Flowers are blooming in my washroom. These are the tiny blossoms on the Kalanchoe
my former boss at Megavision gave me for Secretary’s Day.
Well, we’ve made up our minds... we really are going
to Florida next week.
Now, when one leaves the middle of the Cornland in
middle-to-late February, heading to Florida, it should be freezing cold here,
and nice and warm there. Right? Just as, when one leaves middle
Cornland for the High Country in the middle of the summer, it should be smotheringly
hot here, and nice and cool there. Right?
Well, guess what? It’s going to be in the high
40s and 50s – almost up to 60° – here this coming week. A couple of years
ago when we went to the Rockies, we were gone during a particularly balmy week
here in Nebraska. Timing is off.
One of the things I’m looking forward to is seeing all
the birds. I’ve been looking at Florida bird
sanctuaries, wildlife refuses, and admiring pictures of parrots and parakeets
in all colors of the rainbow. Here’s a
good website: Birds of Florida
When Joseph was little, I asked him what he wanted
for his upcoming 3rd birthday.
“A dween wobbin!” he announced.
So... I went to Earl May and got him the
brightest green parakeet I could find. A real, honest-to-goodness,
living, breathing parakeet. He was amazed and delighted. We called
the bird Chalcedony (a green gem).
Last week, Norma bought a couple of cakes from
Rachel, one of her other Jackson granddaughters, to give Grant and Emma for
their birthdays. Amy sent me
photos. Thinking I recognized Rachel’s
handiwork, I inquired as to who made the cakes.
Amy replied, “I’d like to say I made them – but
Rachel did!”
That reminded me of the following story:
Alice
Grayson was to bake a cake for the Baptist Church Ladies’ Group she’d recently
joined in Tuscaloosa, but she forgot to do it until the last minute. She remembered it the morning of the bake sale
and, after searching through various cabinets, she found an angel food cake mix
and quickly made it while drying her hair and dressing and helping her son pack
up for Scout camp.
When
Alice took the cake from the oven, the center had dropped flat and the cake was
horribly disfigured. There was no time to bake another cake.
This
cake was important to Alice because she did so want to fit in at her new
church, and in her new community of friends. So, being inventive, she looked around the
house for something to build up the center of the cake.
Alice
found it in the bathroom-- a roll of toilet paper. She plunked it into the middle and then
covered it with icing. Not only did the
finished product look nice, it looked perfect.
Before
she left the house to drop the cake by the church and head for work, Alice woke
her daughter and gave her some money and specific instructions to be at the
bake sale the moment it opened at 9.30 a.m., and to buy the cake and bring it
home.
When
the daughter arrived at the sale, she found the attractive, perfect cake had
already been sold. Amanda grabbed her cell phone and called her mom. Alice was horrified. She was beside
herself. Everyone would know. What
would they think? She would be ostracized,
talked about, ridiculed. That night
Alice lay awake in bed thinking about people pointing their fingers at her and
talking about her behind her back. A roll of toilet paper in
the middle of an angel food cake.
The
next day, Alice promised herself that she would try not to think about the cake
and she would attend the fancy luncheon/bridal shower to which she’d been
invited, and try to have a good time. Alice
did not really want to attend because the hostess was a snob who more than once
had looked down her nose at Alice because of her status as a single parent who
was not from the founding families of Tuscaloosa; but having already said she’d
come, she could not think of a believable excuse to stay home.
The
meal was elegant, the company was definitely upper crust Old South. And then, to Alice’s horror, The Cake was
presented for dessert. Alice’s cake. The Toilet Paper Roll Cake. Alice
felt the blood drain from her face when she saw that cake. She started
out of her chair to tell the hostess all about it, but before she could get to
her feet, the Mayor’s wife said, “What a beautiful cake!”
Alice,
still stunned, sat back in her chair when she heard the hostess, a prominent
church member, say, “Thank you; I baked it myself.”
Alice
sat very still while that registered. And then she smiled and whispered
very quietly, “Thank you, Lord.”
