Last Tuesday
was Valentine’s Day, and several of my daughters, nieces, and sisters-in-law
were posting photos on Instagram of beautiful bouquets their husbands had given
them. Not to be outdone, I posted this
picture of what Larry brought home
for me:
A beautiful card – plus boxes of Tylenol
Sinus Severe pills, Mucinex Fast-Max Severe Cold pills, and Cepacol
Extra-Strength Sore Throat lozenges. “And
believe me, I appreciated it!” I wrote.
Besides, don’t
you think it’s pretty, the way the Cepacol box matches the card?
Yeah, my
Valentine’s Day was a blowout – more the definition of “a sudden loss of air
caused by a hole or cut in a tire” than “nice big festive party”. I’d
get up... try to do something... and after about an hour, head straight back to
bed. Ugh, I hate wasted days! I
did at least wash the dishes, so I could say I did something that day.
Victoria
posted a picture of a pretty card she made for Kurt:
I always wonder... What if you choose a piece of craft
paper with another language on it... and you can’t read it... but you give it
to someone who can... and you’ve chosen something entirely inappropriate for
the occasion???
I once made Keith a blue western shirt that had white
Japanese print all over it. Of course, none of us could read it; it just
looked like an artistic design, to our uneducated lot.
Then we went on vacation. We were trekking around at
the Royal Gorge, and wound up in several locations at the same time as a large
group of friendly Japanese people. I noticed them looking at Keith, so I
looked, too.
He had on The Shirt.
I thought, Uh, oh. What does that thing
say?!
It must not have been too bad, though, since one
pretty young woman, as her father started to take her picture in front of the
Arkansas River, which was really roaring that time of the year, suddenly
snatched Hester’s and Lydia’s hands so they could stand with her in the
photo. They were ages 3 and 5, or thereabouts.
They were a bit shy, and both little girls’ eyes grew big as
saucers at this abrupt intrusion into their airspace. Both small heads
swiveled toward me. I smiled at them, nodded, gestured toward the
camera.
Ah. They knew all about cameras. So they both
smiled sweetly, the man took the picture, the family thanked them profusely and
exclaimed over their pretty dresses and bows in their long curls, and the
little girls, eyes still rather wide, scampered back to my side.
Later, as we drove on through the mountains, the few dolls
and stuffed animals that had accompanied us on our trip were pressed into
service as worthy photographic subjects and instructed in chirpy voices, “Now
you smile for the nice people!” – and then appropriate ‘click-click’ sounds
were made.
Silly little girlies.
Along with the cold meds, Larry brought in the mail – and
there was a check from the customer for whom I quilted the French lace and
linen quilt!
“What in the world?!!!” I emailed her. “Did you think I needed a Valentine’s Day
present???!”
“No, I thought you needed more compensation for the quilt
you did for me. I have been planning to send it for some time and now
just seemed the right time to send it.”
Wasn’t that kind of her?
I surely didn’t expect it, and it certainly was a surprise.
Loren was still
offline. The owner of our local Internet
Service Provider finally gave instructions for a tech to go to Loren’s house,
no charge. They usually charge $50-$100
per call. Or per hour, or something.
Problem: the tech doesn’t climb ladders. The dish is at the two-story level. Larry offered to take his scissor lift there
for the tech to use; they accepted.
Then the office
manager wrote to tell me, “I’m
sorry there may be some confusion. Our in office
tech will be available to assist your husband with an install tomorrow, but our
insurance will NOT allow him to climb or get onto a scissor lift. He will be able to check the router connection
and interference status. I hope we can
resolve any issues and get Loren’s connection back up.”
I’m not sure who she
thought was confused.
Wednesday found me still nursing this nasty cold (silly
word; why would anyone ‘nurse’ a cold? Better trying to kill it!). Maybe next
year, I should give serious thought to getting a flu shot. I’ve never gotten one before. But if it would’ve prevented this cold, then
I reckon I should’ve gotten the shot. I
was drinking my coffee cold, if that’s any indication as to the condition of my
throat.
