Journal: Americana Eagle, Easter Dresses, & A Trip to Kearney

Last Monday evening, Teddy sent a video of himself feeding his three little pigs.  The camera takes a 360° view, and I can pan the scene any which way, as I’m watching the video.  Here’s a screen shot of the piglets, chowing down.  They slurp so loudly, you’d think they were having a splish-splashin’ bath.

The one on the left decided his side wasn’t nearly as tasty as what the others were getting, so he rushed around to the other side, used his nose and head to root the other two out of his way good and proper, and went to slurping over there.  Before long, he decided the food was better where he’d been in the first place, so he lollipy-galloped back to his original spot, ears a-flap. 😄

Late Monday night – actually, early Tuesday morning, about 1:30 a.m. – Loren called.  He had a severe stomachache, bad enough that he began worrying that he might be having a heart attack.  Larry went and stayed with him for a few hours, and would have taken him to the ER had he not started feeling better.  But he was finally able to sleep at about 4:00 a.m., and when he awoke at 6:00 a.m., the pain was gone.  Most likely, it was a virus that has been going around.  Our great-niece, Danica, who’s 18, was in the hospital for four days last week with extreme stomach pain.  Levi, too, had a very bad stomachache Monday.

Tuesday afternoon, Hannah called; she was back in town after her trip to Lincoln for her appointment with the specialist.  I was so glad to hear that she really likes this doctor.  Unlike the doctor she saw here in town, this one was careful and compassionate.  When he used a scope in her nasal passages, he was gentle, and it wasn’t nearly so painful as it was when the local doctor did it.

The most objectionable part about the previous doctor was that he was just plain rude, conceited, and mean.  Hannah was feeling so very unwell the day she was there, having difficulty breathing, her oxygen level a bit low, suffering from a migraine headache ---- and he decided that what he first should do was to put her through the Spanish Inquisition. 

He asked her for her definition of asthma.  She gave a short answer... she’s had asthma for 28 years, since she was 9 years old (probably longer, but that’s when she had pneumonia, and was also diagnosed with asthma).  He asked her to tell him how she would define ‘wheezing’. 

Finally she told him, “I’m sorry; I don’t feel well enough to answer all these questions right now.  My brain is pretty foggy.”

So then you know what he told her??!  He told her she needed to see a psychiatrist!

Now, mind you, he had already determined that she had one of the most severe cases of nasal polyps he had ever seen, and he knew her oxygen level was a bit low, and that she had a bad headache.  So to say such a thing to Hannah was downright nasty.  Is it any wonder that on the websites for the clinics where this doctor has worked, both here and in other towns, while other doctors in those offices have good reviews, he has none?  Makes us wonder if he did have reviews, but they were objectionable, and he discarded of them.

I suggested that Hannah not, under any circumstances, go back to that doctor.  There are plenty of other doctors, good doctors, within driving distance. 

So.  Fast forward to Tuesday.  She has found a doctor who treated her well, who seems knowledgeable, and is a good surgeon, according to one of our family doctors.  She’s on another round of antibiotics, steroids, and nose spray.  They will probably do surgery on the polyps in a couple of weeks. 

Hannah had Levi with her that day, since he was sick, too. 

As if all this wasn’t enough, their pretty little dog Misty, a miniature Australian shepherd whose IQ is higher than the IQ of some people I know, has been having breathing troubles for two or three months.  They all really love their doggy, and it makes them feel so badly to see her sick.  That morning, Hannah took her to the vet, and they checked her lungs, etc.  Even though she’d been breathing harder the day before, it actually appears that she’s on the mend.  The vet gave her a shot to get rid of remaining fluid on her lungs.  Here’s a picture Hannah took of her:

Siggggghhhhhhh... Did you ever feel the truth in the old saying, ‘When it rains, it pours’? 

Hannah still doesn’t feel well, but hope renews the spirit!  As King Solomon, often called ‘the wisest man who ever lived’, wrote in his Proverbs, “The spirit of a man will sustain his infirmity; but a wounded spirit who can bear?”

I talked to my brother on the phone that afternoon, and he was feeling much better.  The stomachache was completely gone.  But he was fretting over how Larry could work that day after not having enough sleep.  He apologized for calling, but I assured him we would much rather he call us when he is ill than to weather it alone.  After all, it just might be something serious!

To those of you who prayed for my family, thank you so much.  Now let’s pray that the local ENT specialist stubs his toe, and the attending physician pounds it with a mallet.

Well...  maybe not.  As you please.  😉 

We could just let the Lord deal with him as He sees fit.

I headed for my sewing room to add some pink satin sleeves to a pink satin and chiffon dress for Elsie for Easter and to sew a contrasting hem band and sashes to another of her dresses. 

