Quilting, Quilting, Quilting...

A friend wanted to know how one ‘changes the water’.  (Did she really not know?)

I replied, “You snap your fingers and say, ‘Amon ra, amon dei, sueia-ajarrow muctus inmactupaia, inmactu dipsic sictis tue hatuey hatuey hatuey!!’”

(Hope I didn’t say anything bad.  Near as I can tell, that means, “Oh my goodness, the dipstick is sick.”)

To ‘change the water’ at our house means I walk outside and flip switches on the forked spigots here and there around the house in order to start a new sprinkler spraying in a different location, and sometimes I actually pick up a sprinkler and move it.  By hand.  With me two hands.  ’Cuz we ain’t uptown ’nuff to have underground sprinklers.

There.  Now are you happy?

No, I’ll make you even happier:  sometimes I accidentally walk headlong into the spray and totally douse myself.  Now I’ll bet you’re happy!  

A recent discussion amongst quilting ladies concerned what size of squares, rectangles, or triangles they generally cut their scraps into.  I always wonder, how do they know ahead of time what they’re going to make, or what size or shape the pieces should be?

I don’t cut any scraps until I know what I’m going to use them for.  I save leftovers from big projects together, since the colors coordinate; but I never know ahead of time if I’m going to be making a pieced or appliquéd quilt, or maybe even doll clothes.  So... no cutting without an exact purpose in mind.

We had Schwan’s turkey pot pie for supper last Monday night.  It was good, but I do believe there is more crust and less filling than there used to be.

I was halfway through my weekly letter that evening, hunted for a picture from the previous week to insert, and decided, I didn’t take nearly enough pictures in the last few days! – so out the door I popped with my camera.  I had to wait a while for the fog to clear from the lens, as it was hot and humid out there; but I got quite a few decent pictures of a number of species of butterflies and one little dragonfly. 

Something similar happened today:  I was talking to Loren on the phone, looked out the window – and spotted hundreds of butterflies swarming the purple coneflowers.  Well, I quickly switched the phone to speaker so I could talk and attach my big lens to my camera at the same time; then headed out to take photos.  The results are sprinkled through this letter.

Tuesday morning, we got all thunder and no rain.  Same thing happened several times during the week:  a storm came marching straight at us, then, at the last minute, it parted or veered ever so slightly, and left us dry, even while WeatherBug and AccuWeather reported rain falling on our heads right that very moment.

That afternoon, I received a text from Amy:  She wrote, “You know those poles at random places in Wal-Mart that have price checker/barcode scanners on them?”

I responded, “Yep.”

She continued in the next post:  “I turned around yesterday and Josiah (he’s 5) was backed up to one, trying to get the tag turned up out of his shirt so he could scan it.”

Hahaha!  I couldn’t quit laughing, once I’d read that.

I went to help Loren with his laptop that afternoon.  He’d accidentally moved the entire browser window to the side of his screen, and had no idea what had happened, or how to get it back, and I didn’t think an explanation on the phone was going to cut it.  He sent me home with a bag of potatoes and carrots.  Plus, he wiped off part of the leather interior of my Jeep with ArmorAll leather conditioner wipes.

I don’t think either one of us has a very good idea anymore who is in whose debt (though I’m pretty sure I’m still in his, since, after all, he’s twenty-two years older than me, and thus has been doing stuff for me for a whole lot longer than I have been doing things for him).

Home again before long, I read the news, the funnies (gotta read the funnies, or I’ll be all in a fret, wondering what’s happening to Dick Tracy), and then I quilted, all the rest of the day.

As I quilted, I listened to a lady playing a harp-guitar.  Have you ever heard of such a thing?  Muriel Anderson and Her Harp-Guitar.  I always find unique instruments intriguing.  But I got tired of it before long.  Maybe if she’d’ve been playing something energetic, like, oh, say, Yackety Axe or something, I’d be more inclined to rant and rave. 

Hey!  Of all the noive.  Look what AutoCorrect did.  Did Al Gore invent it?  It changed ‘Yakety’ to ‘Yackety’!  Bah, humbug.  I know how Yakety Axe is speelt.

