Journal: Flowers, Photos, and Fish

 

Tuesday morning, I filled the bird feeders, watered the potted flowers on the porch, and put fresh water in the birdbath.  After finishing my journal, delayed a day on account of Memorial Day, I started scanning the photos I found after finishing that gargantuan photo-scanning project a year and a half ago.  I knew I had a dozen old family photos to scan, but recently I tried to find some favorite photos of Hester at age 2 ½ playing with a little kitchen outfit I had set up under the stairwell – and couldn’t find them!  That always makes my heart skip a beat or two, when I can’t find a picture I especially like.  I have over 300,000 photos – but can usually put my finger on the exact one I want, since they are well labeled and in chronological order.

After considering the issue for a bit, thinking, Oh, this is awful... I’ll have to go back through all 150 albums to find them...  I suddenly remembered seeing three small, fat albums downstairs in an old headboard.  I had assumed they either belonged to one of the kids, or were duplicates of others I had already scanned; but I trotted down there to take a look – and there were the lost pictures!  There were also a whole lot of Lydia’s six-month pictures.  I was so relieved to find them.

While watering the plants on the porch, I discovered that the clematis Bobby and Hannah gave me last year for Mother’s Day has a big, pretty bloom on it!  I had not known, or had forgotten, what color the blooms were going to be.

There is a wild grapevine that insists on growing right next to and around the older lavender clematis.  It’s a never-ending fight to weed it out, and is probably the reason the clematis isn’t bigger and doesn’t sport more blossoms.

Sometimes when I mention having venison for supper, friends remark that they don’t care much for it.

Often the reason people don’t like venison is because it is not cut and trimmed properly.  If the processor doesn’t get every last little piece of fat off the meat, it will have a gamey flavor, not at all pleasant.  But get all that fat off, and season and cook it properly, and it can be delicious.  The age of the animal makes a difference, too.  Everyone wants to get a big buck, but a smaller doe will have more tender meat.

I was recently discussing nursing home snacks with an older cousin who has gone to live at one after several falling episodes.  She often tells me of her afternoon snack:  cottage cheese, peaches, and tea.  It makes me hungry for...  yes, cottage cheese, peaches, and tea.  😄

I wonder how many snacks Loren gets at Prairie Meadows?  He has gained weight in the last few months, which is why I had to get him some new clothes a couple of months ago.  His weight gain isn’t a whole lot, but I’d guess he’s gone from 165 (normal weight) to about 180-185, enough that it makes it harder for him to get up and down.  You’d think they’d keep track of that at a nursing home, and take steps to keep people at a proper weight.  But I know it wouldn’t be an easy job, particularly if a resident was bound and determined to eat.

I really work hard to keep from gaining weight, and I understand very well how easy it is to gain.  It’s annoying when people – usually people who are bigger than me – say things like, “You wouldn’t understand; you’ve been skinny all your life!”  No, I’ve never been ‘skinny’, really; but I do try to stay at the ‘right’ weight, for me.  It truly does make everything more difficult, if I even weigh five extra pounds.

My weakness is breads:  I love 12-grain bread, bagels of all kinds, muffins, croissants...  Mmmmm.  I used to make a couple of loaves of bread every morning, when the children were young.  I love the heel from a loaf of bread fresh out of the oven, slathered with butter and honey.  >>>  droooool <<<

Trouble is, you sink your teeth in – and the top teeth on the soft side of the heel really do sink in, while the bottom teeth on the crust side don’t, and the whole piece flaps up and ka-splats you in the ka-schnozz with butter and honey.  🤣

Speaking of snacks, Larry stopped by that afternoon on his way to Norfolk to do a job, and got himself some grapes, cheese, and juice.

Okay, now I’ve made myself hungry, writing all that.  Excuse me a minute while I go get myself a piece of Colby Jack cheese.

