Tuesday afternoon, I turned the chicken egg roll over that I was baking for Loren, started the broccoli cooking... and was soon taking him his supper, which included mango juice, peaches, prunes, and strawberry cheesecake crunch yogurt.
I decided I’d better mail grandson Justin’s
birthday present to him while I was out, since we hadn’t made it to
Omaha. It only took one day to get there, via UPS.
Home
again, I sat down to pay a few bills.
That’s the signal for Teensy to want up onto my lap. He was purring and cute, but he was all
covered with dust! He must’ve been
rolling in the lane, where the sun had warmed the earth.
Ah,
well. Dust brushes off, and Teensy won’t
be around forever, right?
Early that evening, I started quilting the
‘Lost in Africa’ quilt for a customer, Linda, who lives in Washington State. She was hired by the mother of a lady who is
a missionary to Africa to make this quilt.
By 2:30 a.m., the quilt was done
and I had loaded Linda’s second quilt, ‘Honey Bee’, on the frame, ready to be
quilted the next day.
Wednesday, some quilting friends were
discussing paper-piecing. Some like it
for its accuracy. Others dislike it
because it wastes more fabric. Also,
it’s a little tricky to get the fabric laid down at the right angle so that
after the seam is sewn and the fabric folded back right side up, it lands in
the correct spot on the paper foundation.
It usually takes some practice to become proficient at the skill.
I commiserated with one lady who said
she had to rip more pieces apart than she ever put together, with this
method.
“Paper-piecing is a lot like a toddler
trying to sit on a small bench,” I told her.
“He stands in front of said bench, looking at it, sizing it up – then he
turns around, around, around... sits — and finds himself on the floor, having missed
the bench entirely.”
Yep, that’s how I paper-piece.
(Like toddler enterprises, these things
do improve with practice. Theoretically.)
Here is a photo of backing fabric. It’s soft and silky, and I thought sure it
must have rayon, silk, or poly mixed in, but Linda said she ordered it online,
and it was described as 100% cotton. She, too, thinks surely it can’t be all
cotton. Whatever it is, it sure feels
soft, and it quilted up so nice. I was
delighted when I looked in my thread drawer and found Bottom Line thread in
that exact yellow-orange color.
Note the photobomber in this shot.
After a welcome break Wednesday evening
for our midweek church service, I spent a few more hours on Linda’s Honey Bee
quilt, getting enough done that I knew I’d be able to finish it in time to ship
it back to her the next day.
We
snuck out to Loren’s house after church and stuck a Gurney’s seed catalog in
his mailbox. I wonder if he’ll notice it has my name and address on
it? Perhaps I should make some
name/address stickers with his name and address on them, to stick on his
catalogs and mail.
Thursday, as I’d hoped, the Honey Bee quilt was done in about 45 minutes.
The
pantograph is called ‘Nemesh Feather Grande’.
I swept the deck and then took pictures
of the quilt on the deck. Natural
lighting is always the best.
That was done just in time to call
Loren at the usual time, 3:00 p.m. I try
to keep everything at precisely the same time every day, as any changes in his
schedule produce a little more confusion.
After packing the quilts and affixing
an address to the box, I rushed off to the kitchen to fix Loren’s food – Philly
steak, Mediterranean blend vegetables, a fresh-out-of-the-oven biscuit, mango
juice, a couple of little halo oranges, strawberry jello with peaches, and
Señor Rico rice pudding.
I stuck a magazine from Christian Book in Loren’s mailbox as
I was leaving. Fortunately, there’s a fairly large bush shielding his
mailbox from his front living room window.
😉 I don’t get a whole
lot of junk mail... but maybe I can come up with enough to keep him
happy. Siggghhhhh...
I
was surprised that when I said as much to the manager at the post office, he
laughed and said, “That might work! Just do what you think is best.”
I shipped off the quilts from the UPS
Store after leaving Loren’s house.
I have previously found USPS shipment
of large, heavy boxes cheaper, but because the UPS Store is handier, and
because there is usually not such a long line as there is at the post office,
and also because their lobby isn’t 212° in the shade like the post office lobby
is, I went to the UPS Store. This time, I
specifically requested the lowest shipping rate – and, whataya know, it wound
up $10 cheaper than what Linda had paid to ship via USPS!
Home again, I was putting the kitchen
back to rights when the UPS man came striding up to the door, opened the screen
door (I had the main door open, as it was a lovely day), called out, “UPS!”,
put the package inside on the floor (I have a note on the door giving them
permission to do so), scanned it, shut the door good and proper, started
marching off – and then came to a halt, looking down at his handheld device.
