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| Male house finch |
Some
quilting friends were discussing ‘quilting fads’ the other day. Some like ‘modern’ quilts; some like
traditional quilts. I pay little
attention to fads, other than deciding whether or not I like the whatever-it-is
(be it clothes or quilts or household colors). I like what I like, and
don’t really care whether it’s in fashion at the moment or not.
Do you
ever think that some people do absolutely nothing else with their lives than
surf the Internet for commentable (should be a word) articles, where they
delight in posting insults and invectives, and creating rises and flaps? I have sometimes noticed a name on a comment
under one article... then spotted it under another --- taking exactly the
opposite viewpoint from what they stated earlier.
I was
looking at pictures of quilting recently in order to get some ideas as to how
to quilt the Baskets of Lilies quilt and the Sunbonnet Sue quilt. Sometimes I find quilting so exquisite, I can
hardly believe someone did that with free-motion quilting. After a bit, I
tell myself, I can do that, too! I stare at the designs... walk
over to my quilt on the frame... set my jaw firmly (think ‘The Fearless Fosdick
Face’)... and launch in.
Then I
scowl and mutter, Design alternative!!! and keep going. And when I
think, I just can’t do that! – I go look at the old quilt on my
bed, one of the first I ever did on my HQ16, and I realize, Oh. I have
improved. And, Maybe I can keep on improving!
Before I
do the next customer quilt, I intend to finish the appliqués and do the
quilting on the Baskets of Lilies quilt, because I want to try out my new
machine on a quilt of my own, rather than someone else’s. It moves
differently than the old machine, and if I’m going to make a mess, I don’t want
to be doing it on a customer’s quilt. I’m hoping it won’t take me too
awfully long. I’ve been of two minds whether to do custom quilting on it
or a pantograph; I’m leaning strongly toward a fancy pantograph, in order to
get it done quicker.
Last Monday
evening, Larry took apart the 14-foot frame for the HQ16, and began shortening
it to 10 feet. We needed to ship it to a
lady in Alabama, and her quilting room would only accommodate a 10-foot frame.
Larry numbered various pieces and I took pictures of everything, so the lady
will know exactly how it all fits.
Larry thought
he could round up appropriate-sized boxes at the shop and pack it all himself.
However, I thought we should take everything to the UPS Store and let them
do it. I called UPS, and learned that if they did it, insurance would
not only cover possible loss, but also any damage. If we
did it, and the machine gets damaged, if UPS then inspects it and
determines it wasn’t packaged well, we’d be out of luck. I sent this
message on to Larry, then called Loren for our usual afternoon chat.
We
generally chatter away with any relevant or new news, and that day wasn’t any
exception. Loren immediately thought he
needed to bring me a giant roll of bubble wrap to help Larry pack everything. 😆
Loren is
79 years old. And it was only 2° F, with a wind chill of -16°!
Menfolk.
Tsk.
I
convinced him to stay put in his warm house until we decided how we were going
to go about the operation.
Larry finally
got my message, and, amazingly enough, made agreeable noises. (Well, as
much as he could, in a text.) About taking the stuff to UPS and
letting them do the packing, that is. Whataya bet he searched all
over the shop and couldn’t find any boxes the right size, hmmm?
My Word
program now puts in ‘Alternative Text’ for pictures. If a picture is
taking a while to download, people will see this ‘Alternative Text’. You
can type in whatever you want it to say... or just let the program label photos
on its own.
In last
week’s picture of baby Carolyn, the text reads, “A small child is holding a
baby.” The silly program thinks the highchair,
with a panda face incorporated into the seat back, is ‘a small child’!
Because Larry
used the galvanized steel poles he bought from Menards when he extended the
frame, and there are no joints in the pipes, it’s much sturdier than the
originals. With my 14’ frame, there were
joints, and that made it sag a bit. These 10-footers hardly swayed at
all; it was quite sturdy. The lady will be happy with the frame, I think.
I looked
it over when Larry was through and ready to take it apart again for shipping,
and said, “It’s better than it was for me! I’m jealous.”
He
laughed and pointed upwards. “You have
an even better one than this, just two flights up.” 😊
It’s a
good thing we didn’t have to send her the original poles, because one
got pressed into service as part of the tower that held our Internet dish
waaaay up over our house.
