Upon seeing some of the wedding photos I took last week,
a friend wrote, “And no pictures of you!”
That’s
because I was behind the lens, you see! I saw a five-year-old taking a
picture of me with a pocket snappy, though. (I did smile sweetly
for the little boy – and then I took his picture.)
This little guy and
his brother both have diabetes. Their mother, Jeremy’s sister
Joanna, has had some scary moments – such as a time or two when their blood
sugars dropped while they were sleeping, and she couldn’t get them to wake
up. Big responsibility for a young mother!
Tuesday, the sky was full of long
streams of Canada geese. I want to go to
Kearney—the
Sandhill cranes are coming back! Earl May is getting all
primed up to be ‘crazy busy’, according to Victoria’s boss.
It was so
nice out, I gave serious thought to working out in the yard. But ... I’d just washed my hair, and there sat
my quilt... and... well, I’ll just have to set my alarm to get up early some
morning to work outside, before baths and shampoos. Trouble is, I’m stiff and achy in the
mornings. I’m stiffer than I was last
year, and last year I was stiffer than I was the year before, and yard work happens
down on ground level, you see, and ground level is a looong ways down, last I
tried to get there. Sigghhhh...
About ten
years ago, I lost a couple hundred rainbow and peacock tulips because I didn’t
know one shouldn’t plant them amongst daylilies. 😏 Even the ones that weren’t by the lilies
eventually deteriorated and faded out entirely, on account of the soil. There are only half a dozen of the plain red
(and more hardy) variety left in a flower garden south of the house, where the
dirt is good black stuff, as opposed to clay or sand.
We have several different
types of soil on our ¾-acre. If a plant
doesn’t do well in one place, I try it in another. When something does well, I plant more —
mostly, by dividing and transplanting.
A former coworker, LaVonne, called to tell me that she
had been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer February 24th. She had a double mastectomy March 5th,
and got out of the hospital a couple of days later. She’s feeling pretty good, she said. The doctors told her that the cancer had not
attached to anything, and is not the fast-growing kind. In a day or two, she will get the results
from the pathologist, and then they will decide what route to take next. She has
asked us to pray for her.
A little
after 11:00 Tuesday night, I passed the halfway point in the vertical seams on
the mosaic sailboat quilt. I was still
going strong – or, ahem... still going, anyway.
Dunno about strong, at that
hour. But... there was still some
huckleberry coffee in the pot; that would get me through at least a few more of those looong seams (95”).
Earlier that
night, we had a light supper of Creamy Chicken Pasta Mix (from Bear Creek),
with orecchiette pasta (did you know ‘orecchiette’ means ‘little ear’ in
Italian?) and slivered carrots; peaches, and poppyseed muffins.
It got up
to 70° that day, and the birds weren’t just singing,
they were starting to collect bits of dried grass, cornhusks, and small twigs
for their nests. There were even a few
tufts of rabbit fur blowing about; the mama bunnies must be making nests,
too. But the temperature went down to
32° during the night, and will be doing that for another couple of weeks at
least, maybe longer. We don’t plant much
of our gardens in middle Nebraska until mid to late April. Adventurous souls do plant things like
carrots, turnips, potatoes, kohlrabi, radishes, or parsley... and at least part
of the time, that works out okay. Some
people say not to plant flowers here until Mother’s Day; but of course some
flowers are hardier than others. (And
some souls are more impatient than others.)
Victoria
has celery and broccoli growing in little organic pots in the living room, in
front of the window. She hijacked my
magnifying, extendable-arm light on the floor stand, put an ultraviolet light
in it – and nearly scorched the quick-sprouting broccoli to death before
learning they wanted water, not just
a light mist.
I refilled
my coffee mug, accidentally ate another poppyseed muffin (it jumped out of the
muffin tin and landed in my hand as I passed; I cannot be held accountable),
and began sewing a few more seams. (Is ‘one’
seam equivalent to ‘a few’, if it’s really long?)
After a while, my back
advised me to quit for the night, and sometimes I actually listen to it. Pain-A-Trate cream
by Melaleuca, Inc., had kept me going for the last hour and a half. But
it’s not strong enough, really, unless I mix it with Capzacin. I prepared
to head off to my recliner and heating pad—and then realized... I couldn’t
go upstairs with my laptop just yet: I’d
been backing up my files – all 548 GB of them – since early afternoon.
