Journal: Fabric Nesting Bowls, & A Slow Boat from China

A week and a half ago, the furnace man came and put in a new fan and a new, uh, whangdoodle.  Furnace fans need whangdoodles in order to properly briggledish the devoltajib.  That’s what the man said!  I’m just repeating it.  Or trying to.

At least now I’m no longer worrying about those squalling bearings getting too hot and setting the house afire.  The fan is much quieter.

The other day, I went out the basement patio door to get some wood for the wood-burning stove, and startled a squirrel that was below the upstairs deck, having a smörgåsbord of sunflower seeds that the birds had dropped.  The squirrel whipped around frantically, and then shinnied right up the support post to the underside of the deck, whereupon he was stymied and didn’t know where to go next.  After a couple of panic-stricken moments, he suddenly pitched himself right off at the ground, from one story up!  Apparently no worse for wear, he dashed to the peach tree and raced up it.

Do I look like a squirrel-devouring human to you?!

((considering... ))  Well, maybe he knows that I’m the one who put odor bombs in the upstairs cubbyholes, chasing him and his ilk out of their cozy hidey-hole in the rafters.

On one of the online quilting groups, we were discussing how we save digital quilt or sewing patterns.  One lady has printed everything out for years, because once upon a time, her computer crashed and she lost everything.  She now has a large filing cabinet full, a large bookcase full of notebooks of printed patterns, and two tall stacks of totes – all the way to the ceiling – chockfull of printed patterns.

As for me, I have a folder on my laptop... with folders inside of folders inside of folders, containing quilt patterns... doll patterns... pantographs... paper-piecing patterns... fabric origami... embroidery patterns...

I just checked the properties on that main folder, and here are the stats:

3.20 GB, 8,129 files, and 151 folders.

Wow.  I gotta live to be 352.5, in order to make even a quarter of that stuff.

Oh ------ I also have a whole lot of patterns saved to OneNote.  I save things to OneNote when the tutorials and patterns are right on the webpage itself, and there is no pdf file to download.

I’ve used quite a few of the patterns I’ve saved, but there are thousands more that I will probably never get to.  And still I go on saving patterns... especially if they’re free.

I practically never print them, unless it’s a template or paper-piecing pattern I need to physically use.  Everything is backed up twice on two separate hard drives.

One of the things I do when I save patterns is to make sure it’s labeled well.  If someone has given their pdf pattern a name like this:  ‘35n43kdneSTARewnenc3D.pdf’, I change it to ‘3D Star.pdf’.  Then the nice thing is, I can run a search on the main folder for 3D Star, and presto-voilá, there it is, in half a second flat.  Very satisfactory.  😃

Around my sewing room, if something goes wrong and Larry happens to be near enough to hear my exclamation of dismay, he does what he has done for years – ever since we were dating, in fact, and I was making him a western shirt:  he howls, “I cut it off three times and it’s STILL too short!!!”  And then he ducks, since I have a penchant for throwing pincushions or slippers or toss pillows (well, why do you think they’re called that??) or whatever is close at hand, when there’s a smart alec on the premises.  (No, I don’t throw machines or scissors or rotary cutters.)

I was once making Lydia a dress, and working on the double-layered scalloped platter collar.  The scallops had to be perfect, so that the scallops of the upper collar would match up with the scallops of the undercollar.

Lydia, age 3, stood nearby, rocking her dolly and quietly watching operations with those big blue-gray eyes of hers.

As I grumbled and reached for my seam ripper for the third time, she said sympathetically in her soft little voice, “Do it make you nuts, Mama?”

I used that phrase often after that:  “This do make me nuts!”

Tuesday, I finished the ray sections on the New York Beauty Variation quilt...  put an embroidered patch on a new coat of Larry’s...  and then got back to the fabric nesting bowls.  There are now 68.5 hours in the New York Beauty Variation quilt.

That night, we had chicken enchiladas for supper.  Now, if we only had some of that ‘gravy’ El Matador puts on theirs!  I looked around for a recipe; didn’t find anything that looked like the right stuff.  Larry picked up a package of ‘chili gravy’ at the store, but it just isn’t... right.