Larry had
to drill out the little holes for the, uh... ? push pins? that hold the poles
in the frames. He needed to sand the ends of the poles a bit, because
they were slightly too big to fit into the brackets at the ends of the
frame. The steel sander was at the shop, so he would do that the next morning.
He also needed to rethread the thread guide post. And I needed to dust
everything one more time, too.
I cleaned
out my tool caddy and decided to send it along with the machine, as I have
enough drawer space upstairs for my tools. Also, I sent the lady my TOWA
bobbin tension gauge. I hardly used it, and it would help make up for the
fact that I’m not sending her my bobbin winder, as my Avanté didn’t come with
one.
Larry originally
planned to send the 10’ double folding tables with the particle board bolted
atop them and the Railz (tracks) left in place, to make it easier for the lady
to set everything back up again.
Tuesday, Larry
came home at noon with the proper tools to sand the ends of the quilting-frame poles
to make them fit into the holes in the brackets.
In
describing my frame, I mentioned a ‘dead bar’ or ‘idler bar’, and several
people wondered what that is.
Here’s a
good shot of a frame:
If we
label the bars from near to far 1 through 4, then it goes like this:
1.
Backing
bar
2.
Top
bar
3.
Dead
(or idler) bar (the one with no leader)
4.
Take-up
bar
The dead
bar (also called idler bar) is to keep the quilt level as it travels from the
front bars to the take-up bar.
That day,
Bobby took Hannah to the doctor, quite sick with a sinus infection and
asthma. She’s not been well since last
June, and the doctor hadn’t treated her aggressively enough to ever get her
over it. But the doctor she saw Tuesday prescribed
a stronger prescription for her, which she is to take for a longer period of
time. They went to pick it up – and it was $385!! Walgreens called the clinic to find out if
there wasn’t something else she could take that wouldn’t be so expensive. Fortunately, there was, and it was ‘only’ $80.
By
evening, after just one giant antibiotic tablet and prednisone, and she was
already feeling better. I’ve been so
worried about her. I do hope she can get
well again soon.
That
evening, Amy and Emma brought the Olympus camera that had been Janice’s. Amy had bought a new battery for it, stuck it
into the camera – and discovered there were 371 pictures on it that Janice had
taken, some not more than a couple of months before she passed away. I downloaded the pictures to one of my
external hard drives. There are pictures
of Teddy and Amy’s house in the making and moving; I’ll put those on a thumb
drive and give it to them. And I’ll have
Clark Color Labs print all of the photos, and put them into an album for Loren.
That
night, Larry built a wooden crate for the HQ16 to fit into perfectly, with
enough room for the table brackets, the tool caddy, and the carriage. The poles and tracks would go together in
another package, and the tables in another.
I put the manual and small items such as Alan wrenches, needles,
bobbins, side clamps, the thread guide post, the laser light, stylus, and some
pantographs into a box and taped it shut.
Everything was ready to go.
Or so we
thought.
The other day, a friend wanted to know how I came up with
all our children’s names.
I had a good baby-name book. I chose
all the names I liked best... eliminated the ones whose meanings I didn’t
like... and wound up with a list of about ten boys’ names and ten girls’ names
every time. I never had trouble finding names I liked, or choosing my
favorite out of the mix.
I’d make a long list and show it to Larry. He was always, always perfectly agreeable with my list, and even the order I had
them in according to best liked, middle names and all. I wondered... Does
he really agree with these names?
So one time I made a list of names that I didn’t
like. Nothing farfetched, nothing that would’ve clued him in to the
scheme. Normal names, nothing wrong with them – but I didn’t like them,
at least not for our baby.
I handed him the list. “Do you like
these all right?”
He read through them.
He reread them.
Then, in a slightly hesitant voice, as if he
didn’t want to hurt my feelings, “Do you have any others?”
I was totally delighted: He DID have
an opinion about baby names, and he DID know what names he liked, and we
were in agreement! I didn’t worry about it anymore. We
liked the same types of names. He depended on me to make lists... show
them to him... and now I knew he would let me know, if he didn’t like
the names. 😊
My maiden
name is Swiney. My father always told people with a laugh, “Rhymes with ‘money’!” A lot of people pronounce it ‘Sweeny’.
