Journal: Chewed Cords, Cleaning, & Company

Here’s Larry washing the windshield on the Jeep – and then he noticed I was taking his picture.  This was at the station in the village of Monroe, six miles to our west.  The water in the window wash container smelled like some trucker washed out his cattle trailer with it.  😜😝

What’s the most startling thing that’s happened to you as you sewed? 

Our dogs used to camp out at my feet while I sewed, especially at night when everyone else was sleeping. 

Late one night many years ago, there I was, sewing a loooong ruffle lickety-split, really going full bore.  It was the middle of the night, and not another creature was stirring, not even a mouse.  Ebony, our Black Lab, was sound asleep under the table – or so I thought.

Wrong.

She was chewing the cord to my sewing machine.

And then she chewed through it.

All at once, my sewing machine stopped in mid-seam, its light went off, the dog yelped, sprang straight up, and ka-blanged her head on the underside of the table.

I, who am not jumpy, went directly into the attic without benefit of a ladder.

It was right before Easter, and those little girls had to have their ruffled dresses.  Sooo… I awoke Larry and implored him to come and repair my cord.  He clambered groggily out of bed, put on his slippers, went out into the garage to get his electrical box, came back in, and spliced the cord.

I thanked him profusely and went back to sewing. 

He replied, and I quote, “Grum grum grum.”  Yosemite Sam in person.

The dog did not again chew cords.  One of the children’s Bibles, yes.  Cords, no.

Thursday afternoon, I spotted a large butterfly with black wings on top, yellow underneath, fluttering through the flowers.  I grabbed my camera and rushed out to take pictures of it.  I’d never seen this particular type of butterfly around these parts.  It was a Giant Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio cresphontes).  While taking pictures, I discovered that, of all things, the lilacs are in bloom again!  Sixteen years ago, a friend gave us a couple of bushes, telling us that they were the ‘reblooming’ type.  I’d never heard of such a thing, and after fifteen years of no ‘reblooming’, I decided he was nuts, and then forgot all about it.  But... lookie there, honest-to-goodness reblooms.  Mah woid (with a Shirley Temple accent).

I’ve never gotten pictures of the Giant Swallowtail before; it’s generally either the Black or the Tiger Swallowtails that we see around here.  Swallowtails are the birdwing butterflies, largest in the world.  The female Giant Swallowtail has a wingspan of up to 18.8 cm – that’s almost 7.5”!  By comparison, the Black Swallowtail’s wingspan is only about 8.4 cm (3.3”), while the Yellow Tiger Swallowtail can be about 14 cm (5.5”).  Did you know there are over 550 species of swallowtails in the world?

Too bad I didn’t see the Giant Swallowtail earlier in the year; its poor wings are pretty beat up by now.

Oh... haha... I just discovered that certain reblooming lilac hybrids are called ‘Bloomerangs.’  hee hee  Imagine throwing that into polite conversation, with no introductory prelude:  “By the way, I have Bloomerangs!”  😂

I spent a few hours editing pictures from the Nebraska State Fair and uploading them to my blog and Facebook.  I took pictures of every single quilt – and there were about 475 of them. 

Most people at the quilt show were really friendly and nice, but one lady and her lookalike (must’ve been sisters? Or perhaps they’ve just been friends so long they’ve started resembling each other on account of general attitude, like dogs and their owners do? >chortle< ), whom we kept bumping into (not literally) in each and every aisle, glowered at me every time we met despite my friendly, sparkling smile, quite as if I was committing some dreadful and heinous crime, photographing all those quilts.  I was even making sure I wasn’t getting in anyone’s way, or impeding anyone’s progress!  I should’ve zoomed in on her dour face and pressed the shutter button. 

The judges have all encouraged me to enter my quilt in national shows.  Larry and I waited until there was no one near my New York Beauty quilt, no one paying any attention, and then I handed my camera to him and asked him to take my picture in front of it.  Problem:  he’s not nearly so snaphappy as I am, and he takes a good long while peering through the viewfinder, sizing things up, framing things in, and then starting all over when I tell him to use the flash.  During this production, people noticed.  Aarrgghh.

I’m a timid little thing!

Stop laughing.  I am.

So on came the hordes, asking and inquiring and exclaiming.  One lady who doesn’t quilt, but spends several months in Alaska each year and has many friends there who belong to a quilt guild and keep trying to get her started quilting, begged a selfie with me, in order to show her friends in Seward’s Icebox that she is acquainted with the Nebraska quilter who got the Best of Show ribbon.  (That was a long enough sentence to make Charles Dickens jealous.)

