There are still Painted Ladies by the
thousands all over and around the Autumn Joy sedum.
The cause of this butterfly explosion,
according to the Columbus Telegram and the Lincoln Journal Star is the decent
amount of rain that fell in California earlier this year, where Painted Ladies
start their migration. The rain led to
more flowering plants for nectar, which boosted butterfly numbers.
The butterflies’ migration can extend 9,000
miles and span six generations. The
butterflies currently found in Nebraska are
migrating and preparing to lay eggs for the next cycle.
Larry is afraid
that after walking down our front walk to the Jeep, swarmed by Painted Ladies,
he’ll sit down in church – and butterflies will start emanating from him in
huge fluttering swirls. haha
A friend just
posted a photo of herself on Facebook, then commented on how gray she has
become. I responded, “I like
gray and white hair! It’s always kind of
scary when you are following what you imagine to be a teenager because of her
swinging blond ponytail, then she turns around and you discover she’s 93 if she’s
a day. Gray is better. 🤣”
A teenage boy recently complimented husband
Larry and I with, “You both look so young!” (We are both 56, and both have silver-gray
hair.) We duly thanked him.
After leaving the store, I told Larry, “Don’t
get all conceited. He thinks we’re actually 85.”
By Tuesday, any Friends and Relations (à la
Rabbit, of Winnie-the-Pooh fame) I knew who had been in Hurricane Irma’s path
had all checked in as safe. One couple was without power, but their home was
all right, and a neighbor was letting them use his generator for a few hours,
then using it himself for a while, then letting them use it again, in order to
keep both families’ freezers and refrigerators cold. One friend had a
tree come down and punch right through roof and ceiling into their living room
– but the tree arched over the husband’s vehicle without harming it; he was
glad for that. My cousin and her husband, who pilots tour boats for
Disney World, evacuated ahead of the storm, and managed to snag a hotel room in
Chattanooga. What is normally a 9-hour drive from Winter Haven turned
into a 17-hour drive. After a couple of days in Chattanooga, they went on
to Shelbyville, Illinois, where her sister and husband live, and other
cousins. That’s my father’s hometown.
They headed back home in a few days, and found their
house still intact. They hadn’t even
lost electricity.
Early Tuesday
afternoon, Teensy came back. You’ll
recall he had a little skirmish with a polecat Monday night? My nose didn’t
complain too awfully much at all when he came in and sat down to have himself a
meal. Those pet wipes I’d used on him the night before did a pretty good
job, evidently. Poor little thing, he was sooo thirsty. I’d put
water outside for him, both on the front porch and on the back deck; but he
prefers running water from the tub faucet, pôr fąvör. He just couldn’t quit drinking! Maybe
he tried cleaning himself off, and got the skunk parfum in his mouth. That would sure make a guy thirsty.
Hummingbirds were
at the feeder that day, and there was a pretty little chickweed geometer moth
on the screen. I grabbed my macro lens and got a few shots of the moth. I’ve taken numerous photos of them, but have
never once gotten one on a pretty background.
That afternoon, I cut my right index finger
rather badly while talking to my brother Loren on the phone. He didn’t know anything happened, as I kept
still, and he couldn’t see me grimacing and rushing for a paper towel.
What
happened was, I was getting something out of the cupboard when a box of
aluminum foil fell out. I stupidly tried
to catch it, and the metal serrated edge of the box sliced a long, deep, jagged
slash right through the pad of my index finger, from fingernail to first
knuckle. Since then, things such as bathing,
washing my hair, and blow-drying and curling it have been difficult, with the
index finger on my right hand out of commission. I am not
ambidextrous. Amazing how injuring just
one small digit can stymie a person. Or
at least it sure slows me down.
It probably needed stitches, but I’m making do with
butterfly bandages, Band-Aids, and triple-antibiotic medicine. The most
aggravating thing is trying to type.
It’s healing, but the tip of my finger might never feel
quite normal again.
Once poor Teensy
came in the house, ate, and drank his fill, he slept, and slept, and
slept. Getting skunked is an exhausting
trauma!