Even some of our relatives back in Illinois say it that way. My ancestors came from Ireland, where we are
related to every last Swiney, Sweeny, Sweeney, Sweney, Swinny, Swinney,
McSwiney, McSweeny, McSweeney, McSweney, McSwinny, McSwinney (and every other
derivation you can dream up) on the entire Isle of Eyre.
My uncle,
who went there to track down information for our genealogy, said he could walk
into some of the small villages and call out, “Swiney!” – and every head in the
village would pop out of the cottage doors. hee hee
At noon on Wednesday, it was 23° – warmest it had been in
days. Teddy came to help Larry load the HQ16 in the
crate and the frame/table into a flatbed pickup that he borrowed from Walkers. I fretted about that machine, the tables, and
the poles resting there on that flatbed, but Larry strapped everything down
well, and headed for the UPS Store.
“Now, if
we just won’t go broke paying for shipping, and if that machine can travel
safely 1,100 miles to Spanish Fort, Alabama, I’ll be happy as a turtle on a
conveyor belt!” I said.
An hour
later, Larry called. “Are you sitting
down?” he asked.
The estimated
price for shipping was about $650.
In my ad,
I’d said we would pay half the shipping, and the buyer would pay the other
half. But we certainly hadn’t expected
it to be that much!
I called the
lady and offered her some options: 1) we could keep the tables and the
board top and let her find some that would work for the brackets and bars, 2) ship as it was, at $325 for each of
us, or 3) pay us the entire $650, and
we would take it to her and set it up, too.
She thought about it, and decided to just have us send the whole
works. “After all,” she told me, “Fifteen years ago when I shipped all my
furniture from Kentucky to Alabama, it was $7,000!” – meaning, this didn’t seem
too awfully outrageous to her.
Larry, in
the meantime, had decided to take the board off the tables and cut it, so they
could be stacked, rather than end to
end. He bought some bolts, drilled holes
in the proper spots for the overlap, and then headed back to the UPS Store.
We were
relieved to learn that this cut the price of shipping a lot: the price dropped to
$425.16 – $212.58 for each of us.
You know,
I allllmost wrote ‘local buyers only’ in my ad, but then I remembered
how very, very happy I was when I found the HQ16 in the first place – in New
Jersey. And the lady was willing to ship it to me. She only
sent the machine, though, not the whole table.
That
afternoon I posted some pictures:
I hung
several pictures and decorations in my quilting studio, and then it was time to
get ready for our midweek church service.
Kurt and
Victoria invited us over afterwards. Kurt had shot a deer Tuesday, and
they cut the meat up themselves. Victoria had cooked a roast in her
crockpot (the one we gave them for Christmas), along with potatoes and carrots,
and they shared some of it with us. They gave us a piece of deer loin,
too, for Larry to smoke in the Traeger grill.
While we
were there, Andrew and Hester stopped by to tell Kurt and Victoria the news
they had told us at Christmas time, and which is now ‘officially declassified’,
as Andrew said, laughing: a new baby is
on the way! You can’t imagine how happy
we all are over this news.
That
afternoon, I set up a new email account and a Facebook page for a friend, plowed
my way through some computer work, and then did some housework.
One
of my quilting friends, upon seeing this picture, wrote, “Wow! That big room sure shrank fast! Looks like a wonderful place to play.”
Didn’t
it, though! Shrink, I mean, with that machine and frame
installed. But there’s plenty of room
for what I need to do in there, and I like it.
Plus, I have my little office back... I have a gift-wrapping room... and
now there is that big area at the front of the walkout basement that is empty
of the HQ16 and the 14’ frame. I need to hurry up and get it organdized
(à la Winnie-the-Pooh) before Larry decides to overhaul a tractor or rebuild a
forklift in there, or something!
I’m
really, really happy (and still surprised) with this machine Larry got for me;
but you know I had been sneaking surreptitious glances at those big
machines – the 26” Fusions and Infinities! (that are of course way out of our
budget).
