Here’s a picture of Caleb and Maria’s boxer, Sadie, and
her new toy:
Isn’t she adorable?
There’s just something about that face...
Kurt was in the ICU at the Omaha Med Center Monday
and Tuesday of last week. He was then
moved to a private room – and by Wednesday afternoon, he was on his way home, with
oxygen he would need after any exertion and a Pulse Oximeter to check his
heartrate and oxygen levels.
Hmmm... I just got a notice, someone has purchased
three patterns from me. I told Larry the
other night that if I cranked out 30 more patterns, and keep selling them at
the rate I have been, and then if we save every dime I make from those things,
we will be millionaires in a little less than 6 ½ years.
My word! I’d better get me to my markers and
my lightbox!
The trouble is, you see, there are a gazillion other
things I wanna do. And half a gazillion things I need to do.
I need to draw up a variety of designs for a variety
of sizes of quilts to make with the Buoyant Blossoms blocks. You know, it’s
a whole lot easier for me to put together a quilt in whatever way I happen to
decide, than it is for me to make instructions and a pattern that other people
can follow! Hope I can do it properly.
On the other hand, I see various pattern designers
who sell quilt blocks of all sorts, and show no completed version of any quilt
at all.
Meanwhile, the flower gardens keep looking at me
reproachfully. Crocuses are blooming,
and the daffodils, tulips, lilies, and irises are starting to come up. I went out there and tried removing some of
the old flower stalks, and discovered they were too damp and soft from the rain
and snow we’ve been having to break off neatly, and I wound up pulling up a
baby Autumn Joy sedum. I tucked it back
into the earth and happily came back inside.
One needn’t remove old flower stalks if they won’t cooperate, need one?!
My pedometer said I walked 4,278 steps Monday (and I
walked some before the package arrived).
Here’s an interesting website about ‘how many steps are good’: Healthy
Steps
I have the p.m. and a.m. time switched around on the
pedometer, since I do more exercising after midnight than before noon, most days. The pedometer is programmed to go back to 0
at midnight. Since I switched the a.m.
and p.m., it will instead change to 0 at noon.
Actually, it would be better if I altered the time on it, and forced it
to go to 0 at, oh, say, 4:00 a.m.
I put a bowl of past-their-prime walnuts, pecans,
and Brazil nuts (still in the shell) on my back deck table Monday evening.
By Tuesday afternoon, a cute little squirrel had found it, and was diligently
and industriously working away, one big ol’ nut at a time. It’s so cute
the way he picks one up, spins it this way and that in his little paws, gets it
situated just right so he can best hold it tightly in his mouth, and then off
he goes with it – down the deck post to the ground one story below, across our
yard, under the fence, and then some distance across the nearby wooded pasture
until he finds the spot where he want to cache – uh, that is, squirrel it
away.
I made supper for Loren that evening: white chocolate pudding to go with cranberry
orange muffins, grape jello, mixed vegetables, and Brussels sprouts. He said he didn’t need meat, as he had a big
piece of roast beef from Lura Kay.
He’s 77, but he stills works industriously at
everything he does. That day, he was washing clothes and hanging them on
the line.
At 8:00 p.m. that evening, it was -12° and snowing
in Barrow, Alaska. But it was 43° and raining in Ketchikan, Alaska.
Just how far apart are those towns? I wondered. I looked it up. (I like
researching stuff. All sorts of stuff.)
Ketchikan and Barrow, Alaska, are 1,328 miles apart
as the crow flies. That’s a little farther than it is from Columbus,
Nebraska, to Savannah, Georgia. A long
ways!
Here’s a map with Alaska superimposed over the lower
48:
And that made me have to look up the mileage between
Attu Station – on the island farthest west in Alaska – to Ketchikan on the
east: 2,183 miles!
On this picture, Attu Station is atop western
California, while Ketchikan rests atop northeastern Florida.
On the other hand, Attu Station, Alaska, is only 313
miles from Russia’s Bering Island, specifically, the little town of Nikolskoye,
population 676 as of 2010 (half what it was in 1989). Oh, and it was 31°
there. :-D A picture of the settlement:
And now you have your RF(s)D [Random Fact(s) of the
Day].