And there were still 29.1 GB of photos to go. Hmmm... there are
88,317 photos on my laptop – and on my external hard drive. Photos taken
with my newest camera are anywhere from 4 to 8 MB, depending on depth of color
and how I crop it. Here’s a shot of a cute(?) little black and white
butterfly, taken with my new macro lens.
Consider the above... and
now contemplate this: An extremely knowledgeable (i.e., ‘know-it-all’)
woman at a local computer shop, when I said that I needed a computer with a
large hard drive on account of my many pictures, looked at me like I was the
dumbest thing she’d ever laid eyes upon and said in a scornful tone,
----- here, I’ll just copy and paste the story from my journal of
May, 2012:
The clerk at the computer
store is, uh, not exactly a candidate for the Mensa club. How did she
get a job in a computer repair store, anyway?!
(“Maybe she’s related to
the owner?” I said to Larry. “Yep,” he confirmed, “she’s his wife.” Oh.)
She has a bottom lip that
hangs out in a perpetual scowl, and she never smiles, and is crabby as
all get out, though if I’m extra, extra friendly, she will say one or
two pleasant words to me.
Truly, I don’t judge people
by their looks – unless their looks match their attitude. Boy, oh, boy, then
– well, I cannot be responsible for what I think. After all, remember what Isaiah said: “Their countenances doth witness against them!”
Well, I was deciding
between a couple of refurbished laptops for Larry, and I chose the one with the
bigger hard drive, “because,” I explained, attempting to make friendly
conversation, “my husband likes me to put all our vacation pictures on his
computer and set them to play on screen saver.”
Then she said, in her rude,
abrupt way, “You shouldn’t put pictures on a computer!”
Oh. Oh?
I should… ? … …
… I know, I know! Use a 35mm with film, and have everything printed!! Wonder when someone’ll think of that??
Actually, the first answer
I thought of (I never have trouble thinking of things to say; I only have
trouble keeping from saying them) was what an uncle of mine used to
say: “Don’t try to teach a pig to sing; it’ll just make you mad and annoy
the pig.”
I didn’t say that.
But I sure thought it.
I tried a small, polite
explanation: “I back up my pictures… he likes to look at
them… blah blah blah…”
She shook her head. I
was really too stupid for words.
But I was curious. “Where
do you put your pictures?”
“On a disk,” she said
shortly.
“A”
disk. Just one?
I laughed; couldn’t keep
from it. “If I put my pictures on disks, I’d have a stack from here to
Mars.”
She sneered. “No, you
wouldn’t.”
I decided to just hush up,
since all I wanted to say was something on the order of, “You haven’t a brain
in your head.” Or, worse, “You really do match your teeth.”
She added, “A DVD holds
more pictures than you think.”
Someday, Ms. Crabbyface is
a-gonna get a scratch on her disk, and then what’ll become of her three
dozen photos?
Oh, well. They’re probably nothing but blurred
mistakes, anyway.
There. Been wanting
to rant and rave about that all week. 😖
I was soon delighted to discover
that, while I blithered on, 1) my computer backup worked its way down to
30 minutes remaining, 2) I found the Capzacin, 3) there was
enough piping hot coffee left in the pot to refill my mug, and 4) the
last two muffins stayed politely in the tin when I walked past, like good
muffins should.
P.S.: By the way, I
refrained from arguing with the lady ---- and wound up getting a good deal on a
decent laptop for Larry. Honey catches more flies than a swatter!
Or something like that.
(Why did I want a fly,
anyway?)
Wednesday, my friend Linda asked if I could download
Charles H. Spurgeon’s Sermon Volumes in plain text onto a thumb drive for
her. She does the proofreading for
Christine Walker, who prints up little booklets of Spurgeon excerpts for the
booklet rack at church. I pick them up
about once a week. I had just sent Penny
a couple of Volumes she was missing, and Linda, learning about this, was hoping
to get them, too, as sometimes she needs to look things up to be sure the
booklets are correct. The site where the
sermons are available in various forms of download – some are even available in
audio format – is not blind-user-friendly. I promised her I
would, and got it done that night after church.
