Journal: Hanging Gardens, & The Trouble with Trucks

 

It didn’t cool off much overnight last Monday night/Tuesday morning, and I awoke early, hot.  I went to turn the AC down – and it wouldn’t come on.  The thermostat looked like it was working, except the little light behind the display was not on.  I turned it off and back on... checked breakers... pushed the reset button on the outside unit... nothing.  So I called the repairman, and was put in the queue.  He was running behind, as he was swamped with calls; but he hoped to be here by late afternoon or the next morning.

There’s a little window AC in the upstairs landing, and I use a fan to direct it into the sewing room; so it wouldn’t be too bad up there.  It was only supposed to get up to 85° that day, but it was humid and muggy.  Could be worse, that’s for sure!  😏  Still, I like to be just right.

I was surprised when the repairman called at 10:30 a.m. to say he could come immediately, if that would work.  Yes, yes, that would work!  He was here within 15 minutes.  ‘Late afternoon’ had arrived sooner than anticipated.  

A couple of minutes after 11:00 a.m., the AC came on.  Yay, that was fast!

The man said that the transformer had ‘broken’ (whatever that means), and he had replaced it.

The spring ‘miller moths’ (from army cutworms) migrated through our area a couple of weeks ago, as usual.  The kingbirds – we are at a location where the Eastern and the Western kingbirds overlap – love those moths.  So do the barn swallows.  Here’s an Eastern kingbird; we see more of them than we do of the Westerns. 

Let’s count up the birds we see around our house these days:

1.              Eastern kingbird

2.              Western kingbird

3.              English sparrow

4.              House finch

5.              American goldfinch

6.              American robin

7.              Common grackle

8.              Starling

9.              Mourning dove

10.           Eurasian collared dove

11.           Blue jay

12.           Downy woodpecker

13.           Hairy woodpecker

14.           House wren

15.           Chipping sparrow

16.           Barn swallow

17.           Brown thrasher

18.           Cooper’s hawk

19.           Red-tailed hawk

20.           Bald eagle

21.           Great blue heron

22.           Mallard

23.           Canada goose

24.           Baltimore oriole

25.           Orchard oriole

26.           White-crowned sparrow

27.           Harris’ sparrow

28.           Rose-breasted grosbeak

29.           Dickcissel

30.           Eastern meadowlark

31.           Western meadowlark

32.           Bobwhite quail

33.           Kestrel

34.           Yellow-rumped warbler

 

The Eastern and Western meadowlarks also overlap in our area.  They look nearly identical; the only way I can distinguish one from another is by their song.  The two species hybridize only very rarely.  Mixed pairs usually occur only at the edge of the range where few mates are available.  Captive breeding experiments found that hybrid meadowlarks were fertile, but produced few eggs that hatched.

Sometimes we see and hear catbirds and mockingbirds, but I haven’t lately.  Nor have I seen any hummingbirds for a couple of years.  I don’t even put up the feeder, as I just have to clean it again days later, and the water level hasn’t fallen in the slightest.

There are other birds I hear and cannot identify; some are probably song sparrows, grasshopper sparrows, rose-breasted grosbeaks, phoebes, etc.

That day, I got granddaughter Maisie’s “You Are Loved” quilt bound and labeled.  The quilt measures 56” x 55”.  I used Quilters’ Dream wool batting, 40-wt. Natural White Omni thread on top, and 60-wt. Cream Bottom Line thread in the bobbin.  The fabric is from Dawn Rosenberg’s “You Are Loved” line for Henry Glass fabrics.  I used no pattern, except for the paper-pieced sawtooth stars, which came from EQ8. 

