Midmorning Tuesday, it was 42° on the
way up to 67°, and partly cloudy. The
wind was from the south, as it has been for many days, so we have not gotten
any of the smoke from the wildfires raging nearby, just a little whiff from one
to our south that was quickly contained.
The brown-headed cowbird was back
again that day. As I mentioned last
week, these are parasite birds – that is, they lay their eggs in other birds’
nests and then go their merry ways, letting the foster parents bring up their
offspring. Just look at this little
Chipping sparrow (above) feeding that roly-poly baby cowbird. And here’s a Lesser goldfinch feeding a fat
little cowbird fledgling.
You’d think baby brown-headed cowbirds
would grow up with a sense of responsibility, after being treated so kindly. But nope, they instinctively know they are
cowbirds, and when they grow up, they hire Preacher birds ((... snicker
...)) to marry them to fellow cowbirds, whereupon they promptly start dropping
off their egg-kids at birdie daycares, never to retrieve them again. (A ‘Preacher bird’ is a nickname for the Red-eyed
vireo, because it sings all day long from treetops: Red-Eyed Vireo’s
Song) (Please don’t
learn grammar from the narrator of that video. It’s not, “The bird had sang,” it’s “The bird
had sung,” sir! Aarrgghh. Otherwise, good video.)
I was emailing a friend, and did a search in
gmail to see if I’d already told her about the cowbird. I typed in ‘parasite’,
and wound up with a thread that did not have that word in it
anywhere. I did a double take when I saw the word that was
highlighted: ‘worms’!
That afternoon, I started some Bentley’s
Minty Mint cold tea steeping in the refrigerator. Tea steeped cold is not as bitter as tea
steeped hot, because tea requires heat to release the tannins. And
tannins are those ingredients in tea that give me a stomachache. The
teabags are from the large collection of Bentley teas in a tin that Lura Kay
gave me a few years ago.
The tannin compound catechin in green tea
bothers my stomach much more than the theaflavins/thearubigins in black
tea. I learned this when it finally occurred to me to Google, “Why does
green tea give me a stomachache?”
As I worked in my quilting studio that
day, I listened to an audiobook, Driven
From Home: A Converted Jewess – Jeanette
Gedalius. Robert sent me the link. Quite a story. Some people give up all to follow Christ,
just as Moses, ‘choosing rather to suffer affliction
with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season,’ as it
says in Hebrews 11:25.
I’d not used that website, Scroll Reader,
before. There are many books there that
I plan to listen to. I’ve made it
through three now. I especially like
listening to biographies.
Upon getting the center part of the quilt
together, I began removing the newsprint paper from the back. I’ve haven’t cared for the name of
this quilt, so it is now officially changed to ‘Constellation’.
Wednesday was a hot day, getting all the
way up to 87°. I spent four hours
pulling paper off of quilt blocks, until it was time for our evening church
service.
Thursday morning, I got up early and prepared
for a trip to the eye doctor in Lincoln for another Botox treatment. When I hung out the bird feeders, the
goldfinches were impatient – they were landing on the feeders before I’d quite
gotten them in place!
As I blow-dried and curled my hair, I sipped
Red Velvet/White Chocolate cold-brew coffee, listened to the news, and went through
posts on my laptop. Larry, meanwhile, added
a bit more Freon to the air conditioner in the Mercedes. He put the new compressor in it last Saturday,
and it’s working; but it needed another shot of coolant. (At least we thought it was working;
but it didn’t cool very well yesterday, and now we’re not so sure. Maybe it only works on cool days.)
After telling this to a friend, she promptly
wrote back, “Since you did all this before seeing the eye doctor, you may find
your camera is now hanging out on the deck and you’ll soon try to take a red-truck
photo with a bird feeder.” 😅
Soon raisin/date/ walnut oatmeal and
half a banana were down the hatch and I was gathering camera (not a bird
feeder, nope), coffee, Celsius, and walking shoes, since I wanted to go to the
Sunken Gardens after my appointment.
About the time I was ready to go, Larry decided
to come with me, as it was too windy for him to do the painting at Walkers, as
he’d intended. We filled another mug
with coffee, and off we went.