It takes a little time to download, convert to text, and save, as each Volume
is two or three megabytes. There are 76 Volumes.
A few people wanted to
know, just how long does it take to sew one of the 95”
seams in the mosaic sailboat quilt? So I timed it with my
stopwatch. This includes a short stop every 12-18 inches or so to make
sure all the little one-inch squares are tucking into the seam properly, and to
lift the quilt up onto the table (gently! — so as not rake off any little
squares): 5 minutes, 27 seconds, and 63 centiseconds.
Therefore, if I didn’t have
to stop and glue little squares back on, or take out a seam and reinsert a
little square, it would take approximately 8 ¼ hours to sew these 90 seams.
So now you know. 😉
Shortly after I posted this
information, a friend wrote, “AND maybe the most amazing fact is that I knew
you would attempt to answer it. You did good.” (How in the world did she know that?) 😎
Another lady wrote, “That
seems like a really long time to sew a seam!”
And
the machine is going at top speed, too!
Hmmm... I wonder how fast my machine sews?
Yet another inquired, “How
much would one have to charge to make such a quilt?”
Figuring out prices for
handmade things is often the hardest part of the whole job. Because...
whatever I charge will be way too much for the customer, and whatever
the customer thinks is about right will be way too little for me. If a somewhat intricate, bed-sized quilt
takes 80 hours to make, and a quilter wants to make a measly $10 an hour, then
that quilt will have to be priced at $800 plus the cost of supplies. Who pays over $1,000 for a quilt?? Come to think of it, that’s cheap, for an
Amish quilt.
When I had the Graceful
Garden quilt appraised, I nearly fell over dead when the appraiser put a tag of
$9,500 on it. 😲 I gave Hester and Andrew the appraisal papers
so they could insure the quilt with their household contents.
Thursday evening, I took some supper to Loren –
ancient-grain-encrusted cod, peas, and apple salad. He already had
lettuce salad and yogurt, he told me, so I didn’t need to take anything
else. He’d been working outside in his yard all day – it was a lovely
day, 75° – and he was hungry.
On
the way home, I dropped off the thumb drive with Spurgeon’s Sermons on it for
Linda. Then I filled the Jeep with gas... and soon I was back to
sewing. I had
14 more 95” seams to go. Each one took about 5 ½ minutes – I would be
done in about an hour and a half.
Hannah sent me this picture of a crocheted crinoline lady
she is making for a niece’s birthday.
She will put bows and roses on it, and possibly white trim all around. She is debating what to do with it once it’s
finished. Put it on a pillow? A pillowcase?
Frame it?
When I see pretty things
like this, I want to crochet. I once
made a granny square, when I was about 9 or 10.
But it was stinkin’ ugly, in comparison to this dainty thing. I’d like
to learn to knit, too, if for nothing else than to make myself nifty wool
socks. There aren’t enough hours in every day to do all these things!
I, too, have been debating
over a birthday gift: I’m looking for
ideas for my sister Lura Kay’s birthday.
I want to do something with ribbon embroidery – most likely a ribbon basket filled to
overflowing with all sorts of ribbon flowers. She rarely has time to sew, so I won’t make a
pincushion or needlekeep. A scissors
case would be okay to put the embroidery on... as would a decorated box... a
journal cover... a frame... or I could put it on heavily-interfaced
fabric with batting and binding and a sleeve in the back, and then get a little
black scrolled metal stand to hang it on. The background fabric will be crazy-quilt
patchwork in various shades of ivory, with lace.
Late Thursday night, I
finished the vertical seams in the mosaic sailboat quilt. I would start on the horizontal seams the
next day. The grand thing was, all the
little squares were now sewn down and wouldn’t be popping out of place. Plus, with all the vertical seams sewn, the
quilt is now only 45” wide, as opposed to 90”.
Friday, I launched into The Changing of the Quilts
(sort of like The changing of the Guard, only with more pieces): I washed clothes and
bedding, including the wool/corduroy/velvet winter quilt. I laid it out to dry on the back deck, and
put the Harvest Sun summer quilt on the bed.
