All over the state,
blossoming trees are putting on a show.
I took this picture near Bennington last Tuesday. I wonder if I’ll even recognize that spot,
after the awful tornadoes that hit that area Friday night? I plan to visit Loren tomorrow; I will see
some of the damage firsthand.
Below are our two oldest
grandsons, Ethan, 20, and Aaron, now 23, taken at Keira’s birthday party last
week.
Last Tuesday was a
pretty day, sunny and 61°. It would get
up to 68° in Omaha.
There were cardinals and
red-winged blackbirds at the feeders that morning. Such funny noises they were making. I wonder what the conversation was about? Maybe this:
“You oughta try this
suet! It’s got peanuts and berries in
it, mmm-mmm.”
“No, thanks; I’m good;
these black-oil sunflower seeds are the best.”
“Alrighty, fine; but
whataya think those little yellow canary wingers see in that nyjer seed stuff,
anyway?”
“Dunno, dunno; maybe they
can’t wrap their beaks around this good suet!”
“Cack-cack-cack, yeah! That’s okay; leaves more for me!”
“Until the nuthatches
arrive, anyway! Weeee-wooo!”
I went to visit
Loren that day. When I walked into the
main commons area, he was sitting in a chair near a lady that he sometimes
chats with (or to, as it were), and he spotted me right away.
He said, “I’m so
glad you’re here! You got here just in
time; I was just about to pack up my camper.”
He started to say
where he was planning to go, forgot the words (I think he was looking for ‘Rocky
Mountain National Park’, where he used to like to go) – and then got
sidetracked by a Tesla Cybertruck pictured on the cover of the Car & Driver
magazine I gave him, a gift from his brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Randy
and Judy.
Surprisingly, he
thought of it again later, though, telling me he was going to take a little
trip, and was just ready to start packing. He looked extremely serious when he said it,
and I wondered if any old memories were trying to make themselves known.
The last time he
went somewhere with his camper, back in 2020, he was already showing quite a
few signs of dementia, and he didn’t tell any of us he was going, and then on
his way home (I really don’t know how far he got; maybe all the way to the
mountains, maybe not; who knows), he stopped at a rest area 250 miles to our
west, and then started looking around for Norma (his wife [and Larry’s mother] who
had passed away a couple of months earlier), and told passersby he could not
find his wife.
They helped him look
and then called the State Patrol, who came to help, and called an ambulance,
too, in case something had happened to her.
But when they looked up their names, they discovered Norma had passed
away, and realized Loren was confused.
It was about 7:30
p.m. when we got word of this. Larry and
I headed off toward North Platte, as the State Patrol would not let him go, in
that state of mind; though, truthfully, he’d have probably made it home all
right. He still knew his directions, and
he still drove quite well.
Once we got there,
we took Loren from the State Patrol office back to his camper and truck, and
then Larry drove his rig home and I followed in our Jeep. We got home at 5:00 a.m. the next morning. Ugh, that was a hard trip.
A few months later,
Loren said he needed to ‘get away, take a vacation’. I wonder what he needed to ‘get away’ from? I said
no, we didn’t want him to do that, and reminded him of what had happened
before. He then had a Big Bad Meltdown.
Soooo... we bought a
lock that fits inside a camper hitch, so it cannot be hitched to anything, and
installed it by the dark of the night. That
caused a Bigger, Badder Meltdown.
Whew.
I was glad that all
I had to do Tuesday was smile and say, “Oh,” and hand him another of the
magazines I’d brought.
I got home a little
before 6:30 p.m. After eating some
supper, I went upstairs to my sewing room to finish gluing all the little pieces
for the tractor appliqués onto the Farmall Scenes quilt I’m making for Warren.
When that was done,
I made a cow face.
No, no; I wasn’t
making faces, I was creating a cow face with fabric!
Here’s a funny: I
got the ‘picture’ of the cow’s face, from which I created the appliqué, as a
free download of a tattoo design, from a tattoo parlor! 😄
Furthermore, it was AI-generated.
I generally don’t much
approve of AI-generated stuff; but I have to admit, it did make a good
cow face for appliqué work. AND it was free. I quit griping
about, oh, all sorts of things, when they’re free. 😄
I upsized the download to
the dimensions I needed, printed it, and then drew lines on the picture to
indicate where fabric pieces should be cut. Using my lightbox, I then
traced the pieces onto freezer paper.
That evening Keith wrote,
inquiring, “What was that green and white thing we had that Daddy made
to pull with his bicycle but was originally a pedal thingy? I know you have pictures with us five oldest kids
in it, I think?”
