A friend recently
apologized for writing only my first name, ‘Sarah’, in an email to me, instead
of ‘Sarah Lynn’, as I generally go by. I
wrote back, “No apologies necessary! I knew to whom you were talking.
😊 I not only
answer to my own name, I have also answered to my sister’s name – our parents
and some of our older friends regularly called me by her name. I always
hastened to inform my parents they had the wrong name – but rarely, with their
friends; I was shy!”
Shortly after I
started first grade, we were each required to tell the others our middle
names. I announced that I didn’t have one. I said my whole name was
‘Sarah Lynn’, and ‘Sarah’, as they called me at school, was just my
nickname. The teacher disagreed. I held strong and adamant.
(I might have been shy, but I was determined!)
I went home in
great indignation at noon to report the matter. Imagine my humiliation
when I learned the teacher was right, and I was wrong!
I’ve always been
fond of ‘double names’... and liked mine. However, I was called ‘Sarah’
throughout school, and at my first job. Then I thought, You know,
people would call me by the name I like best, if I’d just introduce myself that
way! So that’s what I began doing.
I often wish I
would’ve called several of my children by both names from the start, but I
never did. Dunno why.
Hester sent pictures
of Keira, writing, “Some days babies are just too cute to not have a photo
shoot 😄” The baby is growing and progressing quickly. And she is awfully cute.
Some friends were discussing the growing use of chopsticks. I knew nothing of this trend; the only people
I’ve ever seen using them have been in videos.
Most of the people discussing it thought it was goofy. “Why would you struggle with chopsticks when
you have forks?” said one. “I spill
enough on my lap with spoons and forks!” remarked another.
When I was little, a visiting missionary from India
gave me a set of chopsticks. I liked
them, because I could rattle them on my plate like a snare drum and annoy my
mother.
((...pause...))
Wonder why those things disappeared??
I found them buried in a drawer, years later. I
didn’t put them there.
Tuesday evening, Hester sent a video of Keira eating
her ‘first people food’, as Hester put it.
“Apparently, squash is good!” she wrote.
It’s sooo cute, as she slurps it out of the spoon
and smiles at her Mama in between bites.
She did quite a good job, especially for her first try eating from a
spoon.
My mother used to say
with a laugh that I was the ‘cleanest child she ever had’. I learned to eat with a spoon by myself when
I was 6 months, and I was downright persnickety about it. If I spilled a
drop of anything on my tray, Mama said I’d carefully put my spoon back in the
bowl, hold my arms up (so as not to get in the spill), and call, “Help!” until
someone came and wiped up the drip. hee hee
I raised both
kinds: the messy and the neat. The neat ones made things easier,
but I loved the messy ones every bit as much. 😉
Isn’t it amazing
how baby food – pabulum or cereal, in particular – can spread? You put
one small bite in a baby’s mouth... she sneezes – and immediately you, the high
chair, the table, the counter, the floor, and the ceiling are totally covered
with a thick, ooey-gooey layer of the stuff.
😅
Tuesday evening, Victoria
sent a video of baby Violet allllmost laughing at her as she made silly noises,
writing, “Silly baby... silly Mama?” 😄
It doesn’t take a
baby very long at all to show the effects of living in a happy home, does it?
Thursday while
Larry was working, a few snowflakes were falling. It continued sporadically until nightfall,
but not enough to accumulate. But it
sure was cold out there!
Here’s one of the mountain
bluebirds we saw alongside Eleven Mile Reservoir. They had already lost their early-season
brilliance, and had acquired some of their winter-dull feathers, the better to
blend into the grasslands in which they live.
This is one of the little retro campers we saw in
Colorado. We looked inside a few at the
RV dealership in South Fork; they’re quite nice, more roomy than you’d
think. Some even have slide-outs.
My parents had Airstreams as I was growing up. We once went on a tour through the factory in
Jackson Center, Ohio. But they started
out with a dinky little camper that was only 13 feet long. Then one evening, as Daddy told it, he and
Mama both leaned over to open drawers at the same time, bumped behinders, and
wound up banging their heads on opposite ends of the camper.