I’ve also been drinking a green tea called Theraflu.
It’s from Lipton, and is honey-lemon flavored. When my throat was so sore
I could hardly swallow, I drank it just a little hotter than lukewarm, and it
was quite soothing. It contains acetaminophen (pain reliever/fever
reducer), dextromethorphan (cough suppressant), and phenylephrine (nasal
decongestant). Victoria got it some time
ago, and I thought it sounded disgusting. But it really does help, and I
don’t mind it at all.
I considered going to the doctor to see if I had strep,
since some of my family have had it recently, but I didn’t wanna, and I didn’t
feel like it! (What do you do when you’re too sick to go to the doctor’s
office?) I read some scary stories about
what can happen if you don’t treat strep with antibiotics: kidney failure, heart failure, rocket-booster
failure ------ oh, wait. That was a story I read on Nasa.com. They say that if you take antibiotics, you
cease being contagious within 48 hours (some say 24; I think that’s a bit
optimistic); but if you don’t take antibiotics, you will be contagious
for 2-3 weeks.
Well. Hmmm. I say, ‘misery loves company’, so I
think I’ll keep myself contagious for as long as possible. Sigggghhhhh...
I decided to go to the doctor if I didn’t feel better by
Thursday. I had a sore throat... earaches... headache... but at
least my stomach had quit hurting. I
read that that’s also a sign of strep; didn’t know that before.
I had enough
oomph that day to go to my sewing room and work on those little ‘Monthly
Hang-Ups’. I certainly didn’t have enough vim and vigor to get
back to clearing out the now-married kiddos’ rooms upstairs. See? There
are silver linings to the cloud!
The ‘Monthly
Hang-Ups’ are a little kit of hangable appliquéd blocks, one for each month, that
my daughter-in-law Amy found somewhere. There are two sets of
twelve. Eight blocks – September through
December – were done when she got them, and four more had the appliqués fused to
the background, though not sewn down.
That day, I finished the blanket-stitch appliquéing around the
four ‘Monthly Hang-Ups’ that had already been fused. The little novelty buttons
like those on the finished ones are no longer with the set; I hoped to find
some in my large button stash that would work.
It was a pretty day, 56° and sunny. Meanwhile, it was
-10° in Barrow, Alaska. I knew you’d want to know.
Larry met the
Internet tech at Loren’s house that afternoon.
The endeavor was not successful; they couldn’t get the dish to pick up
the signal. The tech decided it was
because a tree had grown up somewhere between the dish and the tower, some five
miles away, and it was blocking the signal.
Right. The Internet worked fine until the day-after-Christmas
storm blew it down.
So... between
December 26 and February 15, a Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Er, Middle Nebraska.
Right.
They went
away in defeat. A day later, the office
manager wrote to say they could send out a ‘subcontractor’ who was experienced
in installing Internet dishes for them, and would I like for them to put Loren
on the waiting list. This time, it would
not be free.
I said yes. “And would you please let us
know the cost, but not tell Loren? Just tell him it’s been taken care of?”
She promised to do so.
Let’s hope she remembers, this time.
Late that night I had a window open a bit, and a great
horned owl hooted from a nearby tree.
Teensy, strolling through the living room, hit the deck. He looked
like a cat rug.
I laughed at him, and he stood up, regathered his dignity,
remarked, “MrrroOWW!” before stalking off in High Dudgeon.
I sure hope my kitties keep themselves hidden, when they
head out for a midnight stroll, if that big ol’ owl is around!
Thursday, I put the bedding in the washer and then worked on
the ‘Monthly Hang-Ups’. (I couldn’t go
back to bed, if the bedding was in the washer, could I?) I cut all the little pieces and fused them to
the backgrounds, then stitched them down. After finishing the appliquéing,
I pawed through my old buttons to see what I could find to embellish the blocks.
The cold was getting better. A little. I thought.
Maybe.
