Hey from Ellijay

I’m back in the beautiful North Ga. mountains, trying to pound out another fifty pages. It’s hard to concentrate at home, there’s always so much going on. Boomerang Boy has left the building! He’s moved into a 150-year-old farmhouse a few miles away, and I’m sending the washer and dryer with him. Let’s see if that motivates him to do his laundry. If he ever gets it all out of my house…Katie and Mark have found a house to rent a few miles away too, so they’ll be moving out at the middle of the month–I’ll miss them, because they’re both so much help, but they are more than ready to be living under their own roof. And Tybee, my grand-dog, wants his own place too. In the meantime, last weekend was bargain bonanza time. Last Thursday, I met Jinxie and two other friends at the Ballard’s Backroom Tent Sale in Alpharetta. Holy smokes! Talk about shopping frenzy. If you’ve never seen the Ballard’s Design catalog, you should check it out. The Alpharetta backroom is their catalog outlet–lots of scratch and dent and discontinued items usually. But this was the biggie. The joint was swarming with women, scratching and clawing to get at their bargains. I somehow managed to score a 9-by-12 sisal rug for $150–regularly about $450, and a pair of way cool silver metal wall sconces for Boomerang Boy’s room at the beach. I paid $30 for the pair, I think. And then….I stood in line for nearly two hours waiting to pay. Later in the weekend, Jinxie and I hit some more estate sales. I scored a great oak dresser to put in my antique booth. And by Sunday, I’d painted it a soft sea-glass green enamel, and added glass knobs and handles. Jinx and I went back to the Ballard’s backroom outpost on Howell Mill Road because we were in the neighborhood, and I made another excellent find. Fabric remnants were on clearance, and I managed to round up enough yardage, like 27 yards in all, of white cotton duck. The biggest piece was 15 yards, and the rest of the yardage was in one and two yard remnants. But that’s okay, because I’ll use the duck to have a slipcover made for my $175 Baptist yard sale sleeper sofa for the beach, and my friend Tacky Jacky, the slipcover sorceress, assured me that will be more than enough for what we need. The cost came out to be like, $2.40 a yard! And then I struck gold again, finding a 21-yard bolt of gorgeous beach-glass blue paisley cotton fabric for about the same price. My plan is to use the blue fabric for cushions for the forties rattan armchairs I’ve been hordeing for nearly two years, plus throw pillows, and maybe some window treatments. I brought a swatch of the fabric up to the mountains with me. And I like to look at it, and visualize what my beachy living room will look like. Pathetic, huh? In the meantime, I’m churning out those pages of The Fixer-Upper. Gotta reach my quota of 50 pages, because this is a Scott’s Antique Market weekend coming up. No junking for me ’til the pages are in.