Journal: Scanning Old Photos & Quilting New Quilts

As I listen to the same old news on the radio in the mornings, over and over again, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, I am thankful once again that we’ve been able to continue living our lives fairly normally, here in middle Nebraska.  Our church was shut down for... hmmmm...  six weeks, I think.  We watched services online during that time.  Believe me, we all had a new appreciation for our freedom to gather together again, after that! 

Again I spent a part of last week scanning old pictures, and quilting has been put on hold.  But a customer quilt was on its way to me, and another will soon be following it.

Here’s Larry, gathering up things from our breakfast-at-a-picnic-table in the Colorado mountains, October 10, 1997.  When we traveled with the kids, we took along our own food, and if we didn’t have a camper, we had a cookstove.  We could not have afforded to travel, had we gone to restaurants.

I love to travel far and near.  But the only other countries I’ve been to are Canada (several provinces, and quite a distance north, almost to the Northwest Territories) and Mexico (just barely over the border into Nuevo Laredo). 

Speaking of restaurants, our town has one fastfood joint after another, lining one of the main thoroughfares.  The calorie count in many (or most) of their entrées is astounding. 

We have two Subways, located not very many blocks apart.  We like their sandwiches.  A Freddie’s went up a couple of months ago, and there is always a line of cars in the drive-through.  We haven’t been there.

A cousin and I were discussing handymen, as hers would soon be arriving at her house.

“I need a handyman!” I told her.  Then, “Well, actually, I have one; he lives here.  Trouble is, he works so many hours, he rarely has time to do any work at his own house.”

“Don’t tell Larry,” she remarked, “but the going rate here for a handyman is $60/hour.”

Wow.  Imagine what he could make, if he’d ever retire.  😂

For those of you who have wondered, Larry drives a big boom truck and pup (trailer) for Walker Foundations, hauling aluminum forms for poured walls.

Before he worked for Walkers, he owned Columbus Auto Rebuilders.

Our little spot here in the country is about three-quarters of an acre.  I love it out here, but I sure would be happy if Larry didn’t work so many hours, and could finish our house.

As I’m going along scanning pictures, I frequently come to shots of vehicles I have long forgotten.  I fire a copy off to Larry, asking what it is. 

I did that with this picture of Hannah, 16, and Caleb, almost 4, standing in front of a car she drove for a little while, until Larry sold it and replaced it with another.

In a few minutes, I got a return message from him.  I clicked on it.

“There’s that Blueberry Pomegranate,” read the note.

Huh?

It looked more like Cranberry, to me.

And then...

Oh.

Yes.

Quite so.  (In a Piglet sort of voice.)

He (Larry, not Piglet) was answering an earlier email I’d written, in which I asked if he could bring home some juice or soda when he got off work, and he was reminding me that he’d put a bottle of Blueberry Pomegranate BODYARMOR Lyte Sports Drink in the refrigerator.

A few more minutes, and my computer played the tune to notify me of a message from Larry. 

“It’s an ’85 Olds Cutlass Calais,” he wrote.

He’s like an encyclopedia, when it comes to vehicles.  And he rarely misses the mark.

Here’s Lydia, and below is Joseph, somewhere in southern Colorado.

The lady who sent me the quilt told me that one of the churches in San Diego had services on the beach, and the governor sent in the stormtroopers to break it up.  Another church tried having services, and they came and wrote tickets for all the cars in the church’s parking lot, saying there wasn’t ‘social distancing’ going on.

And yet hoodlums and thugs can protest, riot, loot, destroy, and assault people, with practically no repercussions.

There are some evil people in this world who have an agenda – and it’s not ‘controlling COVID-19’, as they proclaim.  It’s about money, politics, religious suppression, and plenty of other things we don’t even have a clue about.  (And yes, I know it’s a serious illness.)

I’m glad we have a God who is still in control, despite all of man’s attempts otherwise.

Larry got home from work too late Wednesday night to go to church.  I headed out to the Jeep – and found several boxes and packages on the front seat.  The mail lady, evidently finding my front door locked, had put them there, since it had looked like rain earlier that day.

One of the boxes contained the quilt my friend had sent me to quilt for her.  (That will never not sound funny to me:  ‘I’m going to quilt a quilt.’)  That box had not been scheduled to arrive until Friday.  The mail plane must’ve had a tailwind.

It was Andrew and Hester’s 12^th anniversary on the 8^th.  I filled a red metal mesh basket with soup, dried apricots, and crackers (was that all? – seems like there was something else), and gave it to them after church.  Keira, assuming it was hers, was delighted.  Hester, holding her, let her wrap her arms around the basket and hold it.

