Millennium Bear and Victorian Chair.

First let me thank you all for your lovely anniversary wishes. After I published yesterday's entry John had prepared an 'anniversary quiz' with questions like , "what are the middle names of all the grandchildren" and "name the places we have lived in order". It wasn't the usual sort of celebration, but we had a few laughs coming up with the answers and reminiscing about them.

I was looking at Blipper Daker's entry for today which reminded me  that we too have a Victorian chair....two of them, in fact. The story goes that my great-great-grandparents brought them, along with my grandmother and her five sisters, around Cape Horn when they sailed from Virginia to San Luis Obispo, California. My brother has a larger version of this same set and the love seat is, as far as I know, still in Tim's basement where we put it for storage. My mother had these chairs recovered several times and always worried when cousin Peter would lean back on the two back legs of this antique.Despite it's small size, it's probably sturdier  than most modern chairs. When I inherited them I too had them recovered at least twice. I remember an unfortunate choice of pink and blue velvet. This latest iteration is definitely my favorite, beautifully (and expensively) recovered by Mr. Lazlo who had a wonderful selection of fabrics in a shop near the Star Grocery in Berkeley. I have put a picture of the back of the chair in extras just to show his attention to detail.

I bought the millennium bear on a whim at the local toy shop in 2000. I had quite a collection of teddy bears, including a well worn Winnie the Pooh that survived the not so tender attentions of at least two of our children before retiring to the Victorian love seat.  We were being told that the world would come to an end when all the computers refused to make the  switch to the 21st century on New Year's Eve that year. For reasons I can no longer remember only the Millenium Bear survived the move to Santa Rosa. Perhaps it was just as a reminder that some dire predictions DO turn out to be wrong....