Shortly before 2:00 that afternoon, it started raining hard.  I went running downstairs to scoot the table and quilt rack away from the wall where it sometimes leaks (either the fault of the unfinished metal roof or the upstairs French windows) – and nearly put my bare foot on a bat that was hanging from the edge of one of the stairsteps.  I ran in place in midair for a while, propelled myself to the side before landing, ran on down the stairs to grab a weapon (tennis racket), put it out of its misery (the bat, not the racket), threw it out the front door (the bat, not the racket), getting rained on in the process; and then stood there wondering what on earth I’d run down the stairs for in the first place.  ( I did remember.)

Wednesday, I made the fabric book, “You Are Loved”, that coordinates with Maisie’s quilt.  The pages have Quilters’ Dream wool in them.

That done, I started ‘de-boning’, as quilter Bonnie Hunter calls it (cutting fabric from seams), the clothes Hannah’s sister-in-law Esther gave me, clothes her mother Bethany made her when she was young.  Bethany, a good friend of mine, passed away last year, and I offered to make Esther a quilt from Bethany’s fabrics or any of the clothes she’d made. 

Thursday, some quilting friends and I were discussing things we had lost while sewing or quilting.  I told my stories:

I was doing some hand-sewing one evening several years ago as we visited with Larry’s parents.  I poured everyone a fresh cup of coffee, returned to my chair and my sewing – but my needle had gone AWOL.

Where was it??  I looked everywhere I could think of, but no needle materialized.  I trotted up to my sewing room, got another needle, and finished my sewing.

We visited... sipped our coffee...

And then the needle made its appearance.  It was in the bottom of my coffee cup.

No, I don’t know how it got there.

My mother-in-law exclaimed, “Oh!!  That could’ve been bad!” – but she couldn’t quit laughing.  For a good while after that, if anyone lost anything, she’d ask, “Did you look in the bottom of Sarah Lynn’s coffee cup?”

Her son is a lot like her.  😉

Another lost-and-found sewing story, this time regarding an Oxmoor House point turner I was using to turn these blocks – ‘Monthly Hangups’, below – right side out.  I was hand-stitching the openings shut as I went along.

I sewed another block... turned it... reached for the point turner...

It was gone.

I looked high and low, and then I looked low and high.  I looked in the trash can.  I looked under my sewing machine.  I looked under my laptop.  I looked in the other sewing room.  I looked in my pockets.  I gave up and went for my other point turner, which isn’t quite as pointy.

Flash forward:

I finished stitching shut the hole on hanging block #6, reached over to lay it on the stack – Uh, wuzzis?  There was somethin’ sorta hard and plasticky inside that thing.  ?

Oh.  Yes.  Quite so.  (In a Winnie-the-Pooh tone.)

So I ripped it back open and extracted my Oxmoor House point turner.

Last but not least, there was the time I put a Mariner’s Compass block on my head (because it had turned out pointed in the middle) and took a picture to entertain the grandchildren.

A bit later, after trotting upstairs to warm my coffee, and coming back down to finish the compass blocks, one was missing.  I hunted all around and under my sewing table... went back upstairs to see if I'd left it up there... and then spotted myself in a mirror.

Yeah, it was still on my head.  Luckily, no one had come to the door in that span of time.

That morning, Hester sent a picture of Keira and Oliver having lunch with her, and in the middle of the table is the clear glass Teabloom pot we gave her for her birthday a couple of weeks ago, with a blooming flower in the middle.  “We made the peach tea today, it tastes really, really good!” she wrote.  “And everyone had a great time watching it bloom.”

Not long later, Victoria sent pictures of Carolyn, Violet, and Baby Arnold.

They’re such funny little girls.  They were laughing because their Mama was making funny faces at them.

“Did the alligators get one kid?” I wrote back to Victoria, seeing as how Willie was missing.

A couple of hours later, she sent a picture of Willie, who had been taking a nap earlier.

By late afternoon, one dress and jacket was entirely ‘deboned’.  The good thing about doing this with dresses Bethany made is that she loved extremely full, ruffled skirts, underskirts, very puffy sleeves and undersleeves.  So I wind up with quite a lot of fabric from just one dress – in fact, I got three full yards out of one skirt alone.  As I cut, I switched back and forth from spring-loaded, rubber-handled Fiskars to rubber-handled Mundials, and still my hands got very tired from all that cutting, often through thick seams.  