The nice
dealer and HQ tech who sold us the machine and set it up for me assured us that
this machine was just my size, and I am probably a little too small to cope
with the reach of those big machines. I wanted to bluster, “I’m
not too small to cope with anything!!!” – but... he might be
right. 😉
Friday, it
got up to 49°. It was bright and sunny,
and the squirrels were out and about. I
could hear them chattering and scolding somethin’ fierce – which meant Teensy
must’ve been out and about, too. 😨😲😬
Loren
spent five hours that morning cutting wood at a friend’s property north of town,
and several hours the day before. I worry about him, cutting and
splitting wood by himself here and there, and so was glad to hear that our
friend went out in the woods and helped him Friday, the whole while he was
there. We have good friends.
By late
afternoon, I was finally able to work in my quilting studio! The third
load of clothes was in the washing machine, the second load was in the dryer...
and the nice thing is, from way upstairs I can’t hear either one of those
machines when they buzz or play their cute little ‘I’m done!’ chimes, so they
won’t bother me at all, at all! haha!
...
...
...
Okay,
okay, I admit it. I set an alarm so I wouldn’t forget. 🙄😏 All I have to do is say, “Hey, Cortana,
set a timer for 88 minutes!” and the helpful woman inside my laptop announces
sweetly, “Okay. I have set am alarm for
6:30 p.m.” Wheeee, doggies! (in
a Jedd Clampett tone) (I do prefer to fold clothes before they get
all wrinkled, and besides, folding nice warm, clean-smelling clothes is just...
nice.)
On my
cutting table sat my laptop and two external hard drives, and the data from my
laptop – almost one terabyte – was flowing into externals. Gotta keep all
my A-One, Top-Notch, First-Rate, High-Class Stuff and Things, Jetsam and
Flotsam, backed up! Twice. That stuff includes journals from
the early 1990s to today, photos from 1999 ’til now, music (about 5,000?
songs), patterns, recipes, financial stuff in Excel, saved emails, and a
gazillion other things. My life is on a computer chip! heh
That
done, I was finally working on Todd and Dorcas’s Baskets of Lilies quilt
again! Most of the petals in the borders needed to be appliquéd,
using a satin stitch. And then I can quilt it.
I
uploaded some pictures:
And these
are from a week ago Friday, when I met my customer and friend, Carol, in
Fremont: Meeting
at Milady Coffeehouse
In case
it’s been so long since I worked on Dorcas’ quilt that you’ve forgotten what it
looks like, here are the last pictures I took of it:
Did you
know you can put chips in a quilt with all the information on a label, and a
chip reader could then read it? You could even put a tracking chip into a
quilt before entering it in a quilt show. And yes, the label chip is
waterproof; the quilt can be washed.
That
evening, my mother-in-law Norma called to tell me that her brother, Larry’s Uncle
Clyde, had passed away. We’re sad to
lose him, but glad he’s no longer suffering.
And we know we’ll see him again one day in heaven. He did not seem to suffer much, for which we
are grateful. Uncle Clyde’s (and his late wife Aunt Joanne’s) children
have been my good friends since we were small children. And their children and our children
are good friends. Clyde and Joanne were
the first couple my father married after becoming a minister in 1953.
As I worked
on Dorcas’ quilt, I was glad for the quilting gloves (open at the fingertips,
with rubbery bits all over them) my late sister-in-law Janice gave me. It’s
hard work to turn and twist such a big quilt around smoothly, doing a satin
stitch around ovals!
Larry brought
home a light with the three LED swiveling lamps, and put it up for me, effectively
evicting me from my table and sewing machine for a while. Mind you, I wasn’t complaining. It was
too dark in that corner!
Earlier,
he smoked chicken breasts in the Traeger grill. Yum, that thing turns out
mighty good-tasting meat. We also had corn and 12-grain bread and
blueberry applesauce.
My nephew
Kelvin had surgery for colon cancer that day.
His daughter told us that it went okay, but not as well as they were
hoping. There was a lot of scar tissue,
but the doctor said he got everything he could see. “I’m glad the surgery’s over and now Dad can
heal,” she said.
Saturday
morning, Victoria sent me a picture of a simple baby dress she saw online – and
it was $75! It wouldn’t cost much more
than $5 to make, depending on the fabric, of course. She wants to sew it, so I pulled some
patterns out of my file for her.
Kurt, Victoria, and Baby Carolyn went to a
car show in Omaha that day. Victoria posted
a picture on Instagram: Kurt and
Victoria are grinning cheerily at the camera.
