I’ve never had cat-eye glasses
before. Do I look like a 1950s movie
star?
The most noteworthy thing about this
photo is that it was taken a little after 9:00 in the evening... and there
is still a half-full pot of coffee behind me on the counter.
Okay, I confess.
I just made a new pot.
And you don’t know how many pots there
were before that one!
Tuesday
afternoon, there was a red-bellied woodpecker on the suet feeder, a blue jay on
one of the sunflower seed feeders, and goldfinches, house finches, and English
sparrows at the others. Dark-eyed juncos
were on the deck, picking up what the other birds dropped. I couldn’t see the ground one story beneath
the deck from the patio doors, but I could hear Eurasian collared doves and
other smaller birds down there cleaning up dropped sunflower seeds.
On the way back from Loren’s house, fog
began settling down on the fields and hills, with the lowering sun shining
bright and golden through the mist. Snowflakes
began swirling and sparkling in the ethereal light. So pretty.
Loren
arrived that evening about 6:30 p.m. looking for Norma, thinking she was ‘being
unfaithful’, and wondering what to do. I
went through a little merry-go-round of explanations and assurances.
He’d
gone to bed earlier, then gotten back up, all troubled. I’m fairly certain he sometimes dreams, wakes
up, and thinks the dream really happened.
You
know how ‘they’ tell you that you should ‘always agree with everything those
with Alzheimer’s or dementia say’? Well,
baloney. That’s not possible, a good
deal of the time, nor is it always beneficial.
There
are things one must explain; there is no choice. I do so in as kind and reassuring a manner as
I can muster, trying to wend my way through the morass in whatever way works
best at the moment. I’ll probably have
to do it again soon, but that’s okay.
This
time, I carefully went through times and dates with him: he married Norma, my mother-in-law, Larry’s
mother, in April of 2018. She passed
away – “A long time ago!” he quickly interjected.
“Five
months ago,” I nodded, “in June of this year.”
He
was surprised, but accepted that, though he thinks the person who died is a
different person than the one he believes shows up at his house now and again.
I
went on, “So now you are a widower. You
are not married. Whoever this person is
you are talking about – and I have no idea who it is (he gets agitated if we
say she does not exist; it’s better if we say we don’t know her) – you are not
married to her, you are not responsible for her. You can safely go home, lock your doors, go
to bed, and not give her another worry.”
I
told him that all the while he was married to Norma, up until the day she died,
she was loving and faithful, and did as much as she was able for him.
This
seemed to satisfy him, and he soon headed for home in a better frame of mind.
He
is still able to drive well, and other than these odd hallucinations, can carry
on an intelligent conversation.
So
we muddle on, one day after another... Sad
stuff, this ‘Lewy Body Dementia’.
We
had shrimp egg rolls and clam chowder for supper, with peaches and peach-mango
tea, and (this is going to sound silly) a toasted sesame seed bun with peanut
butter and jelly for dessert. That, just
because we needed to use up the buns, and we like peanut butter and jelly
sandwiches.
That day I began quilting a customer’s
quilt, ‘Daddy’s Bow Ties’. Because the ‘knots’ on the
ties are 3D and loose on the edges, and even my glide foot wouldn’t go over
them without getting caught, I decided to give this quilt a simple custom
quilting, and my customer concurred. I can manhandle and/or avoid the
knots easily enough from the front, but not from the back while doing a
pantograph. I finished the top two borders that night.
Sometimes quilt borders have excess
fullness in them. I can usually get them
to behave by making the quilt top tauter on my frame, spraying it with starch,
and then pressing carefully with a hot iron.
But every now and then tucks are unavoidable. I try to make them as unobtrusive as
possible.
The best way to measure for borders is to
measure your quilt in three places – at each edge and the middle – then take
the average of those numbers for your border measurement. It gets a
little trickier with pieced borders. If they’re prone for stretching,
such as when there are bias edges, there are a few things you can do to
minimize this: 1) make the border slightly smaller than your
measurements indicate, 2) starch thoroughly and press gently to ease in
the fullness, and 3) put another narrow outer border on (measuring as
described above – to stabilize the stretchy pieced border.
I
no sooner posted photos of this quilt on one of the online Facebook quilting
groups to which I belong than someone wrote, “Have you ever handquilt it is so
much prettier”
I
responded, “Nope. 😃 ” (Putting a smiley
face after whatever you write is equivalent to say ‘Bless your heart’, don’t
you think?)
Teensy was sprawled on my maple table there
in my quilting studio, right in front of my laptop. As I tried to answer a few emails and posts,
he kept pushing his cute little head hard against my wrist, trying to
get me to stop typing and pet him. 😃
Thursday was Jonathan’s 7th
birthday. He’s Jeremy and Lydia’s second
child. I took him a present on my way
back from Loren’s house: a Battleship
game and a wooden puzzle of the United States.
He was out in their back yard with Ian, 4, playing with his new remote-controlled
Grave Digger truck.
