I thought the clematis were done blooming a
couple of months ago. Then another bloom
showed up last month... and after that, I thought for sure it was
done. But look, there are two more big,
pretty blossoms on the vine, on this hot, hot August day.
It’s 99°, with a heat index of 106°, and
expected to get hotter than that for the next three or four days. There’s hardly a breath of wind – well, my
weather app says there’s an 11-mph breeze, but I sure couldn’t feel it when I
went outside to fill the bird feeders. The
poor little birds all have their beaks open, in order to cool themselves a bit.
We’ve been issued an ‘excessive heat warning’.
Last Monday evening, Larry was using Jeremy’s
tree mek (a big saw in a huge claw on
the end of a boom on a big truck). Huh. That was almost like the
book my Grandma gave me when I was little, Cat in A Box – “my cat is in
a box under my bed in my room in my house in my town in my state in the country
in the world in the solar system in the universe” ... and then it works its way
back down to the box... and out again to the universe. Anyway, he was using it to take down a big
cedar tree and some volunteer mulberry trees in our front yard. With the truck on our slanted driveway, he had
the boom stretched out pretty far, and when he tried lifting the claw, the
truck started to tip. The claw sailed
over and ka-WHAMMED onto the porch, crumpling the big birdfeeder into
nothingness, and slamming the big plastic chest (that goes on a pickup) into
the side of the house, knocking everything (including Larry’s expensive hearing
aids) off the windowsills. I thought the
side of the house was going to fall in, thought the front windows had broken,
and the front door, too. A small piece
of the concrete porch broke off.
Better believe I got up from my seat at the
table right next to those front windows posthaste!
Larry couldn’t pick the claw up with the
controls, because it was too far to the side of the truck, and the weight of
boom and claw kept making the truck tip.
So he drug it off the porch, landing it on the rosebush and the hostas, and
then drug it through the yard toward the truck until he could finally lift it
again.
Later, I would discover things had fallen off
the walls upstairs in my quilting studio and in the little library next to it.
Good grief.
And yikes, too.
In the description of my online MeWe Quilt
Talk group, it says, “If you like on-topic-only groups, this is definitely not
the place for you.”
So in a lady’s recent request for membership approval,
she wrote, “I like on topic discussion of quilting.” 🙄
(She was probably one of those children on
whose report cards teachers wrote, “Does not read with comprehension.”)
The lady who helps me with the group told me,
“I declined at least a dozen applications this morning. None answered the question (as to why they
wished to join) satisfactorily. In fact,
since we changed the group to ‘Selective’, I have only approved maybe two out
of a couple dozen or so. So I took the
liberty of changing back to Private.
Please don’t rap my fingers with a ruler!” 😄
“That’s fine,” I answered. “I approved one, maybe, whilst a-wonderin’ if
I really otter. I’m fine with less
busy-work!”
“You know, some of those people’s personal
pages said that the page may contain adult material. Ack!!!” added my friend.
“Yeah,” I replied. “I declined those even if they said something
sweet and innocent, like, ‘I love making quilts for all the heartbroken and
downtrodden in life.’ heh”
We have a very nice group of people on our
Quilt Talk group. And we want to keep it
that way!
Tuesday, I basted pieces of fabric over the quilt
labels on the quilts I planned to enter at the Nebraska State Fair, covering
them in order to keep the judges at the State Fair from cheating. 😄
I hunted for my nametags to sew onto the kids’
pillows. I didn’t find them for a while
– but in the hunt, I did find my long lost set of extra bands for my
VeryFitPro watch. I couldn’t imagine
where those things had gotten to, for the last year and a half. It’s a wonder I haven’t worn out the watch in
the meantime. But it now sports pretty
blue bands, where they used to be black.
Eventually,
I found the nametags right where I’d put them – in the round navy zippered case Teddy and Amy gave me,
with scissors and buttons and words embroidered on the lid, the one I keep
sewing machine needles in. (Once, a
while after I decided to store the needles in that case, I couldn’t find them,
either. 🙄)
I found the pearls I’ll use on Keira’s
quilt... embroidered Oliver’s name on his fabric book... and found a plastic
case crammed full of tied fat quarters (maybe even half-yards) of pretty wovens. I totally forgot I had those. There just might be enough for an entire
quilt.