Carolyn, lower right, is grimacing as if to say, “Oh, brother, here we
go again. Tsk. Parents!” Every time I look at that picture, I laugh.
Victoria told us that the lady who owns a
boutique called Lavender Thyme in
Pioneer Plaza uptown is paying her $20 each for four crocheted bonnets. The same lady is buying some adorable little outfits
that Lydia has been making, too. Nice to
have a local place to sell their crafts, and at a good price, to boot!
Victoria is
calling her new little business ‘Knots & Bobbles’. She’s on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knots_and_bobbles/.
Lydia has
an Instagram account, too: https://www.instagram.com/chicbabyboutiqueshop/ and an
Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/ChicBabyBoutiqueShop. Looks like she’s all sold out at the
moment.
Victoria
found the cutest little wooden ‘buttons’ on Amazon, and had them engraved with
the name, Knots & Bobbles.
She attaches one to each thing she makes, on the outside as part of the
design. Quite cute.
Somebody
asked if the little screw that fell out of my bobbin case the first of December
had shown up when we moved the HQ16 and frame.
No, it didn’t, and I forgot to look for it in the hubbub of trying to
get that big machine and frame apart and ready for shipping. But this
made me curious, so I went downstairs to have another look. I used a big, strong, flat magnet all across
the carpeted floor.
I came up
with a ladybug. 😆
Not
because he was magnetic, but because he was alive, and grabbed onto the
magnet as it went over him. It doesn’t matter anymore, really, as that
machine is already in Memphis, Tennessee, on its way to Spanish Fort, Alabama,
and the bobbin case in my Avanté is newer and tighter, including the tension
screw. If I lose another one, well, ... I’ll just have to rush back to
Fremont for a replacement. 😉
The HQ16
and frame is scheduled to arrive at the purchaser’s house tomorrow. The
combined weight of everything we shipped was 213 pounds.
I need to
bring my sewing machine thread upstairs to my quilting studio. Now, I
know it is not recommended to have thread on racks right out in the open, and
especially anyplace where the sun might shine on them. But... I’ve had
these big wooden racks for many years, and ... they’re just so handy!
They were never in the sun, and I use up thread fast, so I never worried about
it. But this new quilting studio is absolutely full of sunshine, all day
long. The perfect wall for the racks is exactly right in the
sunlight. I’d better hang a picture there fast, before I give in
and put those thread racks there, right?
There are blinds that I could pull, but I don’t want to pull them. I like the sunshine.
I even
have a new thread rack that I’ve never used – it’s dark wood and shaped
like a turtle. Cute as all get-out. I found it at a Salvation Army
somewhere, and it needs three more little dowels.
Maybe I
could just go hang all my thread racks in my little office across the hall,
where there are no windows? That’s where they used to be, when we
first moved out here, and my office/sewing room was all together in that one
little room.
A friend sent this link:
I enjoyed
reading the stories and seeing the vintage pictures of people knitting for the
soldiers, in the early part of the 1900s. It’s hard for us to imagine
just how much suffering our young soldiers endured in so many ways, from our
relative ease today, isn’t it? It was because of their willingness to
suffer for God and country that we have
the freedom and comforts we do. I’m glad
these articles have been converted to digital archives.
Speaking
of boys knitting and crocheting... I have a story! ((raising hand))
Here it
is, from an old journal of mine:
At our house, the boys have done crafts now and then –
why, Keith and Teddy even learned to crochet. Keith crocheted a baby
blanket for one of his cousin’s new babies when he was about ten. It was quite a lot like Dr. Seuss’ ‘thneed’
that wouldn’t quit stretching. Remember The
Lorax?
Dorcas knitted
one on that order for her nephew Aaron when he was born. It was glistening
white and lovely, but it was large and heavy, and strrrrrretchy.
Bobby said that once upon a time he got the baby out of his crib, took that
blanket off the top shelf of the closet, wrapped the baby in it, and walked out
to the kitchen. He made it all the way
to the counter before he heard THUDDDD!!! – the rest of the ‘thneed’
had finally fallen off the closet shelf.
Keith next crocheted a scarf for my sister Lura Kay,
though it more nearly resembled a necktie, the way it was so wide on one end
and so narrow on the other. He never could get those corners down
pat.
