races are really different up here in the North than they are in the South.  

• For starters, we've actually done a race on a Sunday morning since moving to NY.  Back home, no event organizer in their right mind would ever ask a God fearing Southerner to miss morning church service to run in a 5K!  And you couldn't hold the race in the afternoon because everyone would drop dead of heat stroke before they got off the start line, and if it was in the evening, them 'skeeters would carry right you off.  So Sundays are pretty much off the board.  They may happen, but I have yet to come across a race set for a Sunday in the South.  
• Second:  everything starts a little later up here.  When you don't have to deal with soaring triple digits and humidity, I guess the start gun doesn't have to fire at 7:00 a.m. It's nice to sleep in just a little.  
• The third biggest difference for us has been the altitude!  Not something that we really put a lot of thought into until I just knew my lungs were going to explode while I was standing in the pitch black holding a glow stick on the side of a mountain in Vermont (another night race).  Do you guys know you don't have any air up here?

We've had a great time keeping our resolution and 

found some fun runs to participate in.  Y'all have some cool themes up here!  This past weekend we did the wildest one yet: the Warrior Dash at Windham Mountain in Windham, NY.  It was about an hour drive and is touted by organizers as an "ultimate thrill seeking event for athletes."  This 5K was not only a run, but had 13 obstacles on the course too!  We found ourselves running up a 1,600 foot ski mountain, running through tires, crawl through 50 feet of black metal tunnels, climbing cargo nets, scaling walls, swimming a freezing pond, and walking a wooden plank over a gorge.  But that wasn't even the fun part...the race ended with a bang!  

First a huge redneck style slip'n slide...complete with black plastic, water hose and hay bales with plenty of mud.  That's where I broke a nail and banged up my knee and arm pretty good.  Brett managed to take out a lady who didn't get out of the way fast enough.  The Southern gentleman that he is, he did offer to help her up before she got plowed down again.  The next challenge was jumping over fire!  It was a leap of faith, literally over fire.  Talk about intimidating to be running along and see two rows of fire in your path!  Luckily, no one went up in flames!

The Warrior Dash could have been a Tide commercial waiting to happen....the final obstacle was the muddiest, messiest and ickiest.  You had to crawl, under barbwire, through a mud pit.  It just wasn't pretty, folks.  We both came out looking something the cat threw up.  As you can guess, I'm a Southern girly girl.  It was the dirtiest I have ever been in my life.  That mud was like a bad spray on tan, it took forever to get it off in the shower.

Our clothes went into the trash (not even Tide could save that)   and our shoes went to an organization called Green Sneakers.  The group collects and cleans the shoes and then places them with relief agencies worldwide.  I'm sure they'll change their mind about ours once they smell them!

I read a report that said only 12% of people who set New Year's resolutions actually achieve their goals.  We still have three more races to do before we accomplish ours, but I think the light is at the end of the tunnel.  Of course, at one point I saw a light at the end of the tunnel during the Warrior Dash, and I just ended up with bruised knee caps. And a broken fingernail.

Here's how to dash like a Warrior when you're more of a girly-girl Princess:  

           If you've ever been a fish out of water, you'll totally relate to this blog!  Howdy y'all! Let me introduce myself, I'm Heather Flanigan and no, I don't sound like you.  My husband Brett Garrett and I just moved nearly 1500 miles cross country to the Albany area from Tupelo, Mississippi! 

          Why in the world would we pack up and become Yankees you ask?  Well, we're just crazy like that!

          Brett and I met in a television news room in Jonesboro, Arkansas in 2006. He came from North Carolina to be a reporter and I from Missouri to report and anchor for the ABC affiliate.  Fate put our desks side by side in that newsroom and the rest is history!  His dreams of becoming a sports anchor took him to Tupelo, Mississippi where he was smack dab in the heart of the SEC and in the middle of the war between Ole Miss and Mississippi State fans.  

         I joined him down there soon after we married in Poplar Bluff, Missouri in August of 2008. Believe it or not, our wedding was planned around football season!

         Small town television certainly has its perks.  Everyone knows you when you've got to run to Wal-Mart in your glasses and sweatpants to pick up the necessities.  Or if you make a quick stop at a gas station because you just 'gotta go!'  And don't even think of trying to get a bikini wax in town...that gossip will spread quicker than wildfire.  But most folks might be surprised to know that all that fame comes with little fortune.  In fact, usually small market television is about one step above the poverty level.  When I signed my first contract to be an on-air reporter, I seriously qualified for HUD housing.  But at the time, you're young, gung-ho and don't really know any better, you just want to change the world with all that hard hitting news you're doing on cat fashion shows and such.  

              Other reporters in the newsroom taught us how to survive and dress on a dime.  A fabulous junk jewelry store in the hood of Memphis is where we would find truly amazing knockoff trendy jewelry.  Of course, you'd run the risk that your necklace might break on air or you'd lose an earring mid interview, which did happen a few times.  Fine dining was eating the samples at Sam's Club for lunch (or spring for the hotdog combo at the cafeteria for only $1.50) and groups of photographers/anchors/reporters would get together for home cooked potluck dinners once a week....and we made sure we had leftovers for at least another meal. 

            When the opportunity for Brett to work for Snap-On Industrial fell into our laps, we realized we might be able to actually buy something at Sam's!  But the job was in upstate 

New York and isn't that like the tundra or something?  With great reservations, we hopped on a plane to Albany, had 1.5 days to look around and had thankfully missed a huge snowstorm that had just passed through the area.  Exactly two months later, we were loading up an ABF trailer with all of our worldly possessions and embarking on a cross country trip that would change our lives forever.

           So, now we're pseudo-Yankees (but not Yankee fans-our alliances stay with the St. Louis Cardinals & Mr. Albert Pujols) and are trying to not only adapt, but fit in with our new environment.  Things may be different, but I don't think we'll ever stop trying those samples at Sams's!