Every time I pull out my embroidery floss (I got this particular case full of thread for only
about $5 on the ‘Sew It’s For Sale’ group online), I look at all the pretty
colors and remember that I really do like to embroider. I haven’t done it
for so long, it’s a wonder I remembered how. After I finish the
grandchildren’s quilts and make my own bird quilt using the fabric Larry got me
way back when, I’ll finish that embroidered butterfly quilt that I carry with
me in a fancy briefcase on vacations, on the off-chance I might have time to
work on it. (I rarely do.)
I have a certain Mode of
Action that I employ: When I haven’t
been able to find something, and spend altogether too long before I do
find it, I take that item and put it in the first spot I
looked for it. This, ... uh, ... sometimes works.
Other times, when I look for it again, I
look in the spot I found it last time – and of course it’s not there. 🙄
Most of the time, though, I have a particular spot for my things, and try hard
to keep them there. I said, ‘I try.’ 😏
Once
everything was properly prepared for the Fair, I put them into boxes and hauled
them out to the Mercedes.
“Don’t let
me forget my folding canvas wagon!” I said to several friends and relations.
That
done, I got back to quilting Keira’s ‘Puppies & Kittens in the Flowers’
quilt. By the time I quit for the night, all the letters for Keira’s name
were finished, and the large blocks were done. As soon as the white
borders and the bottom pink and green borders were quilted, I would remove the
quilt from the frame, turn it, and finish the pink and green side
borders.
Wednesday,
I had one of my fun and interesting little chats with Levi:
Levi:
How are you today?
Me:
I’m fine! How are you?
Levi:
Sweaty.
Me:
Did your AC run out of freon?
Levi:
I rode to Daniels Produce (they have trucks here and there around town
where people can buy fresh fruits and vegetables) and got a watermelon.
Me:
How did you bring it home? Did
you balance it on your head?
Levi:
Freon? Don’t you know the danger chlorofluorocarbons
pose for the environment? (He’s 13. Thirteen.)
Levi:
And I hung it on the handlebars.
(I presume it was in a bag, and he
didn’t just puncture a hole in the watermelon, therewith to hang it on said
handlebars. I should’ve said that. But I was fixated on chlorofluorocarbons.)
Me:
How else are air conditioners supposed to work? A fan in front of a tray of ice cubes?
Levi:
They use other things, like propane.
Have you heard about Einstein’s fridges?
Me:
Puron works, too. No, I haven’t
heard of Einstein’s fridges.
Levi:
One second. Need to pull the
files.
(It was more like a second and a half,
but who was counting?)
Levi:
So when he was eating breakfast and reading the newspaper, he nearly
choked on his eggs; an entire German family had suffocated because a bunch of
refrigerants had escaped their fridge unit. So he called up Leo Slìzard and
asked him to help.
I found this diagram and added it to
the conversation (for proof I was paying attention).
Levi:
They eventually made 3 different fridges, the most notable of which used
a methane flame to change the state of the refrigerants (which were non-toxic). When they both moved to the U.S., they
patented it and made about $3,400 off it. They put the money into a joint checking
account.
Me:
Too bad Albert Einstein, in all his wisdom, missed the most important
understanding of all: Albert Einstein
stated, “I believe in Spinoza’s God.” He
did not believe in a personal God who concerns Himself with fates and actions
of human beings, a view which he described as naïve. He clarified however that, “I am not an
atheist,” preferring to call himself an agnostic, or a “religious nonbeliever.”
As for ‘Spinoza’: Baruch Spinoza, born in 1632, was a
philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin, born in Amsterdam. As understood by Spinoza, God is the one
infinite substance who possesses an infinite number of attributes, each
expressing an eternal aspect of his/her nature. He believed this was so, due to the definition
of God being equivalent to that of substance, or that which causes itself. (Huh?) He
thought the Bible should not be regarded as a source of truth: not historical truth, not metaphysical truth,
not truths about nature and the cosmos, not even truths about God. “The Bible,” he said, “is not philosophy,
history, or science.”