Victoria got home late Tuesday night. The doctor and nurses had let them listen to
Kurt’s lungs ---- and this was after they drained his lung, and after breathing
treatments, so it was a lot better than it was: it sounded like a loudly growling bear (according
to Victoria), or like rocks sliding down a chute (according to Kurt).
Even if that young doctor had trouble reading the
x-rays, as he had said, and couldn’t make heads or tails out of the blood tests,
he certainly should have known from that little gadget called a stethoscope that
hangs around his neck that Kurt was in a terrible way! Yet he proclaimed Kurt’s lungs ‘clear’ when one
side was in fact nearly full, and the other side half full of thick fluid. He had not checked for mono even though Kurt had
many of the symptoms.
As I mentioned last week, this young doctor, after
hearing about Kurt being in ICU and the details of his illness, called Ruth to
apologize for so badly missing the boat.
He called Bill the next day to inquire into Kurt’s welfare, and
apologized to him, too.
Let’s hope that something good comes from all this –
and that is, that this doctor learns to listen to his patients, and really
understand that life is fragile, and if a person can’t breathe, they can’t
live!
Tuesday’s step tally on my pedometer was
6,547. It was a somewhat normal day for me, so I suppose I generally do
anywhere from 4,500 – 7,000, as a rough estimate.
Early Wednesday morning, Victoria headed off to
Omaha again with Bill and Ruth. Shortly
after 8:30 a.m., she texted: “Kurt might
get to come home today!!!!!!!!! 😃😃😃😃😃😃 😃😃😃😃🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌 ” Does that look like High Excitement to you??
Larry, not realizing he was sending his reply to the
entire group of recipients, including me, wrote, “Tell him if he gets to come
home I’m going to put a monitor on him to make sure he doesn’t leave his house
till he’s well enough. 😃😃😃😃 ”
Norma then joined the conversation: “Good. I will tell you someday how well your Dad
stayed in the house after he was in the hospital with pneumonia. 😉 ”
I headed downstairs to mend some work pants for
Larry, hem a lined, pleated, single-knit skirt for Hester, and work on the
Christmas tree skirt.
There was a blue jay on the feeders; he’d discovered
the peanut butter suet cakes, and was making that funny ‘toodle! toodle!’ that
blue jays do now and then, sounding a lot like one of those Fisher Price Happy
Apple baby toys from the late 60s.
Would you believe, there is yet a third alien cat
around here? And Teensy had been bitten on a hind leg, and was
limping. I got the feline antibiotic out again and gave him a couple of
doses.
At least two of the alien cats out here are actually
quite tame, and I’ve petted one. Shouldn’t’ve,
I know – it just encourages him; but he came rubbing and purring around me when
I was working in the flowerbeds... and then he wanted to follow me straight
into the house, and he sat on the front porch and mrrroowwwed and
ppbbhrrrred... and coaxed and wheedled. Poor thing.
But he beats up on Teensy!!!! I have to care
for my own cats, first. Siggghhhh...
At 2:25 p.m., Victoria sent a text: “We’re on our way home!!!!”
Larry responded:
“OK I’ll get the surveillance equipment and the ball and chain 😁. And
it’s your grandmother’s fault for my misbehavior. She was working and couldn’t keep her eyes on
me 😆. ”
Victoria, clearly in high spirits, replied, “Hahahaha
okay I’ll let you do that. And oh
SUUUUUUURE , and you were how old?”
Teddy had to throw in his two cents: “Old enough to know better.”
Meanwhile, I got stymied in the patching of Larry’s work
pants, because I couldn’t find the pair from which I was going to cut the
patches. So I cut Hester’s skirt shorter – and was then stymied again,
unable to hem it, because I didn’t have the right color of thread.
So... I worked on the Christmas tree skirt.
(That’s what I wanted to do anyway.) ;-)
I’ll tell you what happens now and then when I
happily trot down to my sewing room to sew something, after a too-long hiatus:
I cut pieces... I pick up the first two... (that’s
maybe my favorite part, beginning a new project)... I put the pieces
together... I insert them under the presser foot... step on the pedal... pull
the pieces out ----------
------- and discover I’ve sewn right side to wrong
side.
Eh, I learned to sew right sides to ride sides when
I was 8 years old, now didn’t I? Or did I?
