Journal: Merry Christmas!

Last Tuesday found me (again, still) working on the photo-music movie I wanted to burn to DVDs for my friends for Christmas.  I’d have been done with the original Monday, if Movie Maker was up-to-date (latest one, the one I downloaded onto my new computer, was a 2012 version), and more compatible with my 2016 laptop, and if the program itself had more memory.  Sooo... Tuesday night I redid it all on my old laptop.  And then... I clicked ‘Save as .wmv’ (there is no option to save it as an .mp4 file) and held my breath.  That was where it hung up on the new laptop, every time.  Frustrating.  I shot six songbirds and kicked a cat, trying to get that dumb thing to work.

Not... really.  (I always have to add that, for those literal-minded folk who read my letter.)

Leaving the computer working, I went to bed.

Wednesday morning, I clambered back out of bed, went to check on the movie – and it was done. 

If the 2011 version of Movie Maker can do it, why can’t the 2012 version do it??

Guess I need to look for a different movie maker.

I clicked ‘Play’, scanned quickly through it, found no problems, and so transferred it via external hard drive to the new computer to turn it into a DVD.  If I could just get that first DVD burnt, I could start the duplicating!  And the Christmas service was that very night.

I pulled up the DVD maker and started the disc burning without issue.  It didn’t ask me for title or cover or anything, as the old program had done, and I, expecting it to do so, neglected to look at options for title cover and prologue music.  Well, what happens, happens, I thought, and scurried off to wash and curl hair, hoping it wasn’t throwing in a default of Up On The Housetop, as an old program once did.

Maybe if I used these programs a little more often, I’d get a little smarter at it!

By noon, the duplicators were spinning away.  One burns five discs at a time; the older one, just one.  As soon as the first five were done, I used one of the newly burnt ones in the single dupe (it’s a good word) and there we were then, with six burning at once. 

Hmmmm... the single duper (another good word) must be high-speed; the multi-dupe must not be.  Or at least, it isn’t set on high-speed.  If there is such a setting.  I’d plugged empty discs into both at the same time, and when I checked a few minutes later, the single was on 56% done, while the multi was only on 19%.  I don’t recall that being the case last year!

But then, I don’t recall what I did last week, so who’s to say?

‘Multi-dupe.’  I went to school with one of those.

By 1:00 p.m., 20 DVDs were done, and 6 more were burning.  90 more to go.   I needed to put one in each of the Christmas cards I was taking to our service that night.  Could I do it?  Could I DO IT??!!!  If the dupers would just hurry... hurry... hurrrrrrry...

While the next set of discs burnt, I took deeper seams in the bright red Pendleton wool suit jacket Lura Kay had given me, as it was a bit too big through the midriff.

Half an hour later, I stuck more discs into the duplicator.  While it worked, I clipped and ironed seams and sewed the lining back in.

I took out finished discs... inserted blanks... and tried the jacket on.  Just right!  It fit perfectly.  I dashed upstairs and grabbed the pleated skirt, then rushed back downstairs to press the pleats back sharply into it.  You’ll recall perhaps that I got the skirt on eBay, and then had to run it through the dryer with Dryel (spray and wet cloth treated with dry-cleaning chemicals), because it positively reeked of mothballs.

On the bright side, there are absolutely no moth holes in it.  In fact, I’m pretty sure all wool-eating moths not only in my house, but also in all the neighbors’ houses fled for dear life, the moment I opened the package.

**Just doing my part for mankind in Middle Cornland.

Problem:  ironing those pleats back in resurrected the Eau de Mothball fragrance.  :-P

Fortunately, by the time we were heading to church, the scent had faded almost entirely.

An online quilting friend, in answer to a post I wrote with the above query, “Can I get all this done in time?!” responded, “If you just weren’t so lazy.  It is all the idle time of doing nothing that is slowing you down.”

That made me laugh right out loud.  The cats in the vicinity turned and looked at me.

Wasn’t it Mark Twain who said something on the order of, “All men are lazy; some are just lazier than others”?