It was a bit windy, with gusts up to 25 mph. But it was a good day
for drying clothes and bedding outside – so long as everything didn’t wind up
in the neighbor’s yard. It
didn’t take long to dry, for it was a sunny 70°, and the humidity was only
28.5%. Now the winter quilt is folded
and stowed in my sewing room closet. The
Harvest Sun is by far my favorite; I’m glad it’s back.
I restrung my clothesline,
and soon Larry’s shirts and jeans were blowing in the wind, and another load was
in the washer. Carrying heavy quilts and
several batches of pillows up and down the stairs called for a snack, and since
I’d had only a small bowl of walnut-raisin oatmeal that morning, I splurged: a handful of Tostitos scoops with Salsa Con
Queso dip (“Made with Real Cheese!” ---- as opposed to, what, Styrofoam? Formaldehyde?), a few bites of apple salad, a
sliver of strawberry-rhubarb pie with whipped cream, a peanut granola bar, and
orange juice.
Then I headed back to the sewing
machine, armed with huckleberry coffee.
The windows and patio doors were thrown open wide, and the birds were
singing up a choral rhapsody. (Well,
that little English sparrow over there was merely chirping, and not very
melodically, at that – but he has Great Expectations.)
Horizontal mosaic seams,
ho!
Because I was curious... ... ...I
wanted to know how long it took me to sew the horizontal seams, which are 45”. Other than being thick with the vertical
seams, so that I must be careful to keep the ¼” seam allowance correct, the
seams are simple, as I don’t have to keep stopping to tuck in little squares
and suchlike. I only need to make sure
the seams I am sewing over are all continuing to go in the same direction.
So, while the 95” vertical
seams took almost 5 ½ minutes to sew, the horizontal seams take 1 minute, 49
seconds, and 22 centiseconds to sew – and that’s with the pedal pressed all the
way down, flank speed emergency the whole way.
Of course, one must add in the time it takes to cut the thread,
rearrange the quilt, fold the next seam on the proper mark, and then make sure
all the vertical seams are folded the same direction, and that could easily add
another minute or two. There. Aren’t details fun?
I took my
brother supper that night: roast beef
(the melt-in-the-mouth roast from Schwans), baked potatoes, carrots, and onions
with gravy, and his favorite apple salad (just like Mama used to make).
Tabby came begging for his
supper. I set it down for him... he
sniffed it... turned up his aristocratic feline nose, and stalked off in High
Dudgeon, making a small ‘Mrrrphhz!’ noise as he went, which I’m pretty sure
meant, ‘Ah don’t eat me no strychnine!
So, ha! You’ll hafta try harder’n
that to get rid of me, you will. Hmmph.
I’m a-gonna hire me a food taster, I am.’
Along came Teensy, the
opportunist, stepping quietly (and quickly) on tippytoes, hoping I wouldn’t notice,
so he could clean off Tabby’s saucer slicker’n a whistle.
Gotta snatch the
food...
* *
* * *
There. Food has done been snatched, consoling words
said, back-of-the-ears scritch-scratched.
Teensy only gets the soft food as a treat now and then; he’s plump
enough already!
Victoria’s friend Robin
came visiting, and they made cards. Two
small young ladies upstairs – but now and then it sounded more on the order of
a herd of large buffalo rumbling through.
What were those girls doing?!
Some quilting friends were
discussing attending funerals and/or weddings, and one said that she should
hire herself out as a professional crier, because she was so good at it. If anybody else shed so much as one tear, she
didn’t let them do it alone!
Well, I have gotten so
sappy in my dodderage that I sometimes cry over the news – especially if there
is a video, and somebody is telling some touching story, or worse, crying over some touching story.
And I am here to tell you
that, when I cry, I don’t look tragical and beautiful like an actress, oh,
no. Rather, I look like a tomato. With a strawberry for a nose.
Years ago, when I used to
sing solos at funerals (or weddings), I learned not to look at the mourners (or
the wedders) (that should be a word,
and would be a word, if Noah Webster
had’ve ever tried telling this story, because he would have needed that word, just like I did). Instead, I looked at the guy who once threw
up at the Christmas program, when we were kids.
