Journal: When It Rains, It Pours

Last Monday, my brother Loren headed off for Rocky Mountain National Park.  By evening, there was lightning off to our north, and tall thunderheads to the west.  It had rained earlier, but according to AccuWeather it wasn’t supposed to rain again that night.

Loren called to inquire into the weather, so I looked for information on AccuWeather.  He was heading toward North Platte, and from his vantage point on Interstate 80, it appeared that he was driving straight into a bad storm, complete with huge thunderclouds and violent lightning. 

Fortunately, the storm, complete with hail large enough to cause damage, skirted the northern edge of North Platte and the Interstate, and caused Loren no trouble.

He stayed in the Ft. Morgan Riverside Park that night, where they have free electrical hookups.  My parents and I used to stay there with our camper when I was a little girl.  Any time Larry and I were driving by with the children, we stopped and let them play on the toys and feed the tame ducks and geese on the lake.  Here’s Victoria feeding the geese in August of 2013.

By the next afternoon, Loren was already on his way home.  He didn’t stay in the mountains, because he discovered the price of campgrounds near the National Park has gone up from $22-30 to $75-77 in less than one year!  That’s as much as a 250% increase.  Now, he might buy a brand new crewcab Ford 4x4 pickup, but he won’t spend $75 on a campsite.  Not if he doesn’t have a family to share it with, he won’t.  He checked around a little bit – and then headed for home after taking just one little walk in the foothills. 

I’ll have to look online for campgrounds farther away from the Park that don’t cost so much, so he can stay somewhere and still enjoy the mountains without feeling like he’s throwing money down the drain.  We generally head farther south.  Or farther north, up into Wyoming.  It’s cheaper, once one is out of the ‘resort’ area.

Again there was bad weather around our neck of the woods, with thunderstorms, lightning, and rain, rain, rain.  Loren stayed in a Wal-Mart parking lot out west somewhere – free, and with easy access to anything he might need to buy.  Thus, once again, he avoided the bad weather.

He got home on Wednesday afternoon, in time to come to church that night.

Tuesday, I paid some bills and the then spent some time finding airplane and bus tickets for my blind friend Linda, and registering her at the National Federation for the Blind Convention in Orlando. 

I sent her a text:  “When I start trying to make these bookings, I feel quite a lot like a fresh flounder asea.”

But I got it done, and printed a couple of pages of information she would need.  I told her when I gave them to her Wednesday evening after church, “If you ever wind up in Tahiti or Guatemala or Madagascar or some other odd place, I want you to know that it was a total accident, not done out of spite or malice or anything.”  She laughed.

For some reason, airline tickets from Omaha to O’Hare were hard to come by for one of the dates she needed.  I had to get a ticket with one stop, or the price would have gone from $213 to over $550.  I wondered if there was some event that caused it, but what do I know.  One flight after another had one stop, and some had two, and took hours and hours.  There were only a handful that were direct flights, and they cost two and even three times the usual price.

Finally I chose one that would have Linda in Detroit over the lunch hour.  “You always wanted to eat lunch in Detroit, didn’t you?” I asked her.  “Didn’t you?”

Tuesday evening it rained cats and dogs, and it leaked in the storage area under the porch.  Ugh, that gets old.  Larry brought his shop vac downstairs and cleaned up the big puddle.  Since I can’t stand the awful screech of that dreadful vacuum, I put earbuds in my ears and watched and listened to video clips of tornadoes and hailstorms that had been hitting around the country. 

There were several tornadoes in Oklahoma and Arkansas, and at least two in Colorado.  There was one by Wray, Colorado, that was quite the sight to see.  The meteorologist, Reed Timmer, upon capturing it on film, was heard exclaiming, “Beautiful!  Beautiful!”

It’s true, there’s sometimes an awesome beauty in the power of nature.  But tornadoes certainly can be devastating and destructive, and I don’t imagine anyone who’s lost their home, or worse, would call one ‘beautiful’.  It’s so eerie the way a tornado can sometimes reduce a beautiful home to nothing but a pile of rubble... while other times it completely clears the landscape, so one would never know there had been a home there at all.

While listening to weather reports, I sewed away on the paper-piecing for the quilt top.

For supper that night we had pulled pork on pita bread toasted in the oven, broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots, applesauce, and orange juice. 

Three reams of newsprint from Blick Art arrived Wednesday, so I printed the rest of the foundation blocks, and get back to sewing the table topper.  May 29^th is coming fast!

Ladies on an online quilting group were discussing how best to cut the fabric in their stash.  I have been surprised in days gone by to learn that some people buy fabric, bring it home and wash it, and then immediately cut it into strips and squares, even though they aren’t planning to use it right away, nor do they have a pattern in mind.

That wouldn’t work for me.  I cut things only as I need them.  Rarely do any of my projects have the same size pieces as another, so cutting without knowing what I’m cutting for would be a mistake.  I have a relatively small stash, but the size of it seems to stay just as fixed as large stashes do! 