Spinoza died in 1677 at the age of 44.
So he learned sooner than Einstein did
that his theories were wrong, as Einstein lived to age 76, dying in 1955.
Certainly, as Jesus Himself said, the
secrets of the Bible are not made known to the ‘wise’, but to babes!
And that was our Chat for
the Day.
Having preached to the
choir, I bid Levi adieu and got back to quilting. By the time I headed off to church, I’d made
it down to the bottom borders.
Thursday, I took my things to the Nebraska State Fair in Grand Island. What a lot of walking I did, hunting for the
... uh, it’s not ‘Trivial Arts’, so what is it? Turpentine Arts? No... Twisted Arts? No... Tiddlywink Arts? No... Textile! Textile Arts. That’s what it is. Anyway, they moved to a different building,
and I didn’t find it right away.
I parked... walked a block or so (carrying the box with two quilts, two pillows,
and a fabric book) (yes I had my canvas wagon, and yes I used it at the Expo
building for carrying that big, heavy quilt and the two smaller ones; but this
was a little box – or at least it started out that way)...
and discovered that the south side where we usually entered was under
construction.
Oh. Yes. Quite so. (in a Winnie-the-Pooh tone)
I remembered that, online, it had said that the Techni--- uh, ... Textile Arts
were now on the north side. I assumed
that meant ‘the north side of that same gigantic building’.
I drove around to the other side of the building. These buildings are huge, shaped
like giant L’s and T’s and E’s, and I was glad all the food wagons and vendor
booths and rides had not been set up yet, so I could actually drive through.
I got to the north side, parked, gathered up the box with the two
quilts, the two pillows, and the fabric book, walked to the door, and went in.
❗
The Transcript --- uh, Textile Arts building had
turned into a gigantic casino!
After spending all my money, I came back out and went on hunting for the
right building.
Not... really.
There was a wide hallway on one side. Still hopeful that the Tarantula ------
uh, Textile Arts were in that building, I trotted down that
looooong hallway, the small box growing at every step, asking each and every
person I came to where the Twinkie, uh, Textile Arts building was. They all greeted me with friendly
nonhelpfulness (which should be a word, and would be a word, had Noah
Webster bumped into all those people who didn’t know what he needed to know).
I rounded a corner at the farthest end of the building (think, miles from
where I first entered the place), and wound up smack-dab in the middle of a
whole lot of construction.
A short, thin man with a nametag smiled at me but asked no questions. This, because I march along so purposefully,
chin up, that everyone apparently thinks I know exactly where I’m going and
what I’m doing. In fact, one couple even
asked me where to find a particular room! I said I didn’t know; I was looking for the
Twister, uh, ... Textile Arts building.
“I just wander around until somebody rescues me,” I told them.
They laughed, and headed off the other way. They’re probably still walking.
Back to the short, thin, smiling man. “Could you tell me where the Tiddlypom,
uh, Textile Arts building is?” I asked.
He looked blank – and then I noticed that his nametag said Tutankhamun
(or something) Construction, and knew he wouldn’t know. But he spotted a lady coming down the hallway
behind me, smiled in relief, and said, “Here’s Ankhesenamun!” (That may not be precisely what he said; the
noise of construction pretty much drowned him out.) “She can tell you where it is!”
She could, and she did. Her
nametag said something about coordinating the Nebraska State Fair, after all. I thanked her, trotted allllll the way back
down that hallway (think, kilometers!) lugging my millstone,
and went back out into the parking lot to my vehicle.
I drove off northwest in the general direction the lady had pointed. I spotted what I felt pretty sure was the
correct building, back behind the enormous Outdoors Nebraska building, where
the Parks and Services groups set up shop.
Yep, there it was, and, as they say in Italy, “You can’t get there from
here.”
