Is it an English sparrow? A black-capped chickadee?? A rock pigeon???
No! It’s a
Masked Bandit!
Yep, he’s back again. And he’s having a midnight snack of black-oil
sunflower seeds, shells and all.
When I pointed the business end of my big lens at him, he first attempted to look inconspicuous and innocent; next he tried to lie flat enough on the railing to blend into it;
and finally, giving up on blending, he curled up in a small ball.
But after a few
minutes of that, hunger got the better of him. He gave me another good look, decided I was
harmless, and poked his nose right back into the sunflower seed feeder.
Tuesday morning, a red-winged blackbird was chirruping away for
the first time this year. That
afternoon, I heard a bird I didn’t recognize... looked out the window... and spotted
a dark-eyed junco sitting on the flowerpot on the porch, singing his heart out. Since the juncos are usually here only during
the winter and migrate back north in the spring, we generally only hear their
chip-chip noises as they keep track of their mates while hopping along on the
ground hunting for seeds. But this tune
was his mating song! Junco Sounds
There’s a long list of various recordings of different
varieties of juncos on that page. The
ones that sound most like the juncos I’ve been hearing are those that were
recorded in Colorado and Wyoming.
Query of the Day: Why
do I have a Sticky Note (on my computer) that says, “Haircut Practice” and
nothing else?? I do not remember writing
that at all, nor do I have the slightest clue what it’s about. Exactly whose hair was I planning to practice
on, I wonder? I already know how
to cut my own hair; I’ve been doing it for 48 years, after all, since I
was 13 years old.
I took
some groovy boards (really, that’s what they’re called) to my favorite little
sewing store, Sew What. It’s owned by a lady, Jo, who was a
good friend of mine in high school.
Groovy boards are heavy plastic or Plexiglas boards with grooves in them. A stylus on a longarm machine slides through
the grooves as one guides the machine along, and thus the machine quilts the
design on the groovy board onto a quilt. I got them with my first HQ16. I tried using them once, but the table for
that machine was made of fiberboard, so the boards wouldn’t stay put, and it
was an exercise in frustration that I quickly abandoned. Now, though the rubber pieces on the backs of
the boards would grip the table of my studio frame just fine, I prefer freehand
for my own quilts, or the pantographs most of my customers request. Jo will
put the boards up for sale in her shop, and I won’t have to post them online
and then spend an arm and a leg shipping the big, heavy things.
Here’s
a video of a man using groovy boards: Groovy Quilting
Before
coming home, I took some things to the Goodwill, including the big, heavy
footlocker that used to be Norma’s mother’s, and maybe her mother’s
before that. It’s probably over 100 years old, and probably worth
something. The man who took it out of the Mercedes for me seemed highly
impressed, and thanked me several times. Did I unknowingly give them
something worth half a gazillion dollars?! 😅
I put away another boxful of stuff from Loren’s house, and hung a painting by one of Larry’s late Aunt Lois that I found in that trunk.
There was also a handful of old photos.
I’ll scan some of them; too bad I didn’t find them in time to add them to the
thumb drives full of Norma’s old photos that I gave all the family members at
Christmas time.
I continued
scanning pictures that day. Here I am in 3rd grade at age 7,
almost 8.
That evening, my nephew Kelvin wrote, “Five years
ago I went on a helicopter 
ride to Omaha.”
That was the day he had a frightening, severe health
crisis and was transported via LifeFlight to an Omaha hospital – where he learned
he had colon cancer. It’s been a rough
road for him since then. But he’s likely
to say, if we ask him how he is, that he ‘gets tired’, rather than that he’s in
pain. And he is in pain, most all
the time. One wouldn’t know how sick he
really is, just by having a conversation with him. He’s a strong person, cheery and upbeat. I was six years old when he was born, and I
loved that little boy so very much.
He recently had Covid, and has been ‘a little weak’
(his words) ever since.
