Journal: Birthdays, BMWs, and Updoinks

 

Ah haff a qveshun!  (raising hand)  Do any of you ever look at pictures of pretty quilting – but instead of seeing the stitching as ‘holding down’ the design (for lack of a better way to put it) and the feathers and other parts of the design puffing up all pretty, you see the stitches rising up, and the feathers and whatnot dipping down like dents or impressions in the fabric?  (I know, that’s a lousy description... and if I think of a better way to describe, I’ll try again.)  In my mind, I know perfectly well I’m seeing an ‘optical delusion’, as Larry says (making it hard for me to say it right)... but I just can’t quit seeing it like that.  😵‍💫

In an effort to explain this to my quilting friends, some of whom knew exactly what I was talking about, and some of whom did not, I wrote, “It’s not at all a quilting error that I see (most times the quilting is absolutely perfect), but a total inverse of updoinks and downdoinks!  (There, I finally made the description better, heh heh.)”

One lady agreed, “Yes, I sometimes see what looks like thread ridge outlines instead of the puffy insides of the designs.”

A man added, “I know what you’re talking about:  it’s when the quilting puffiness appears sunken in, instead of being puffed out.”

One lady thought perhaps it was a matter of needing to refocus on the quilt or picture.

“So if y’all find me at a big quilt show someday,” I answered, “and I’m standing before a beautiful quilt scowling ferociously whilst crossing and uncrossing my eyes, you’ll know what I’m doing:  I’m de-focusing and re-focusing!”

That begged another question:  does it happen in person [uh, ‘in quilt?’], or only when looking at pictures??

We pretty much agreed, it only happens in pictures.

I tried some experimentation:  I copied a photo wherein the stitching versus the areas that should’ve looked puffy were inverted, pasted it into a Word document, and then flipped the offending picture 180°.  

Lo and behold, the updoinks no longer looked like downdoinks to me!  The photo appeared correct.

(By the way, I learned the word ‘updoink’ from Larry, back when he had an auto-rebuilding shop.  It described what looked like a hail dent on a vehicle – only it poked outwards instead of inwards, and was sometimes caused by an autobody repairman who didn’t know what he was doing with dent-removal tools, and got a little carried away pulling out dents.)

I considered this new development.  Did it mean my eyes were upside down??  For a long time, I have thought this phenomenon was a snafu between my eyes and my brain, causing a visual problem.  But maybe not!

I selected a picture of quilting that looked perfectly fine to my eye, and turned it upside down.

Whataya know!  The parts that were supposed to look puffy were instead indented!

Take a look at these pictures, and see if you understand what I’m talking about.  The top one looks right.  The bottom one does not.  They are identical photos, but one is flipped.

So now I have learned:  it’s the shadowing that causes this illusion.  Our brains are programmed to think light should come from above, thereby putting shadows at the bottom of things.  And that’s the explanation of that.

Let us move on to other, equally important, subjects.  Such as red trucks.

Anyone who has looked at my photo collections has doubtless noted that I take a lot of pictures of red trucks.

This all started because I like to throw splashes of bright colors into my pictures, especially on overcast days.  Though most anything colorful will do, I particularly like red.  And red trucks were the perfect answer when traveling, as there are a lot of them, and they are big.  Ergo, a Big Red Splash.

A friend teased me about it, years ago.

I was therefore obligated ever after to take as many photos of red trucks as possible.  ORTs, they are.  Obligatory Red Trucks.

A friend recently wrote, “I have decided that you are just red object obsessed!!  Red barn... click, red semi... click, red truck... click, red vehicle... click, red bird... click.  🤣🤣  They do bring color to the world.  So, when you will be getting a red vehicle???”

I promptly posted this picture, writing, “Here we are on our wedding day, July 15, 1979, with one of my first little cars. 😊”

I was most horribly insulted when I discovered the Renault Le Car in a big hardcover book someone once gave Larry, entitled “World’s Worst Cars”!  I absolutely loved that little car.  It was a four-speed manual, it was snappy, trustworthy, and went marvelously through snow and ice, as if it thought it was a little Jeep.  It was front-wheel-drive, and my father got me a set of chains for the front wheels.