Our Mercedes X5 is four-wheel-drive, and it has a button you can push to
lift it 18” so you can go off-roading. (Why
anyone would want to go off-roading in a Mercedes is beside the point.) There were only a few curbs, gullies, arroyos,
and ditches between me and that building. Reckon anybody
would notice?
No, I didn’t do it. Instead, I
weaved my way around future food carts, found a lane behind Outdoor
Nebraska, and parked somewhat close to the far building.
My cellphone rang. It was a lady
from the Travesty— uh, Textile Arts building itself,
informing me that I had entered three items, and as of right
that very moment, nary a solitary one had been brought in!!!
Yeah. I done knowed it.
“Well, I’m wandering around on the premises,” I told her, “and I expect
I’ll find my way inside sooner or later!”
She might as well have said, “Ve ah not amused” with
an audible sniff. “We have to have
everything signed in by 3:00 p.m.,” she stated, “and after that, we go
home!!!”
It was only 1:00 at the moment, and there really were not all that many
people there at all.
“I’ve just gone by Outdoor Nebraska,” I told her. “There’s a big red building ---”
“That’s Outdoor Nebraska!!!” she
screeched.
Aaaaaaa! I jerked the phone away
from my hapless li’l ear in case she had anything further to say at
those same decibels.
I wondered if she had noticed that the building she was doubtless in
right that very minute was red. I kept still, on the off-chance she might
offer me some helpful directives.
“There’s a big garage door, wide open!” she continued.
There was indeed a big garage door at one end of the suspect building. It was half open.
“I’ll be there in about half a minute,” I replied.
And I was.
There were at least a dozen ladies in the building checking in and
arranging items. It took three of them
to check me in. I have no idea which of
them might have called my cell; they were all friendly and nice and helpful. Maybe the lady had been smiling the entire
time we talked on the phone. Maybe she
was just trying to talk and to hear over the noise of hammering, as people set
up their stalls. Maybe she thought I was
a smarty-pants, and then when she discovered I was actually a smarty-skirt (if
I was a smarty-anything-at-all), she forgave me.
Anyway, after all that walking whilst dragging a ball and chain (it
started out being a small box), I no longer had a hankering to go walking at
the pretty Stolley Park, never mind the fact that it was a lovely day and will
be too hot to enjoy anything outside for the next week. I got in my car, cranked up the air
conditioner and the heated seat, and came home.
“I’m pretty sure
you got your 10,000 steps in today,” remarked a friend when I related this
story.
“I’m pretty sure
I did, too,” I agreed, “but the arm with the VeryFitPro watch on it was quite
still through a good many of those steps, carefully holding that box; so a
whole lot of my steps did not register. I’ll
just swing my arm back and forth until the watch awards me the Gold Cup, hmmm?” 😄
Home again, I returned to my sewing room –
and then, just before putting the Avanté back in gear, I did something I hardly
ever do (and soon remembered why I don’t):
I made my way through a question-and-answer thing online – a ‘quiz’,
they called it – about what my ‘style’ is (not that I particularly care what
someone else thinks, but just for the fun of it). I got clear to the end of it, and when I
clicked ‘Finish’, an hourglass turned a few times to let me know it was hard at
work, figuring all this stuff out for me.
I was asked my name... and then my email address. I paused at that, then went ahead and typed it
in.
The very next window that popped up wanted my
credit card number. I had to pay them $0.99,
if I wanted the results. Nowhere had it
warned they were going to charge for this fun!
I clicked the handy-dandy little X at the top
right of the window.
I’ll just go on wearing the clothes already
in my closet and drawers, like I would do regardless of what ‘personal style’
they might’ve come up with.
I was peeved.
I had lost two minutes of precious time that I would never get back
again.
(Unless I do something twice as fast as usual,
something that usually takes me four minutes.)
We had ground venison meatloaf and California
blend vegetables for supper that night.
Aren’t there any brands of California blend that can hold a
candle to Schwan’s?? Sigghhhh... I don’t like to eat bark and tree
fiber!