I admit to this, and this only:  I work hard – on exactly what I want to work hard on.  Some of my friends who love to work in their flowerbeds and gardens would take a look at mine and mutter under their breaths at how very lazy I am, because sometimes the weeds outpace the flowers or strawberries or tomatoes.  Others who daily wage valorous warfare on dust would look at my end tables, headboard, dresser, or bookcase and shudder.

But the dishes are washed, the floor is swept (even mopped!), the carpets are vacuumed fairly often, and things are where they belong.  Ahem.  Most things are where they belong.

I decided to find out exactly how long it took to burn those discs, so I pulled up a stopwatch and checked it out:  The single duplicator does a disc (these are full discs, with an hour and 29 minutes of music and photo-slideshow) in 8 minutes and 23 seconds.

The 5-slot duper (good word, yes?) does 5 discs in 17 minutes and 27 seconds.

So now we know.

By a quarter after 4, there were only 8 more discs to go, and 5 of those were half done.  When I saw I was going to make it, I started sticking the finished ones into envelopes and sealing them.  Around 120 DVDs... finished and stuffed into cards and envelopes by 5:00 p.m.  It was time to don my glad rags.

Once nattily clad and coiffed, I had enough time to iron about half of the tea towels I needed to embroider.  I had big ideas about coming home after the Christmas service and getting started on those.  But I waaaaaaay overestimated my ambition and want-to, and seriously underestimated my fatigue from a week or so of 4- to 5-hour nights.

And then, wonder of wonders, Larry got home early!  He dawdled about until we were almost not early, but we managed to get to church in time to put our cards into the appropriate families’ bags.  Uh, into the families’ appropriate bags.  Well, something was appropriate, anyway.  ’Cuz we bagged ’em!  Yeah, we done it, instead of leaving some other poor chump to do it after the service, when everything gets into quite the hullaballoo, on account of latenics like us leaving some other poor chump to do it.

Somebody gets a whole volley of those big brown paper grocery bags, and then people write family names on them with markers, and the bags are set on tables in alphabetical order.  So if one’s cards are also in alphabetical order, one can really make tracks, trotting around those tables and dropping cards in bags.

Trouble is, my printer spews out envelopes so fast and furious, it inserts newly-printed envelopes between previously printed envelopes in the stack it makes.  Always something to foil one’s need to hurry!

We had a wonderful service, first singing several Christmas carols, then listening as my nephew Robert, our pastor, gave a sermon from the first chapter of Luke about Zacharias and his wife Elisabeth, parents of John the Baptist, forerunner of Jesus.

The band and orchestra played, and the children sang and read verses or recited poems.  We do so very much love to hear the children sing and play their instruments, and we love the wonderful old Christmas story.

We came home with a big bag stuffed full of cards and pictures from our friends.  Those are my favorite things – pictures of our friends’ families and children.

We stopped at the store before coming home to get more ear-mite medicine for Tiger.  Last week, he clawed a big, bad sore in his ear because of those mites; I evidently hadn’t been treating them aggressively enough.  It got terribly infected, and we had a hard time getting him over it, even though we put triple antibiotic on it several times a day. 

The sore is all healed up now, and the mites don’t seem to be bothering him much at all.

I sat down to look at Christmas cards and pictures.

((... yawwwwn ...))

Problem:  the coffee pot was empty, and the butler had already gone home for the night.  I made myself a cup of the Legends of China white tea Loren gave me.

Thursday, I would embroider!  Machine embroider, that is.  

In the morning, I got up, trotted into the bathroom for bath and shampoo, and turned on the radio to listen to the news.  There was a sad story about a young farmer who lived about 10 miles to our north; he was killed when the tractor motor he was working on exploded.  A tragedy at any time, but sadder yet when it happens at Christmas time, I think.

I soon had my head under the faucet, thereby becoming a bona fide ‘captive audience’, as it were, to the very most stupidest rendition of The Twelve Days of Christmas I ever did hear in my whole life.  Bah, humbug!  I wanted news, not idiots who considered themselves singers.  No, artists.  It’s ‘artists’, these days.  ‘Artists’.  Haha!  (In the most sarcastic sense of the word.)