“I thought of your helicopter ride the other day
when I saw Mitchell (his grandson) wearing the little helicopter tie tac you
gave him,” I answered Kelvin. “I’d like
to go on a helicopter ride someday, but I’d rather go over, oh, say, the Grand
Canyon, than to Omaha!”
“Yes,” agreed Kelvin. “I tried sitting up to look out the window,
but they kept wanting me to stay laying down.”
“Well, that’s a bummer,” I said. “A helicopter ride, and they won’t let you
look out.”
Since I’d just scanned these photos, I sent them to
Kelvin. In the first one, he’s holding
Sharon, his second daughter. It was
Easter of 1992. In the next shot, he’s holding
Jamie, the fourth of their five children, and it was Christmas of 1997. Sharon is Lydia’s age; Jamie is Victoria’s
age.
Sharon is the child who once said to me, when she
was about three years old, “I know what yo-uh name is, and I know how to say
it, too!”
“Do you?” I asked, and she replied happily,
“Uh-huh!” ((...pause...)) “It’s Shar Winn.”
Kelvin sent me a picture of a Kawasaki motorcycle he
was trying out – a 50th-anniversary model like the 900 Loren used to
have, of which Kelvin was particularly fond.
“They let me test-ride the motorcycle,” said
Kelvin. “When he asked for my insurance
card, I accidentally gave him my handicap card... but he still let me ride it.” 😄
He asked if I had seen pictures of his newest grandchild,
Greyson. Greyson is his oldest daughter
Jodie’s sixth child, and Kelvin and Rachel’s 13th grandchild. I had seen a few, but Kelvin sent me one I hadn’t
seen: a picture of older brother Jackson
holding his baby brother. Kelvin
entitled it, “When Jackson isn’t done with his turn.”
Wednesday I had planned to go to Lincoln with Larry to retrieve
his truck. I was all ready to go when
Larry texted, “I won’t need you to go
with me to Lincoln. I figured
out how I can lift my motorcycle onto my truck.”
He sent a picture of the
motorcycle suspended by several sets of straps to prove it. He would ride the motorcycle there, load it
on his truck, and drive the truck home.
So... I paid bills, and went back
upstairs to scan photos. It was a lovely
day – 70° and sunny – and I had the windows open. I could hear the Eurasian collared doves
cooing... the American goldfinches and house finches warbling... and the
English sparrows chirping. Now and then
a Northern cardinal sang, and a blue jay whistled. The American robins, of course, are
downright noisy. The little
junco was in the lilac bush, singing his spring song again. Such pretty little things they are in their dapper
tuxedos. I pulled up the All About Birds
website and played some sound clips of juncos near the open window, and brought
the little singer right up next to the screen, tipping his head and looking all
over the place, trying to find this competing warbler.
Wednesday evening after church, we again went to Loren’s
house to gather up some trash, this time planning to take it to our
house, since our trashmen come on Thursday mornings. However, since the stuff we wanted to throw
away consisted mainly of half-full bottles and
jugs of weed killer, bug killer, oil, car wax, etc., we decided it would
be better to take it to the big dumpster where Larry works. The men who collect those dumpsters from
construction companies know to expect things like that; whereas, while garbage
trucks can cope just fine with a few bottles of this and that, they
might not expect a whole volley of large totes full of such stuff.
Why are
there gazillions of identical bottles and jugs, and why are they all half
full?!
A week and a half ago while working in Loren’s garage, Larry
moved some tall toolboxes and shelves and discovered that the wall behind them
was all wet, soggy, and moldy. On the
other side of this wall is the laundry room.
A man had just finished drywalling in there, and had not reported any
leaks. Larry didn’t see anything amiss
in that room, either.
He and Robert continued on upstairs to the bathroom directly
above the laundry room – and there, under the sink, they found a loose pipe or
hose from which water was dripping so steadily, it was almost a small
stream. It must’ve been going on for a
good long while, judging by the probable age of the mold inside the wall. I had cleaned things out under that sink, and
hadn’t seen any dampness, because the majority of the water was going straight
down the inside of the wall.
