 |
| Dark-eyed junco |
As I type, I’m sipping piping hot, aromatic
White Chocolate Raspberry Truffle, made from fresh-ground beans from
Christopher Bean. Mmmmmm...
I used
to love the smell of Daddy’s coffee in the morning. Every now and then,
he’d give me a taste. AAacccckkkk!
It didn’t taste like it smelt!
He put
all sorts of stuff in it: honey, a pinch of baking soda (because he didn’t
like the way distilled water tasted), powdered creamer, and a few dollops of
half-and-half cream. We called it ‘coffee soup’. 😄
When Lydia was 2 or 3 years old, if I gave her a bowlful of
something she didn’t particularly like – vegetables, for instance – she’d say, “This
isn’t very good for me!” in a somewhat pained tone. Hand her a bowl of ice cream, though, and she’d
say, “This is really good for me!”
Sometimes she’d wax eloquent and say, “The reason this is really good
for me is because I really like it!”
During
the night and early Tuesday morning, there was a lot of lightning and loud,
crashing thunder. Quite unusual, for this time of year. The first
time lightning lit up the room, I figured ice had brought down lines, caused
them to arc, or ruptured a transformer. Then there was the boom of
thunder, and it went on rolling and rumbling for nearly a minute.
By Tuesday morning, we had several inches
of snow. But a little farther to the northwest, just over the state line
in South Dakota, they got 25” inches of snow.
By
early afternoon, it had warmed enough that a freezing drizzle was putting a shiny
glaze atop the snow. A friend was asking
about our weather, wondering why there is often such a difference between our
weather and the weather in Omaha, which is only 85 miles away – and why there
is almost always a huge difference between our weather and the weather
in Chadron, out in the northwest part of the state.
The average
elevation of Omaha is 1,060 feet. The elevation of Columbus is 1,447. Omaha is also farther south. The elevation of Chadron is 3,379, and it’s
farther north. Not far to the north of Chadron are the Black Hills, and
to the west is the Medicine Bow Range.
It’s
the topography as much as anything else that dictates Nebraska’s weather.
Storms both summer and winter come swooping over the mountains, across the High
Plains, and generally cut cattycorner across the state from southwest
toward the northeast.
It occurred to me that our house is on a
bit of a hill, higher than Columbus, so I looked up the elevation for Tarnov, a
little town directly to our north that’s on approximately the same plane as we
are. So a more accurate elevation for this very house I’m in is 1,650
feet. That’s about 200 feet higher than Columbus, just as I might’ve
guessed. We are high enough that the entire town of Columbus, including
the one and only skyscraper (the four-story-high courthouse, heh heh) could be
totally underwater, and the flood would not have reached us.
In the middle of the afternoon, we had
several dips and surges in electricity. I hoped the power didn’t go out;
I wanted to sew those appliqués onto the quilt!
Speaking
of the appliqués, a lady on Facebook asked where I purchased them. I told her that I had used line drawings from
the Internet, and sized them as needed.
Then
another lady decided to write a ‘tutorial’ on my Facebook page. In a garbled paragraph of mangled spelling
and grammar, she told others to cut appliqué templates from plastic or
cardboard, and to stuff the appliqué with cotton balls.
Aarrgghh,
don’t do that; you’ll ruin your quilts.
Please. There’s a better way!
Here’s
my favorite way of making appliqués: Sarah Lynn’s Appliqué Tutorial
And give me a gold star.
I resisted (so far) telling Knowledgeable Nellie to never try writing
tutorials for a living.
Here was her top post on her own Facebook page that day: “Why does it seem so many movies these days
have someone dying or killed or dead in it as a character?”
I submit, Stop watching the stupid movies.
Upstairs
in my quilting studio, I gathered all the things I needed – cleaning brush,
oil, thread, snips... then cleaned and oiled the machine and threaded it.
I
positioned an item under the needle and let down the presser foot.
And
then I tried to use the touchscreen on my newer 730 Bernina like I had with the
180 Bernina.
When it
didn’t do what I expected, I pushed enough buttons that I painted myself into a
corner, and, not knowing what else to do, I restarted the machine. I sat there and looked at it a moment or two,
and then it belatedly occurred to me to go get the manual out of my bookcase.