Here’s the big boom truck, pulling a pup.  Larry drives for Walker Foundations (owned by my late nephew David’s wife Christine, and now run by their sons).  Those are aluminum forms on the truck, used for making poured cement walls.

A little squirrel is running about on the front porch – oh!  He just tried leaping through the front door, and smacked headlong into the glass, poor little thing!  The late afternoon sun is shining on it, evidently creating an illusion of being open.  Sometimes birds hit it, too, especially in the evenings.  Poor things.

Now he sees me at the door and is hiding behind the pot of begonias, imagining that I cannot see him at all.

He’s scavenging sunflower seeds the birds have dropped from the feeders.

I found a little blurb about Loren on Cedar Creek of Prairie Meadows’ Facebook page: 

“Since he was a boy, Loren has had a passion for riding bikes and skiing, a love that eventually evolved into a fascination with motorcycles.  Loren spent most of his career as a successful salesman, always bringing his signature charm and enthusiasm.  Nowadays, he continues to light up our days with smiles and laughter here at Cedar Creek of Prairie Meadows!”

A lady had called last month to ask if I could tell her some old stories about Loren for their new feature, Throwback Thursday.  She put her own spin on my stories (for instance, he didn’t learn to ski until he was an adult); but that’s okay.  

Look, they found a suitable picture of Loren as a boy in the old album I gave him some time ago.  That photo was taken at the barracks in Fargo, North Dakota, after Daddy got home from being in the Navy during World War II.  It was in July of 1947, so Loren was not quite 9 years old, as his birthday is in August.

It was around this time, or maybe when he was a little older, that Loren got a job delivering newspapers.  He came home one day all upset, saying that dogs kept coming after him, barking and threatening to bite. 

So Daddy got him a squirt gun and filled it with ammonia.  “That should keep them from biting you!” said Daddy.

A day or two later, Loren was late getting home.  Concerned, Daddy got in the car and went to find him.

He found him, all right.

Loren was done delivering papers, and was having the time of his life pedaling pell-mell after the neighborhood’s rogue dogs, blasting them with ammonia anytime he got close enough.  The dogs were running like crazy, trying to get away from him.  Loren was fast.

Daddy confiscated the squirt gun and sent Loren home, following in the car.

He didn’t give the squirt gun back, either – but Loren didn’t need it, in any case.  The dogs steered clear of him, from that day on.

On Tuesday evenings, I post a weekly ‘Winding Thread’ topic for my online Quilt Talk group.  Last Tuesday’s question was, “When you travel, do you see quilt designs everywhere you look? – in tile, in pressed-tin ceilings, in flower gardens, in someone’s jacket?  Here’s the place I remember, when I think of charming quilt designs ‘in the wild’: 

It was a place called ‘The Depot’, in Riverton, Wyoming, where we ate supper back on October 15, 2019.  The restaurant was in an old train depot.  There was an electric train running on overhead tracks all around the restaurant, which was divided into multiple small rooms.  They served authentic Mexican food, made on premises.  And look! – the tile on the tables and the sink and counter in the lavatory look like quilt blocks!

One lady on my quilt group remarked, “I was never aware of how many designs were out there until I started quilting.  There was a study done a few years ago about suggestive awareness in your brain.  Example: you buy a black SUV.  Suddenly, you’re aware of how many black SUVs like yours are on the road.  The same with geometric designs that are around you.”  

“I started thinking about that SSCS (See the Same Car Syndrome) after reading your first sentence!” I told her, “– and then you actually talked about it!  😄”

Once upon a time when Caleb, our 2^nd-youngest child, was about 3 ½, we were driving along when he excitedly pointed out a pickup traveling near us:  “There’s a pickup exactly like Daddy’s!, almost not quite, waaaay different.”  haha

Wednesday was a nice day here, 72° at 11:00 a.m., with an expected high of 78°.  I worked in the yard earlier in the morning, and spent the rest of the day, until time for our evening church service, scanning photos.

