It didn’t cool off much overnight last
Monday night/Tuesday morning, and I awoke early, hot. I went to turn the AC down – and it wouldn’t
come on. The thermostat looked like it
was working, except the little light behind the display was not on. I turned it off and back on... checked
breakers... pushed the reset button on the outside unit... nothing. So I called the repairman, and was put in the
queue. He was running behind, as he was
swamped with calls; but he hoped to be here by late afternoon or the next morning.
There’s a little window AC in the
upstairs landing, and I use a fan to direct it into the sewing room; so it wouldn’t
be too bad up there. It was only
supposed to get up to 85° that day, but it was humid and muggy. Could be worse, that’s for sure! 😏 Still, I like to be just right.
I was surprised when the repairman called at
10:30 a.m. to say he could come immediately, if that would work. Yes, yes, that would work! He was here within 15 minutes. ‘Late afternoon’ had arrived sooner than
anticipated.
A couple of minutes after 11:00 a.m., the AC
came on. Yay, that was fast!
The man said that the
transformer had ‘broken’ (whatever that means), and he had replaced it.
The spring ‘miller moths’ (from army
cutworms) migrated through our area a couple of weeks ago, as usual. The kingbirds – we are at a location where
the Eastern and the Western kingbirds overlap – love those moths. So do the barn swallows. Here’s an Eastern kingbird; we see more of
them than we do of the Westerns.
Let’s count up the birds we see around our
house these days:
1.
Eastern kingbird
2.
Western kingbird
3.
English sparrow
4.
House finch
5.
American goldfinch
6.
American robin
7.
Common grackle
8.
Starling
9.
Mourning dove
10.
Eurasian collared dove
11.
Blue jay
12.
Downy woodpecker
13.
Hairy woodpecker
14.
House wren
15.
Chipping sparrow
16.
Barn swallow
17.
Brown thrasher
18.
Cooper’s hawk
19.
Red-tailed hawk
20.
Bald eagle
21.
Great blue heron
22.
Mallard
23.
Canada goose
24.
Baltimore oriole
25.
Orchard oriole
26.
White-crowned sparrow
27.
Harris’ sparrow
28.
Rose-breasted grosbeak
29.
Dickcissel
30.
Eastern meadowlark
31.
Western meadowlark
32.
Bobwhite quail
33.
Kestrel
34.
Yellow-rumped warbler
The Eastern and Western meadowlarks also
overlap in our area. They look nearly
identical; the only way I can distinguish one from another is by their
song. The two species hybridize only
very rarely. Mixed pairs usually occur
only at the edge of the range where few mates are available. Captive breeding experiments found that hybrid
meadowlarks were fertile, but produced few eggs that hatched.
Sometimes we see and hear catbirds and
mockingbirds, but I haven’t lately. Nor
have I seen any hummingbirds for a couple of years. I don’t even put up the feeder, as I just
have to clean it again days later, and the water level hasn’t fallen in the
slightest.
There are other birds I hear and cannot
identify; some are probably song sparrows, grasshopper sparrows, rose-breasted
grosbeaks, phoebes, etc.
That day, I got granddaughter Maisie’s “You Are Loved” quilt bound and
labeled. The quilt measures 56” x 55”. I used Quilters’ Dream wool
batting, 40-wt. Natural White Omni thread on top, and 60-wt. Cream Bottom
Line thread in the bobbin. The fabric is from Dawn Rosenberg’s “You Are
Loved” line for Henry Glass fabrics. I used no pattern, except for the
paper-pieced sawtooth stars, which came from EQ8.
Shortly
before 2:00 that afternoon, it started raining hard. I went running downstairs to scoot the table
and quilt rack away from the wall where it sometimes leaks (either the fault of
the unfinished metal roof or the upstairs French windows) – and nearly put my bare
foot on a bat that was hanging from the edge of one of the stairsteps. I ran in place in midair for a while,
propelled myself to the side before landing, ran on down the stairs to grab a
weapon (tennis racket), put it out of its misery (the bat, not the racket),
threw it out the front door (the bat, not the racket), getting rained on in the
process; and then stood there wondering what on earth I’d run down the stairs
for in the first place. ( I did remember.)