I looked at the hoity-toity visitor’s small urchins, who were right that
moment attempting to murder each other in the back pew. I looked at the woman with the hat that could
do double duty as a wood stork nest. I
looked at the man whose westward comb-over had gone eastward in the breeze as
he entered the sanctuary. I looked at
the baby in Row 3 who was inspecting the interior of her father’s ear (and then
switched to his tonsils when he yawned).
And thus, I managed to keep
my dignity! (Or at least I think I did.)
The simultaneous urges to
laugh and to cry balance each other out and leave one looking suitably
solemn. Or at least blank.
Don’t they?
Fortunately,
one can play the piano even when tears are trickling down one’s face. (A good, hearty sneeze might do one in,
though.)
Saturday, a lady from
France wrote and asked, “Can you please explain what in heaven’s name is huckleberry
coffee???”
So here’s my explanation,
in case you missed it: The coffee beans
are flavored with huckleberry oil. In fact, I’m drinking some right now. Here’s a good place to get it: Larchwood Farms
In addition to coffee beans
and teas, Larchwood Farms makes jams, jellies, preserves, syrups, honeys,
candies, pie fillings – and many sugar-free products. Huckleberries are
naturally sweet, and require little sweetener in any case. When they
sweeten their products, they use organic cane juice, fruit pectin, and lemon. They even make BBQ sauces! They also
make lotions, candles, lip balm, bath salts...
When we were in Gardiner,
Montana, the town just north of Yellowstone National Park, we went in a gift
shop that was chock full of huckleberry, chokecherry, apricot, red raspberry,
and marionberry items – all of the above and a whole lot more. Ohhhhhhh...
I wanted at least one each of every item in the store – and a dozen
of some things. There were even shirts,
sweaters, hats, and socks with their logo.
Trout Creek, Montana, where Larchwood Farms is located, is called ‘The
Huckleberry Capital of Montana.’ It’s in the northwest corner of Montana,
a beautiful part of the country.
I found a set of videos on youtube called Fantastic
SwissView, many hours of HD video taken from a helicopter, and I’ve been playing
them while I sew. There are a couple dozen
videos, each an hour and a half long. What
amazing, beautiful scenery!
On the video, the Aescher
Hotel in Appenzellerland, Switzerland, suddenly shows up directly in front of
the helicopter as it approaches this massive rock face cliff.
I looked it up – and discovered many pictures like this
one, but only one from the viewpoint the helicopter had. You can get there only by hiking, though
there is a tram car on a cable some distance down the mountain that brings
visitors from the village far below. I
wanna go there!
But...
in the meanwhile... I took clothes off the line, hung another load out, and
started one more in the washing machine. I took a stack of freshly-washed
sweaters downstairs and put them away – and then put a stack of summer tops in
my dresser upstairs.
It
was a beautiful day... cardinals, turtle doves, sparrows, goldfinches and house
finches were singing... and for once, the wind was hardly blowing.
Since it was Pi Day, 3.1415 (or maybe because there was one
piece left in the refrigerator), I had a piece of
strawberry-rhubarb pie for breakfast.
Mmmm, mmm.
As I was out on the back
deck collecting another load of clothes, I heard geese. I looked up... couldn’t see anything in the
bright blue, blue sky for a moment – and then I noticed a faint twinkling. I dashed in the house, grabbed my binoculars,
rushed back out, zeroed in – and saw thousands upon thousands of snow geese,
high, high in the sky, lines upon lines of them. Some are in their blue-morph stage, but most
are snowy white, shining in the bright sun.
Here’s a funny thing: nearly all of them were sailing, wings
outspread, not flapping at all, except for a few who were changing
positions. They are heading due north –
some of them will nest along the shores of Hudson Bay, others, along the
Beaufort Sea. Some will even head all
the way to the islands off the Arctic Ocean.
They have a long ways to go.
Anyway, they were sailing – evidently they were in a wind current,
because they were going fast, though they were, for the most part, not
propelling themselves – and they were going north. Down here on the ground, the wind was from
the northwest, blowing at only about 5 mph (oddly windless, for Nebraska), with
gusts up to 20 mph. But the wind up
there – probably somewhere around 20,000 feet – must’ve been blowing from the
south. When migrating at that altitude,
snow geese can travel steadily at 45-50 mph.