He then turned around, tiptoed back,
pulled the door open as quietly as possible, sneaked a hand inside, snagged the
package, and went scurrying off with it.
Wrong house, evidently?
I was standing nearby in the kitchen,
unnoticed, the whole time. Betcha he
would’ve jumped like a skeert rabbit, had I yelled, “HEY!!! Whatcha doin’ with my package, huh?!!!” 😂
Joseph sent a picture
of Justin with his birthday gift (Juliana in the background), thanking us for the
present.
I wrote back, “You’re
very welcome! I hope the pjs fit.”
“They do,”
Joseph assured me. “Perfect timing,
because he was just asking for some.”
Justin recently
grew out of the school shirts they’d gotten him at the start of the school year. Instead of complaining, he just took to
wearing his jacket all the time. When Joseph
realized this, he took Justin straight to Target and bought him a bunch of
shirts that fit.
Joseph did
something similar with his shoes, back when he was about 5 or 6.
Suddenly noticing
that those shoes were hard for him to get on, I said, “Oh! Are those hurting
your feet?!”
“Oh, they’re
all right,” responded Joseph, “if I curl my toes a little.” 😯
So off we
hurried to Wal-Mart for shoes.
I got several
dozen photos scanned before bedtime that night.
The Sandhill cranes are back in Nebraska! Sandhill Crane Live Cam
Oh! – I just looked
at it again, and see that the camera is zoomed in on some white-tailed deer
walking along the banks of the Platte.
What a pretty picture, with the river in the foreground, and the bright
golden prairie grasses behind them. It’s evening,
and the cranes are leaving the cornfields where they’ve been feeding during the
day, heading to the river in long lines and V formations, sailing in on
wingspans of 6 to 7 feet. They are noisy! Their rattling bugle calls can be heard
up to 2 ½ miles away. They’ll spend the
night standing in the shallow water or on sandbars.
That water is freezing
cold! How do they do that? Answer:
the amount of blood that needs to be warmed is reduced because blood
vessels in their feet constrict. Furthermore, warm blood in the arteries coming
from the heart warm the colder blood in the nearby veins as it flows back
toward the heart and the rest of the bird’s body. Yes, they have a wonderful Creator, just like
you and I have! Other interesting crane facts
can be found here. Just don’t fall for all that evolutionary
nonsense (which often contradicts with other evolution balderdash and claptrap,
in any case). I hope we can go see the
cranes before they migrate north.
Friday after tossing some clothes into
the washing machine, I headed for my office to scan more photos. Just as I clicked on the HP scanner, Teensy
stood up long and tall and wrapped a soft, fuzzy paw around my wrist.
I clicked on EQ8 instead.
And unexpectedly discovered a problem.
My last Electric Quilt update
downloaded with a glitch: after it was done, the program wouldn’t
open. All I got was a popup box telling me that the program had been
downloaded into someone else’s account on my computer, and I would need to move
it into a shared folder in order to use it.
Huh? I don’t have any
other account on this laptop.
The repair function did no good, so I
uninstalled the whole program, then reinstalled it. Success. And it
reinstalled with the latest version, too, so all is well again.
When it came back to life once more, I
looked at my Blooming 9-Patch design and thought about that fabric I bought for
it back in October...
Scan photos!
Scan photos!
Scan photos!
I am enjoying the photo
scanning. All these trips down Memory Lane... so many special pictures...
all the things we did together...
I’m looking forward to giving thumb
drives to all the kids! 😊 I send
them a few favorite photos now and then, and they’re enjoying them, too.
Hester recalled us fixing up that new room for her – and she wasn’t even quite
two years old. I was surprised she remembered.
I remember a handful of things starting
at age 18 months, and then increasingly from age two and on. But most of
our children don’t remember much before the age of three.
Loren’s supper Friday was Alaskan
salmon, baked with slivers of red and green peppers and onions, peas, carrots,
and corn, applesauce, red seedless grapes, a cinnamon roll, and strawberry
banana yogurt drink. I collected his laundry
while I was there, including his sheets and pillowcases, and put a new set on
the bed. He always keeps it neatly made.
I gathered
everything up, headed out to the Jeep – and the chilly breeze reminded me that
I’d left my sweater in Loren’s house. I
trotted back in to get it – and that reminded Loren that there was a jeans
jacket on a chair in the kitchen.
“One of the
boys (that usually means one of my boys) left it here a few days ago,”
he told me, “but I don’t know which one it belongs to.”
