In last week’s letter, I started to
tell you how, in our trek about town delivering birthday gifts, we greeted and petted
several of our offspring’ns pets.
However, I got sidetracked somewhere,
and that part of the story stalled after two fresh-hatched lambs, Teddy and Amy’s
Anatolian shepherd/white Lab mix Molly, and Jeremy and Lydia’s golden Lab Bella.
When we went to Bobby and Hannah’s
house, Chimera and Misty, the Australian shepherds, were delighted to see
us. Chimera, younger and bigger, is a
bit jealous if he thinks Misty is getting more attention, and does his best to
worm his way between her and any petting hands.
At Andrew and Hester’s house, we petted
Spooky, their cute little calico cat.
So, all told, animalwise, we petted four
granddogs, two grandlambs, and one grandcat.
Last Monday, I got a box from Young
Living – an early Mother’s Day gift from Kurt and Victoria and the little girls. In it was a bottle of Citrus oil and Deep
Relief roll-on for me, and a bottle of Lemon oil for Victoria (purchased in my
name in order to keep my account active).
I tried the Deep Relief on my neck, and
it does help. Mixing it with capsaicin helps even more. Plus, it
smells good. The ingredients are peppermint, balsam fir, clove, vetiver,
wintergreen, lemon, helichrysum, copaiba, and coconut oil.
Tuesday afternoon, the wind suddenly
picked up something fierce. There was a
loud crash from the vicinity of the front porch. I went to see what had blown off, and –
Whooaaaaa!!! I almost blew off with it! It was the big iron bench and a large
flowerpot. I pressed hard against the
house to keep from falling right off the porch, and I had to wait for a lull in
the wind before I could get the door open enough to get inside, and then get it shut
again. I pulled up WeatherBug and saw
that they had the wind gusts pegged at 37 mph.
Nosireee, those gusts were way higher than that. I guessed they were closer to 55 mph.
I refreshed WeatherBug – and it went offline
entirely. I pulled up NOAA weather radio
online: “Wind blowing at 25 mph with most
gusts up to 45 mph, but some very strong gusts are at 55-60 mph and even
higher.”
Yep.
That was more like it.
I finished the label for Kelvin’s quilt
that night, and sewed it onto the quilt.
Wednesday afternoon, I took it to him.
He’d had another chemo treatment
Tuesday, and had the chemo pump on Wednesday, so he was working from home,
keeping track of the time because a meeting was scheduled for 3:30 p.m. He works for BD medical company.
He has a good job, and the
company has treated him well, letting him work whenever he is well enough to do
so.
He showed me this and that in their
beautiful new home; I’d never been in it before. They finished it and moved in very shortly
before learning he had cancer.
He’d just gotten a new pair of
high-powered Vortex binoculars. Amazing,
how far one can see across the fields behind their house with those field glasses.
Oakley is never far from Kelvin, and
always knows if he’s not doing well. He’ll lay right beside Kelvin with his chin
lopped over Kelvin’s leg, when Kelvin is sick.
Oakley is part poodle, part Irish
Setter, and part Golden Retriever – a mini Irish Goldendoodle. (He doesn’t really look very ‘mini’, does
he? 😄)
Kelvin was surprised with the quilt; Rachel
hadn’t told him I was making it. (I gave
her the option last week, saying that I didn’t know whether anticipations or
surprises were more fun.) He first thought it was a pillow (because it
was all folded up tightly, and in a clear bag), and was surprised to find a ‘blanket’,
as he called it, in there.
“That’s a real keepsake!” he
exclaimed.
I was just fine – until Rachel sent me a
picture of Kelvin with his quilt, after I got home. Then I cried over it.
A bit later, Rachel sent a second photo. “Oakley is especially friendly when Kelvin is
eating,” she wrote.
We had bagel dogs and cheese, broccoli
florets, peaches, and chocolate chip mint ice cream for supper that night. It’s been a while since we’ve had bagel
dogs. We like to pour chunky salsa or
picanté sauce over them.
That evening, I played with one design
after another in my Electric Quilt program, looked at quilts on Pinterest, and
hunted through some of the patterns I’ve collected on my computer, trying to
come up with a pattern for a quilt for my niece Susan, who is fighting breast
cancer. Then I got an email from EQ8 offering an add-on of 61 quilt
patterns by Judy Martin.