Oh, guess what! (Did you guess?) Larry didn’t turn into that apartment complex
next to the doctor’s office, even though the sweet-talkin’ GPS lady told him
to! He apparently remembered the fiasco
that happened last time he did that, when we wound up in a parking lot with no
exit, and had to retrace our steps (or wheel prints, as it were), thus winding
up a few minutes late for my appointment.
Astonishing. (Astonishing that he
didn’t follow the GPS instructions instead of mine, that is. Nothing astonishing about being late, last
time.)
We made it with time to spare, this
time. That’s astonishing, too.
We didn’t go to Sunken Gardens after all,
since it was very windy in Lincoln, too, with dust blowing everywhere. Not good for my eyes. We decided instead to take a scenic route
home.
Dry lightning hit out west, and started new
prairie fires. The Ashby Fire was
already up to 30,000 acres; the Minor Fire was at 16,000 acres. Two other small fires started, also; but fire
crews got them put out quickly. The
villages of Ashby and Hyannis were evacuated. This is Ashby.
Here’s a ring-billed gull we saw over Lake
Wanahoo north of Wahoo.
Below is Czechland Lake north of
Prague.
When we got home, I headed upstairs to
my quilting studio to continue removing paper from the Constellation quilt.
Friday morning at 10:30 a.m., my weather app said
it was 37°, feeling like 27°, on the way up to 51°. But it felt so much warmer when I went out to
rehang the bird feeders earlier, I could hardly believe the app was correct. I checked my other apps, and even looked at
one on my tablet. It must’ve been right;
they were all in agreement! Still, it was
sunny and nice, and – well, I was going to say the wind had died down, but my
app said it was gusting up to 28 mph. What, did somebody drop a Good-Weather Bubble
down over my house?? 😄
That day, Carolyn’s class set up a
Colonial Village with a variety of shops that would’ve been found in such a
village. Carolyn’s shop was a bakery –
and she had the chef’s hat to prove it!
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Victoria sent me pictures and videos
of it. Hours later, I looked at them
again – and belatedly noticed a familiar table quilt at Carolyn’s Bakery, one I
had given Victoria a few years ago.
After school, Hannah brought Levi to
put a new string in my piano. Those
strings have become fragile because they’re a bit rusty – perhaps from the
humidity in the house last summer when the air conditioning went kaput. Levi is handling them – and I’m playing them
– with kid gloves so we don’t have to replace more than one at a time, and only
when necessary, as a piano with all new strings goes out of tune fast,
on account of the elasticity in the strings.
It was dreadful trying to keep the poor piano in tune after it
was restrung in 1988 following our house fire, when everything got soaked from
the firemen’s hoses.
We had venison meat loaf that evening,
made with plenty of eggs and Ritz crackers, and with a ketchup and brown sugar
glaze on top. This was accompanied by Caribbean
Blend vegetables (broccoli, carrots, green beans, and strips of red peppers).
Saturday morning was chilly, 47°; but
it got up to 64° in the afternoon. We
were issued yet another Red Flag Fire Warning. The Ashby Fire that started Thursday was at
36.2K acres and 46% contained. The nearby
Minor Fire that had also started Thursday was at 17.0K acres and 7% contained. Another small fire started to the southeast,
near the Nebraska/ Iowa border. I heard a helicopter
go over low in the early morning hours; it was probably measuring fire
perimeters. Depending on the terrain and
the wind, it’s often easier to do that at night, when the flames show up better with their infrared sensors, and the absence of solar
radiation eliminates false positives from sun-heated rocks.
I spent a good part of the day removing
paper from the Constellation quilt blocks.
There are three left to do. It
takes about an hour for each block.
The piano grabbed me once as I walked
by, but I managed to tear myself away after four or five songs.
Sunday morning, Palm Sunday, the sun peeked
over the horizon about the time I went out to rehang the bird feeders. The birds heard me come out, and came
fluttering in to the backyard trees, sitting there chirping and twittering
impatiently, and sometimes making forays to the feeders before I quite had them
in place.