I took it with
me. It was a size Large, and looked like
it would fit Larry. If it wasn’t his, I
could ask some of my offspring’ns.
When Larry got
home at 5:30 p.m., I showed it to him.
He didn’t think it was his, and when he noticed some fancy detailing in
the back, he informed me it was a woman’s jacket.
He headed off
to work on something, and I went back to scanning pictures.
Four hours
later when I turned the next page in the album, lo and behold, there was a
picture of Larry, circa 03-16-96, loading vehicles on a trailer – wearing that
identical jeans jacket (or its near twin)!
Grabbing
the page, I trotted downstairs to compare it to the jacket I’d brought home
from Loren’s house. I first discovered the jacket was not a lady’s
jacket, for it buttons left over right. Next, all the seams (at least the
front ones that I can see in the picture) are exactly and precisely the same.
Larry took
another look. “The jacket I had on in
the picture was worn out and tossed long ago,” he told me. “And it was a Levi jacket; this one is a
knockoff.” He zoomed in on the picture (I’d
emailed it to him), and we discovered that the buttons are slightly different.
He tried on the
jacket. It fit. I’ll betcha the one in the picture was an XL
rather than a L, as he weighed more back then than he does now.
He pondered a
bit, and then thought that maybe today’s jacket is one he loaned Loren three or
four years ago when he was here helping Larry work on his garage, and Loren had
gotten cold. As for Loren thinking ‘one
of the boys’ left it at his house a few days ago, we know from the game cam
that no one but Larry and me have been there.
So... Loren probably found the jacket somewhere, didn’t recognize it,
hung it on a kitchen chair to show me – and then, forgetting he had done that,
dreamed up those ‘boys visiting’.
After all,
things get lost and then float to the surface at his house all the time. A while back, he came up with a piece of mail
from his financial advisor – merely a ‘notice of service’ of some sort, nothing
crucial – that had been sent in January of 2020. He thought he’d gotten it in the mail that
very day, and wondered if it was something important, something he needed to
take care of.
I read it,
pointed out the date, and told him it was a simple form letter and nothing to
worry about.
He looked at
the date on the letter again and shook his head. “Isn’t it something how letters can float around
in the post office for months before they finally get it to you?!” he
exclaimed. I nodded agreeably.
Well, he wasn’t
getting any mail, so that letter had evidently been in his plastic filing bin
where he saves his receipts and suchlike.
I have no idea how it snuck off the bottom of the pile and leaped out.
We had Plecostomuses
(Plecostomi?) (a type of scavenger fish) that did that periodically. Fortunately, I found them in time (once with
my bare foot, aiiiyiiiyiiiieee) (no, I didn’t step down; I barely bumped it,
and immediately commenced to running in midair), scooped them up, and put them
back in the fish tank. They proceeded on with their fishy little lives as if
nothing untoward had occurred.
After the
foot-to-fish episode, I took to scanning the floor with great caution and
suspicion before approaching the tank.
When I talked to Loren on the phone at 3:00 Saturday
afternoon, he told me, “I was gone all morning, and I forgot to get some eggs!”
so I took him half a dozen (as that was all I had). (He really had only been gone from 1:30 to
2:00 p.m.) While I was there, I stuck a
can of Campbell’s Homestyle Chicken Noodle Soup and a can of peaches in his
cupboard. He rarely will open a can of anything, but if for some reason I
am ever unable to go to his house, I can tell him where to look for the food,
and hopefully coax him into opening it and eating it. He is totally
convinced that he does not know how to make anything except eggs and
toast.
The last time this happened, during a January blizzard that
I didn’t want to try driving in, he said, “But I have no idea how to fix it!”
“You don’t have to do anything but open the can, pour it
into a bowl, and heat it in the microwave,” I assured him. “It’s ready to eat, as soon as you open the
can.”
Thus encouraged (and doubtless with hunger pangs urging him
on), he did it – and polished off the entire can of clam chowder.
This ‘I can’t fix food’ attitude is not new, but back before
he married Norma, he might at least buy himself yogurt, fruit, and juice at the
store. He doesn’t think of writing himself a list when he goes to the
store – and he’d probably leave the list on the kitchen table even if he did
write it. That’s really not terribly new, either. 😄
Saturday afternoon, the rain was starting right about the
time I headed to Loren’s house. I helped
him set all his clocks forward. Loren
has always loved clocks. I remembered this, when we had to set half a
dozen in every room – wall clocks, free-standing clocks, alarm clocks... 😅
I took him a bowl of rice/honey chicken/vegetable casserole,
green beans, beets, Chobani Greek yogurt, a little bottle of Dannon yogurt
probiotic drink, half of an apple turnover, and cranberry juice.