Schwan’s changed the kind of cheese they use in their quesadillas!  I don’t like them anymore.  😝

Hester sent a picture of Keira with the leg of her stuffed lamb in her mouth.  Her caption:  “Tuesday night menu:  leg of lamb.”  There’s a pacifier attached to the lamb.  Hester wrote, “She talks really loudly until she finally gets the pacifier in her mouth.  😅”

“Look at that little hand,” I wrote back to Hester.  “It’s always in motion, blurry... just like her Mama’s was at that age.  😃”

“Almost every picture I have of her has a blurry arm or leg, 😄” answered Hester.

It was cold that evening –  23°, with a wind chill of 18°.  But the snow had stopped.

These days, I haul the cats’ thermal beds upstairs with me... downstairs when I go back down---------otherwise, they walk over to the corner where the bed is supposed to be, sniff at the floor as if their eyes are deceiving them... then come and stand directly in front of me and, giving me a piercing stare, say, “MeeOOWWWW!!!”

“Okay, okay!” I say, “You don’t have to yell!”  And off I go like a good feline maid to retrieve the requested bed.

I like my cats.  They practically speak English.  😃  Or maybe I speak Cattese.

Teensy is the cuddliest thing ever.  His thyroid medicine has brought him back to himself again.  He’d lost all the way down to 7 pounds, poor kitty.  He’s back to his regular 13 pounds again, thankfully.

But... why does the biggest cat sleep in the smallest bed, and vice versa??

Here’s the first set of fabric nesting bowls.  The heat-moldable batting is easy as pie to use, and working great.

I started Set #2 Wednesday, and finished it after our church service.  There are nine sets to go.

Back

Thursday morning, I was reading my email... clicked on the notice from the USPS that tells me what will be in the daily mail delivery – and saw our first Christmas card would be arriving.

It suddenly and belatedly dawned on me:  Christmas letter!  I totally forgot about writing our Christmas letter!  If our letter is a week later in getting to some of those to whom I normally send it, they start inquiring into our well-being, and wondering where the letter is.  Sooo... I gotta write!  I scan through all my weekly journals from the year, and pull out choice paragraphs here and there... paste them into a new document... and then I have to go back through it and delete, delete, delete, until the letter is down to a manageable size.  Is 150 pages too much?  >snerk<

My Christmas cards have arrived; I need to get them addressed and signed. 

Victoria sent pictures of Violet lying on her tummy on her bed, looking at a book, all enthralled, and holding her head up very, very well for a two-month-old.

Several people wrote asking what the fabric nesting bowls are for, and if they have cotton or polyester batting. 

It’s poly.  These nesting bowls can be used as hotpads to set warm bowls in, on the table... or, if something isn’t going to take more than a minute or two in the microwave, they can be put in there, bowl, hotpad, and all, to save burned fingers upon getting the item back out again.  I know some people go into frenzied panics over 100% polyester in the microwave (“Big, bad inferno!” “Microwave Explosion!” “Volcanic eruption!” “Atom bomb effect!”), but nothing bad is going to happen in just one or two minutes, unless the stuff in the bowl boils over and gets on the fabric.  That’s when people might have the Big Bad Problems they warn about.  However, this heat-moldable batting has been subjected to high heat and steam in order to shape it; the fiber is a bit different than the run-of-the-mill poly.

I give things like this away with warnings, disclaimers, advice, and instructions as to usage and laundry, and thereby declare myself void of all culpability.  😁😅

That night, I rummaged up a decent picture of Larry and me, and ordered reprints.

Friday and Saturday, in between a few household chores, I worked on my Christmas letter.  Is telling people my quilts got ribbons at the fairs the equivalent of one of our relatives telling the world at large in her Christmas letter how much each of her children make in their high-kaflutin’ jobs???  And once wasn’t enough; it happened at least three years in succession, and then abruptly quit, after one went through a nasty divorce.  He must’ve lost his very suspenders in the ordeal – thus the lacking Nasdaq.

I just looked back at my Christmas 2017 letter ... and laughed at the first few lines:

“Before I begin, a disclaimer:

“This is not a Christmas letter.

“Christmas letters are supposed to be short.  Somebody who thinks they know said so.

“Therefore, this is not a Christmas letter.  This is a story.  Stories are supposed to be long.