Larry tore off all the wet Sheetrock and pulled out the
ruined insulation. He set up fans to
blow directly into the area, and turned the heat up inside the garage, as it
was still very cold outside.
When everything was dry a few days later, he put new
insulation in place, cut new waterproof Sheetrock to put in place, and then I
helped by leaning on it to keep it from sliding down while he trimmed it to fit
and put in the screws. He taped it and
put on the joint compound, and planned to paint it that Wednesday night.
But... when we got there, we noticed
a small puddle of water at the base of the newly redone wall. We took a good look at the pipes in the
laundry room on the other side of the wall, went upstairs and checked the hoses
and pipes under the bathroom sink, but we couldn’t see exactly where the leak was.
It wasn’t damp at all in the bathroom,
but was a bit wet in the laundry room around some of the pipes going to the
water pressure tank. We hoped it would
be an easy fix of replacing a pipe or resealing a joint. But it was too late to worry about it right
then, so we set up a fan to try to keep damage minimal until Larry could
find the leak and fix it after work the next day.
Thursday was a cloudy day,
with rain now and then. Days like that make the birds sing like anything,
especially in the early springtime.
I finished an album that afternoon, pulled
out two more big ones from my hope chest – and realized that they were albums I
had given my mother, and thus held duplicate pictures of my own. So that’s two more albums down without raising
a sweat. 😄
Robert went to Loren’s house that day to clear
out a whole lot of overgrown brush. When
he got there and saw a fan set up in the garage and blowing on the redone wall,
he thought, Uh, oh, and, as we had done, went to see where the leak
might be. He was relieved to find nothing
leaking in the upstairs bathroom – and then he realized what it was from: it wasn’t a leak after all; just water seeping under the wall
from when Robert was painting the laundry room and had disconnected a pipe or
two. A small amount of water spilled onto the floor, and some made its
way under the wall. But it dried quickly with that fan blowing on it, and
everything is fine.
Robert called me to find out what bushes I might want to
keep, and I told him about the burning bush near the mailbox that is always so
beautiful in the autumn. I love the lilac bushes, too. Lilacs shouldn’t be trimmed this time of
year, or they won’t bloom.
I told him, “But if you go by everything I think, you’ll
still have a jungle!”
I like the wild English gardens around the old-fashioned
cottages in the Olde Country. I dislike really structured landscaping,
and bushes that are squared off or trimmed into fantastical shapes. But I know a lot of people like things small
and neat; and our goal is to sell this place!
Loren didn’t do much weeding at all last year, and he did
little the year before; so bindweed took over a lot of the flower
gardens. Some odd bush or volunteer tree grew into the burning bush; it had
pods on it in the autumn, almost like the Black Locust tree has.
When Aaron was about three years old, he said with some
degree of concern, “The beans are all falling off of Grandma’s June Bug tree!”
He was close, very close; he just got the wrong bug, is all.
We call it a ‘June Bug tree’ often enough that sometimes its real name, ‘Black
Locust’, escapes me. 😄
Here are Victoria, 1 ½,
and Dorcas, 16, on September 2, 1998.
The little one is always
the dramatic photo ham.
I have a total of 26,850
pictures scanned. I look forward to
completing this task and getting back to quilting – but, in the meanwhile,
pictures like these are fun to find, and keep me happily scanning away.
Below is Hannah, 17, at
the piano, on August 28, 1998.
Robert put up two new lights in the basement at Loren’s
house, and the one old light that was still in good shape is now in the laundry
room, making it brighter in there.
We’ve ordered the new carpet and flooring that will be put
in the kitchen, dining area, living room, and hallway. We’d thought the wood flooring in kitchen and
dining room was okay, but once the rugs were removed, we discovered that the
sun had faded it out where there were no rugs, and it’s cheap 3/8” stuff, not
worth refinishing.
I haven’t been too
worried about doing a thorough cleaning yet, as Larry still has quite a bit to do
in the garages. I really don’t want to dust
and polish everything, and then have to do it again! – but I think it’s about
time now.