After a few miserable days, my eyes are getting better.  I should not complain, really, because after all, they aren’t going tightly shut uncontrollably now, and that really was awful.  But the painful burning and watering weren’t too nice, either.  Today they are doing quite well.

I did a search in my journals for the word ‘blepharospasm’, and I see that I had already realized that’s what I had back in May of 2010.  But no eye doctor believed me, for years.  Some didn’t even know what blepharospasm was.

By Tuesday night, having finished the bottom pedestal of the birdbath, I had quilted my way past all the appliqués on The Birds of Colorwash Patch quilt.

Wednesday, February 22^nd, was our oldest son Keith’s 43^rd birthday.  We sent him a fleece-lined flannel shirt, but it wouldn’t get there until Sunday.

I filled the bird feeders that morning, and soon there were the usual housefinches, goldfinches, English sparrows, and juncos.  A few minutes later, I spotted a red-bellied woodpecker and a white-breasted nuthatch enjoying the suet, one on each side of the holder.  We’ve trained the juncos to eat from the Nyjer seed feeders, despite them supposedly being ground feeders.  😄

Another one of those tiny black tension screws fell out of my bobbin case that evening.  I was mighty glad I had extras, from the last time that happened two or three years ago.  I popped one back in, tightened it, and got back to quilting.

By the time I quit that night after church, the batting was a good foot and a half off the floor.

Noon on Thursday found the temperature at 5° here in middle Nebraska, with a wind chill of -18°.  ‘Balmy’, our weather announcer said.  😂  A couple of days prior, he had told us that if our crocuses were starting to come up, we should hurry outside and push them back down into the ground.  🤣

I had scurried upstairs that morning to turn on the heater in my quilting studio.  That room gets pretty cold!  I have one of those big EdenPURE infrared heaters in there, which warms it up nicely.  

My room changes from ‘sewing room’ to ‘quilting studio’ as the whim strikes (or as my activities in said room change).  I even have my Microsoft programs (Word, Outlook, Excel, etc.) set to throw those words in when I type ‘sr’ or ‘qs’.  😊

I paid a few bills, then, pouring myself a big mug of steaming Raspberry Amaretto coffee, off I went to my sewing/quilting room/studio.

Speaking of coffee, where was our order from Christopher Bean?

I sent them a note:  “We are sad!  Our order is listed as ‘delivered’ Tuesday, the 21^st – but it’s nowhere to be found!  We looked all over the place yesterday... and again today.  Nothing.  And we have only enough coffee for one more potful.  Waa waa waa...”

They soon wrote back, all sorry that had happened, saying they would check with the shipper, and would soon create a new order, if we did not get it within the next couple of days.

The package did not show up the next day, nor the next.  If any of our few neighbors had it, I figured they were probably enjoying a potful of my favorite Blueberry Crumble coffee.  There were four 12-oz. bags of coffee in that package:  Blueberry Crumble, Blueberries & Cream, Praline Confection, and Bavarian Chocolate.  You can’t just go buy those flavors any ol’ where!  😢

We’d stopped at Hy-Vee after church Wednesday night and gotten a couple of bags of Cameron’s coffee.  Imagine what a tragic ordeal I would’ve been going through, had’ve I run out of coffee! 

Larry sent me a picture of the sundogs/sun halo he saw Thursday morning on his way to work.  He wrote, “Not photoshopped!”, remembering that a woman on Facebook called my photos of sundogs in Yellowstone National Park ‘photoshopped’, ’cuz, after all, she had never seen such a thing in her life!  (She’d probably spent her entire life looking down at the earth to see where next to place her size 15 herring boxes without topses {with a nod to Darlin’ Clementine}.)

I then looked on the Facebook group US 81 Corridor, and found dozens of similar photos, some quite beautiful.  This sight was evidently seen all across Nebraska that morning.

Larry also sent me pictures of the flatbed he is making for Walkers’ new boom truck, which he’ll be driving.