I find all this –
everything about nature – strange and wonderful, and I guess I will never get
my fill of it as long as I live. There
is always something new to see and to learn about.
After the geese disappeared
from sight, I made a new pot of coffee and headed downstairs to the sewing machine.
After sewing most of the
afternoon, I put some chicken breast filets into the oven. When they were done, I poured chicken
dumpling soup over them. Also on the
menu: corn and mixed fruit. (Not in the same bowl.) I made enough for my brother, and took it to
him. His lawn is starting to turn green
from the water he’s been putting on it the last few days, and the new grass he
planted where he took down some dead trees last fall is beginning to come up.
I thought I’d get done with
the top of the sailboat quilt Saturday night, but it took longer than I
thought, and of course I had to chat with Victoria... and Teddy came visiting
for a bit... He sold his Excursion, and so he came to pay us for the
Suburban Larry traded for a couple of months ago. There was so much
buying and selling of vehicles going on there for a little while, involving Victoria’s
Jimmy... the Aurora... the Suburban... Larry’s Dodge Ram... the one-ton Chevy
dually... I really can’t remember how we wound up with this or
that! The Suburban gets better gas mileage than the Excursion did, and
drives nicer, too. Teddy and Amy had been to a bulk-food store in Omaha,
and he brought us Maple French Toast bagels (from the Thomas Co.) and English
muffins and a giant carrot muffin with cream cheese frosting. The muffin
was actually for Larry (‘payment’ for cutting Teddy’s hair), but Larry was nice
enough to share it with Victoria and me.
I think maybe I’ll start
putting my pictures on my old blog instead of my website – I’m probably getting
close to the quota for data on my website again, and, besides, pictures are
easier to look at on the blog, I think.
They load much faster, and are in a more convenient format – you can use
keyboard arrows to go from picture to picture. What do you think? – I
added some from the first of February, and will do more this evening, if I have
time: http://tinyurl.com/Feb1-2015-BirdsNSnow
That old FrontPage software
really has its drawbacks. I think
viewers will be much happier if I put my pictures on Blogger. Oh,
and I can leave the pictures higher quality, too. I wonder how many extra
‘pages’ I can make (as opposed to the main blog page)? If I run out of
those ‘pages’, I guess I’ll just make another blog with a similar name, and
then put a link on the main blog.
A friend
on a quilting group wrote in a froth of excitement to tell me she’d won $500 from
her state lottery. She knows I never win
anything — because I don’t gamble. She
teases me about this. So, of course, I
wrote back, “How much did you have to spend to win this much?”
Turns
out, she’d spent $21 that very day, but – give her credit for honesty – “I have
spent much more than $500 in the previous days, weeks, months, and years. However,” she added, “I’m going to do better!
– I have canceled my online account and will from now on only play a buck a
day. But there will always be a chance I
could win anywhere from $50,000 to a million.
I don’t routinely play Mega-millions or Powerball, but if the jackpot
gets up to where ‘the buzz round town’ is about the jackpot (generally when it
starts to go over $600 million) I’m sure I’ll spend a few bucks on that.”
I
can’t help myself; I have to protest: “A
buck a day is $365. Put it in a savings
account, instead! Ten years from now,
you'll have $3,650 plus interest.”
Then I
added, “I won $50 yesterday.” “Well, actually, my brother gave it to
me. He wanted to put gas in my Jeep, but I’d just filled, and the tank
was plumb full. I don’t think he believed me... ‘I knew you’d say
that,’ he remarked, giving me ‘the look’. So, despite my protests, he
wrote me a check, and wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
My friend replied, “$3,650 sounds sorta good (not a lot
over ten years, really)... but, I get to daydream each evening that the next
morning I might have won enough to buy a house outright AND get Zoe’s nails
trimmed and painted (Zoe is her ugly little Chihuahua). To me that moment of daydreaming is worth a
buck. I’ll admit it’s not worth 3 or 4
bucks which quickly adds up to $90-$120 a month.”
