Journal: Birds & Gardens & Raccoons -- and Quilts, of Course

 

After seeing last week’s pictures of tornadoes in our area, a friend asked, “I know that underpasses are dangerous in a tornado because of the stuff the wind funnels through them.  What is a driver to do when they are caught out?  Is there a safer place?”

They tell people to stop and get down flat in a ditch.  But some people not too far from here did that once, a few years back:  they left their one-story home that was in the direct line of the tornado, jumped in their vehicle, and headed for a neighbor’s house where there was a basement.  But the tornado was coming toward them, way too fast for them to make it there.  They stopped, jumped out, ran for the ditch, laid down in it – and the tornado picked up a big combine in the field and threw it on them.  They did not make it.

However, their house survived intact, without a shingle removed from it.  Nobody recommends what I am about to say, but if it was me, I’d make sure I knew which way the tornado was headed, and travel the other direction.  They rarely travel more than 35-40 mph; one can usually outrun them.  The trouble is, a storm cell can unexpectedly drop a funnel where you aren’t expecting it.  We have watched the radar and skirted around storm cells that looked tornadic, when we were out driving a few times.  Better to be at home – and I’m glad we have a basement!  I would never live in Tornado Alley in a house without a basement.

Oh, and one more thing: the couple’s car that they’d run from did not get damaged, other than having mud flung on it.  Such a sad story, that was.

Tuesday, I called the computer repair shop in Fremont to ask if they’d had a chance to look at my computer.  The man who answered the phone went and checked with another man, then came back and assured me politely, “Yes, we’re still looking at it.”

Do you think it would be rude to ask that they quit ‘looking at it’ and just get on with fixing it?? 

That day I put together a dozen blocks for the Split-Blade Pinwheel quilt in turquoise, black, and white, using the pattern I designed in EQ8 to match the pink, black, and white quilt I finished last week.  These will be for Carolyn and Violet.  The swirly turquoise fabric is left over from dresses I made their mother, Victoria, and her friend Robin (now her sister-in-law) for our Fourth-of-July picnic in 2015.

A little after midnight, I shut everything down in the quilting studio and headed for my recliner, where I edited pictures and did what I could to make this little laptop run with more efficiency.

A family of raccoons squabbling and arguing out front kept me entertained for a while.

Wednesday morning, I worked outside for a little over an hour, cleaning up the flowerbed on the east side of the front porch.  The wagon was completely full with not much other than crabgrass.

I put the glass birdbath bowl there, right on the ground.   Now it won’t get broken by the wind, hopefully.

I also planted the Fireworks clematis from Bobby and Hannah there at the corner of the porch.  I need to put a trellis into the ground for it to climb.

By the time we headed to church that evening, I had another 16 Split-Blade Pinwheel blocks completed, making a total of 28 blocks.  

After last week’s rains, the gardens are really coming to life.  I still have a lot of work to do, but everything is beginning to look better after several mornings of work outside.

There was no working outside Thursday morning, as smoke from major wildfires in Western Canada had been brought down by a cold front and dropped right into our part of Nebraska.  The smoky odor was so strong, I started getting a headache just in the time it took me to fill a few bird feeders.  They said on the radio that visibility was down to less than a mile in places – but right here at our house, it was less than a quarter of a mile.  I couldn’t see the highway down the hill south of our house, nor Teddy and Amy’s house just beyond the hill to the east.  We can usually see all the way to town, 7 miles to the east.

Looking east

Looking south

We were issued an extreme air alert through 12:00 p.m. Friday.  All of Nebraska, as well as numerous adjacent states, would be dealing with the smoke from Canada.  Some would only have hazy skies, as the smoke would remain high in the atmosphere.  Other areas, such as ours, would have smoke right down on the ground, creating visibility problems.  This would affect Larry and many of his fellow workers who drive big trucks hither and yon.

A fellow quilter with whom I sometimes correspond online lives in Alberta, Canada, and she said the smoke is really bad where she lives.

As of last Friday, over 764,000 hectares of land have burned in Canada – the most since 2019 when nearly 883,500 hectares burned the entire year.  This year has already seen the third-highest hectares burned since 2005.  (For those of us in the States, that’s the equivalent of 1,887,885.11 acres or 2,950 square miles.)