The center part (dark gray) is steel.  He picked up all the steel in Norfolk, and the weight was over 10,000 lbs.  He has used 9,600 lbs. of it.  The outside parts are stainless steel.  The bed will probably weigh 14,000 lbs. when finished.  When they put the crane on the truck, it will add about 15,000 lbs.  The crane, together with the hydraulic tank for holding the oil, and the rear outriggers (which they’ll put on when they mount the crane), will be in the neighborhood of 30,000 lbs.  The truck will then weigh a total of about 53,000 lbs.  The pup probably weighs in the 12,000-lb. range; so truck and pup together will be about 65,000 lbs., unloaded.

Larry, with Caleb’s help, is welding the bed together.  Caleb has been cutting all the metal.  Larry is painting the steel while he’s building it, because once it’s together, he can’t paint interior sections.  Inside the unpainted parts of the steel bed on his old truck, it’s all rusty.

Larry put the bottom metal down on the frame of the truck, then added the tube steel, which runs down each side.  Cross members are added in between the cross rails.  In order to have that part painted, it must be done before the top steel is put on.

Now the top steel is on.  The stainless steel outer parts of the bed are all welded in, and he’s ready to turn it over (the picture shows it upside down).  Then he can put on the rest of the stainless steel top sheeting for the top of the bed.

Larry got home earlier than usual, wondering where supper was.  I’d just put a venison roast, a bunch of potatoes, carrots, and onions into the oven, and they wouldn’t be done for a good two hours or more.  The French oven was full to the brim, and the roast was frozen.

(Yeah, yeah, I know you’re supposed to thaw it out before putting it in the oven.  I just thawed it out a little more abruptly than usual, that’s all.)

Sometimes I make a big, lovely supper, have it done by 7 – and Larry doesn’t get home until midnight.  🙄

So we ate a snack (he ate enough that it would’ve been a whole meal, for me)... and then he went to Genoa to work on vehicles.  He would eat supper when he got home later.

Here’s a funny a friend told me:  A man in Northern Michigan was hooking a trailer up to his car, and his neighbor asked him, “What are you doing?” 

He replied, “I’m going to put my snow blower on this trailer.  Then I’m going to get in my car and drive south until someone points at my snow blower and asks, ‘What is that?’  Then I’m going to stop and buy a house and live there for the rest of my life!”

Mind you, he won’t get to see sundogs and sun halos down there, wherever ‘down there’ is!  See, there are pros and cons, everywhere one goes.

That night, I unrolled the quilt a few inches until I could see the first border at the bottom, in order to measure the side and make sure the arcs I’m quilting along the side borders will come out even.  It turned out, I needed to do five more arcs, and if I make them just a smidgeon smaller than I’m doing right now, everything will come out perfect.  Whew!

After turning off the longarm for the night, I sat down to post a few pictures and to look at pictures fellow quilters had posted.  On a Facebook quilting group, a lady had posted a photo of lovely old quilts made by her mother, grandmother, and herself, displayed on a wide rustic ladder in her living room.

Someone commented, “I too have my Mom, grandmother and me on a quilt rack.”  🤣

I now have only a few rows left to quilt – and they are, for the most part, the dark plum colors.  I’m using a dark maroon thread.  Not the easiest to see!  I have lots of lights, including LED; but the best is when sunlight is pouring in my north window, and I can turn out all the room lights except for a long LED light in the far north dormer.  That creates sharp shadows in the quilting, making it easier to see it.

A friend asked me how much weight my quilting adds to the quilt, wondering if it will stiff.

I have found that my quilting adds practically no weight at all (even a 6,000-yd. cone of thread weighs very little, after all), and it doesn’t make it stiff, either – if good batting is used.  This quilt will doubtless be stiffer than most of my quilts, because I’m using 80/20 Hobbs Heirloom on the bottom and Soft & Bright on top, as that’s all the LQS had the day I needed it.  I won’t do it again; the combination doesn’t have enough loft to suit me.  I wanted Quilters’ Dream wool on top.  I love that batting; it’s sooo soft and silky.  With Quilters’ Dream cotton or poly as the base layer and QD wool on top, you’d have to put thread down five layers deep to make a quilt stiff.  In any case, this is a king-sized bed quilt with a fair amount of hang on all sides.  So if it’s a little stiffer than I would’ve preferred, it’ll be all right.  When I start on the personal throws for the grandchildren, I’ll be sure to use one layer of QD wool!