Judy Martin! I love her patterns. Furthermore, I have a book with a number of
quilts I’ve been wanting to make – and I suddenly knew exactly which quilt I
would do.
I went upstairs to my little office
where the stack of bins (six 28-quart bins) full of fabric are, and pulled out a
pile of fabric pieces.
Does this look like a quilt to you?
Don’t laugh at it! What might
look like mayhem, disarray, and hodgepodge to you is an organized and
well-grouped coordination to me. 😂 Funny thing is,
despite it looking like an awful lot of fabric is on that table, only three of
those 28-quart bins looked like anything was missing from them.
The pattern I chose is in the book, Scraps,
and the quilt is called ‘Hollywood Boulevard’. I will call mine ‘Starry Shadows’.
I was surprised to find a five-yard
piece of fabric in my smallish stash – the only sizable piece – that will work
for the backing, and a piece that will look nice as binding. The
background will have to be scrappy white-on-creams; I don’t have enough of any
one white or cream fabric for the background.
Upon posting this picture of backing
and binding fabric on a Facebook quilting group, someone promptly wrote to inform me, “Upholstery won’t work for a quilt. It will be much too heavy.”
I responded, “It’s
quilters’ cotton.”
I really should have extra
credit for not adding, “Duh.”
Thursday, I began cutting the fabric. Here’s a fact: cutting a scrappy
quilt with a gazillion different fabrics takes a whole lot longer than cutting a
color-coordinated quilt with half a dozen fabrics. But I went on cutting away, one little piece
after another...
For supper that night, we had
ancient-grain-encrusted cod, broccoli, and peaches with cottage cheese. There were chocolate chunk/peanut butter chip
cookies and maple nut ice cream for dessert.
Our cats smell things cooking
(especially fish or chicken) and come begging. They can’t quite figure
out what the deal is, when the food is still in the oven, and there’s nothing
yet on the table.
Tubby ol’ Tiger cat, who didn’t
understand a thing about kitchen table handouts when he first came to us, gets
so excited over little pieces of chicken that he’ll actually exert himself to
stand on the edges of our chairs with his front feet, and peer into our faces
as he begs for a tidbit. Every once in a while he forgets himself and sticks
a couple of his prickles into Larry’s leg, which makes Larry jerk away and
howl. Tiger is not much fazed; he knows Larry is totally harmless.
On the other hand, the one time he did
it to me, I howled and popped him on the rump (gently; don’t want to
hurt the poor old thing). So he is a lot more careful to keep those
talons out of my leg. He doesn’t mean to claw us; it’s
just that he’s so fat and clumsy, he uses his claws to help balance himself and
pull himself up. I feed him diet food – but he’s still
obese. 🤨🤔
Our big Siberian husky, Aleutia, even
from the time she was a puppy, would take things really, really carefully from
the children’s hands. When it was from one of the babies, she’d slowly,
gently, slip her tongue under the tidbit in their hands and draw it out. She
never took a thing, even when they offered it, without first turning that big
ol’ furry head and looking at me for permission. She knew the difference
between a nod and a shake of the head, too. What a dog she was.
A friend was telling about a parrot and
a duck she used to have (not at the same time), both of which she got when they
were tiny. She had to feed the parrot
with a medicine dropper at first. Both
birds were pretty well convinced she was their mother.
I always thought I would love to have a
parrot. We had a few parakeets, starting when Joseph was almost three. When asked what he wanted for his upcoming
birthday, he said, “I willy want a dween wobbin.”
A green parakeet would have to do.
I tried to teach it to talk by
recording my voice over and over (and over) on a cassette saying, “Hello, my
name is Chalcedony!”
The parakeet did not learn to talk. Probably the repetitious barrage stunned him
into silence.
The kids, however, went around
mimicking, “Hello, my name is Chalcedony!” until I destroyed the tape and
ordered them to cease and desist. They still said periodically, “Hello,
------” in my tone of voice, and then they’d stop and give me a devilish
grin.
They hadn’t said it, but we all
had thought it.
It took us a long time to recover from that
fiasco.
Have you ever heard someone say that they
like animals better than they like people?
We had a relative who used to say that.
I found out she meant it when her
little dogs jumped on Teddy when he was about 2 years old, and scratched his
poor little tummy all up. He came to show me, just about to cry. I,
thinking it improper to murder the relatives’ dogs, reported the issue to them.