The first time I remember smoke from Canada affecting us was about 10 years ago, I think.  Victoria and I thought something was on fire just over the hill from our house, the smoke was so thick, and smelled so bad.  We drove north, then west, but the smoke was equally thick everywhere we went.  We drove through a little town nearby, and couldn’t even see the opposite end of Main Street from the beginning of it, though it was just a few short blocks.  We went home and looked it up online, and were so astonished to learn that it was smoke from wildfires in British Columbia.

That afternoon, a quilt arrived from a customer in Michigan.  I finished putting together the turquoise Split-Blade Pinwheel quilt (minus the border), so as not to lose any pieces, and then started working on my customer’s quilt.

Do you ever feel really proud of yourself when, upon running out of fabric, you manage to piece together enough scraps to complete the blocks you need?  Look at all those extra seams.  They don’t show much on the front, and once it’s quilted, no one will ever notice.

A lot of the clothes I made in days gone by were sort of like quilts, in that I coordinated and contrasted fabrics, trying to use what I had, and not buy more fabric if I didn’t need to.  If necessary, tops acquired princess seams and skirts acquired more gores.  Anything to make a too-small piece of fabric work.  We’d laugh when friends would admire outfits and asked, “Where’d you get such a nifty pattern?!”

I have enough blocks put together for the quilt top and the quilt bag; I need at least one more for the pillow top.  Because the pink and the turquoise quilts are for sisters, there must be the same items in the sets.

By early evening, the smoke had cleared a little, and I could actually see the big white barn on the opposite side of the road from Teddy’s house, a quarter-mile away (as the crow flies).

Here’s Friday morning’s breakfast:  a waffle Larry made, adding cornmeal and blueberry yogurt to his mixture, liberally bedecked with butter, then peanut butter and syrup, and blackberry jam.  Mmmm, yummy.

Contrary to what some thought, it is not ‘piled high’ with peanut butter; the peanut butter is mixed with syrup, so it looks like more than there really is.  The syrup and the jam are sugar-free.

The smoke situation was much better that day, and the air quality warning was allowed to expire at noon.

Victoria sent pictures of her flower gardens and raised vegetable beds.  The border for her flower garden was made with bits and pieces the old owners had sitting around the property.

If everything grows well, she’s going to have a lot of produce with which to bedeck their table later this summer!

It’s the time of year when big brown or black millers hatch.  Every once in a while, one goes flying through the house.  Larry and I duck, thinking it’s a bat.  We then duck once or twice more in an exercising sort of way, like Piglet did, so as to convince the other one we aren’t jumpy.

I spent the day working on my customer’s beautiful ‘Wildflower Way’ quilt.  She asked for ‘light custom’ quilting.  I’m using one of my new rulers from Julia Quiltoff.  

This talented lady also makes the most beautiful soaps, sometimes in the shapes of flowers, sometimes in the shapes of berries.

I was so pleased and surprised when I opened my latest package from her, containing a set of three rulers (this is the smallest in the set) – and there was a white box containing a beautiful bar of soap, made to look like a quilt block!  I had not before seen her quilt-block soaps.  And it has a wonderful fragrance, something reminiscent of gardenia and citrus, perhaps.  The main ingredients are goat milk, Shea butter, coconut oil, and Vitamin E.

By evening, I had the top borders and a little bit of the side borders done, and was ready to start outlining the embroidery on the next border.  Such pretty motifs they are!  It’s machine embroidery.  I took a second look at it when I pulled it from the box, wondering if it was done by machine or by hand.  But the stabilizer and the back of it told me it was done on a machine.  Such tiny and perfect little crisscrosses!

Saturday, I got up a little earlier than usual, thinking I’d go outside and work in the flower gardens; but the temperature was in the low 50s, and I decided I didn’t really want to purposely give myself the earaches and headache I often get if I’m out in a chilly breeze.  Instead, I decided to hurry to Omaha and back again, hoping to get a few hours of quilting done when I returned home.