Christopher Bean emailed me Friday to ask if I would like a replacement coffee order. 

“Yes, please, I would like a replacement,” I answered.  “I contacted UPS, but they could not find the order, nor could they absolutely verify that the package had been delivered.  We did another search all around the yard, since it was very windy Tuesday night; but we found nothing but a few stray shingles.

“We really do love your coffees!  We use approximately one 12-oz. bag each week, sometimes more, and have worked our way through all your various flavors at least once, and have started over. 

“I was so looking forward to those blueberry flavors!”

It was Victoria’s 26^th birthday that day.  We gave her a set of a sunny yellow bath towels, hand towel, and wash cloth with ribbon embroidery, and a 12-piece ornament set from Danbury Mint.  The ornament set used to be Janice’s.  I dropped off the gifts Saturday on my way to visit Loren.

Friday afternoon, I got a call from the Optometrist Center; my craft glasses were in!  So off I went to town.  It was 11°, with a wind chill of -3°.  🥶

The prescription in the new glasses is slightly different (a little stronger in the left eye) from the old ones.  The lens is bigger, which is better.  Those ‘stylish’ narrow frames of a few years ago were never as easy to see out of than the bigger frames.

That evening, Amy sent pictures of Elsie with one of their lambs and one of their Anatolian Shepherd puppies.  Girl, lamb, and puppy are all totally adorable.

Quilting got interrupted that evening by something causing jerks and bumps in the Avanté’s movement.  I wiped down the rails and wheels, took out the bad stitching, and tried again.  It felt like the wheels were hitting something on the tracks. 

I hunted for a tool to hold against the rubbery wheels as I moved the machine along the track, in order to scrape off whatever buildup might be causing the problem.

A metal hem gauge didn’t work so well.  A wooden ruler didn’t work so well.  A metal half-thimble didn’t work so well.

I finally used my thumbnail, pressing it against the wheels (and shivering) as I pulled the machine along the rails.

Then I wiped off the tracks and the wheels with a fibre optic cloth one more time, washed my hands, and recommenced quilting.

And all was fine again.

A little before midnight, I figured it was time to quit quilting for the night when I put dark burgundy thread in my machine – and started quilting a blue square.  😅  (No, I didn’t leave it that way; I fixed it.  I really, really don’t like walking into my quilting studio to start quilting the next day – only to remember that I need to redo something.)

Look at the front bar: that’s one of the bottom borders showing there!

I now have 145 hours of quilting done, making a total of 245.5 hours in this quilt.

I headed downstairs to post a few pictures online.

I have quilting friends who are members of some of the same Facebook quilting groups to which I belong; so if I am looking at the Facebook feed for all my groups, and if they have posted on several groups, I might very well see each of those posts.  I once got severely reprimanded by a li’l ol’ lady who thought I was posting multiple identical posts right on her very own timeline, on her very own personal Facebook page!

That day, Facebook kindly showed me this photo that I posted three years ago, letting me know that exactly three years earlier on that date, February 25^th, I was in Texas purchasing a Bernina 730 from a quilting friend.

In one of the pictures I took across a wide expanse as we traveled a road along a high ridge, I thought there were half a dozen oil wells in the distance. Upon downloading the photos to my computer and zooming in, I discovered there were at least two dozen oil wells near and far, and about six oil derricks besides!

Here’s a piece of trivia:  An oil pumpjack (also called donkey pumper, nodding donkey, pumping unit, horsehead pump, rocking horse, beam pump, dinosaur, sucker rod pump, grasshopper pump, Big Texan, thirsty bird, or jack pump) is the overground drive for a reciprocating piston pump in an oil well.

Saturday was much warmer, in the high 40s.  The skies were blue and sunny that day as I drove to Omaha.

Loren was doing well.  From his table on the far side of the dining room, he spotted me coming through the door, and beamed at me.  We carried on a repetitious conversation while I showed him pictures on my smartphone.