I looked up the
pictures and sent them, glad once again that I had finished that huge
photo-scanning project.
This was a pedal car
that originally belonged to some people we knew. The teenage boys totally destroyed it, and
someone offered the wreck to Larry. He
removed all the pedal mechanisms and put on a hitch. We put a lot of miles on that thing, and had
fun doing it. Someone stole it from our
back yard one night. I wonder if they
were crestfallen when they discovered it had no pedals?
While I texted with
Keith, using Google Messaging on my laptop, Larry was snoozing away in the tub.
My tablet was in the bathroom, on the
back of the commode. Every time there
was an incoming text, the thing chirped loudly.
But Larry slept obliviously on.
One time when Hester
was little, about 3 years old, she was playing in the tub, having such fun that
I let her stay in there a little longer than usual.
When I got her out,
she looked at her hand, and said in alarm, “I’m an old woman!”
Then she looked at
her other hand and added, “AND an old man.”
I like flavored
coffee beans, though I drink coffee black. Wednesday’s coffee was Cherries Jubilee by
Amana Coffees in Iowa. Mmmm, mmm. While the coffee brews, I play the piano – and
when there’s enough coffee in the bottom of the pot to fill my coffee mug half
full, I pour it, then fill the mug the rest of the way with hot water. It’s the yummiest cup of the day. Larry says I’m ‘skimming the cream’. ☕😋
That afternoon, Victoria
sent pictures of the children out on a walk.
Their neighborhood is very pretty, and many of the trees are blooming
and colorful. Here are Carolyn, Willie,
and Violet. Baby Arnold was in the
stroller.
The main street of
Bennington is lined with pink-blooming trees, all the way down the hill. It’s really pretty this time of year, and I
made sure to take that route last Tuesday.
I wonder if those trees are still there, after Friday’s tornado?
I spent the day, up
until time for church, working on appliqués for the cow face. There were 46 pieces. I didn’t expect them to be so small – the cow
face is fairly big, after all.
After tracing the
templates onto freezer paper, I ironed sections of freezer paper to more
freezer paper to make the templates thicker, carefully cut them out, ironed
them to fabric, trimmed the fabric, and began starching and ironing the edges
under with my mini iron. It was a bit tricky,
on account of the smallness of the pieces!
By church time, I
was about half done. Larry was working
late, and was still in Fremont when I headed to church.
It was Aaron’s 23rd
birthday that day. We gave him a slim tactical
LED flashlight, a tactical carabiner with paracord (like the one we gave
Joseph), a pair of dress socks, and one of Loren’s nicer small pocketknives
with a bone handle. An Old Timer, I
think.
Later, Aaron sent me a
thank-you note: “Thanks
for the tactical knife and tactical holder and tactical socks and tactical
flashlight.”
“You are tactically
welcome!” I responded.
It
took several more hours of work Thursday before I finished gluing down all the
appliqué pieces of the cow face for the central block of the Farmall Scenes
quilt. The 13 tractor appliqué blocks were
done, too. I was ready to start sewing
them down! But first... supper.
I tried out the
camera on my new laptop for this shot (below). It... worked. (I’m sticking with my Canon, though. 😂)
For supper that
night, we had baked pollock, Southwestern lettuce salad with Toasted Sour Cream
& Onion chips, cottage cheese, grapefruit, Oui yogurt, and
cranberry-watermelon juice.
It rained a good deal of
the evening and night, with thunder rumbling and the occasional loud, crashing
BOOM! Around midnight, small hail fell
for a little while.
By 1:00 a.m., all the
black pieces were stitched down.
Tornado warnings and
large hail warnings were showing up on my weather app. The weather app also said that the rain at my
location had stopped. The weather app
forgot to look out the window.
Before going to bed, I
made sure I had the longarm thread I would need for this quilt. It’s always disappointing to finish putting
together a quilt, load it on the quilting frame, and then, all excited about
started to quilt it, ... ... ... discover there is no matching thread in the
thread drawer. Furthermore, the closest
place to get longarm thread around these parts is an hour’s drive away, and
they don’t always have what I need.
Actually, I have found some long-staple thread suitable for
longarm quilting at the local Sew What store, but it’s only available in
small spools, rather than the large cones I generally buy.
Even if I order thread
through Amazon Prime, it will take at least two days to get here. Better to check ahead of time.
A quilting friend I know
who makes the most gorgeous quilts and quilts beautifully, says, “Don’t quilt
with white thread! Ever.”
