This last week has been all about dates,
I do believe – and I’m not speaking of figs.
Yep, Kurt and Victoria are now dating.
A friend remarked, “Your children are
all growing up! What will you do with no
kids in the house someday?”
I replied, “Go on trips to Alaska? Stay in a Bed & Breakfast where rooms are
for only two people?”
Well, maybe not that last one. I just looked at what I thought was a nice,
conservative B&B – and they charge $750 a night! Good grief.
That’s more than enough money to pay for the gas to drive all the way to
Nome, Alaska.
A week ago, Levi and Ethan were both having
troubles with asthma. Asthma is such a
worry. I remember getting up in the
middle of the night and going one child’s door to the next, checking on the
three who had asthma, making sure they were breathing okay.
Amy said a thermometer got broken at
their house, and it reminded me of a story Lura Kay once told: she and the boys broke a thermometer when she
was little, and, not knowing the danger, they played with the little balls of
mercury.
Larry broke one when he was little, too
– by sticking it into his mother’s tea in order to seem sick enough to stay
home from school. (I don’t imagine she was fooled.)
Last Monday night, Victoria was playing
the piano – When They Ring the Golden Bells – and Larry was singing. I love to listen to them. Sometimes it’s funny... they do a good impersonation
of The Three Blind Mice or Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Nevertheless, I love to hear them play and
sing together.
Larry worked 74 hours the week before last.
When he’s home during a week like that, he’s usually falling asleep over his
supper plate. When he’s home, awake, and talking to me (or singing while
Victoria plays the piano), all three at the same time, I’m glad, never mind what
the subject matter is!
Tuesday morning, it was only 46° by
10:30 a.m., but sunny and bright. Delmar Tucker’s funeral was at 2:00
p.m. I made sandwiches for the luncheon
after the funeral. Would it be a bad
choice to use jalapeño bread, cracked pepper beef, and pepper jack cheese?
<pause...> I didn’t do that, really. I made the sandwiches with cheese bread fresh
from the Wal-Mart bakery, a bit of Miracle Whip, thick Carving Board turkey
slices, Marble Jack cheese, and sweet butter lettuce.
Delmar’s wife Helen lived at our house from
the time I was a baby until I was 2 ½, when she married Delmar. I was their flowergirl. I sometimes went with her and Delmar when they
first started dating. They took me to
the fair, and we went on the Ferris wheel – and it quit working and stopped
when we were right at the top. I thought
it great sport. Helen was frightened,
and Delmar would swing his feet and make the chair rock!
Shortly after 12:30 p.m., I was right
properly amazed when I looked out the front window and saw Larry pulling into
the drive. This meant...
...we wouldn’t be late, for once!
And we weren’t, either. But it was mighty close.
After dropping off the sandwiches at
Tom’s business, where the luncheon would be served, we roared on to the church,
dashed headlong down the aisle, slid into our pew, and were just able to quit
gasping so loudly for breath when it was time to rise and sing the first song.
This, because Larry, feeling like he
had ever so much time, lollygagged
around, having lunch, giving Tabby tidbits, etc., etc., and it was 20 after 1
before he even started running his bathwater.
We had to drop off the sandwiches at Tom’s. There were many visitors (i.e., lots of cars)
at the church (visitation had started at 10:00 a.m.) – and yet another section
of parking was unusable, on account of big trucks and cranes bringing huge prefabricated
cement walls and beams for the new school and Fellowship Hall. One doesn’t park small squishy cars, pickups,
and Jeeps in an area under which huge cement walls and beams are being swung to
and fro on the end of a crane.
As mentioned previously, since our
Fellowship Hall is torn down and the new one, along with the school, is under
construction, we’ve been having receptions and luncheons at the building Tom
Tucker rents from Walkers. It’s a huge building; he rebuilds campers and
motorhomes there, and has many displayed on the large lot. It’s a big job
for him and others to get all the camper stuff moved out, and tables and
suchlike moved in. I imagine no one will be happier than he, when our new
school and Fellowship Hall are completed.