Remember our discussion a while back about funny
typos? Well, here’s one to add to the list: A friend wrote, “I’m up
and trying to get a gripe on the morning...” hee hee
She’s a dear, and I would never make fun of her...
but that is funny.
(And go ahead and make fun of my typos now. I’m sure to make several, having laughed
about that one.)
Look what Hannah crocheted for Emma’s doll:
That makes me want to learn to crochet!
Tuesday evening, I did some quilting for a customer
on a piece of flag-print fabric, using a pantograph called ‘Twinkling Star’.
Wednesday, I washed the laundry and the dishes, then
packaged up a small bear of Dorcas’ that she’d like to have now. It’s an adorable
little stuffed thing with raggedy fur, and he’s holding a wooden honey pot, and
there’s honey spilling all over his paws and even on his head. The honey
is rubbery, made from hot glue, I think. There’s a fuzzy little honey bee
on his head and another on the edge of the pot, both sporting teeny tiny wiggle
eyes.
Then, after a couple of minutes to watch a cute bunny
out in the front yard giving himself a bath, scrubbing at his face and long
ears with his little paws, I got back to work on the Christmas tree skirt,
starting a Lone Star for the center. I enjoy choosing fabrics for the
next phase of a project. I don’t think I’ve
ever made a Lone Star of satins and taffetas before. I wonder how I’m
ever going to quilt this thing? Perhaps I’ll
have to do it on my DSM, on account of the ‘doo-dads’ all over it.
There are always things that get in the way of
progress on certain projects – such as wedding gifts (people are forever
insisting on getting married, tsk), clothes washing (people are forever
insisting on wearing clean clothes, tsk), supper fixing (people are forever insisting
on eating, tsk), and dolly clothes (now, those were a necessity).
An online quilting friend wrote to tell me about all
the birds she’d seen in her yard that morning – birds that included ibis,
painted bunting, parrots, myna, and, she said, small ones she calls ‘tweet
tweets’. hee hee
That reminds me of a story in a birding magazine
about a couple who went on a birding tour in Africa. The guide pointed
out one exotic bird after another. One that showed up fairly often was an
‘elbebee’, though no one in the group ever got a good look at it.
When they got back to their lodge, they were all
comparing notes, and looking in their bird books for details on the birds they’d
seen. Unable to find the elusive elbebee in any of their books, one in
the group inquired of a manager at the hotel, “What is this ‘elbebee’, and can
you tell me what section of my bird book I might find it in?”
The manager laughed. “Oh, that’s the LBB!
That’s what the tour guides call any of the Little Brown Birds they are unable
to identify, since there are so many of them, so similar, and so hard to tell
apart.”
Friday I went on putting together the large Lone
Star. Each elongated diamond of the star is comprised of 45 small diamonds
(cut at 2 ½” x 1 ½”), so there will be 360 diamonds in all.
Did you know that satins, taffetas, and brocades are
slippery?? Furthermore, some fabrics are stretchy; some are not. I
was on diamond #3, and getting better at it as I went along. I think.
Upstairs, Victoria was scrubbing the house till it
sparkled. She had part of a fancy meal
already fixed – she was making an early Valentine’s Day supper for Kurt, with
enough food for all of us. She even bought candles for the table.
I took a break to pay bills and make a fresh pot of
Cameron’s French vanilla crème coffee, then returned to the sewing machine.
I wrote to a friend, “Help yourself, the coffeemaker’s right over there on the
counter. You might wanna take your shoes off before you walk on Victoria’s
shining floor, though; you wouldn’t want her to take after you with the mop!”
If I ever happen to be filling up coffee cups and
ask Larry, “Where’s your mug?” he makes the goofiest face he can muster, turns
it toward me, and says, “Right here.”
By 6:00 p.m., the rows for diamond #3 were done and
looking good. Next, I joined them, trying to match up points.
Matching points on satin diagonals isn’t exactly a walk in the park. Some points match... and some points, ----- well,
ah’m gonna be a-lookin’ ze othah way, ah am, ah am!