Anyway...  I like harps... I like guitars... pianos... most instruments... but not if they’re going to play 1960s grocery store music.  I want something I can tap my foot to...  and I’m not talking about the new stuff they call ‘music’. 

Larry came home from work at 5:00 p.m. – several hours earlier than usual, because he was dizzy and had an upset stomach.  He first noticed the dizziness as he was leaving a job some 65 miles to our west, driving his big truck.  He’s rarely sick.  Week before last, he put in 74 hours.  Maybe that’s why he’s sick?  It was hot, many of those days.

I quit quilting at a quarter ’til one in the morning.  I’d been standing there for nearly 8 ½ hours (with a Maple Nut ice cream break – and Victoria brought home caramel peanuts to put on it).  She even brought me supper from El Matador’s, my favorite Mexican restaurant:  a quesadilla.  Yummy.

I was a little more than halfway through the first part of the quilting – and when I get to the end of that, I have to remove it from my frame and reload it sideways, in order to quilt the big half-squares along the sides.  I made what could have been a fairly quick job a looong, looong job, by doing all this micro-quilting in the sashing!  Good grief, what’s wrong with me?  I hope it’s a looong, looong time before I decide to do that again. 

If it’s late, it’s late.  I have some DVDs of Switzerland -- high definition, shot from a helicopter, really beautiful scenery – that I’ll give Loren, if I don’t get the quilt done.   

I paused to look at Victoria’s goldfish doing his using frenetic wiggling, begging for food, and sent her a note:  “Your fish can’t see where they’re going.”

She dutifully cleaned the tank the next morning.  I’m certainly glad that’s no longer my job.

Here is the baby albino Plecostomus; below is the bigger one.  It’s going to outgrow this little tank soon!

Larry slept in his recliner from the time he got home until about 3:30 a.m., when he took a bath and came to bed.  His alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, and off he went to work, saying he felt better.  It only got up to about 82° that day, much more comfortable for men working outside.

By early afternoon, the kitchen was clean (after a fashion), a few bills were paid, and I was back downstairs in my quilting room.  Out the basement patio doors and big front window, I could see my brother mowing.  It looked like he was having fun with his new zero-turn mower, one of those nifty jobbies with a suspension system, so that each wheel moves up and down independently, which gives a much better ride on uneven ground.  The mowing deck moves with it, so the cut remains even. 

He set the sprinklers back up for me, and we let the water go until time for church.  The yard looked very nice – even if there is more crabgrass than bluegrass.

I walked out to the kitchen Thursday morning... and found grass and dirt all over the floor, and rice all over the counter.

What in the world?

Do you think the cats kidnapped a poor little Vietnamese rice farmer and dragged him in through the pet door, and he, in trying to save himself, wound up with rice under his fingernails and grass and dirt under his toenails?

He didn’t appear to be cowering in any corner anywhere, so evidently the cats ate him.

Idea #2:  Victoria decided to plant a rice farm in her room, and this is the usual trail she left behind?

I questioned the other occupants of the house, but no one had any plausible answers, though one of the cats looked decidedly guilty.

By suppertime, I was about halfway done with row number 7 out of 9 rows on the Cross-Stitched-Block quilt.  That meant there were 2 ½ rows to go before I could turn it on the frame.

It was a good time for a break – one hand was cramping from hanging onto the quilting machine handle while the other held a little ruler in place.

I decided a big chef salad was just the ticket, with strawberry/mango pie for dessert, with Schwan’s Maple Nut ice cream on top.

(Uh, the ice cream was atop the pie, not the chef salad.)

I went from totally starving to stuffed to the gills in ten minutes flat.

I waddled back to my quilting room.  Wonder what my stitching would look like if I ran in place whilst I quilted? 

Victoria brought home three neon tetras again – bigger ones, this time, hoping they’d have a better mortality rate.  One died within two hours and another was acting none too chipper.  Wonder what’s the matter with them?

By midnight, the second neon had croaked.