It’s because of pictures like this that I scan photos: 

These are my maternal great-grandparents, Charles and Joicie [Adkins] Bacon.  This photo was taken on their wedding day in 1885.  Joicie made her wedding dress entirely by hand.

Charles was a schoolteacher in South Dakota.  One cold winter in 1888, a blizzard came up. Charles sent the schoolchildren home early, then put out the fire in the stove, cleaned the room, got on his horse, and headed for home. He had farther to go than any of the schoolchildren.

He didn't make it. The horse brought him in the next morning, more dead than alive. He survived, but was never well again, and contracted tuberculosis (or, more likely, aspirated pneumonia).

Charles and Joicie and their baby, Ethel Pearl, moved back to Illinois to be in a warmer climate and near family, where he could receive better care.  But he died a year and a half after that blizzard, in June of 1889.

The blizzard would later be referred to as the Schoolhouse Blizzard of 1888, because so many of the 170 deaths in South Dakota alone were of schoolchildren trying to walk home.

My grandmother, Lura Mabel, was born in August of 1889, two months after her father Charles died. Joicie began doing sewing and tailoring -- particularly of men's suits -- to provide for her little girls.

She would later marry George Reuss in 1904 at age 39 and have two boys. In 1906, her oldest daughter Ethel died of 'consumption'; it seems she was never strong.

A friend asked, “Any mention of what color the wedding dress was?”

I hadn’t even given it a thought.  “Come to think of it, I have no idea!” I answered.  “I always thought it was light pearl gray, because, of course, it looks light pearl gray in the picture, haha.”

Now I’m wondering, What color was that dress?!  I wanna know!  Impossible, I guess.

My father met Grandmother Reuss in 1935, a few months before she passed away.  My parents were married in 1936.  Daddy always spoke highly of Grandmother Reuss.

This is Grandmother Reuss as she would’ve looked when Daddy knew her.

I had thought to see if I could finish scanning pictures after church that night, but when I saw there was only a small window wherein I might be able to work in the yard the next morning before it started raining, I decided to go to bed a little earlier than usual.

Accordingly, I got up somewhat early and started weeding one of the flower gardens.  I’d only been out there for about 45 minutes when it started raining, so I skedaddled inside.

I showered, polished up the bathroom, ate breakfast, and then headed back upstairs to finish scanning pictures.  I’d gotten 2½ little albums Wednesday, and had 1½ to go.  It didn’t take too awfully long to finish the scanning part of job.  By bedtime, all these latest old and very old pictures – 313 of them – had been scanned, labeled, and edited.  

This is Hester at age 2 ½ in 1991, playing in the little kitchen I set up under the stairwell.  Silly little girl was pretending to spill something, in order to made me howl, “Ohhh!  You spilled it!!!”

And here’s Lydia at age 6 months in the little swing.  It wasn’t long after this that we put it away and saved it for the next baby, as Lydia had grown too big for it.

That evening, Victoria sent a picture of Willie and Kurt.  “Willie was helping water in some fresh dirt around the plastic piece for my new umbrella clothesline,” she wrote.

Little Willie looked totally pleased as punch to be helping.

It was too wet and rainy to do any weeding Friday morning.  Instead, I mended and hemmed a few things, and then started on Baby Maisie’s quilt.

The plain purple irises have finished blooming, and now the multi-colored ones have begun to blossom.  I have a few that faithfully send up leaves each year, but do not flower.  I know why, too:  it’s because I planted the rhizomes too deeply.  Iris rhizomes should be barely below soil level, and seem to do all right even when parts of them are showing.  I always get carried away covering them with soil, worrying about our cold, cold winters.  I need to dig them up and replant them closer to the surface.

My weather apps that day had told of the rain, and also announced that there might be ‘weak funnel clouds, but none that would reach the ground,’ and said spotters would not be needed.  They underestimated the weather.