I rip out the seam and redo it.
I redo it the same way I did it the first time.
And so begins my new project. :-D
At a quarter after four, I put another load of
clothes in the washing machine. These wouldn’t
be hanging outside on the line, because we were expecting 5-8” of snow.
The wind was gusting at 45 mph, and expected to increase to 50 mph. It was
37°, and there was lightning all around us. The little songbirds were
clustering around the feeders, as they do when a storm is approaching.
I cut 45 more 2 ½” x 1 ½” diamonds, as I needed to
make the swirling star middle of the Christmas tree skirt bigger. Trouble
was, I would have to sew them together lengthwise to fit on the side of the
star rays they needed to go on. They’re taffeta and satin. Slippery!
This may turn into a calamity, I thought.
Then, Ah, well. I already have plenty of points that don’t
match. I’ll just carry on the theme! ;-)
By a quarter ’til six, there was a wet, sleety rain
pouring down, and the wind was blowing even harder. The sleet would soon
change to snow. I was glad Bill and
Ruth, with Kurt and Victoria, had gotten home.
A quilting friend posted a picture of a small quilt
someone had made with a child’s handprints in the center block. That reminded me of when our oldest, Keith,
was in kindergarten, and he made a poster with his handprints in the middle,
and this poem underneath:
Sometimes you get discouraged
Because I am so small,
And always leave my fingerprints
On furniture and walls.
But every day I’m growing,
I’ll be grown up someday,
And all these tiny handprints
Will simply fade away.
So here’s a final handprint
Just so you can recall,
Exactly how my fingers looked
When I was very small.
Because I am so small,
And always leave my fingerprints
On furniture and walls.
But every day I’m growing,
I’ll be grown up someday,
And all these tiny handprints
Will simply fade away.
So here’s a final handprint
Just so you can recall,
Exactly how my fingers looked
When I was very small.
After church that evening, Hester gave me two
scarves, one in a rust/peach print that matches my skirt so closely, it almost
looks like it was made from the same fabric. The other is ivory, part in a
fine, thin linen-type fabric, and part in lace.
It was exactly right for the ivory and gold jacket I’d gotten.
Hester also gave me a pin-striped tan jacket with
tiny ruffles all around the double-lapeled collar. That, I decided, I would wear for the Sunrise
Service, with a navy and indigo skirt with tan and ivory flowers.
Larry and I went to Wal-Mart that night for thread
to hem Hester’s skirt. There was no
thread of the right color in serger thread; I’d have to make do with regular
sewing machine thread. Serger thread is
two-ply; sewing machine thread is three-ply.
When that happens and I’m serging thin fabric, I do a three-thread seam
instead of four-thread, so the thread won’t be so thick on the fabric.
We got some Martinelli apple juice in cute roundish
10-oz. bottles for the kids and their kiddos, as a little Easter gift. We cleaned off the rack and asked a stocker
if there was more, but we were out of luck; it was all gone. It’s good stuff – and other people must know
it, too!
As it turned out, I don’t think we even got an inch
of snow that night. Why can I never find a previous day’s precipitation
totals?? I hunt around here and there on the Internet... I can find ‘greatest
precipitation on this date in history’... I can find ‘predicted precipitation for 2017’...
but not for yesterday.
Thursday, I wound a couple of bobbins with the
thread I’d gotten, threaded my serger, and finished hemming Hester’s skirt. The fabric is a thin, fine knit, stretchy,
with very narrow pleats pressed into the fabric in a bit of a design. My
serger can’t equal the big commercial sergers at stuff like that, but it can
give them a good run for their money, if I get it set properly. It’s a
Bernina 1300DC with a gazillion settings. Pretty slick machine.
I repaired Victoria’s bed ruffle, did a bit of laundry,
and then got back to work on the Christmas tree skirt. After adding another row of diamonds, the
rays for the center of the Christmas tree skirt were ready to put together:
Next, I cut eight ivory satin triangles to go
between the rays. I was nearly done
sewing the ivory-colored satin triangles onto the star when I noticed: half
of the triangles are of shiny satin, the other half are of slightly less-shiny gloss
satin. Aarrgghh.