I was
soon in business. When all else fails, Read the Manual!!!
Here’s a cute little fox squirrel in the black oil sunflower
seeds.
Later, as I was stitching happily away, there was a muffled CRASH,
tinkle thuddity thump almost directly overhead, somewhere in the dormer
rafters.
What in the world? Were
there mice in the rafters putting away a bunch of their tiny dishes, and did
one of them drop a stack of bowls??
It was
an icy, snowy day. I spent part of it
doing some mending that had been languishing for a good long while, and then I
began stitching down the appliqués on the Colorwash 9-Patch quilt. By suppertime, two birds were done, and I was ready
to start on the next.
Three
were done by the time I headed for bed.
Oh, and
I chose a better name for this quilt: Birds
of Colorwash Patch.
 |
| Male house finch |
Wednesday dawned cloudy and windy. By
11:00 a.m., it had warmed up to 28°, with a wind chill of 15°.
I
heard another nugget from the rural radio:
“I am really passionate about sustaining water for our... uh...
sustainability.” ((clap clap clap clap))
I went out to fill the
bird feeders. There’s a little
red-breasted nuthatch that’s almost tame.
When he sees me come out with the bird seed, he comes swooping down and
lands right in front of my face, making those little metallic noises, tipping
his head and looking right into my face with his bright eyes. He does it all the more if I talk to him.
There’s a dark-eyed junco
out there that thinks he’s a finch. He
hangs on the Nyjer seed feeder, trying his best to pluck seeds from the
screening with his thick little beak.
I went back to stitching down appliqués.
Whew! Sewing those
appliqués whilst manhandling that king-sized quilt and stuffing it through the
harp on my sewing machine brought back memories of trying to quilt big quilts
on my domestic machine – the 830 Bernina Record, back then – before I got my
first midarm quilting machine, the HQ16. My shoulders, hands, neck, etc., were
protesting. But, finding I was about
half done, I applied some Absorbine Plus to various strategic spots and pressed
on.
And then it was time to get ready for church. I
chose my outfit, and soon I was all decked out in a soft, southwestern-style
cardigan sweater that Caleb, Maria, and Eva gave me for Christmas.
I sent Maria a note, writing, “The cardigan fits perfectly,
and the sleeves don’t fall clear past my knuckles, for once! I’m wearing it to church tonight with a shiny
black short-sleeved shell under it and a pleated swing skirt, along with little
gray suede slip-ons with snakeskin toes. I’m utterly too-too!”
I sent a picture, saying, “Tell Eva, here’s Grandma
in the pretty sweater she gave me.”
(It’s not very high quality, because I took
it with my phone, into a mirror.)
“It’s so soft and nice,” I added. “But I do hope they don’t have the heat
cranked waaaay up at church.”
That sweater was warm.
After the church service, I let Eva feel the sleeve of my
sweater, telling her, “See? This is the soft
sweater you gave me for Christmas!”
She felt it, smiled at me, and said, “Thank you!” (meaning, ‘you’re welcome’.)
I said, “You’re welcome!” and she grinned, and gave a very
small shake of her head, knowing we had those salutations twisted around
backwards.
Caleb has recently gotten himself a guitar – and he got Eva
a little guitar, too. Lydia got herself
a new ukulele – and she got littler ones for each of her children,
too. She printed up guitar fingering
charts for Caleb and Larry, so we stopped by Jeremy and Lydia’s after church to
pick one up. They weren’t home yet when
we got there. We decided to go get some
food somewhere and then come back – but we met them in their Tesla at the curve
leading into Shady Lake Road, so we turned and went back.
They’d already driven into their garage, and everyone was
getting out when we pulled into the driveway.
They walked out to greet us.
“Nobody’s home,” Larry informed them, gesturing at the
house. “I rang the doorbell and knocked,
just a few minutes ago.” 🤣
After leaving Jeremy and Lydia’s, we went to Runza. They’re staying open later now, since moving
into their new and bigger building. I
got a Swiss mushroom runza and a bowl of chili.
I couldn’t even eat half of either of those entrées, so that’s what I
had for supper Thursday night, too.
Home again, I went back upstairs, determined to finish those
appliqués. And finish them I did,
shortly before 2:00 a.m.