Dottie, the lovely lady who lives at the home with her husband Fred, upon seeing pictures of my quilts, asked me to come to their room before I left the nursing home; she wanted to give me a cross-stitch kit.  She started stitching it, but can no longer see well enough to cross-stitch.  While Fred has some form of dementia, Dottie is still very bright.  This time she was in a wheelchair.  Fred, who had not spoken much at all any of the times I had seen them, took a look at my quilting pictures, and immediately started up a conversation.  He pointed at one of my pictures and said, “That represents many, many hours of work!”

I agreed, and then he told me that his mother and grandmother had both used knitting and weaving looms, making knit cloth and woven cottons, from which they cut the fabric for the clothes they made for their families.

Ron, the tall, nice-looking, friendly man who surely must’ve been svelte and dapper in his younger years, was on the opposite side of the table.  Two weeks ago, he was dressed in neatly creased white slacks, white short-sleeved shirt, and white sweater vest with navy trim, looking like he had just stepped off the deck of his sailboat.

Last week, at the same time of day, about 5:00 p.m., he was in bright red-and-white-printed pajamas.

A young black man brought plates of food from the kitchen and set them in front of the four people at our table, then proceeded on to the next tables.  Supper that night was breaded fish, peas, and a salad, with a slice of white bread laid on top of the food like a comforter.

This seemed to stump a number of people.  Some leaned down and tried to peer under the bread.  Some picked up their slices, stared at the food, then put the slices back down atop the food, quite a lot like Socks kitty when something objectionable was in one corner of his bowl, and he’d scrape the rest of the food over the top of it with one outstretched paw.

Ron lifted the bread up, looked over the food, frowned in a puzzled way, and then asked me, pointing at his food, “How shall I do it?”

Ummmm... In a box, with a fox?

No, I don’t say stuff like that to anyone other than my brother.  He always laughs.  But not many dementia patients keep a sense of humor as he has done.

Not totally sure what we were talking about, I smiled at the man and said, “However you like!”

That didn’t help him much at all. 

He looked at me... looked back down at his plate... and then asked, “Which of these should I eat first?” 

“Just eat a little of each!” I suggested.

His head jerked up, and he stared at me, eyes wide.  “It’s bewitched?!”

“No,” I said, shaking my head and smiling at him.  “Just eat a little of each,” I repeated.

No amount of overpronunciation could dissuade him from thinking I’d said his plate was ‘bewitched’, after that.

Ron looked at Dottie, who was sitting next to him.  “My plate is bewitched!!” he exclaimed.

Dottie tried to help.  “She means, ‘Just take a bite of this, and then a bite of that.’”  She pointed at various items on his plate.

Ron looked across the table at Loren.  “Is yours bewitched?!!”

Loren, grinning, said loudly and clearly, “A little of each!!”

Ron turned to Fred, who was on his other side.  “All of them are bewitched!” he informed him.

Fred gazed at him blankly, then looked across the table at his wife.  Dottie winked, gestured at his plate, and said, “Eat your supper before it gets cold!”

Fred obediently ate.

Ron watched him – and then he ate, too.

“Well, that’s settled,” said Loren, still grinning.

I felt like we had just gotten ourselves out of a bad Joel and Rufus (of Gasoline Alley) routine.  Or maybe it was Abbot and Costello.

Dottie told me, with a nod of her head toward Ron, “He thinks you are a doctor.  He started calling you ‘doctor’ after he met you two or three weeks ago.”

“Well, I’ve done some doctoring in my time,” I laughed, “but it wasn’t ever on purpose!”

When they were done eating, Fred wheeled Dottie back to their room.

A few minutes later, Ron finished eating and got up to go.  He gave Loren the ‘ka-chink’-wink-point-the-finger gesture straight from Goober out of Mayberry.

I went on visiting with Loren a while longer, telling him that Larry was working on Nathanael’s BMW, which is being entirely troublesome with its constant switching into Engine Safe Mode and then refusing to chug along much over 18 mph.  Larry had gotten new throttle plates to put on it, and he hoped that would fix the problem.  Cleaning them had only helped momentarily, last time.

Loren perks right up when we are talking mechanical Stuff & Things, seemingly understanding exactly what I am talking about, and making comments to prove it.

