Journal: Foggy Days of Fall

 

Last Monday night, Larry went downstairs to take a bath.  I heard some commotion – and then he was coming back upstairs with his phone to show me a picture of a big wolf spider that he’d found in the tub.

He wasn’t the only one coping with the local creepy-crawlies.  I found one lurking near my feet one morning in the shower!  I didn’t even worry about dripping all over the floor as I hurriedly stepped out to grab a flyswatter.

No, we don’t do R&R (Rescue and Relocate) when spiders brazenly march into our house.  Nope.

The salmon run on Brooks River in Katmai National Park peaks in mid-to-late June, but it continues through September and October.  I like to watch the live streaming cameras when the big brown bears (grizzlies) are at Brooks Falls having a feast, catching salmon right and left.

I happened to look at the camera at 2:30 a.m., and found this big ol’ bruiser sittin’ all comfy on a big rock in the middle of the river, looking waaay too calm and laid back to actually catch anything.

Looks can be deceiving.

He suddenly lunged forward, swiped a giant paw through the water, and came up with a nice-sized flapping fish for his midnight snack.

(Well, a midnight snack 30 minutes early, to be precise, as it’s 11:30 p.m. there in Alaska when it’s 2:30 a.m. here.)

He happily enjoyed his meal, and then rested his head on his paws and took a short snooze, never mind the fact that his fuzzy rump was still in that icy water.

Tuesday afternoon, I quilted a small quilt for a customer.  That meant I had to clear off my quilting frame, as I use it for a cutting table.  I have a 36”-long cutting mat cut to the exact width of the quilting table (between the machine’s carriage rails), which is about 18 ½”.

The high that day, the first day of Autumn, was 63°.  It was cloudy, but bright, and no rain was expected until Thursday – wouldn’t you know it, the day I had an appointment with my eye doctor in Lincoln.

In the middle of the afternoon, hearing birds, I peered out the patio door. 

Oooohhhhh...  there was the baby cardinal I’ve been hearing for days now!  He was on the back rail, fluttering and begging, and both parents were there getting sunflower seeds from the feeder, then hopping down to the railing to feed their baby.  He’s already redder than his mother, so he’s a young male.  He’s so cute!

Welp, I worked hard to get Nano Banana 2 (officially known as Gemini 3.1 Flash Image), Google’s high-speed AI image generation and photo editing model, to recreate what I saw on my deck, since I didn’t get a photo.  

This is close, but when I told it to tilt the father cardinal’s head as papa birds do when inserting food into their babies’ beaks, Nano Banana gave me a bird that looked more like Avon’s glass cardinal perfume decanter with the lid askew.

Look at him.  He’s not feeding his offspring; he’s thinking, Say what now, kid?! while the kid apparently chirps in Italian.  (Kid’s tail is too long, too, and he should be taller, overall, with redder feathers.)

In the first oh-so-close picture, Nano Banana forgot to dehull the sunflower seed.  Baby isn’t going to get much nutrition from that seed!  Some birds such as doves and jays swallow them whole, shell and all, relying entirely on a grit-filled muscular gizzard to hull seeds for them.

Being so pleased with the AI mouse Canva created for me last week, I first gave that platform a try.  Good grief, it’s obvious that nobody with any birdbrains has been working with Canva at all!  They churned out a picture of identical father and son Northern Cardinals, except the male was about two feet tall (to go by size comparison with the feeder), and sonny was about the size of a field cricket.

Cardinals rely on their thick, conical beaks and jaw muscles to do the work of removing shells from seeds.  They crush the sunflower seed, peel off the hull with their tongue, and spit it out.  Because their gizzard only needs to process soft, pre-hulled seed kernels, it does not require the muscular density needed to grind down jagged seed husks.

Birds such as doves lack the beak structure and strength to crack hulls.  But their strong, thick-walled gizzards function like an internal stone mill to grind whole, uncracked shells down to a digestible pulp.  They therefore must regularly swallow large quantities of stones, coarse sand, and grit.  These pebbles sit in the gizzard permanently to smash the hard hulls apart.  Without grit, a dove cannot break down a whole sunflower seed.

The cardinal fledging makes constant high-pitched, metallic peeping noises; I knew it was a baby cardinal, but couldn’t spot him for several days, as the trees are thick around here.  He goes right on chirping even when his mouth is plumb full!  Sounds like he’s chirping through a dampening mute, until he gets the bite swallowed.  😄

Cardinals often have babies quite late in the season here.  This baby would likely be from either a second or a third clutch – and there’s a possibility it could even be from a fourth brood.  Northern Cardinals stay here during the winter; they don’t migrate.