Victoria brought me a plate of her delicious supper
– smoked salmon on a bed of rice on baby spinach leaves with a side of
asparagus broiled in butter and almonds. She made a fruit dish of cream
cheese, graham cracker crust crumbles, and frozen berries. They must’ve
gotten full, because the cherry cheese cake – in a heart-shaped pan – was still
in the refrigerator when they went off to Wal-Mart.
By 9:30 p.m., I was pinning together the rows for
diamond #4.
When the kids came back to have their dessert,
Victoria had something else with which to decorate the table: a bouquet of big, beautiful red roses from
Kurt. He also gave her a soft, dark
mauve hoodie.
Late that night, I got the large diamonds for the Lone
Star center of the Christmas tree skirt finished and ready to be sewn together.
Our artificial tree has a slender trunk, so the hole
in the middle of the skirt will only take out some of the blue fabric.
The plus side of this is that nobody will ever know if the middle points
mismatched, or what a bad hump there might’ve been in the middle of the
star! It would’ve probably wound up like this:
Excuse me a moment... Tabby wants out. He tells me this by batting at a cord that
hangs against the wall near the door.
Sometimes on cold, cold days, the cats meow at the
front door... I open it, an Arctic gale whistles in, the cats leap backwards in
alarm and amazement, and then sit down and look at me reproachfully. I
shut the door... the cats trot to the back door.
“Meowwrrr, we want out back here; it’s summer back
here! Right? Mrrrrowww!”
At Jeremy and Lydia’s house, everyone has bad
colds. The boys had conjunctivitis last
week. The new baby will be arriving any
day, and Lydia feels like she’s getting pneumonia.
What do you call this insect? When I was little, people around here called
the Armadillidiida (aka roly poly, aka pill bug, aka doodle bug) ‘potato bug’.
I see from Google images that we were not the only ones who called them that;
but the ‘real’ potato bug is a member of the ant family, and looks considerably
different than the roly poly. This odd little insect will roll quickly
into a small ball if frightened.
(Did you know ‘roly-poly’ – with a hyphen – is a
steamed pudding made from suet pastry containing jam or fruit?)
Well, before I learned what the correct names for
this little insect were, I taught the wrong name to all my kids.
One day when Caleb was about 3 years old, we were
getting ready for church. I scooped him up, plunked him onto the bathroom
counter, and set about combing his hair. I had on a favorite sweater that
had hand-embroidered pastel flowers all over the bottom front, and little satin-stitched
lumps (technical term meaning ‘small mound of embroidery thread’) here and
there over the rest of it.
As I combed his hair, Caleb traced flowers with a
finger. “I really like your sweater, Mama,” he told me. He touched
one of the aforementioned ‘lumps’. “Especially these little potato bugs.”
His sisters screeched with laughter – and they’ve
called that sweater ‘Mama’s potato-bug sweater’ ever after. Yeah, I still
have it... and they still remember.
Lydia is making a quilt for the new baby. It
has appliquéd rocking horses on some of the blocks, black on white, with
touches of aqua. Some of the black is in a small chevron print. The
rest of the blocks are pieced.
I told her, “If it’s a girl, you’ll have to tie pink
bows around the necks of all those horsies.”
She laughed and said, “Or give it to Jonathan. He said, ‘Oh! Horsies! They’re mine!’ (nod nod) ‘They’re mine!’”
Her little boys are sentimental about things anyone
makes for them. That’s probably a direct result of their Mama being just
the same. Always has been.
One time I was hard at work on Easter dresses when
along came Lydia, age 5, carrying her favorite little stuffed Sharpei
puppy. She said in her serious, big-blue/gray-eyed way, “Rumply Bob-Bobby
needs a toy! Could you make him one, please?”