Well, I gave it a quick press, spread it out, looked
at it, took a picture... and went off to bed.
Friday, I headed downstairs to my sewing room all
set to get down to business with my new Bernina seam ripper.
Except... it was still hard to tell those two
fabrics are actually different, even by light of day in front of the big patio
doors.
Therefore, I decided to pretend the fabric mix-up never
happened and proceed on.
I cut the outer borders for the Christmas tree skirt
blocks, and then went to my blind friend Linda’s house to fix a few things on
her computer. Java needed an update, and
Eudora, her mail program, wasn’t reading properly. I’m not very accustomed to Eudora, but I
opened the program, sat and stared at it rather dumbly for a moment or two –
and suddenly noticed: all the buttons over
the various email columns were stacked on top of each other, so the synthesizer
couldn’t read them! Must’ve happened
when the program crashed, a couple of days earlier. I restored the Google search app that her
Internet Service Provider had removed without her permission a week ago, and
set it as default instead of the Yahoo search they’d changed it to.
Once the computer issues were resolved, I stepped
back in time and inserted a ribbon in a manual typewriter that she uses to
print envelopes.
Then, with the ink scrubbed off my fingers (I hoped),
and her little dog Cassie properly petted, I returned home and got back to
sewing strips of ivory satin onto the Christmas blocks.
Sewing sans pattern is quite a lot like traveling
sans map. But, oh, the things (and places) we wind up with (and in)!
A quilting friend said, “I know how that
works. You have your plan, but when you actually get into making the
project you see things you hadn’t previously thought about. What if I did
this? Or what would this look like? Oh, wouldn’t this look
spectacular? LOL”
Yes, well, ... one of my main and foremost thoughts
is, “Oops.” :-D
And then, Ah, well; guess I’ll do this... and
this... and this... instead.
I hadn’t been home long before Linda wrote to tell
me, “I keep getting ‘Program Manager wants attention’ when I either open
Window-Eyes (her reader) or go to the Desktop with Windows key and M. It’s making my keystrokes really sluggish, and
everything else, too. It doesn’t tell me
anything, and I can’t close it with Alt F4; that only asks me what I want the
computer to do.”
I suggested a total reboot, then typed ‘Program
Manager’ into Google to see if I could discover what that was all about. What I got was a whole bunch of information
about starting a career as a Project Manager, and nary a single entry about ‘Program
Manager.’
When Linda turns her computer on, her synthesizer
announces something about an ‘Event Status Manager’. I cannot see anything happening – but her
synthesizer reads it; I heard it myself.
I searched around to see what that might be, but didn’t find anything
helpful in the slightest. She also got a
popup that said ‘Start wants attention’.
I’ve never heard of such a thing before.
“Next thing you know, you’ll be getting one that says ‘Polly wants a
cracker’, or ‘Cassie wants a milkbone!’” I told her.
In one of my searches, I found this paragraph:
“Windows oozes with all sorts of hackle-raising ‘features’
that interfere with just plain using your PC. But don’t chuck your monitor across the room! By the time you’re done reading this article,
your headaches should be gone.”
Trouble was, the article only told me a bunch of things
I already knew, an’ I dint larn nuttin. Someday
I’ll look to see what things are scheduled to launch upon startup on her
computer. It didn’t occur to me to do
that until after I got home.
Early Saturday afternoon, I happened to look out the
window, and was surprised to find it snowing like anything. Big, fat, wet
snowflakes. I pulled up WeatherBug, found a winter weather advisory...
and saw that we could expect 2-5”. The temperature dropped from 36° to
32° in the next hour, and the snow started to accumulate.
Meanwhile, Barrow, Alaska, had finally made it above
0° – they were at a balmy 2°. That wouldn’t last, though; the high for
Easter was expected to be -4°. I like to know things like that, so I can feel
warmer by comparison. :-D
I’ve always loved Alaska. We studied Alaska
when I was in grade school, and I’ve read stories and biographies of people who
lived in Alaska. More recently, I’ve seen films, and later, youtube
videos, about Alaska. When I was young, my parents and I headed to Alaska,
but my mother got sick, and we turned back at Grande Prairie, Alberta, north of
Jasper National Park. I was always sorry about that, and hope to go there
someday. Now, there’s a destination Larry won’t put up any fuss about! –
he wants to go to Alaska just as much as I do. Barrow is the 11th northernmost
public community in the world and is the northernmost city in the United
States.