Lydia came out with Monty, their huge
St. Bernard ‘puppy’. He wagged happily
at the boys and me – and then noticed that Grave Digger was heading straight
for Jonathan. With a few long, slow
bounds, he was in front of that vehicle.
“Bow-WOOOOOFFFF!!!!” he told it,
in his low-pitched voice.
We laughed, and he glanced at us,
wagging happily. He’d obviously done the
right thing, because that truck stopped in its tracks.
And then it started back up.
“Bow-WWOOOOOFFFF!!!!” said
Monty, taking a long jump toward it. He had
to protect his boy! He crouched in front
of the thing, rear end up, staring it in the face, and Bow-WWOOOOOFFFFed
it down. His ears flopped up, down, up, as
we laughed, and the car started and stopped.
Funny doggy.
Hester sent a video of
Keira that evening. She and Keira, who’s
2 ½, were enjoying some hot chocolate, using snowman mugs and the placemats I’d
made to match them. Keira was the baby
who weighed two pounds, eight ounces, when she was born.
She exclaimed over the
placemats, “Dramma (Grandma) made ’em!” Then, pointing at the mug: “You put mine coffee on there –” she paused,
changed it to, “hot chocolate on his face...”
“Is the snowman
drinking hot chocolate too?” asked Hester.
Keira studied the
placemat. “Maaaaybe,” she said, “it’s ... um...”
“Apple cider?”
supplied Hester.
Keira likes those
words. “Appo cido.” She studied the mat. “My snowman has appo cido. Does yo’s have appo cido on him? He’s drinkin’ it?” She slid Hester’s placemat and mug over, the
better to see it, saw that the hot chocolate sloshed, and quickly and carefully
put a little hand on the mug to steady it.
“He’s not
drinking any,” Hester replied, “but he’s got a fancy scarf.”
Keira pointed at
hers. “He may have ano’ (another) one?” She pointed at Hester’s. “Are yours eyes open?” She touched little fingers to the embroidered
eyes.
“And my snowman’s [eyes]
shut ---” and in the middle of the sentence she spotted her straw
and suddenly had to get a drink. 😂
Remember the ceramic soap dispenser
Hannah and family gave me for my birthday?
I put Caress Peach and Orange Blossom body wash in it. The body wash is pink. It looks pink in the clear plastic bottle in
which it comes. It looks pink inside the
ceramic dispenser, when I take the top off and look inside. But when I depress the squirter thingy, blue
soap comes out. ???
Friday night, I finished my customer’s Bow Tie quilt. The lady tie-dyed the backing herself. The
quilt measures 67.5” x 85.5”. I used
white 40-weight Signature thread on top, white 60-weight Bottom Line in the
bobbin, and did a light custom job whilst a-steppin’ over the usual speed
bump.
That was Teensy, who likes to sprawl on the rag rug
in front of the frame if I’m working from the front. He naps on the blue
and white runner behind the frame if I happen to be following
a pantograph and working from the back. Wherever it’s the most
inconvenient. ’Cuz, you know, he’s a
cat.
Notice how he presses his tail into use as a lapghan.
Tiger, meanwhile, was in his Thermabed under the quilting
frame. When I flipped on the long
overhead LED lights, he grunted and covered his eyes with one paw.
Saturday, I was playing some Christmas songs
from my big Christmas notebook. I
launched into one I don’t know very well, called “That First Christmas”, and it
was such a terrible copy, it nearly drove me berserk. I couldn’t even tell the difference between
whole notes, half notes, and quarter notes! I hunted for the song online,
but couldn’t find it.
It’s by Thos (probably short for
Thomas) C. Wallace, and here are the first couple of lines:
I’m thinking of that special day When
in a manger lay
A baby wrapped in swaddling clothes,
Whose home was far away.
The page number in the book from which
the copy came is #34. It takes up two pages. We used it for a Christmas program only once,
in 1969. I would’ve been 9 years
old. I don’t recall singing it; perhaps
a small group sang it, or some of the older children.
Giving up on finding a good copy of the
song, I pulled out a pen, began counting out the timing the way I thought best,
then inked in the half notes that should be quarter notes, and added arms to
the whole notes that should be half notes.
That wasn’t hard, once I got the pen
and went to work. I’ve always loved
figuring out timing. A-one an’ a-two an’ a-three...
I checked on the pillow shams that I
had quilted for a customer in North Carolina.
Nope, they had not been delivered yet.
I shipped them December 7th and they were supposed to arrive
on the 11th. This was
beginning to be a worry.
Going upstairs to my quilting studio, I
folded and boxed the Bow Tie quilt. In
my little office, I pulled out a stack of bookmarks with pretty pictures and Bible
verses on them, and tucked one or two into each of the Christmas cards for our
fellow church members – over 120 cards. I
then Brailled Bible verses and greetings on Christmas cards for my three blind
friends. Penny gave me that slate and
stylus when she first moved here, about 51 years ago. I was 9 years old.
I
didn’t use the NIV verse; I switched to KJV. Later, when I reread it, looking at the
printed verse to compare and see if I’d gotten it right, I couldn’t understand
what on earth had happened --- until finally I remembered, “Oh. Yes. Quite
so. I wrote ‘giveth’, etc.”
