As I type, windows and doors open to a fairly
nice though humid day at 78°, the birds are singing up a concert. I hear baby cardinals cheep-cheeping for
food, male cardinals whistling melodically, blue jays screeching raucously, and
in the middle of that, finches and sparrows warbling, and mourning doves and
Eurasian collared doves cooing.
(Photo by photographer Altan O.)
Ever since last Wednesday, the weather has
been much cooler than it had been the two previous weeks. Temperatures have been in the mid to high
70s. Some days, we didn’t run the three
portable ACs at all. I wonder what the
next electric bill will look like? In addition
to those freestanding units, we had several fans going: my new tall, thin Dreo, a barrel-shaped
EdenPURE heater/fan, Larry’s squirrel cage fan that blows up a hurricane, and
three ceiling fans whose light switch chains have broken long ago – so if you
want the fan on without the lights, you have to shinny up on a stepstool and
unscrew the bulbs. (“Ow ow ow ow ow” –
like that [unless you were smart enough to turn it off and let the bulbs cool
down beforehand].)
After one of the buckets under the
drain hoses coming from one of the portables nearly ran over one night, I made
sure to empty them when they got to the half-full mark. A five-gallon bucket of water weighs 42 pounds
plus the weight of the bucket. I can’t
manage that.
Turns out, even 20 pounds was a little
much for the sore rib that refuses to get better (probably on account of
20-pound buckets).
Those two portable ACs on the main
floor each draw about 10 gallons of water – a total of 20 gallons – from the
air every day on humid days, think of that. The new one upstairs doesn’t draw water unless
it is specifically set to do so, for which I’m glad. I don’t want to haul buckets of water down
the stairs! Well, I could just
pour it out the window, I suppose. One
should wait for some deserving soul to walk underneath before doing that,
right?
((...pondering...)) I’d better just leave that thing set only to
‘Cool’. 😉
This old farmhouse is not at all well
insulated. Bad windows, etc. We heat and cool the entire half acre. Makes the birds, squirrels, stray cats,
opossums, raccoons, coyotes (they were noisy again the other night), bobcats,
bats, and woodchucks more comfortable.
At 11:00 a.m. Tuesday, it was 85°, with a
heat index of ---- 100°! The temperature
would be going up to 93° that afternoon, with a heat index around 108° or 109°.
I refilled the bird feeders, emptied the
water buckets, shined up the bathroom, and put a few curls in my hair whilst sipping
Pecan Sticky Buns cold brew. It was
quite comfortable in the house at the moment – witness, I actually turned off a
couple of fans. Noise pollution,
noise pollution.
By noon, those fans were back on, as the temp
was 88°, and it felt like 102° – and no wonder:
the humidity was 73%, the dew point 78°.
I find
weather stuff interesting. This is from
weather.gov.:
Dew Point vs. Humidity
The dew point is the temperature the air needs
to be cooled to (at constant pressure) in order to achieve a relative humidity
(RH) of 100%. At this point the air
cannot hold more water in the gas form. If
the air were to be cooled even more, water vapor would have to come out of the
atmosphere in the liquid form, usually as fog or precipitation.
The higher the dew point rises, the greater the
amount of moisture in the air. This
directly affects how ‘comfortable’ it will feel outside. Many times, relative humidity can be
misleading. For example, a temperature
of 30 and a dew point of 30 will give you a relative humidity of 100%, but a
temperature of 80 and a dew point of 60 produces a relative humidity of 50%. It would feel much more ‘humid’ on the 80-degree
day with 50% relative humidity than on the 30-degree day with a 100% relative
humidity. This is because of the higher
dew point.
So if you want a real judge of just how ‘dry’
or ‘humid’ it will feel outside, look at the dew point instead of the RH. The higher the dew point, the muggier it will
feel.
General comfort levels using dew point that can
be expected during the summer months:
Ø
less
than or equal to 55: dry and comfortable
Ø
between
55 and 65: becoming ‘sticky’ with muggy evenings
Ø
greater
than or equal to 65: lots of moisture in the air, becoming oppressive
I headed upstairs to my quilting
studio. The room was nice and
comfortable with the new portable AC in it.
I am apparently part chinchilla – I like the temperature to stay right
around 65°.
