February Photos

Monday, March 16, 2015

Computer Clerks & Cat Yawns

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.”
  I know how many pictures a DVD holds.  I’ve been making photo DVDs and CDs for my friends for years and years.  I also take tens of thousands of pictures.  I can fill a DVD with high-quality photos in one day.  Half a day.  My trigger finger is no medical problem!  A psychological problem, maybe.  Perhaps even a psychiatric problem, heh heh.  But not a medical problem.
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.  πŸ˜–
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.  πŸ˜‰
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?)  πŸ˜Ž
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?    Ah, here we go:  880 spm (stitches per minute).  Stitch length, 12 spi (stitches per inch).  If I could sew the entire seam without a pause, I’d probably shave 1-1.5 minutes off that time.
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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