They, rather than reproving their
salivating beasts (who were standing ready to repeat the infraction), told
Teddy to ‘buck up and be a little man’. I, temper smoking out my ears,
informed them that he was a baby, and I would not allow such a thing to
happen again.
They, evidently having a sneaking
suspicion I meant what I said, watched their darling dogs like hawks
thereafter.
Then there was the time we were visiting
an aunt many years later. Victoria was
10, and Caleb was almost 14. It was August of 2007.
Aunt Gertrude had about ten dogs.
Two of them were allowed in her main living area. Three big black dogs, two of which were Vizsla/Black
Labs and one of which was a half-pit bull, had the run of a middle room in the
house with access to the middle back yard.
There were a couple of golden retrievers in the front yard; in the back
yard was another golden retriever and a mongrel of unknown lineage; and in the very
back yard was a short, stocky cattle dog that had been dumped beside the
road. He knew how to herd things, all right – but he tore up a horse’s
leg, and so Aunt Gertrude lock him in his yard all the time, and never let him
out. (He had also bitten people, but he hadn’t lost his freedom
until he messed up the horse.)
Aunt Gertrude left the door to that
middle room open when the weather was nice so the big black dogs could go in
and out from the house to their section of the yard at will. The part pit
was a much better-tempered dog than the Vizsla Labs were.
One afternoon while Larry repaired their
door (they had nearly torn it from its hinges), Victoria swept the dogs’ room,
shook out their bedding, and put it back into their beds. They acted
plumb tickled – but you should have seen the pit’s ear calisthenics when he
started to climb into his bed just as Larry reached behind him and set his
hammer down in the corner of that very bed.
The poor doggy’s ears flew up, then collapsed, then rose, then sank, and
his eyebrows went up in the middle and drooped at the edges, and he stared at
that hammer as much as to say, What on earth is this alien thing you have
contaminated my bed with?!
So now I have established the fact that
the dogs knew us, and seemingly liked us. Right?
One day while Larry and Caleb were
somewhere on the ranch helping Aunt Gertrude work on equipment and machinery,
and Victoria was trotting about outside exploring, I was in a back office
working on Aunt Gertrude’s computer. To get to the office, I had to walk
through the three dogs’ part of the house.
They were friendly enough, and I like dogs, so all was well.
The window was open, and I heard
Victoria come in the gate and walk up the sidewalk to the open door, singing as
she came. She did not surprise those dogs. But suddenly, there was a mad scramble of a
dozen dog feet, with growling and snarling and barking – and Victoria screamed
and then was silent. But the dogs were still snarling and snapping and
growling.
I never moved so fast in my life.
Later, I would find the desk chair flipped upside down. In my dash into
the dogs’ room, I had somehow grabbed a sturdy wooden handle such as one might
find on a large shop broom or suchlike; I have no idea where I found it, and no
recollection of even picking it up.
I was shouting as I ran, “YOU DOGS
STOP THAT!!! STOP IT!!! BAD DOGS!!!” – and I’m not a
preacher’s daughter for nothin’; I have a voice that carries, when I want it
to.
I was so scared at what I might find in
that room... but by the time I got there, all three dogs were backing away from
Victoria, who was standing leaning against the wall, eyes bigger than
saucers. They had been right in her face, growling and snarling, as if
she was a totally different person than the one they’d allowed to pet them and
shake out their beds, since she’d come in a different door than usual.
The dogs looked at me, looked at that
big wooden handle I was brandishing, and slunk rapidly to their beds, while I
shouted at them, “Lie down and STAY THERE, YOU BAD DOGS!!!”
I told Victoria not to ever come in
that yard again, or to walk through that part of the house by herself.
And every time I walked through, I carried that handle with me, and paused
in front of each dog to inform him that he was BAD, and that I still had
a very, very big grudge against him, and that all he needed to do was
bare his teeth at me, and I’d crack him over the skull. “Just give me
the excuse, horrid dogs.”
GRRRRRRRRRRR. It’s wrong
to have animals like that around. If a person knows their animal is
capable of harming someone and keeps that animal, if then that animal does
harm someone, the owner is guilty of whatever that animal has done.
Speaking of traveling with Caleb and
Victoria, I found this little excerpt from a journal dated January of
2004:
Caleb, age 10, upon spotting the lights
of Trinidad, Colorado, as we topped a mountain pass, inquired, “What are those
lights for?” – wanting to know the name of the town.