While waiting for the fabric I had
ordered – Robert Kaufman’s ‘Softly’ line, I cut the cream fabric for the
background of Emma’s quilt, all 216 pieces.
Next, I started on the design for Ethan’s quilt. Ethan is Emma’s older brother, the oldest of
Teddy and Amy’s nine children. Amy had found
several duck prints that I planned to use. Ethan likes ducks; he has even raised some.
This vintage fabric that Amy found at
a secondhand store is by VIP Cranston Print Works, and is called Wild Ducks
Picture Book Patches. It’s better
quality fabric than most printed panels. There were 40 squares on one big
sheet of fabric, with six different duck prints. I cut them into 8 ½”
squares (unfinished), and ordered background fabric for it. I took pictures, imported them into EQ8, and
started playing. Here are a couple of
EQ8 designs. Which do you like best?
It was still 94° at 7:00 p.m., with a
heat index of 109° or 110°.
I consoled myself with a walnut
pistachio muffin with mint chip ice cream for dessert.
After supper, Larry went off to get
the part he’d ordered for the Mercedes at O’Reilly’s. Hopefully, it would fix the air conditioner on
the SUV.
It did not. Wrong part – and the people at O’Reilly’s
tell him they cannot order true Mercedes parts; he has to order them from a
Mercedes dealership, so they said.
He hunted up one on eBay, and placed an
order. It will arrive anywhere between 2
days and 2 weeks. ? It’s a small thing about the size of Larry’s
thumb. Can’t the seller just mail
that thing already?! We’re HOT over
here!
Wednesday morning, Levi sent me a short
video with a few discordant chords and notes from a piano he was just starting
to tune in Leigh, 35 miles to the north.
“This piano doesn’t sound very nice!”
he wrote.
“It sounds like an old-time saloon
piano! 😂” I agreed. “(Not that I’ve ever heard an old-time saloon
piano in person, you understand.)”
A few hours later, he sent another
video of himself playing a pretty tune on a nicely in-tune piano.
“It’s fixed up now, after a pitch
raise,” he said. “I’m in the middle of
fine-tuning, but for now I can do this.”
The song? Song of the Robin,
by George William Warren.
“You’re starting to churn up business!”
I remarked, then changed it to, “Or ‘tune up’ your business, heh. You need some business cards!”
“I have some, actually,” answered
Levi. “A pack of 50 (and I have given
away two). The piano needs a little bit
more work, and then I’ll labor over it for another three hours.”
I know for a fact that he is very
particular when he tunes a piano. Mine
still sounds beautiful, even though the heat and humidity the last couple of
weeks did affect it.
It was much cooler here that day, just
73° at noon after raining a good part of the night. Severe weather had skirted around us, as it
did a week earlier; but, just like the previous week, thousands of people in
the Omaha area were again without electricity.
The house was nice and cool, a welcome
respite. I opened the back
patio door in order to cool off the laundry room. There were a couple of loads of clothes to
wash; it would be nice not having to go into a blast oven to do it. The portable ACs were going on and off at
regular intervals, instead of running full blast constantly.
When I went to transfer clothes from washing
machine to dryer, there was a woodchuck, aka a whistle pig, on the back deck, gathering up spilled
sunflower seeds. He’s fat and healthy. He obviously heard me bonk the hamper into
the hallway door, and, unlike the songbirds, he can see me easily through the
screen. I stood bolt still and looked at
him, and he sat still and looked at me, until he decided, I am not safe
here! and took off running, muscles and fur rippling in the sunlight. (Image from Wikimedia.)
Look, I
found the perfect pantograph for Ethan’s quilt!
Ahem.
Not...
really.
That afternoon, I pulled out the piece I planned to use for the central part of Joanna’s quilt. It was found amongst her late other grandmother’s fabrics.
I will use some
of my newly-purchased greens with it, along with a couple of light blues also
found in her other grandmother’s stash. I
split the piece into several sections, and sewed some narrow, pale yellow
strips into it. I don’t usually use a print
that repeats, as this does, and treat it like a scenic panel; but I think it
will work.
