Happy 84th Birthday to my Dad!!

Yes this is finally the end of last weekend!! On the eve of this weekend. I know, but I have been really busy. I went to my dad's house last Saturday after the workshop. His 84th birthday was August 1st and I was going to cook him dinner. I got there and he asked me to go down the basement (it's a HUGE mess). He pointed at an area and told me how much he would like that area cleaned up. *sigh* so I started cleaning. How many empty boxes inside empty boxes does one person need, really? He had begun to take "junk" out and put it in his snowmobile trailer to haul to the dump. He still had his snowmobile inside taking up half of the room.

I worked for awhile and then DD2 called and told me she and my DH were coming to the celebration too. They arrived and DH made his way to the basement to help me clean. Now, there is a corner in that basement with "treasure". I, however was cleaning the trash area! Where do you think DH went to clean? Of course, the treasure corner. I told him to leave that alone, I know what's there. After about 4 hours of non-stop cleaning and hauling, we had filled the other half of the trailer and it was time to eat. Oh, his stove/oven is almost as old as I am and it had decided not to work that night. We ended up going out for dinner.
I did buy him a cake and here he is with his cake!

He was so happy that we were all there to celebrate with him! I need to make time to go and visit more often now that he is getting older. It's only about a 2 and a half hour drive so not that far.
I took some stuff from the basement to donate to charity (we always say Goodwill or Salavation Army) and some that I wanted to look though to see if we can sell it. Here is what the back of my car looked like as I parked at my house.

I did find some treasure though. My mom's mom (my grandma) apparently, was a quilter. I found a box with some cut up feedsack pieces in it. All cut into Dresden wedges and some butterflies. I showed them to DH and he told me too bad those were such little pieces and I wouldn't be able to do anything with them. I just laughed. I also found some very old patterns that I have not gone through yet. I might have found some vintage paper stuff for a certain friend that loves that kind of thing too. I will get some pics when I get a minute.

You will all appreciate this story too. I had separated out the stuff for charity from the try to sell boxes. A new SA shop just opened up by the gym (how lucky am I?) so I was bringing stuff in to them. There were 3 small root beer mugs and I put my fingers into them to transfer all 3 at the same time to a box. Out of the corner of my eye I happened to notice color in one of them so I sen them down and looked into the mug and saw this

Yeah, you all know how much I *love* spiders so um, you know I was thrilled to find this, right? I couldn't donate that! It came back home with me and I had DH clean them out (I'm NOT touching spiders) and now there is another full box of stuff for the SA for me to drop off tonight!

DD2's birthday is Monday so we will probably do something to celebrate that this weekend. I hope to get to my machine and be able to sew sometime soon. I am behind in my JR quilt a long. Maybe tonight?