Wednesday,
I made the fabric book, “You Are Loved”, that coordinates with Maisie’s
quilt. The pages have Quilters’ Dream wool in them.
That done, I started ‘de-boning’, as quilter Bonnie
Hunter calls it (cutting fabric from seams), the clothes Hannah’s sister-in-law
Esther gave me, clothes her mother Bethany made her when she was young.
Bethany, a good friend of mine, passed away last year, and I offered to make
Esther a quilt from Bethany’s fabrics or any of the clothes she’d made.
Thursday,
some quilting friends and I were discussing things we had lost while sewing or
quilting. I told my stories:
I was doing
some hand-sewing one evening several years ago as we visited with Larry’s
parents. I poured everyone a fresh cup
of coffee, returned to my chair and my sewing – but my needle had gone AWOL.
Where was
it?? I looked everywhere I could think
of, but no needle materialized. I
trotted up to my sewing room, got another needle, and finished my sewing.
We
visited... sipped our coffee...
And then
the needle made its appearance. It was
in the bottom of my coffee cup.
No, I don’t
know how it got there.
My
mother-in-law exclaimed, “Oh!! That
could’ve been bad!” – but she couldn’t quit laughing. For a good while after that, if anyone lost
anything, she’d ask, “Did you look in the bottom of Sarah Lynn’s coffee cup?”
Her son is
a lot like her. 😉
Another lost-and-found sewing story, this
time regarding an Oxmoor House point turner I was using to turn these blocks –
‘Monthly Hangups’, below – right side out. I was hand-stitching the openings shut as I
went along.
I sewed another block... turned it... reached
for the point turner...
It was gone.
I looked high and low, and then I looked low
and high. I looked in the trash
can. I looked under my sewing
machine. I looked under my laptop. I looked in the other sewing room. I looked in my pockets. I gave up and went for my other point turner,
which isn’t quite as pointy.
Flash forward:
I finished stitching shut the hole on hanging
block #6, reached over to lay it on the stack – Uh, wuzzis? There was somethin’ sorta hard and plasticky
inside that thing. ?
Oh. Yes. Quite so.
(In a Winnie-the-Pooh tone.)
So I ripped it back open and extracted my
Oxmoor House point turner.
Last but not least, there was the time I put
a Mariner’s Compass block on my head (because it had turned out pointed in the
middle) and took a picture to entertain the grandchildren.
A bit later, after trotting upstairs to warm
my coffee, and coming back down to finish the compass blocks, one was
missing. I hunted all around and under
my sewing table... went back upstairs to see if I'd left it up there... and
then spotted myself in a mirror.
Yeah, it was still on my head. Luckily, no one had come to the door in that
span of time.
That morning, Hester sent a picture of Keira
and Oliver having lunch with her, and in the middle of the table is the clear
glass Teabloom pot we gave her for her birthday a couple of weeks ago, with a
blooming flower in the middle. “We made the peach
tea today, it tastes really, really good!” she wrote. “And everyone had a great time watching it
bloom.”
Not long later, Victoria sent pictures of
Carolyn, Violet, and Baby Arnold.
They’re
such funny little girls. They were
laughing because their Mama was making funny faces at them.
“Did the
alligators get one kid?” I wrote back to Victoria, seeing as how Willie was
missing.
A couple
of hours later, she sent a picture of Willie, who had been taking a nap
earlier.
By late afternoon, one dress and jacket was
entirely ‘deboned’. The good thing about
doing this with dresses Bethany made is that she loved extremely full, ruffled
skirts, underskirts, very puffy sleeves and undersleeves. So I wind up with quite a lot of fabric from
just one dress – in fact, I got three full yards out of one skirt alone. As I cut, I switched back and forth from
spring-loaded, rubber-handled Fiskars to rubber-handled Mundials, and still my
hands got very tired from all that cutting, often through thick seams.