After our church service Wednesday
evening, we visited with family and friends, then headed to Walmart to pick up
a grocery order. It was 77°, and we no
longer cared if our hair got mussed, so down went all the windows, and we
opened the sunroof, too. And the cold
brew in the Thermal mug in the console was still icy cold.
As we waited for our groceries to be brought
out, I told Larry about the woodchuck: “People
act like there’s nothing good about them. There’s got to be something
good about them!”
Larry responded agreeably, “They’d make ya a
nice winter hat.” 😂
When we got home, I finished this central
panel for Joanna’s quilt.
When I was pulling out the fabrics I
planned to use for her quilt, lo and behold, I found some larger duck blocks,
already cut and more than twice as large as the ones I had just cut, that Amy
had also given me! She mentioned at the
time that Ethan likes ducks, and I had planned to use these. I think I’ll stick with the smaller ones,
though, so I can use the new center panel.
Thursday morning, my breakfast was a
thick-sliced piece of Nature’s Craft multi-grain bread with an egg, sunny-side
up, on top. 😋 It was quite nice here, just 71° by 11:00
a.m. However, what I thought was fog
covering the countryside was actually smoke from Arizona wildfires. It didn’t bother me much when I refilled the
bird feeders earlier, though it’s not good at all for our children and
grandchildren who have asthma.
Emma’s fabric and the duck-scene panel
for Ethan’s quilt arrived, so I hurriedly finished cleaning the kitchen, and
then headed upstairs to start cutting the fabric for Emma’s quilt. That’s one of my favorite things: starting a new quilt.
That afternoon, in checking my
messages, I saw that some woman on Facebook – same culprit as usual – had
‘poked’ me.
I typed into Google, “What is the
purpose of Facebook’s ‘poke’?”
It’s to annoy people, in my
estimation.
I found this: “In a 2005
interview, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook’s ‘poke’ feature originated
from a spontaneous idea he had while intoxicated. (Yeah, that makes sense.) Introduced in 2004, ‘poking’ allows users to
send notifications to others without a specific purpose, leaving its intent
open to interpretation.
My
interpretation: “You are trying to annoy
me! Mission accomplished.”
If I could, I’d step on the heels of
that woman who likes to ‘poke’ people.
Since I can’t, I ignore her.
Those of you with whom I correspond
regularly, whether through email, text, or posts on quilting groups, do you
notice that my journals often have the same stories and descriptions as those
I’ve written earlier in the week? Yep, I
copy from daily notes and paste them into my weekly journal. Some years ago, I had a friend who often
emailed several times a day. I did the
same back then: I’d copy things I’d
written to her, and paste them into my weekly letter.
She did not like it.
She seemed to labor under the delusion
that, once I’d written something to her, it was then her property, and I
no longer had the right to retell it anywhere! An involuntary transfer of copyright, as
it were.
{You will note that I said, I ‘had’
a friend. Past tense. People with one strange
qually-fobble... have more.}
Anyway, humblest apologies to those
who get tired of reading the same thing twice.
I do try to reword things now and then.
But sometimes I said it best the first time! (Or maybe I’m just lazy. 😉 )
Once again, one of Larry’s 2nd
(or 3rd? 4th?)
cousins asked me, “Don’t you ever get tired of making quilts.”
(More of statement than a question,
when it ends with a period rather than a question mark, eh? Sometimes she uses the word ‘bored’ instead
of ‘tired’.)
Nope, I don’t get tired of making
quilts. I don’t get tired of much of any
of the things I do; I enjoy it all.
Almost. The least enjoyable is
weeding; but I enjoy the flowers, so at least there’s that. As for quilts, I never make the same thing
twice, so how could I possibly get bored?!
😄 Besides, I look
forward very much to giving these quilts to the recipients.
I remember how delighted I was when my
grandma made me a little oval braided rag rug to put beside my bed. I loved that soft little rug! I like to think my grandchildren feel the same
way about the quilts I make them.
The nice cousin will ask me the same
thing again next month. I wonder if it
would startle her if, just for the fun of it, I exclaimed, “Yes! I am SOOO bored!!!!! What shall I do instead??” >>...snerk...<<<
I was glad that Thursday was cool
enough that the portable ACs turned off fairly often. Most of the day, I heard only the birds and a
distant crop duster. Noisy fans and loud
freestanding AC units are wearisome.