The birds were busy at the feeders that morning.  There was a baby house finch loudly begging its Papa to feed it.  There were red-winged blackbirds, common grackles, blue jays, cardinals, goldfinches, house finches, English sparrows, Eurasian collared doves... and out in the lawn, robins were tugging worms out of the ground.  One robin found such a big worm, it had to hop and flap upwards numerous times to get that thing unearthed.  hee hee  That looked funny.

How does a person respond when someone writes ‘Amen’ in a comment under a post?  A post of a quilt I’ve made, to be precise.  I felt like answering, “I wasn’t praying.”  Or maybe, “I wasn’t done praying,” since, after all, we’re supposed to ‘pray without ceasing’.

I posted a picture of the turquoise Split-Blade Pinwheel quilt, writing, “I put this quilt together—” and one of the first comments under the picture is, “Did you make this?”  ((eye roll)) 

A hefty chunk of the population can no longer read, it seems.  They can only look at pictures, and poorly, at that.

I needed to go to Nebraska Quilt Company in Fremont to pick up some longarm thread.  I’ve ordered some, but I’ll probably run out before it arrives.  I thought Nebraska Quilt Company wouldn’t have the big cones of thread I usually get, nor the usual brand, nor would they have a very large variety of colors; but their thread is Aurifil, a good brand of long-staple thread.  It would keep me quilting until the 6,000-yard cone of Omni thread arrived.

I’d hoped I would be picking up my laptop from the repair shop in Fremont, too; but the part they had to order for it wouldn’t be in until today.  So I’m still limping along on this sloooow little laptop.  Bills need to be paid, but it would be a pain to try to do them on this computer.  Nothing is late.  Yet.  I think I can wait until my laptop is fixed, if they hurry.

Ugh, this computer is sometimes so slow, I can’t read the news while I’m curling my hair or eating breakfast, because the pages simply won’t load!  I often can hardly type in Word, because it constantly goes ‘unresponding’.  When I am finally able to start typing, I can wind up a good three paragraphs ahead of the type on the page.  Going from one tab to another, or from one window to another, is a total pain.  Even if a tab or a window has been used less than 30 seconds earlier, it will be unloaded, the page white and blank, upon returning to it.  And it will not reload quickly, either.

I pulled up Task Manager (an old version of Task Manager that’s not nearly as easy to use as the new one) and proceeded to manually force an end to each and every Chrome procedure, since those were using the majority of the available memory.  Many more were listed in Task Manager than the actual number of tabs I had open, which meant old tabs I had closed out of were not really closing, even though they could no longer be seen.  After that, things ran smoother, though the speed is nothing to brag about.  I accidentally shut down Explorer, confusing it with Internet Explorer.  That lost the task bar.  Not wanting to reboot the entire computer, which takes an Act of Congress and special permission from The House of Representatives, I pulled up the Run function through Task Manager and got Explorer going again.

Then I shut the lid (note, I did not ka-THWACK it shut, much as I wanted to), grabbed purse, coffee, camera, and magazines and newspapers for Loren, and headed out.

On the way out of town, there was a Chevy Silverado pickup in front of me tearing along pell-mell with its tailpipe scraping and bouncing on the road.  I hung back, not wanting that thing to come loose and come crashing through my windshield.  As soon as traffic dissipated and there was a clear shot, I stepped down on the accelerator and went flying around him, and thereafter I made sure to stay ahead of him.

When I got to Nebraska Quilt Company, I discovered I was wrong about the longarm thread they offer!  My info was outdated, coming from when the quilt shop was called Country Traditions.  Now they have several big racks of longarm quilting thread in a variety of good brands, with a big selection of colors, and in large cones (not the 6,000-yard cones, but at least the 3,000-3,500-yard ones).  I was so happy to find that out.  I bought a 3,000-yard cone of Mettler thread.  I will now have two large cones of dark green thread.  I rarely use that color.  The one I’m running out of right now was purchased in... hmmm... 2011, I think.  Well, I’ll just... use it!  Somewhere.

I could create a couple of quilts that require green thread.  After all, I have sometimes created an entire outfit for myself or for one of the girls, merely because we found a pair of shoes that was entirely too cute to pass up!