The Eurasian collared doves strut-waddle their way around
the back deck, cleaning up the Nyjer seed – and, every now and then, a
sunflower seed – that the little songbirds have spilt. They don’t seem so big, until you see them
side by side the other little birds!
Thursday, I was ready
to load the Birds of Colorwash Patch quilt on my quilting frame. But... why
didn’t I have the right size of batting?? I wanted two layers:
the bottom one, 80/20 cotton/ poly, and the top one, wool, preferably. I
have a lot of scraps of batting; but they are all small, and in a variety of
different kinds and shapes. It would
create quite the disaster, trying to piece those together into two
king-sized pieces of batting. They’ll
work for some of the smaller quilts I plan to make, though.
The sun was shining, and snow began sliding off the roof
that morning. Sometimes it hit the windows... and sometimes it hit the
deck with a resounding ka-BOOOM! I thought there was a large
animal on the deck, the first time it happened.
That afternoon, Teddy got his cow
up! She’d
been down for a week and a half. The
sling he’d ordered had arrived, and he used Larry’s forklift to lift her. He massaged her legs, rubbed her down
– and soon she was walking around again.
He led her to the hay, and she was eating. He thinks she’ll be all right. I’m so glad.
The little calf, now 4 ½ weeks old, is still fine; she
learned to nurse even though her mother was down.
That day, Keith had
surgery to remove his gallbladder. He’d
had a nasty attack on New Year’s Day and spent a few painful hours in the ER. An ultrasound showed that he had several
stones.
A few minutes before 5, Korrine texted to
tell me that the surgery went well – but there was still a stone in a duct,
which the doctor said was probably why the pain in his back was so severe. So, about an hour after bringing him to the
recovery room and waking him up, they put him back out and returned to surgery
to remove the stone.
Keith wrote later, “Just
dealing with some pain and discomfort. And
feeling happy with some pain meds. 😉😃”
And that is funny,
because Keith particularly dislikes pain meds.
He went home that
evening, and the next morning overdid it by going out and shoveling an inch of
wet snow off his drive, while Korrine threatened to tell his mother on
him. 😄
Thursday afternoon, I went to our LQS, Sew
What, owned by a good friend of mine from high school days, and got two packages
of king-sized batting. One is Soft &
Bright, a good-quality polyester from The Warm Company; the other is Hobbs
Heirloom 80/20 cotton/poly. I put the
80/20 on the bottom, and the Soft & Bright on top, for best quilting
definition. I would’ve gotten wool, had
they had any – but this will be all right, and it was a whole lot cheaper: $48 for the Soft & Bright, and $46 for the
80/20.
I started to load the quilt onto the quilting frame – and discovered
that the backing was only 106” wide. The
quilt top is 112” x 120”. Fortunately, I
must’ve known this when I purchased the backing, way back in October of 2020,
and I got more than enough. I measured, cut,
pieced, and pressed it, and was finally really ready to load it, an hour
later.
But it was suppertime.
Though
my supper that night was
the rest of the chili and Swiss mushroom burger that I got at Runza the night
before, Larry needed something to eat; so I made deer meatloaf and
California blend vegetables, and we had peaches for dessert.
Then back to the quilting studio.
The backing is loaded first... then the
two layers of batting... and then the top.
I cleaned, oiled, and threaded my machine. I basted the top down around the edges of the
top border.
I was ready to start quilting!
Mañana.
It was one o’clock in the morning.
As I put the batting in place and pushed the excess
under the quilting frame, I suddenly very much missed my kitties, who were
constantly trying to get in the batting. I made sure to keep them out of customers’
batting, but wasn’t quite so vigilant with my own stuff. They seemed to know the difference, somehow...
maybe because of a difference in smell, or maybe the difference in my general
attitude? Anyway,
I found myself being careful when I went to boot the batting farther under the
frame, and then thought, I don’t need to do that anymore, and
missed them.
It always takes a little while to
decide on a quilting design, to measure, put a few guiding marks on the
quilt... and then launch in.
But soon the preliminary arches were
done, and I was ready for some inside feathers.
A friend got each of her two young granddaughters
Barbie doll houses for Christmas.
I asked, “Do the girls
stick to their own things (Barbie houses, in this case), or do they switch and
share?”