I spent most of the day in my quilting
studio. Here I am with a big thermal mug
of Strawberry Crumble / Pecan Sticky Buns cold brew coffee.
As I sewed, I went on listening to The
Civil War: A Narrative, by Shelby
Foote. Here’s an excerpt:
Ulysses S.
Grant used to get heaps of letters asking him for his autograph, a
time-consuming source of aggravation to him. He found a way to cut down
on them:
“I don’t get
as many now as when I answered them,” he remarked dryly.
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, Hannah
had an event in Neligh, 77 miles to our north.
She sells Lilla Rose hair accessories. Thursday evening, she sent me pictures from Riverside
Park there in Neligh.
By midnight, I was 3/11 done with the 18
Triple Irish Chain blocks for Emma’s Embroidered Flower Garden quilt. You wonder how I came up with that
fraction? Well, there are 11 rows of
patches in each block. I have 3 rows
done for each block. So there you have
it.
Here’s Emma with her kitty.
It was smokier Friday than it was Thursday,
and I could definitely smell it when I went outside to refill the bird feeders.
Otherwise, it was a nice day, just 70°
at noon, with a heat index of 81°.
The smoke in the atmosphere seemed kind
of low, for crop dusters to be working. I
hoped they all stayed safe, and stopped working if visibility lessened. It’s a dangerous job. Some of them crash every year, I think. Last year there were two or three crashes in
Nebraska and Iowa alone.
It was grandson Jeffrey’s 17th
birthday. I got him a ball cap, a book
by James Herriot (because every time I order a hardback All Things Bright
and Beautiful book from Abe Books to complete Nathanael’s four-book series,
they send me a softcover!), and an aluminum pen/touchscreen writer with both Imperial
and Metric measurements along the sides.
I’d sure like to know why my rib has
gradually gotten worse for the last two weeks or so. Well, maybe it’s not too hard to figure out,
after all: I keep re-injuring it, that’s
why. Aarrgghh, it even hurts to blow my
nose. All you have to do is have one
small owie somewhere, and you realize, Wow, my body sure is connected! Can’t do anything without
making said owie complain. 😧😐😏😖😣🤪
At nighttime, I usually rub on some
Two Old Goats Essential Oil lotion. That
helps enough that I can sleep, and it has a pleasant enough aroma, what with
the lavender and eucalyptus oils in it, that it doesn’t destroy the nice clean
sheets.
Whoever wrote this news title needs to
retake biology class: Mother Zebra Saves
Her Cub When A Lioness Attacks
That evening, I took Jeffrey his
gifts.
Amy sent me home with these things in
return – a Bible case made from an antique quilt, and a pin cushion-scrap bag
that found a perfect spot beside my sewing machine.
When I quit sewing for the night, I had
about 8/11 of the Triple Irish Chain blocks for Emma’s quilt done.
Saturday, right at noon, it was only
69° – on August 2nd, in the middle of Nebraska! Wow, that’s cool. ((Me make pun!
...snicker...)) Annnnd...
we have found someone who can fix our central air, thanks to Caleb. Compressors are available, and the
Freon in ours is still good (the man checked). If we had to put new refrigerant in that
thing, it could cost up to $3,000! The
compressor and installation won’t be cheap, but it’ll be somewhere around only
a tenth of the price of a new AC unit.
Supper that evening was chicken,
potatoes, and carrots in the Instant Pot.
I like to make enough for two nights, especially on Saturdays.
The Instant Pot
isn’t so very ‘instant’ when I cram it full with two big hunks of frozen
chicken, four potatoes, and a bunch of carrots. It was as full as I could get it. I have six-quart pot. Clear full, it will make at least two generous
meals for two people.
I started it at 5:30 p.m., and it
wasn’t until 7:00 that the cooking part (set for 40 minutes) was done, and the depressurizing
was going on. I like to let it depressurize
on its own, rather than push the release valve and make a steam geyser in the
kitchen.
That night I got all the strips of
patches for the Triple Irish Chain blocks sewn together and one block
completed. Each block has 97
patches. There are 18 blocks. That’s 1,746 patches in the Irish Chain
blocks alone.
