Sarah Lynn's Nature's Splendor: October 2024

Last Tuesday, I cut apart the Vintage Airplane blocks (is there any fabric panel in the entire world that hasn’t been skewed in printing?!), and got quite a few pieces of the three-strip sashings sewn, and a little more than half of the nine-patch cornerstones.

That day, Victoria sent pictures of Willie and Arnold.

“They’re so cute,” I said. “Such bright little faces. ❤️”

“Arnold was alternating that with fussing for a nap,” Victoria remarked.

“Well,” I told her, “catch the good (and never the bad) on film (ha), and years from now, everyone (including Arnold himself) will think he never, ever fussed. 😅”

Wednesday, I filled the bird feeders, shined up the bathroom, and had a piece of Victoria’s yummy homemade sourdough bread, toasted, buttered, and with honey melting into it.

That afternoon, granddaughter Joanna sent a news article about a woman in Washington State who’d been feeding raccoons at her house for 35 years without trouble – but suddenly, about six weeks ago, she had a ‘raccoon invasion’. She called 911 after she couldn’t get inside her home because it was surrounded by raccoons ‘demanding food’.

“Somehow the word got out in Raccoon Land,” said McCarty, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office.

Deputies responded to the woman’s home and were startled by what they found: more than 100 raccoons.

“They were shocked,” McCarty said. “They had never seen that many raccoons in one place. Nobody ever remembers being surrounded by a swarm of raccoons.”

(‘Swarm’? Someone tell the man that a group of raccoons is called a ‘gaze’! If he had’ve ever surprised a group of raccoons before, he’d know why it’s called a ‘gaze’, too.)

The woman contacted a trapping organization to help her with the raccoon problem, but they wanted $500 per raccoon. Yikes.

“Maybe the homeowner should just buy a permit, a bazooka, and an instruction book on how to make coon hats,” I suggested.

Joanna immediately responded, “If they use a bazooka, they’ll need all 100 raccoons just to get one hat. 😳”

“That is a drawback,” I agreed, and then added, “When I was little, I thought ‘drawback’ meant ‘drawing backwards’, somehow.”

For my Winding Thread topic that day on my Quilt Talk group, I asked, “How long does cotton quilting fabric last?”

And because I know you want to know, the answer is...

There are many variables. As for unused fabric in a stash that is kept at moderate temperatures and not exposed to light, fabric will last decades – even 50, 60, 70 years. A lot depends on the dyes and the manufacturing process. At around 100 years, though, most fabric begins to experience some – or a lot of – deterioration. Antique quilts are generally kept in climate-controlled rooms, and visitors are often not allowed to use camera flashes when taking pictures, as even that can contribute to fabric degradation.

I think of this when I am looking at the fabric my late sister-in-law gave me back at Christmastime of 2013, just a few months before she passed away. Some of her fabric was years old by then. So far, it’s been fine.

There are a couple of ways to tell if fabric is beginning to deteriorate: 1) it will feel dusty or gritty to the touch; and 2) it tears too easily. Best to discard those fabrics. One wouldn’t want to go to all the time and effort of making a quilt with inferior fabrics, only to have it turn into confetti within a year or two!

This all makes for good arguments for ‘shopping’ one’s stash as much as possible, buying new only when necessary, and not getting an overabundance.

Okay, where are my sandals? This discussion made me want some new fabric! 😆

I sewed until time for our evening church service. When we got home, we had a late supper, and then I sewed for a few more hours. When I stopped, I was ready to start sewing all these pieces of the Vintage Airplane quilt together. This one will be for grandson Justin, who’s 12.

Thursday morning, Victoria sent a picture of her sandwich, writing, “Good old tomato/peanut butter.” Then she added, “I’ve never seen any food get as much ‘hate’ from people who won’t try it! 😂”

“Boring, scaredy-cat tastebudders!” said I.

“What’s so strange about it anyway?” Victoria went on. “It’s less odd than peanut butter and jelly, really! And who thought of that?”

Hee hee, that’s such a ‘Victoria’ thing to say.

I looked it up.