Before starting on the second dress, I paused to sip coffee and look out the windows at the yard and back deck, where finches, sparrows, cardinals, blue jays, and downy woodpeckers vied for a place on the feeders.  A cottontail rabbit sat and groomed his face and long ears on the bottom step of the porch.  A couple of young squirrels were playing under the Blue spruce trees, and innumerable other birds flitted about in the spruces and Douglas firs and cottonwoods.

After the second dress was cut apart, I took some time out for supper, and then I hunted through my own fabrics for anything that might coordinate with the fabrics from Esther.  After gathering what I thought was enough fabric, I arranged them in the order I planned to sew them, and cut some of the longer strips.

Friday morning, I awoke at 5:45 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep, despite having only slept four hours.  I finally gave up a little after 7 and just got up.  After checking the outside temperature, I went out to rehang the bird feeders and to see if 74° plus high humidity would make it unpleasant for weeding the gardens. 

It would.  (Not that I consider weeding particularly pleasant in the first place.) 

So I showered, curled my hair, ate breakfast, and got back to cutting the fabric for the Hanging Gardens quilt.

Levi sent me pictures that day from their explorations in Colorado.  A number of his shots showed clouds covering the mountaintops.

“I saw on radar that you were probably getting a rainstorm yesterday,” I commented.  “Did it last long?  Tornado Headquarters said there was a severe thunderstorm in that area.”

“It stopped about the time we got off the train,” he told me.  “We were WET.”

“I always think that’s so neat,” I remarked, “when the clouds are right down on the mountaintops.  I remember how your Mama (that’s Hannah), when she was about 3 or 4, was so delighted when we drove into fog on some mountain road somewhere, and I said, ‘Look!  We’re driving right into a cloud!’”

He then sent pictures of Piedmont Falls.  There’s Aaron (above), and here are Joanna and Aaron.

“Aaron and I climbed up and over rocks in this river to get good angles on the waterfall,” he said.

I’ve never seen that waterfall before, as it takes a somewhat lengthy drive on gravel roads north of Wolf Creek Pass to get to it.  It’s flowing strongly because of all the snow.

“The gravel road was deliciously back-jolting,” he told me, in his usual funny way of describing things.  “Plus a half-mile hike,” he added.  “Mama’s group took 30 minutes longer to get there than we four kids did, and so we managed to climb every rock in the vicinity.”

“That makes me think of the trips I took with my parents,” I told him.  “They’d go in the camper and take a nap, and I’d go exploring farther than they would’ve ever dreamed.  Their hair would’ve stood up on end, had they known of all my excursions.”  ((...pause...))  “Or maybe they knew more than I thought they did, and that’s why they let me get a dog when I was 12.”

“My parents’ hair did stand on end, when they saw my rock-scrambling shenanigans,” laughed Levi.  “I did slip and get covered in algae once, though.”

This is the fabric I’m using for the Hanging Gardens quilt.  I switched the photo to black and white to make sure I had placed the fabric according to color value, from dark to light.

After 12 or 13 hours of cutting, the colored fabric was all cut.  I needed to buy some background fabric, though; I didn’t have enough.

Saturday, I went to visit Loren.  He was better than he’s been for a month.  They’ve been giving him physical therapy and Ensure Nutrition Shakes, and it has made a definite improvement.  He was sitting on a loveseat in one of the wide hallways toward the back of the home, and a man in a wheelchair, who I’ve not seen before, was stopped there and talking with Loren.  The man is doubtless a new resident of the home, and he can still carry on a fairly normal conversation. 

Loren saw me coming, grinned happily, and told the man, “Oh!!  My little sister is here!”

