My hair is bold like the chestnut burr; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves.

Emily Dickinson's description of her eyes has always intrigued me, and I always remember it when I see a few drops of sherry or brandy left in a glass.

The glass in the photo below is one of the "old everyday things" that I have been tagging. I have two of these, and one of my oldest memories is of looking at these two little glasses in my mother's china cabinet. The story as I remember it is that these little glasses are one of the few mementoes of Germany that my great-grandparents brought with them when they emigrated to the United States. Imagine having not much more than two fragile glasses to remember your past by!

Much of the gilt has worn off; we still use them occasionally.

And whenever I look into them and see a few drops left, I think of Emily Dickinson and her eyes. Is this the color she was thinking of?

Crock pot cake

One of my favorite cakes since I first tried it when I bought a crock pot in the seventies. Here is the recipe:

Pour the batter into the special crock pot cake pan:

I didn't have sherry, so I used Irish cream liqueur. And I didn't have pecans, so I used almonds.

This is the pan, with its vented lid, inside the crock pot:

It's not the most beautiful cake in the world:

But it is very, very delicious.

I looked on line, and found that Rival no longer makes these crock pot cake pans. (Hey - I just realized that I can use the Old Everyday Things tag for this post!) Some people use old coffee cans, and others bake cakes right in the crock pot itself. But you can buy the pans used, as this website points out.

Baking a cake in the crock pot is a nice option in the summer, when you don't want to turn on the oven.

Old 3-D entertainment

I still have my old Viewmaster. I can't say it's in everyday use, but I do like to look at those old 3-D pictures every once in a while.

Old bowl

This bowl has been in almost daily use for at least 55+ years. Here it is in 1953 or 1954:

That is me in the top of the cupboard, my brother Norbert standing (just barely), and our neighbors Kathy and Barbie. The bowl is on the floor behind us. I used that bowl almost every day in high school, when I came home and made myself a big salad. (I never ate lunch in the cafeteria, mostly due to shyness. Lunch was the most terrifying period of the day in high school.)

Here is the bowl today, still in almost daily use:

Old table

Old and beat up. This is a child's table. It was mine when I was little, and at one time there were at least two chairs to match. They have been gone for a long time. This little table has been in continuous use for more than fifty years, mostly as a place to pile things. It's kind of ugly, and sort of wobbly, and I really, really like it.

Old sheet

I was making the bed the other day, and suddenly realized that the sheet I was using is at least thirty years old. Not so old for a sheet, I guess, but old enough. It's still in great shape, and I remember buying it because it was the first set of sheets I ever bought for a king-size bed. The color scheme (pink and blue) and pattern also bring back the era of the 1980s for me.

I don't think I have any older sheets than this one. It made me think about what kinds of things I have around the house that are oldish - not in the sense of being antiques, but in the sense of being ordinary, everyday things that have been in use for at least a quarter of a century. This sounds like a project!