Did I mention that our insurance, Christian
Health Ministries, turned down my request for assistance with my Botox
treatment for blepharospasm? Suspecting
that they saw the word ‘Botox’ and decided it must surely be a cosmetic
procedure, regardless of my explanation, and thinking they’d probably never heard
of Benign Essential Blepharospasm, I asked my eye doctor to write them a short
letter for me. He did (it was a very
good one, too), and sent it to me to pass on to my insurance company. I also wrote a letter, telling them that the
treatments were not each for separate issues, as they were thinking; they had
split them up, and then informed me that each ‘incident’ was less than our
deductible. They also took issue with my
‘date of first noticeable symptom’, saying it was long before we were in their
insurance program.
Now I’m very sorry I tried so hard to be
honest and accurate in answering the question!
The truth is, I suspected I had this disease a good eleven years ago. However, no eye doctor agreed with my
self-diagnosis, and in fact two or three of them told me adamantly that I did not
have it. I was never treated for it,
except for the time a couple of years ago when a family doctor gave me a
medication more commonly used for epilepsy, in the hopes it might help. It did not.
After I researched possible side effects, I stopped taking it.
I was not diagnosed with blepharospasm until
January of this year – and the doctor who diagnosed me also gave me my first
Botox treatment that very day. It has
made a profound difference, and I’m so thankful; but I will have to cancel my
next appointment, if our insurance company refuses to cover it. I have had three treatments thus far.
Thursday morning when I headed toward Grand
Island, I took along the letter from Dr. Clark and the letter I wrote, in an
envelope addressed to Christian Health Ministries, so that I could mail it
somewhere enroute. I remembered to look
for mailboxes as I went through the little towns of Monroe... Silver Creek...
Clarks... By the time I got to Central
City, I’d forgotten about the letter.
But I did take a picture of that town’s pretty post office as I
went past it – twice! Once on my way
through going west; next on my way through coming east. 🙄
Larry took the letter with him when he went
to Genoa that evening and mailed it at the post office there. He was getting a vehicle ready to paint for his
friend Joe. Every night he gets home
late from work, sets up a ruckus for a while with Jeremy’s tree mek and chipper,
then goes to Genoa. Then home for five
hours of sleep before heading back to work at Walkers.
After
finishing the bottom border on the ‘Puppies & Kittens in the Flowers’
quilt, I removed the quilt from the frame, turned it, reloaded it, and worked
on the side borders. With just a little more oomph, I could have finished
all the quilting that night. But ze oomph, she had done vamoosed!
“Tomorrow
is another day,” quoth Scarlett O’Hara.
I have always loved maps and globes. I like picking out a destination and then
mapping out the best routes to get there.
I use GPS a lot nowadays, but I like to take side jaunts and force the
lady inside my GPS system to reroute me.
(She always sounds so... chagrined.)
And yet, I have been somewhat directionally
challenged, all my life – except in the mountains, where, unfathomably, I
hardly ever get turned around. I
have improved over the years by paying close attention to the turns I am
making, the angle of the sun in the sky, and maps and navigational systems.
But one of the things I have often done is to
walk into a building... come back out... turn the wrong way... and look blankly
at a parking lot devoid of the vehicle in which I arrived. Or drive into a gas station or store, and
then, when leaving, have no idea which direction to turn onto the highway. In years gone by, I used to make the kids
(some of whom seem to have inherited this same directional glitch) laugh when,
upon exiting a restroom in a truck stop or convenience store or rest area,
turning the wrong way and winding up faced with a dead end, I’d say in
wonderment, “Huh, how ’bout that. I
walked right through this wall when we came in.”
The skies were smoky again Friday from
the wildfires in Canada, and we heard that the city of Yellowknife, population
about 20,000, capital of the Northwest Territories, had been totally evacuated
because of wildfires.
Some
time after midnight Friday, I finished the side borders of Keira’s ‘Puppies
& Kittens in the Flowers’ quilt, and then, wonder of wonders, I remembered
to make the machine-embroidered label and put it in the corner before attaching
the binding, so that it can be sewn down by machine on two sides, rather than entirely
by hand. Astonishing. I’ve never once ever remembered to do that
before, in my entire life.