I paused with the quilting to fix supper – salmon and broccoli.  (Did watching the bears’ banquet make me hungry for salmon?  😅)

Deciding that wasn’t quite enough, I made some blueberry muffins for dessert.  They were from a Martha White mix, and the blueberries are fake.  Next time, I’ll get the Blueberry Streusel Duncan Hines mix with the big tin of blueberries in the box!

Wednesday was another cloudy day.  The temperature got up to 67°.  I made another Dresden Plate flower and cut the ‘picket fence posts’ I plan to add along the bottom of the quilt.  I laid the quilt, flowers, and posts out on my bed to see how it looked, and to decide how many more Dresden Plates to make.  A bunch more flowers and butterflies, and it’ll be just right.  It’ll be a few more days before I’m ready to start appliquéing. 

Since I started drinking cold-brew coffee instead of hot coffee, I’m a lot less likely to pick up a mug of coffee and discover it has gone room temperature.

Lukewarm coffee or tea is the worst, I think.  Plus, when it’s about the same temperature as your face, you don’t notice when it gets to your lips as you tip up the cup, and you wind up pouring it right down your front.

I only had time to get this Dresden Plate partially ironed before it was time to go to church.  After the service, we had a late supper of Detroit Pizza.  Yummy!

That night, Hannah sent me this picture (below) of all the school children.  It makes me laugh.  Hannah wrote, “I took this in between whistles for attention, so they are doing whatever enters their heads.”

Yep, they are definitely doing whatever enters their heads.  One big kid in the back row is telling a fish tale (the fish was evidently standing on it tail, and is therefore measured by height rather than length), a little one in the front is stargazing, and several are turned completely backwards.

“I hope the kids looked at the actual photographer better than they looked at you!” I remarked to Hannah.

“Yes,” she assured me, “When the whistle sounded, they looked at the camera and smiled.”

Thursday morning, I got up early, preparing to go to Lincoln for the appointment with my eye doctor.  By a quarter ’til 8, it was 59°; the high would be just 61°.  It was already raining, both here and in Lincoln.  I was glad there were a couple of new tires on the front of the Mercedes to help with traction.  It rained almost all the way there and all the way home, stopping just long enough for me to walk into the clinic and not look like a drowned rat.

I sipped Raspberry White Chocolate cold-brew coffee (good stuff!) and blow-dried my hair while reading posts from quilting friends and a few news articles.  My appointment was at 11:30 a.m.  I left home at 9:40 a.m., and barely made it in time, since I had to stop and put gas in the Mercedes.

On the way home, I stopped at my customer’s house to drop off the quilt I had quilted for her and to pick up another small quilt she had finished. 

Before quilting the next little quilt, I finished pressing the Dresden Plate I’d put together Wednesday, and cleared off the quilting frame table.  A few hours later, I completed the quilting for my customer.

That evening, Victoria sent a video of Baby Russell smiling and cooing, followed by a sweet picture of Carolyn holding him.

“He has a Gerber Baby mouth, ❤️” I said.

Victoria then proceeded to change his picture to a pencil version, which made him look even more like the Gerber Baby.

Having done that, she soon followed it by switching pictures of each of the other children to pencil sketches, too.

“These could go into frames and be put on a wall,” I said – and now Victoria is thinking of doing exactly that.

She’s always loved black and white photos.  As for me, when I was little, a lot of people were still using black and white film, because it was cheaper.  And good-quality color film was only starting to be used more often.  I loved it sooo much better than black and white – and I still do.

But every now and then an old photo I took years ago was ruined, almost, by bad coloring; but when I scanned all my pictures, I was glad I had saved it, because turning it to black and white or sepia salvaged it completely.

Dorcas, 3; Hannah, 4; Keith, 5; and Teddy, 2
Denver, Colorado, 1983

Shortly after we first got a computer, I discovered PaintBox.  I immediately put our family picture into it and started playing.  I put a big sombrero on Keith... curly orange Afro on Caleb, age 5 – and he, standing there watching, had been giggling at all the others up until I disfigured him.  

Then he said very quietly, “I wish I had a computer, so I could draw on Mama.”

Several of the older kids laughed ’til they cried.

“Now you need a frame with five oval slots,” I told Victoria – and soon found one online and sent her the picture.

“I can give you small prints if you want them in that frame!!” offered Victoria.