In 1901, the first peanut butter and jelly sandwich recipe appeared in the Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics written by Julia Davis Chandler. She said to use currant or crab-apple jelly and called the combination delicious and as far as she knew, original.

So now you know.

By then I was hungry for peanut butter and jelly, so I toasted a piece of the sourdough bread from Victoria, slathered it with gobs of butter, and then spread peach preserves on one side and apple jelly on the other.

That is, not top and bottom, but left and right.

I toasted it under the oven broiler on low, since it doesn’t fit in the toaster. According to Victoria, it ‘over-poofed’ that day because she was out picking up the girls from school about the time it needed to go into the oven.

That afternoon, I went to our LQS, Sew What, and purchased these fabrics for borders for the Vintage Airplanes quilt.

By midnight, I had the central section of the Vintage Airplane quilt together.

The Aurora Borealis put on quite a show that night across much of the United States – in fact, over much of the Northern Hemisphere. At the same time, The Aurora Australis lit up the skies of the Southern Hemisphere. At one point, our electricity went off for a few seconds, but I have no idea if that had anything to do with solar activity or not. I did not get any pictures, but these shots were taken near our house.

The above picture was taken by Blake Delarm, and this one by Stacie Micek.

Friday, I got eight 9-patch blocks put together and attached to the quilt with two more borders.

Saturday, I went to visit Loren. It was a pretty drive, as the leaves are all turning gold and scarlet. Harvest is in full swing, making the blue sky look hazy from dust.

I found Loren in one of the large rooms at the rear of the home with a group of ladies (and one younger man who was visiting his mother) who were playing Bingo. Loren doesn’t have the faintest idea how to play Bingo.

I sat down next to him, handed him a couple of the National Geographic magazines I’d brought, and showed him pictures on my tablet.

A little while later, a lady (let’s call her ‘Betty’) at another table won the first Bingo game. Everyone cheered and clapped, and a lovely, reserved lady at our table suddenly turned into a different person and thumped her slender hands on the table, grinning at me.

She (let’s call her ‘Loretta’) and the friendly woman next to her (let’s call her ‘Mabel’), both of whom have their own memory-loss issues, then discussed how nice it was that Betty had won, and that she was even able to play.

“It really helps her; it keeps her brain active!” said Mabel, putting a chip down on the wrong number.

“I agree, so true!” said Loretta, looking to see where Mabel had put her chip, and then putting one down in the same location on her card. Wrong letter and number; but same location.

On the way home, I bought a couple of chef salads for our supper from a truck stop in Schuyler. When I got home, Larry was outside working on a vehicle, trying to get as much done as possible before it got dark. So I headed upstairs, and had time to make four 9-patch blocks and attach another border onto the Vintage Airplane quilt before we ate.

Wouldn’t you know, I found a voicemail from Nebraska Quilting Company saying my Avanté was fixed, and I could pick it up. Of course I’d driven past Fremont both a-goin’ and a-comin’ from Omaha. 🙄 The tech had called and left the message that morning while I was in the shower, so I hadn’t heard it. (How does that happen, e.v.e.r.y... s.i.n.g.l.e... t.i.m.e.??) And I, in my rush to head off to Omaha, never even thought to check for missed calls or messages. 🫤

Anyway, my longarm is fixed. The man said it sounds ‘a little whiny’ (I’d noticed that, too), but he couldn’t find anything wrong inside it. It’s probably just from being used so much, and it was used when we got it.

It takes a full hour to get there. At least I don’t need the machine just yet.

Yesterday, October 13^th, was Caleb’s birthday, Caleb and Maria’s 11^th anniversary, and Teddy and Amy’s 22^nd anniversary. We gave Caleb a Cabela's shirt and a pocketknife. For the anniversary gifts, we got gift cards from Hy-Vee.

After church last night, we picked up a grocery order from Walmart, ate a light supper, and then Larry headed to bed quickly and slept fast, because he had his alarm set for 3:30 a.m. That, because he needed to get to the airport in Omaha in time to catch an early flight to Houston, where he planned to pick up a motorhome for the elderly friend who lives near Genoa, and for whom he has sometimes worked on vehicles. The man bought Larry’s plane ticket, gave him a credit card to use for gas and food, and will pay him for his time. It’s a 900-mile drive.