It rained all night Saturday night, and
was raining hard when we went to church Sunday morning. It slackened a bit by the time the morning
service was over, but the wind was still blowing up a gale at a steady 40 mph,
with sudden gusts over 50 mph. The Jeep
is usually a sure-footed vehicle, but that wind sure was jerking it around. Fields and ditches to our south are flooded. Part of Old Highway 81 was covered with
something reddish colored; Larry finally realized that it was leaf buds from
the trees lining the road. The wind had
blown those buds off. Will those trees
be bare all summer, I wonder? Our sugar
maple has red buds all over it. Most are
still on the tree, I think. If there are
buds in the lawn, I cannot see them.
We took Loren some lunch, and then
Larry fixed some of his famous pancakes when we returned home.
Last night after church, we drove to
Shelby to get E-85 gas for the Jeep. The
wind was again whipping us about, and the rain was pelting. Not the best night for a drive... but we
needed gas, and the Jeep runs so much better with E-85. The ‘Low Gas’ light came on just as we turned
into the station.
The station in Shelby has a nice little
grocery store on one side, and fresh-made food from their bakery and kitchen on
the other, along with the usual convenience-store fare. Larry dropped me off at the door. First, I could barely shove the Jeep door
open in the wind; next, I could hardly get it shut. Once I floundered my way to the front door, I
had to pull with all my might and main to get the door open far enough that I
could dodge inside. Whew!
As we hadn’t had supper, we picked up a
couple of sandwiches (roast beef and swiss on rye for me, chicken salad for
Larry), cottage cheese, bananas, coleslaw for me and potato salad for Larry,
and Sicilian Honeysuckle and Lemon tea. We
were sad that the warming container where they keep their scrumptious Junction
Burgers was plumb empty.
I could only eat a quarter of the sandwich
(the cheese was mushy and there wasn’t enough meat to make up for it), a few
bites of coleslaw (something wasn’t quite right – overgrown cabbage? bitter
dressing?), and even less cottage cheese (only 2% milkfat, and small curd,
bleah), so I was still hungry when we got back to town. So we went through McDonald’s – the only fast
food joint still open (Covid-19 spreads faster during the night, don’t you know)
(’course, they’d be able to keep people farther apart, if they didn’t
concentrate them all into the daylight hours) (duh) – and Larry got a fudge
Sundae while I got a caramel Frappé.
I might have enjoyed that thing better
had I not noticed on the sign shortly before they handed the treat out the
window that it contained 510 calories.
510! That’s one-third of the
caloric amount I consume in a usual day!
I drank half of it and saved the other
half for today. (Yes, it was still good;
I put it into the freezer last night, and this afternoon I let it thaw to the
proper texture before drinking it.)
Ohhh... Good grief. I just discovered that Dunkin’ Donuts’ Frozen
Mocha Coffee Coolatta has – get this – 990 calories. Mercy on us.
No wonder so many members of the population can barely waddle
around.
I think I’ll have a Pine Float from now
on, thankee kindly.
(That’s a glass of water with a
toothpick floating in it.)
Despite forecasts with ‘possibilities’
of snow, we’ve had nothing but rain. There was a report of 8 ½ inches of
rain south of Schuyler, 15 miles to our east, where there was already flooding from
ice jams in the river last week.
It’ll get colder here in the days to
come, so the continuing rain might turn to snow. The I80 and Highway 30
closures that started in the west part of the state have been backed all the
way east to Grand Island, 60 miles south of us, partly because the corridor is swamped
with stranded people. There are three
and four feet of snow in the foothills of the Rockies and the Front Range, from
Wyoming down through Colorado. The storm dumped 30.8 inches of snow in
Cheyenne, Wyoming, the most snow from a single storm the city had ever
seen. Colorado’s Buckhorn Mountains got 42 inches... but a site
atop Windy Peak in the Laramie Range topped them all with a report of 52 inches
of snow.
Why am I not cozily camped out in a mountain
cabin, fire crackling in the fireplace, somewhere in the middle of all this lovely,
deep snow?!
If the foot of slush on the Interstate west
of Grand Island freezes, it will be difficult for the plows to remove. A foot of slush is hard to drive through. Hence, the jackknifed trucks and other
one-vehicle accidents before they shut the roads down.
Here are Courthouse and Jail Rocks near
Bridgeport in the Nebraska Panhandle, as a blizzard hit.
Back to the scanner I go!
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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