 It was still a bit hazy around Omaha from the wildfires in western Canada.  But I could not smell any smoke.  

Look at the license plate on this little Cooper Countryman.  J

A few seconds later, I pulled up behind this powder-blue Wrangler.  Look at this plate.

Reckon his mother regularly stalks him?

The lady who pestered Loren and me last week when we were visiting (not that he was troubled) started it up again this week.  I was showing Loren some pictures on my phone, and Loren, being Loren, likes to hand my phone to anyone nearby, so they can see the pictures, too.  This doesn’t always work out the best, because those persons then decide that the phone is theirs.  So I jump up and retrieve my phone, smiling and friendly and saying cheerily, “Let me show you another picture!” – and then I keep a grip on that thing.

This week when she started getting in his face, a couple of the nurses noticed and retrieved her. 

Last week, she put her walker in one of the lounges and went off (shakily) without it.  This week, she not only kept her walker, but collected someone else’s, too.

I thought watching Kathy totter along with no walker was scary, but it couldn’t hold a candle to the scariness of seeing her trying to trundle through the commons with two walkers!  Yikes.

Fortunately, two or three nurses came scurrying to the rescue.  One returned the walker to the hapless resident from whom it had been pilfered (while Kathy protested); the others talked down Kathy, who seemed primed and ready to have a fearsome meltdown. 

“We don’t want you to fall, sweetie!” said one of the nurses in a soothing tone, while firmly leading her away with an arm around her.

On the front of one of the Messenger newspapers I’d brought for Loren was a picture of a geothermal geo-air greenhouse built and owned by the Lorenzen family.  The greenhouse, a good part of which is underground, is located two miles south of Wakefield, Nebraska, in the northeastern part of the state.  They grow fruits and vegetables, many of them tropical varieties, year around.  Here is a recent article, part of which was in the Messenger:  Lorenzen Family Produce

Loren was very interested in the picture and the article, but kept getting sidetracked by Kathy, and then starting the greenhouse discussion all over again.  He thought it was a barn.  Then he thought Larry built it.  If not Larry, then surely Walker Foundations.  He asked several times, “How are they (the Lorenzens) related to us?” 

It belatedly occurred to me that he may have thought that because of the name, the first part of which is ‘Loren’.  Or maybe he thought that just because he thinks everyone in magazines and newspapers is related to us.

On the way home, I stopped at Sapp Bros. truck stop in Fremont and got a Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino.  I paused at the open-air cooler and discovered that they had just put the 50%-off stickers on the big chef salads they make earlier in the day.  I promptly grabbed two of them, and then picked up a couple of fruit and granola parfaits – blueberry for me, strawberry for Larry.  That, in addition to the ground venison meatloaf I’d made the day before, would be supper.

I got a picture of the house that used to be Loren’s as I passed by.  The young couple who purchased the house last year have redone some of the inside, and fixed up the landscape. It looks so nice. If Loren understood, he’d be happy that they have the house now, for their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents have been friends of our family for many, many years.

I got home a little after 6:30 p.m., so I had time to quilt for a couple of hours that evening.  I’ve started doing crosshatching around the machine-embroidered motifs.

Yesterday was two of our grandsons’ birthdays.  Lyle, third child of Teddy and Amy, is 15.  Levi, fourth child of Bobby and Hannah, is 13.

On our way home from the morning church service, we stopped and gave Lyle a present:  a light blue dress shirt, a pair of canvas and suede work gloves, a little hand-tooled piece of leather shaped like a cowboy boot, on a key ring, and an Old Timer pocketknife that used to be Loren’s.

We gave Levi his gift after the evening church service last night:  a white dress shirt, a pocketknife shaped like a ball bat, and a wooden and canvas 12” replica of the Mayflower.

A little after 10:00 p.m., I heard something at the bird feeders.  Larry went to check – and found a raccoon.  He took a video of it, and I extracted this still from the video.

This raccoon was a scaredy-cat, making for the steps when Larry started videoing him.  Some of them just sprawl along the top of the railing and look at us, hoping we’ll go away and leave them to the sunflower seeds. 