I made a pot of coffee.  I didn’t measure the coffee grounds.  Larry and Caleb never measure, and their coffee is always yummy.  (We won’t discuss Victoria’s coffee(?)(!) at this time.)  The bag was getting empty... the back of my hand gets grounds on it when I reach waaaay down into the bag... so, I did it Larry and Caleb’s way:  I just dumped it out.  When I had approximately the right amount in the filter, I peered into the bag.  It was almost gone.  Might as well use up the rest.

Dump.

That coffee didn’t taste like anything I usually make, and it certainly didn’t taste like Larry and Caleb’s, either.  I’m telling you, that ‘rest of the bag’ idea was baaad.

I’m going to be looking surprised for at least a week.

Just call me ‘Sarah Let’s Add More Water to That Lynn’.

For a good 45 minutes, I kept drinking half an inch out of my cup, grimacing, and then filling it with hot water.  Drink, fill.  Drink, fill.  It was finally alllllmost bearable.

Oh! – I supposed I heard a little downy woodpecker...  thought, He’s LOUD! – looked out the window – and instead of a downy on the suet feeder, it’s the bigger and rarer hairy woodpecker!

You know how to tell the difference in these birds, when they’re way across the yard?

Well, do you?

Answer:

You glue rulers to all your trees.

I told this good advice to a friend.  She looked at me blankly, then asked, “What good does that do?”

So I told her, “Well, the birds can sit next to the rulers, see how tall they are, and then they can tell you which variety of woodpecker they are.”  ((...pause...))  “’Course, you’ll have to split their tongues first, so they’ll be able to talk.”

Hair curled, I was ready for breakfast.  What should I eat? 

A truck came rumbling down the lane – it was the UPS man with an order of groceries from Wal-Mart.

Mmmmm!  I was ready for Raisin Crrrrrunch cereal!

Please pass the milk.

....  and suddenly, an old memory surfaced:  Me, saying to my mother (just to bug her, you know), “Seelp sap the klim.”

I got really good – and fast – at saying each of the words in a sentence backwards.  Just to bug my mother, you know.

That day, I embroidered designs from a set by Carol Endres called Willow Woolkeepers.  I have no good guidelines for coloring other than a poor-quality, small picture I found on the Internet.  The small, black and white screen on my embroidery/sewing machine sometimes makes it hard to tell what part of the design is going to be stitched next.  I muddled along, trying to make edjeeecated guesses (as Rufus says, in Gasoline Alley).

Sooner or later, I’m going to stitch out a purple face and a flesh-colored hat. 

Each design takes at least an hour and a half, not counting thread changes or husbands coming home from work, hungry and looking for food. 

We had chef salad for supper, along with fruit and nuts given to us at church after the service.  I put a Schwan’s apple pie into the oven for dessert. 

That night, I finished another tea towel.  This one is called ‘The Hoer’ (as in, ‘person who hoes’). 

I clipped the thread, cut new pieces of stabilizer, inserted stabilizers and the next tea towel into the hoop, and pressed ‘Menu’ to go to another design.

It was blank.

Huh?

I pressed other options, went back to Menu.

Still blank.  I pulled the card out, put it back in.  Blank.  I rebooted the machine.  The card remained blank.  What in the world? 

I stuck in a different card, and everything immediately went back to working crackerjack.  Evidently the files on the Willow Woolkeepers card have somehow been corrupted. 

Rats!  I only used three designs on that card, and the dumb thing cost about $25.  Furthermore, I can find nary another card like it anywhere on the Internet.

Friday, my machine toiled away, and I left it now and again to wrap and bag gifts.  If I get too involved with something else, a thread invariably breaks, or the bobbin runs out.  Just another of Murphy’s Laws.  The new machines stop when that happens, and a little beep sounds.

Oh! – now there are two kinds of nuthatches on the feeders at the same time! – the red-breasted and the white-breasted.  The red is smaller, at 4.5”; the white is a full inch longer, at 5.5”.  The red-breasted has a black stripe through the eye; the white does not.  Not until a few months ago did I ever see the red-breasted nuthatch in our vicinity.  Nuthatches are such funny little birds, spiraling headfirst down tree trunks or the rebar that holds our feeders.  They pound their little beaks into the suet quite a lot like the woodpeckers do.