I’ll betcha Teensy
tried doing to the skunk what he periodically does to the other cats: they walk past him (nervously, recognizing
that devilish gleam in his eyes), and just as they get far enough to relax and
suppose themselves safe, he swats them on the rump, THWACK!
I’ll betcha the ol’
skunk went a-waddlin’ past, unconcerned about the cat as he sat calmly, waiting... waiting... waiting... and
then – ka-SLAP!!! And the skunk, startled, let loose a small bit
of stinkum before realizing, Oh, it’s just you, you stupid feline.
Skunks keep their spray as a last resort, as it takes a while for it to
replenish, and once it’s gone, they are practically defenseless for a while.
They carry only enough of the chemical for five or six uses – about 15cc – and
require some ten days to produce another supply.
Teensy barely
smells bad anymore, thankfully. Mostly,
it’s like a souped-up case of new-puppy breath.
😄😁
A large shoebox full of #60 Bottom Line thread
for my quilting machine came that day, containing many colors I need. I
bought it from a lady who posted three lots of the thread on
SewItsForSale. The box arrived with the
paper covering it all ripped and torn nearly off – and the whole box was
covered with dirt, like it had been out in a dust storm. But inside, all
the thread was fine.
The UPS man apologized, saying it had arrived at their
store like that.
Note: it is never
a good idea to cover a box you are sending with paper, never mind which carrier
you are using. It will almost always get ripped, and if the label is
only on the paper and nowhere else, your box is going to be lost to the four
winds.
The lady from whom
I bought it was all apologetic, though it really wasn’t her fault.
Ah, well. No
harm done, and it gives me the opportunity to make up tall tales about what
might have happened to the box and where it might have gone.
Maybe it got misdirected
to the Saudi Peninsula and fell out of the helicopter during a terrible dirt
storm. But nobody in Al Khobar had a longarm machine, so they sent it
back!
I bought another
big shoebox full of thread from her a week after purchasing the first. I now have over $500 worth of bobbin thread
(it can be used on top, too, though I prefer heavier-weight thread for the top)
for either longarm or embroidery machine – and I paid about half that amount.
The lady sent the second box of thread wrapped in paper –
and it, too, arrived with the paper nearly ripped off, though not embedded with
dirt like the last one was.
The lady called the
UPS to report the matter, and they told her not to wrap her boxes with paper. Do you remember the days of yesteryear, when packages
were wrapped in brown paper and tied with string?
If you wonder why I
order longarm thread... well, they don’t sell it in this burg – or at least,
not the large cones I usually need. Nor is
it sold in any nearby town. I get cones
with 3,000 yards on them. At Country Traditions in Fremont, they sell
smallish spools of Aurifil long-arm thread, and they don’t have a very big
selection of colors. I like to buy from www.sewthankful.com, because it’s run by a Christian family... but it’s a small business,
and they often don’t have the color I want on hand. They have to order it from their supplier, so it can take 5-7 days
to get here. So if I’m in a hurry, I order from Red
Rock Threads in Pahrump, Nevada. Here’s a funny-odd bit of trivia about
Pahrump: it’s unincorporated, even though the population is about 36,500.
The thread I
ordered late Thursday night, when I saw I was probably going to run out of top
thread before I ran out of quilt, got here early this afternoon. However, I already finished the quilt Friday
evening.
Longarm thread is a
lot longer-stapled than regular sewing thread, and thus doesn’t break as easily
– a requirement for a machine that goes 1,200 stitches per minute or
faster. Domestic sewing machines are usually under 1,000 spm. The
APQS longarm machine goes about 3,600 spm. That’s fast!
I like Superior
threads. They have quite a variety of types, colors, and weight. I
generally use #50 So Fine on top, and #60 Bottom Line on the bottom. (The
higher the number, the finer the thread. There’s an explanation on www.superiorthreads.com, if you’re interested.)
Wednesday, I asked
Victoria how she and Baby Carolyn were doing.
“Pretty good,” she responded. “The baby finally slept most of the night
last night and we got some much-needed sleep.”
She suggested I use Larry’s method of gorilla glue for my
finger.