Teddy put his crocheting to good use. He
made a loooong chain… then, late one night, he tied one end to a downstairs
door handle… fastened part of it to a hanger on which he carefully perched a
large teddy bear, wrapped it around the upstairs door handle, then brought it
back down and affixed it to a pulley. He held the end… and waited.
After some time, Hannah came sleepily through the
kitchen, her completed homework in hand.
She reached for the handle on the door to the steps…pulled the door open
---
--- and up popped a big teddy bear, arms and legs
flapping with the momentum. It stared her straight in the face, then
bobbed abruptly downwards, bouncing merrily on each step as it descended to the
bottom.
Hannah screamed and ran in midair about two feet off the
floor. Teddy, Keith, and Joseph, lurking downstairs in the hallway,
laughed so hard they each sat limply down, one after the other, plop, plop,
plop. They laughed so hard they woke up Dorcas, and that’s hard to
do.
Ah, yes, we like crafts! 😅
The boys liked wood burning… and Teddy liked to put
miniature furniture together. But I must
say, they all liked football and scooters and motorcycles better. 😃
I went to
practice the piano a few minutes ago ---- and discovered a partially digested,
upchucked bird of unknown denomination deposited squarely where my foot needs
to go in order to use the sustain pedal. AAAARRRRGGGHHH.
Let me
rephrase that:
AAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!
I got
that all cleaned up, and then the microwave went off, and I never did
get the piano practiced. Until later, that is.
I headed
upstairs, and set to appliquéing petals with a vengeance – until I had to take
time out for a few shots of a male downy woodpecker and a house finch in the
locust tree just outside my window.
Saturday
night, Larry got the rest of the lights up in my quilting studio. Pass
the sunglasses!
It’s bright in there now. Very nice.
I got
more than 2/3 of the petals appliquéd on the borders of the Baskets of Lilies that
night. I should be loading that thing on the frame soon! – in a couple of
days, I expect. I’ve pretty well decided that I’m going to use a favorite
pantograph on it, as opposed to custom quilting. I have customer quilts
waiting, and more are piling up right along. Gotta hurry... gotta hurry.
People
are coming out of the woodwork, wanting me to do quilting. I wanted to do
a whole lot of my own stuff this year! But... we can use the
money, especially right now when Larry doesn’t get as many hours, on account of
the weather. Sooo... I’m not turning anybody down. I did tell
them I want to finish Dorcas’ quilt first, because I want to get a ‘feel’ for
my new machine on my own quilt, rather than a customer’s quilt.
I
suppose, if I don’t want so much quilting, I should quit posting photos in so many
places online that upwards of 30,000 people are seeing them??
Friday,
Saturday, and Sunday, the weather announcers steadily upped the possible
amounts of snow we were expecting. First
it was 4-8”... then 6-12”... then up to 15”... and eventually, they said some
areas would receive 18”, and that’s about what we got, out here. They predicted 30-40 mph winds, then kept
increasing that prediction, too. So we weren’t surprised when they upgraded
the Winter Storm Warning to a Blizzard Warning. “Extremely dangerous,”
they kept saying.
Why do I
always feel gleeful, the worse the predicted storm?? ’Course, I don’t
want anyone to be in danger, but... well, I can’t help it. I love
big storms! Especially big snowstorms. They’re just so... stormy, you know. And snowy!
Someone suggested that Larry build cupboards for my
thread racks to sit inside. Yes, that’s
a good idea... but... We have a problem, Houston. Larry would nevah, evah, find the time. Not for another 30 years, anyway.
There’s no issue yet, though, because, first, he didn’t even have enough
steam to put up the cord concealer kits he bought; and second, when I mentioned
that I needed my thread racks, he queried, “You mean, you need them taken off
the wall downstairs, brought upstairs, and fastened to the wall up here??”
and when I said ‘yes’, he looked at me, sighed, and promptly fell asleep in the
non-reclining chair he was sitting in.
I could
just put those spools in a flat plastic bin made especially for spools of
thread. My poor, overworked husband would be glad.
“Do you
not attach things to walls yourself, Sarah Lynn??” asked another friend.