My view from my upstairs north window showed clouds that didn’t know which way to go.  Most were traveling east, and there were a lot of tendrils tumbling down out of them.  I looked out my east window showed clouds traveling straight north, in a hurry.  The squirrels marauding at the bird feeders paid no attention to NOAA radio and were unconcerned.

Not long after this, it rained so hard I could not see those same trees in the picture. 

Meanwhile, right about this same time, Larry went to get his hair cut at the place he’s been going near Platte Center, eight miles to our north.  He has tried to find a decent barber in Columbus for the last couple of years, after his long-time barber retired; but nary a one have been capable of giving him a decent cut.  He has thick, coarse hair, and if it gets cut too short or isn’t tapered properly, it refuses to lie down nicely.  A friend recommended a lady near Platte Center, and he is finally getting good cuts once again.

But he drove through rain so heavy he could barely see the road.  He got there all right... got his hair cut... and headed back home.

A few minutes after leaving, the lady barber (barberette?) sent him a short video that a neighbor had just sent her, telling her, “Go outside and look up!”  She did – and there was a funnel cloud directly over her house!

Several roads to our north would soon get shut down because of flooding from area creeks.

Larry’s truck has been needing new tires.  The tires have been ordered and were in fact waiting for him at Bill’s Tire, but Larry was trying, trying to make the old tires last 30,000 miles, and he was getting close.  He’s been driving that truck for almost a year now.  Each tire – each tire! – costs $1,300.  And there are six of them.

However, with all this rain we’ve been getting recently, Larry had two occasions where his truck hydroplaned a bit.  The second time it happened was Friday, and the pup started doing some scary shenanigans back there, too.  Larry held the wheel steady and coasted, then carefully gave the truck some throttle as soon as it had cleared the water on the road, and it pulled out of it all right.  But he decided it just might be prudent to get those new tires put on sooner rather than later.

By 4:00 in the afternoon, the mending and hemming was done, except for a couple of pairs of jeans Larry needed me to hem – but he’d neglected to mark them.  “Oh, just cut off a couple of inches or so,” he said carelessly.

Nope, nope, and nope.  He knows I refuse to hem pants without knowing exactly where to hem them!  If my husband goes around in jeans that drag on the ground, guess who gets the blame?  And if my husband goes around in jeans that hit him at the calf, guess who gets the blame?!  So nope.  NOPE.  He has to put them on and either mark them himself or let me do it.  Those are Ze Roolz.

I was just getting started on Maisie’s ‘You Are Loved’ quilt, when there was a really bright flash of lightning, followed immediately by one of the loudest crashes of thunder I’ve heard in a long time.  The hotspots on both of my tablets, my phone, and Larry’s phone, which I use to connect my laptops to the Internet, didn’t work worth a hoot the rest of the day.  Perhaps lightning messed up a Verizon tower nearby?

I suddenly remembered another job I needed to do:  I needed to cut and hem the sleeves on the new Van Heusen dress shirt we were going to give Kurt for his 27^th birthday Saturday.  I dashed downstairs to my gift-wrapping room, grabbed the shirt and a birthday card, and scurried back upstairs to my sewing room, snagging one of Larry’s shirts as I passed our room on the main floor in order to use its sleeves as a guide.

It took a whole lot longer to refold that shirt around the cardboard and tissue paper and get all the little pins put back in the proper place than it had to cut and hem and press the sleeves.  😏

When I went downstairs, I discovered that it was all wet in the storage area under the front porch.  I duly reported the matter to Larry; so when he got home a little later, he vacuumed it up with his shop vac.

Despite available puddles everywhere, there was a lineup of birds at the birdbath.  Robins are not at all inclined to share the water, not even with other robins.  Maybe especially with other robins.

If it doesn’t rain, I put a couple of gallons in it each day.  I need to wash it.

“Mine gets so dirty, too!” agreed Hester.  “The kids like to dip things in it, too, 😆” she added.

