Monday, March 23, 2015
Last week started with a good deal of cyber
sleuthery, which, ridiculously enough, isn’t in the dictionary. Noah Webster really did need me on hand to report
needed and necessary new words to him at regular intervals.
I email my friend Linda fairly often. She writes to me somewhat frequently. Last Monday, however, I discovered that she
had not received some of my email. Since
one or two others who use the same Internet Service Provider also had not
received my email recently, and my ISP does not block outgoing
email, the problem had to be on their
end, one way or another. I wrote to her
from gmail... she got the email. Perhaps
her ISP was blocking my ISP's email?
I remember them doing that one time when I was working at our local ISP,
and the owners were all in a steam over it.
They really got quite lathered up about it, saying that the bigger company was
trying to run them out of town. Maybe they were, too; who knows?
Big operatives do that to little businesses, now and then.
However, that theory was put to rest when
the part-owner of our local ISP wrote to my friend Linda, and the email
went through just fine. Then I wrote to Linda from Victoria’s
account, which is an offshoot of mine, and that
email went through just fine, too.
“My emails wouldn’t be disappearing into some
obscure folder somewhere, would they?” I asked Linda. “I wouldn’t think so, since my address is in
your address book, and we haven’t had a problem before.”
She replied,
“I’ll call ----- and ask them to check my account settings. Maybe they changed my spam filtering or
something, and you’re now Spam.”
There’s
a thought. Maybe I am now Spam!
She
soon reported back, “They’re not blocking the local ISP emails. It’s something with your email, says the guy
from -----. He said it’s the client’s
email.”
It’s almost never the sender’s server that
causes a problem when email is not delivered; it’s nearly always because the
receiving server reads it as Spam.
Facts: 1) Linda’s junk folder was empty. 2) I received no notice telling me my email
could not be delivered. I wondered if somehow a rule had gotten
set in her email program (Eudora) that was moving my email to some unknown location
where she didn’t see it. She checked Tools,
then Filters...
But she
had not created any filters or new mailboxes.
Nothing goes into the Trash folder unless she manually deletes it from Inbox
or the Sent file.
It really had
to be ----- blocking or filtering my email, since 1) email from my other addresses were
getting through, 2) her emails were
getting through to me, and 3) she was
receiving emails from other email addresses (so far as we knew – this would
prove false). I didn’t know any other
explanation. But of course there are
multitudes and hordes and swarms of things I don’t know.
Linda wrote, “I wonder if you could go to the
web when you’re here and check my email from there. Maybe something would show up?”
“I could do that from here, if I had your password,” I answered.
She
sent the password. I signed in.
And
there were all the lost emails – several hundred of perfectly
good email – in an online Spam folder that she did not know was
there – in fact, she was told there wasn’t one there. There were emails
from the National Federation for the Blind ... and, get this, even -----’s
own monthly bill! haha
So much for the dunce who told her it was my email causing the trouble, and that
they do not filter the mail! A bunch of emails
from a couple of other friends were in there, too. I marked everything I thought was not Spam,
and transferred them to Inbox, which would send them on to Linda. I wondered, Why are there a bunch of things in the trash folder, if Linda’s emails are
downloaded into Eudora? There were
things in there that I knew she’d received and read. Are her Eudora program and the ----- online email program synced? Our local ISP webmail is not synced; it is only a holding place, as it were, until it is
downloaded to the customer’s computer.
What in the world. This was new and
different. I’ve checked her email for her before, and it certainly wasn’t
like this. I put a filter on my address
to redirect it to Inbox, and then checked into it further to see if I could
just shut that folder off entirely. It wasn’t in settings, though I’ve
found Help files that say it is.
I researched more. And... here’s the
scoop: ----- webmail is now ----- Yahoo webmail, and yes, it
is indeed synced to the email programs on customers’ computers/tablets/etc.
I see by comments on various forums that other people are having the same
problem – they are throwing fits and tantrums that they have to log in to
webmail to find their lost email. And the Help file instructions don’t
match what’s on the page. One person says that the filter directing
important email to Inbox didn’t work; but it seems to have worked, for Linda’s
emails.