Next, I altered a skirt of my own that I’d purchased on eBay.  It was supposedly my size, but it was waaaay too big, and waaaaay too long.  But as Victoria once remarked when she was about three or four, watching me alter a dress for her, “It’s easy to smaller things, but it’s really, really hard to bigger them!”

Amy sent me a video of Jeffrey, age 7, sitting on a riding toy and pushing Elsie around in an unzipped rolling luggage case.  Elsie was making motor noises, which got exponentially louder when she wanted the speed increased.

I wrote back, “If Elsie survives her childhood, she’ll doubtless think she had lots of fun.”

Amy responded, “She is so funny.  She loves to be pulled around.  If she sees anything remotely big enough laying on the floor (towel, blanket, rug, mat) she will sit on it and make noise to get somebody to pull her around!” 

The more I looked at the Americana Eagle quilt, the more I knew I wasn’t done with the background.  I wouldn’t quit, until the eagle showed up properly against that background.  So on Wednesday, I worked on it with my new Inktense pencils.

After church that evening, we took Amy the dresses for Elsie, and she gave me the other dress for Elsie and two for Emma, along with the coordinating fabric.

Late that night (or early the next morning, if you prefer to look at it that way), after using a watercolor painting of mountains as my model, I decided I was finally finished with the background of the Americana Eagle quilt.  I’d been disappointed over the center section, wishing I’d’ve just gotten the background right in the first place, so I didn’t have to do all this Inktense painting, trying to make the head and tail show up all right.  Now they show up... and the feet are blending in! 

Well, maybe not too badly.  In any case, I’m done with the painting.  Any other accents of the central area will be done with the quilting.

It was such a lovely day Thursday, I opened windows and doors and let the warm spring breeze waft through while I worked on Emma’s and Elsie’s dresses.

The gray dresses have a tiny lavender dot, and the lavender fabric Amy got to go with them has a small gray dot.  The striped dresses are for the Fourth-of-July picnic.

When the dresses were finished, I went back to the eagle quilt, and got four of the nine borders sewn on.  (The pinwheel borders were already sewn together, as you may recall.)

Late that night, I heard Tiger somewhere out in the front yard having a big, bad cat fight.  I grabbed a flashlight and shined it around out there, but never did see those cats.  The other one was doubtless the stray cat that has come into the house a few times.  When Tiger finally came inside almost an hour later, the poor thing could hardly walk, and he had bites and scratches on his ear and head and back.  I put triple antibiotic on his owies, and they seem to be getting better.

Friday, I started on border #5 of the Americana Eagle quilt – Prairie Points.  The majority of these folded triangles are leftovers from the same project that the pinwheel triangles came from.  There weren’t enough, so I cut more – and made too many.  So now there are more leftovers.  Quilt pieces are like sourdough starter – every time you use them, it’s like ‘feeding’ the starter for the next batch... and it lives forever.

Maybe I can use them up on a matching pillow.

Only four more borders to go... four more borders to go... four more borders to go...

Saturday, Larry and I went to a farm near the little town of Ashton, some 82 miles to our west, to get some tires and wheels for his pickup, along with a bumper, a grill guard, and various other pickup parts that he purchased on the Big Iron online auction. 

Upon leaving Ashton, we turned south and headed toward Kearney, where we planned to use some of the Cabela's gift cards the kids have given Larry.  Since Bass Pro Shop purchased Cabela's, either gift card works at either store.

But first... we drove right through Kearney and on south to Fort Kearny State Historical Park (spelling of the State Park is different than spelling of the town) in order to see the Sandhill cranes that are at the peak of their migration right now.  Every year, 400,000 to 600,000 Sandhill cranes – 80 percent of all the cranes on the planet – congregate along an 80-mile stretch of the central Platte River in Nebraska to fatten up on waste grain in the empty cornfields in preparation for the journey to their Arctic and subarctic nesting grounds.  It’s an amazing sight to see.

There were baby calves in one field after another.  Some were itty-bitty, fresh-hatched, and cute as buttons.  One was running and jumping... another having a head-butting contest with a big ol’ yearling.  I saw one galloping along pell-mell with a big mouthful of corn husks, while another one chased lickety-split after him.  I’ve never seen them do that before – grabbing stuff in their mouths, playing keep-away with it.  They’re so frisky and funny.

At the State Historical Park, we walked around and looked at the old sod blacksmith shop, the old wagons, the canon, and the plaques telling where the buildings once stood that were part of the Fort, and what they were for. 

Sandhill cranes alternately rose and settled in nearby fields, often flying directly overhead.  They are loud birds! – the call of one crane alone can carry for five miles on a quiet day.  Imagine what the sound of half a million birds sounds like!

It was a dark, overcast day, but I got a few halfway decent photos.  See more here.

We were about to leave when I pointed out the earthen mound with a wooden door.  “What’s that?  We’ve never looked at that before.”

We went to see.