Ooookay then. Sometimes
I not only quilt with merely white thread; I quilt with bright
white thread! To each his (or
her) own.
A friend posted this:
“Nooooo,” I wrote, “You’re
mistaken! That was MY cat!!!” haha
The owner of the Denver & Front Range Weather Facebook
page calls tornadoes ‘danger noodles’. In
telling subscribers that it was going to be really windy in the next day or two,
he warned, “Keep a leash on your dragon.”
The very next day, ‘danger noodles’ came calling. Since some were in the form of a wedge, I
guess they should be called ‘danger lasagna noodles’.
It was noon on Friday
when I learned of a tornado east of Ravenna (a small town west of Grand Island),
heading northeast.
By 1:30 p.m., that
tornado had gotten within 10-15 miles of our house, but was going to pass by a
little ways to the north. It was bearing
2” hail along with it.
Another tornado was
forming to the south, and there were reports of funnel clouds and tornadoes
popping up in various other places around the state, too.
We are too far from
any tornado sirens to hear them, so I rely on NOAA weather radio – either the
actual radio, or the webpage (or both) – and I pay attention to the weather
apps on my electronic devices.
Meanwhile, I went on
appliquéing.
Andrew holding Baby Maisie, Victoria playing the piano,
Amy, Emma holding Baby Arnold
Another tornado was reported, this one near Albion, 36 miles to our west. Like the others, it was moving northeast. One was then reported in Iowa.
Suddenly, the wind was
blowing up a gale. Dust was flying, and I
could hardly see Teddy’s house, half a mile to the east, from my upstairs
window.
A tornado struck near
Wolbach, Nebraska, a village of around 300, about 55 miles west of us. It, too, was moving northeast. If it continued on its trajectory, it would
pass us to the north.
Within minutes, a tornado was reported, this one to the southeast,
approaching Lincoln. This one was a bad
one, and it would bring down the Garner Industries building, trapping some 70
people. Several were injured, and there
was a gas leak, hampering rescue. Multiple
ambulances were requested. The tornado
derailed a BNSF train at approximately the same time.
That same tornado (or maybe another one; I just came upon a debate over the issue) continued northeast and became a big EF-4
wedge – or at least that’s what they thought at the time; in recent reports it
has been downgraded to an EF-3. Wind
speeds higher in the atmosphere were clocked at 235 mph; but today they are
saying that ground speeds were ‘only’ 165 mph, just 1 mph shy of a low-end EF-4. It was one mile wide.
This powerful wedge tornado hit Elkhorn, a western suburb of Omaha, and demolished 30 to 40 houses.
The weather scanner said it was heading
toward Standing Bear Lake, which is just north of Cedar Creek of Prairie
Meadows where Loren lives; but it veered north and hit the little town of
Bennington, population 2,000, destroying 60-65 homes there, many of them the
big, beautiful houses around the lake.
That same tornado
traveled northeast and wiped a good part of Minden, Iowa, off the face of the
earth, even though it had diminished to an EF-2. Winds from an EF-2 tornado range from 110 to
135 mph. One person was killed there in
Minden.
Hearing that another
tornado was close to Bellevue, a southeastern suburb of Omaha, I wrote to
Joseph, “Do you have a safe place to go if a tornado gets close to you?”
He responded
promptly, “I’ve got my glitter shoes on. I’ll just click my heels and be fine.” 😄
Then he relented and
wrote, “The office here and a duplex three doors down have basements. The kids are locked down at school in the
library until all warnings are lifted.”
After a bit of small
hail here, heavy rain, and high wind, it was suddenly deadly calm, except for
the birds all trying to get to the feeders at once. A dark blue-gray cloud bank to the east had a
verrrrry uneasy bottom edge to it, for a while.
The tornado near
Bellevue lifted as it went over the area where Joseph and his family live, then
came back down near Council Bluffs.
Another around Louisville tracked to the northeast.
“Juliana called me
from school crying and asking if the dogs are okay,” wrote Joseph. “Her teachers are doing a terrible job of
letting the children know our area is fine.”
Probably because the
teachers were too frightened to be calm for the students. Poor little girl.
Joseph reassured
her, telling her, “We are fine, we are safe here.”
“With her, I have to
be almost stern,” said Joseph. “I once tried
talking sweetly and reassuringly, and it made her worse. So I switched to ‘STOP CRYING, WE ARE FINE.’ And that worked way better.”