I guess I’ll just have to check her Spam
folder now and then, and make filters for emails that should be allowed
through. Ugh, this is not handy in the least. The tech with whom
Linda talked at ----- told her they had done nothing new – but obviously
they have, since this has not happened before. Really aggravating, when some know-it-all
tech somewhere spouts what you know good and well is bonhomie!
I sent
Linda a list of email she might possibly want, and added, “Everything else is
junk, unless you want to send Miss Donna Gwen $250 in order to claim the millions
and billions you won from the Lottery, or unless you want to contact Justin
Ella Mark (odd name – foreign spammers often inadvertently combine male and
female names) and let him/her know you are the next of kin to some unknown entity
who has left you $13.5 billion, or unless you want the Metallic Silver 2015 BMW
7 Series car you won from the British Gaming Board.”
Ooof! Teensy
just landed on me. Now he’s kneading bread on my lap. He’s very insistent – now he’s cramming his head
into my hand — “Pet me! Pet me! Don’t type! Pet me!”
It was 88° last Monday, but only 36° at noon
Tuesday, though it was bright and sunny. The birds were squabbling
ferociously at the feeder. Earl May Gardening
Center is picking up speed. Victoria works
about 25 hours a week, at the moment, but it’ll probably be 40 by next month.
Someone found a parrot somewhere around town,
and brought the bird to Earl May. So
Victoria walks around some days with the parrot perched on her shoulder. We are acquiring some of Earl May’s products
in our house: fish...plants they were going
to throw out (which are now doing well)...
There was a price tag of $85 on a large plant
she brought home last week. She
separated it into five large pots, as it was root-bound. The plants are already growing and looking
better.
Now Teensy is on top of my arm, trying his
bestest to hold it down. Typing is a
chore.
Our poor old Black Kitty is getting quite
feeble. I think she was getting way too
hungry in the last few days, because she wasn’t eating the dry food we always
have out for the cats, and I generally only give the soft food to Tabby. But it finally dawned on me that I hadn’t
seen her at the dry cat food bowl crunching away for quite some time, and she was
acting a little more frantic than usual to get to Tabby’s soft food. I just thought it was because she is
partially blind, more on some days than others, and she’d get all excited and
run lickety-split after the food dish as I was picking it up to put it in the
refrigerator. But finally my feeble
brain put these things together, and I got all alarmed, and gave her a fresh
little container of soft food, and she ate nearly half of it. Poor little thing, she was really
hungry! And she had to work at it,
eating the soft food – I think her muscle tone has deteriorated, so that even
chewing is a bit of a chore. But several
days of having all the soft food she wants has strengthened her, and her back
legs don’t seem so weak now.
I don’t want my animals to suffer needlessly,
but neither do I want to put down old animals just because they are old, if
they can still be comfortable and happy.
She’s at least 19 ½ years old now.
She was a stray before she came to Larry’s shop, and the vet estimated
her age at about one year.
As I sewed last week, I had those beautiful
videos of Switzerland – they’re called SwissView
– playing on my laptop. Since there
is no narrative, but only an aggravating noise some would term ‘music’, I played
iTunes along with it, with my own music. Ahhhh.
The best of both worlds. Literally
and figuratively, both.
A lady wrote to the quilt talk group
telling about the neighbors’ big ol’ ram hitting her in the back – right where
she had surgery after a car accident – and sending her flying, landing right on
the road. Her husband ran and picked her
up before the ram got to her again. She
wasn’t seriously injured, but she was mighty sore for several days.
Another
lady then told about her great-grandmother: “My billy goat stupidly went after my tiny
great-grandmother while she was weeding the garden. That day, we learned that Granny could really
swing a hoe. All of us cousins stood and
hee-hawed until she ran after us.”
That reminded me of a story about my
grandfather, who died long before I was born.
He was using his large mule to pull his plow, and this mule had a habit
of stepping backwards through the traces if they stopped, and tangling
everything up. He particularly liked to
do it when Daddy or his older brothers were driving him. They told Grandpa their troubles, so one day Grandpa took the mule out to work in the
field.