“Yes and
no,” she replied. “They
move back and forth between the houses, but Jenna (the oldest) is very much
aware of exactly what is hers and where it is.”
Our girls played with each other’s
dolls; but they called it ‘babysitting’, and the ‘parent’ could reclaim said
doll at any time. 😄
That evening, I wrote to my quilting group, “The
inside-the-arch feathers are done (on the top border, at least). Yikes, I’ve
gotten spectacularly bad at backtracking during this quilting
hiatus! Somebody send a wrecker!”
I started on the arch outlines, the inside-the-arch
pebbles, and the piano-key quilting.
“You ain’t speaking the King’s English, dear,” wrote a non-quilting friend who had no idea under the sun what I meant.
“No,” I agreed, “it’s probably the Queen’s
English.” hee hee
Another
friend, admiring the quilting, notwithstanding the bad backtracking, wrote, “Ever
thought about a teaching video?”
“Sure,”
I responded. “And what I think is, ‘Eeeeek!’”
“But
we could learn so much from you!” she wheedled.
“Just
think of my pictures as slow-motion videos, and look at them real fast,” I
advised.
By a quarter ’til midnight, the top border on The Birds of
Colorwash Patch was finished – and so was my back.
Wow, no wonder I couldn’t finish scanning the
pictures in 2021: I quilted 40
customer quilts! I counted them that
night. And I put together the Colorwash
9-Patch, too.
Finally,
in 2022, I said ‘No more quilts’ and meant it. And still people kept asking, even those to
whom I’d said ‘no’ and explained why. We
also had to clear out Loren’s house, and I see from my photos that I finished
that job on April 12th. Larry
would not get the garages emptied for another 2 ½ months.
I
finished scanning pictures in the nick of time, just before Christmas.
Reckon I’ll remember to look at these quilt pictures and do
the same thing with the corners when I get to the bottom border?
Saturday, we went to
visit Loren. We jounced
off in Larry’s one-ton pickup, with tires that had 75 pounds of air in them,
because Teddy had borrowed it to pull a flatbed of hay. After several
unpleasant miles, Larry pulled off and dropped the pressure to 60; but it was
still pretty stiff, and the roads felt quite a lot like they were made of cobblestones.
At the nursing home, we glanced around, and, not
seeing Loren, went to check his room. He
wasn’t there. As usual, the heater was
set on 80°, and it was stifling in there.
I turned it down to 72°.
Leaving a magazine and a newspaper on his bed, we went
off to look for him.
 |
| The Mormon Bridge |
One of the nurses stopped us to tell me that Loren’s
shaver was broken. “I’ve been using the
trimmer you got him, but it doesn’t do a close shave, and that’s what he
wants.”
I thanked her for letting me know, and promised to
bring a new one next time we came.
We found Loren in one of the pretty sitting rooms where
he must’ve been watching the TV from a big leather chair in a corner of the
room, and had dozed off. He awoke moments
after we walked in and sat down in chairs next to him, though we made little
noise, and the TV was still on.
 |
| Missouri River |
He was quite confused, saying he was going to visit ‘Mama
and Daddy’ – our parents who have been gone for 19 years and 30 years,
respectively, along with a lot of other stories all thrown helter-skelter into
a mishmash of nonsense. We tried to
redirect the conversation by telling him that we would be bringing him a new
shaver.
He laughed a bit ruefully, felt of his face, and said,
“Oh, good! I didn’t want to go visit Mama and Daddy without
shaving! They wouldn’t like that, you know. They don’t want me to
look like a billy goat!” (That’s probably a direct quote from Daddy, I’ll
just betcha it is.)
Nevertheless, we had a nice visit, with Larry telling
(and retelling) him of our power going out on that cold, cold night a couple of
weeks ago, and me showing him pictures of some of the family on Instagram. Sometimes I can’t tell if he’s getting hard of
hearing, or if he simply can’t grasp what we are saying – and then the
slightest little noise makes him turn his head toward it, and I realize, He
can still hear just fine. The
confusion was probably worse because he’d been dozing. Old memories got all jumbled with dreams and
TV blarney, I think.
He pointed out a sweet li’l ol’ lady with a walker who
always greets us with a lovely smile, and said, “That woman over there is Larry
and Sarah Lynn’s mother.”