Eppley Airfield, Omaha

Bush Intercontinental, Houston

In the news this morning: a sheriff in a nearby town found a man in their impound lot in the middle of the night, and asked what he was doing. The man said the stars were tracking him, and he needed to remove a fuse from his girlfriend’s car in order to make them stop it.

The report ends, “The sheriff advised the man of his options.”

Wonder what those are? Traveling to the stars via spaceship, to find out why they’re tracking him, maybe? Making himself a tinfoil hat, maybe, to avoid endangering his last few brain cells?

At noon today, it was a sunny 56°, on its way up to 62°. I refilled the bird feeders this morning, although at this time of year the majority of what eats from the feeders are critters, rather than fowl. But I saw a cardinal out there earlier, so they’ll be coming back before too long, when the insects disappear, and there aren’t so many seeds to find.

OH! The female cardinal is back, and, of all things, there’s a baby with her! She’s feeding him black-oil sunflower seeds. I know it’s a male, because those little wings and tail he’s fluttering so vigorously as he cheep-cheeps for more seeds are a brighter red than his mother’s.

This is late in the season, to see fledglings. I ran for my camera, and perched it on a pillow in the windowsill in case the cardinals returned.

But although I heard them in the back yard, I did not again see them at the feeders.

In fact, I heard Mama Cardinal explaining to her young’n that that big camera lens in the window was a fierce, fast, ferocious bird trap, something to be avoided at all costs. At least, I think that’s what she said. After dealing with two flies and a fierce, fast, ferocious mosquito, I gave up and closed the window. I murdered the skeeter in cold blood before it got to my warm blood.

This photo is a screen capture from the Front Yard Video YouTube channel.

Here’s a picture I took Saturday in the town of Bennington, north of Omaha. We don’t have as many trees that turn red as some states in the east, but it’s still pretty.

Hannah and Levi came for a little while this afternoon, along with their two Australian shepherds, Chimera and Willow. Levi tuned a few notes on my piano that had slipped since the last time he tuned it. One was a new string, and they always have more elasticity than older strings, and will slip out of tune quickly for the first month or two. I sat down to play it when he was done. He liked the song, so he dashed out to their vehicle, grabbed his French horn, and came running back in to play it with me. He’d never heard the song before, but he played it so prettily.

Larry called a little while ago. He’s near Guthrie, Oklahoma. There was roadwork all the way from Houston well into Oklahoma – and he came upon more while he was talking to me. The motorhome, a 2006 Class B F450, is working great. He likes it – and proceeded to give me a sales talk, explaining why motorhomes are so much better than pickups towing fifth-wheel campers, as the camper is hard on the truck.

I in turn explained that the reason our camper was so hard on his truck is because he ran the poor truck out of fuel last year. Perhaps you’ll recall that when we were at that truck stop in southwest South Dakota, the pump shut off when the tank was only half full, and Larry didn’t notice until he’d returned the nozzle to the pump, and didn’t want to go to the trouble of starting the pump all over again.

He climbed in the pickup, told me this – and I said, “You’d better get back out and fill that tank, or you’ll be sorry!” – because I knew what kind of territory lay ahead.

He didn’t. He thought there would be plenty of places to fill.

There weren’t. We ran out of fuel, and it damaged the clutch (because he tried ‘popping’ it to get a little more mileage out of it after it spluttered and died, hoping to clear the next hill). So we spent most of the ‘vacation’ at the campground, with Larry under the pickup working on it.

But we didn’t get stranded on the shoulderless road and have a semi smash into us. So there’s that to be thankful for.

I like our camper. I don’t want to get rid of it. I like more room, not less! Plus, it’s paid for.

Anyway, at least Larry’s hauling a bed around with him, so he’ll be able to sleep comfortably in a little while.

People are now posting pictures of the comet named C/2023 Ag Tsuchin-shan-ATLAS. Some even managed to get shooting stars from the Orionid Meteor Shower in the same photo.

I do not know who took the above photo.

Yuri Beletsky captured the following image this morning at 09:22 UTC from Atacama desert in Chile. It is a photo stack of 15, each at 5-second exposure.