With Kurt’s dress shirt safely in a gift bag, and a pocketknife added to it for good measure, I got back to Baby Maisie’s ‘You Are Loved’ quilt.  That’s the name of this panel designed by Dawn Rosengren for Henry Glass Fabrics.  After measuring the panel and considering the coordinating fabrics I had, I settled on Feathered Stars to go with it, and found one in EQ8.  I made it the size I needed and printed it on newsprint to use as foundation paper since, once again and as usual, it was an odd size that couldn’t easily be rotary cut.  So I’m paper-piecing it.  One is done, and there are nine more to go.

On this quilt, I’m using the only two large pieces of white fabric I have.  Next time I need white on white (or cream on white, for that matter), I’m going to buy a bolt of it.  I still have quite a few small scraps, but probably not enough for a whole quilt, even if I make it scrappy (all different prints).

If I would figure up how many quilts I’ve used these cream-on-whites and white-on-whites on, I could make an estimate as to how much it decreases the cost of the cream and white New York Beauty quilt.  I purchased the fabrics from Marshall Dry Goods in 2018 for the New York Beauty.  

Okay, I looked back to see what I got.  Here it is:  28 one-yard pieces of cream-on-white, 25 one-yard pieces of white-on-white, and four other one-yard pieces that didn’t quite fit in either category.  Wow.  57 yards of whites and creams.  No wonder it has taken so long to use it all up!

I have this ritual I go through nearly every time I start a new quilt.  (Well, it’s not supposed to be a ritual, but it sure seems like it.)  I happily finish cutting... sit down at my sewing machine... pick up the first two pieces...  

--- and proceed to sew right side to wrong side.

I pull out one of my cute little seam rippers, take it apart, resew – the same right side to the same wrong side, more’n likely.

Aaarrrggghhh!  How long have I been sewing?!  I used to do the same thing when making clothes for the family.  Guess I just can’t stop tradition!  🤣

This is my favorite part of a quilt:  the beginning (other than the abovementioned ‘ritual’).  (Well, after the ending, that is.)  (Actually, I like all parts of quilting.)

At 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning, I got a call from Prairie Meadows saying they were sending Loren to the hospital via ambulance for severe stomach pain.  

The doctor at the hospital called a couple of hours later to tell me that an abdominal ultrasound had shown that Loren had gallstones, but he had been given something for pain, and was sleeping.  However, the scan had also shown spots on his spine that could possibly be metastasized cancer.  He said they would make some doctor appointments for him to decide what to do next week.

They took him back to Prairie Meadows at about 6:00 a.m., and someone called to tell me he was resting and doing all right.  If it is cancer, they’ll probably want to do all kinds of procedures.  Loren would not want that.  

Later that morning, Larry was again working on his coworker’s pickup at the house next to Hester and Andrew’s.  Keira and Oliver came out to see him, and they began picking some clematis to give him.  He thanked them profusely, which made them so happy, they scurried back to the clematis bush to get a few for Grandpa to take home to Grandma – and then they gave him a couple of big strawberries, one for him, and one for me.

Amazingly, he got the flowers home before they wilted (and he didn’t forget himself and eat my strawberry, either).  Only one clematis blossom had a stem, so I snipped it off and then laid all the blossoms in water on a saucer.  After arranging them just so-so, I took a picture and sent it to Hester, requesting, “Tell Keira and Oliver thank you for the clematis!  They’re pretty!  And thank you for the strawberry!  It’s huge... and it was scrumptious.  <<slurp munch dribble>>”

“I can’t believe how big the clematis has gotten!” said Hester, sending me a picture of her bush, which sports burgundies, pinks, lavenders, and whites.

“Wow!” I said.  “No wonder you didn’t mind if they picked blossoms.  😆  Now I’m suffering from a serious case of Clematis Envy.  Mine are pretty, but the bush looks anemic, in comparison to yours.”