Well, I seldom turned down my children when they
asked for something so sincerely. I decided that a toy for Rumply
Bob-Bobby was more important than Easter dresses that afternoon. So while
Lydia was at Kindergarten, I rummaged through my fabric, and came up with brown
burlap and some soft red fuzzy stuff. With the burlap, I made a
bone. I put a small lid in each end with a pebble in the lid, so it
rattled. With the red fuzzy stuff, I made a ball, and put a couple of jingle
bells inside it. There was just enough red fabric left to make Lydia a
circle skirt. I was putting in the last of the hem stitches when the
children got home from school.
If you could’ve seen the look on that little girl’s
face when I gave her those things, you’d have known I was right: a ball
and a bone for Rumply-Bob-Bobby and a circle skirt for Rumply’s mistress was of
infinite more value than any ol’ Easter dress.
“Is that baby going make his Grand Entry when we are
in Daytona Beach?????!!!” I asked Lydia.
“Hopefully before then,” she answered.
As usual, people are telling her they hope she has a
girl, since she has ‘only boys’. This,
she finds offensive, and I don’t blame her.
First, she doesn’t want her little boys to hear such talk. But even more importantly, she believes God
gave her those sweet little boys. “God
made them and graciously granted me the responsibility of raising them, and for
that I am most humbled. It’s not up to
me to decide what I want the next one to be.
You know, they don’t grow on trees!”
Then she added, “So there. Now I will
go have a t-shirt made with that written on it.”
Teensy is sick.
He has a bad cold – feline upper respiratory infection, actually, which
is a lot like human influenza. He keeps sneezing,
breathing with mouth, and his eyes are watering. Every one of our cats – except our first
calico kitty that never went outside – have had it, several more than
once. It’s always a worry, since it can
be fatal. Cats aren’t quite as important
as people, I know; but we like him! Larry
picked up some medicine for him today at the veterinary’s office. I’ve given him three doses so far he’s
already better, thankfully. Makes me
feel so bad when one of our pets is sick, obviously feeling unwell. He’s such a sweet-tempered cat.
It’s the same medicine – Clindacure – that they gave
him two weeks ago for the bad bite he got (an infected bite, by the way, can
bring on this respiratory illness). I had half a bottle left; I could
have been giving it to him! But I looked it up online, and never saw a
single suggestion for using that stuff for respiratory distress; it was only
listed as a medicine for infection in cuts, scrapes, bites, punctures. Bother! Had I known, I could have been
dosing him for two days! Poor kitty. Why do they insist on getting sick or hurt
when the vet’s office is closed??
This afternoon, progress on this, that, and the
other thing was stymied for a little while, because I kept staring out the
window, wondering why the neighbor man was snow-blowing a tall drift --- in his
ditch, beside the lane. ?? He wasn’t one bit happy about it, either.
Oops, he readjusted the snorkel thingy that the snow
shoots out of – oh! – it’s a chute deflector, heh. Anyway, he readjusted
it. Wrongly. Then he hit a huge drift hard, several cubic yards of
snow shot straight up in the air – and showered right down over the top of said
unhappy neighbor man’s furrowed pate.
Well, that should’ve cooled him off a bit.
Here’s Larry with his ‘new’ Suzuki, the trade-in he
took on his six-wheeler, heading back to work after lunch.
I called Loren this afternoon, as usual, partly to
see if he needs any supper, and partly to make sure all is well. He doesn’t need any supper tonight, because John
H. and Lura Kay gave him more than enough yesterday for tonight’s supper, too.
His fireplace hasn’t been drawing properly, and he
hasn’t been able to get a fire started for over a week, so he bought all the
stuff he needs to clean the creosote out of the chimney. It’s supposed to
be warm and sunny later this week, and he plans to clean it then. We
obviously don’t remind him often enough that he’s 77 ½ years old!
At the moment, I’m having a difficult time typing,
because Teensy is sprawled on my lap – and across both arms and part of my
laptop keyboard.
Bedtime! I
have a customer quilt to load on the frame tomorrow, and another block to
design for the Buoyant Blossoms BOM before we leave for Florida.
P.S.:
Question: Do
you know how to get parts for an old Vega?
Answer: Duh. You just follow one until the desired parts
fall off.
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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