Last Tuesday, I spent most of the day working
on the Jardin de Fleurs quilt. I cut the
printed blue blocks for the next border and attached large background triangles
to each side to set them on point.
Just like other printed panels, this printed
fabric is printed off-grain, all whoppyjaw, so cutting them was a bit tricky. Aarrgghh. I’ve learned to go with the print, not
the grain. The print will be noticed;
the grain will not. Hopefully. I made the triangles big enough that I was able
to trim them all square at 14 ½”, unfinished.
At 5:00 that afternoon, I went to the visitation
at our church for my sister, who passed away Saturday, September 20th. There were already many beautiful bouquets
and plants arranged at the front of the sanctuary, and there would be more the
next day at the funeral.
Home again, I returned to my quilting studio
to finish the border blocks. I like to
lay out separate elements of a quilt, just to admire how they would look
together as a quilt on their own, rather than as part of the quilt they’re
going to be in.
Wednesday,
September 24, 2025, was National Punctuation Day.
Punctuation is important! It can mean the difference between life and
death. I give you the following:
1.
“Let’s eat, Grandma!”
2.
“Let’s eat Grandma!”
You see what I mean? I rest my case.
As usual, I found a quilt to go with
the day: Punctuation Quilt! This quilt was designed by Kari Nichols of
Quilting Renditions for Robert Kaufman Fabrics.
It was a pretty morning, 68° on the way up to
77°. My sister’s funeral was at 2:00
p.m. I love the beautiful old hymns that
speak of heaven.
It rained a few big drops on us as we came
out of the church after the service, heading for our vehicles. Fortunately, as we’d forgotten the umbrella,
it soon stopped. It was a hot drive to
the cemetery in a vehicle whose air conditioning still doesn’t work, though
Larry had spent a while the previous night trying to fix it.
It would’ve been nice at the cemetery,
though a bit warm, if it hadn’t’ve been for those horrid little pirate bugs. They’re no more than a wee black dot when they
land on you, but oooooeeee, they have pinking shears for mouths! I do believe there were 30,000 pirate bugs for
each and every one of us – all 475 of us. That makes 14,250,000 bugs, just for
us, not counting the ones on the other side of the cemetery lying in wait for
other hapless souls.
Most of us ladies looked a lot like storks,
standing on one leg while we scratched the back of our other leg with a foot.
Afterwards, we had a luncheon in our
Fellowship Hall at the church. We sat across the
table from Andrew and Hester and their two children, and next to Bobby and
Hannah.
I was given
one of the bouquets; it’s sitting in the middle of my table making the entire main
floor smell good.
When we got home, I finished the data backup
from laptop to three external hard drives that I had begun that morning,
getting all newer data on my Asus laptop backed up, then putting some of the
recent information onto the MSI laptop.
I then traded computer locations.
The newer MSI will now be downstairs on the main floor, the Asus
upstairs in my quilting studio. I like
the Asus best, as the screen is bigger, and it has a bigger and better number
pad. Also, it has the Corel PaintShop
Pro X8 photo editor on it. But the jack
is about to fail just like it did with the first Asus. I got a new one out of that fiasco; but I
have no idea if the warranty would cover another one; so the best thing to do
is put that thing on my sewing table and try not to disturb the cord and plug
end.
The MSI is also a good laptop, and very
fast. It’s a gaming computer, though I
never use my computers for games. I took
it along when we went to Grand Island for the Nebraska State Fair, and
discovered that the power inverter wasn’t big enough to handle it. I was surprised that the MSI needs more power
than the Asus, as the Asus has that big honkin’ heavy cord and power
adaptor. Totally unwieldy – the cord is
more like a PVC pipe than a flexible cord.
I mean, you can clear the entire table off by accident with that cord,
just trying to move the laptop!
Back when the jack went bad on the first Asus,
I couldn’t find any information about it online. It was another story when I looked it up a
few days ago, though. Hundreds of people
have posted complaints about it, and they aren’t one bit polite about it,
either. Really, Asus ought to issue a
recall, and put everyone’s hard drive into a totally reconfigured machine. A jack should not be welded directly onto the
motherboard, for cryin’ out loud! Things
get hot (one of the other problems with that laptop), and then the connection
gets loose. Techs refuse to attempt
repairs, as welding a new jack back into it would doubtless fry the motherboard. Some idget with no forethought and/or no
understanding of the effect of heat on metal must’ve designed it, and none of
the idgets in quality control had any better understanding than Idget #1.
I’ve decided to actually use OneDrive
in the Cloud in order to work on journals and pictures on both computers
without having to manually transfer files via SD card or external hard drive. I’ll move finished files into the proper
folders. I am allowed 1 TB through my
Personal Microsoft 365 Plan. I pay for
it; might as well put it to use!
((...pause...)) After moving Wednesday’s folder of pictures to
OneDrive, and seeing how long it took, I believe I’ll change that plan when I
have over 30 photos and/or over 150 MB to move, and just do it with the SD
card, which is much faster.