The man greeted me, chatted for a couple of minutes, and then said, “Well, I’m sure you two want to have a visit without me monopolizing the conversation, so I’ll see you later!”  With a friendly wave, he was off – and he was pretty good at propelling and guiding his wheelchair.

That sentence alone tells me he has not been suffering from memory loss too awfully long – though Alzheimer's progresses slower than most other dementias.

A lady came along in her wheelchair.  She has only been using the wheelchair for three or four months, and she doesn’t know how to roll the wheels with her hands.  She proceeds down the hallways by leaning forward and then back, like a child on a swing, and sometimes she uses her feet to ‘walk’ the chair forward in small increments.  It’s a slow process, moving only inches at a time.  She stopped and looked at the magazines and the newspaper I had brought for Loren.

“No one ever –” she waved a hand at the magazines, looking sad. 

She was trying to say that no one ever brings her magazines, but she couldn’t think of all the words she needed to finish her sentence.

I held out one of the National Geographics.  “Would you like to look at this one?”

She started to reach for it, then drew her hand back, staring at the cover.  “I don’t...”

Oops.  It was a picture of an Ethiopian person with white clay or chalk smeared thickly all over his face, purportedly to ward off evil spirits.  (I think it probably wards off good spirits, too.  heh)

I laughed.  “Oh, that’s kind of scary looking, isn’t it?!  Here, this one has pretty pictures of house interiors.”  I handed her one entitled ‘Omaha Homes’, opening one of the pages and showing her a pretty kitchen.  I somehow got signed up for magazines and brochures from Omaha; maybe it happened when I entered a drawing for something, but I’ve long forgotten what that might have been.

The lady smiled and took it.  “Thank you!”  She traced a finger over the cabinetry and said, “My brother does this!  I’ll show him.”  (Opens cupboards?  Paints cabinets?  Installs kitchens?)  She went a short ways down the hall, somehow managed to turn her chair around by using her feet on the floor, and then got a front wheel turned sideways and stuck against the baseboard, so that she couldn’t move either direction. 

I hurried to help her.  “Shall I move you away from the wall?” I asked, grasping the handles.

She didn’t really understand what I said, and every move I tried to make with the chair was met with an equal and opposite movement of hers, which only succeeded in getting her more thoroughly wedged against the wall.

She was bigger than me, but I was more determined.  I paused, waited until she lifted her feet, the better to push on the floor again, and then quickly pulled her backwards and away from the wall.  “There you go!” I said.  “You’re loose!”

She gave me a big smile, and thanked me two or three times.

I might often relate some of the funnier things that happen there at Prairie Meadows, but I do hope you understand that, in my heart, I have ever so much sympathy for those people.

I turned back to the loveseat where I’d been sitting with Loren, and he was smiling at me.  One time a while back when something similar happened, he managed to think of the words, and said, “It’s so good that you were able to help her!”

I know from the nurses and sometimes from other visitors that when Loren is able, he often helps other residents, and sometimes even the nurses.  But he has been having a hard time standing up from a seated position for several months now.

After leaving Prairie Meadows, I stopped at Hobby Lobby and got five yards of 108”-wide white-on-white fabric for the background of the Hanging Gardens quilt.  It was only $7.99 a yard, and very nice quality fabric.

When I got home, I cut all the background pieces, then sewed together all the light and dark squares for the tops of the ‘gardens’.  I put two sets of doubles together to make a couple of four-patches... and that was enough for the day.  

I used up two full yards of that 108”-wide white-on-white fabric (that’s the equivalent of about 4 ½ yards of 44”-wide fabric), cutting 476 pieces. 

And... I didn’t even sew right side to wrong side once!  😄

I cut one layer at a time of the checked fabric, in order to get the lines straight.  I really dislike it when checks or plaids are not straight.