I wanted to clutch at my chest and exclaim, “Who am
I?!” but I didn’t. Nope.
Shortly thereafter, the sweet li’l ol’ lady went to
the locked glass French doors that lead into the dining room, set aside her
walker, got a good grip on the handles, and rattled the livin’ daylights out of
them. Amazingly, the glass remained
intact.
Loren did nothing more than make a small, laughing ‘tsk’
noise, though in days gone by, he would’ve been appalled.
He told us, “I was going to drive out to your place
this morning, but I had a late night last night, and just wasn’t up to it. I’ll come out later this afternoon. What time will you be home?”
“9:30,” Larry decided, after a bit of pondering.
Loren nodded agreeably, though that will be long past
his bedtime.
While we were there, a lady who was walking in and out
of the doorway of that sitting room in a somewhat worried fashion told me, “My
two husbands are supposed to come and pick me up, but neither one is here yet,
and I don’t know what to do!”
I didn’t know what to do, either, so I smiled politely
and said, “Hmmmm.”
The woman glared at me.
I pulled my old trick of suddenly looking over her
shoulder with a show of great interest.
Works every time.
She immediately turned and peered off down the
hallway, and then went to take a closer look at something in a glass case on
the wall, perhaps thinking that had been what I’d been looking at.
Despite
being a little more confused than usual, Loren was in good spirits, and glad we
had come.
After leaving Omaha, we headed on east to Anita, Iowa,
to get a tommy lift – a liftgate for a pickup – that Larry had bought. It’s
made to attach to the hitch receiver, and thus can easily be switched from
pickup to pickup (as opposed to the way most are bolted onto the pickup itself).
I
spotted this getup at the place where we got the lift, and suggested we
get it, instead, as it’ll look prettier, sitting on the lawn:
Iowa is a pretty state in which to travel, with all its hills and valleys and
rivers,
despite the woman of the cotton-ball instructions informing me, “they
make Hot dogs there. You can smell them booking
the pork. it smells awful”
‘Booking the pork’?
“I’ve traveled in Iowa many times
throughout my life,” I replied, “and have never smelled anything bad except for
a feedlot now and then, if the wind is blowing the wrong way. The cooking of pork, ham, bacon, or sausage,
whether it’s being baked or smoked, usually smells scrumptious. Meatpacking and rendering plants can smell
bad; perhaps that’s what you are referring to? In Des Moines, regenerative thermal oxidizers
are being installed at several of those facilities. These oxidizers destroy volatile organic
compounds and reduce up to 98% of odors.”
It never does any good
to tell her such things, though.
“you start smelling the cooking or
whatever they do to the animals after DeMoines [sic] and by the time you get to
Ottumwa it’s grotesque,” she retorted. (Grotesque?)
“Maybe when you’re living in Iowa you get used to the smell I guess.” (She thinks I live in Iowa no matter how many
times I tell her otherwise.) “Just like
New Yorkers dont Smell the disgusting smell of the Subways...smelled like toe
jam.”
She doesn’t know me very well, if she
thinks I ever ‘get used to’ bad smells. My
dainty little schnoz is offended.
Maybe when she went through Iowa, they were ‘booking
the pork’ in every single farmhouse she went past? Or maybe she was smelling her own toejam. haha
After getting the tommy
lift loaded into the back of the pickup, we drove to Anita Lake State Park
south of town. There were whitetail deer
everywhere we looked, and the sky was beginning to fade from pale to indigo
blue, with the edges of the clouds in the western skies turning crimson and
pink. It reflected on the ice-covered
lake, where a number of men were ice-fishing.
We saw one doe that had quadruplets.
Victoria invited us to lunch yesterday
after our morning church service. She’d
left a stew of chunks of roast beef, potatoes, and carrots baking slowly in the
oven all morning, and it was sooo good.
I posted a few of my pictures,
including a shot of one of the dark-eyed juncos.
Ms. Toejam immediately voiced
complaint: “You should put the city or
country of it’s [sic] residence.i have never seen this bird before”
My good humor evidently out to lunch, I
retorted, “He did not show me his ID card.”
I clicked on her personal Facebook
page. She had posted another verse from
the King James Version Bible: “And when
thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray
standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be
seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They
have their reward.”