I then
sewed the binding onto the front, folded it around, and pinned it to the back,
ready to be machine-sewn tomorrow. I’m saving the pearls on the 3D
flowers for last, so they won’t get messed up as I sew the binding.
Saturday, Victoria sent a picture of Carolyn
with a pretty pillow she’d made for her other grandma, Ruth, for her
birthday. Victoria embroidered the
flowers in the middle square.
At noon
that day, it was 45° in Qikiqtaaluk, Canada, the northernmost town in the
world. It was 41° in Ushuaia, Argentina,
the southernmost town in the world. I knew you’d be a-wantin’ to know.
Here in
middle eastern Nebraska, it was 88°, with an expected high of 95°. I was getting ready to go visit Loren. His sister-in-law, Judy (his late wife Janice’s
sister), bought four big boxes of National Geographic magazines at a garage
sale and gave them to me to give Loren. If
there are 35-40 magazines in each box, that means there are about 150
magazines. Even if I take him two
magazines a week, it’ll take a year and a half to empty these boxes! 😄
While I
gathered up purse, coffee, camera, magazines, a can of Celsius drink, yogurt, and
a stick of string cheese, Larry was out front trying to use Jeremy’s tree mek. It wasn’t wanting to do anything, for some
reason. Maybe it thought the truck was too
tipped? Each time Larry pressed the
button to make the crane start moving, there was a loud honk. It’s set up like that, so that bystanders can
get themselves out of harm’s way, if they’ve a mind to.
I loaded
everything into the Mercedes and headed for Omaha, hoping it wasn’t a bad idea
to leave Larry unattended.
Loren is doing well, though he has a bit of
trouble standing to his feet when he’s been sitting very long. When I got
there, he was at the counter by the nurses’ station talking to one of the
nurses. I don’t know what the
conversation was about, but the nurses all looked decidedly relieved when I
walked around the corner.
“Look who’s here, look who’s here!” a couple
of them chorused, interrupting Loren in midstream.
He smiled at me, looked at the magazines in
my hand, shook his head a bit in a ‘not now’ gesture, and started to say
something about ‘needing to---’ ?? but he couldn’t think what he needed
to do, and the nurses were adding to his confusion by saying excitedly, “Go
visit with your sister! Go visit with your sister!” so I coaxed him into
walking to his room, where we had a nice conversation until I left.
He enjoyed the magazines and the Messenger
newspaper, and he carried on a fairly normal conversation about glaciers (he
knew they grind things into fine ‘dirt’ as they come down a mountainside) and
scorpionfish (he knew they were poisonous – “You can tell from all those
colorful stripes! ” – and he was right!) and suchlike.
After leaving Prairie Meadows, I went to
Cabela’s to get Jeremy and Lydia a few things for their 15th wedding
anniversary.
I like
to walk through the aquarium and all around the ‘mountain’ with its many
taxidermy animals set in lifelike poses.
There’s
the General Store where I got things for Jeremy and Lydia: peaches, apple butter, huckleberry preserves,
bacon cheddar and garlic parmesan biscuit mix, and a couple of Bass Pro Shops
mugs, one with wolves on it, and the other with moose on it.
The food all looked so good, I got the same things for Larry
and myself, except I exchanged the garlic parmesan biscuit mix for jalapeño
cheddar. Instead of the two mugs, I got
a very large mug with bears on it for us, to go with the very large wolf mug we
already have. We used to have two of
those wolf mugs, but one slipped out of my hand while I was washing it
recently.
I got
the last wolf mug using a gift certificate from some of the children. I was totally surprised when I got home,
opened a particular cupboard where I thought I’d put it – and discovered an
identical wolf mug already in residence there!
I had a hard time deciding whether to get another matching one, or the
bear mug.