A quilting friend asked me if I have an AccuQuilt GO! fabric cutter.  I do not.  I’ve looked at them, and thought about it; but I so very rarely make anything the same, and often my quilt pieces are such odd sizes, AccuQuilt GO! would not have a die in that size.  So I don’t think it would do me all that much good.  I did put a new blade on my rotary cutter, though, and that helped immensely with all that cutting.  I use a June Tailor slot cutter.  I have 12” x 12” and 12” x 18” rulers.

When I got home, Larry had Walkers’ boom truck in the lane, picking up a big air compressor that he had sold to someone.  He drove it to town, met the man, and transferred the compressor to his vehicle.  Then he called Pizza Hut, ordered a taco pizza, picked it up (no, he didn’t drive the boom truck through the pickup lane; the BMW was at the shop), and brought supper home.

Yummy, I really like Pizza Hut’s taco pizza.

Sunday, a missionary from Mexico City, Tom Montgomery, visited, preaching both morning and evening services.  He and his wife (who sat behind us, and sang so very beautifully during our song service) are heading back to Mexico in the next couple of days.  It’s a dangerous trip, what with all the drug cartels and criminals running rampant through the country.

I have usually felt safe here where I live, but a couple in their early 70s, traveling from Missouri to California in their motorhome with a Jeep hitched on behind, were attacked last week at a rest area about 65 miles south of us on I80 – a rest area where we have often stopped.  The man died.  The woman was in critical condition but is recovering.  A 22-year-old from Ohio had tried to steal their Jeep, going right into their motorhome, demanding the keys, and stabbing them.  Horrible.

Sunday was a pretty day, not a cloud in the sky; but it was already 69° at 7:30 a.m.  The high would be 90°.

Last night after church, we picked up a grocery order at Wal-Mart, then came home and finished the previous night’s taco pizza.

Larry left this morning a little after 3:30 a.m. to go to Kansas to pick up some things he bought on Purple Wave Auction:  snowplow metal wear blades, forks for a lift, and buckets for a skid loader.  He wanted to be to the first pick-up place by 9 a.m., and it takes six hours to get there, and he was driving the Kodiak truck with the bad steering.  Yikes.  The part he’d gotten with which to fix the steering didn’t fit.  He was able to tighten up a main bolt, and that helped.

At 11:30 a.m., it was 88°, with a heat index of 95° and an expected high of 96°.  We were issued a heat advisory, as heat indices would rise to about 107°.

I shined up one of the bathrooms, filled bird feeders, washed out and refilled the birdbaths, and set up a sprinkler on one of the flower gardens.

The hibiscus has blooms all over it.  Isn’t it pretty?

It has been exactly three years since I ruptured a disc in my back trying to pull a small sapling out of the earth.  In case you’ve forgotten the story, here it is from my journal of three years ago:

Last Monday morning (June 21, 2021), I had just gone outside and started weeding... found a big weed/small sapling, pulled at it... it was coming... it was coming... I thought, I really should go on around to the garage and get the clippers I was heading for in the first place...  But it was coming!  And one should always go for the roots, right??

And then there was a very loud POP!!! in my back, and I knew, This is not good.  I sat down fast, just in case ... then eventually decided, like Piglet and the burst balloon, Well, even if I AM on the moon, I needn’t lie face downwards all the while, and got up.  With difficulty.  The weeding was over before it began.  They’ll grow tall, healthy, and happy before I recover, I imagine.

Anyway, I don’t have to crank the air conditioner down so low, what with all this going around with cold gel packs fastened to my back with elastic bands these days.  My daughters have been helping take meals to my brother, thankfully.

At least I can stand at my quilting machine!  I move carefully, exchange gel packs often, and try not to bend over.  Whose wise idea was it to store my Red Snappers on the floor?!

,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Surely I’m Getting Better Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,

 

P.S.:  I will not pull up sequoias.  I will not pull up sequoias.  I will not pull up sequoias.  I will not pull up sequoias.  I will not pull up sequoias.  I will not pull up sequoias.