Sure enough, as soon as he stopped, the beast
began his backing-through-the-traces stunt.
Grandpa blocked him and started pushing him back where he belonged – and
the mule laid his ears down flat and bit him.
He sank his teeth right into Grandpa’s upper arm and tried to remove a
hunk out of him.
Grandpa, who was only 5’ 6” but solid muscle
and bone, doubled up a fist and socked that big ol’ mule right in the middle of
the forehead so hard that it brought the beast down onto its knees. After a few groggy seconds, the animal stood
back up again, looked around, stepped neatly back through the harnesses he’d
backed over, getting himself right into his proper place without so much as a
directive. And he never, never ever, backed through the traces again,
not even with my father or his brothers.
Mules might be rascally at times, but they ain’t no dummies!
Tuesday
night I finished the top of the Mosaic Sailboat quilt, and Wednesday I put a
border on it. I decided one 2.5” border was
enough, and got half the backing put together before church.
See those little green men on the sailboat? The Martians are thusly colored because I was
trying to use up the little squares I had already cut – and because I thought
perhaps we could imagine they were dressed in tree moss camouflage. heh heh Victoria wants me to couch little wooden
sticks into their hands, and not just embroider the poles onto the quilt. ’Course, Victoria thinks all matters
involving sewing and quilting is easy – so long as her mother is doing it. ha!
I’d
planned for this to be a wall hanging, and thought maybe I’d give it to Ethan,
Teddy and Amy’s oldest boy, who’s 11. But with the Pellon backing the top,
it feels a bit stiff.
I said
to Teddy, “Either you need to finish building Ethan’s new room so he has a wall
to hang this on, or I need to make a softer quilt! – because this thing doesn’t
drape.”
He
laughed and remarked, “Ethan would love a quilt you made him – not a
wall hanging, a quilt – even if it’s stiff. It’s something to get
under, isn’t it? And Grandma made it.”
So
that made me wish I could put fleece on the back... but I really needed
to see how my machine responds, in order to know what to do with the lighthouse
quilt – therefore, I need to put the sailboat quilt together just like I’ll be
putting together the lighthouse quilt, and that is with a cotton back.
When it’s done, I’ll decide what it’s going to be – quilt or wall
hanging. I’ll put button-down tabs at the top with big sailboat buttons,
if I decide on ‘wall hanging’.
I posted
pictures on my old blog, which loads a whole lot faster than my website. The website is published through FrontPage,
Microsoft’s outdated software. I’m planning to abandon the website next
year in favor of the blog. I also made a
couple of new pages, one especially for quilts (Sarah Lynn’s Quilting), the
other (Sarah Lynn’s Mitered Corner) for projects such as ribbon embroidery. Nature’s Splendor will be for photos, and
that’s where I will post my weekly letter, too.
The
pictures on the blog should load much faster, and be easier to look at, too, as
you can use the arrows on your keyboard to navigate through them. Wednesday
night after church, I uploaded the rest of February’s photos, and checked to
see just how many stand-alone pages a blog on blogspot can have. Twenty, as it happens. I will make several other separate blogs (for
poetry, recipes, doll clothes, etc.), and post links on each of them. One
big point in favor of the blog, as opposed to the website, is ---- the blog
is free. Plus, I wouldn’t be obliged to sign in to my website
host files and delve into their tools to reactivate FrontPage extensions every
time the host updates their servers. Each
time that happened, I wondered just how long it would be before they abandoned
FrontPage entirely and left me high and dry.
I’m tired to death of FrontPage with all its
foibles and bugs (unresolvable bugs are why Microsoft abandoned it).
Plus, my website at BlueHost costs $100 a year. I started with
blogspot... and then my boss at our local ISP saw me working on it one day when there wasn’t anything to do, and gave me FrontPage software (outdated,
even when she gave it to me), and a website from them for a small fee.
I promptly made the site too big to suit them.
(“We’ve never had anyone
make such a huge website!”)
(Me? Something too big???