I
can read Braille much better from the back, right to left, with the
updoinks going downwards. After all, that’s the way I ‘write’ it – from the
back.
Supper that evening was meatloaf made
with deer burger, clam chowder, pears with cottage cheese, orange juice, and
chocolate chunk/peanut butter chip cookies. Larry wasn’t home yet; he’d
left very early Friday morning to pick up some equipment in locations in
Missouri and Kansas.
I trotted downstairs to my
gift-wrapping room (it used to be my sewing room, back when my quilting studio was
Victoria’s bedroom) and wrapped the rest of the Christmas presents.
Larry got home safe and sound about
10:30 p.m. He’d had a couple of things
go wrong, but nothing too major. The bracket
for the alternator on his pickup had broken.
Noticing the tack dipping and surging, he stopped to take a look. Finding the problem, he clamped the bracket
to something with a pair of vise-grips.
This would hold it in place for only a little while before the jouncing
and bouncing of the pickup loosened the pliers, so he had to keep stopping to fix
it.
Once as he walked around his flatbed
trailer checking on the load, which included a big mower, a snow blade, and a
flatbed, he spotted a tire that looked odd.
A cord had broken, and it was fortunate he’d discovered it before it
blew out. The load was heavy, and a
blowout would’ve been bad news. He had
two spares, and put one on.
He’d slept for only three hours in his
pickup Friday night. It had been a longer
trip than expected, taking him first to Branson, Missouri, then all the way
back west to Rolla, Kansas, a small town in the southwestern corner of the
state, and then home again. It’s 489
miles from here to Branson, 535 miles from Branson to Rolla, and 460 miles from
Rolla to Columbus. That’s 1,484 miles.
Shortly before Larry got home, I had trimmed
off some mats on Tiger’s rump. When
Larry came in, Tiger lumbered over to greet him, then did his customary figure
8s around our ankles, purring loudly. He
requested to be let outside, pôr fąvör, and Larry obligingly opened the door
for him.
It wasn’t long before he came back in
via the pet door, marched up to Larry, and squalled at the top of his lungs in
his loud, gravelly voice, whilst rolling
his golden eyes momentarily in my direction – obviously
informing Larry that there was an odd spot on his behinder that nearly froze to
death while he was out there (it was 24°), and, additionally, that it was my
fault. 😆
Sunday after the morning service, we distributed
most of our Christmas cards into the labeled paper sacks that have been set up
in Fellowship Hall. Since both the sacks
and our Christmas cards were in alphabetical order, the job was a snap.
We came home, fixed Loren some dinner, took
it to him, then stopped at Hy-Vee to get some small things to tuck into a
handful of cards for a few people.
We weren’t home long when Larry
realized he’d lost one of his hearing aids.
Probably the elastic on that stupid face mask had caught on it and
pulled it loose. We didn’t go back and
look for it; it would be like trying to find a needle in the haystack, and it
probably happened near the Jeep anyway, where it doubtless got run over and smashed.
He has only been using one hearing aid,
as one ear is better than the other. So
he got out the other aid and put new tubes on it so it would work in the proper
ear.
I guess we should just be glad it
wasn’t one of those $7,000 things. 😑
He had to use bigger tubes on that
hearing aid than he usually uses, as that’s all that was left in his kit. And whataya know, he could hear better with
the bigger tube.
That morning, Hannah told me that she’d
had pictures of the children printed at Walgreens, but they hadn’t turned out
very good. For one thing, her phone had
compressed the upload, so that it wasn’t a high enough quality to print well. I offered to help, so last night after church
she came here with her laptop. She emailed the photo to me, I edited it, and then uploaded it to Walgreens for 130 prints
to go in their Christmas cards.
Remembering my scathing review of Chipotle
Almond Brittle coffee, can anybody hazard a guess as to what I think of
Blackberry Patch’s Raspberry Pepper Fruit Preserves?
Right.
Somebody with an evil, twisted sense of
humor ruint my breakfast this morning.
Mind you, I like Hot Stuff! But
not in my jelly.
After finishing the toast, I nibbled on
Oui lemon yogurt in an effort to get the pepper taste out of my mouth. It wasn’t all that hot, really; I just
dislike the flavor.
Bleah.
Let’s keep the jalapeños in my sancho, and out of the raspberry jelly.
I found very good news on my computer
this afternoon: the pillow shams had finally
reached their destination in North Carolina.
That package took 14 days to get there, ten days longer than it was
supposed to.
The two quilts I shipped to Washington
State were slated to get there today. Annnnd... they did, right on
time.
I took the Bow Tie quilt to the post
office; it’s going to the same lady in Washington State. And that’s the last of the customer quilts.
It was 53°, and the wind was gusting up
to 32 mph. Abnormally warm, for this
time of year in mid-Nebraska. We are expecting
snow Wednesday.
Time for bed! I have a dress to hem for Emma tomorrow.
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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