I wonder how long it will be before uploads
and downloads are instantaneous? Maybe
they already are, in some areas; but certainly not out here in the sticks (and
tumbleweeds) of rural Nebraska.
That done, I pulled out a Celsius powder
packet to dump into my thermal mug.
These skinny packets weigh about as much as a feather, but this
one seemed to weigh less than a feather.
But it was still pretty puffy...
I snipped off the end, upended it over the
mug – and nothing came out. Not one
grain of powder. It had nothing but air
in it; that’s all the puffiness had consisted of. I’ve been gypped!
Well, at least I had more boxes of Celsius
packets to choose from.
I sat down in my recliner and, sipping
Strawberry Coconut Celsius, set out to play around with an EQ8 design for Aaron’s
quilt. I discovered to my surprise that
I’d already started it! Hmmmm... I wonder when that was? >>... looking at the PJ8 file
...<<
Wow, it was April 11, 2023! No wonder I forgot.
The panel I’d chosen is of a soaring eagle. So I trotted upstairs, pulled out the box from
Missouri Star Company that holds the panels I ordered maybe 3 years ago,
thinking, Now I’ll have to paw through this whole stack of panels ---
but it was the first panel right on top of the box. 😃
Late Thursday morning, the temperature was 71°
on the way up to 83°. I went out to fill
the bird feeders, and got bit from head to toe by pirate bugs in the five
minutes it took me.
AAAaaaiiiiyiiiiieee, do they ever bite.
That afternoon I went to town and closed the
estate account for my brother. It’s done!
Everything is all taken care of. That’s a very good feeling.
But! – we’d carried some of those
nasty pirate bugs with us into the car the day before, and when I got into the
Mercedes, all of them leaped on me at once, giggling fiendishly.
You know, if every one of us took
1,000 bugs home with us, that reduced the cemetery’s pirate bug population by
475,000 (assuming 475 of us were at the cemetery).
That means there are only 13,775,000
pirate bugs at the cemetery now – speaking only of the pirate bugs in that one
particular area of the cemetery, not the other hapless-soul-lying-in-waiters. Furthermore, one must now factor in all the
newly hatched pirate-but nymphs.
When I got home, I smooshed every bug
on me that I could see. I looked myself
over thoroughly in the mirror for tiny black dots. Finally deciding I was bug-free, I headed
upstairs to work on Joanna’s quilt.
Hours later, a pirate bug bit me on
the shoulder. AAAaaaaiiiiyiiiiieeee,
those things bite.
As I sewed, I noticed some fluttering
in the apple tree outside my east window.
It was Monarchs and Red Admiral butterflies in the tree, landing on the
apples way up high.
Those apples are probably a bit
fermented by now. The butterflies would
like that.
Now there are probably a bunch of
drunk butterflies doing loop-de-loos all over the neighborhood. 😆
For supper that night, we had beef
steaks, potatoes, and carrots cooked in the Instant Pot.
Somebody posted a picture of a big bull moose
seen in Keya Paha (KIP-É™-haw) County that day, about 160 miles to our
northwest.
So we’ve got a bull elk about fifteen miles
east of us, and a bull moose 160 miles northwest of us, and about 70 mountain
lions scattered through the state.
Friday, I began making tracing and
cutting appliqués for the Jardin de Fleurs quilt. By the time I quit for the night, all the
edges were starched and ironed over the freezer paper. It’s not a fast process, but it yields good
results.
I was glad there were leftovers from
Thursday’s supper, and they were yummy leftovers, at that.
By midmorning Saturday, the temperature was 68°,
on the way up to 79°. I heard someone on
the Chicago news station say, “The high here in Chicago today will be 87°. Pretty hot for the final days of February!”
At least he got the location correct. 😄
Here’s a young female cardinal. Look, she only has two tall feathers for her
crest so far! By next month, she’ll have
considerably more fluff making up her topknot.
That morning, friends from Gehring Ready-Mix
delivered cement for Larry’s building, and Larry did the screeding. (All these years until right now, I thought
it was ‘skreeting’. Now I can go to bed
happy, ’cuz ah done larnt me sumpthang t’day.)
I washed
the dishes, filled the bird feeders, shined up the bathroom, ate breakfast, and
went back upstairs to work on the appliqués for Joanna’s quilt. I took with me a tall thermal mug with a combination of Highlander Grogg (no
Irish additives, of course; only the blended flavors of caramel, butterscotch, vanilla,
maple, and hazelnut) and White Chocolate Pumpkin cold brew. Mmmmm, good.
The beans are from Aroma Ridge. The beans are bigger than those I’ve gotten
from other places, and more mellow, I think.
Don’t I sound like a coffee snob? 😅
In my
north-facing upstairs window that afternoon, between pane and screen, there were
a gazillion Asian Beetles (not the local ladybugs, though they look similar),
and rushing around wondering how to get out. Why’d they get in there in the first place?!
A paper
wasp affixed himself to the outside of that same screen a few days earlier –
and there he stayed for four more days, until I thumped him off of it. 😜 Yeah,
he was done expired.
For supper that evening, Larry got us runzas,
chocolate chip cookies, and pumpkin spice milkshakes.