“Ah ain’t no
gorilla; cain’t use me no gorilla glue-’em!” I protested.
Thursday, I began working
on the lady’s next quilt, which was called ‘Sidelights’ and was made of Asian
fabrics. The pantograph is called Paisley Park.
That afternoon, Loren brought us a jug of
Martinelli’s unfiltered, not-from-concentrate, apple juice. Mmmm... best apple juice ever.
Sometime later that day, I looked at the
calendar and realized that it was exactly 25 years ago that day that my father
had died. Hard to believe it’s been that
long.
Friday afternoon, I
was quilting away on my customer’s Asian fabric ‘Sidelights’ quilt... looked at
the cone of variegated coral thread... and knew it wasn’t going to last. I hated to think I might be stalled out until
my thread from Red Rocks arrived. I
could remove this quilt and put on another... but I’m never very fond of that
idea.
On a whim, hoping
things might have changed and they would now stock it, I grabbed the phone and
called my favorite quilt shop in town, Sew
What, which is owned by a lady with whom I went to school.
“Do you have
longarm thread?” I asked when someone answered the phone.
The woman on the
other end of the line (or radio wave, as it were) didn’t have a clue. About anything,
I don’t believe.
(No, it wasn’t my
friend from school; she knows where every speck of lint is, in her store.)
The lady went for help.
Maybe she’d never heard of a longarm.
Maybe she’d never heard of longarm thread.
Maybe she’d never heard of thread.
Maybe she really worked
at the flower shop next door, and had hit the wrong entrance, and nobody,
including the woman herself, had noticed her error yet.
Someone else picked up the phone. “Hello?”
I restated my request.
She didn’t know either, but walked back to the thread
rack to take a look.
Then, “No, we don’t carry longarm thread,” she said in a
tone of finality.
I waited a moment, wondering if she really knew what she
was talking about, and if I should rephrase the question. I could hear her plunkity-plunking spools of
thread around.
Then she muttered, almost to herself... “Machine quilting thread... long-stapled...” She petered out.
“Nope,” she reaffirmed.
“Well, but that’s it!”
I exclaimed, getting all excited. “Do
you have any variegated thread? In
coral? I’m using King Tut.”
“Oh?” she said doubtfully. “No, this isn’t King Tut.” (pause)
Since I hadn’t yet politely taken ‘no’ for an answer, as she seemed to
hope I would do, she added discouragingly, “Yes, here’s some variegated coral;
but it has many tones in it, all the way from pink to orange. I doubt if it would match.”
I doubted if it wouldn’t. “What time do you close?” I asked, and she
told me.
I grabbed my dwindling cone of thread, stuck my feet in
sandals, snatched up my purse, and trotted out the door.
They had no cones, as she’d said; only spools. Spools with a measly 500 yards on them. But the variegated YLI coral thread was very,
very close to matching perfectly. On my
customer’s busily flowered fabric, any disparity would never be noticed.
I paid $8.83 (counting tax) for those 500 yards of
thread.
A spool holding 400 yards of Coats & Clark Dual Duty general
purpose thread, which is what a majority of seamstresses use, costs $1.79. The 3,000-yard cone I just got today cost
$23.95. I would need six spools of YLI
thread to equal the amount of thread on the Superior cone. And that would come to a total of $52.98!!! Good grief.
But I really, really
needed to finish that quilt. So I bought
the thread.
And finish the quilt I did. Now I’m ready to quilt Lydia’s cute ‘Lil
Ladybug’ quilt.
That day, Victoria sent a picture of Baby Carolyn,
asking, “Doesn’t this look like me?”
The sweet little baby was just working on a smile, and a whole bunch of
work it is, too.
“Quite a lot!” I
answered Victoria’s question. “New babies’ earliest on-purpose smiles are
often a thoughtful job of face-working, aren’t they? I got so many
pictures of first smiles with faces so similar to this. What they’re
doing is working hard to imitate the smiling faces looking down at them.
So very sweet.”
Shortly thereafter, Lydia posted an adorable picture of dear little Baby Malinda.
