Journal: ♫ ♪ Bloom, Lilies, Bloom! ♪ ♫

Here’s one of the red-winged blackbirds that has been enjoying the birdbath lately.

Last September, I quilted a ‘Dear Jane’ quilt for a lady from Cincinnati.  Last week, I wrote to her, “Here’s a little piece of SLQT (Sarah Lynn’s Quilt Trivia):

“I think I will never again see a Dear Jane quilt without remembering that I was sick with Covid-19 the entire time I was working on yours.  😏😂

“What a thing to remember, hmmm?

“I couldn’t quilt for more than two or three hours without going to take a nap.”

She quickly wrote back to tell me I hadn’t needed to work on her quilt when I was sick!

“I actually felt better if I was up doing things, whenever I could,” I replied.  “I really hate wasting time!  😃” 

On the other hand, sometimes late at night when I should be going to bed, I sit down in my recliner, tuck a heating pad behind my back, and watch car crashes on YouTube.  Reckon that’s ‘instructive’ enough to not be considered ‘wasting time’?  ha!

I also like to watch animal documentaries from Planet Earth, National Geographic, and suchlike (on YouTube).  And sometimes I go on ‘tours’ through various cities and countries.  Though math was my favorite, I also loved geography, biology, science, and history in school, and still do. 

At least three friends have written this week to either say they were praying for us as we help Loren, or to say they understood, because they are going through something similar.  A couple of my friends mentioned that it makes them feel like crying.

It affected me that way a lot, when we first realized Loren had some form of dementia.  I was often on the verge of tears, feeling sad for him, and wondering how I would cope with it. 

But I’ve sort of... well, I guess you might say, ‘gotten used to it’, and am better able to take it one day at a time.  It helps that Loren himself is almost always cheerful.

I wonder how people manage such things when they have no faith in a better life beyond this one.  Not very well, I should think.

We have trials... and we have blessings.  I am very thankful for our many blessings.  And I am appreciative for the friends who pray for me.  Last Sunday we sang the song, I Need the Prayers of Those I Love.  Now, there’s a tearjerker, if you’re in that exact state when singing it!  I had to vigorously think of something else so I didn’t cry right there in public.

I’ll put the song on the last page.  We sing one word different from this copy:  instead of ‘to bear my tempted soul above’, our copy reads, ‘to bear my weary soul above’.

Tuesday, Loren’s supper was Alaska salmon, potato salad, rice pudding, red grapes, a banana, Key Lime Oui yogurt (in the cute little glass jar), and watermelon lemonade.  He was quite pleased with that meal.

After gathering some things from his basement, I took three large, heavy bags of frozen garden produce to Hannah.  It was from our neighbor, Chopper; he grew it in his garden.  He and his wife are moving back to Texas, and they couldn’t take all the food they’d frozen with them.  I kept a few bags of berries, and gave Hannah the zucchini, yellow squash, and tomatoes.  (Does that make me a bad person?)

Nathanael, who will be 15 in a few days, came along, and I gladly handed bags to him. That boy is quite a bit taller than me now, and strong.  Plus, his face brightens up when he sees me.  Life is good, when teenagers’ faces brighten up when you show up.

Why, come to think of it, even their dogs brighten up when I get there.  Ergo, it’s a nice place to go.

After leaving Hannah’s house, I went to see Hester; it was her 32^nd birthday.  We got her an Irish flute (a big, pretty wooden thing that comes in three parts in a black leather case) – to take the place of an Irish fife she had years ago.  She mentioned a while back that she had loved that fife, and wondered what had become of it.  So... I thought she might be pleased to have one again.  We also gave her a big hardcover bird book.

I played with Keira, age 3, for a little bit.  We had all sorts of interesting happenin’s with her wee stuffed lamb, a larger stuffed Husky dog, a ruffly little pink purse, and a small basketball net with a catch-all and lots of balls. At one point, the Husky snuffed at Keira’s bare feet and then barked, “Peeewwwww!!!” – and quiet little Keira yelped with laughter.  Having conducted a successful playtime, I bid them adieu.

Home again, I changed the water on the yard and flower gardens, gave Teensy some of his soft Fancy Feast, ate strawberries and half a banana, swigged down some Almond Vanilla milk, and then trotted back upstairs to the quilting studio.

Every now and then as I quilt, I peek out the window at all the birds playing in the birdbaths and the sprinklers.  There are cardinals, brown thrashers, Eurasian collared doves, English sparrows, blue jays, house finches, mourning doves, chipping sparrows, grackles, red-winged blackbirds, and a female Baltimore oriole flitting about in the water, fluttering their wings, shaking their feathers, and having a splish-splashin’ good time.