That’s straight from Jesus’ very own lips,
and is part of the Sermon on the Mount.
And Ms. Toejam dares to argue with it!
She
actually wrote, “What’s wrong with praying in the streets? Aren’t we supposed to pray without
ceasing? We need prayers everyday
[sic].”
Good grief. The verse itself answers her question: The Pharisees, hypocrites that they were,
prayed in public for no other reason than to ‘be seen of men’. And the only reward they’ll ever get is
praise of man, for they certainly will get no reward from the Lord. There aren’t many things the Lord hates more
than hypocrisy.
My eyes were more troublesome than ever
both Saturday and Sunday. So today I
finally hunted for a doctor who has treated Benign Essential Blepharospasm.
 |
| Whitetail doe with quadruplet fawns |
So...
we shall see. I would be sooo grateful if I could get some help for this
problem. I do get tired of looking like
a mole that just found its way topside, after too long underground. 😄
I also
have a regular eye exam scheduled here in town at the Optometric Center for
Monday, February 20th. I need new glasses, both the bylines
(graduated lenses) and the craft glasses.
I usually go to LensCrafters in Lincoln or Omaha, but I’d rather stay here
in town. I can never get
glasses in an hour from LensCrafters anyway; they always have to order them. And
from the times I’ve gone into the Optometric Center to have my glasses
adjusted, I know they have prettier frames than they do at LensCrafters. (That’s the important part, right? – pretty
frames.)
I haven’t
had an eye exam at the Optometric Center for over ten years, and they have a
doctor there whom I have never met. Maybe by then, the Botox will have kicked in, and I’ll be
able to actually look at the doctor long enough to know what he looks
like! 😂
When I asked the
receptionist at the Optometric Center if they treated blepharospasm there, she said,
and I quote, “Huh?” When I repeated it,
she said she had never heard of such a thing. That’s pretty much been the case with every
eye doctor I’ve mentioned it to (or if a doctor had heard of it, he did
not at all act like he believed me when I said I had it). So I was really glad when the people at
Midwest Eye Care in Omaha acted like it was old hat.
I just put liquid
creamer – Natural Bliss from Coffee mate, with real milk and cream – in my
coffee! Whataya think of that? It’s the stuff we brought home from Hester’s
house on Christmas Eve. I noticed it in
the refrigerator last night, and thought, We need to use that stuff up.
So I poured myself a
cup of piping hot Almond the Mood for Love coffee from Christopher Bean, and it
was too hot to drink, and I wanted to drink it, and suddenly I
remembered: Ah. Yes.
Quite so. Creamer. (in a Winnie-the-Pooh tone)
So I poured some into
my cup, and now I’m drinking Almond the Mood for Love with Natural Bliss. 😂
And I must say, I will
always prefer my coffee black.
He said he didn’t think it was broken,
but it really hurt to put weight on it.
She helped him stand (aarrgghh, why do they do that?!), and he
was in quite a bit of pain; so she helped him into a wheelchair.
The nurse wanted to know if I’d rather
they took an X-ray there at Prairie Meadows, or transported him to the hospital
ER for an X-ray. Loren had told her he
wanted to stay there, as it hurt too much to be moved. I first thought that might be all right,
until she told me it would be several hours before they could have the X-ray
read. I decided the ER would be better.
“He doesn’t seem to be in a whole lot
of distress,” the nurse told me.
An hour later, a nurse from Methodist
Hospital called to let me know Loren was there, X-rays had been taken, he was now
resting, and was fairly comfortable.
She called again
in 45 minutes to tell me that nothing was broken; all looked fine on the X-rays. They did blood work and a few other tests,
and also a CT scan in case he hit his head.
All was well, so they would soon be transporting him back to Prairie
Meadows. The lady said he was not in too awfully much pain, unless he
tried to stand or walk. She said, “He
probably bruised that hip. We see no
bruise right now, but it will probably show up in a couple of days.”
It
makes me feel bad when he gets hurt. At
least nothing is broken, and the hip replacement is still perfectly in place.
And now
it is bedtime. Tomorrow I’ll start
quilting the interior parts of the quilt.
I need to hurry; three quilts will soon be on their way from a good
friend and regular quilting customer who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio!
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.