Before starting on the second dress, I paused
to sip coffee and look out the windows at the yard and back deck, where finches,
sparrows, cardinals, blue jays, and downy woodpeckers vied for a place on the
feeders. A cottontail rabbit sat and groomed
his face and long ears on the bottom step of the porch. A couple of young squirrels were playing
under the Blue spruce trees, and innumerable other birds flitted about in the
spruces and Douglas firs and cottonwoods.
After the second dress was cut apart, I took
some time out for supper, and then I hunted through my own fabrics for anything
that might coordinate with the fabrics from Esther. After gathering what I thought was enough
fabric, I arranged them in the order I planned to sew them, and cut some of the
longer strips.
Friday morning, I awoke at 5:45 a.m. and
couldn’t get back to sleep, despite having only slept four hours. I finally gave up a little after 7 and just got
up. After checking the outside
temperature, I went out to rehang the bird feeders and to see if 74° plus high humidity
would make it unpleasant for weeding the gardens.
It would.
(Not that I consider weeding particularly pleasant in the first
place.)
So I showered, curled my hair, ate breakfast,
and got back to cutting the fabric for the Hanging Gardens quilt.
Levi sent me pictures that day from their explorations in Colorado. A number of his shots showed clouds covering the mountaintops.
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“I saw
on radar that you were probably getting a rainstorm yesterday,” I commented. “Did it last long? Tornado Headquarters said there was a severe
thunderstorm in that area.”
“It stopped about the time we got off
the train,” he told me. “We were WET.”
“I always think that’s so neat,” I
remarked, “when the clouds are right down on the mountaintops. I remember how your Mama (that’s Hannah), when
she was about 3 or 4, was so delighted when we drove into fog on some mountain
road somewhere, and I said, ‘Look! We’re
driving right into a cloud!’”
He then sent pictures of Piedmont
Falls. There’s Aaron (above), and here
are Joanna and Aaron.
“Aaron and I climbed up and over rocks
in this river to get good angles on the waterfall,” he said.
I’ve never seen
that waterfall before, as it takes a somewhat lengthy drive on gravel roads north
of Wolf Creek Pass to get to it. It’s
flowing strongly because of all the snow.
“The gravel road was deliciously
back-jolting,” he told me, in his usual funny way of describing things. “Plus a half-mile hike,” he added. “Mama’s group took 30 minutes longer to get
there than we four kids did, and so we managed to climb every rock in the
vicinity.”
“That makes me think of the trips I
took with my parents,” I told him.
“They’d go in the camper and take a nap, and I’d go exploring farther
than they would’ve ever dreamed. Their
hair would’ve stood up on end, had they known of all my excursions.” ((...pause...)) “Or maybe they knew more than I thought
they did, and that’s why they let me get a dog when I was 12.”
“My parents’ hair did stand on
end, when they saw my rock-scrambling shenanigans,” laughed Levi. “I did slip and get covered in algae once,
though.”
This is
the fabric I’m using for the Hanging Gardens quilt. I switched the photo
to black and white to make sure I had placed the fabric according to color
value, from dark to light.
After 12
or 13 hours of cutting, the colored fabric was all cut. I needed to buy
some background fabric, though; I didn’t have enough.
Saturday, I
went to visit Loren. He was better than
he’s been for a month. They’ve been
giving him physical therapy and Ensure Nutrition Shakes, and it has made a
definite improvement. He was sitting on
a loveseat in one of the wide hallways toward the back of the home, and a man
in a wheelchair, who I’ve not seen before, was stopped there and talking with
Loren. The man is doubtless a new
resident of the home, and he can still carry on a fairly normal conversation.
Loren saw
me coming, grinned happily, and told the man, “Oh!! My little sister is here!”