While I quilted, I downloaded Windows 10 onto my computer.  While it worked away at the installation, little notices of progression showed up now and then.  One that made periodic appearances read, “This may take a while.  Sit back and relax.”  What, do people sit and stare anxiously at their screen the whole time this is going on?!

I should have checked the time to see how long it took, but it didn’t occur to me.  Three hours, maybe?  It was 2:00 a.m. before my laptop informed me that the installation was complete.

Everything looked a bit different.  I wondered what in the world Microsoft Edge was, and if I was going to fall off.

“Send crampons!” I wrote to a quilting friend who was also burning the midnight oil.  “Send harnesses!  Quickdraws!  Carabiners and belays!  Ice axes and piton hammers!”

I discovered within seconds that the scroll function on the side of the touchpad didn’t work.  Time for a bit of investigation.  I pulled up mouse properties, and soon had everything back the way I like it – and discovered there are new functions that I really like.  Chiral scrolling, for instance.  When running your finger along the side of the touchpad to scroll up or down, if you got to the bottom of the touchpad before you got to where you wanted to be on the page, you had to lift your finger, reposition it, and run it down the side of the touchpad again.  With chiral scrolling, you start running your finger down... and then take it around in a counter-clockwise motion to continue scrolling.  Want to go back up to the top of the page?  Reverse your direction to clockwise, and up you go.  This is jolly handy-dandy!

By Friday morning, the third neon tetra was dead and gone.  Perhaps there was something wrong with the shipment of tetras Earl May had received, for when Victoria got to work that day, she found four tetras dead in the tank, which is somewhat unusual.

Victoria says her goldfish is yelling for food when he gapes like this.  And indeed every time we get near the tank, he rushes to the side nearest us, and wiggles so hard you’d think he was having an epileptic seizure.  Victoria says we mustn’t feed him too much, but when she’s not looking I sneak him a tidbit or two.  Then I drop in a few morsels for each of the small fish, since this glutton tries to consume it all before they get to it.

He likes food.  Food!  Food!!  FOOD!!!  He begs constantly, when he sees us in the room.  Funny fish.

Victoria went for a 12-mile bike ride that morning.  Not used to it, she came home feeling sort of like a wet noodle.  But that wasn’t enough; no, she then played softball with friends that night – after which she came staggering in, moaning.  She was sore all over.

I found something else that wasn’t working on my laptop:  the screensaver.  I think the poor machine was probably trying to index them, and the sheer quantity was overwhelming it.  I switched to Windows Live Photo Gallery... let it think about it, ponder, and mull things over for a while – and then it worked.  The only problem:  if I try to use all my photos for the screensaver, the ‘shuffle’ option doesn’t work; they go along in chronological order.  But if I only choose a folder or two, it works as it should.  What don’t these Windows technicians understand about the word ‘infinite’?!

But other than a few small details that I had to pummel into subjection, everything looked good.  The most noticeable difference is the speed with which things are working.  I have nearly three-quarters of a terabyte of data on my laptop, and that slows down some applications.  But Windows 10 seems to have sped up not only browsers (that’s what ‘Edge’ is, by the way – the new Microsoft browser) (I also have Chrome, Firefox, and Safari), but also the various programs I have.  The Photo Gallery now loads faster.  When one has over 150,000 photos, that program can really get bogged down, and I haven’t found a way to turn off ‘People Tag Search & Index’, which might be what slows it down the most.  I expect I’ll have to change something in the register, and I never do that without trustworthy instructions.

Oh – Windows 10 removed my pretty purple color from the title bars.  I’ve added a dark teal outline to the windows... but the title bars themselves are white.  It’s the paring down of some of the graphics that makes it speedier, though, so I won’t complain.  Much.

Later, I would discover an added benefit I had not expected:  the laptop is running considerably cooler.  This is indeed good, for I’d been worrying about it running so hot.  That has probably been a primary reason for the slowdown and unstableness of my previous computers: heat.  When the motherboard is continuously subjected to high heat, circuits get fried.  Fried food is bad for you.  Fried motherboards are bad for computers.