Sunday afternoon as we were eating a lunch of
Mexican omelets and English muffins, two female Baltimore orioles landed on the
large stems of the hosta plants right outside the kitchen window, sticking
their beaks into the not-yet-opened buds to sip nectar from them.
Larry decided to take a Sunday afternoon nap
in the nice, cool camper (in which he’s been wasting electricity by running the
air conditioner). He grabbed the door
handle – and got shocked good and proper.
This, because the plug that’s been lying on
the ground through several rainstorms last week was shorting out, having its wires
crossed, and not grounded (except through the camper and thus through anyone
who touched said camper whilst a-standin’ on the ground.
He fixed the cord, and all is well now. I hope.
Last night we left patio door and
front door open, since I informed Larry adamantly, “There will be no rain.”
Ahem.
It rained. If there was thunder and lightning, I neither
heard nor saw it, possibly because I left the portable AC in our bedroom on,
set to dehumidifier.
Our Teensy
kitty used to get scared if he ever heard thunder, and run pell-mell for the
pet door — to go outside! What in the
world. If I heard thunder, I’d dash for
the pet door to slide in the blocker before he could get there (and then I had
to make sure the other cats were also safe indoors. Why did he do that?
At 2:00 p.m., it was only 69°, but
felt like 78°. It’s a bit smoky here, this time
on account of the Canadian wildfires. I
refilled the bird feeders. Papa cardinal
is teaching his offspring to hover in nearby trees and chirp loudly whilst I’m
a-fillin’ those feeders, and then to come swooping in lickety-split before I
even get both feet back in the house. 😄
There was a baby cardinal out front, too,
newly fledged, cheeping in his high-pitched metallic chirpy voice for “Food! Food! Food!” This one is younger than the one I heard
earlier in the week, for his cheeping is higher in pitch.
Papa cardinal is working hard to keep
the baby full – and he’s doing a good job, for the baby looks fatter than the
father. Sometimes the baby goes right on
chirping while the father crams a worm in his gaping little beak. You can hear his chirp turn into “GLUPPP!” –
and then the worm is down the hatch, and he’s right back to “Cheep! Cheep! Cheep!”
Crop dusters are traveling back and
forth over the house. The last one went
over at 8:20 p.m., heading in a straight line for the airport, nine miles to
our southeast.
Earlier today, I made Apple Cinnamon
French Toast cold brew in my nifty new gallon jug brewer. Should’ve done it last night; I like to let it
steep for at least 12 hours. Oh, well; I
have a big mug of iced coffee (though it doesn’t taste nearly as good as
cold brew). I have packets of
Celsius. I have a variety of flavors of tea. And I have Alō Aloe Vera juice, the ‘Appeal’
flavor this time, in the refrigerator. Mmmm...
The first time we tried this juice, we
had not known there were aloe vera chunks in it. We both took a drink at the same time – and
then I was immediately reading the label to see what on earth I’d just
put in my mouth, and Larry was peering down into the neck of his bottle to see
what on earth had gotten into his bottle. 😂
Yesterday while looking for designs using the
Dream Big panel, since Hannah has several of them that she intends to turn into
a king-sized quilt, I came upon one on the Quilted Twins website that is
supported by, of all things, a motor hoist!
I’ve been looking for something to hold big
quilts while I photograph them for a long time.
Larry has motor hoists!
BUT. I
couldn’t be paid to get any of my quilts even close to his motor
hoists, huh-uh, nosireee.
I looked on Amazon to see how much a cheap
motor hoist might be. I found some in
the $100-$200 range, but the maximum height of the lift arm was only 6.89 feet
(why do they all have the identical maximum height?) (something to do with
safely lifting motors without tipping over, I suppose), and once a rod is
attached from which to hang the quilt, that height would be even less.
Well, that won’t do. Furthermore, those hoists, even the cheapest
of them, weigh a whole lot too much for the likes of me to cope with.
I typed ‘large quilt stand’ into Google,
expecting nothing of use, since I’ve done it before with no results of
value. When I say ‘large’, I mean ‘LARGE’!
I saw the usual offerings: all sorts of pretty stands and racks for
folded quilts. No, no, I don’t want to fold
the quilt for display; I want it to hang full-sized so I can get a picture
of it!