Later that afternoon, Robert
sent Larry a couple of pictures of the front yard after he cleared it out. He did a lot of work! I don’t have any good ‘before’ pictures,
except those taken by the Moultrie camera, and they don’t show much of the
brush that was there.
Before:
If we don’t get the place sold soon, we will have to start watering the lawn, and it may very well become apparent that a lot of it has died for lack of watering last year. Larry would set up the sprinklers (because Loren no longer remembered how to use the irrigation system)... turn on the water... tell Loren to leave it on until dark ------ and we’d see by the camera that he’d turn it off 15 minutes or so after we left. Then he’d mow it two or three times a week, quite scalping it – and sometimes we’d see him mowing when it was so dry, there would be a huge cloud of dust all around him and his mower.
So we might have to
overseed the lawn, if everything starts turning green and the lawn doesn’t.
Friday, I got 91 photos
scanned – not as many as I would’ve liked, but I did get something else
done that I’ve been hoping to do for a long time: I found a place to enter the Atlantic Beach
Path quilt where they have no size restrictions. I’d thought to enter it in the Houston
International quilt show – but learned that the maximum size they accept is 96”
in width. That’s barely wide enough for
a queen-sized bed! The Atlantic Beach
Path quilt is 123” x 124”. There were a
handful of quilt shows where I could’ve entered it. I narrowed it down to two: the BBQ quilt show (no, no, not ‘Barbecue’;
it stands for Boise (Idaho) Basin Quilters!) and the Ozark Piecemakers quilt
show in Springfield, Missouri.
I chose the Boise Basin
Quilters quilt show, because... mountains! We wanna go there.
The next few pictures
were taken in early September, 1998, on a trip to Yellowstone National Park.
 |
| Victoria & Larry |
Saturday, Amy wrote to
wish me Happy National Quilting Day. I
wrote back, “Huh,
how ’bout that. And I just entered a
quilt in a quilt show in Boise, Idaho! The show will be at the end
of September. I wonder why they don’t
have National Photo Scanning Day?”
 |
| Joseph |
Larry went to Oklahoma that day to get a
pickup, so we didn’t go see Loren. As
usual, he told me this – after I was ready to go. Larry has had a bad cold, so it was just as
well that we didn’t go. He drove the BMW,
then put it on a flatbed U-Haul and pulled it home behind the pickup he’d
purchased.
I was glad to learn that
Judy’s daughter Sara and her husband Ernest and their four boys visited Loren
that afternoon. It was such a nice day,
they were able to sit out in the courtyard.
Loren still recognizes and knows friends and family, and he remembers
days later that they have visited him.
The Mercedes was
deader’n a doornail Sunday morning, so we drove the BMW to church. Good thing we’ve got an extra, hmmm?
Kurt and Victoria invited
us for dinner. On the way, we stopped
and filled the Beemer, as it was nearly empty.
It cost $99.24. 😲
I remember Daddy driving clear to the other side of town (only
a mile, back then; the town has grown since then) to get gas, because it was
only 28¢ instead of the 29¢ they were charging at the gas station nearby.
Victoria fed us a tender,
scrumptious roast, baked potatoes, carrots, and onions; and frozen Maine blueberries
and raspberries for dessert. Mmmmm,
everything was so good.
When we got home, Larry
charged the battery on the Mercedes. The
dash lights came on as soon as he hooked up his charger, with a notice still
reading ‘Don’t forget your key.’ So,
when we leave the key fob in the vehicle, is that what runs down the
battery? Because as soon as he took the
key out and walked away with it, the dash reminder went away and the lights
went off.
 |
| Caleb & Lydia |
Yep. I just researched the matter, and have
learned that leaving the key fob – one of those that doesn’t have to be
inserted in the ignition; the car starts with a push of a button – inside the
car, or even too close to the car, will drain the battery. It can also drain the battery of the fob
itself. Siggghhhhh... Why don’t they tell us these things
when we purchase such a vehicle?! Maybe
they don’t know, themselves.
 |
| Hester |
After church last night, I showed Rachel several
new and nearly-new Bibles that I’d brought from Loren’s house, as I wanted to
give Kelvin one of them. He was at
church in the morning, but didn’t feel well enough to attend the evening
service.