I like mountains... and snow... and big wild
animals... and I also like to look at weather extremes around the world. We
have a big, intriguing earth. Too bad evil people make so much of it
unsafe.
Here is a list of the northernmost cities and towns
in the world: Northern
Cities
Many of those are in pristine, beautiful
country. The most northern of them all, named Alert, is in the Qikiqtaaluk Region of
Nunavut, Canada, and is only 508 miles from the North Pole. There are
polar bears... artic foxes... ptarmigans (and other birds that nest there in
the summer)... muskoxen... wolves... arctic hares... caribou...
The goldfinches were fussing like hoydens and
jackanapes at the feeders. What sounds like friendly little chirps,
tweets, and twitters are actually altercations, squabbles, and wingdings.
I got a few funny shots of their fusses and squabbles
in the snow: Junco
Versus Finch, and the Sunflower Seeds
That afternoon, Larry worked on his big trailer,
putting new wood on the floor and greasing the wheel bearings. He says it’s because he might sell it. I thought it was more likely because he’d
bought something and needed the trailer to haul it. I would learn I was right – but it’s a
secret, and I can’t tell you yet.
He took a little break that evening, and went with
me to take Hester her skirt, and the rest of the family the Martinelli apple
juice. Four of these 10-oz. bottles come
in a pack. We found them in the juice aisle (as opposed to the cooler
aisle). There is no water, no concentrate, no preservatives... just
apples in it. Yummy stuff! I just looked it up online, and I
see the company was started in 1868: http://www.martinellis.com/about.shtml
Oh, haha, I just noticed a column of running Tweets
at the side of their homepage, and someone had written, “Mom gets me a jug of
Martinelli’s Apple Juice and says that’s what I get for Easter. #MomOfTheYear”
Hee hee Reckon
my kids will award me ‘#MomOfTheYear’?
That afternoon when Levi, who’s 5 ½, saw it snowing,
he took a mixing bowl out to the patio so he could catch some. Hannah didn’t know about it until late this afternoon
when he kept talking about the prospect of making snow ice cream. She asked
him where he got that idea, and he said it was in a book. Hannah told him they’d need snow.
“No problem,” said Levi, “I already collected some!”
So Hannah got out the ingredients for a recipe she
found online, and they made some ice cream. “It was really sweet,” she said, “but fun to
eat anyway.”
Saturday night, I got the Christmas tree skirt top
finished; it’s now ready to be quilted. Larry
looked at it, and wanted to go get the Christmas tree from the basement and set
it back up. Then he suggested I put it around one of the blue spruces in
the front yard, right atop the snow, to take a picture of it.
Our Sunrise Service started at 7:00 a.m. It was 22° as we drove to town a good
half-hour before sunrise. After some
songs and a sermon, we went to our friend Tom Tucker’s big camper sales
building for breakfast. They clear out a
large part of the building and set up tables, and it makes quite a nice place
for our get-togethers while the Fellowship Hall and school are under construction.
We hope to have the Fellowship Hall done by the next
wedding, which will be in 2 ½ months. We’re hoping to have the school
done by next fall, too. All the windows are in now. It sure is big!
By 10:00 a.m.., we were home again, and Victoria and
I had changed clothes in preparation for our morning service, which would start
at 11:00 a.m.
Larry prepares for the next service by removing his
suit jacket and tie, taking a nap until half a minute before time to go, then
putting suit jacket and tie back on – which once again goes to show how unfair
life is for us ladies who like to look all spiffy and coiffed and
Easter-Sundayish.
It had only warmed up to 25°, and Saturday’s snow was
not melting.
We were surprised to see Kurt at the service! That boy refuses to stay down for long.
Amy sent pictures of some of the kids drinking their
Martelli’s apple juice that afternoon, writing, “Kids love the juice!! Thank
you!!!”
Our evening service was at 6:30 p.m. Shortly before time to go, I looked out my
front kitchen window – and there was Kurt, dressed in his Sunday best, coming
down the sidewalk to get Victoria and take her to church! I really was
quite surprised that he felt well enough to drive all the way out here to
collect his girl and ferry her to church.