So I moved to BlueHost with their ‘infinite’
web plan – and a year later, was informed that my website had ‘exceeded quota’.
Infinite, ha! So now I have three separate blogs, all connected with
links and profile, and will make a couple more for various pages. Now, if
someone would just migrate all my data to the new sites...
Too bad I’m not so profuse in the garden-work
category.
Larry
didn’t go to church Wednesday night, as he didn’t feel well. He got sick Tuesday night, and hasn’t felt
well until today, when he finally started feeling better. I was beginning to worry – and was planning
to insist that he see the doctor; but he was able to eat without undue
discomfort, and that’s an improvement.
He continued going to work each day, despite being sick.
I like
to chat with children and grandchildren after church. I talked to baby Jonathan (who’s not really a
baby anymore) after church that night. Such fun to watch a bright little brain absorbing,
learning, enjoying...
Last Sunday night after church, Larry handed him a
little VW car he’d brought for Grant, should he need to hold him while Teddy
sang in the choir or men’s quartet. Because
the wheels were a bit noisy, Larry wrapped a rubber band around them, thus
rendering them unmovable.
Jonathan started to run the car over Grandpa’s shoulder...
noticed something amiss... turned the car over, and frowned studiously at the
rubber band encumbering the wheels. He
glanced up at Larry. “Car,” he remarked,
and stabbed at the tires with one small finger.
“Car,” he said again, eyebrows lowering even farther. He ran a finger over the rubber band, gave it
an ineffectual pull, and then fixed a piercing look on Larry. “Car!”
Larry took the rubber band off.
Jonathan grinned, and the car immediately began traveling
over Grandpa’s suit lapel. Jonathan
pursed his lips and added the sound effects.
I admired a picture Jacob had drawn in his
little notebook – and he promptly removed it from the notebook and gave it to
me. He’s a sweet, loving, generous
little boy.
Thursday,
I got a
box from a lady for whom I have done some quilting... and, oh, my goodness, it’s
crammed full with many dollars’ worth of lovely things! It felt like
Christmas, going through everything. There
is ribbon embroidery background fabric – just what I needed for my next project. There are several Bucilla cross-stitch
kits. Bucilla makes such pretty designs. One of the grandchildren
will love the Noah’s Ark picture.
The
ladies on one of the quilting groups to which I belong were discussing grammar
– or the lack thereof – and words people use, regardless of whether or not they
are actually words (we will not mention ‘sleuthery’ at this time).
One
lady mentioned the word ‘irregardless’. “It
doesn’t
exist!” she wrote.
It does now!
So many people insisted on saying it, they added it into the dictionaries. Noah Webster is turning in his grave even as
I type.
They added ‘pompom’ in, too, because so many
people refused to say ‘pompon’. Imagine
my great humiliation when, in grade school, after informing another classmate
(with a great deal of pomposity) that the word was ‘pompom’, she showed me the
entry in the dictionary: ‘pompon’. And then
imagine my consternation when, a couple of years later, after a lively debate
over that very same word, I smugly flipped open the dictionary to show several
other classmates a thing or two, only to discover – ‘pompom’ had been added. I learned (painfully, at times) to keep my big
mouth shut before spouting information I hadn’t verified.
As is usually the case, this thread of
conversation was carried on until someone got offended. The offended lady often writes with little
punctuation and regularly uses homonyms that leave me scratching my head until I
finally figure out what in the world she meant to write. However, far from judging her, we are all properly
impressed by her attitude and industry in the face of a number of physical
limitations.
Bad grammar and punctuation and spelling bug
me (especially when found in news articles and suchlike) – but not to the point
of being impolite to others.
Unless they deserve it.
And anyway, it is one of Murphy's Laws that, as soon as one complains about someone else's bad grammar/punctuation/spelling, she will immediately make a glaring blunder herself.
Victoria
spotted a picture of herself on my screensaver, taken when she was 8 or 9:
“Oh, look how cute I was!” she exclaimed. “What happened?” hee hee
She pressed PrtScn, and I sent her the photo.
That
afternoon, I finished piecing the backing for the Mosaic Sailboat quilt, then
pieced together enough batting for it.