I was going strong when Larry got home from work and came to find me, stomach a-rumble and puppy-dog eyes at their saddest.  So I left my Avanté cooling its heels and came downstairs to fix supper.  We had Canadian bacon pizza, potato salad, grapes, and ice cream... and then I was ready to go quilt again.

I used a lot of starch on this quilt, trying to tame the thing into subjection.  I thought I’d hit the jackpot, having found a full can of starch in a bin of craft things belonging to my late sister-in-law Janice; but it worked only just barely for a few rows of quilting, and then quit entirely.  I pulled off the nozzle and cleaned it in hot water to no avail.

So I put the stupid thing in the trashcan, picked up a jug of liquid starch, and poured it into a spray bottle that was already half full of water.

By starching and ironing, I was getting the top of the quilt pretty flat; but the backing was another story altogether.  It had a lot of piecing, and some sections were tight while others had too much fulness.  It was particularly bad when I first started.  I quilted one row... advanced the quilt... saw that parts of the backing were drooping alarmingly... cranked up the tension – and the Red Snappers I use to hold backing to leaders popped loose.

So I released the whole works, rolled it back to the top edge, and pinned it.  With lots of pins.  And then I cranked up the tension waaay tighter than anyone ever recommends.  And I quilted.

When I quit for the night, I was about halfway through, and there were no tucks or puckers on the back... yet.  Every time I advance a quilt, I lean down and peer underneath to make sure all is well.  Looking at the excess fulness under there, I considered the possibilities of lying on the floor (with goggles on), spraying starch up onto the backing... and then dragging the iron under there and pressing it from the bottom.  😅

No, I don’t believe I’ll do that.  I’d probably drop that big heavy Rowenta on my face, or something.

This quilt, called ‘Missy’, is a lovely quilt.  My customer designed the borders herself.  I really, really, wanted to do a good job of quilting it for her!

Shortly before 11:00 p.m., it occurred to me that I hadn’t turned off the water.  I walked outside, went around the corner of the house – and found a pudgy little raccoon sitting on the ground under the bird feeders, which are one story up on the deck.  He – no, actually, I think it’s a ‘she’ – was scarfing down sunflower seeds (and shells, too, by the looks of things) as fast as she could gather them up in her little paws and stuff them into her mouth.  She looked a lot like a toddler eating birthday cake sans utensils.  😂

I left the water on, the better to cover any noise I might make, and scurried back into the house for my camera.  When I re-exited the house, I found a tree frog on the front door, with a little moth beside him living dangerously.  I stopped to catch his portrait, then hurried around the house to snap a few pictures of the raccoon. 

Wednesday, Loren seemed all right, and he didn’t have any trouble at all finding his way to church.  This is typical for Lewy Body dementia – it goes back and forth from normal to not-at-all normal, sometimes in the space of only a few hours.

I finished the quilt that night after church.  There are no tucks... and the quilt is square – but it doesn’t lie perfectly flat, on account of the irregularities in the backing.  I shall suggest blocking, starching, pressing.  It’s not so bad that a little starch can’t fix it, I don’t think.  Another trouble is that there are a lot of dark ravelings – and even though I removed a lot and tucked some behind the dark patches, I didn’t get them all, and they shadow through the light fabric.  😑

Thursday, I was listening to the rural news on the radio, and heard the usual cattle and corn reports getting interrupted because there had been a bad accident near Scribner.  A car had hit a semi head on.  Both parents and a child had been killed, and another child had been transported to the hospital in Fremont.  Not too long later, they reported that she, too, had died.

It suddenly occurred to me that I knew a family with two small children.  I immediately texted Victoria, “Are you all safe and sound, and not traveling anywhere near Scribner?”

She responded, “Yes, why?”

I told her about the accident.  We had a little discussion about how dreadful it would be to have that happen to one’s family, and I signed off, “I love you.”

She soon sent a picture of Carolyn and Violet. 

I wrote back, “Tell them Grandma says, ‘I love Carolyn, and I love Violet!’”

Shortly thereafter, an audio clip arrived.  “Gwammaw, we love you, too!” said Carolyn.

Her voice does not quite die out before Violet, funny little parakeet, says, “We love you, too!”  🥰

I often count my blessings, but I said another prayer of thanks and request for their continued safety that day.

On my way home from Loren’s house that day, I stopped at Amy’s house to pick up the rest of the pieces of a quilt she had found while cleaning at her elderly grandmother’s house.  One of these days, I will finish it.

Leroy showed me their new baby ducks, which were corralled in a very large plastic tub.