I turned on the water outside.  A few hours later, there was a big, bad thunderstorm coming, supposedly.  I’d been heading outside to move the sprinklers when I heard the thunder, checked the radar, saw the storm, and decided to turn them off instead.

We got three raindrops.  :-D 

I took Loren some supper that evening, came home and ate some myself, and then returned to the quilting machine.  Later, taking a little break to read news and email, I pressed Alt + the back arrow to return to a previous page --- but my finger slipped, and I pressed two unknown buttons together, and presto-ka-bang, my entire display, windows, Desktop, and all, were in portrait mode.  Like this:

Huh?? 

I had to put my head on sideways to see what I was doing while I found the Graphic Settings and switched it back – and the mouse was all discombobulated, too. 

This is a function that makes a screen compatible with other types of electronics, such as tablets and phones.  I looked online to see what keyboard commands did this.  If there’s a command to flip it one way, there’s gotta be a command to flip it the other, right?  I’ve looked up several things about Windows 10, and discovered there really isn’t very much information at all yet.

Turns out, it’s Ctrl + Alt + ↑, ↓, ←, or → that change the direction or layout of the screen.  I wonder how long that’s been an option that I didn’t know about??  What fun I could’ve been having with that little function!  :-D

Before I went to quilt Saturday morning, I washed a heap of dishes.  Did the cats have a midnight feast, or what??

Lydia sent some pictures of Jonathan, age 1 ½, that afternoon.  He’s such an adorable little sweetie.

I must’ve said that in Teddy’s hearing when he was about the same age, for he one day told me, “Me!  Doble!”

Eh?  He repeated it a couple more times... then took me to my cheval mirror, turned this way and that, smiling sweetly at himself in the mirror, and said, “Me!  Just doble!” 

Oh.  Adorable.  And humble, too.  :-D

Lydia made Jonathan’s little outfit using a pattern in one of Martha Pullen’s Heirloom Clothing for Children books we gave her.

One time I took Christmas pictures of the five older kids on an old wooden bridge in the park.  I never at all noticed until I got the prints back that Hannah had curled her fingers up inside her sleeves – in all the best pictures, of course.  So we sent out Christmas pictures that year – with one girl having no hands.

I allllmost got to the halfway point on the last row of Loren’s quilt that night.  Half a row to go... and then I have to turn it and do the sides.  Once I get to the sides, it will be faster, because I’ll have all those silly sashes with the microquilting all done.  I’m certifiably nuts. 

After turning it and quilting the ten large half-squares, I have to put the binding on – and then it has to be washed to remove all the markings.  And hopefully the spots of blood from when Janice cross-stitched it will come out... but they’re old, I think.

Sunday afternoon we took Jeffrey a birthday gift; he just turned 7.  We gave him a Wilson’s three-quarter-size football and a remote-controlled red Corvette.

We were supposed to get a humdinger of a thunderstorm last night, according to AccuWeather, but we only got a few raindrops on the way home from church.  Mostly, we were treated to a spectacular sunset.  And I didn’t have my camera!  By the time we got home, the sun was done sunk like a submarine.

Teensy just leaped onto my lap, and he’s trying to cram his head into the cupped area of my hands on the keyboard.  Pet me!  Pet me!  Pet me!  Now he’s stuffing his head under my arm and trying to lift it.  Insistent little cuddly feline, he is!  And I sure am having a hard time typing.

Did you ever watch someone handling an animal, clearly agitating the animal, but totally oblivious to anything the animal was feeling, and really want to box the person’s ears good and proper?

Every animal there is gives signs and clues to their likes, dislikes, and general attitude about things, and if one cares enough (and has a brain molecule in his head), he ought to be able to figure it out.

A friend told me the following story: 

Many years ago we went to the Wisconsin state fair and watched the sheep shearing contest.  The shearers were given a group of animals that had never been handled by them before and were timed at how fast and how perfect the fleece was when they finished. 

One shearer struggled and struggled with his sheep.  They wiggled and pushed and wanted nothing to do with him.