Being two and a half months older, she’s just about got those smiles
down pat. 😍
Isn’t it
something to think how these tiny lives have so much potential, and yet, right
now, they are totally, absolutely, completely dependent on others to love and
care for them? And they totally trust
that they will be cared for, without consciously
understanding it. Precious little babies.
Friday night I
finished quilting the ‘Sidelights’ quilt, and Saturday I quilted a
sports-themed table runner for Hannah’s children’s piano teacher, the elderly
lady who has had a return of cancer, and is trying hard to finish quilts for
her family while she still feels well enough to do so.
I posted some
photos:
Sunday morning I barely had time to get ready
for church, even though I allowed myself 2 ½ hours. First, the sweater vest I steamed was too
small. Not much, but enough that I didn’t
like it. Stands to reason, though, since
it was one I wore in high school, 40 years ago. When I went to steam the next one (which
happens to be too big, but that’s
better than too small), the iron
spewed all over it, because I pressed ‘steam’ before the thing was hot again. On top of all that, this booboo on my right
index finger slows me down a lot. Fortunately, I had yet another sweater to
don.
Good thing I’d cut my hair the day before, so
it didn’t take so long to dry and curl.
Some friends of ours who had been vacationing
in the Tetons, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Parks were home again. They posted some of their beautiful photos on
Instagram, including some of Old Faithful Geyser.
Once upon a time we were at Old Faithful, along
with hundreds of people sitting around the geyser, waiting for it to erupt. We had seven kids with us; it was two months
before Caleb was born. Hester was
three. Everyone was chattering... and then
the geyser spluttered loudly, and everyone abruptly quieted in anticipation.
Into this silence Hester piped, “It’s about
to sprout!!!” – and that was the end of the silence.
Bobby and Hannah
and family came visiting last night after church, bringing a scrumptious pear
dessert Hannah had made, with ice cream to go with it. The pear filling had cream cheese in it, and there
was a streusel topping. Not too sweet...
just right.
We enjoyed the
visit.
The butterflies are
still going strong around here.
On the West Point radio station, the
announcer said the butterflies are coming from South Dakota. Hmmm.
That’s New and Different information.
I wonder who’s right?
Time for a bit more
research...
++++++++
Ooooookay. Here’s The Rest of the Story:
Royce Bitzer, an
entomologist at Iowa State University, said there is an abundance of Painted
Ladies in areas across the region, including in South Dakota, Minnesota and
Iowa.
Larson attributes
the butterfly boom to the ample rains earlier this year in California, where
the Painted Ladies get their start. The rain produced more flowering plants,
providing an abundance of nectar that boosted the Painted Lady population.
The butterflies
spend the summer in cooler places like North Dakota and Canada, Larson said,
but as fall approaches they head south, passing through Nebraska. In a week or two, they’ll be heading for
warmer climates.
So now we know the whole answer. The radio and the newspapers didn’t really
contradict each other; it was just that neither one told the story in full!
We also have
white-lined Sphinxes (aka hummingbird moths) buzzing around the hosta
blossoms. I should try photographing
them again, this time with my camera set on ‘sports mode’, and maybe that would
speed the shutter up enough that I could catch those wings with a little less
motion.
A cousin of mine
who lives in Montana just posted a picture of snow in the mountains. She has snow on one side of her home;
wildfires on the other. They hope the
snow and cooler temperatures will put out the fires.
Our neighbors have
gone on a cruise to Alaska. Meanwhile,
Larry is carrying for their goats, chickens, guineas, and the garden. All the eggs and the garden produce is ours
to keep. Now we need a couple heads of
lettuce to go with all these delicious tomatoes! I had a peanut butter/tomato sandwich for
supper. If you haven’t ever had one, and
decide to give it a try, for pity’s sake, toast
the bread. Don’t tell me you don’t
like it, if you haven’t toasted the
bread. Bleah.
Here’s Teensy,
snoozing in my chair. You’d think the
cat would get cramps in his toes, the way he sleeps with them curled up so
tightly.
And now, I believe
a soft-to-medium-boiled egg fresh from the henhouse would hit the spot.
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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