Friday afternoon, two quilts arrived from the lady in Cincinnati.  I had just enough time to load the first quilt, called ‘Outer Space’, on the frame before it was time to call Loren and then make him some food.

Before I left his house that day, I finally remembered to look in the little room under the steps where he used to have a small freezer, in order to see if it had old food in it that needs to be removed.

😲

Somehow, there has been a dimensional warp, because that room has expanded enough to contain three or four (or five) semi-truck loads of bins, boxes, and other things. 

Wow.

(I never exaggerate.)  (Ever.)

One of the things I found buried in a dresser drawer that day was a large stack of cards for an antique 3D stereoscopic viewer.  I did not find the viewer; but surely there must be one, somewhere.

I put the cards into the left drawer of my treadle sewing machine cabinet.  They perfectly fit there, and antique things should go with antique things.  Right?

If I ever find the stereoscope, reckon there’ll be the slightest chance I remember where I put the cards?

If I totally finish cleaning Loren’s house someday, and the viewer hasn’t turned up, I’ll order one somewhere.

That evening, this picture of Victoria went scrolling through on the screensaver on my laptop.  We were going over Imogene Pass, and had stopped at Yankee Boy Basin, elevation 12,526 feet.  I noticed something in the picture I had not seen before.  I quickly pressed Print Screen, then sent it to Victoria.

“Did you think hanging onto that giant Sequoia behind you would keep you from tumbling over the edge of the cliff into that rocky stream below?” I asked.  😂

Teddy’s Guernsey cow had her calf that night.  He sent this picture.  She’s a first-time mother, and Teddy spent some time during the next day and a half helping both cow and calf figure out how things are done.

I got about three rows of quilting completed before I quit for the night.

Saturday, another quilt arrived from the lady in Washington State.  When it rains, it pours!  (Did I say that last week, too?)

At 5:00 p.m., I estimated that I was nearly to the halfway point of the ‘Outer Space’ quilt.  The pantograph I’m using is called ‘UFO’.  The lady who had made the quilt asked if the backing was working okay, as she’d added some plain white fabric to the sides and bottom so there would be enough room for the clamps on my frame. 

I assured her, “Yes, the backing is actually quite a lot bigger than necessary!  You’ll have some extra fabric to play with, in another quilt.  Anyway, bigger is better than smaller.”

I was somewhat mistaken, as we shall see.

Having posted the pictures of the raccoon, tree frog, and quilt on a large quilting group on Facebook, the usual Knowledgeable Nellie showed up.  At least she was nice.  “Love it all,” she wrote, “but that’s a toad not a tree frog.  ”

Nope, it’s a Cope’s Gray Treefrog, which is the kind we have here in this part of Nebraska.  Our toads can’t stick to the glass like that.  Just look at his little suction cups!  The frogs are greener in color when they are smaller.  As they grow, they turn tannish, then gray, and even brown in their camouflage suit.  If you could hear his funny chirping ribbits, you’d know without a doubt, ‘That’s no toad.’  Take a look at this:  Cope’s Gray Treefrog

And here’s a YouTube clip of a Cope’s Gray Treefrog calling:  Treefrog Call

Later that night, I glanced at the clock.  I think I can finish this quilt, I thought, and rolled it forward to the next row.

That’s when I discovered that the backing was too short.  Huh???!  Did I load it sideways??  I must’ve.  I put the edge with no extra white fabric at the top, because I assumed that was right.  It was not.  Aarrgghh, such a novice mistake to make.

I shut down the machine, turned off the lights, and headed for the feathers.  The quilt will have to be taken off the frame, trimmed, and some of the extra backing fabric at the sides will have to be sewn onto the bottom edge of the backing, after I remove that white fabric.  Siggghhhh...

At least it’s fixable.

Again Sunday morning when Larry called Loren, he asked, “What church are we supposed to go to?” – but he seemed to understand when Larry told him, “Bible Baptist, same church we always go to.”

He was already there when we arrived, for both the morning and the evening services.

After church Sunday morning, Victoria asked us to stop by, and she gave us a dish of roast beef, carrots, potatoes, and carrots, along with a plateful for Loren, too.  We took it to him, and then ate dinner with him.

Last night, we put a new – and, hopefully, better – tracker on Loren’s Jeep Wrangler.  It told us he got home from church safely.  This tracker shows the actual route, rather than a line on the map ‘as the crow flies’.

Do you dream?  I dream every night – but often when I awake, the harder I try to remember what I was dreaming, the mistier it gets, until it totally evaporates.  My dreams are disjointed, weird things with major distortions and alternate realities.

The dream I had in the wee hours of the morning was seriously soupy.

Literally.