I’m having fun using all the pretty Sulky embroidery thread I got from a lady on SewItsForSale.  The thing is, a collection of thread can look like ever so many colors ---- but when you actually start embroidering all sorts of designs, you discover you sho’ ’nuff could use a whole lot more! 

It’s really amazing (to me, anyway) watching my machine embroider such things as these puppies, especially the ‘fur’.  First, it does a stabilizing stitch over the area... then it fills it in entirely with horizontal stitches.  Next, it heads back over the works, doing zigzags long and short, this way and that, until it really does look like fur.  Sometimes I could be doing other things, but I’m entranced with watching the machine work.

Saturday, Christmas Eve, U.S. Security issued a warning to churches to be on the watch, as ISIS (or some offshoot of the terrorist group) has sent out a list of churches for their zealots to target over Christmas.

Why does some of the world think we should tolerate such murderous, godless heathenistic infidels?!

Larry and I seem to have gotten a touch of food poisoning Friday night after eating some take-out from Runza.  I suspect it was the onion rings.  I only ate a couple, because I didn’t like them; they didn’t taste quite right.  They’re usually pretty good.  The runza itself tasted scrumptious.  It was only after eating the onion rings that we felt a little queasy.

After feeling sick most of the night, we were fine and dandy again by Saturday afternoon, or almost.  That makes it all the more likely it was food poisoning, since bona fide stomach flu (or, to be medically correct, gastroenteritis) usually lasts longer than that.

Larry bought himself a Christmas gift that morning – a new tool chest.  A friend asked, “What are YOU going to buy as your Christmas present?  A new sewing machine?”

Ha!  The sewing machine I want would be about twenty times the price of Larry’s tool chest!  :-O 

“For now,” I told her, “I’ll just be thankful that we were able to go buy all the grandchildren’s Christmas gifts.  I’ll get all crabby and think I really need new machines (notice the plural) another day.”

As it turned out, the day wasn’t even over before I wondered if I might have to get another sewing machine.

When we got home from our shopping spree at Wal-Mart, Larry went off to see if he could find some venison walking around on the hoof.

I set my machine to embroidering another tea towel while I snacked happily on beets, a banana, cottage cheese with half a pear on top, fresh raspberries with a little bit of peach smoothie poured over the top, and Tropicana orange juice.  I had a slice of apple-fritter cobbler bread for dessert, with steaming Caramel Drizzle coffee to wash it all down.  Being hungry, I’d dished up at least twice the amount I could actually eat.  That wasn’t just a snack; that was supper.  Light on the vegetables, though.

That evening, the sewing machine locked up.  I rebooted it, oiled it, put a new needle in it, repositioned the embroidery design, and started stitching again.  The machine didn’t sound quite right, but it was stitching.  I went on embroidering.

A few hours later, it locked up tighter’n a jug, making good on its earlier threat.  So I did what I do best:  I hurried upstairs calling, “Larrrrrryyyyy!!!”  I told him what kind of screwdriver we needed to take off the sewing machine cover to the left of the take-up lever (“an end with more thingies than a Phillips”), as I was fairly certain there was thread caught inside it somewhere.

He found a screwdriver... took off the cover... and indeed there was a large glob (technical term meaning ‘clump, chunk, hunk, and wad’) of thread all tangled around the spring for the needle bar, and more thread back where we couldn’t see.  I pulled most of it out with my serger tweezers, and then Larry vacuumed it out.  He oiled it in places where I have been unable to reach, being careful not to get it on the electronics.  We rebooted the machine and started it running slowly, then a little faster, until the oil worked its way into tight spots.

I think it’s fixed now.  I sure hope so.

I finished four towels that day. The large strawberry design wound up with permanent marker dots for seeds instead of embroidery thread, because that was where the machine quit.