“And then,” finished my father, “I drove straight to
the dealership and traded that thing in on a longer one!” 🤣
Thursday night, I
got another page of pictures uploaded: From Eleven Mile Reservoir to Wray, Colorado
Friday afternoon at
the bird feeders, there were house finches, red-breasted nuthatches,
goldfinches, juncos, blue jays, downy woodpeckers, English sparrows, and
cardinals. And finally, finally, the goldfinches are landing on
the new Nyjer-seed sock, and extracting seeds from it. I thought the thing was a dud. I used one once before, but it was a
disposable one, and more loosely woven than this one. It’s still fairly full, though I filled it
almost two months ago. It rained several
times after that, and I feared the seed was spoiled. But it still smells and looks okay, and the
birds finally realized it had yummy stuff inside. 😋
Speaking of something yummy, here’s an antelope
raking up the turf in search of food. They
eat grasses, forbs, sagebrush, and other prairie plants. Here, he’s pawing away dirt and gravel from
some tasty little plants, to make it easier for him to get at them. Pronghorns are fast and usually very timid. This is the closest we’ve gotten to antelope
in a while. The buck is in the front;
the does (there were 5; one is out of the picture) are in the background.
The does walked slowly away, but not too far, with
the buck sort of herding them off. Then
he spotted more yummy-looking vegetation, stopped worrying about us, and chowed
down. I guess they’re more acclimated to
humans, there in the State Parks, than their brethren off on the wide-open
prairies! 😃
That night I got
the last of the vacation pictures uploaded.
On my blog:
A friend commented
on this picture, “Almost
straight road.”
“Allllllmost! 😅” I answered. “I wonder what
they had to build around? Maybe there
was a large woolly mammoth standing there, and he refused to budge?”
An elderly handicapped friend who enjoys looking at
pictures, saying they’re the only way she can vacation now, wrote, “Whoever put
a camera in your hands did a great thing! I love your pix.”
I thanked her, and then told her the story:
It happened one Christmas when I was 8 years old: My parents gave me a bright red short leather
jacket with big red leather buttons. I
was thrilled.
BUT!!! That
wasn’t all!
They also gave me a little red camera! I’ve hunted for it online... I’m not sure, but
perhaps it was a Tower Snappy like this one. Doesn’t seem quite right, ... but then, that was half a century ago.
You cannot imagine my delight. I put the film in the
camera, trotted outside, and went down the block to my brother’s house, looking
for something to take pictures of. (Loren
is 22 years older than me.) And there he
was, out in his backyard, skinning some rabbits he’d shot. I used up all but one of the 12 pictures on
the roll of film – in color – taking pictures of my
brother in the rabbit-skinning process. The
one other picture was of Loren’s dog Bullet.
I happily raced home to take the film out of my
camera, give it to my mother, and beg her to take me to the drugstore to have
it developed. A week later, the pictures
came back. My mother picked them up
while I was at school.
I wonder why she was reluctant to develop my film
ever after??
Wish I still had that camera.
Saturday afternoon,
it was in the mid-forties out in the mountains of Colorado – and only 25°
here. The wind chill was 13°.
Brrrrr...
The Nebraska Huskers
were playing against Illinois in Lincoln.
We won 54-35. Everyone is hoping
Scott Frost, former football player for the state, is beginning to turn this
program back around to what it has been in years gone by.
That day, I put a
new button placket on a navy skirt that kept tearing... then fixed a hole in a
pair of Larry’s flannel-lined jeans. And
I heard the tell-tale scrabbling of squirrels in the dormer rafters again. Aarrgghh.
We’ll have to buy another odor bomb, and hunt for possible entry sites.
I went downstairs
and rummaged up the four-patch blocks my late sister-in-law gave me that were
put together by her late mother. I can never seem to do that without
cleaning out a few drawers whilst I’m at it... and then I find all sorts of
nifty things... have to rearrange a bit... and even redecorate a little. I brought a couple of resin vintage cameras
upstairs and put them on the old treadle Domestic sewing machine, along with
the Canon film camera that used to be my sister-in-law’s. This one is actually made to be a birdhouse –
but I don’t want the birds to demolish it!