He (Larry, that is, not the raccoon) set up the game cam on the deck.  We’ll put the other one down by the basement patio door as soon as we get batteries.  Wonder what we’ll see??

Today when I checked the SD card, I found that at least two raccoons were busy at those feeders, nearly all night long.  The last shot of them was taken a little after 5:30 a.m., shortly before the sky began to lighten.

By the time the birds began arriving, there were no sunflower seeds, only Nyjer seed and suet – and not much of that.  The raccoons like Berry Blast suet, too!

I worked on one of the flowerbeds this morning for about 45 minutes, and that was as much as my back and hips preferred to do, thankee kindly.  Then I took pity on the birds and refilled the feeders.

A friend was telling about sewing together some quilt patches, then deciding to make an oven mitt out of the small quilt top she had constructed.

She accidentally cut two identical pieces, instead of a top and a bottom.

I commiserated with her:  “I liked to cut two same-side sleeves (when I was running low on fabric and had to cut them from separate pieces, or because I was making one sleeve from a different fabric than the other).  Even after sewing for 30 years!  And you should always start any project by putting right side to wrong side, for that first seam.  Always.”

One of the men on an online quilting group purchased a new computerized quilting machine.  It shut down and rebooted several times shortly after he started using it, but is now running nicely.  I asked a question or two about it.

“I wish I knew,” he answered.  “I’m a guy.  I don’t read instruction manuals.”  hee hee

I love reading instruction manuals.  I like reading them as well as I used to like reading The Bobbsey Twins.  I who was never late taking the kids to school or picking them up afterwards once came skidding into the parking lot a few seconds past the very last minute to collect them at lunchtime, all because my first-ever cellphone had arrived, and I was so deeply engrossed in reading the manual, I forgot to look at my watch.  ☎  (They have not let me forget that.)

This afternoon, I spotted a brown thrasher at the feeders!  First time I’ve seen one this year.  I wonder if the bird I heard last evening that I thought was a Baltimore oriole was instead a brown thrasher?  Thrashers, being in the same family as mockingbirds (Mimidae), can mimic just about anything.

There is also a female American robin that keeps coming to the suet feeder.  She, too, loves that Berry Blast suet.  It’s funny to watch her trying to hang onto the wire suet holder.  Robins were not made for ‘clinging’!

Since I put the last cake into the feeder this morning, I checked Amazon to see when the next shipment would be coming, as I have a subscription for it.  I was sorry to discover that the subscription was canceled because they have no more of that particular concoction.  I ordered another in its place – St. Alban’s Bay Suet Plus.  It also has berries in it, which the birds particularly like.  I hope they like St. Alban’s Bay as well as they’ve liked Berry Blast.

The red-winged blackbirds were happy when I refilled the sunflower-seed feeders.  They have strong enough beaks, they could manage the striped sunflower seeds; but I always get the softer black-oil variety so that the little finches and sparrows can crack the shells.  As I type, the goldfinches are out there warbling like little opera singers. 

A young friend of ours once thought those patches of red on the blackbirds were tags, and wondered how the ornithologists had managed to tag so many!  haha

For supper tonight we had deer meatloaf, corn on the cob, strawberry muffins fresh out of the oven, Oui yogurt, and cran-grape juice.

I have now brought in the bird feeders, except for the Nyjer seed feeder.  Sorry, little raccoons!  You’ll have to find your own food.  But there’s an abundance of food for wild animals in this locale; they don’t need to eat the birds’ black oil sunflower seeds!

I should head for the feathers a little earlier than usual tonight, so as to work outside bright and early – and then maybe, maybe, I’ll be able to pick up my laptop in Fremont.  And the ‘Wildflower Way’ quilt needs to be quilted!

 

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

 

P.S.:  The raccoons just came back up on the deck, looking for the customary free meal.  They must’ve been so peeved that the buffet had vanished, they started brawling with each other!  They were trilling and snarling like everything out there.  Worried they might have cornered one of the roaming neighborhood cats, I flipped on the deck light and jerked the patio door open at the same time, sending the coons scuttling lickety-split down the steps.  (There was no cat.)  Ha, foiled you, you little bandits!  (They sure are cute, the little fiends.)