The problem, though:  “It’s on Craigslist,” I told her, “for pick-up only, and it’s in West Covina, California. 🤣  It’s vintage, and the only one I saw.  I did see two others with five oval frames in the mat, but one frame was big and the other four were small.  You’d have to decide which kid you liked best.”

“Oh! 😂” she responded.  “We have one just like that with Kurt’s baby pictures in it.”

“Anyway, it’s okay,” I assured her.  “I can be perfectly happy with them in digital form.”

She’s thinking to get enlarged prints and put them in her 8x10 oval frames in the hallway.

Friday, it was about 12:45 p.m. when I happened to look out the window and discover that there was a thick fog outside.  I couldn’t at all see the highway off down the hill a quarter of a mile.  It wasn’t so dense one couldn’t drive in it, though; and I prepared to do exactly that.  Soon I was driving over to the little Daniels Produce store, about 12 miles to the west, to get some corn on the cob and big red tomatoes for ourselves and for some of the kids.

A little later, I took some corn and tomatoes to the kids, and dropped off my customer’s quilt while I was at it.

Baby Russell smiled at me for the first time while I was there, and made the cutest little cooing noises.

Hannah sent me home with some peach cobbler she’d made.  We had some for dessert after our Detroit Pizza that evening.

Saturday morning, I had a peanut butter/tomato sandwich for breakfast.  I love those things.

The high that day was 71°, and once again it was foggy and damp.  I spent a good part of the day making three more Dresden Plates, bringing the total to 12.  I have just about enough big ones (12-15”); I need more little ones (6”-11”).

For supper, I cooked our corn on the cob.  Amazingly, Larry got home in time that his corn was still nice and hot.  We had fresh tomatoes and cottage cheese, too.

Sunday was a repeat of the last few days, weather-wise.  As I sipped Blueberry White Chocolate cold-brew coffee and blow-dried my hair, getting ready for church, I listened to the Chicago news station.  Do weather reports in random places make you want to be there?  When they described the sun coming up over Lake Michigan, I wanted to be right there, camera in hand!

Ah, well. I’d be late for church.

Larry fixed waffles for our lunch after we got home from church.  He makes scrumptious waffles.

After the service last night, we visited with family and friends, then went to pick up groceries at Walmart.  Next, we stopped at the Speedy Gonzales Mexican food truck, and I got chicken quesadillas, and Larry got a burrito.  They fix authentic Mexican food, and it’s quite likely the best in town.

I ate half of my quesadillas, while Larry ate his entire humongous burrito – and promptly regretted it. 

“I’ll have the other half of my enchiladas for supper tomorrow night,” I told him.  “What will you have?” 

He held his stomach.  “I won’t need to eat breakfast or lunch tomorrow; maybe not even supper!”  Then he changed his mind.  “Maybe I’ll have a peanut butter/tomato sandwich.” 

After thinking they were horrid for years, he finally tried one – and liked it, last year.  Dorcas tried one once when she was a teenager; but she didn’t toast the bread – and then wondered how anyone could possibly like such a yucky sandwich.  🙄 

Toast it!  You’ve gotta toast it, I tell ya.

It was another damp, cloudy day today, and a slight haze of fog could be seen down the hill toward Shady Lake Road, a mile or so in the distance.  The temperature got up to 69° this afternoon.  You’d think we lived on Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, these last three weeks.  Grand Banks is considered the foggiest place on earth.

I like fall weather.  We don’t have as many varieties of trees as some places to the east do, so we don’t have quite as much color; but over by the Missouri River it’s quite beautiful in the autumn.

The second load of laundry is in the washing machine.  Larry came home for a few minutes and happened to be in the washroom right when I was ready to start the next load, and I coaxed him into extracting the coins from the area between the agitator and the barrel where they get stuck.  They’re his, after all; he forgets to remove the change from his pockets, and I refuse to put my hand into those murky depths.

A deliveryman just dropped off an order I made a couple of days ago:  a collection of ‘biscuits’ (little shortbread cookies) made in the U.K. by the company McVitie’s:  Digestives, The Original; Rich Tea, The Classic One; Hobnob, The Oaty One; and Ginger Nuts, The Fiery One.

I had to try them all (how else do you properly compare flavors and textures?!) – but I didn’t want four entire ‘biscuits’, so I opened each package and took one bite out of one cookie per package.  Larry should not be surprised when he discovers them thus; he knows what happened on those seldom occasions when I received a box of assorted chocolates!

There goes the drier singing its little tune.  I’m off to put away another load of clothes!

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