As I sit here evaluating 15 baskets with 15 hand made print liners, matching garters and coordinating skirts, I remember the cliche about the fine line between hobbies and insanity. This time, I may have crossed it.

It started out very innocently. My grand daughter needed a place to put her toys between visits. I decided on several baskets to keep them organized. The baskets weren’t sturdy enough, and they allowed small things to filter out, so I decided to make liners. To make the liners sturdy, I decided to add coordinating lining to the liners, and add inner lining to make them stiff. No problem .

As most addicted seamstresses, I have a large stock of fabric and trims on hand, so I just measured the baskets and proceeded to cut the pieces, and sew them together. Because the baskets varied in size, and the top measurements didn’t match the bottom measurements, the cutting became a little more complicated than expected, so I put the measurements and the sizes needed in a spreadsheet to keep track of them during the construction process. No problem .

The first baskets looked so good with the liners, I decided to coordinate them with additional baskets to organize my "stuff" in an appealing way. Soon, I had 15 baskets in various sizes that exactly fit the various hidey holes in my den. Because of the additional numbers, the measurements took longer, and the spreadsheet became more complicated. I am spreadsheet fanatic, so No Problem .

I would have to cut five pieces each for the 15 baskets in each of the three fabrics for the liners, the lining for the liners and the inner lining. That meant cutting, matching and sewing 225 pieces of fabric. Well, I had the spreadsheet to keep it organized, and a retired lady has plenty of time, so No Problem?

Well, there was a little problem. Some of the baskets had a cutout for hands to easily lift the basket. I didn’t want to cover up the cutout, so I had to line it separately. Covering four sides of a three dimensional small rectangular opening is not too easy, but it’s doable. Since I didn’t have enough of my lining fabric, I chose a coordinating fabric. To make the rectangular opening look better, I added skirts that would blend in with the cover for the cutout. No Problem!  .

Stapling and glueing those skirts to the baskets took hours, and it aggravated the little issue of mild carpal tunnel, but it went okay. The skirts didn’t drape exactly the way I anticipated, so that meant making garters to match the liners to hold the coordinating skirts in place and make them look neat. By now, a week has gone by, and I have done nothing but make basket liners, and I’m sick of looking at them .

The only thing I have left to do is attach the garters to the skirts on the baskets, and I will have 15 perfectly matching baskets with cozy liners and neat skirts that coordinate with the colors in my den. The only thing I can think of now is WHY DID I DO THIS?

Then I realize how neat it would be to just attach a fastener and handles to each of the removable liners so that we could just take toys or projects with us anywhere by picking up the basket liners with all the contents........ I believe there is a second part of the cliche about hobbies and insanity..... No project is ever complete.

   It soon became clear that the cordless phone system I had installed in my parents home to help prevent falls and assist them in getting help in an emergency was not working out. They couldn’t see the buttons. They couldn’t hear on the "voice enhanced" hand set. It was too complex, and many of the features could not be used in their rural area anyway.

I searched for a replacement phone system that had the same look and feel as the old phones, and had volume control in the hand set for the hard of hearing. I found the perfect solution. It had huge buttons that could even talk if someone had sight problems.  It had the personalized phone book that would speak the name of the caller. It had a very sensitive speaker phone that could pick up voices from as far away as 15 feet.

To make matters even better, it had a remote control pendant that would allow answering from a remote position. The pendant could even be used as an emergency call device. If the button on the pendant is held down for three seconds, the phone automatically dials pre-programmed emergency numbers and plays a pre-recorded emergency notification message.

http://www.seniorssuperstores.com/cart/html/Products/PHONES--PAGERS/Telemergency-ClearV-598.html

I purchased the phone and installed it for them. Mom loves it!! She mostly uses the speaker phone because it’s easier for her, and she and dad can both participate in the conversation. She is still reluctant to try any of the other features, and asked me not to program any emergency notification numbers into it until she was sure she understood it.

She was afraid a curious great grand child might push the emergency call button and she would have a lot of explaining to do. She’s probably right. She usually is. Anyway, since they can depend on each other, they don’t face the challenges of an elderly person living alone.

The only issue we have now is that I had to remove the cordless system because they had read that no more than three phones should be connected on a single line, and they had to keep their old phones for connection to medical monitoring devices. 

Now, mom misses the answer machine that she had on the cordless system, and the freedom of walking around with a phone in her hand. She used more of the new fangled features than she thought. Dad still bypasses the new phone with a voice amplifier handset especially for him, and uses the same old phone he has had for twenty years.  I understand his choice. I still use a clock radio that I purchased during the vietnam war.

     After my elderly mother took a bad fall from tripping over the phone cord to get up to answer my call, I vowed to get rid of the cord. On Christmas morning, I proudly presented a brand new phone system to my aging parents. 

It was marvelous!! There were several cordless units in the set. One was a base unit, and the others were remotes that did not require the installation of new phone jacks. They were 5.8 Ghz digital gigarange. They were voice enhanced, with volume controls and speaker alternatives to the hand set. They had built in, synchronized, personal phone books. They had variable ring tones with volume adjustment. The base had an automatic answer machine with personalized message recording. It had talking caller ID, a hold button, and "call waiting" flash button. It had a memo reminder function. It could even be used as an intercom. It was awesome!!!