The moment I finished telling him everything I knew about the subject, he asked, “So, how’s Larry doing?”

“He’s fine,” I answered.  “He’s working on Nathanael’s car today.”

“Oh,” he said, nodding.  “It’s good that he’s able to help these young kids these days.”

Then, after a moment’s thought, “How is your BMW working?”

I didn’t want to go through that all over again!  I barely knew what I was talking about the first time through.  So I smiled and said, “Just fine.”

Loren said, “Those are really good vehicles.  They last just about forever, and hardly anything ever goes wrong with them!”

I nodded agreeably – and talked about Canada geese landing on the icy Platte River.

A pretty black girl started clearing tables in the dining room.  She had below-shoulder-length hair that hung in glossy curls.  Most of it was black, but a few hanks were dyed red, rust, and navy.

“When are you going to dye your hair red?” Loren asked me with a straight face.

“Not... yet,” I answered, making him laugh.

After telling him goodbye, I dropped off a couple of Messenger newspapers in his room, then went on to Dottie and Fred’s room.  Their ‘apartment’, as they call it, is the size of a large motel room.  There are two beds, one a hospital bed, a living room area with armchairs and a big TV screen, and beautiful pictures on the walls, including a couple of cross-stitched pictures Dottie had done.  One, a woodlands scene with animals and birds, had the tiniest cross-stitching I’ve ever seen, and each tiny stitch was absolutely perfect.

By the door was a large picture Dottie’s great-grandmother had made of itty-bitty beads.  It was a picture of an old-fashioned girl, and was just gorgeous.  Dottie said it was well over a hundred years old.

That evening after I got home, Victoria sent a video of the innards of her sewing machine, the Bernina 830 Record that used to be mine.

I texted her, “I trust you are just showing me that you are taking good care of the machine, and not that it has kicked the bucket or anything?”

“Right,” she answered, “I just oiled and cleaned it!  It still purrs, smooth as silk.”

Earlier that day, I looked online to see if the new owners of Country Traditions in Fremont, which is now called Nebraska Quilt Company, still service Handi Quilters – and discovered that they are also Bernina dealers!

I needed to have my Avanté serviced while I was scanning photos – and forgot all about it.  The hopping foot quit working, way back in 2019 when I was quilting Jeremy and Lydia’s quilt, the New York Beauty, and Larry did a temporary fix on it.  The store didn’t have the part we needed in stock, and it was sorta pricey, and would’ve taken a while to get here from the factory in Utah.

So the hopping foot isn’t perfectly synchronized, creating a slight drag on the quilts, especially if they are thick, and makes pushing that machine harder than it should be.

That was one of the things that was sooo nice about this machine, in comparison to the HQ16 – it moved so effortlessly.  It’s no longer effortless, and I want it back again the way it was, the way it’s supposed to be!

“Do you remember when I used to push all your pins into your pincushion so they didn’t poke out?” asked Victoria.

“Yep,” I answered.  “And so did each and every one of your siblings before you.”

“Guess what happens to my pin cushion every time I sew?” she asked.  😄

I told her, “I always had to pick up my pincushion gingerly afterwards, because some of my pins were looong, and poked through on the other side.

“You liked to arrange them in ‘flowers’, putting six like-colored pins together with a yellow or white-headed pin in the center.  You were a wee bit frustrated that I did not keep your artwork nice, when I’d go to using the pins.”

“I remember that!” said Victoria.  “Funny.  😄”

The conversation reminded me of Keith learning his numbers at about age 2 – with a tape measure.  He’d trot around measuring things, hold his finger on the number, and bring it to me to read.  It wasn’t long before he knew all the numbers on the tape, and was figuring out half-inches besides.

So there he was, playing happily with various things I’d given him – and then he went around and measured the back of me.  He paused.  Then he said, said he, “Woooowwww.”

Biggest thing he’d measured all day, I guess.

Dorcas sent pictures and a video of Trevor opening his birthday gifts and telling us thank you.  His birthday was the next day, Sunday, the 26^th, when he turned 7 years old.

We gave him a hat and glove set and a Lego excavator set.