{AaaaaCHOOOOOOOOOO!!!!}
On the other hand...
Larry is still coughing, and he got it three weeks ago.
We sort of had soup for supper – I poured potato soup
over Black Angus burgers that we put atop fresh-from-the-oven ciabatta
rolls. {It’s another option when one has no lettuce, no tomatoes, no
peppers, and not even any ketchup or mustard.}
{Want more options? Here’s 100 Ways to Top a Burger.
I vote for the peanut butter and jelly sandwich hamburger! Uh... not... really.} For dessert, we had
multi-berry smoothies made with black cherry frozen yogurt. And I ate too
much!
After supper, I sewed flat buttons onto blocks, snipped the
plastic shanks off the backs of other buttons with my pliers, and then
hot-glued them to the blocks. After
picking the fabric for the borders and backs, I sewed borders on a couple of blocks. And that was enough for the night.
Fortunately, I’d remembered to put the bedding into the
dryer and later make the bed, so there were nice clean sheets and microfleece
blanket to climb into. Ahhhhhh...
Since I’d been having troubles sleeping on account of a) a bad cold, and b) the resident logger, and since it was quite late, and since I
could barely talk past a croak anyway, I switched my phone to ‘Vibrate’ – and when
I picked it up late the next morning, I was mighty glad I had, too.
A lady whom I sometimes help with her computer troubles,
though I’ve only met her online and never in person, had texted my phone all in
a giant panic because her mouse cord had gotten disconnected from the tower
somehow. (She blames the cat.) The first text came in at 5:58 a.m. Second text, 7:22 a.m. Third text, again 7:22 a.m. She didn’t know how or where (or couldn’t
reach) to plug the mouse back in, and she needed to know how to shut the
computer down using the keyboard! NOW!!!
At 10:37 a.m., about the time I was washing my hair, she’d
sent another text: “Got the computer to
shut down.”
She’d finally thought of doing a hard shutdown by holding
the power button in until the machine turned off.
In case any of you ever need to know, the way (or one of the ways) to shut down a Desktop
computer using the keyboard is to press the Windows logo button, then press Tab
and/or the arrow buttons until you get to the power icon. Press Enter, then arrow or tab down to Shut down
or Hibernate. I can’t give precise
instructions, as other computers’ Shutdown menus will be different from mine. Another option: most computers are set to Hibernate or Sleep
with a quick push of the Start button. But
it doesn’t hurt to leave a computer running.
Really, it doesn’t!
Upon hearing this, the lady told me that she couldn’t leave the computer running, as
the screen is so bright it would keep her and her husband awake! Uh, their bedtime was a good 15 hours later.
A Desktop screen can be shut off independently from the computer. The button is on the screen itself, usually
front bottom middle or front bottom right.
Oh. That hadn’t
occurred to her.
Not everyone had a mother like mine who rarely let me call
anyone before 10:00 a.m. or after 8:00 p.m., unless I thoroughly convinced her
that the recipient of my phone call was actually expecting and waiting on my
call.
During
the last week, a dozen or more emails, all from Yahoo (some through the Yahoo
groups; others, private email) have arrived at random times – emails that are
one or two months old, and that I had already received. That’s what you call ‘Stale Email’.
I think that
happened because the little guy at the front desk in Yahoo who is supposed to
press ‘Send’ went into the back room and took a long winter’s nap. A
month or two later, he suddenly came out of hibernation, rushed back to his
desk all in a panic, and went to clicking Send on anything and everything he
could find, including a few old emails that had already gone through once.
There are
probably a few reindeer herders in Northern Siberia, looking up all puzzled at
Yahoo smoke signals in the sky and saying to each other, “Igor, why’s Granny
sendin’ out ’nuther invite ta Christmas dinner inda middla Febrarey, reckon,
huh huh?”
“Dunno,
Dunbar; we din’t fergit ta go, did we, eh?”