Good grief. I
think I shall keep right on not gambling.
Friends are talking about their gardens... and one lady wrote
this:
“Off in the field was a
fella using two plow horses, tilling a field with the ol’ plow they used to use
in the olden days. He was hanging
on for dear life as those big horses were pulling like mad. Even though they were doing all of the work,
he’s going to be hurting from just hanging on behind them.”
When my father was a boy, he wound up with something so
badly wrong with the fronts of both legs below the knee that he couldn’t walk
for one whole summer – that was from riding a plow with a seat that was coming
loose, and he had to brace himself with first one foot and then the
other. He told his father about it, but no one realized it was so bad, or
that he was hurting himself, so they didn’t get around to fixing it – until he
couldn’t walk one morning. He spent the
summer sitting out in the orchard – his father would carry him out there in the
morning, and carry him back in the late afternoon – with a BB gun, knocking out
crows and blackbirds that came to steal the fruit. He got to be quite the deadeye.
Though he was naturally a careful person, this experience
caused him to become very diligent to always keep things in excellent repair,
and to watch out for others’ health and well-being, especially if they were
young.
When I
was a little girl, I traveled a lot with my parents. We came upon some bad accidents a few
times. It always made a sick feeling,
right down in the pit of my stomach. One
time we stopped at a rest area, and I made friends with a couple of little
girls about my age who were traveling with their parents in a big, beautiful, motorhome
with purple designs painted on the sides, pulling a nice trailer with two large
purple Harley Davidsons on it. They left
the rest area before us; we followed half an hour later.
Fifty miles farther on
through a hilly, wooded area, with the wind whipping down through the canyons
and gullies, we came upon a bad wreck.
The motorhome was down in a deep canyon below the road, nothing but a
shambles of confetti. The motorcycles
were twisted pieces of metal, and the trailer had gone to bits and pieces. Paramedics were loading a man into an
ambulance; a distraught, sobbing woman was sitting at the side of the
road. And there were two small covered
mounds near the shoulder of the highway.
I didn’t have to ask, to know
what that meant. Such an awful, sick feeling... I won’t ever forget that.
Lydia is sewing Jacob a suit for Easter. Last night she sent me a picture of the flap
over the welt pocket in the front of the jacket. The flap lacks a scant quarter of an inch
being as wide as the slit for the welt underneath the flap. It’s not noticeable, and her sewing is neat
as a pin. But she’s worrying about it.
“That really doesn’t look bad at all,” I told
her. “The seamstress always sees the worst. Just steam it and
forget it! No one will ever notice a thing. It takes a number of those to really get in
the hang of sewing them – and then, after you get #50 absolutely perfecto, #51
will fail miserably. Ha!
“Actually, it just takes three or four, and you
get pretty good at. If it’s any consolation, those are considered one of
the hardest things to sew! And you did a very good job. Can you
help it if someone printed the flap slightly too small?? Believe me, no one will notice anything wrong
with it at all. Just steam it neatly, and don’t point it out to anybody. Boys’ and men’s suits are topline
tailoring! – yer doin’ good!” And she is.
The temperature is already
up to 88°, and it’s not quite the middle of the afternoon! But tomorrow, it might not even reach 50°.
Victoria has finished putting tucks in her new purple blackout
curtains, which were a bit too long for her room. They hang soft and pretty and look very nice.
I’ve
paid the bills, and ordered a new 2-terabyte external hard drive. I’m a bit fanatical about backing
up my data. I’d feel like creating time warps
and volcanoes, if I lost my pictures or scribblings! I keep intending to subscribe to Carbonite
(or BackBlaze or CrashPlan or suchlike), too, but haven’t done it yet. Now and again, some people have found their
uploaded data to some of those sites only partially there, or corrupted,
though; so ... Nothing is totally sure,
so more than one method of backup is best.
Now,
I really, really want to get the rest of the horizontal seams sewn on
this sailboat quilt.
I have spring fever... need to go west
and see the Sandhill cranes on the Platte over by Kearney! Need to go east and see the snow geese on the
Missouri over by Blaire! Need to go
somewhere!
But right now, I need to get Larry’s dress shirts off the
line, and then go sew.
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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