“I understand,” I
told him. “That’s what I had to do sometimes
with Lydia, when she was little. Like
when she got terrified of the car wash with the swishing chamois. 😄”
“I remember that
terrified screech,” replied Joseph.
“And then there are
Victoria’s girls...” and I sent him an audio clip, taken inside a car wash, of
Carolyn and Violet shrieking with laughter as the brushes and chamois went
around their vehicle. It doesn’t matter how
many times I listen to that, it invariably cracks me up.
I checked to see if
Larry’s sister Rhonda was all right.
“I’m safe where I
live,” she answered. “Homes have been destroyed
in Gretna and Elkhorn. I’m right between
those two suburbs.”
Some of Larry’s coworkers were on a job in that area when that big tornado
went through, too close for comfort.
Another tornado, also an EF-3, struck Eppley Airfield. The terminal is all right, but a number of
outbuildings with private planes were demolished. There was a United plane on the tarmac – full
of passengers.
One lady said, “My husband was stuck on that plane, and he and the others watched
the tornado go by. They had landed at
4:30, and would have had plenty of time to get to safety; but nope, the ground
crew was in shelter, so nobody was available to get them off the plane.”
Good grief.
But listen to this, according to the airport’s social media: “Passengers in the terminal were safely
sheltered as the large tornado struck.”
No mention of the poor people in the plane!
After things calmed
down a bit, I got back to the appliquéing.
My sewing machine is evidently scared of bad weather, however, and began
making ferocious knots.
I had to leave it to its miseries while I fixed some supper. Deciding it would be nice to have a good
supper after all the excitement, I pulled out a venison
roast, carrots, and potatoes, and cooked them in the Instant Pot. We also had strawberry Oui yogurt and
cranberry-grape juice.
It was a quarter after
midnight before I finished stitching down all the red pieces on the Farmall
tractors. I’d hoped to get the tractor
blocks completely done, but all those tornadoes frisking and cavorting and
slam-banging around the state took my attention a good part of the afternoon. Also, the sewing machine threw fits and
tantrums for a while, making knots and refusing to give up the fabric when I
lifted the presser foot and tried pulling it out. I fought with it for quite a while before I
finally got it pummeled into subjection and, once it knew who was boss, it
sewed very humbly and nice.
Here is the tornado tally
of Friday, April 26, 2024, from the NWS:
Nebraska 47
Iowa 18
Texas 12
Kansas 9
Missouri 6
Oklahoma 5
Louisiana 1
Saturday, I got
ready to go visit Loren – and then changed my mind, as the time frame for another
bout of bad weather around Omaha kept moving earlier. There was a probability of large hail,
damaging winds, tornadoes, and flooding. I could’ve visited Loren in the morning, but
they often have all sorts of activities in the mornings, and I’ve found it
works best for him if I visit him in the afternoon. Several roads near the home are impassable
because of Friday’s tornado, and other roads are jam-packed with those who are
trying to clean up the mess. I just saw Loren
Tuesday, so it would be okay to miss Saturday.
I would instead finish
the appliquéing.
The little American
goldfinches are getting their summer plumage.
At a quarter ’til nine, I
finished appliquéing all the pieces for the 13 tractor blocks, and was about
half done stitching down the pieces for the cow’s face. For
scale: the small hubcap is 3/8”.
I couldn’t bear to
quit, being so close to done with the appliquéing; so I continued on. Three hours later, the cow face was all done.
It’ll look quite a
bit different, after I ‘thread-paint’ it on the longarm.
As usual, as soon as
I posted the picture of the appliquéd cow and mentioned ‘thread-painting’
someone wrote, “Oh, no! It’s perfect
just the way it is!”
No. It is not.
Or if it is, let’s make it perfecter!!!
😂
That night, I learned of
tornadoes in Oklahoma, including one that destroyed much of the town Sulphur,
killing four people.
Sunday dawned rainy and
dreary, and stayed that way most of the day.
That afternoon, my niece
Christine texted me to say that Lura Kay was interested in the clock I had
offered to give her. She
had told Christine that she felt disoriented, and couldn’t remember what day it
was or what time of the day.
I’m so glad I saved this
clock that I got for my brother Loren when he couldn’t remember the day or the
date, and got times, including whether it was morning or night, mixed up. Not that the clock helped much. I set it smack-dab in the middle of his table;
but he steadfastly ignored it – or unplugged it, since it was ‘wrong’ anyway. 😂 But maybe it will be of help to my sister.
