Tammy World and I Had a Busy Month: Toy Show, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Titanic, and Pee Wee Herman

   My birthday was last month. I turned 62. Ken says we get to enjoy the whole month as part of our birthday. So I did a lot of stuff last month. And of course, Tammy World wanted to come along for the fun. (She didn't have to age though. She's still ten years old.)

  On my birthday we went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to see the new enductees exhibit just for the Kate Bush part.

"Bit windy!"

 I've loved Kate Bush since 1978, and I was so glad she got into the Hall of Fame.

Me with the Kate exhibit. She's there, sandwiched between Willie Nelson and George Michael.

  It's not well known, but those headset microphones that everyone uses now, were invented for Kate Bush's only tour, in 1979. The first one was rigged up using a wireless microphone and a wire coat hanger. There was one of the originals in the exhibit.

 Emma met us up there and went through with us. After we left there we headed for an Italian restaurant. We were trying to get there in time to get the mascarpone French toast, but we were a few minutes too late. So we got  regular Italian American things like lasagna and eggplant parmesan. And it was my birthday, so of course there was dessert.

It was my birthday, so I got to taste all the desserts.

 Afterward Emma and I went in a vintage store, while Ken napped in the car. It was freezing that day.

"You're telling me! Did you get the picture, because I'm out of here!" 

And it had snowed like crazy on the way up that morning...

And was snowy at the Hall.

... so we were a little worried it would be really bad going home, but it was okay.

   Ken and I also took a day trip to a big antique mall that month. I am doing a separate post on that though.

  The next week or so Ken and I went to the Titanic exhibit  at the Center of Science and Industry, (COSI).

 It was interesting, and there was some new stuff we hadn't seen before, but there was a lot less stuff than we were used to. 

Had a recreation of the grand staircase though.

  We have been to two other Titanic exhibits there, and this one was pathetically smaller than either of them. We were told by a lady who was working there that the owner of the exhibit had sold to someone else, and the new owner has split up the exhibit to get more exhibits out of the stuff, in an effort to make more money. At the same time as we went there, my friend in Belgium told me there was a Titanic exhibit about to open in Brussels. It probably had the other half of the stuff I should have gotten to see.

  Being as it was so expensive and the Titanic exhibit took such a short time, we partook of the 'progress' exhibit. It consisted of  an early 1900's 'street', complete with shop fronts and fake starry sky.

One shop had this dollhouse doll that was definitely NOT of the era they were depicting.

  From that street the exhibit suddenly 'progressed' to 1962. You just turned a corner into the year of my birth.

  Ken found the thing he was most interested in at the whole place, including the Titanic stuff: a recreated 1962 diner, complete with menu, but no employees or real food. In spite of that, he sat at the counter for ages, perusing the menu. I think the opportunity to sit down for a while might also have been a draw. Tammy waited it out on the jukebox.

  Toward the end of the month I spent a few days with my sister. Ken drove me half way between here and my sister's and she picked me up. We considered stopping at an antique mall, but instead we went to the grocery store and bought stuff for tacos. 

  We had plans for my visit, which included tacos, a blooming onion, paper quilling, clay sculpting, quiche, going to the bicycle museum again to see the now returned Pee Wee Herman bike, making a doll quilt, dremeling the rest of the mohawk off the doll she got at a toy show a while back, going to the big toy show, watching a bunch of movies, and doing my laundry. 

  We had the tacos the first night. The next day we went to the Bicycle Museum of America. Some of you may remember that my sister and I visited the museum a while back and Pee Wee's bike was out on loan. Well, it was back, and this time we basked in the glory of the Pee Wee bike...

Tammy wanted to show off the bike too, but we weren't allowed to touch it...or put her on it.

  

My sister didn't want to be in the pictures, so if she doesn't like the alternative here, she brought it on herself.

  But of course, Tammy World had no problem having her picture taken.

  

   It was more beat up than we expected, but then, it was just a stunt bike, the one used in the scene where Pee Wee, trying to escape the movie lot guards, leaves an oil slick via nozzles on his bike.

 

 It was obviously not the main bike, because the 'saddle bags'  didn't open, and a lot of the chrome accents were adhesive. Of course, the bike had been 'restored', so that may have happened then.

  When we finished taking in every aspect of the Pee Wee bike, we looked around at a few other things that had come back from being out on loan. While we were doing that Tammy remembered there was something she could touch.

And she took advantage of that.

   After leaving the museum we had snacks at the coffee shop that had shut the door in our faces the last time we we there. They were okay, but I think we should have gotten pie, like we did the last time, for a couple of reasons.

   On the way back we stopped at a mall because I had heard that all the remaining J.C. Penney stores were about to close. Not true. My sister made me shop for shoes that I knew wouldn't fit me, because my feet have become, to use one of my dad's phrases, "as broad as they are long". That night I made quiche, while my sister played Prince Charming to her dolls and tried a bunch of shoes that I brought on them, so she could pick some out. I think that was the evening she also dremeled the hair off her doll. I had made double my crust recipe, so I also made up something for dessert out of the only things we had for pie filling: cream, milk, eggs, sugar, vanilla, and frozen strawberries. It was okay.

  In the morning we got up early again to go to the toy show. I'll show you what I got in another post. Here I'm just going to show you some interesting dolls that I didn't get. They were not in the best condition, and were overpriced. But it's a toy show, not a doll show, and the  dealer said he knew nothing about them. They were about 10 inches tall. Most of them were Kimports dolls.