Bobby recommended that she use the basket for a hat after the food was out of it.  Keira, who particularly loves ‘Unca Bob’, looked at him, looked at the basket, and looked back at him, clearly thinking ‘Unca Bob is nice, but a wee bit nuts.’  

Victoria, standing nearby, said, “Or you could put your dolls in it!” 

Keira grinned and nodded in her quick little way.  Much better idea.

It was three days before Caleb’s fourth birthday in this photo, and Hester (below) was 8.  It was October 10, 1997.

Thursday, I went to my favorite LQS, owned by a good friend since high school, for some Hobbs 80/20 batting for my customer’s batik HST (half-square triangle) quilt.  I like to give this lady business when I can.  She was a very nice girl in high school, and she’s a very nice lady today.

I took along a lunchbox for Loren with V8 cocktail juice, cherry tomatoes from the neighbor’s garden (no, I didn’t sneak over there by the dark of the moon and pick them myself; he gave them to us), and applesauce.  After leaving Sew What, I stopped at Subway and got a foot-long beef and cheese sandwich, with lettuce, spinach leaves, tomatoes, and pickles.  It’s Loren’s favorite sandwich.  He would only eat half of it, I knew, and have the other half later.  This way, I wouldn’t have to hurry home, cook something, and then take another drive (it’s ten miles to his house).

Loren told me he’d mowed his large yard the day before, but I knew for a fact that he’d done it that morning.  He’d probably taken a little nap afterwards – and then ‘morning’ had felt like ‘yesterday’.

Home again, I tossed the sheets into the dryer before heading upstairs, quilt and batting in hand.

This is Hannah and Victoria, ages 16 years and 7 months, respectively.  Below is one of Keith’s senior pictures.  He was 17.

It was Teddy’s 37^th birthday on August 13^th.  We are giving him... can you guess?

No, I didn’t think so.

We are giving him pieces of roofing.  😂 

Because that’s what he asked for, that’s why!  They’re for one or more of his outbuildings.

I began loading my customer’s quilt on my frame.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not normal.  At least, I’m not like most of my fellow quilters.  I rarely have more than one project going at the same time, as I really dislike starting something new before finishing the previous project, whatever it might happen to be.

So... now that I’ve gotten started on photo-scanning, I want to just keep plugging away at it, every minute I can wrest from the day.  My quilting friends are all sympathetic; but they don’t understand that I love photography every bit as much as I love quilting!  Besides, these pictures are bringing back a lot of memories, and I’m enjoying it.

When I quit quilting for the night, I had two and a half rows done on the Batik HST quilt.  I was using a pantograph called ‘Pink Hibiscus’.  Each pantograph row took 20 minutes. 

By the way, if any of you have tried to post a comment on my Nature’s Splendor blog, you may have gotten a message saying that you have to be a member to post.  I had to turn on this option because of a large volume of spam.  At first it was just stuff like this:  “Wow!  You’ll never guess what your name means!  Click here.”  There was a link that probably took one to a phishing site.  It was annoying, but I just set it so that any comments on posts older than two days (since the spam occurred mainly on older posts) required me to approve them or mark them as spam.  (Supposedly, blogger will ‘learn’, and the more certain comments are marked as spam, the better they’ll be able to stop the spam.)

But it kept happening more and more often – sometimes a dozen spam comments a day -------- and then the comments turned pornographic, and I started getting two dozen or more a day.  So I took the next step, adding a captcha and prohibiting any who were not a member from posting.  A couple of days ago, I had to do this with my quilting blog also. 

I’ll wait a month or two, and then remove the comment restrictions.  Other people have had success in stopping the spam, doing this.  Ugh, how did these nasty spammers think they could make anything off of a sweet li’l ol’ quilting lady’s blog, read mostly by other sweet li’l ol’ quilting ladies??

Once when I was a little girl, we went to visit my Grandma Swiney.  We drove out to see Uncle Don, Daddy’s oldest brother, who had a farm just outside of town.  He was in his field, driving a new tractor, and he told Daddy, “It’ll plow as fast as a man can run!”

Daddy, in usual Swiney fashion, said, “I’ll betcha I could outrun it!”

With that, Uncle Don cranked up the speed, and Daddy set off running.  (I, about 7 or 8 years old, ran, too, and got left behind.)  Daddy was probably, oh, about 52 or 53 then; but he was fast.  He got up to around 15 mph – and then Uncle Don shifted gears and left Daddy in the dust.  Literally and figuratively both.