The first- and second-graders sang a couple
of songs, Hosanna
and For
God So Loved the World, before Sunday School.
Twelve of those children are related to me; it would’ve been 13 – three
of them, granddaughters – if Keira had not been sick. Carolyn is in the middle row behind the little
boy with the light blue tie. Violet is
on the far right, in the dress with yellow collar and cuffs. The rest of those related to me are
great-great-nieces and nephews, and a few second cousins thrice removed, or
some such (those, from Larry’s side of the family, as I have no cousins who
live here).
Bobby, Hannah, Nathanael, and Levi went to
Broken Arrow,
Oklahoma, over
the weekend, where Bobby preached a couple of services at Pastor
Chamberlin’s church. You’ll recall, he’s
the friend who broke his back and his arm when he fell while cutting a tree a
couple of weeks ago. Hannah played the
piano.
After leaving Broken Arrow, Bobby,
Hannah, Nathanael, and Levi went to visit friends, the Parrows, in Stillwater,
Oklahoma, some distance west of Broken Arrow. They had an enjoyable (and
musical) visit, then headed for home.
It was Maria’s birthday; we gave her a
Pioneer Woman pitcher, white with blue flowers on it.
It started out as a pretty day here,
61° by 10:30 a.m. on the way up to 86°. By midafternoon, though, it was all overcast.
Last night when I went out to get the
bird feeders, a raccoon was already out there chowing down, as they often are. This one had himself a different escape route
than most of them: he shinnied into the
middle of the triangular steel tower that holds some of the feeders, rising
from the ground one story below; then, going down through the interior of it,
using it like a 3D ladder, two paws on rungs on either side, he made his way down
to the ground and then waddled off through the big flowerbed. One roly-poly raccoon can make more noise than
half a dozen spooked deer.
There was another small wildfire
yesterday about 50 miles to our north. It
was started by a malfunction with the electric company’s equipment. Several fire departments and farmers with big
discs worked hard to save a nearby farmhouse and put the fire out. The one that started over on the Nebraska/Iowa
border wound up seven miles long and one mile wide and injured one person
before they got it contained. Another
started early yesterday morning about 155 miles to our west near the village of
Bertrand. This picture is from that one.
Almost the
entirety of Nebraska is in drought, but we are hoping for and expecting rain
and possibly snow tonight and throughout the next week.
Nebraska has over 6 million head of
cattle, making it one of the top cattle-producing states in the U.S., with
cattle outnumbering people by more than 3 to 1.
The
sparrows are very busy gathering up fluff for their nests. There’s one little male English sparrow out
front that’s trying his bestest to haul off with a glob of dried grass that’s
three times bigger than he is. He gives
up, grabs a different piece, flies off – and then returns to give the big
dried-grass glob another go. He can drag
it around, but he can’t fly with it; it’s too big, too unwieldy, and too heavy
for him. Others are becoming interested
in the goings-on, and one little female sparrow has given it a try; but that
piece is just too big for them.
Today is National Pencil Day, so I posted a
picture of this quilt, Color Outside the Lines, on my Quilt Talk
group. Thinking I had the pattern, I went
upstairs and looked in my bookcase for it.
I didn’t find it (maybe I never bought it at
all), but I did find Loren’s baby book.
I need to send it to Richard, Loren’s oldest son. I’ll take pictures of it first; I find it
quite touching, reading what my mother wrote on those old pages from 1938,
right up until Loren went to school.
Ah-ha.
I only thought I’d bought this pattern, because I did buy
a nifty pattern for a roll-up colored pencil or crayon holder.
The lady who designed this pattern, Kelli
Fannin, passed away about three years ago at the age of 54 after a battle with
cancer. The pattern is no longer being
printed, and copies are impossible to find.
I reckon I could figure it out, if I had to. I’ll save the picture for reference, just in
case.
Time to put a load of clothes in the dryer,
and another in the washing machine!
Tomorrow, I should be able to finish extracting newsprint from the
Constellation quilt blocks, and start working on the borders. The additional fabric I needed arrived last
Wednesday and has been cooling its heels ever since.
Here’s one of the minimum-maintenance roads
we traversed Thursday.
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