Here is Delmar’s obituary:
Delmar and Helen’s oldest daughter,
Annette, is married to Larry’s brother, Kenny. And Helen’s brother, John
H. Walker, is my sister’s husband.
When Delmar started coming to our house
to court Helen, he rarely showed up without a handful of flowers for her.
My father, upon hearing the knock at the door, and knowing it was Delmar, would
leap to his feet and dash headlong to the door in order to get there before Helen.
Swinging open the door, he’d shout, “THE FLOWER BOY’S HERE!!!”
Many years later, Delmar’s grandson Jeremy
started coming to court Lydia. He sometimes
arrived with flowers in hand, just as his Grandpa had done, all those years
before. He had no idea he was stepping in his grandfather’s footsteps; no
one had told him Delmar did that – he just did it because he, too, likes
flowers. So I followed in my father’s footsteps, dashed to the door ahead
of Lydia, flung open the door, and yelled, “THE FLOWER BOY’S HERE!!!” (And of course I told them the story, from
when I was just a wee little girl.)
Helen is always helping others, never
mind what she needs help with herself.
It’s been a way of life with her, every day of her life. She taught me to read, to play the piano, to
make pumpkin chiffon pie, and a host of other things too numerous to
mention. She’s always been like another
big sister to me.
After the funeral service, we drove to
the cemetery. Teddy, three of his children, and Victoria rode with
us. We carpool as much as possible when we have graveside ceremonies, but
even then there are a lot of cars in the procession.
As we passed Loup Public Power
District, a humongous man with a looong, forward-pointing goatee walked out on the
right side of the street. Everyone stared
without saying a word. Immediately
thereafter, a kid from the Middle School walked around the corner of the Loup
building on the left side of the street.
He was in huge, baggy cargo shorts, spindly white legs sticking out
below and embedded up to upper ankle in gigantic neon orange sneakers – the
old-fashioned style with the big white rubber toes (although the color was
decidedly not old-fashioned). His t-shirt
was nondescript and partially covered by a book bag big enough to put Granite
Gear’s ‘load-gobbling, mountain-tackling’ pack to shame. Far atop his smallish head, above hair sticking
out like a scarecrow’s mop, perched a little brown and orange knit stocking cap
(cheers! He color-coordinated it with
his podiatric clodhoppers). The cap,
roosting high, bobbed happily back and forth as the boy lumped along.
In the seat behind me, I saw Emma’s
head turning from one window to the other, looking with big brown eyes upon the
astounding array of humanity street-side.
So, very quietly, I quoted Dr.
Seuss: “Looking here and looking there,
funny things are everywhere.” And Emma cracked
right up.
Disclaimer: I never make fun of people who have something
about them that they cannot help. If
they do this ‘something’ to themselves on purpose, however, why, then, they’re
fair game!
We all went back to Tom Tucker’s shop
for the luncheon. Victoria and Kurt, after helping serve some of the
tables, came and sat beside us to eat. Jeremy and Jonathan came to visit
with us. Jonathan toddled over to see
his Aunt Victoria, then stopped dead in his tracks and stared long and hard at
Kurt. Kurt grinned at him – and all of a
sudden Jonathan grinned back and trotted forward to show both Kurt and Victoria
his Thomas the Tank train. After a
minute or two, Kurt scooped Jonathan up onto his lap, and they all played with
Jonathan’s little train cars on the table.
Soon Jonathan was having a jolly good time – and so were Kurt and
Victoria. There’s another good
recommendation for Kurt: Jonathan likes him!
Afterwards, we took Loren home and
visited with him for a bit while I did a bit of maintenance on his computer and
pulled up an email with a bunch of pictures his granddaughter had sent
him. Maybe, with this incentive, he’ll be more inclined to learn to use
email!
A lady from one of the quilting groups
was telling how she’d cut several inches from some fabric to sew onto another
piece – but then proceeded to sew it right back onto the fabric from which she’d
cut it.