I still remember them both laughing.  Uncle Don had a signature laugh that one couldn’t forget, a little high-pitched, with his shoulders shaking.  Daddy had a much deeper laugh, low and rollicking. 

I once heard Uncle Don say to Daddy, “It’s a good thing you’re the preacher, and not me! – no one would be able to hear me!”

Daddy laughed and responded, “They’d probably like that better!”  haha

Friday afternoon, I stopped quilting to fill a bobbin.  I picked up my coffee mug, carried it to the window of my upstairs studio, sipped coffee, and watched half a dozen big, bright Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterflies flitting about on the tall lavender phlox.

A thirteen-lined ground squirrel (aka striped gopher) came dashing over the driveway and through the front yard.  He stopped and stood tall to scout for possible danger, then began digging and eating things.  This little rodent eats grass and weed seeds, caterpillars, grasshoppers, crickets, beetles, cicadas – and sometimes the eggs and even the young of small ground-nesting birds.

A brown thrasher swooped low overhead with a harsh scolding noise, making the ground squirrel duck and then stretch up to peer over a stand of weeds to see what in the world that was.

Since brown thrashers often nest fairly low in trees and thickets, and thirteen-lined ground squirrels can and do occasionally climb trees in search of a tasty meal, it’s no wonder the thrasher divebombed that squirrel.

A thunderstorm was moving in, complete with lightning and rumbling thunder.  Even when I can’t see the clouds, I can judge how fast a storm is coming by how much the neighbor man speeds up his mowing.  He usually moves at a snail’s pace; but when he kicks in the afterburner, I know he must’ve gotten hit on the noggin with an acorn------- er, raindrop. 

After eight hours of quilting, I threw in the towel for the night.

I finished the quilt Saturday evening after about 7 hours of quilting.  The Pink Hibiscus pantograph isn’t hard, really, but it’s time-consuming.

Teensy, as usual, kept me company while I quilted.

A quilting lady asked, “Is there any special trick to controlling the machine while following the pattern with a laser, or is it just a steady hand and lots of practice?”

“I would say the ‘steady hand and lots of practice’ pretty well covers it!” I replied.  “When I tried doing a pantograph the very first time, I aimed at Los Angeles and wound up in New York City. 😆”

After the morning church service yesterday, we took Loren some food:  wild caught Alaska salmon, fire-roasted vegetables, applesauce, ruby red grapefruit juice, and crackers.  We took him several gallons of water, too.

Larry hooked up his new (bright red!) phone for him.

After church last night, we went to the grocery store, then stopped by Kurt and Victoria’s house for a little bit.  They gave us some iced tea and then some yummy organic hazelnut coffee.

This afternoon, I mailed my customer’s quilt back to her.

Do you know how much the cost of shipping has gone up?!  Good grief.  The cheapest way I could send it was UPS ground – for $33.55!  It didn’t even quite weigh eight pounds.

I asked if it would be cheaper if I took it to the post office (I chose the Mailbox, because it’s a little closer to my house, and it’s easier to get in and out of the building with a big box), but the man said it would have been $54.95 through the USPS!  That’s waaaay higher than it was, the last time I shipped a quilt.

Next time I mail a big box, I’m going to the post office.  I really can’t believe they would have charged $55.

A little later, I took Loren some food – beef stew, cottage cheese, peaches, strawberry banana yogurt, V8 cocktail juice, and another kind of crackers.  I tried to choose foods that would be easy on his stomach, since he didn’t feel well last night. 

“I don’t think it was your food,” he said.  “It wasn’t your fault.”

“No,” I agreed, “I figured it was probably your fault.”

He laughed, at that.  “Yeah, always blame the other guy,” he said.

Then off I went to Humphrey to put E-85 in the Jeep.  It was a pretty day for a drive.  Wish I could keep driving, and actually go somewhere!  The British Columbia Rockies come to mind.

After supper, I walked with Larry up the hill to feed the neighbors’ goats and collect the eggs (no, the goats didn’t lay the eggs).

Now I’m having steaming hot Citrus Sunburst tea by Tiesta Teas.  It’s made from loose tea leaves, apple pieces, papaya bits, hibiscus, orange slices, pomegranate bits, and safflowers.  Mmmm... the longer it steeps, the better it tastes.

Back to the scanning of old pictures!  Reckon I can get another big album done before the next customer quilt arrives?  The lady is almost done putting it together.

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