They say clematis like ‘cool feet, warm head’, and if the ground is soggy, the roots will rot – which I found out, to my consternation, when I put newspaper and mulch in the flowerbed, and then watered the livin’ daylights out of it.

This is from the Missouri Botanical Garden:  “The key to growing healthy clematis is to see that they have hot heads and cool feet.  That is, the vines and foliage should be in the sun and the root areas should be shaded so that they are cooler.  Provide shade for the roots by planting clematis on the shady side of a boulder, wall or other object.”

“Do you still have a Bleeding Heart plant?” asked Hester.

“No,” I told her, “it croaked some years ago.  They like shade, and one of the trees that shaded it died.  The Bleeding Heart didn’t appreciate the hot sun every day, all day.”

This picture is from April of 2005.

When Joanna was wee little, she’d ask Hannah, “Can we go see Grandma Jackson and her Bleeding Heart?” 😄

Bethany, her other grandmother, upon learning how she liked Bleeding Heart flowers, made Joanna a dress for Easter, and embroidered those flowers on the bodice.  Joanna was so delighted.

Hester described other plants and flowers in her yard.  “Sometimes I’m not sure if I’m allowing giant weeds to grow or if it’s a plant like I think,” said Hester.

I told her about the time, back when we lived in town, when I was nurturing an Asiatic lily, and my brother-in-law John H., who lived next door, came along and asked, “Why are you growing a cornstalk in the middle of your flower garden?”

I protested, “That’s an Asiatic lily!”

He got that familiar droll look on his face and said, “Sarah Lynn, I’m a farmboy from Colorado.  I know what a cornstalk is.”

Then he carefully dug it up with his pocketknife (his pocketknife!), and showed me the corn at the bottom of the stalk.

So I said, and I quote, “Oh.”

Yesterday something reminded me of the time Larry’s sister Rhonda and I were in our high school P.E. class, and it wasn’t nice enough to go outside, so we were playing whiffleball in the big gymnasium. 

Rhonda came up to bat.

She got a one-handed grip on the plastic bat, tapped it a couple of times on home plate, lifted it, got into the stance, and looked at the pitcher.

The pitcher, mistaking Rhonda for a ‘normal’ high-school girl, gave the plastic ball a nice, gentle lob.

WHACK!!!  Rhonda hit it. 

She also inadvertently let go of the bat.

All eyes tracked the bat as it spun, fast and faster, high and higher, YING YING YING YING YING, until it smacked into a heat duct in the steel rafters, high above our heads, CLANG-ANG-ANG-ANG-ANG. 

Dust – and the plastic bat – came raining down on our heads.

We entirely lost track of the ball, while Rhonda jogged imperviously around the bases and back to home plate.

The girls stared, wide-eyed.

What had they expected?  Rhonda had proven in Jr. High that she could hit a softball completely out of the ballfield and into the distant residential areas surrounding the school!  (That ball was lost.  If any windows were shattered, we did not hear about it.)

Everyone regathered their wits, found another ball (the first one had probably landed irretrievably in the folded-up bleachers), and got on with the game.

And then it was Rhonda’s turn at the bat again.

As before, she gripped the bat, stepped from one foot to the other, tapped the plate, lifted the bat, bent her knees, looked out at the pitcher -----

And discovered that every last girl in the outfield, including the pitcher, were down on elbows and knees with their forearms up over their heads, fingers locked protectively around their hapless pates.

Rhonda laughed so hard she sat right down on the floor. 

Our P.E. teacher laughed ’til she cried.  And she had previously been called ‘crabby’!  Rhonda got her over it.  Or proved she wasn’t in the first place.

I sent this story to Rhonda, telling her, “They should’ve hired you to keep the dust off those heat ducts!  Cheaper, and safer for the custodian.  Quicker, too.”