“Na, na,”
says Dunbar, shaking his head. “Ze ol’ gal, she’s a-gettin’ fergitful,
zat she ar!”
Igor shakes
his head sadly, and they watch the smoke signals slowly drift over the Ural
Mountains and on toward the Barents Sea.
And that
little BT (Brain Trip) probably happened because I looked something up on
Google Maps – and wound up roaming about in Moscow. Street view, that
is. (No, I don’t know how these things happen to me; they just do. I like to explore – in real life, and on
Google Maps.) I started off watching a
video on Siberia, paused the video to look something up
on a map – and wound up in Moscow. I found a hotel you can ‘See Inside’,
the Hotel Khitrovka.
I really need to reschedule our
appointments at LensCrafters; I need new glasses! I’m having twubbles and
twials trying to see what I’m looking at.
I got tired of Moscow (too many onion
domes make my eyes water), and hunted down cabins near Cedar Rapids, Iowa,
since we need to go there soon to pick up some large tines for a big forklift
of Walkers’. I found Lake’s
End Resort
– and discovered that Google Maps had it wrong.
They showed it as a house in the middle of Cedar Rapids á when actually it’s just west of Delhi,
some 30 miles northeast: ⇩
So I moved the peg, edited the address,
clicked ‘Publish’; and now they should pay me lotsa moneys for doing such a
good deed.
I once added a bunch of beautiful
pictures to the Colorado map, including one of Taylor Reservoir, colorful rowboats in the foreground. And then the photo storage site Google used
back then, Panoramio, went defunct, and took my photos down with it when it
sank, glub glub glub. I hate doing all that uploading fer nuttin’!
I’ve gotten several thousand views of a photo I
posted on Google Maps of a little decrepit church in a small village in
southeastern Nebraska. But I never get any notifications about it, and I
can never remember
the name of the village without hunting for it.
Somebody once told me Google pays people, when their views per photo really
climb. I looked it up – and I see that
the real debate is how much Google
Maps should charge various entities for
using their maps (such as Uber, the on-demand driving company – $10,000/month
for a million hits or so!).
By Friday night, I had all the borders
sewn on all the 'Monthly Hang-Ups' blocks, and the batting cut for each one,
using up smallish batting scraps by butting them together and zigzagging with a
9mm-wide stitch. I pinned them all
together, layering right sides together and putting the batting against the
front. Then I sewed around the edges, leaving
a hole at the bottom through which to turn them right side out. I only got about three done before I
fizzled.
Larry spent part of Saturday working on his big garage. He found
metal sheeting for the roof at a smashing bargain on the Purple Wave auction –
and the seller was only about six miles away. In the middle of the
afternoon, he went and got one of Walkers’ boom trucks to assist him in
removing a large metal vent that was in the roof of the building when he got
it. (He brought the building home in multiple pieces from where they took
it down in town three years ago.)
By evening, I had all the blocks sewn
together and turned, and was hand-stitching all the holes shut at the
bottom. A couple of hours before
suppertime, I was turning them right side out as I went along, using my Oxmoor
House point turner.
I sewed
another block... turned it... reached for the point turner...
It was gone.
I looked high
and low... and then I looked low and high. I looked in the trash
can. I looked under my sewing machine. I looked under my
laptop. I looked in the other sewing room. I looked in my
pockets. I gave up and went for my other point turner, which isn’t quite
as pointy.
Flash
forward:
I finished
stitching shut the hole on hanging block #6,
reached over to lay it on the stack –
Uh,
wuzzis? There’s sumpthang sorta hard and plasticky inside this thing.
?
Oh.
Yes.
Quite
so. (In a Winnie-the-Pooh tone.)
So I ripped
it back open and extracted my Oxmoor House point turner.
A similar
story:
I was hand
sewing one evening as we visited with Larry’s parents. I poured everyone
a fresh cup of coffee, returned to my chair and my sewing – but my needle had
gone AWOL.
Where was
it?? I looked everywhere I could think of, but no needle
materialized. I trotted up to my sewing room, got another needle, and
finished my sewing.