By evening, it was loaded on my frame. I cleaned and oiled my
HQ16, threaded it, and got the tension just right. By then it was a
quarter ’til eleven, so I quit for the night. The overhead lighting above
my frame is not very good, and it’s difficult to see when one is quilting with
dark thread on dark fabric at night. I need get a light bar to go over
it. Since my quilting frame is in the
front part of our walkout basement, and there is a patio door and a big window
in the front wall and a smaller window to the side, it’s well illuminated
during daylight hours.
One
thing that works better at nighttime than daytime is editing photos.
Sooo... after stopping with the quilting, I got on with the photo
editing. I posted a number of my February photos on my blog. There
are goldfinches, house finches, English sparrows, dark-eyed juncos, and
cardinals congregating around the feeders after a big snow... and a bright-eyed
squirrel eating the striped sunflower seeds that are a bit too hard to crack
for the smaller birds. (see sidebar)
Friday,
I started quilting the sailboat quilt.
In the middle of the afternoon, I paused for a little lunch: two
egg yolks and a cup of orange juice. I had to eat the egg yolks, you see,
because Victoria made herself an egg-white/avocado sandwich on rye, and left
behind the yolks. So I ate them, like any good mother would do.
I got
back to the quilting machine then. Soon
I was done with the top border and starting on the mosaic part – the part that
is backed with lightweight fusible Pellow. Would my quilting machine
quilt through all these thicknesses, or would it won’t??
Quilting, quilting, quilting ----- and
then... YAAAAYYYYYYY!!!!
It’s woiking, it’s woiking, it’s
woiking! My HQ16 is handling this thick, dense quilt like a trouper.
I’m so happy and relieved!
I’m taking it slow and easy, so as not to
break thread or needle, or, worse yet, throw the machine out of timing, and
guiding the machine is a bit of a chore; but it’s quilting it – and with perfect
thread tension, too. Wheeeee!!! I
did have to raise the hopping foot two full swivels, but the hardest part about
that little job was blundering around
in Larry’s none-too-clean toolbox for the right size of crescent wrench. Never did find one small enough; so I used
one of those plier clampy things instead.
Oh! – it’s a vise grip, isn’t it?
Some of my curves were not as curvaceous as
they should be when I first began, until I found that I had to really get a grip
on the handlebars and steer
this big machine where I want it to go, when it’s traveling over all the seams
on the Pellon. But... the fabric is busy enough that (I hope) the uncurvy
curves won’t show much. And, after all, this is my ‘practice piece’!
The next thing I need to know is, will it
drape, is it usable as a bed quilt, or must it of necessity be a wall
hanging? Determining that
issue will be the deciding factor in whether or not I add nautical blocks to
the sides of the Lighthouse quilt for the ‘hang’ at the sides of the bed – or
just put a couple of borders on it and call it done.
I didn’t double the batting, because I was
scrambling to find enough to piece together for one thickness, and didn’t
want to buy any. The HandiQuilter is quilting it nicely enough that I
think it would actually do it just fine, with two thicknesses of
batting. Sooo... I might... and I might not use two battings on the
Lighthouse quilt. Even this 57” x 57” quilt – the top alone – is heavy,
on account of all the seams.
Late
that night, I got to the approximate one-third mark, and quit for the night. There are more pictures here: http://sarahlynnsquilting.blogspot.com/
A friend wrote, “Glad your machine is working
so well for you because Plan B – whatever that was – would not have been as
easy.”
Truth o’ ze mattuh is, there was no Plan B. Had the machine not handled the quilt, the
only thing I could think of doing was throwing hands into the air, wailing and
howling loudly, and then retiring to a dark corner to sulk. And I don’t sulk easily, I’ll have you know. I take
others down with me.
Victoria
went to her friend Robin’s birthday party that evening. Robin turned 16 yesterday.
Saturday,
we went to Gallatin,
Missouri, southeast of St. Joseph, to pick up some sort of motor for a mower
for Caleb. At least, I thought that was what it was, and what
it was for. Something that goes ‘üden üden’.