Victoria, almost 7, answered quicker’n
a wink, “For people to see with.”
Friday, I finished cutting the
fabric brights, folded and stacked and put the rest of that fabric away, then started
cutting the medium neutrals.
Upon posting that,
someone immediately commented, “There are only two neutral one is white the
other one is black. Shade, tone, and tint. Colour theory is a though one. The
word is natural meaning you added a neutral to a shade to change the colour.
But good job 
”
”
I looked at that and thought, Shall
I fix her sentence fragments, punctuation, and spelling?
Instead, I wrote, “Huh?”
I clicked on her name
to look at her personal profile. I like
to see if a person is a Know-It-All Bossyboots on her personal page, too, in
addition to being one on the Quilting groups.
Immediately upon
arriving on her page, my po’ li’l eyeballs were violently assaulted by a very
large picture of a political person I particularly dislike.
Aha! See, I knew that lady was haywire!
With that satisfactorily
resolved, I looked up explanations of ‘neutral’. Now, I know that in the strictest sense of
the word, it does indeed refer to black and white only. But that’s not how the general public,
especially the quilting general public, nor even the home décor general
public, uses the word. The ‘scientific’ explanation ‘only black or
white’ leaves quilters, home decorators, and suchlike in something of a
quagmire, in attempting properly descriptive word-portrayals of color.
Here’s
an excerpt from a website called ‘Empower Yourself with Colour Psychology’. It explains fairly well what is meant by ‘medium
neutrals’, ‘light neutrals’, etc.:
Defining
Neutral Colors
Neutral
colors can be defined as those colours to which you can’t give a definite color
name. These colors include beige, cream,
ivory, white, grey, brown and natural wood tones.
A
‘neutral colour scheme’ doesn’t mean all one neutral; there may be a variety of
different neutrals used. These colors
can be light, medium, or dark, or a contrasting combination of dark and light.
The
best description of neutral is natural, with these colors appearing often in
nature. Examples can be seen in the trunks of dead trees, the bark of most
trees, and in the dried stalks and vines of other plants which have been
bleached by the effect of the sun, in driftwood on the beach and in various
timbers.
++++++++++++++++
The
study of colors is interesting, isn’t it?
(We’ll leave out the
psychology part of it; that gets too goofy to suit me.)
So there. That’s a ‘normal’ explanation, and shows that
my description of ‘medium neutrals’ and ‘light neutrals’ is perfectly
acceptable. (They even spelt ‘colour’
the same way Mrs. Bland Colourwheel spelled it, meaning the writer is probably
from the same side of the Pond as she is.
So she can’t use location as an excuse.)
 |
| Trevor and Todd |
Dorcas
sent pictures that evening of a fishing excursion they’d gone on. It was Trevor’s first experience at fishing,
and he thought it was fine and dandy.
I got
the medium neutrals all cut, and part of the light neutrals, too, before my
back ordered me to quit for the night.
Tally of
pieces:
Brights:
292
Tans:
320
Creams:
479 (of which I only got 103 pieces cut)
Larry spent Saturday working
on his friend Joe’s Acadia, in Joe’s building near Genoa. It was nearly midnight when he got it painted
and headed for home.
That day I finished cutting the light-colored
pieces and put two blocks together.
I’d no sooner posted these pictures, listing
the pattern name, ‘Hollywood Boulevard’, the book and author, Scraps, by
Judy Martin, and the name of my quilt, ‘Starry Shadows’, than someone wrote the
following:
“So
someone else’s pattern your changing name? Because borders will be different?
It beautiful either way, but still someone else’s design ”
Didn’t any of these
know-it-alls take basic grammar, spelling, and English composition in school?
Now, I already knew
this was ridiculous (and I do so detest Copyright Nazis), but I looked
it up to see what the ‘experts’ have to say.
In the first article, I found this label:
Haha!
I think Elizabeth S. Eastmond, a well-known quilting teacher, was as
aggravated over the issue as I am.
Suffice it to say, I can name my
quilt whatever I like. But if you’re in
doubt, or just cantankerous, here are a few articles to read, written by people
more learned than me:
My quilt will be
called ‘Starry Shadows’, yes it will; and I’ll give Judy Martin full
credit for the block pattern, just like I always do when I use someone else’s
pattern or design.