Larry let him in, and I immediately said, “What on
earth are you doing out of bed?!” which made him laugh – and he didn’t even
cough afterwards. You can’t imagine – well, maybe you can – how relieved
we are to see him getting well. He still must use oxygen after any exertion,
as his oxygen levels fall fairly quickly. But he’s improving.
After the song service, however, Kurt’s heartrate
was at 160 bmp. He went out and used his oxygen, which he’d brought
along, thankfully.
Lawrence was well enough to come to both morning services.
There used to be a Sunday School teacher at our
church when my father first arrived, long before my time, who would simply
spend the hour reading some long passage of Scripture, and then end it by
remarking gravely, “That was self-explanatory.”
That’s what you say when you haven’t studied the
passage, and/or have no earthly idea what in the world it means. The
older members of my family who remember that are still prone to rattle off some
bit of deep, incomprehensible rocket science and then remark drolly (with a
deadpan face), “That was self-explanatory.”
At the luncheon, we sat by Loren, and Bobby and Hannah
and family. I sat next to Nathanael, who’s 9 ½. I got a glass of
white milk before I knew they had chocolate milk, so I tried to trade Nathanael
my ‘lovely, delicious, snowy-white milk’ for his ‘dirty ol’ stuff’. He
thinks Grandma is lots of fun (though he didn’t trade).
Lura Kay gave me a pair of Ginghers
appliqué scissors yesterday, the type with offset handles and a ‘pelican
bill’, as it’s called, which helps to keep them from accidentally snipping underlying
fabric. More than just appliqué
scissors, they will be just the ticket for trimming silk ribbon when I’m using
my embroidery hoop, because of the offset handles! Ginghers slide open and closed so
smoothly.
When we got home, I wrote to her, “Good grief, did
you know those things are $40 scissors????!!!!!!! (I know, that’s supposedly rude to find that
kind of thing out, but seeing as how we were raised by the same father, you’ll
know how I couldn’t help it – and, besides, now you know I’ll take really,
*really* good care of them!)”
Teensy must be feeling his cheerios this
afternoon. As I type, he has gone bombing
through the kitchen and living room several times, twice taking a time out to
leap into my lap for a short cuddling.
He doesn’t race around very often; he’s generally more dignified and
sedate.
When we were first married, we lived in a nice trailer
court not too far from where we live now.
Our trailer, a nice large one, had a big ‘garden tub’ with steps into
it, and metal scrollwork on one end that reached the ceiling. Well, we had
a calico kitty who would climb the scrollwork all the way to the top –
especially if one of us was in the tub – and then she’d sit up there, stranded,
and cry until we rose dripping from the tub and helped her down. :-D
It’s a lovely day here, 66°, bright and sunny, and I’m
hanging clothes on the line, and there’s a red-tailed hawk doing spirals on the
updrafts overhead. If he gets too low, all the little songbirds at the
feeders scatter. They don’t seem to mind Tabby snoozing away on the deck,
though.
Three loads of clothes are folded and put away...
one load is hanging and drying... last load is in the washer. How do I
break two nails, just washing clothes? (Not that nails are very high on
my list of priorities, but I would rather they weren’t all jagged and ugly.)
The windows and doors are open... the birds are
singing... and Teensy is still in High G.
There goes the little chiming tune on the washing
machine... time to hang out the last load.
++++++++++++
Okay, I’m back!
Did you miss me?
The wind is gusting at 25 mph, and the humidity is
only 22.4%, so the clothes should get dry by the time the sun sets at 7:50 p.m.
(2 hours and 10 minutes from now). The
birds are singing their evening songs. I like it out here in the country.
++++++++++++
And now it’s a quarter ’til 8, and the clothes did
indeed get dry. They’re folded and put
away. The sky is all lavender and aqua
and pink, with little puffy cream-colored clouds drifting in long ripples low
at the horizon. The grass is green from Saturday’s wet snow, and the
trees are turning a misty green from the tiny new leaves. I like the
country, I like springtime, I like the birds – and here comes a warm, cuddly,
purring cat to hop up onto my lap and get in the way of my keyboard.
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