I think I successfully fooled all those friendly, outgoing people into thinking I’m just as friendly and outgoing as they are.  😄

We had fun, that day.

I’ve been getting the Atlantic Beach Path One-Block Wonder quilt all properly imagined in my mind (well, imagined, at least – I’m not sure about ‘properly’).  A hint about my preliminary ideas for the Atlantic Beach Path One-Block Wonder quilt (I need a shorter name for that quilt!):  the fabric origami star I stuck in the middle of that hexagon table topper last week was a trial run for a design element in this quilt. 

Loren and Norma came visiting for a while that evening, bringing us some yummy pumpkin bars Norma had made.

Our son-in-law and daughter Todd and Dorcas, along with their little boy Trevor, age 3, were coming to visit from Tennessee, so I did some housecleaning Friday – sweeping, mopping, vacuuming, dusting... nothing quite as monumental as all the painting and total room clean-outs I did in June.

I got another one of these stupid ‘warnings’ on Facebook:  “Be careful: I got a message from you or it shown [sic] on your wall here (that’s false; she didn’t get a message from me at all).. Please tell all the contacts in your messenger list (all 4,700 of them?!) not to accept friendship request from Andrea Wilson. She is a hacker and has the system connected to your Facebook account. (That doesn’t make a lick of sense.)  If one of your contacts accepts it, you will also be hacked (doesn’t work that way), so make sure that all your friends know it. Thanks. Forwarded as received. Hold your finger down on the message. At the bottom in the middle it will say forward. (Even on a Desktop computer?)  Hit that then click on the names of those in your list and it will send to them THIS Is REAL”

I wrote back, as I usually do, “This is a hoax that's been going around for years.  Please read this article:  https://www.hoax-slayer.net/andrea-wilson-friendship-request-hacker-hoax/”

Most people thank me, and life goes on.  But this person wrote back, “I know but better to be safe with those that don’t know”

That doesn’t make any more sense than the ‘warning’ she sent.  I replied, “The real Andrea Wilson has been quite disadvantaged by this lie, however.  Best to not spread untruths.”

It bugs me when people perpetrate such stupidities, and their dupes ignorantly follow their instructions, even though the story is completely implausible, absurd, and ridiculous.  I don’t suppose my small protests on the matter accomplish much; but if it keeps someone from sending it to a couple thousand people... each of whom won’t be sending it to another couple thousand...

I posted pictures of the quilt show at the Nebraska State Fair:  Quilt Show NSF

If you prefer Facebook’s format:  Quilt Show Nebraska State Fair (Facebook)

Here are some people looking at my Sunbonnet Sue quilt, which won a blue ribbon in its division, Fragment Quilts (meaning, a quilt made with pieces created many years ago).

All the other pictures from the fair are posted on my blog and on my Facebook page:

http://natures-splendor.blogspot.com/

https://www.facebook.com/sarahlynn.jackson2/photos_albums

Saturday, I woke up to a house all nice and clean – except, as I reconsidered, it occurred to me that I still needed to get the cats’ blanket off the loveseat and give it a good vacuum.  Then I decided to sweep the steps to the second floor, too – though, as it turned out, nobody went upstairs.  I should’ve swept the stairs to the basement and shaken the rugs in the downstairs bathroom, because somebody did go down there.

Oh, well.  It wasn’t bad, and at least the bats stayed under wraps while the company was here.

Todd and Dorcas live a little northeast of Knoxville, Tennessee.  Todd’s son, along with his wife and two little children, is stationed in Bellevue (suburb of Omaha) at Offut Air Force Base. 

That afternoon, I decided to make a giant pot of soup and a big bowl of fruit salad.  Soup is always a good choice when one doesn’t know precisely when the company might arrive, or lots of people are coming, and not all at the same time.  Soup can simmer quietly on the stove for several hours without coming to harm.  In fact, a lot of soups – particularly those with meats and dense vegetables such as potatoes – are improved by the process.