That done, I pulled
the blocks from the bag they were in – and discovered there aren’t merely
enough to make a small baby quilt, as
I’d presumed; rather, there are fifty 12” (unfinished) blocks!!!
If I put 49 of them together, I’d have a 103.5” x 103.5” quilt, with one
block left over!
So much for my
thought to make a quick child’s quilt.
I began
recalculating.
Some of the blocks were
put together all right, but some were not – on several, the midpoint was off by
a good half-inch. So the blocks aren’t perfectly uniform in size. Four of the solid-color squares were noticeably
pieced. I don’t want to purposely make trouble for myself, with
whoppyjaw blocks.
I decided to do as
I’d intended from the beginning: cut
these four-patch blocks apart. I would then have 200 six-inch squares
(replacing the pieced ones). I could add a bunch of white background (and
maybe a few more red, blue, or navy blocks)... and find some patterns that
would make these brightly-colored squares look nice. It occurs to me that
a couple of weeks ago when I was cleaning the storage room in the basement, I
came upon a box of fabrics that belonged to the lady who made these blocks. Perhaps I could add to the blocks from that
box.
I tried to look at some of my Pinterest
boards... but I was offline. Some days,
we get quite poor reception out here, and webpages load slowly. But ‘slowly’ is better than ‘not at all’!
I thought, Well, I’m up a creek ----------- then, Wait a minute! I have an entire bookcase full of
quilting books! Good grief, I’m
perfectly fine, and don’t even know it. 😆
I now have a stack
of books with markers in them.
By midnight, the
blocks were all cut apart.
While I cut the blocks, Tiger snoozed, all squished into
the smaller cat bed, even though I brought the bigger one upstairs for him. And
over there on my serger chair is Teensy, sawing logs. The cat scanners are sleeping on the job!
I’m glad to have
the blocks all cut apart, but I’m going to set these squares aside for a while
and make some gifts.
A week or two ago,
a couple of elk were found drowned in a farm pond about 100 miles to our
northwest, horns entangled:
Sad when such
beautiful animals die like that.
2:00 this afternoon found me sitting in the Jeep at a
truck repair place in Norfolk waiting for Larry to get in and drive us back
home. He’d driven his truck there to
have it repaired, and I had followed him there in the Jeep.
I’m not
sure what was wrong with the truck. Something
about it not wanting to go... not wanting to reverse... that must be a
transmission problem, maybe? He told me,
but I’m not good at other languages. 😉
Our wood-burning
stove is going, and it’s toasty warm up here in my quilting studio, because the
chimley (as one of my kiddos – was it Hester? – used to say) runs right through
it, against one wall.
I spotted a hanging nest of some sort in the maple
tree out front, so I ran for my camera and 300mm lens. The nest had been hidden until the leaves
fell. Then, there were such pretty views
from both windows, I took several more photos.
I dashed back downstairs to get the binoculars, took a closer look at
the nest, and determined that it’s a Baltimore oriole’s nest.
I discovered that,
with the leaves gone, I can now see Jeremy and Lydia’s house. I’d be able to see Teddy and Amy’s if a shed
wasn’t in the way. Teddy and Amy’s is
about 1.5 miles away, as the crow flies; 2.5 miles by road. Jeremy and Lydia’s is 5 miles away. I can see the steeple and the front of the church,
6.5 miles away, the water tower, 9 miles away, and the corn plant, steam
rolling from its smokestacks, 12 miles in the distance. When I’m on the upper deck, with a radius of
180°, I can see half a dozen grain elevators in small towns up to 20 miles
away.
We just finished
supper: broiled chicken thighs, with some of the scrumptious spices on it
that Hannah gave Larry for his birthday, broccoli, grapefruit and oranges,
12-grain toast and honey, and piping hot Berry Patch coffee. Oh, yes, we had a peanut butter cup apiece
for dessert, thanks to Lydia.
The chimney isn’t
as warm as it used to be! I’d better go
toss some more wood into the wood-burning stove. It’s only 9° tonight!
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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