I had earlier asked him, “Would you prefer large
print, or regular size?”
“Regular,” he answered. “I ain’t that old... yet.” 😄
Rachel started to choose a
dark blue Bible Loren had given to Janice not long before she passed away; but
I had saved a brand-new looseleaf Bible for last. I was glad when she chose that one.
Since we’d already had a big meal that day, and I
had not had breakfast in the morning, we decided a late breakfast was just the
ticket. So we had the last of the Blueberry
Corn Chex with the last of the Almond Milk and one egg apiece (because there
were only two left) on the last half-slice and heel of bread, and drank the
last of the orange juice – half a cup for each of us. It was just enough.
 |
| Larry, Caleb, Joseph, & Victoria |
We then went to Loren’s house to put the trash out,
and Larry put more drywall on the garage wall.
It’s all dry at the bottom of that wall, and ready to be painted now.
I cleaned out the cupboard under the
sink. I hadn’t done that yet,
because there were cleaning products in there that we needed to use.
Whataya
know, I unearthed two bottles of Rust Out, or something similar.
Now,
the shower off the master bedroom has been baaaaaad. Larry worked on it for a couple of hours back
when he was staying there with Loren, but he only succeeded in getting the top
layer of soap scum off.
What
was left behind in the shower after the soap scum was gone was dirty pinkish
orange. Larry thought maybe the solution
was just to tear that shower out and put in a new one, but Robert convinced him
that that wasn’t a good idea. The
bathroom is very small, and the only way the builders got that shower in there
in the first place was by putting it in before the walls were up.
 |
Top of Snowy Range Pass,
Medicine Bow Mts., Wyoming
The
orange-pink color of the shower told me it was discolored from iron and
minerals in the water. So, armed with
Rust Out and a good brush, I marched off to do battle.
It worked; the shower
looks much, much better. It won’t
take much more work and it’ll look almost like new. Larry finished the drywalling before I
entirely finished the shower; but I did empty both of those bottles of Rust
Out. I rinsed the shower walls before we left. I need to find more Rust Out (there’s surely
some product on that order in the garage), and then use something that will
shine that shower ’til it sparkles.
Yeah, yeah; I can hear you all now: “Use vinegar!
Use vinegar!”
I might. I just
might. 😜
And yes, we went to the grocery store before coming
home. 😉
Here are Hester and Joseph with a string of 14 fish we caught at Sherman Reservoir September 7th:
It
started raining this afternoon, and will continue through the night, changing
to snow if it gets cold enough. We plan
to visit Loren tomorrow, since it will still be raining and/or snowing. You wonder why we do it on a day like that? Well, because Walkers’ work gets curtailed by
the weather. So, quite often, our
excursions are made on bad-weather days.
 |
| Lydia |
“‘There
has to be a better way,’ he said, as he bumped down the stairs on the
back of his head. But here he is at the
bottom, and ready to be introduced to you: Winnie the Pooh.”
(But I
digress.)
It’s
bedtime!
P.S.: I have figured out what that ‘Haircut Practice’ Sticky Note was all about: it’s the name of a comic on Go Comics dot com. Some time back, I was looking through the funnies in alphabetical order to see if there were any I might like to add to the list of funnies I read each morning while I’m curling my hair, and that’s how far I got: I got to the comic called ‘Haircut Practice’. It’s been so long, I totally forgot.
Caleb
P.S.S.:
Now I got curious, and had to look at this ‘Haircut Practice’
comic. Nope. I will not be wasting my time reading that. The next one in the list is ‘Half Full’,
which I accordingly wrote on a Sticky Note.
And because three months from now when I notice that Sticky Note again I
will wonder, Why on earth did I write ‘Half Full’ on a Sticky Note??, I
also wrote, ‘Go Comics’.
Let’s see if that rings a bell.
It was bedtime ten minutes ago.
It’s still bedtime.
Goodnight!
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