The man
greeted me, chatted for a couple of minutes, and then said, “Well, I’m sure you
two want to have a visit without me monopolizing the conversation, so I’ll see
you later!” With a friendly wave, he was
off – and he was pretty good at propelling and guiding his wheelchair.
That
sentence alone tells me he has not been suffering from memory loss too awfully
long – though Alzheimer's progresses slower than most other dementias.
A lady
came along in her wheelchair. She has
only been using the wheelchair for three or four months, and she doesn’t know
how to roll the wheels with her hands.
She proceeds down the hallways by leaning forward and then back, like a
child on a swing, and sometimes she uses her feet to ‘walk’ the chair forward
in small increments. It’s a slow
process, moving only inches at a time.
She stopped and looked at the magazines and the newspaper I had brought
for Loren.
“No one
ever –” she waved a hand at the magazines, looking sad.
She was
trying to say that no one ever brings her magazines, but she couldn’t think of
all the words she needed to finish her sentence.
I held out
one of the National Geographics. “Would
you like to look at this one?”
She
started to reach for it, then drew her hand back, staring at the cover. “I don’t...”
Oops. It was a picture of an Ethiopian person with
white clay or chalk smeared thickly all over his face, purportedly to ward off
evil spirits. (I think it probably wards
off good spirits, too. heh)
I
laughed. “Oh, that’s kind of scary
looking, isn’t it?! Here, this one has
pretty pictures of house interiors.” I
handed her one entitled ‘Omaha Homes’, opening one of the pages and showing her
a pretty kitchen. I somehow got signed
up for magazines and brochures from Omaha; maybe it happened when I entered a
drawing for something, but I’ve long forgotten what that might have been.
The lady
smiled and took it. “Thank you!” She traced a finger over the cabinetry and
said, “My brother does this! I’ll show
him.” (Opens cupboards? Paints cabinets? Installs kitchens?) She went a short ways down the hall, somehow
managed to turn her chair around by using her feet on the floor, and then got a
front wheel turned sideways and stuck against the baseboard, so that she
couldn’t move either direction.
I hurried
to help her. “Shall I move you away from
the wall?” I asked, grasping the handles.
She didn’t
really understand what I said, and every move I tried to make with the chair
was met with an equal and opposite movement of hers, which only
succeeded in getting her more thoroughly wedged against the wall.
She was
bigger than me, but I was more determined.
I paused, waited until she lifted her feet, the better to push on the
floor again, and then quickly pulled her backwards and away from the wall. “There you go!” I said. “You’re loose!”
She gave
me a big smile, and thanked me two or three times.
I might
often relate some of the funnier things that happen there at Prairie Meadows,
but I do hope you understand that, in my heart, I have ever so much sympathy
for those people.
I turned
back to the loveseat where I’d been sitting with Loren, and he was smiling at
me. One time a while back when something
similar happened, he managed to think of the words, and said, “It’s so good
that you were able to help her!”
I know
from the nurses and sometimes from other visitors that when Loren is able, he
often helps other residents, and sometimes even the nurses. But he has been having a hard time standing
up from a seated position for several months now.
After leaving
Prairie Meadows, I stopped at Hobby Lobby and got five yards of 108”-wide
white-on-white fabric for the background of the Hanging Gardens quilt. It was only $7.99 a yard, and very nice
quality fabric.
When I got
home, I cut all the background pieces, then sewed together all the light and
dark squares for the tops of the ‘gardens’. I put two sets of doubles together to make a
couple of four-patches... and that was enough for the day.
I used up two full yards of that 108”-wide
white-on-white fabric (that’s the equivalent of about 4 ½ yards of 44”-wide
fabric), cutting 476 pieces.
And... I didn’t even sew right side to wrong
side once! 😄
I cut one layer at a time of the checked
fabric, in order to get the lines straight.
I really dislike it when checks or plaids are not straight.