There
are runza varieties with different kinds of cheese in them, and some with more
of an Italian flavor. I like the
originals. They’re made with hamburger
and cabbage, and spiced exactly right. I
like butter on mine.
Larry was sore that night from screeding cement. He had to use a small blade that was on the power
screed, as the bolts that held it on were stuck, and the longer he tried to get
them loose, the stiffer the cement got. He
finally just gave up and used it with the short blade, which of course was a
lot more work for the large space he had poured.
Two of my cousins wrote yesterday to let me
know that my Uncle Bill, my father’s youngest brother and my last living uncle,
had passed away. He would’ve been 102 in
a month and a half.
He and Aunt Helen used to ride bikes
often, all over the place, until they were well into their 70s and 80s. I imagine that’s one of the reasons they were
so healthy for so long.
Last night after our church service, my
niece-in-law Margaret gave me a stack of lovely sympathy cards that friends had
put in the large box that the funeral home provided for cards for members of my
sister’s family. I went through them
today, and soon wound up wiping my eyes and blowing my nose over the sweet
notes people wrote to me.
I make it through Lura Kay’s funeral all
right. Throw me calamity, mayhem, and
tragedy, and I slog through with stalwart stoicism. Be sympathetic to me, and I cry.
I’ve rehung the bird feeders, though the
birds have hardly eaten a seed for a week. There are seeds and insects all over the place
this time of year; the birds haven’t much need of bird feeders right now. I watered the indoor plant (note the singular
word ‘plant’; I murdered the other two in cold blood) and shined up the
bathroom.
It’s a pretty day, 84°, with only a skiff of
clouds here and there. The flowers in
the bouquet from Lura Kay’s funeral last week are still lovely, with several
new blooms appearing.
I’m still reading the book Bobby loaned me – The
Civil War, A Narrative, by Shelby Foote – after the audiobook(s) I’d been
listening to since June ended before the book was finished. There are three volumes, each with over 1,000
pages. Volume 3 stopped at the end of
Chapter 6, with Chapters 7 and 8, pages 802 to 1065, yet to go. This was indeed deflating, since the
surrender of General Lee’s southern army, along with the death of President
Abraham Lincoln, was still to come.
“I don’t know how it ended!” I exclaimed in
dismay to Bobby and Hannah.
(Of course I did know the overall
outcome, but I wanted to read (or have read to me) the rest of the book!)
I had earlier learned that Bobby had two of
the books, the first and the last of the three-volume set, and I begged to
borrow the third volume. In return, I
got him Volume 2.
Today I got to the part where General Ulysses
Grant wrote the terms of surrender, and General Robert E. Lee wrote his
agreement to same.
Grant would a short while later that day stop
the celebratory roar of the big guns and canons, “not only because he feared
the warlike racket might cause trouble between the victors and the vanquished,
both of them still with weapons in their hands, but also because he considered
it unfitting. ‘The war is over,’ he told
his staff. ‘The rebels are our
countrymen again.’”
It was a sad war, from start to finish. There were good men on both sides – and so
many, many deaths. A true tragedy for
our country, it was.
A few pages back, I read about President
Lincoln sleeping one night aboard a warship just off Rocketts Landing near the
capitol Jefferson Davis had left two nights earlier. The ship was Admiral David Dixon Porter’s
flagship Malvern, a converted blockade runner. Having declined the admiral’s offer of his
own commodious quarters, Lincoln spent an uncomfortable night in a six- by
four-foot cubicle whose built-in bunk was four inches shorter than he was. Asked next morning how he had slept, he
replied somewhat ruefully, “You can’t put a long blade into a short scabbard. I was too long for that berth.”
Here is Porter, center, with members of his
staff, on board the USS Malvern in Hampton Roads, Virginia, December 1864. The officer standing at far left is
Lieutenant Commander William B. Cushing, USN.
In the course of the day, Porter had the ship’s
carpenter take down the miniature stateroom and rebuild it, together with the
bed and mattress, twice as wide and half a foot longer. Lincoln, however, knew nothing of this, as he
was at the telegraph office sending and receiving communications.
Back aboard the Malvern after dark, he
eventually turned in for another presumably fitful sleep in the cramped
quarters.
Next morning, rising early and well rested,
he announced that a miracle had happened in the night: “I shrunk six inches in length, and about a
foot sideways,” he told Porter, straight-faced.
There, you see why I’ve been enjoying this
book series?
I’ll get it done, though I haven’t time to
just sit down and read it right the way through, as I’d like. I have 110 pages to go, having already read 153
of the 263. That means I’ve now read 58%
of the pages left off of the audiobook.
Oh!
There’s a Monarch on the burgundy chrysanthemums! Since I was too lazy to attach my big lens,
put on a pair of sandals, and sashay outside to grab a photo, here’s a picture
of a Monarch Hannah took today.
Levi just sent me a recording of himself
singing Come, Thou Fount, with multiple tracks. He’s singing all the parts.
Bedtime! Tomorrow I hope to start quilting the Jardin
de Fleurs quilt.
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