We were shopping at a grocery store, and I wanted soup.  It came in large bags, about the size of a humongous bag of sunflower seeds.  Someone explained that that was the way it is done in the far north, which was apparently where this store was located.

With no more room in the cart, we put one of the bags on the rack underneath.  Somebody promptly bumped into it with their cart, the end of the bag popped open, and soup started pouring out.  We blithely strolled on through the store, liberally coating the floor with beef/vegetable stew.

A dream psychologist would have to see his psychiatrist, if he tried analyzing my dreams.

This was my To-Do List for today:

1.                   Set up water outside

2.                   Refresh birdbaths

3.                   Pick mulberries

4.                   Take pictures of flowers

5.                   Wash dishes

6.                   Wash clothes

7.                   Call Loren at 3

8.                   Start next load of clothes

9.                   Take Loren food at 4

10.                Return Loren’s plate & silverware that we used yesterday at his house (I couldn’t wash them there, because I had on my Sunday clothes & the suit jacket had long sleeves)

11.                Sneakily stick mail into Loren’s mailbox (I have permission from the postmaster to do this)

12.                Collect Loren’s laundry

13.                Do some cleaning in Loren’s lower level

14.                Take an Amazon return & letters to UPS Store

15.                Go home & sort stuff from Loren’s house

16.                Pick up our mail

17.                Move water

18.                Pick more mulberries

19.                Take pictures of flowers on other side of house when they are in sunlight

20.                Start another load of clothes

21.                Finish last load of clothes

22.                Write journal

 

When one is pressed for time, here’s what to do with those mulberries:  just eat them, as fast as you can pick them.  🤣  Then you don’t have to make jelly or muffins or pie or anything.  And if there’s enough (there were), you don’t even need to eat anything else for breakfast, except maybe a piece of buttered toast.

At Loren’s house, I got two more thick gel foams off the downstairs guest bed.  One was too heavy for me.  I’m still trapped underneath it, halfway to the BMW, writing this letter by telekinesis.

Well, it was allllmost too heavy for me.  But ah got ’er out.  Then I remade the bed (pausing to do battle with a fierce, fast, black spider) (I won).  It’s down to a nice mattress and box springs, minus four thick gel foams and one extra 5” mattress (stuck midway between the four foams) and half a dozen scritch-scratchy wool blankets from Mexico.  Oh, and I removed a ripped-up mattress cover, too.  Once I put some matching pillowcases on the three remaining pillows (I gave one too many to the Goodwill, I think), it will look very nice, and people will actually be able to sit or lie on the bed without having to use a ladder, into the bargain.

I gathered up a boxful of stray books (I found some very old booklets that used to be my father’s!) and grabbed a box of old paperwork that was on a shelf in the garage (and which I nearly knocked off during that foray with the really, really heavy gel foam).  Contrary to popular opinion, one truly doesn’t have to save paperwork dating back to the time of the early pioneers.

The milkweed blossomed.  Isn’t it pretty? 

Hannah is contributing to a neighborhood garage sale this coming weekend, and she asked if there might be anything from Loren’s house I might like to offer for sale.  We dropped off a few things last night... but in today’s haul are only one medical quackery book and one rubbery novelty pen that someone might buy.  The rest of the books are really nice ones which I will give to the kids (except for one big well-used Winnie-the-Pooh book, which I tucked into my own bookcase for the grandchildren to read when they are visiting).

Here’s a photo I took years ago, put in a heavy resin frame, and gave to Janice.  I found it in her old dresser.  It is now gracing my sewing machine cabinet.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll find more garage-sale-worthy stuff.

The Amazon return consisted of a suet cake for the bird feeder.  One block of suet – one – and I was charged $17.  It was supposed to be a box of a dozen blocks of suet.  I have to return that one stray suet cake if I want a refund.  At least Amazon pays for repackaging and return shipping.

The third load of clothes was Loren’s things.  The shirts are now on hangers, and the other things are folded and put in a bag.  The fourth load was the last, and it is now put away.

At about 5:30 p.m. I decided it was time for a break, so I went outside, turned off the water, and took some pictures.  The lilies have bloomed! – both the Asiatics (top) and the Stella de Oro. 

Here's a Wild Prairie rose:

And this is a milkweed bug:

After a snack of apple-cinnamon Oui Oatmeal yogurt (I love that stuff), a mozzarella cheese stick, and a cup of coffee, I made a fresh pot of coffee and got back to typing.  (Telekinesis wasn’t working so well, and voice-to-text has its drawbacks, too.)  

And now I have checked off everything on my list – or I will have, as soon as I sign my name.

So I shall do just that.

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