“Okay.  With that out of the way, let us proceed.”

This year’s is going to be a ‘story’, too.

Friday, I filled the bird feeders... and in two minutes flat, the little birds were already back again.  They really swarm the feeders, on these cold days!

My eBay order for heat moldable batting got canceled.  They returned my money without even an explanation.  I figured it was because it was out of stock, just like so many other places where the stuff is sold... but they didn’t bother to say so.  I wrote and asked... and a couple of days later, they wrote back:  “When we packed your order, there was none in inventory.” 

Eh.  ‘When they packed my order, there was none in inventory.’

How, then, did they ‘pack the order’? 

Maybe they filled up my box... looked back at the shelf... and thought, Oh, my lands-a-goodness, the shelf is empty!!!  Can’t have that, can’t have that, and they got everything back out of the box and restocked the shelf.

Tsk.  Someone needs a refresher course in Basic English and Intelligible Explanations.  And in ‘listing things on eBay’ versus ‘keeping track of inventory’.

But ... I found more at the same website where the pattern is sold, and ordered it... and it’s been shipped.  All the better!  The designer herself will get a share of the money.  I hope.

Saturday, Larry went looking for a deer.  The only ones he saw were too far away.  He could’ve gotten one, with his rifle... but it’s only muzzleloader or archery season.

A couple of gifts I ordered for Dorcas, requesting them to be shipped to her home in Tennessee, have stalled out.  The tracking shows that one is still in China, and the other is cooling its heels at the Blaine Post Office, just two miles from her house.  Why did I not notice that those things were coming from China?!  I have had bad experiences ordering from China before.  Not always... but several times.

This afternoon I was on the phone with someone from the U.S. Postal Service for 45 minutes...  then with someone at the Blaine Post Office for ten minutes.

The first 15 minutes of the first call took me round and round and round through an animated system that seemed to have no end ---- and then all of a sudden I tried a new tack and just yelled into the phone, “TALK TO A PERSON!” ------ whereupon there was a stunned silence (can electronic answering systems be stunned?), and then the robo-voice said, “Okay.  Hold while we connect you with a live representative.” 

Huh.  How ’bout that.

A woman who sounded American listened to my entire story, taking notes and tracking numbers and dates an’ ever’thang before informing me that I needed to speak to someone in a different department.  She connected me to that department... and after a long wait, someone finally answered, and then I had to go through the entire song and dance all over again.

This man spoke English with a hard Asian/Indian/Arabian/WhoKnows accent, so I kept saying, “Pardon me?” (when I wanted to say ‘pardon YOU’ instead.)  Then I got struck funny because every time he went to typing on the report he was filling out, he told me, “A moment of silence, please” (did someone die?) ... interspersed reassuringly at various intervals with “I’m still here” ... and “Will you wait for me?”, the latter of which I’m pretty sure was the title of an old cowboy song from the 1920s.

I learned from this Iranian/Singaporean/Japanese/Nepalese/Whozit that the packages have been sent ‘registered mail’.  (Actually, he said, “You had them sent registered mail,” which I didn’t, but I didn’t argue, since that would’ve brought up a new line of dialogue, and I was having enough trouble slogging through this one.)  This means Dorcas would’ve needed to sign for the package; and if she wasn’t there, the package would have been kept at the post office for 15 days and then returned to the sender – which, in this case, is Hu Dun Dis on ze Slo Bōt Du Jina.  I think.

At the very end of this long conversation with several more moments of silence, the man gave me the actual number of the Blaine Post Office.  I called.  The man (who said he knew Dorcas, which isn’t surprising, since the population is ony about 1,900) checked the tracking, then told me that the package had indeed arrived there on November 21.  There is no further record of it.  He will talk to the carrier.

Did he try to deliver the package?  If so, they’re supposed to give mail customers a notice, if they’ve tried and failed to deliver a piece of registered mail!

Meanwhile, I wrote to the other seller (no idea if it’s the same one or not – sometimes one Chinese seller has multiple names and accounts on Amazon or eBay)... and was asked to give it another five days before re-inquiring.

Aarrgghh. 

And now I need my coffee mug refilled, and Teensy and Tiger have declined, and Larry isn’t here, so I reckon I’ll have to do it myself.  😉

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