A quilting friend asked me if I have an
AccuQuilt GO! fabric cutter. I do
not. I’ve looked at them, and thought
about it; but I so very rarely make anything the same, and often my quilt
pieces are such odd sizes, AccuQuilt GO! would not have a die in that size. So I don’t think it would do me all that much
good. I did put a new blade on my rotary
cutter, though, and that helped immensely with all that cutting. I use a June Tailor slot cutter. I have 12” x 12” and 12” x 18” rulers.
When I got
home, Larry had Walkers’ boom truck in the lane, picking up a big air
compressor that he had sold to someone.
He drove it to town, met the man, and transferred the compressor to his
vehicle. Then he called Pizza Hut,
ordered a taco pizza, picked it up (no, he didn’t drive the boom truck through
the pickup lane; the BMW was at the shop), and brought supper home.
Yummy, I
really like Pizza Hut’s taco pizza.
Sunday, a missionary from Mexico City, Tom
Montgomery, visited, preaching both morning and evening services. He and his wife (who sat behind us, and sang
so very beautifully during our song service) are heading back to Mexico in the
next couple of days. It’s a dangerous
trip, what with all the drug cartels and criminals running rampant through the
country.
I have usually felt safe here where I
live, but a couple in their early 70s, traveling from Missouri to California in
their motorhome with a Jeep hitched on behind, were attacked last week at a
rest area about 65 miles south of us on I80 – a rest area where we have often
stopped. The man died. The woman was in critical condition but is
recovering. A 22-year-old from Ohio had
tried to steal their Jeep, going right into their motorhome, demanding the keys,
and stabbing them. Horrible.
Sunday was
a pretty day, not a cloud in the sky; but it was already 69° at 7:30 a.m. The high would be 90°.
Last night
after church, we picked up a grocery order at Wal-Mart, then came home and
finished the previous night’s taco pizza.
Larry left this morning a little after 3:30
a.m. to go to Kansas to pick up some things he bought on Purple Wave Auction: snowplow metal wear blades, forks for a lift,
and buckets for a skid loader. He wanted
to be to the first pick-up place by 9 a.m., and it takes six hours to get
there, and he was driving the Kodiak truck with the bad steering. Yikes.
The part he’d gotten with which to fix the steering didn’t fit. He was able to tighten up a main bolt, and
that helped.
At 11:30 a.m., it was 88°, with a heat index
of 95° and an expected high of 96°. We
were issued a heat advisory, as heat indices would rise to about 107°.
I shined up one of the bathrooms, filled bird
feeders, washed out and refilled the birdbaths, and set up a sprinkler on one
of the flower gardens.
The hibiscus has blooms
all over it. Isn’t it pretty?
It has been exactly
three years since I ruptured a disc in my back trying to pull a small sapling
out of the earth. In case you’ve
forgotten the story, here it is from my journal of three years ago:
Last Monday
morning (June 21, 2021), I had just gone outside and started weeding... found a
big weed/small sapling, pulled at it... it was coming... it was coming... I
thought, I really should go on around to the garage and get the clippers I
was heading for in the first place... But it was coming! And one should always go for the roots,
right??
And then there
was a very loud POP!!! in my back, and I knew, This is not good. I sat down fast, just in case ... then
eventually decided, like Piglet and the burst balloon, Well, even if I AM on
the moon, I needn’t lie face downwards all the while, and got up. With difficulty. The weeding was over before it began. They’ll grow tall, healthy, and happy before I
recover, I imagine.
Anyway, I
don’t have to crank the air conditioner down so low, what with all this going
around with cold gel packs fastened to my back with elastic bands these days. My daughters have been helping take meals to
my brother, thankfully.
At least I can
stand at my quilting machine! I move
carefully, exchange gel packs often, and try not to bend over. Whose wise idea was it to store my Red
Snappers on the floor?!
,,,>^..^<,,,
Sarah Surely I’m Getting Better Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
P.S.: I will not pull up sequoias. I will not pull up sequoias. I will not pull up sequoias. I will not pull up sequoias. I will not pull up sequoias. I will not pull up sequoias.