How pleased I was as I went about installing the phones. I would put the base in the den, and I would put one in each bathroom, one in the kitchen, one in the guest bedroom. It meant no more falling while trying to reach a phone, no more stretching cords across the room, no more invitations to trips and falls. How sweet it was!!

After several hours of selecting the right placement, setting up the ring tones and the message unit, entering the phone book numbers and synchronizing them, I was ready to demonstrate the features to mom and dad. Mom listened carefully as I explained the most basic usage. She tried it out, and vowed that she would get used to it, given a little time. Dad said "It’s real nice, and since i don’t use the phone much, just don’t worry about teaching me how to use all those buttons."

Each time I called, I asked how they liked the phones.

In the beginning, mom said "I think I will like them once I get used to them".

Dad said "I can’t hear you".

Later, mom began saying "How do I get it off the speaker?" I replied "Just push the small, black Talk button.". Mom said she couldn’t see which one that was because the letters are real small. She always answers by just pushing the orange button because she can see that one. The orange button turns on the speaker phone.

Dad said "What?"

Soon, mom asked how to connect dad’s pacemaker monitor to the new phones. On a regular basis, a technician calls and instructs them to connect the pacemaker monitor to the phone so that it can be checked remotely. I said "Uh Oh!"

I installed a splitter and re-connected the old phone, so it could be used in addition to the hotsy totsy new-fangled phone system that would not work with medical monitoring equipment.

The telephone wars were escalating. On my next call, dad sounded really strange and hoarse.

What’s wrong, dad? I asked

"I was taking a nap. When the phone rang, I got up to answer it, and didn’t realize my leg was asleep. It buckled under me and I fell". He sounded like he was in pain.

Rather than use the new, cordless phone system I had installed to prevent them from having to get up suddenly to answer the phone, he had bypassed and ignored the new phone system, and attempted to go for the old phone, because he only knew how to use the old phone. 

I was devastated. 

  Since I live far away from my elderly parents, I stay in contact with them by phone. About a year ago, my mother took a nasty fall when she got up from her easy chair to answer my phone call. The conversation went like this:

"How are you, mom?"

"I don’t think I broke anything, but I’m going to have a big knot on my forehead."

"What happened?"

"I tripped over the cord when I got up to answer the phone, and I hit my head on the corner of the table when I fell. Don’t worry. I think I’m going to be alright. Is anything wrong?"

"No, I just called to make sure you were okay."

"I was fine until I got up to answer the phone."

I wallowed in guilt for the rest of the day, and started plotting the demise of the phone cord.

To understand the telephone wars that were brewing, you need to know that my parents never saw any reason to give up a telephone that was still working. They retired their 1960’s model black rotary dial phone only when Ma Bell sent her henchmen out to collect it after the breakup of the behemoth in 1984. 

 www.youtube.com/watch

For anyone who is not old enough to remember, before 1984, the phone company owned all the phones that were connected to their phone service, and customers rented the phones on a monthly basis. Customers were not permitted to purchase and connect their own phones. If you purchased your own company approved phone and connected it, you only owned the outer shell. The phone company still owned the working parts of the phone by definition, no matter how much a customer paid for it. After the breakup, the phone company went out to private homes and collected the company supplied phones from anyone who had not already replaced them.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2006-09-14-phone_x.htm

I’m calling this battle one in the saga of the phone wars, but there were preliminary skirmishes that preceded it. The involuntary surrender of the company owned rotary phone was skirmish number one. It resulted in the loss of the beloved rotary phone and the permanent demise of a beautiful phone I had previously purchased for them as a gift. The phone company henchman insisted that we only owned the shell of the phone, no matter how much we paid for it nor where we bought it, so he ripped out the interior working parts of the phone and took them prisoner of the phone company.

 A decade later, after a fall when getting out of bed to answer a night time phone call, my parents gave in and allowed the installation of a second phone jack in their bedroom. In a world that is now strewn with phone paraphenalia in every room, most cars and most pockets and purses, it’s hard to remember the times when families had only one phone in the house, one telephone jack and one telephone number, which only required dialing seven digits.

  My mother couldn’t compete with the men in her family in terms of the number of pounds of cotton she picked per day, but none of them took time out from dragging a heavy cotton sack down those long, straight rows to nurse a new baby, either.

When I recently asked her about it, she said she could normally pick 200 pounds a day when she was young. An experienced, strong male picker could bring in 300 pounds in the same time frame. Before mechanical pickers came into general use in the mid 1950’s, everyone in farm famiies in the south picked cotton. That included black and white, male and female, young and old, weak and strong.

I’ve searched for documentation, both written and pictorial, of the women who worked alongside their men in the cotton fields, but I have found virtually nothing on the subject. Documentation focuses on slaves, tenant farmers, and share croppers working in the fields. While that is certainly true, It seems to be a well kept secret that the majority of women in the south worked in cotton fields alongside their men. The truth is that both black and white southen women picked cotton like field hands.

The majority of the population of the area was agricultural, most were small farmers, and cotton was the money crop. Women worked to boost the family’s income then, just as they do today. When I talk with my strong, loving, beautiful mother about her life in the earlier twentieth century, I become increasingly aware of how little the traditional role of women is understood today. It is a myth that women working outside their home or in "men’s work" is a new phenomenon.

While there is much discussion today about the current roles of women in the home and in the workplace, there is little disccusion about why we deny that women have historically carried both roles.