The second shearer, before starting to trim, set the sheep on her behind, put his arm across her chest and pulled her close, talking softly into her ear.  He then began to trim.  She relaxed as he trimmed the fleece off in one large pelt, nuzzling him as they went.  And so it went with each of the sheep he did, until the time limit was met.

Of course he won the event.  Someone asked him what he said to each girl before starting.  He said that he told the girls that they were very pretty and would feel a lot better once he got all that hot wool off.  “Just be a good girl and we’ll be done in no time.”

The man who’d had all the difficulty said that it was obvious that the other guy got some animals that liked to be handled and his were more wild..  Yeah... that’s what he said.

Just have to smile.

##################

Why would anyone get into such a job as sheep-shearing, when he seems to neither like nor understand the poor hapless animal?  I wonder if he really thought the other guy got easier animals than he did?  Some people, in addition to having their ears boxed, need to have them tied together behind their heads, too. 

Victoria went bike riding with a friend and a cousin this morning.  They got rained on good and proper out by Lake North.  Even though she rode 22 miles, she doesn’t feel as sore as she did Friday and Saturday, after riding only 12 miles.  Acclimation doesn’t take too long, when one is young and healthy.

Back when we went traveling with, oh, anywhere from 5 to 9 kiddos, if anyone asked, “How far is it?”, I handed them the map, and they had to calculate the answer for themselves, and then tell us how far it was to each approaching junction where we had to turn.

Some learned to read a map well.

The rest learned not to ask.

Here’s an Eastern Comma butterfly.  The butterfly gave serious thought to landing on Teensy, who was all sprawled on the porch; but Teensy flinched and rolled over, startling the butterfly away.

When you think of the great diversity and amazing array of colors and shapes in the fishes... the butterflies... the birds... the insects... the flowers... the animals... is it any wonder the Lord of all Creation said “It is good!” after He created all these wonders? 

It looks like we need to mow again.  Loren thinks he will probably bring his zero-turn mower and cut the grass for us in the next day or two.  A couple of the neighbors are fussy enough, I imagine they would complain if our grass got out of hand.  They fuss when Larry mows what they consider ‘too late’; and they’d fuss if the grass wasn’t mowed.  Maybe I should just put a sign up at the edge of the property:  

BACK TO NATURE

CERTIFIED WILDLIFE HABITAT

PLEASE WEAR CROC-SAFE SHOES

That should not only explain things, but keep the wolves at bay.

Some people on a photography forum are having a disagreement.  Good grief.  People should remember, when using the Internet, that it really is a) quite easy to judge wrongly when we have only the written word, b) quite easy to write something rude when we don’t intend to, and c) well, I’m sure there was a c), and I’ll certainly tell you what it was as soon as I think of it again. 

Hmmm... maybe they did intend to be rude and mean.  They should remember... if they forgot to remove their global positioning data from their photos, the axe murderers will know right where they are, and come an’ get ’em!

Speaking of Internet quallyfobbles... I once told someone that my email address was eat@thefish.net – and they thought I meant it, and couldn’t figure out why the email kept getting returned.  So I said, “Oh, sorry; got it wrong.  It’s getcurled@thehair.net.” 

And she proceeded to fall for that one, too. 

There used to be a woman who worked at a station where men took their deer to have them tagged here in town.  A couple of men brought in a big buck, huge rack... and she asked, as she prepared to write it on her clipboard, “Male or female?”

One of the men, more patient than the other, explained that only the males have antlers.

Fast forward to the next day.  Another group of men, several more bucks.  “I don’t need to ask whether they’re male or female,” the lady laughed; “I’ve learned that only the males have antennae!”

The spray planes were busy today.  Two of them flew right over our house several times.

And now I shall quilt.  I have five days before my brother’s birthday.  Can I do it???

It’s late... I’m in a hurry... therefore I’m posting this letter without rereading it.  Please do let me know if you find any glaring errors in it – spelling, grammar, misstating of facts, or a failure to replace a real name with a fake one, if I gossiped about someone.

How in the world do people ever write biographies without alienating and infuriating a few dozen people?

Answer:  they don’t.

,,,>^..^<,,,     Sarah Lynn     ,,,>^..^<,,,