Sunday afternoon,
after listening to our morning church service online, we went to visit Loren and Norma
for a little while. Norma is still in pain, and is having trouble
with fluid retention, making her legs hurt.
Sure makes us feel bad to see her
suffering, and not be able to do anything much to help.
Both morning and
evening services streamed quite well yesterday.
Nowadays
when the stream hiccups, it’s not the streaming service being problematic so
much as our Internet. We use Verizon hotspots from Larry’s phone and my
tablet, and sometimes coverage is poor out here in the country.
Also, even though we have the Unlimited
Data plan, it doesn’t give us unlimited hotspots. So, while my
tablet and Larry’s phone (supposedly) stay steady in data speed, any device we
use that pulls from their hotspots will slow after a certain amount of data (15
GB, I think) is used up. Sometimes I can’t tell it has slowed much at
all. Other times it seems to be waaaaaaay slowed down, even before
we get the notice that we’ve used up our allotted amount.
When that happens, the best way to get
to desired webpages is to stand on one foot with a big toe pointed at the moon,
tilt one’s head to the left, and whistle Yankee Doodle Dandy in G♭.
Last night, I finally got a
notice from Schwan’s saying, “We’re sorry, we’re going to be unable to visit
you Friday, May 1. We’ll see you Friday,
May 15.”
A little behind the 8-ball, hmmm?
No further explanation.
Today, I managed to upload photos to my
blog just fine, but Facebook, always a data hog, stalled out. The ‘new
Facebook’ does work better than the old ‘classic Facebook’, though. There’s a possibility I foiled it by trying
to upload to both blog and Facebook at the same time. ((sheepish look)) Larry says I
try to blow up not just my laptop, but also the Internet.
After the blog posted, I reloaded
pictures on Facebook, and it went along at a fairly decent clip.
We’re going to church Wednesday!
The ushers will try their best to keep families spread a distance apart, as the
officials recommend. We have speakers throughout the building, so some
people will sit in the library, in classrooms, and elsewhere. Too bad we
don’t have the balcony open yet. Until we need it, it’s been functioning
as a gym room for the children on bad-weather days. I like sitting in
balconies. The higher, the better! 😃 I hope
they open it up before I’m too old to clamber my way up the stairs.
Larry has gone to Texas to pick up a
large boom lift, weighing 12,000 lbs. It’s a 24-hour round trip – if one
can drive straight there and straight back, with no interruptions. Early
this afternoon, he sent me this picture of the
boom lift on his trailer, writing, “I bet you wish you were along to
co-pilot. 😉😘.”
Larry called a
little before 7:30 p.m. tonight. He was
at a Love’s truck stop near Denton, Texas.
Earlier, two tires blew out at once on his tandem-axle trailer. He replaced the blown tires with the spare
for the trailer and the spare for the pickup, which is only 12-ply. The trailer tires are 16-ply.
He drove to a
Discount Tire shop and got a 16-ply tire to replace the pickup tire he’d
temporarily used. It was about
$100. Not too much farther on, the
trailer spare blew. He put the pickup
tire back on and got to a Love’s truck stop.
They don’t have the right tire, but located one for him that’s not too
far away – but it has a price tag of $200.
There’s a Discount Tire shop nearby, but it’s closed now. All Wal-Mart automotive places are closed on
account of COVID-19. So... since he
needs sleep anyway, he’s going to a motel for the night.
No, of course
he didn’t take any extra clothes. Why
would he ever do that? Nothing
ever goes wrong, right? 🙄 So... he’ll buy some
clothes at Wal-Mart.
See, if he had’ve
invited me along, I’d have packed clothes for four days, at least.
I was just looking at my list of
birthdays and anniversaries, and realized something I hadn’t thought much about
before. Six of our nine children have
wedding anniversaries in October!
October 13, 2002: Teddy and Amy
October 13, 2013: Caleb and Maria
October 17, 2011: Joseph and Jocelyn
October 18, 2014: Todd and Dorcas
October 20, 2018: Keith and
Korrine
October 30, 2016: Kurt and Victoria
And now, in ‘these uncertain times’, as
everyone likes to say, here’s a Dose of Peanuts:
Lastly, a question:
Do you know what happens when you march
over to the sink, all in a rush, flip on the faucet, and water comes pouring
out of it, straight into the bowl of an ice cream scoop that’s lying in the
sink?
If you don’t know, then I highly
recommend you try it.
Especially if you are ‘bored’.
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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