We visited...
sipped our coffee...
And then the needle
made its appearance. It was in the
bottom of my coffee cup.
No, I don’t
know how it got there.
My
mother-in-law exclaimed, “Oh!! That could’ve been bad!” – but she couldn’t
quit laughing. For a good while after that, if anyone lost anything, she’d
ask, “Did you look in the bottom of Sarah Lynn’s coffee cup?”
Her son is a
lot like her. ;-)
Not too long
after the pointer-inside-the-block fiasco, the 'Monthly Hang-Ups' were done,
other than the wire hangers. I’ve
ordered wire from Wal-Mart, but it hasn’t come yet.
Sunday was a
beautiful day here – 70° on the 19th of February, in the middle of
Nebraska. It was only 10° cooler than it
was in Miami Beach, Florida.
However, it
was -68° – that’s 68° below 0° – in Delyankir, Russia! That’s way off in
the eastern part of Russia in the Sakha Republic, about 1/3 of the way north of
the Sea of Okhotsk and 2/3 of the way south of the East Siberian Sea.
That’s 1,582 miles straight west of Unalakleet, Alaska, where it was a
comparatively balmy -16°, and an astonishing 5,832 miles from Moscow, Russia,
where it was a shirt-sleeve-wearing 35°.
Okay, boys
and girls, Climatology and Geography class is over. We return you to your
regular programming.
It was Ian’s 1st birthday yesterday, and
I hadn’t been anywhere, so I hadn’t bought him anything. I went downstairs, rummaged around in the bags
of stuffed animals, and came up with a Bearington teddy bear with little red
and white embroidered peppermint candies.
Next, I went upstairs and rummaged through some boxes of books, and
found a Winnie-the-Pooh board book that still looked like new, amazingly enough. Larry gave Ian the present after church last
night.
Today I’m
feeling better, but with lots of coughing and blowing ze ol’ honker (as in
‘schnoz’, not as in ‘goose’). But I was well
enough to pick up the grandchildren after school, and they were glad to see me,
so that was fun.
Larry met the
New and Improved Internet tech at Loren’s house this morning. He couldn’t get the equipment to connect,
either; so he put up a bigger and better dish – and then it connected. Larry called me after the tech left, in order
to get Loren’s Accu-Weather page up the way he likes it. They’ve revamped their webpage since Loren
looked at it last, and I knew he’d have troubles finding his way through the
maze, if someone wasn’t there to help.
Sometimes Larry is better at helping him than I am. Perhaps it’s because they think more along
the same lines. With computers, there is
generally more than one way to skin the cat (what a horrible expression) – and I
think I invariably pick the way that’s the most difficult for Loren to
remember.
I’ve been
reading of the willingness of many generous people in my quilting group to help
with the Pine Ridge Reservation, which is the poorest area of the United States.
It’s located just over western Nebraska’s northern border in South Dakota,
about 120 miles south of Rapid City. We’ve
driven through this area many times, and I hear the news of this tribe, as it
often hits our local newspapers and radio stations.
Because I am
co-owner of this quilting group and was somewhat concerned about ideas some had
about what they could send to help, I wrote the following:
I caution you
to send any donations through trusted channels, since, just as with many
charitable drives, not all donations actually wind up where they should, nor is
some of it useful. I’ll give links in a moment. But first, here are
some astounding and dismaying statistics:
·
Unemployment rate of 80-90%
·
Per capita yearly income of
$4,000 (more recent reports say $2,600 - $3,500)
·
8 times the United States rate
of diabetes
·
5 times the United States rate
of cervical cancer
·
Twice the rate of heart disease
·
8 times the United States rate
of Tuberculosis
·
Alcoholism rate estimated as
high as 80%
·
1 in 4 infants born with fetal
alcohol syndrome or effects
·
Suicide rate more than twice the
national rate
·
Teen suicide rate 4 times the
national rate
·
Infant mortality 3 times the
national rate
·
Life expectancy (38-45) on Pine
Ridge is the lowest in the United States and the 2nd lowest in the
Western Hemisphere. Only Haiti has a lower rate.