Turns out, it was where the ammunition had been kept.  We went inside.

It was pitch black in that ammunition hut, and we didn’t have a flashlight.  I took pictures... and it never even occurred to me that while I had the 75-300mm zoom on my camera, which was really too big for the area in the hut, Larry was holding my 18-55mm lens right in his hand, the whole time! 

He didn’t think of it either, even when I grumbled, “This lens is too big for this space!”

We couldn’t see these cannonballs at all, but the camera’s flash illuminated them.

A friend and I were discussing sod homes and dugouts.  Pioneers on the plains often lived in soddies, 150-250 years ago.  Those homes with their two-foot-thick walls were cool in the summer, warm in the winter.  But as for me, I like my many-windowed house!

Some houses were better than others.  Take a look at these pictures:  Sod Houses  Here are some that were in Kansas:  Sod Homes and Soddies on the Plain.

Here’s the Interior of a Sod Home.  Notice the quilt on the bed. 

People certainly persevered through hardship, back then!  Makes me thankful for all my niceties.  One more website, with good photos and interesting reading:  Building a Sod House

Scroll down and click on the two-story sod house.  Now there’s an example of somebody who knew how to build one of those things, and build it well!  It’s still standing, too, north of Broken Bow, Nebraska.  We’ve been through Broken Bow dozens of times, and never knew about that house.  Now I want to go see it.  Broken Bow is 130 miles to our west, out in the Sandhills.  I’ve always loved studying our history.

After leaving Fort Kearny State Historical Park, we went to Cabela’s.  Larry got a 60x60 Herter’s spotting scope with a tripod:

I got some soft, fuzzy slippers.

Hey!  I’ve just discovered that this very scope is on sale for less than half price online.  Aarrgghh, that’s a cruel trick!  I wonder if we can complain, and get some money back?

Before leaving Kearney, we made use of yet another gift card – this one, for Applebee’s restaurant, given to us by our neighbor man for caring for his goats and chickens while they were gone. 

On one of the online quilting groups, we were discussing how we began quilting.

I almost got started quilting when I was 17, when I saw a satin puff quilt (or biscuit quilt – with the puffy squares) in the J. C. Penney’s catalogue.  I loved to sew, and was willing to try most anything, so I bought lengths of brown satin and peach-colored satin and cream-colored satin ......... and then, before I got around to making the quilt (I had a full-time job, so I didn’t have a whole lot of time for such a frivolity as a quilt) — anyway, before I got around to making the quilt, we began making plans for our wedding.  We were 18 when we got married.  Being a frugal soul, I decided, since I’d already purchased it, to use the satin for the bridesmaids’ gowns – floor-length, full-skirted dresses with hooped underskirts, one peach, one brown, both with cream accents and laced-up fronts, sort of an old-fashioned Swiss style.  Remember the Gunne Sax patterns? 

Larry had a brown suit; the groomsmen had cream-colored suits.  (Are men’s suits colored ‘cream’?)

Everyone then concluded that peach was my favorite color, and for years I got peach this and peach that.  My favorite colors are bright, bright blue, bright, bright red, and bright, bright purple!  But I lived with peach.  ha

Anyway, that quilt didn’t come about, but by the next year, I needed a nursery ensemble – and once again, I was drooling over the J. C. Penney’s catalogue.  Nursery ensembles – at least the ones I was drooling over – were beyond our budget.  But I had fabric!  So... I sewed.  I made curtains and bumper pads and sheets and rocking chair cushions and a ruffled crib skirt and a ruffled crib canopy and a quilted toybox cover and a pillow – and a crib quilt.  That was for Keith.

The next year, I did it again, this time for Hannah.  Years later, before Hester was born, I made a cross-stitched quilt similar to this design:  Cross-Stitched Bunnies.  But I didn’t have much time for quilting until about 2005 or so, because I made a good many of our clothes. 

I enjoy sewing clothes, but... quilting feels like recreation!

Last night after church, we went to Kurt and Victoria’s house.  We took along a snack to share:  orange juice, cheese curds, and sweet potato/cinnamon Sun Chips.

My nephew Kelvin, who went through treatment for colon cancer last year and had surgery in January, has made it to several of our church services lately.  He’s recovering fairly well from the surgery, and has been feeling better.  It’s been a rough year for him.

And now, I must get back to the Americana Eagle quilt.  I have to hurry! – a customer quilt is on the way!  Plus, I want to make a wildlife panel quilt for son-in-law Jeremy’s birthday, which is April 20^th, and if I’m going to enter the Americana Eagle quilt in the Chadron, Nebraska, quilt show, I have to get it done before April 19^th.  I hope to enter the Baskets of Lilies quilt and the Mosaic Lighthouse quilt, too.  If I call one a throw, one a wall hanging, and another a bed quilt, that should be permissible, hmmm?

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