We had quite a few members of our family here that evening – 18, to be precise.  Along with Todd, Dorcas (child #3), and their little boy Trevor, Joseph (child #5) and his little boy and little girl, Justin and Juliana, came.  They live in Bellevue.  His wife Jocelyn works nights, so she was unable to come.  Also, Kurt and Victoria (our youngest, child #9) and their two little girls, Carolyn and Violet, came, along with Caleb (child #8) and Maria (expecting their first child), and Jeremy and Lydia (child #7) and their three boys and one girl, Jacob, Jonathan, Ian, and Malinda.  That’s 5 of our 9 children and 9 of our 23 grandchildren.  (Or 9 ½, to be technical and precise.)

We had Black Angus steak soup (with potatoes, onions, peas, corn, green beans, red and green peppers, and summer squash), twelve-grain bread, Club and Pretzel FlipSides crackers, fruit salad (consisting of Fuji apples, peaches, mangoes, pineapples, strawberries, and mandarin oranges) with strawberry yogurt to put on it, and chocolate chunk/peanut butter chip cookies for dessert (specially requested by eight-year-old Justin, because I made them the last time he was here).

Larry took the children for rides on his RZR after supper, thereby making himself a hero in their eyes. 

He’s my hero, too, because earlier that afternoon he brought home a brand-spankin’-new Samsung Galaxy A10e smartphone for me!  My dumbphone was about to croak.  It no longer rang, and sometimes didn’t even vibrate when calls came in.  Then I became a hero in Carolyn’s eyes by letting her play with the dumbphone.  She loves it, partly because I have a video of Teensy as the wallpaper.

I sent a large jar full of soup and one full of fruit salad home with Joseph for his wife Jocelyn, and tucked the last cookie into the box, too.  Thus ended a very pleasant evening.

Todd, Dorcas, and Trevor stayed overnight at Jeremy and Lydia’s house, and came to church the next morning.  Sunday afternoon, they went back to Omaha to be with Todd’s son and wife for a couple of days.  They’ll be coming back tomorrow, then leaving Wednesday, I think.

Last night we had a baptismal service.  Along with quite a number of other young people, our grandson Nathanael was baptized.  Baptismal services are blessed and joyous occasions for us.  Ever since I was a child, I loved the Bible stories of Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist and the eunuch of Ethiopia’s baptism by Philip.

Last night, a friend and fellow quilter who is a minister’s wife mentioned the pancakes, sausage, and orange juice they’d had when they got home from their morning services.  I was glad to learn that someone else has the same kinds of brunches/lunches that we do, after Sunday morning church services!  We regularly have Larry’s supah-dupah waffles or pancakes, or maybe French toast, with peanut butter and syrup and sometimes Polaner jellies and jams, and now and then we add eggs to the menu.  Larry likes to put yogurt, fruit, or applesauce into his batter, and it’s soooo good.

I can almost never eat one entire waffle.  They’re big, made on an industrial-sized double waffle maker.  A former neighbor, Hank, who used to own a restaurant in town, gave it to us because it didn’t work, and Larry fixed it. 

One Sunday afternoon shortly thereafter, I dashed up the hill to the neighbors’ house with a couple of piping hot waffles encased between two warmed plates to give the people as a thank-you for the waffle maker.

Hank took a look at the waffles, set them on the table, hurried to the refrigerator for butter and syrup, and asked when Larry was going to return the waffle maker.

“Henry!!!” exclaimed his wife, Cynthia, in a reproving tone, just as I clapped the plate he’d lifted off the waffles back over them, picked it up, and said, “Never mind about the butter and syrup, I was just showing these to you.  Larry will return the waffle maker as soon as it breaks again.  We believe in returning things in the same shape they were in when people gave them to us.”

He shuffled his feet, stared at the plate, tried not to drool, giggled a little, and finally said, “Well... I guess I did say he could just keep it.”

“You’re the witness to that,” I said to Cynthia, and she laughed and nodded.

I put the plate of waffles back on the table, bid them a cheery adieu, and departed.

Maybe I wouldn’t have reacted like that, had that man not gypped us time and again when we moved out here, starting with the very plot of land we purchased.  It was the watershed area of the hill, and he knew it.  We had originally chosen another acreage, but he decided he didn’t want to sell that one, for some indecipherable reason, and offered this one instead, telling us he was ‘willing to part with the better piece of land, just for us.’ 

Rrrrrright.  He was getting rid of it, dumping it on us chumps.

On this little ¾ acre, we have just about all the types of soils that are found in the entire state:  sand, clay, loam, loess, and rich black dirt.  About the only thing we don’t have is shale.  At least it grows flowers well!  (And weeds.  But we won’t talk about that right now.)

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