I’ve recovered, but can
still pick out the spot of the injury now and again. I tell you, gardening can be dangerous!
– at least, for the likes of me, it can. I once broke a rib, because in trying to use
the long-handled loppers on a thick branch, I couldn’t seem to get enough
leverage, so I stupidly rested one handle against my side and pulled on the
other handle with both hands – all while thinking, This isn’t a good idea.
But I’m a Swiney, which,
translated, means ‘determined’, you know. (Some people say ‘stubborn’. I prefer ‘determined’.)
All of the sudden,
something said BANG! on my side, and knocked the wind out of me. (But I did get the branch lopped off,
heh.)
By 2:00 p.m., it was 96°, with a heat index
of 102°. It felt quite stifling when I went out to readjust the sprinkler
on the flower gardens, and to water the flowers on the porch. The birds were enjoying the refreshed
birdbaths.
After cleaning
the kitchen, I headed
to Wal-Mart to get a tool set for grandson Jacob, who turns 15 today. Larry
started this year off by getting grandson Grant some tools – so, in order to be
fair, we’re getting the rest of the grandsons who are Grant’s age and older
tools for their birthdays, too.
I dropped off some stuff at Goodwill on my
way. At Wal-Mart, I also got a feeder
that I think will work just fine for nyjer seed. The last few had too small of holes for the
birds to get the seeds out of. Larry
helped me make bigger holes in the screening on a couple of them. The feeder that holds five pounds of seed
worked all right for a while, but then seed got wet and mildewed, and I can’t
get it out of the very bottom – and the birds weren’t eating it, probably because
of that mildew. I don’t want to make
them sick, in any case. Plus, the thing
was too heavy for me to lift and hang, when it was full. Can you see
the little rubber ‘flexports’ at the feeding holes? That will help keep the small nyjer seed in,
but allow the birds to eat just fine.
I bought a big green bow, stuck it to the
plastic box the tools came in, and took it to Jacob before coming home.
Arriving home, I filled the new feeder with
nyjer seed and hung it. I haven’t seen
any birds on it yet. They usually assume
new feeders are big, scary bird traps.
A little before 7:00 p.m., Larry called. He was somewhere near Topeka loading the
blades, but he had to quit and sit in the shade beside his truck for a while,
because he got too hot, and he’d run out of water. The people at the place where he’s picking up
his things had already left, but he found a spigot on the building, filled his
water bottle, drank some, and then poured some over his head and arms and down
his back. He was having some trouble
loading the stuff, because as he was lifting a blade, something punctured part
of the hydraulics on the small crane he has mounted on his flatbed, and now it
will hardly lift anything. He somehow
rigged a strap to help the thing lift.
The blades are too heavy for him to just pick up himself.
He told me that this morning, he stopped at a
truck stop, got out – and noticed diesel fuel all over the side of his
truck. A fuel filter had cracked. Fortunately, there was enough fuel in the
truck to get him to a parts house where he was able to buy a new filter and
install it. That put him a couple of
hours behind. So there are some forks
and a bucket that he won’t be able to get on this trip.
At 10:30 p.m., he called again. He’s at a truck stop about 70 miles east of
Salina, Kansas. He got some coolant for
his AC, opened the hood and added the stuff, restarted the truck – and noticed
that the fan was barely moving.
The serpentine belt on the motor had come
off. He was able to get a new belt, but
that didn’t do much good, as a bolt that holds the tensioner had broken, and
the tensioner is gone. The batteries
wouldn’t last long enough to get him to Salina, since they’d be powering the
headlights (and there probably wouldn’t be any place open where he could get a
tensioner anyway); so he’ll sleep in his cab until morning, then try to make it
to Salina.
And no, of course he didn’t pack any
extra clothes or anything.
Ah, well.
He no doubt needs to sleep, and I will not have to worry about him
driving through the night, falling asleep, and crashing.
Tomorrow, I shall get back to the Hanging
Gardens quilt.
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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