I added another story, for good measure:  “Remember the time we were walking out to the field to play golf, each of us carrying a club, and we wound up right behind Mrs. Weiser, our P.E. teacher, and you kept sticking the head of your club under her heel and lifting gently just as she took a step, making her do a high-step now and then?  She kept looking down at the ground like she thought something down there was causing it — and then she realized it was YOU.  She got a grip on your collar with both hands and shook it a bit, saying, ‘Rhonda Jackson!’  And you said, ‘Hee hee hee hee hee!’  So much for bawling you out.”

Rhonda laughed, “I’m still a bit ornery like that.”

Here are Rhonda and I when we were juniors in high school.  Larry carried it around in his wallet for years, and damaged it.

That afternoon, Larry went with me to Omaha to see Loren.  With Larry driving, and coming in from the west, I was finally able to see a whole lot more of the devastation from that April 26  tornado.  So many houses, reduced to nothing but rubble.  Over 160 homes were demolished.

We stopped at Dillon Brothers Motor Sports first so Larry could get a tire for his motorcycle, then went on to Prairie Meadows.  This old Ford pulled into the parking lot while we were there.

We found Loren in the TV lounge in a big easy chair, sleeping.  We roused him with difficulty.  Larry tried and failed, so I tried, and awoke him.  He had his Walker cap pulled low over his eyes, so that he saw me, but not Larry.

“Look who I brought with me!” I said, pointing at Larry.

Loren looked, then grinned happily, saying, “Oh!  I didn’t know you were coming, too!”

We only stayed about half an hour, because he couldn’t stay awake.  Maybe he was exhausted from his overnight ordeal, or maybe the pain medicine was putting him to sleep; likely both.  I thought it was best if we let him rest before time for his dinner, so we bid him adieu and departed.

We went to Cracker Barrel to eat supper.  I got a grilled chicken BLT with maple sauce, with fried apples for the side dish, and Twinings tea with lemon slices to drink.  Larry got grilled trout, steamed broccoli, fried apples, biscuits, and beef tips.  They forgot the beef tips until he asked – and so he got them free.

Afterwards, we went to Cabela’s to make use of some of the gift cards the kids have given us.  We managed to spend a little more than half of what the cards are worth, buying Jalapeño Cheddar and Bacon Cheddar biscuit mixes, Broccoli Cheddar and Creamy Potato soup mixes, chocolate-covered raisins, chocolate-walnut fudge, chocolate-covered peanuts, Wild Huckleberry preserves, Apple Butter, two packs of six Under Armour no-show socks (for me, and I would’ve only gotten one pack, but I complained because no one set of six had all the colors I wanted, so Larry tossed both packs into the cart), and Apples & Pumpkins and Citrus Grove wax melts.  And just that used up over $80 of our gift cards.  Good grief. 

I found several soft, soft jackets I liked, but even on sale, each of them was nearly $200!  Yikes.  I don’t need a $200 jacket.  I don’t need another jacket at all.

I like seeing all the taxidermy mounts, and walking through the aquarium.  I think this fish is singing, “♫ ♪ Oh, nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, ♪ ♫ ... ♪ ♫  Glory, Hallelujah! ♫ ♪”  Don’t you?

Heading back north, we thought we’d take a look at that floating trail at Standing Bear Lake, though the sun had set and it was getting dark.  I always think, Rats, it’s too dark for pictures.  Larry always thinks, Ugh, the mosquitoes will be out in force.

Since he would not be wanting to walk the trail, we took our time working our way through the city, and wound up in some pretty neighborhoods we’ve never seen before.  There were tall trees of all varieties, and big, beautiful homes tucked into the hills.  Someone had a campfire going, and between that and the smell of the cedars, the balsam firs, the pines, and the lindens, along with the hills, it was reminiscent of the mountains of Colorado.

These are the explorations I enjoy doing and seldom do when I’m alone.  For one thing, it’s a lot more fun with Larry; for another, it’s hard to take pictures of residential areas on curvy, hilly streets while driving.