I almost gave up – and then I saw it: the perfect stand. It was pictured on the Alanda Craft webpage, The
Ultimate Quilt Rack Guide. There were lots of decorative quilt stands,
but halfway down the page, there was the stand, a backdrop stand for
photography, with a link to Amazon. I
chose the 12’ x 10’ stand, and ordered it.
It’ll be here tomorrow. I’ll
probably need to get more of those spring clamps, but they can be found at
local hardware stores. I don’t want to
sew hanging sleeves onto every quilt I make, after all. Depending on how sturdy it is, I might need
to get sandbags to lop over the leg braces, too. We’ll see.
The backing and background fabric for Ethan’s
quilt just arrived. The FedEx man put
the package in that big black heavy-duty plastic box Larry put on the porch for
just that purpose. It’s one of those
boxes that goes in a pickup bed behind the cab.
Not a real beautiful porch decoration.
🙄
It’s been there for over a year now, and the
FedEx, UPS, and USPS have used it a grand plenty of maybe two or three
times. So why would I ever think they
would use it today? It’s neither raining
nor snowing, after all, and there is practically no wind.
The inside of that black box is
textured. From the picture the FedEx guy
took, I thought it was a tractor tire.
The latches on the edge of the box looked like part of a control
panel. So, grumbling all the while, I
put on my shoes and wandered outside to look at Larry’s various tractors,
scissor lifts, the RZR, motorcycles, flatbed trailers, and suchlike.
No package materialized.
I went back inside, prepared to send the
FedEx’s photo to Larry and ask what and where that might be, when I paused and
took a look at the man’s description of where he’d left that package.
“Front porch,” it said.
Front porch?
>>...scratching hea-------------<< OH!!!!!!
The box! The stupid, ugly box.
I scurried out there, got the lid open (with
some difficulty) – and sho’ ’nuff, there was the package of fabric.
Please explain to me why, on rainy days, they
put cardboard boxes on the porch, on the sidewalk in the lowest spot they can
find (where puddles turn into ponds), atop the black box, or even out on the
driveway. But on a nice day, they
put a package wrapped in thick, waterproof plastic inside the black box.
Personally, I think they go away giggling
when they do that, muttering quietly to themselves, “Just let her find that,”
like Calvin’s mother (of Calvin & Hobbes fame) did when she hung Calvin’s
coat in the closet.
He didn’t find it.
”WHERE’S MY JACKET?!!” he shouted.
He looked under the bed... on the backs of
chairs... on the floor in the front hall...
No coat. He finally opened the
closet door.
“Oh, HERE it is!” he snarled. “Who put it in the stupid closet?!?”
Can you tell from all my fabric orders
lately that I’ve been hitting the bottom of the barrel here, with my
not-very-big stash? I just don’t have
enough scraps left (and certainly no big pieces) for the larger quilts I’m
making.
I do look forward to making some simple,
scrappy quilts one of these days, in order to use up a whole lot of small
leftover bits. I have numerous patterns
and pictures saved for just this purpose, such as this one, found on Pinterest.
The part for the Mercedes – a sensor for the
air conditioner – has arrived. Larry
plans to put it on after supper (Panera Bread’s loaded potato soup).
When I went out to get the bird feeders a few
minutes ago (9:00 p.m.), a dozen or more purple martins were doing aerial
acrobatics, gobbling down their last buggy snacks of the day. It’s getting dark out there, and at first I
thought they were bats – but then I noticed that instead of constantly flapping,
as the Little Brown bat does, they were soaring a good deal of the time, even
when they dodged and dived. Plus, they
had bird tails, not bat tails.
(Picture from All About Birds.)
Seen on Facebook: Somebody posted a picture. In the comment section, someone wrote, “If you have a negative of this, I would really like a copy.” 😄
One of my friends
used to think that if she sent me a picture she had on her computer, I would
then have said picture – and she would not.
When I once asked her to send me a certain picture, she said anxiously,
“But that’s the only one I have! You’ll
send it back, won’t you?”
Larry has now
come back in, reporting that the new part did not fix the car. ☹
It’s bedtime.
I have put Spring Chicken Muscle Rub on my rib. Reckon it’ll help?
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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