Sunday, Christmas Day, we had unusual weather.  It was warm, with a couple of loud thunderstorms.  About a quarter ’til 5, I suddenly realized that while the rain was coming down and the skies were a dark cadet blue, the setting sun was also shining very brightly from the west.

I knew what that meant, or hoped I did.  I dashed for the eastern window, peered out – and yesirree, there was a brilliant rainbow, and this one was a double!  I ran for my camera. 

A few minutes later, the sun went down, but it was still shining on those puffy cottonball clouds (scientific term meaning ‘puffy, cottonball-shaped clouds’), making them all salmon pink and gold against a dark blue sky. 

I never before saw a rainbow and a cottonball sky on Christmas Day! 

My cute little knitted slippers are still soaked, because I knew I had no time to waste, and grabbed camera and dashed out on the front porch without bothering to either shed the slippers or don shoes.  The porch was covered with half an inch of water.  I went splatting out, and Tabby, who was sitting on a dryer corner of the porch, turned around and stared curiously at my feet. 

She’s getting her socks wet, he was quite clearly thinking. Why would she do that?!

He’s the cat who shakes his paws merely from standing in the doorway watching me mop the floor, even though not a drop of water has touched those little feet, silly kitty.

Last night there were 60-80-mph wind gusts.  The wind blew Loren’s camper off the block he had the hitch sitting on, and backed it uphill on his drive about four feet.  It took down his internet dish and smashed it on the ground, and tore trim from his front window.  It removed a piece of siding from Larry’s garage and blew sheets of insulation around.

Our neighbors lost a big, nice Austrian pine.  Why couldn’t it have blown down the dead tree, instead of the healthy, pretty one?          

Nevertheless, we still have roofs over our heads – and I got these photos!

Here’s one where you can see the second rainbow reflection a little more clearly.  Mists rolled over it quickly, and soon the second one faded.  The main arc stayed bright for a good fifteen minutes.

Our Christmas dinner with our church members was today at noon.  We had roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, carrots, onions, green beans, freshly baked bread sliced and buttered hot, lettuce salad, pickles and olives, strawberry jello, chocolate or white milk, apple or orange juice, coffee or tea, and a variety of cheesecakes.

Afterwards, we went to Wal-Mart for a few photo reprints, and I spotted an Extreme SD card, which I’ve been needing for my camera ever since I got it a year and a half ago.  It takes high-definition movies, but if it doesn’t have the Extreme card, it can’t record fast enough, and the movie turns off.

When we got home, I gave it a try – and it woiks, it woiks, it woiks!  The camera went right on shooting a movie, and didn’t turn off until I decided to turn it off.  Wheeeee!

We also got a couple of Marie Calendar’s pies at Wal-Mart – cherry streusel and peach.  I’d gotten full at church and hadn’t had any cheesecake, and was feeling downright deprived over it.  I baked the cherry streusel, and we later had a slice with frozen vanilla yogurt on top.  My piece was too big, and within a scant few minutes I went from pieless to whatever the opposite of deprived is.  Overfed.  Overstuffed.  Overflowing.  Too full!

Larry went hunting again, and this time he got a deer.  He cleaned it at the shop.  Soon our freezer will be full of venison.

“They’re prettier when they’re alive,” I commented, when he sent me a picture of it.

“They taste better when they aren’t,” he replied.

This evening, I designed a table topper in my EQ7 program.  The pattern is called ‘Storm at Sea’, though the color variation makes it look considerably different than the classic ‘Storm at Sea’.  I’m planning to make it for the upcoming wedding – upcoming next Sunday, in fact.  I won’t get it done in time... but I don’t suppose anyone will string me up by the toenails, read me my last rites, feed me a final meal, and shoot me at daybreak if it’s late.  So... late it will be.  I probably won’t be able to start on it until January 3^rd.  With any degree of success, I should have it done before the happy couple returns from their honeymoon.

I’ll stick a note in the package telling them that it’s their own fault the gift is late, for deciding to get married right after Christmas, of all things.  heh

Oh!  There’s a great horned owl hooting, right outside my window!  I hope little Tabby has enough sense to get himself under cover, if he’s out there somewhere.

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