I collected camera... tripod... camera...
laptop... camera... shoes... camera... socks... camera... sweater...
camera... eyeglass cleaner... camera...
Don’t let me forget my camera!
Larry
woke me up at 7:00 a.m., because we were leaving early.
Except...
we left at about 1:00 p.m.
That,
because Larry went to change the oil in the Jeep – and the parts house sold him
the wrong filter; and, next, because he helped a friend straighten the frame on
his four-wheeler. Oh, and because when
he changed the oil, it splattered all over him and got in his hair, so when he
came home, he had to take a bath and wash his hair. And then he needed to take the big forklift
back to Walkers’, and it only goes about 30 mph. (see photo above)
We got to Gallatin, Missouri, at about ten ’til six. The motor (which was indeed for Caleb’s mower,
I learned) was loaded on our trailer, and we were on our way again in about
fifteen minutes.
Thirteen miles south of Gallatin, population
1,762, is the town of Hamilton, Missouri, population 1,731. As we drove through it, I suddenly spotted
something familiar: The Missouri Star Quilt Company!
A block farther on, on the opposite side of the street, there was
another store – Penney’s Quilt Shop, a branch of the main store. There are two others: Sew Seasonal and the Mercantile. A fifth building is undergoing restoration;
it will house batiks. Now, listen to
this about Penney’s Quilt Shop, which houses solids, minky fabrics, and basics: Hamilton is the birthplace of J. C. Penney
himself. While this large building most
recently was a hardware store, many years ago it was a J. C. Penney's store,
owned by J. C. Penney himself. There are
several museums dedicated to J. C. Penney in this town. But, wouldn’t you know, it was late Saturday
afternoon, and all the museums and quilt shops were closed.
We ate supper at a Cracker Barrel restaurant in St. Joseph,
Missouri. Because of our late start, we
had no time for any sight-seeing stops anywhere, more’s the pity. And Larry still didn’t feel well. There are a few pictures from our trip scattered through this post.
Look at this picture Victoria sent me – it’s
entitled ‘Cat Latte’, and is drawn in the froth of a coffee latte. Now, that
seems like more of a waste of time than pulling weeds! But it did
make a prettier picture.
Victoria’s
broccoli and celery plants in their little biodegradable pots are doing fairly
well – the ones that survived the initial drought, anyway – and should be ready
to plant outside when danger of frost has passed. It’s supposed to drop to the mid-20s during
the night Thursday and Friday. In
addition to using the UV light on them, she also got a container with a clear
plastic lid, and they look quite a lot healthier now.
I just
looked out the window and noticed that the stems on Mama’s old-fashioned roses
are bright green! One of these nice warm
days, I need to trot around the house and see if the peonies are coming up
yet. I want to divide a few of them, and put them some in the front.
I love pretty gardens – flower and vegetable,
both – but ... they sure are a lot of work. My biggest gripe is that all
that work doesn’t stay done. Oh, well. It’s mighty
good exercise.
And
now, just as if they knew I was talking about them, BlueHost sent out a notice
that their web hosting for my website is set to expire June 22nd. Huh? I
thought this wasn’t supposed to happen until January! Whataya know.
How ’bout that. I need do
nothing, however, as it is set to automatically renew, no further action is
needed; the money will be taken from my account, and I’ll be all fixed up for another
two years.
Looks
like I’ve decided to change just in time.
And I have decided. After using blogspot again for a week, it is
quite clear that this is the way to go.
Everything is so much easier... and it’s
free, it’s free, it’s free!
Without
another moment of hesitation, I clicked on the link provided in the email, and changed
my settings to ‘Do Not Renew’. And that’s
that. According to the confirmation
email, all information related to my account will be deleted when my account
expires. However, I have all my webpages
saved on my laptop, and backed up on my external hard drive; so I will be able
to add pages as I desire to blogspot.
Now to
add a few pictures to my quilting page... and then to add a few clothes to the
dryer, and some to the washer, too... and then I shall add a few stitches to
the sailboat quilt.
,,,^..^,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,^..^,,,
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