Yep, I
hung most everything that’s hanging in our house myself. But the thread
racks are put up with heavy-duty screws that are tight enough I can’t budge
them. I’m even the one who put those screws in! – but that was quite a
few years ago, and my hands were tougher then than they are now. I’ll need
one of Larry’s cordless screwdrivers for the job, and I did not want to
use the one he was using, as it had grease on it, and I was working on Dorcas’
very white quilt. Also, those thick wooden racks are quite heavy, and I’m
not so sure I could keep a grip on them once the screws are out of the
wall. Still, if he’d rummage up a nice, clean cordless screwdriver
for me, I’d sure give it a try. I used to be tough, before
rheumatoid arthritis reared its ugly head!
***
Okay, I
just asked Larry where his clean cordless screwdriver is, and he
informed me that he is going to take those racks down, because if
I do it, they’ll fall off the wall and land on my foot and rebreak all
the toes I recently broke. 😆
Sunday
afternoon, Yahoo Groups (including the quilting groups, doll clothes groups, HandiQuilters’
group, craft-selling groups, and a few others to which I belong) had a massive crash. Emails were still going through, by some
strange phenomenon, but homepages were totally inaccessible.
I did
what Larry sometimes does in the face of troublesome obstacles and
dilemmas: I took a nap.
By 5:30
p.m., it was drizzling out, and meteorologists predicted it would be snowing by
midnight. Why do the cats think they need to go outside at such times,
and why do two medium-to-large-sized damp cats smell like five large, wet Saint
Bernards??!
I had
three weather apps up at the same time, comparing them. Larry, meanwhile, was looking at a couple on
his phone. Every time he started reading
one to me, I quickly hauled up an app and read it with him, in unison. hee hee Made Teensy turn his head
around backwards and stare at us. 😹
After
church, we ate a late supper, and then Larry went to the shop to finish putting
the bucket on his four-wheel-drive tractor. He worked on it for several
hours Saturday; he had to make brackets and drill holes to make it fit the
tractor, and run lines to connect the hydraulics. And that’s an extremely simplified explanation
from someone who doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
The
weather announcers kept pushing back the time of the beginning snowfall, as the
storm was moving a little slower than anticipated, which also meant it was
dropping more snow than expected in many areas.
At a quarter after 1:00 a.m., AccuWeather said it would start snowing in
45 minutes. At 2:00 a.m., they said it would start in an hour.
That time, they were right.
At 3:00 a.m., that blizzard came on with a fury.
Meanwhile,
Yahoo Groups was still down. I checked
on http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/groups.yahoo.com.html, and it said it was up, but there were
many comments from people who could not get to their groups. For a while
I wondered if they were doing a monumental rebooting of all their servers. Or maybe a stork flew into an overhead Cat 5
line somewhere and discombobulated the works. Or perhaps the carrier
pigeons were downed by strong Santa Ana winds?
 |
| Quilling and bluebird from Hannah |
On one of the Yahoo help forums, it said that
they no longer support Groups, and have no techs actively working on them. (Yeah, I think we can tell that.) There is no one in the company who answers
questions or responds to comments concerning the Groups. (Yeah, we noticed that, too.)
When it
was still out of commission at midnight, I decided, as an owner of a quilting
group, it was high time I got in gear and did something about it.
So... I created
a group called Quilt
Talk on a
website called MeWe, and invited all the members of my Yahoo quilting group to
join.
By
midmorning today, a lot of roads had been closed on account of the snow and
high winds, and there was no sign of a letup anytime soon. We already had over a foot of snow, with a lot
of drifting. I went out to fill the bird feeders, and snow was tumbling
into the tops of my boots.
I came
back inside, started blow-drying my hair, — and the blow-dryer bit the dust. Fortunately, I didn’t have to get all spiffed
up and go anywhere; my hair could dry on its own.
Wouldn’t you know, Yahoo Groups came
struggling back to life again in the early morning hours. However, some groups are still on ‘life
support’, and the whole system may very well kick the bucket again. Many groups have been experiencing odd
glitches and have been unable to post photos or files for a good two months. We decided to stay with MeWe. (Why must they call things by such goofy
names?! Couldn’t they have named it
something pretty, like, oh, say, ToweringMountains, or RipplingCreek, or
FluffyKitten, or something??)
This
‘Flying Free’ painting of eagles was from Andrew and Hester; it’s now hanging
in my quilting studio.