I wrote back: Aw, that’s not so bad! I was once patching jeans, got a couple of
patches sewn neat as a pin onto one leg, then held up the jeans to see if the
other leg needed a patch –
But the other leg wasn’t there.
I’d been patching the only remaining
leg of the jeans from which I’d been cutting the patches.
At least I hadn’t cut the patch from a good
pair of jeans, there was that good news.
And then there was the time I shortened
one pant leg twice—pants Larry was going to wear to his daughter’s wedding!
Thankfully, I’d put in a 1 ½” hem, and only cut an inch off in the first place,
so once I corrected the error, both legs sported a half-inch hem, which I
serged nicely before doing a blind hem. No one was ever the wiser, except
me. (And I was wiser – I was a whole lot more careful in cutting off
pantlegs, thereafter.)
On another occasion, I sewed a very
puffy, gathered sleeve into a dress... carefully getting all those tiny gathers
absolutely poifect...
Only to discover --------
Kid needed a chiropractor, after
wearing that dress.
<pause>
(No, she didn’t wear it that way.
Did you think she had?!)
Yessiree, I’m always finding new and
different ways to make blunders. ’Cuz,
after all, my motto is: “I will never be
bored!”
Since we had sandwiches, jello salad,
chips, pickles, juice, and cake at the luncheon and didn’t get home until
almost dark, we didn’t bother with supper.
But by 12:30 a.m., I was hungry, so I dug around in the cupboard – and
found the jar of Nutella Teddy and Amy gave me for my birthday. There was
nothing to put it on, but... oh, well. What does it matter, when it’s Nutella?
I ate a few scoops straight out of the jar, just like a Calicack might do.
One scoop too many, evidently, as my
stomach promptly went to grumbling. I settled it down with a nice hot mug
of coffee.
What’s a Calicack, you ask? Well, it’s a play-off of ‘The Kallikaks’ – a
pseudonym for a hypothetical family from some 100+ years ago that, as a whole,
was known to be dumb as posts. We change
the spelling and use it to mean ‘hillbilly’ or ‘person totally bereft of
manners or smarts’.
If you happen to be around when a
member of the family does some country-bumpkinish thing, you might see someone
else roll his or her eyes and exclaim scornfully, “Aacck, you’re such a Calicack!”
– and you won’t even need to look it up to know exactly what it means.
Wednesday morning, in reading through a
few news headlines, I clicked on one of interest – and wound up listening to Hillary
screeching about who knows what. Ugh,
what a cacophony. The tone of her voice
affects me the same as fingernails scraping a chalkboard does.
In case you love Hillary, I should
hasten to apologize, change my tune, as it were.
“She sings like a songbird!”
There. Howzat?
(You will note I did not specify which
songbird.)
I spent a good deal of the day quilting
the Long Pine cabin wall hanging.
That night, Victoria had her first ‘real’
date. Kurt worked with Teddy and Caleb’s
crew that day – and they were late getting back to town from a job.
So Caleb, ever the thoughtful brother,
sent his little sister a text when they were on their way home in the company
truck: “Your knight in shining concrete smeared armor is charging madly
to your side.” hahaha
Kurt, his younger brother Jared, and
Victoria’s friend Robin (who is a cousin of Kurt’s and Jared’s) had supper with
us – a supper Victoria cooked in the crockpot: roast, baby potatoes and carrots...
also lettuce salad and a pumpkin roll, which she made from scratch (pie
pumpkins and all).
I can now report that the First Date
was a Rousing Success.
I have several online friends who like
to send recipes around. A couple of them
have not mastered the art of copy and paste (or forwarding, evidently). Instead, they type each recipe out
manually. And I’m telling you, those
recipes are not usable. If one looks good, I must look it up online, find
one that’s similar, and follow those instructions, because there will without a
doubt be major mistakes in the recipes those ladies sent.
A day or two later, they will attempt
to correct the errors.
They will miss some entirely, while some
of the corrections themselves will have errors, and they will also correct
things that were originally correct.
This will continue for a couple of
weeks until they either a) think they have it right, b) give up entirely, or c)
forget all about it.