Christine, her
daughter-in-law, set it up for her, and then sent me a couple of pictures, saying
that Lura Kay really likes it.
I bought the clock
on Amazon. I somehow got one with a plug
end compatible with outlets in Europe(!) and had to get an adapter. (I’m sure it was Amazon’s fault. Not mine, surely!)
Here’s a
picture of my sister and me, taken in December of 1960, I think. I was 2 ½ months old.
This afternoon, Victoria
was asking me how I got hollyhocks to grow so well. “I didn’t get a single one to come up last
year,” she said.
I gave a few pieces of
advice, though, truthfully, I didn’t do much more than toss out some seeds and
then make sure they got watered. My
hollyhocks throw seeds far and wide, and pop up everywhere a seed lands, I
think. Hollyhocks like lots of sunlight,
and they need well-drained soil, and plenty of water, especially on hot summer
days.
They’re hardy enough, and
grow fast enough, that one should be able to put seeds directly into the ground
in late April/early May, and have a nice stand of them by mid-to-late summer. There’ll be quite a few blooms the first year,
and a bunch the next year.
They are considered
bi-annuals – meaning, each individual plant only lives about 2 years; but they
drop so many seeds, a stand of hollyhocks might be in the same place, blooming
vigorously, forever and a day (to borrow one of my mother’s phrases).
But a lot depends on soil
and enough (but not too much) moisture.
My mother used to make ‘hollyhock
dolls’ for me – and I did the same, for my girls.
“Maybe you were too
little to remember?” I asked Victoria.
“I remember!!” she
said. “I tried to do it when I was
bigger and never could figure it out. I
got the peonies to work, though!”
Take a look at this one,
perched atop a cupcake. “Here, kid, have
a bite of pollen.”
Here are some very
similar to what my mother used to make, with big ‘Easter hats’, as she called
them.
Here are some instructions:
https://designmom.com/hollyhock-dolls-easy-how-to/
“Here’s a secret,” I told
Victoria. “I was not enthralled with
hollyhock dolls, because in order to make them, one must murder hollyhock
blossoms, and they never last long anyway!
“I never said that to my
mother, though; didn’t want to hurt her feelings after she took the time to
make me something.”
(I feel that way about
cut flowers, and yes, I realize I’m an oddity.)
“That’s funny,” replied
Victoria. “I love using flowers
personally; it never has bothered me to kill them. 😄”
“It did the time you
clasped your hands behind your back and leaned waaaay over to smell a hyacinth,”
I told Victoria, “and then lost your balance and tipped over on it, breaking
the stem. You were... 3? You nearly cried, and I hastened to assure you
that all was well, and we could put it in a little vase on the table, and truth
is, when one cuts a blossom from a plant, it makes the roots healthier, as the
plant doesn’t have to expend so much energy on the blossom! Maybe my little speech of condolence is why
it doesn’t bother you to murder flowers, haha.”
I went outside to chase a
squirrel away from the bird feeders I had just filled, and saw a white-crowned
sparrow on the ground below the deck, scavenging the seeds the birds drop. The ground-feeding birds have a smörgåsbord
down there.
Oh! Now there’s one out on the front porch! – and
now he’s eating black-oil sunflower seeds from the hanging resin mallard duck
feeder. It only holds a few handfuls of
seeds, but the birds that don’t normally eat from feeders really like it, as it’s
flat and open.
Well, I got some pictures
of the white-crowned sparrow, but not at the duck feeder. It took too long to put my big lens on.
I stopped to watch a
yellow sulphur butterfly flit through the yard – and then it landed a few
inches in front of a Eurasian collared dove that was strutting along looking
for seeds and insects. I thought maybe I’d
see a butterfly go down the hatch – but no, the dove didn’t see it, and when it
stepped too close, the butterfly took flight, which startled the dove, making
it skippety-hop and flutter. The
butterfly, seeming to be enjoying itself, then swirled around the dove’s head
and skittered right down its back, even landing for a nanosecond on its
tail. The dove shook its head and
fluttered its wings and tail, trying to rid itself of this flitting
nuisance. Hee hee Surely the yellow sulphur didn’t think that big
pearl-gray bird was a flower, did it??
The white-crowned
sparrows are whistling like anything.
They don’t really sing so much as make high-pitched,
long-drawn-out whistles in two or three tones.
I
picked up a grocery order at Wal-Mart, and put everything
away when I got home. Tomorrow I’ll visit
Loren. Hopefully, I’ll get back soon
enough to start putting the Farmall Scenes quilt together!
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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