 

I’ve recovered, but can still pick out the spot of the injury now and again.  I tell you, gardening can be dangerous! – at least, for the likes of me, it can.  I once broke a rib, because in trying to use the long-handled loppers on a thick branch, I couldn’t seem to get enough leverage, so I stupidly rested one handle against my side and pulled on the other handle with both hands – all while thinking, This isn’t a good idea.

But I’m a Swiney, which, translated, means ‘determined’, you know.  (Some people say ‘stubborn’.  I prefer ‘determined’.)  

All of the sudden, something said BANG! on my side, and knocked the wind out of me.  (But I did get the branch lopped off, heh.)

By 2:00 p.m., it was 96°, with a heat index of 102°.  It felt quite stifling when I went out to readjust the sprinkler on the flower gardens, and to water the flowers on the porch.  The birds were enjoying the refreshed birdbaths.

After cleaning the kitchen, I headed to Wal-Mart to get a tool set for grandson Jacob, who turns 15 today.  Larry started this year off by getting grandson Grant some tools – so, in order to be fair, we’re getting the rest of the grandsons who are Grant’s age and older tools for their birthdays, too.

I dropped off some stuff at Goodwill on my way.  At Wal-Mart, I also got a feeder that I think will work just fine for nyjer seed.  The last few had too small of holes for the birds to get the seeds out of.  Larry helped me make bigger holes in the screening on a couple of them.  The feeder that holds five pounds of seed worked all right for a while, but then seed got wet and mildewed, and I can’t get it out of the very bottom – and the birds weren’t eating it, probably because of that mildew.  I don’t want to make them sick, in any case.  Plus, the thing was too heavy for me to lift and hang, when it was full.  Can you see the little rubber ‘flexports’ at the feeding holes?  That will help keep the small nyjer seed in, but allow the birds to eat just fine.

I bought a big green bow, stuck it to the plastic box the tools came in, and took it to Jacob before coming home.

Arriving home, I filled the new feeder with nyjer seed and hung it.  I haven’t seen any birds on it yet.  They usually assume new feeders are big, scary bird traps.

A little before 7:00 p.m., Larry called.  He was somewhere near Topeka loading the blades, but he had to quit and sit in the shade beside his truck for a while, because he got too hot, and he’d run out of water.  The people at the place where he’s picking up his things had already left, but he found a spigot on the building, filled his water bottle, drank some, and then poured some over his head and arms and down his back.  He was having some trouble loading the stuff, because as he was lifting a blade, something punctured part of the hydraulics on the small crane he has mounted on his flatbed, and now it will hardly lift anything.  He somehow rigged a strap to help the thing lift.  The blades are too heavy for him to just pick up himself.

He told me that this morning, he stopped at a truck stop, got out – and noticed diesel fuel all over the side of his truck.  A fuel filter had cracked.  Fortunately, there was enough fuel in the truck to get him to a parts house where he was able to buy a new filter and install it.  That put him a couple of hours behind.  So there are some forks and a bucket that he won’t be able to get on this trip.

At 10:30 p.m., he called again.  He’s at a truck stop about 70 miles east of Salina, Kansas.  He got some coolant for his AC, opened the hood and added the stuff, restarted the truck – and noticed that the fan was barely moving.

The serpentine belt on the motor had come off.  He was able to get a new belt, but that didn’t do much good, as a bolt that holds the tensioner had broken, and the tensioner is gone.  The batteries wouldn’t last long enough to get him to Salina, since they’d be powering the headlights (and there probably wouldn’t be any place open where he could get a tensioner anyway); so he’ll sleep in his cab until morning, then try to make it to Salina.

And no, of course he didn’t pack any extra clothes or anything.

Ah, well.  He no doubt needs to sleep, and I will not have to worry about him driving through the night, falling asleep, and crashing.

Tomorrow, I shall get back to the Hanging Gardens quilt.

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