{Now I must remember not to post a
recipe until you forget I said all that, because, sure as the world, I’d have
some big blunder in it, big as you please.}
A quilting friend recently made herself
a pretty dress out of – get this: a
shower curtain.
I can honestly say I’ve never used
shower curtains to make any clothes – but I have used draperies and ruffled
priscillas to make little boys’ suits (from raw linen living room drapes, once),
dresses, skirts, and blouses.
Larry’s father Lyle used to rush in,
whip around the corner into the living room, then wipe his forehead in mock
relief. “Whew! The curtains are still up in here, at least.” He took to calling me Scarlett O’Hara after
one particularly flamboyant dress of drapery velvet.
When I make my shower curtain dress, I’m
going to use this:
I discussed geysers and scary mountain
roads in Bolivia with Nathanael (he’s 9)... rocked Jonathan madly in the rocker
just to make him laugh (he’ll be 2 next month)... admired Joanna’s new
leather coat (she’s 12)... tucked a granola bar that he was drooling over into
Jacob’s pocket, covered the top of it with his hand and told him not to tell,
which made his tongue poke into the side of his cheek as he tried not to grin
(he’s 6). He must’ve felt guilty about taking
that granola bar, because he returned it to the table after a moment or two.
I finished the quilting that
night. I would put the binding on it the
next day.
Thursday evening after taking some
supper to Loren, I stopped by my friend’s house to take a look at her new
computer. When she starts it up, her Window-Eyes
reads something to her about an Event Status Manager. I looked it up, but couldn’t find an explanation
anywhere.
I turned on her computer, and sure
enough, Window-Eyes made its ‘Event Status’ comment – but there was absolutely
nothing on the screen. The computer
seems to be working great, though, so I don’t think it’s anything to worry
about.
I fixed a couple of shortcuts on
desktop, checked a setting or two, and was done.
I told Linda, “Maybe your computer just
likes to tell you that everything’s working, and all is well, like the town
crier. Maybe mine does it too, only I
don’t have Window-Eyes, and since no box pops up, I don’t know anything’s
happening!”
It’s funny that it would read something
not on the screen, since it’s a screen reader.
Maybe all our computers send us invisible, subliminal messages, and one
only discovers it if one uses Window-Eyes.
That night I finished the Long Pine
cabin wall hanging. You can see more photos here:
I also posted some new photos: Squirrels,
Blue Jays, and Tabby Cat
There was a city-wide black-out Saturday
morning for about 45 minutes, and while it didn’t affect our electricity out
here in the country, it messed up some of the switches at the local internet
service, so email through Megavision was all discombobulated. For a while
no mail came through at all, and then when it finally started trickling in,
some had a sending time of 9:00 a.m. and an arrival time of 12:30 p.m. or
later.
Victoria, since she didn’t have to work
that day, spent some time busily cleaning the house.
It occurred to me that it was the very
last day of October – and I had promised various quilting ladies that I would
design another flower appliqué block to go with the iris block I did last
month. There went my plans of starting the Christmas tree skirt.
I found a pretty picture of a couple of
roses with similar dimensions to the irises of the last appliqué block, made a
pencil sketch of it, traced over it with a fine-tipped permanent marker, and
numbered the pieces in what I hoped was the proper order. I laid it on my lightbox, traced templates of
freezer paper, ironed them onto a second layer of freezer paper, cut them out carefully, ironed them to fabric,
and cut them, adding a quarter-inch for the seam.
I probably shouldn’t have done that;
the little roses block will look so much better when the appliqué stitching is
complete. The BOM is called ‘Buoyant
Blossoms’. You can download a pdf here:
Roses
Applique
Sunday afternoon, we were invited to dinner
with Kurt’s family, including his six siblings, his parents, Bill and Ruth, and
Ruth’s father and stepmother Steve and Dianna, who live next door. Her mother died of cancer when she was just
44, in 1993. They have all been good
friends of ours for many years. All our lives, come to think of it.