The
alcoholism plays a great part in all of this. It’s a bad cycle:
Alcoholism begets lack of ambition... lack of ambition begets alcoholism.
That’s making it pretty simplistic, I realize, but it’s one of and maybe THE
top problem.
I could
launch into a diatribe about whys, wherefores, rights, and wrongs, but that’s
not my place.
Instead, I
only caution you that you may not want to, for instance, send a beautiful
handmade quilt. Take a look at this picture of a mountain of
clothes:
Those are (or
were) clothes donated by a group of churches in Colorado. And
there they are, discarded in a huge heap. I don’t know the reason for
this – but perhaps it’s because many live in ramshackle, tumbledown shacks, and
there simply is no place to put extra clothes – no closets, no dressers.
Here are
websites that will help insure – though by no means guarantee – that your
donations reach those who truly need and will use them. Please check out
all the links on these websites, and make your decisions carefully:
A good
article:
When we drive
through the reservation, we make a point to fill with gas and buy food there,
and sometimes we’ve purchased handmade items (not faux souvenirs made in
China). The native peoples are always friendly with us, as we are with
them, but we’ve certainly seen some awful and heartrending sights.
Sooo... find out as many facts as you can before making your decision, if you
wish to help.
* * *
This
afternoon, a lady on the group decided to be a Miss Bossyboots and tell
everyone to trim their messages. Rude of
her, never mind the fact that she
started her message with ‘Please’ and ended it with ‘thank you’, seeing as how
she’s not the Big Cheese of the
Group.
So, once
again, it fell to me to address the issue.
I wrote:
Miss
Bossyboots (no, I didn’t really write
that; I did use her real name), please let the group owners and moderators
decide the rules. If you have a complaint, do please write to the owners
and moderators and let us know.
I understand
that the daily digests in particular can get awfully long when people keep
replying and not wiping out at least some of the previous emails.
On the other hand, sometimes people respond and leave nothing of the
email to which they are responding, and the rest of us, who often receive
numerous emails in addition to the group emails, have no idea what they
are talking about.
Here’s just
one of the problems: people are using a lot more devices these days, such
as smartphones, tablets, iPads, etc. Yahoo groups were set up for
Desktops and Laptops. What you see on your computer or device is not
necessarily what others see – and some people either have no way to trim, or no
idea how to trim messages.
Let it
go. In the scheme of things, a too-long message is small potatoes.
Making somebody feel bad and perhaps causing them not to write any more
messages is a whole lot worse than leaving a five-inch message attached to your
post.
,,,>^..^<,,,
Sarah Lynn, group co-owner ,,,>^..^<,,,
* * *
The group was
deathly quiet for a while after that, and then ladies started writing to thank
me. Whew.
It always puts
me a bit on edge to answer someone the way I did. It really does dampen everyone’s enthusiasm!
They practically stop writing for a while. Our goal is to have lots
of friendly chatter, not to squelch it!
I debated
answering privately – but that won’t work, because she wrote publicly,
so I have to answer her publicly. I tried to be factual and polite
and friendly, rather than confrontational. Don’t know if I pulled it off.
(Yes, I know what some people think about untrimmed messages. They practically froth at the mouth over the issue. So now you have another viewpoint. Consider yourself well-balanced.)
Ah,
well. These things happen. And anyway, I just pulled a
yummy-scrumptious apple pie from the oven! Now, shall we have maple nut,
or butter pecan ice cream with it?
Okay, you
talked me into it; I’ll have a small scoop of each.
Now, if you
were a little closer, I could share!
Here are a
couple of vintage buttons I found in an old button box of my mother’s, that I attached
to the 'Monthly Hang-Ups'.
You can see
more photos here. I’ll save these sets for granddaughters Joanna and Emma for
next Christmas.
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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