When I
say I had ‘a hard time deciding’, that means it took me about 15 seconds,
rather than the usual 3 seconds. 😆 The bear mug
is nifty, because it has a different scene on each side. Inside the rims, it says, “Remember, we all
live downstream.”
At a
quarter after nine that night, I was hoping the neighbors wouldn’t get alarmed
and call the police, thinking someone out here was shooting! Larry had just gotten the old farm truck running
again (it’s full of wood chips from the trees he’s been putting through the
chipper), and it was backfiring and smoking like crazy. Peeeew, it was stinking to high heaven,
too. Not quite like the newer trucks,
whose bleachy stench makes my head pound awfully; but bad enough. He’d had trouble with it throughout the day,
because the battery kept running down, and finally the charger he was using ran
down, too. One of the neighbors will
gladly take the wood chips for mulch. I
can use some, too. In addition to the
cedar and some volunteer trees and brush and a couple of dead Austrian pines,
Larry removed two dead Austrian pines for the neighbor to the west.
It was a
big job, on a very hot day. Larry looked
like he’d jumped into a swimming pool, clothes and all.
We tried
some of those peaches last night after church. They are so sweet, they would make pie
filling, and you wouldn’t have to add any sugar. If I buy peaches in cans
or jars, I always make sure to get those that have no added sugar. But not these! Ah, well. They made a nice dessert, and we only had a
couple of halves each. We ate some again
tonight, too. They’re good, but we
prefer things with less sugar.
Roy and
Samantha, the young couple who bought Loren’s house in June of 2022, have had a
baby girl! Roy is a cousin of Andrew’s
on his mother’s side of the family, and Samantha is a cousin of Andrew’s on his
father’s side of the family. Hester
ordered some gifts for them through Amazon – and the box came here, to my
address. This, because Amazon somehow decided
that, when given Loren’s old address, they should transfer it to our
address. People (and Artificial
Intelligence) sure can get mixed up these days.
The mail
lady again put the box, plus a package of mine (gummy calcium and vitamins that
should not get hot), out on Larry’s stack of roofing insulation. Fortunately, Hester had told me the box was
coming, so I looked for it. As usual, the
packages had been placed precisely so that the Douglas fir hid them from the
front door and most of the front windows.
You’d think this was done purposely.
And it probably is. Our mailbox
is over on Old Highway 81. If everything
fit into that box, the woman wouldn’t have to come down our lane. She has a hard time turning around on that
narrow lane, too, especially when there’s a big tree mek truck, a farm truck,
and a crewcab pickup sitting alongside the lane.
She
marks these boxes as ‘delivered to front porch or safe location nearby’. The location is neither safe nor very nearby. I marched inside with the boxes and proceeded
to type a note:
DO NOT LEAVE PACKAGES AND BOXES OUT
HERE.
You knew we were not finding them last week,
as you could clearly see the four boxes from previous deliveries that had been
damaged by numerous thunderstorms. Some
contents were damaged, too.
Packages can be left on the driveway on the
west, if you cannot walk down the sidewalk to the front porch. Not behind a vehicle, please.
I printed
it as large as possible whilst still fitting on a sheet of typing paper, put it
into a Ziploc gallon baggy, and taped it onto the stack of insulation.
So the
woman is already madder’n a wet hen at having to bring boxes to our house, struggling
through the ditch out front, and then finding construction stuff in her way,
and sometimes weeds that have run amok because the lawn mower won’t fit between
the construction stuff. Why, oh why, won’t
she just pull into the driveway like a normal person would, and walk [or
waddle, as it were] down the sidewalk to the porch?! Furthermore, if she’d pull into the drive, it
would be easy for her to back out and head back down the lane. Instead, she tries going over hill and dale,
and then gets hostile because it’s difficult!
(I’ve seen her throw boxes a time or two.) So this note will doubtless make her fume.
On the
USPS website, it says they will put parcels ‘in a safe place’. I could call the post office and complain,
but I prefer not to cause that much trouble.
We’ll see what happens next.
This
afternoon I made reservations for nine nights at Whispering Pines Campground in
the Black Hills of South Dakota for September 5th through the 13th.
