My Podcast Guests are the Best

This month is National Sewing Month, but it’s also the month for Project Dress a Girl, which makes and donates dresses for infants and young girls living in poverty around the world. Project Dress a Girl was the brainchild of sewist and designer Mari de Jesus, who owns Inspired Leather, a company making leather hats, bags, and other items. Mari graciously accommodated my request for an interview during what is a busy month for her. Our conversation will air as part of next Tuesday’s episode.

Before I press the record button for an interview, I like to visit with my guests to get a sense of who they are. I also let them know the planned trajectory of the interview. In talking with Mari, I discovered she grew up in Ohio, so I asked where. She said, “A town west of Cleveland”—which is how I describe where I grew up to people who ask—so I pressed a bit more and discovered that she grew up in Lorain. I told her I grew up in Avon, a few miles away, and asked if she had gone to Clearview High School, my parents’ alma mater. She had gone to another Lorain high school, Southview, but it was fun to discover that we were from the same area.

Please visit the website for PDAG and consider making a dress or two to donate. I am going to look through my stash for something fun and make at least one dress this month. The website also has a calendar listing all the PDAG events and YouTube sewists who are participating.

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The husband forgot his phone at home yesterday. I told him I would bring it to him after Susan and I spray-painted “MBHF” on the backs of all the new metal folding chairs purchased recently by the homestead foundation. We’ll be using them at the pie social this weekend. The two of us worked together—supervised by her younger grandson—and got them painted in about an hour.

I have always joked about my “husband radar” because ever since we started dating, I have been able to locate the husband with the vaguest of directions. That is a skill that has come in very handy when needing to visit him on a jobsite.

Yesterday, my husband radar failed me, but it was Flathead County’s fault, not mine. The husband is putting in a foundation on the west side of Flathead Lake. He gave me the address and said “This is hard to find, so put it in your GPS.” I followed the directions, which led me to the named road, but there was no number 817. The numbers started in the 600s. Baffled, I drove around a bit. I could see where the guys were working but not how to get there. I managed to find a closer road—not the one I was supposed to be on—but still couldn’t figure out how to get to the jobsite. In addition, I was on a gravel road that dropped sharply down to the lake and I wasn’t about to go driving into a place where I might get stuck.

I called one of our employees, who alerted the husband, who walked up to where I was parked. He showed me how to get to the jobsite. Flathead County really needs to fix this problem. This road has the same name as the road I was initially led to by GPS, but it’s a completely separate road a quarter of a mile further south with no road sign, and it juts off a road with yet another name. EMS is going to have a difficult time finding someone there who calls for help.

I handed off the phone and went on my way.

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I called our friend Smokey yesterday. He lives around the corner and stops by occasionally to chat and buy eggs from us. I haven’t seen him in a while—I was traveling and he doesn’t believe in the concept of retirement—but he lets us use his stock trailer to transport the pigs. We thank him with bacon. I wasn’t sure he knew that the pigs were supposed to go in next week, so I called to double-check that we could use the trailer. He laughed and said, “Yes, I talked to your husband last weekend when he was out working in the yard,” and I said, “Well, you know that he and I don’t actually communicate with each other.” But better to duplicate our efforts than drop the ball. I called the processor earlier in the week to make sure we were still on the schedule.