On the way to church, we drove on a highway that looked like the only ribbon of dry ground between vast lakes of water.  Some of those fields that were covered with water had already been planted.  Sometimes if seed is lost from a too-early planting, the farmer’s insurance will not cover the loss, since this is not too awfully rare of an occurrence, though I don’t recall ever seeing quite this much water around our very own countryside.

After the service, we visited with family and friends before heading for home.  Have you ever watched a large group of people leaving church – or most anywhere, for that matter?  It’s funny.  Some mistakenly assume there’s a fire, and they must fly out apace.  Others – usually those directly in front of me at any given time – seem to have nothing to hurry for, ever, ever, ever.  They mosey along until I long for a bumper car.  With a very loud horn, just to make them jump and look alive, for once.

Somewhere in between those two extremes is just about right.  :-D

We had soup, peanut butter/chocolate chip cookies, and Folgers Vanilla Biscuit coffee for a late supper when we got home.

I sewed for a little while, until I had 22 pieces done on each of thirteen 41-piece blocks.  That meant I was slightly more than half done with the piecing when I quit for the night.  Here is the pattern I designed in EQ7:

Why in the world did I once think I wouldn’t like paper-piecing, anyway??!  I do like it. 

I was back at it again Thursday, with a short break to take Loren some supper – mixed vegetables, peas, carrot/raisin cake with cream cheese frosting, and apple/plum salad.  He said he didn’t need any meat, because he had roast beef from Lura Kay (John H. often cooks it) – and then he wound up giving me the roast beef, because he decided he’d had enough.  Larry was pleased when he got home for supper and discovered we had some of my brother-in-law’s melt-in-your-mouth roast beef.  I baked a little loaf of 12-grain wheat bread, and we had hot roast beef sandwiches. 

Friday, I went on sewing... sewing... sewing.  I thought I’d be able to finish the blocks and get them together, but I waaay underestimated the time it would take to first finish the pineapple blocks, and then to put the 104 HSTs together for all the little pinwheels that go in the corners between the pineapple blocks.

Anyone who quilts knows what fun it is to finally get enough pieces put together on a multi-pieced block that you can start to see what it’s going to look like – and to discover, as a bonus, that you actually like it.

Hannah sent me a note with a question from Levi, who’s almost 6:  “What if trees were white, and stayed white?  Would they be considered ‘nevergreens’?”

Funny little guy.  For some reason, that reminded me of something Martha Smith Tiller, daughter of the late evangelist J. Harold Smith, wondered when she was young:  “If I had eyeballs on my kneecaps, and crossed my legs, would I be cross-eyed?”

Saturday, I worked on the little pinwheels that go in all the corners of the table topper.  They are now ready to lay out and put in some color scheme that will coordinate with the pineapple blocks and be pleasing to the eye.

Hmmmm... there are 48 pieces in each 12.5” block.  There are 13 blocks.  Thus, there are 624 total pieces.  I have 13 days to get it finished!  Shouldn’t be hard, providing I don’t try something way too complicated in the quilting.  I would never dream of doing such a thing.

Would I?

Supper that evening was chicken, gravy, and biscuits; corn; broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots; and lime jello.  Loren came to pick some food up, and Larry arrived about the same time, riding his motorcycle.  Loren then took Larry back to the shop to get his pickup.  ??  How did he wind up with both pickup and motorcycle there in the first place??

Later that night, since Kurt and his brother Jared were coming for dinner the next day, I put an apple pie into the oven.  Victoria would fix the rest of the meal.  As I sewed, I watched (well, mostly listened to) ‘Ask This Old House’ episodes.  I came upon one where host Kevin O’Connor gave a short tribute to Joe Ferrante, the man who did much of their tiling.  Joe died at 56 of a massive heart attack while working on a 2007 ‘This Old House’ episode in Massachusetts:  This Old House – The Newton Project.  I recall reading his articles in This Old House magazine, before we got a computer and I discovered I could read many of the articles online.

Sunday morning after church, we were walking down the sidewalk to the Jeep when I spotted a white oval object in the front church lawn.  An egg??  A chicken egg???  Why would there be a chicken egg on the front lawn of the church??  One of the Mexicans’ chickens from across the street must’ve gotten loose! 

Since Dorcas and a couple of quilting friends have new baby goats at their houses, we started talking about Larry’s first job, when he was 13 years old.  He milked 100 goats, plus two cows, every morning and evening, 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m.  It was all done by hand, into milk pails. 

 Jacksons lived on the outskirts of Trinidad, Colorado, and Larry rode his bike three miles each way over hill and dale to get to the goat farm.  He worked 49 hours a week, got paid $20, and the owners also gave him cheeses, milk, eggs, and homemade dill pickles to take home.  They fed him breakfast each morning, too.  They were really sorry to see him go when the Jacksons moved to Nebraska a few months later.