There is a quilt show in Hill City on
the 9th and 10th, and I hope to enter some quilts, if
out-staters are allowed. I’m waiting to
hear back from the Hill City Art Organization to find out if I can do that, and
how many I can enter. I wish they’d
hurry up and email or call, because if I’m going to enter anything, I need to print
the entry forms and mail them (snail mail, tsk) to arrive before August 28th!
If I don’t hear by tomorrow, I’ll just fill
out papers and send them, for however many quilts I have on hand to enter, and
cope with the fallout later, haha. The
campground is near Pactola Reservoir.
My mother used to say, when we’d get
home (usually from the Colorado or Wyoming or Montana Rockies), “Aren’t you
glad to get down out of those mountains and get home again?” And I’d answer, “No, Mama! I wanted to stay there!” 😃
Mama worried about us when we were
traveling. But she always, without fail,
would call the children over to her house before we left, to give them money
for souvenirs. (We lived just across the
street, and she continued to live in the parsonage after Daddy passed away.) She would also pop out the front door during
those days when we were packing to go somewhere, waving a note for one of the
kids to get – whereon she had written things she was afraid we’d forget.
One time she sent a note especially
for Larry, written carefully in her still-beautiful handwriting despite the
fact that a stroke had left that hand a bit shaky. Larry had just finished rebuilding the crewcab
pickup that was going to take us all to Jasper National Park in Alberta,
Canada, in 1994, towing a 1966 Holiday Rambler that he had also fixed all up. There was a fixed-up pop-up camper on the back
of the pickup, too. There’s the rig
(above) on our back driveway when we lived in town, and here it is (below) as
Larry was driving it down the avenue in front of Mama’s house, so she could get
a good look at it from her front porch.
That’s her sidewalk (and Loren’s dog Bullet); I called it ‘the curvy
sidewalk’ when I was little, and my children did the same, when they were
little. Our house is on the far right,
across the street.
Anyway, Mama’s note read, “Put the
pedal to the metal and keep on truckin’!” – lingo that was totally out of
character for my soft-spoken, ladylike mother. Larry laughed and laughed over that note, and
told me to save it and keep it always. I
have it, somewhere.
I keep
clicking the Refresh button on the Nebraska State Fair webpage where the
results will be posted. Click...
click... click... click... click... I hope I
don’t wear out the Refresh button.
Bobby’s
knee is getting better and better, and we are very thankful. He’s been doing some underwater physical
therapy on that knee lately. They use an
underwater treadmill, and they can adjust resistance jets in the water so it
feels like he’s walking into a light or a strong breeze.
Larry,
of course, told him to make sure they didn’t plug in the treadmill while it was
underwater and he was in the pool with it.
😂
Here’s a
description from Ewac Medical. Though I
don’t know exactly what the one Bobby uses is like, they all generally employ
the same basic principle: “Underwater
treadmills work by using a conveyor belt that is submerged in a pool,
often a free-standing pool, allowing the patient to walk or run while the water
provides resistance. Resistance can be
further increased by the placement of a strong counter current.”
Almost
bedtime! I’d better remember to vacuum
the rugs tomorrow morning; they’re in bad need of it. If I don’t, someone is sure to come visiting;
they always do.
Why do
unexpected visitors insist on arriving when one’s place is the worst, and not
immediately after a person has thoroughly cleaned?!
On those
occasions when my cleaning had all been going on with aplomb in the basement, I
used to tell the kids that I needed someone to make us a trapdoor right inside
the front door, so that when visitors arrived, I could hit a button and usher
them from the untended upstairs straight into the nicely cleaned downstairs,
ka-FWOOOMP.
I have
to finish Keira’s quilt tomorrow – because the embroidered label says it
was finished August 22! I have the rest
of the binding to do, and 64 small pearls and 16 bigger pearls to sew on.
Annnd...
I have just discovered that anything entered in the Hill City Quilt Show must
have hanging sleeves attached to them.
I’ve got
lots of hanging sleeves to make!
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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