Martha and George Washington.

George's pal Ben Franklin.

President Abe Lincoln and wife.

A very shabby and motheaten Clark Gable/Rhett Butler, that the dealer wanted $50 for.

Another Southern gentleman, who brought along his mint julip. Obviously the war was rough on him. Look at those pants. Also, something previously in the box must have had feathers, because there were bits everywhere. Look at his coat.

This guy was described by the dealer as a 'con-qweestidor'. He wanted $50 for him too.

These two were my favourites. Look at her face. They are Priscilla and John Alden.

  These two were the non-Kimports dolls. The man had a tag the said Oaklands Originals. The one on the left had a necklace too, but it had fallen off. I did put it back on.

 My bad leg has been bothering me again, and my back was killing me. I had to keep sitting down at the show. It was like a messed up game of musical chairs. I have never had to sit down so many times during a show. It was worst than the last doll show I went to, where my back hurt really badly, and I kept feeling sick. I sat down every so often then too. Of course, this toy show is a lot bigger. It's at a fairgrounds, and there are loads of buildings, and according to the flyer, 'over 700 dealers'. I was feeling mighty old. On top of that, I still had to stop at the store and buy laundry detergent because I had forgotten at the store the first time. We still had a blooming onion on our to do list, so we stopped and my sister went in and ordered a to go onion. Were we so tired and sore at this point that we nearly said forget about it. 

  When we got back we had our blooming onion with left over quiche, and for dessert we had leftover whatever-the-thing-was-that-I-made-up-the-night-before. 

  After all that we watched movies and stuff for the rest of the evening. We could hardly move.

  The next day we were glad we didn't have to go anywhere. We did laundry and watched movies, and in the evening we tried paper quilling. It takes longer than you'd think. We'd never done it before, and you have to quill up all those paper shapes before you can make anything with them. They take a while. Neither of us got any farther on our paper than a couple of eyeballs. (She was going to make a cat, and I decided on an owl.) 

  I did make a few other shapes. I wasn't sure at first what my picture was going to be, so I just tried out some random shapes the guys in the tutorial I watched had made. My sister refused to watch a tutorial, and then wondered how I got my middles to swirl like I did. She doesn't think she'll bother to finish hers, but I'd like to finish mine. Whether or not I do....

  The day after that we had to wait for the cake mix she had ordered from Amazon to arrive. Ken came and hung out with us, and we watched a movie while my sister made fried tofu and stuff for lunch, and the cake baked. It was a mochi cake, and I ate way too much and felt crappy, but it was good. 

  So the only thing we didn't get done was the clay sculpting and making the doll quilt. We decided  the quilt would be better done with the intended bed in hand, so I took the 'ingredients' home.

  We watched several episodes of Leave it to Beaver too. In total we watched 9 movies. Here's the final list:

  Into the Woods

  Tammy

  Ghostbusters (2016)*  Not as bad as I thought it would be.

  Cabin in the Sky *

  Music and Lyrics *

  Down With Love *

  Nothing to Lose

  We're the Millers

   Pee Wee's Big Adventure

  The ones with the stars are the ones I picked, and Pee Wee was a mutual choice, so we could spot the bike we had seen.

  The visit wore me out. (And it was April by then. Still) I was super exhausted, mainly from the pain in my leg. Yes, pain wears me out. It took me a couple of days to catch up on my rest, because the night I came home my leg hurt, and our cat, Jimmy, kept jumping up in the bed and walking on me all night. That's super painful too. The doctor told me several years ago that I have fibromyalgia, and my whole body is tender spots. The next day Ken and I tried again to do something we had meant to do the week before: get up super early and go to a bakery we know that sells pastries filled with real cream. It's about an hour away, and you have to get there early or everything we want is gone. I had to have blood work done that day for my endocrinologist visit coming up. So when we got back to town I went to have that done. My leg was killing me, and I must have been really tired, because I had a terrible reaction. Normally it hurts when they tie that giant rubber band on my arm, but this time it hurt so bad when she just started to wrap it around my arm that I couldn't stand it. The poor girl kept restarting and apologizing. I finally told her to just tie it on there, because she had to. It hurt so much that I had to do the pain control breathing. Tears were pouring. I didn't have pain from the needle. This was all just from the rubber band! Then she couldn't get the blood to come out!  She tried changing tubes to see if that would help. She finally got the blood. When she was finished I had to sit there a while and compose myself. That has NEVER happened to me before. From there I had to go to the library and get something printed. All the way there I kept bursting into tears. I had to sit outside the library and pull myself together for a while before I could go in. It wore off after a while, but it was really weird.

    This month is going to be busy too. My sister and I have a doll show next weekend, a screening of "Napoleon Dynamite" and Q&A with Jon Heder and Efren Ramirez, (Napoleon and Pedro), which was a birthday gift to us from Emma, and I have another doll show at the end of the month. In between there's work on the house and Ken's day off, where we try to do something fun. And tomorrow is the total eclipse. I just discovered that there is a Pompeii exhibit in Cincinnati! If I had known that and known how small the Titanic exhibit was going to be, I would have gone there instead! I've always had an interest in Pompeii and I always wanted to go there. Well, there's still Mother's Day.