Flatirons

These old irons were on display in the dry cleaners when I took our winter quilt in to be laundered. It's really heavy and too big to do in our washing machine, and I'm willing to pay anything to have it done rather than sitting in a laundromat...too many memories of doing that when we were first married and didn't have a washing machine.

For somebody who never irons anything (except pieces of quilts) I think I figured out the order of the irons. The bottom row are true flatirons, heavy metal which are placed on a stove to get warm. The center row have a chamber in them for hot coals and various kinds of vents to release the steam. I love the two with smokestacks. These seem  quite fancifully decorated, and must have made for quite unwieldy, not to mention hot work. The top row looks like early electric irons.

We took Spike to Spring Lake where we met an older man walking three very nicely behaved black labs. Two were in training as Guide dogs for the Blind, and the third was having a 'career change' (i.e. he didn't make the cut to be a guide dog). The man said he had attention defecit disorder and training the dogs was a good hobby for him. 

We finally got to the French Bakery to try the coffee. It was a little late for pastries so we opted for lovely baguette sandwiches. I had ham, butter and arugula, and John had ham butter and fig. Delicious. The coffee wasn't bad either. We sat at a little table outdoors so that Spike could join us.  The tables are right next to a busy parking lot which made Spike a little antsy with a resulting tendency to drag the table with him as he tried to get under it to the fence between us and the parking lot.

Tomorrow he has an appointment with the animal ophthalmologist for a pressure test for glaucoma. It seems that not having any retinas doesn't prevent him from having glaucoma....

David came by this afternoon and restored the power to the dead outlets in our garage. There are a lot of them, but the only one we really need is the one the solar battery app in plugged into and it is one of the ones that went dead. David is one of those people who can fix anything and a very useful person to have on call....he had to rush off today because he is installing a solar powered , temperature controlled wine storage  cabinet ....