Larry came home a while later.  He’d gotten the new throttle plates put on Nathanael’s BMW – but the vehicle still wouldn’t come out of Safe Mode.  The display on the dash says he needs to ... um... do sumpthin’ else.  So... he’ll do it, as soon as the parts are in.  And I’ll tell you all about it, too – if he tells it to me first.  😉

Sunday, we got home from the morning church service – and there on the front porch was the box with our coffee, as big as you please!  What on earth.  Maybe it was on the roof all this time, and finally slid off?

I quickly emailed the Christopher Bean company to tell them, and to offer to pay them if they had already sent a second package.  They had not; they were able to cancel the order in time.

This is the ‘weather ball’ near Valley, Nebraska.  The ball is the protective covering, called a radome, that protects the spinning radar dish inside.  It’s dual-polarization radar, responsible for gauging rain, snow, and tornadoes throughout the region.

Last night after our evening church service, we were in the front vestibule of the church visiting with family and friends, when there was a loud rumble.  I thought people were up in the balcony area moving things – but then I saw a flash from the front doors.  Lightning!  That rumble was thunder!  Unusual, for February in Nebraska.  When we walked outside, it was raining, a nice, gentle rain.

A little while ago, I sent Lydia these pictures, writing, “Today I was wondering if I looked like the neighbor lady, old Mrs. Bigsby, in my light olive green skirt with a pale pink sweater with pearl buttons, and roses and leaves embroidered down the front – and then I found these socks you gave me with blocks of that exact light olive green and pale pink.  This proves it:  I’m utterly too-too!”

Lydia responded as expected:  “🤣”

Lydia had a dentist appointment Thursday that was supposed to take an uneventful hour.  Instead, it was ‘a very eventful 2.5 hours’, as she put it, and she still feels quite ill.  “I don’t know if I got a flu bug while my mouth was wide open,” she said, “or if the headache and nausea is from the anesthetic I wasn’t supposed to need.”

They took X-rays first; then they took the healing abutments off the implants and screwed in something for scanning, so they could take the digital impressions.  They tested the strength of the implants; that was good.  When the dentist began putting the healing abutments back in, it was causing Lydia so much pain, he decided to numb it, because they had also realized they had to redo the digital imaging, as they’d gotten a setting wrong.  Everything had to be done all over again.

Lydia’s jaw is bruised from being pried open for so long, and her mouth is bruised where she got one or two shots at the back.  Her ears hurt, her head hurts, and she feels sick if she turns her head very fast.

It made my teeth and head hurt, just hearing about all that.  Eeek.

This evening Lydia fixed the dried Bear Creek chicken noodle soup we gave Ian for his birthday a week ago Sunday.  There was enough in the bag for the whole family.  Ian had his in the Thermos we gave him.

“He is so thrilled with that Thermos,” said Lydia.  “And he said it was ‘the best soup’, probably all because of the Thermos.”

He was so cute, looking at his birthday gifts that day.  But at first, he was taking waaaay too long to get to everything, having stalled out on the Lego police car set, so Malinda, who’s 16 months younger, decided to help.

She unscrewed the lid on the Thermos.  And then, “Ian, look, Ian, look, Ian, it FOLDS!!!!  The spoon FOLDS!!!”

Ian was pleased when I showed him that the lid can do double duty as a bowl – and he was right properly amazed when I told him that if you put piping hot soup in the Thermos, it will stay warm for 6 to 8 hours.

{“He really wanted to try that,” said Lydia, “— leave the soup in it for 6 hours.  I told him sometime they can take lunch to school and he can try it.”}

Then he was taking too long to look at his shirt, so Malinda held it up so he could see it.

“Ian, this looks huge!” she informed him.

Jonathan, 9, took a look.

“That does look kind of big,” he allowed, tilting his head.

“It’s HUGE!!!!!” Malinda said adamantly in her piping voice. 

Larry and I laughed over those kids, all the way home.

I am fixing deer meatloaf, corn, peaches, and cranberry-watermelon juice for supper tonight.  Larry’s going to love the meatloaf, because I put too much ketchup and brown sugar on it. 

Back to the quilting!

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