Or at least, all my life – Larry’s family didn’t move to Columbus until Larry
was 13. Kurt has 4 brothers and 2 sisters. It’s an extra nice
family – and good cooks, besides! :-D
It was a pretty day that day – 77°,
sunny, with a few fluffy white clouds.
Caleb and Maria got their puppy Saturday
– and it cried all night. Caleb finally
got up and held it, sitting in the recliner to sleep the rest of the night.
There were just two puppies left that
hadn’t been spoken for – a brindle and a fawn. Caleb had thought he would
take the brindle, but the fawn was more strikingly colored, and, most importantly,
had a delightful disposition.
After people wrote asking about the
Long Pine cabin wall hanging, I am considering how best to offer this as a
pattern. I tend to make a rough template or pattern – and then cut it to
shreds as I go along, doing appliqué work. When I’m done, there’s no pattern
left!
Of course, I do have the cabin photo
(in ‘pencil sketch’ form) and the skewed log cabin blocks on my computer, but I
don’t exactly think it’s usable as it is. I could draw it in EQ7, I suppose.
But I don’t have time to work on it before Christmas at all.
I can put it into any format – jpg,
doc, pdf, etc. My dilemma is this: how do people print it out in
the proper size? When I printed the middle section with the cabin to make
it 10” x 15.5”, for instance, I put a jpg in a Word doc, quadrupled the photo,
cropped each one to about a quarter (top right, top left, bottom right, bottom
left), then enlarged the cropped shots to fit on the page. I did the same
with the skewed log cabin blocks. After printing, I matched up the pages,
overlapping a bit in the middle, and taped them together.
I’ve done this for years, helping the
kids make posters and suchlike, so it’s old hat to me. But if people have
never used this program or a similar one such as Open Office, this method might
be a problem. Also, you can see there would be a lot of leeway as to size
of finished product.
So I think what I need to do is get
those cropped quarter shots as precise as possible, with not much overlap, put
in hash marks for connecting points of reference, and then make it into a pdf (with
a one-inch square printed on the page for reference) so everyone would wind up
with the same size of wall hanging.
There. I talked myself through
that quite well, don’t you think? Quite the display of brain molecular
spinning and bouncing and churning.
My brain is a funny thing; it rarely
sees the obvious first. I was originally thinking, Now, how in the world
is the regular Jane Q. Public going to print a 15.5” x 26.5” piece of paper???
I’ll put some effort into this – next
year. Right now, I have to stitch down the roses appliqué and put the
completed photo into the pdf (shouldn’t’ve offered it until I did that, but suddenly
and quite without warning it was October 31st, and I’d promised a new pattern
for November). Next, a Christmas tree skirt and a bunch of pjs for the
grandchildren.
I’ve put out food for the squirrels and
blue jays, extracted fuzzy spiders from the front window, answered email, and am
now sipping hazelnut crème coffee.
This morning Larry made reservations to
stay Friday night in the same Long Pine cabin we stayed in on the Labor Day
weekend. Too bad it isn’t today,
tomorrow, or Wednesday – temps are in the 70s. Thursday, Friday, and
Saturday, it’ll only be in the 50s. Oh, well... it is supposed to be
sunny and nice.
Now and then, just for the fun of it, I
read one of our punctuation-challenged friend’s emails to the family, trying to
keep all expression out of my voice, and not pausing anywhere (hard to do it
without breathing), through the whole thing (there are no commas, after all) –
after which I must gasp in great breaths of air.
Commas are important, I tell you!
Important to life, even! After all, just compare these two sentences,
with and without commas:
“We ate, Grandma!”
“We ate Grandma.”
I rest my case.
Today one of my favorite online
quilting groups is moving to a new ‘home’.
That is, a new website with a new name, because the original ‘owner’ is no
longer around to take care of it, and the one and only moderator who runs the
group has limited authority to do the things that need to be done, especially
on a large group with nearly 3,500 members.
Since I particularly like this quilting group and would hate to see its
demise, last week I offered to help run it, should we start a new group (the
only logical solution, since with the owner gone, ownership cannot be
transferred to someone else). I like
this group because the members are friendly and warm, and chatting is not
restricted only to quilting. People talk
about all sorts of things, especially household and family things, just as they
would do if they were at a real, honest-to-goodness quilting bee.