Larry told us about a time when the man and his wife were going to be gone one day, and they entrusted care of the farm to Larry and his brother Kenny, who was a year younger. 

Sooo... the boys got there, opened the door into the barn for the goats...  Fifteen could come in at once.  The other end of the barn was open.  The goats were quite tame, and would come in, stop at their stanchions, and eat their grain while they were being milked.

The first fifteen goats came in.

But... Larry and Kenny had forgotten to put the grain into the troughs, as the farmer had always done it, when he was there.

The goats walked in and looked at the empty troughs, sniffing curiously.  They continued all down the row, peering into the troughs now and then.

Straight through the barn they went, and right out the other side.

Larry and Kenny slapped their foreheads, poured the grain into the troughs, let another 15 goats in. 

At least goats are smart!  And hopeful, evidently.  Those first 15 merely made a circuit, came back around, and got in line behind the others.

When the milking was done, they played ‘rodeo’ with the friendly and playful young calves.  Then they drove the pickup down to the field and did some irrigating.  One of the pastures was muddy – and they discovered what fun it was to slide the pickup around in the mud... until they got it thoroughly stuck. 

Sooo... they went and got the tractor and pulled the pickup out. 

“We’d better quit goofing around and get everything done right,” Larry decided then, so they finished all the chores quite properly before the man and his wife got home that evening.

Larry said that when they were leaving Trinidad on their way to Columbus, they stopped to tell the people goodbye, and the man and woman came out to their car to wish them well, both of them crying.

Too bad we didn’t keep in touch with them!  I would’ve, but I didn’t know much about them until well after we’d been married.  They’ve probably been gone for many years now.

The kids and I always enjoy it when Larry tells stories.  What’s really fun is when Larry and Kenny get together, and both are telling stories!  It’s like Laurel and Hardy déjà vu. 

Here’s Tabby cuddled up amongst the stuffed toys Jacob and Jonathan were playing with the other night when they were here.  Tabby has always loved stuffed animals, big or little.

A free pattern just arrived from a website where I’ve signed up for their newsletters.

The nifty thing about electronic patterns stored on a computer is that they are easy to find.

((...pause...))

That is, they are easy to find... if they are labeled well and filed in some intuitive manner.

When I save such things as BOMs, I relabel the file if it has only ‘Block #2’ or suchlike as its title.  If it’s a paper-pieced raccoon, I title it ‘Raccoon, Block #2’.  If the quilt’s name is ‘Mariner’s Starlight’, I type that in front of ‘Block #2’.

Everything is in folders.  I start off with one main folder to keep it all corralled:  “Quilting and Sewing”.  In that folder, I have 23 subfolders with names such as Appliqué, Bags & Purses, BOMs, Embroidery, Pantographs, Paper-Piecing, Quilt Assistant Projects, Row by Row, Serger Projects, Smocking Patterns, and so forth. 

In many of those folders are more folders.  For instance, in BOMs there are folders entitled Christmas Yet to Come (I really like that pattern; gotta make it someday), Claudia’s Lighthouses, Deco Garden from Morning Glory Designs, Granny’s Hankie, Henrietta Whiskers, Ray of Hope, etc.

Now, if I should someday happen to think, I remember a cute little teapot appliqué; where is that pattern? – I just click on the Quilting and Sewing folder, type ‘Teapot’ into the search window, and presto-bingo! – in five seconds flat, I have a list of all the teapot patterns, plus any teapot pantographs, which is quite handy if I want to match pantos to patterns.

The folders aren’t as important as the titles on the individual files themselves.  I give each file or document a name I will remember (hopefully).  I print nothing until I actually need to.  My computer has a search engine... my pattern drawer does not.

I keep all of this backed up on two separate external hard drives. 

I like electronic patterns! 

It’s raining here this afternoon, a steady, gentle rain, and the birds seem to like it, for they’re singing their hearts out.  I just had easy-over egg on toast, a cold, frothy cup of milk, and a little glass of mango juice to top it all off. 

As I sit here typing my weekly blither, a cup of Panera Bread’s Salty Caramel coffee sits near at hand, steaming away.

The lilacs are starting to bloom!  There are hybrid irises and columbines in all colors of the rainbow.  We have a starling that builds a nest over our back patio door every year.  Just yesterday, I heard the peep-peep-peep of fresh-hatched babies.

Oh! – there’s a little bird out front that I don’t recall seeing before!  Time out while I grab my camera...

*     *     *

Got it.  Not the world’s best shots, as I took it through the front glass door, and it’s dark and rainy out.  But the photos are good enough that I was able to identify this small bird as a wood thrush!  I’ve heard them sing nearby, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen one, or at least gotten a good enough look at it to tell what it is.

I took a few shots of flowers while I was at it, too.

Now, back to the table topper!

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