Eventually, we got back to Standing Bear Lake, and drove along the southern side of it.  I would’ve walked that floating trail, but not Larry, because... mosquitoes.  I might get one or two bites, if by myself; none, if with Larry, since all the hungry insects leave me alone and zero in on him.  He might get one or two thousand bites.

We stopped at a Dairy Queen in Elkhorn for Royal New York Cheesecake Blizzards before heading toward home, and soon we were no longer pleasantly full from our nice meal at Cracker Barrel; we were overly stuffed.  Ugh, why do we do that?!  I gained a pound and a half.  (I have since lost it, after being very careful what I ate, both yesterday and today.  🙄)

I got a call from Prairie Meadows on the way to church yesterday morning, and they told me they were again sending Loren to the hospital because of stomach pain.  They promised to let me know any news about him as soon as they knew anything.

After the morning service, we went to the cemetery and gathered up our flowers.

It was not until we were at our evening service that I received a voicemail telling me that Loren had been returned to Prairie Meadows around 4:00 p.m., as the ‘pain from constipation had abated’.  Constipation?  Not gallstones?  Or maybe both?  If constipation, it’s something he’s had trouble with for years.  Not as much, when I was taking him a meal with vegetables and fruit every day.  He prefers sweets, lots of bread products, and less fruits and vegetables.

Late last night, we had a little bit of rain and rumbling thunder, nothing serious.  However, there was a tornado near Seward, about 50 miles to the east.  Sirens were going off in many of the small towns in that area.

There’s a recently-fledged house finch on the silo feeder.  Below is a male English sparrow.

The Old-Fashioned roses are about to bloom.  I have several of these bushes around my house.  They came from a root I found at my mother’s place in 2003, after the house had been hauled away.  I knew it was where a flowerbed had been, so I took it home, cut it into three pieces, and put them each into the ground.  I was so delighted when spring arrived and dark red leaves popped up!  I knew exactly what it was:  the Old-Fashioned roses.

My mother started hers with clippings from my Grandma Winings’ bush in North Dakota.  Mama cut them, wrapped them in wet paper towels and put them into a plastic bag, brought them home to Nebraska and planted them, and they grew and blossomed every year since the early 1960s.

From my three bushes from that one large root, I have divided and transplanted, and now have five Old-Fashioned rosebushes around the yard.

The Wild Prairie roses are in bloom, and the yellow irises keep putting on new blossoms.

Here’s a male house finch, keeping watch on a couple of young’ns at the feeder.  They are learning to crack open black-oil sunflower seeds, but continue to beg for food from Papa Finch – and he gives in and feeds them at regular intervals.

It’s a pretty day today.  It rained overnight, and everything was still all wet this morning, so I didn’t bother to go out and do any weeding, even though it’s a whole lot easier to pull weeds when the ground is wet. 

The truth is, I’m glad when it rains in the mornings, so I have an excellent excuse for not going out and weeding.  Don’t tell anybody.

I did manage to transplant some hostas a few days ago, and they and the peonies and daylilies I transplanted a couple of years ago are doing quite well.

Here’s a Small Blue (Cupido minimus) butterfly on a dandelion.

I sent Lydia a picture of the Dipladenia she and her family gave me for Mother’s Day, telling her, “The Dipladenia you gave me is blooming like everything – both the red and the white blossoms.”

“They’re so pretty!” she wrote back.  “You need a little American flag to stick in the pot, too. 🤩”

“I do!” I agreed.  “I should’ve stolen one from the cemetery.”  😆

The buds on the Old-Fashioned rosebush have blossomed now.  They smell so good.  Maybe I’ll cut a few stems and put a bouquet on the table.

Bedtime!  Tomorrow before I get back to Maisie’s quilt, I need to order photos to put in the wooden-covered album my mother started when Loren was a baby.  I have all the black photo-safe pages cut to the right size, and the holes punched.  It needs to be done.

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