Goodness, I’ve been in a few groups
where the moderators acted like crabby old librarians from the early 1900s.
I am always afraid that the moment I put my hands on my keyboard to type
something, my knuckles will get rapped with a ruler.
Well, I am now co-owner of this new
group. The members of the original group
were given the link to the new – and then the trouble began.
Many of them are having troubles joining,
probably because of the influx of people trying to do so all at once. They sign in, type the Captcha (nasty things
created to foil the sincere), and are informed, “There has been an error.” I’ve spent a few hours trying to help the Great
Huddled Masses, with limited success.
Do you ever scratch your head when you’ve
gone on discussing something for, oh, just days on end, and all of a sudden
somebody perks up and queries, “Huh?! Eh?! Whosit?! What
planet am I on?! Can anybody tell me the year? BC or AD?!” or
something on that order?
I sometimes entirely refrain from
answering, since I can’t think of anything to say that doesn’t sound snide.
Sometimes I tell myself, Well, you said that really dumb thing just last
Tuesday, and then I find enough politeness somewhere deep within with which to
respond to the poor discombobulated soul.
Around here, if someone blunders into
the middle of a conversation and immediately asks, “Who?!” we almost always
say, “Mr. Adkisson!” He was an old neighbor we used to have – looked sort
of like Adolph Hitler’s little brother, only more sawed off and dried up.
He was a hoarder, and his house was falling apart. We always tried to be
nice to him – and especially to his wife.
They were appreciative, since some of the other neighbors were not nice
to them. Poor old people. Anyway,
he is frequently the topic of conversation around here, although it doesn’t
start out that way.
Several people are asking me why things
they are posting haven’t shown up.
Hmmm.
Probably because ISIS and the Irish Republican Army are camped out in
their yards, and every time the poor ladies send their carrier pigeons out with
a new post, one of the soldiers trains a surface-to-air missile on the bird and
blows it out of the sky.
Or maybe because they are signed into
the African Water Buffalo forum instead of the sewing group.
Or maybe because they are using their
microwaves instead of their laptops.
Now someone wants to know if I can
teach them ‘Neo’.
Sure, I can teach you to use Neo.
I can teach evwyone to use Neo. Here it is:
“You hit the letters on the keyboard,
which for some silly reason, they didn’t put in alphabetical order. That’s
it. Now leave me alone; I’m dead.”
You’re welcome.
Me go now.
And off I go, jabbering gibberish to
myself.
I have Vanilla Biscotti coffee, 100%
cranberry juice, Chex mix, and chocolate chip/pea-nut butter chunk cookies,
fresh out of the oven. A Pumpkin Apple Harvest candle is flickering
warmly over there on the counter, and the front window is open, the better to
hear the coyotes yipping, yelping, and howling out in the fields and prairies
to the west. The moon will be coming up at 11:30 – almost an hour from
now – but there isn’t a cloud in the sky, and it looks like glassy black crystal
out there, with brightly twinkling stars covering the heavens, all the brighter
since there are no artificial lights anywhere near us.
The other day, Amy took some of the
little boys into Earl May Gardening Center.
Grant, upon spotting the birds in their cages (finches and parakeets and
suchlike), exclaimed happily, “Oooooo, chickens!”
Victoria’s boss, who thinks those
little guys are cute as can be, went on calling the birds ‘chickens’ the rest
of the day.
I was just looking at pictures of a
pretty quilt online – and then, upon reading the captions, discovered that the
lady had hand-dyed all the fabric she used.
If I tried that, I’d wind up looking
like I was preparing for Halloween.
Well, my letter is now late, because of
all the upheavals the new quilting group is experiencing. I’ve tried to help people, sometimes
successfully, sometimes not.
Sometimes people should just relax and
tell themselves, “But at least there was no earthquake!” (or tornado, or
hurricane, or whatever there wasn’t one of.)
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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