I called
my brother this afternoon at the usual time.
He didn’t answer. I tried his
cell phone. No answer. I thought about that for a moment or two,
decided it was a very good day to worry about him, and called Larry at the
shop. “Could you go see if Loren is all
right?”
“He’s
probably just outside in his John Deere with the heated cab, pushing snow,” he
told me.
Yes, I
knew that. But... “Can you go make
sure?”
He assured
me that he would.
Some time later, he called to tell me, “Your
brother is just fine! He’s out in his
tractor moving snow, and didn’t have his cell phone with him.”
That man. As my sister said to me the other day (in
front of Loren himself), “When do you suppose we should tell him he’s 79 years
old?”
I answered, “Well, I’ve
mentioned it now and again, but he doesn’t listen!”
He was laughing, of course.
While Larry was out, he
checked on his mother, who hasn’t been feeling very well, and scooped her front
walk. Kenny would later clear the
driveway for her.
On the way back to the
shop, the wind gusted strongly, creating a blinding whiteout, and Larry, taking
a curve to get onto the highway, went through a tall drift that hadn’t been
there the last time he’d taken that corner.
He got stuck. He was in the
Touareg, and it has four-wheel-drive. He
put it in four-low. He even pushed the
switch to lock in all four tires.
Nothing did any good, though,
because he was high-centered.
The Touareg is only a medium-sized SUV, and this snow is
calling for big SUVs.
Along came a friend, Paul
Tucker, in his four-wheel-drive pickup.
“Need a pull?” he asked.
He had Larry out of that
drift in nothing flat.
After a
pause in intensity, the storm picked up steam, and soon the snow was coming
down hard again. Teensy kept asking me
to turn it off, pôr fąvör, and thankee kindly.
Snow fell at one to three
inches per hour the rest of the afternoon, and the wind was blowing at 50 mph
with gusts as high as 65 mph. More roads
were closed.
I called our local florist
to order flowers from our family for Uncle Clyde’s funeral tomorrow. The lady told me that florists here in town
couldn’t get their fresh flowers today on account of the blizzard, and they are
running out. So I asked for all sorts of
dried plumes and pods, ferns and long leaves, maybe some feathers mixed with
the flowers; that should be pretty. Did y’all know flower arrangements are
pricey?!
This
bluebird painted on wood was from Bobby and Hannah; the needlepoint sachet was
made by my friend Ann. I hung it near
the wall arrangement with the bluebird on the shelf.
I paid some
bills, then popped a venison roast and seasoned baby bakers into the
oven. What I wouldn’t give for some carrots! Oh, well. We’ll
add peach yogurt and orange juice to the menu, and maybe the orange colors will
fool our brains into imagining that we had carrots. 😃
I wonder if the wind howling at my window is in minor or
major scales? It’s calmed down to a breezy 45 mph now. Teddy and Amy
are totally snowed in. Larry is going to take his tractor over there in
the morning to clear the snow. His pickup, with a long flatbed trailer
hitched to it, is stranded in our sloped drive; it’s still missing the
driveshaft he removed on our jaunt to Colorado when that, uh, U-joint
thangamajiggertyjig went kabonkers. (Simple
technical mechanical terms for those who don’t understand mechanical
semantics.) Fortunately, the Jeep was parked behind the
pickup and flatbed, so at least it’s not stranded, though I
didn’t try to brave the storm to go to visitation for Uncle Clyde tonight at
the church.
Larry finally
got home, minutes after I sent him a text to find out if he was still all in
one piece, or stuck in another snowdrift someplace. He walks in, makes a huge mud lolly on the
kitchen floor — and then sheepishly explains that there was ‘moisture’ on his
boots.
He did have the good grace to mop up after
himself, though he had to do it twice, as he forgot to remove his boots the
first time around. 😆
Well, I’d
better get busy on the next item on my To-Do List. I work my way through my lists from top to
bottom, and new things get added only at the bottom, usually. So, as Barney Fife once said, “When I say I’m
going to do something, I’ll do it!”
((...pause...))
It might
be ten years from now, but I’ll do it.
Now... could
somebody please come and clear up the mess we made in the basement, getting
that machine and table out, so I can sew in peace up here in my pretty new
quilting studio??
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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