Journal: ♫ ♪ Hosanna, Hosanna, We Joyfully Sing! ♪ ♫

 

Midmorning Tuesday, it was 42° on the way up to 67°, and partly cloudy.  The wind was from the south, as it has been for many days, so we have not gotten any of the smoke from the wildfires raging nearby, just a little whiff from one to our south that was quickly contained.

The brown-headed cowbird was back again that day.  As I mentioned last week, these are parasite birds – that is, they lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and then go their merry ways, letting the foster parents bring up their offspring.  Just look at this little Chipping sparrow (above) feeding that roly-poly baby cowbird.  And here’s a Lesser goldfinch feeding a fat little cowbird fledgling.

You’d think baby brown-headed cowbirds would grow up with a sense of responsibility, after being treated so kindly.  But nope, they instinctively know they are cowbirds, and when they grow up, they hire Preacher birds ((... snicker ...)) to marry them to fellow cowbirds, whereupon they promptly start dropping off their egg-kids at birdie daycares, never to retrieve them again.  (A ‘Preacher bird’ is a nickname for the Red-eyed vireo, because it sings all day long from treetops:  Red-Eyed Vireo’s Song)  (Please don’t learn grammar from the narrator of that video.  It’s not, “The bird had sang,” it’s “The bird had sung,” sir!  Aarrgghh.  Otherwise, good video.)

I was emailing a friend, and did a search in gmail to see if I’d already told her about the cowbird.  I typed in ‘parasite’, and wound up with a thread that did not have that word in it anywhere.  I did a double take when I saw the word that was highlighted:  ‘worms’!  

That afternoon, I started some Bentley’s Minty Mint cold tea steeping in the refrigerator.  Tea steeped cold is not as bitter as tea steeped hot, because tea requires heat to release the tannins.  And tannins are those ingredients in tea that give me a stomachache.  The teabags are from the large collection of Bentley teas in a tin that Lura Kay gave me a few years ago.

The tannin compound catechin in green tea bothers my stomach much more than the theaflavins/thearubigins in black tea.  I learned this when it finally occurred to me to Google, “Why does green tea give me a stomachache?”

As I worked in my quilting studio that day, I listened to an audiobook, Driven From Home:  A Converted Jewess – Jeanette Gedalius.  Robert sent me the link.  Quite a story.  Some people give up all to follow Christ, just as Moses, ‘choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season,’ as it says in Hebrews 11:25.

I’d not used that website, Scroll Reader, before.  There are many books there that I plan to listen to.  I’ve made it through three now.  I especially like listening to biographies.

Upon getting the center part of the quilt together, I began removing the newsprint paper from the back.  I’ve haven’t cared for the name of this quilt, so it is now officially changed to ‘Constellation’.

Wednesday was a hot day, getting all the way up to 87°.  I spent four hours pulling paper off of quilt blocks, until it was time for our evening church service.

Thursday morning, I got up early and prepared for a trip to the eye doctor in Lincoln for another Botox treatment.  When I hung out the bird feeders, the goldfinches were impatient – they were landing on the feeders before I’d quite gotten them in place!  

As I blow-dried and curled my hair, I sipped Red Velvet/White Chocolate cold-brew coffee, listened to the news, and went through posts on my laptop.  Larry, meanwhile, added a bit more Freon to the air conditioner in the Mercedes.  He put the new compressor in it last Saturday, and it’s working; but it needed another shot of coolant.  (At least we thought it was working; but it didn’t cool very well yesterday, and now we’re not so sure.  Maybe it only works on cool days.)

After telling this to a friend, she promptly wrote back, “Since you did all this before seeing the eye doctor, you may find your camera is now hanging out on the deck and you’ll soon try to take a red-truck photo with a bird feeder.”  😅

Soon raisin/date/ walnut oatmeal and half a banana were down the hatch and I was gathering camera (not a bird feeder, nope), coffee, Celsius, and walking shoes, since I wanted to go to the Sunken Gardens after my appointment.

About the time I was ready to go, Larry decided to come with me, as it was too windy for him to do the painting at Walkers, as he’d intended.  We filled another mug with coffee, and off we went.

Oh, guess what!  (Did you guess?)  Larry didn’t turn into that apartment complex next to the doctor’s office, even though the sweet-talkin’ GPS lady told him to!  He apparently remembered the fiasco that happened last time he did that, when we wound up in a parking lot with no exit, and had to retrace our steps (or wheel prints, as it were), thus winding up a few minutes late for my appointment.  Astonishing.  (Astonishing that he didn’t follow the GPS instructions instead of mine, that is.  Nothing astonishing about being late, last time.)

We made it with time to spare, this time.  That’s astonishing, too.

We didn’t go to Sunken Gardens after all, since it was very windy in Lincoln, too, with dust blowing everywhere.  Not good for my eyes.  We decided instead to take a scenic route home.

Dry lightning hit out west, and started new prairie fires.  The Ashby Fire was already up to 30,000 acres; the Minor Fire was at 16,000 acres.  Two other small fires started, also; but fire crews got them put out quickly.  The villages of Ashby and Hyannis were evacuated. This is Ashby.

Here’s a ring-billed gull we saw over Lake Wanahoo north of Wahoo.

Below is Czechland Lake north of Prague.

When we got home, I headed upstairs to my quilting studio to continue removing paper from the Constellation quilt.

Friday morning at 10:30 a.m., my weather app said it was 37°, feeling like 27°, on the way up to 51°.  But it felt so much warmer when I went out to rehang the bird feeders earlier, I could hardly believe the app was correct.  I checked my other apps, and even looked at one on my tablet.  It must’ve been right; they were all in agreement!  Still, it was sunny and nice, and – well, I was going to say the wind had died down, but my app said it was gusting up to 28 mph.  What, did somebody drop a Good-Weather Bubble down over my house??  😄

That day, Carolyn’s class set up a Colonial Village with a variety of shops that would’ve been found in such a village.  Carolyn’s shop was a bakery – and she had the chef’s hat to prove it!

Victoria sent me pictures and videos of it.  Hours later, I looked at them again – and belatedly noticed a familiar table quilt at Carolyn’s Bakery, one I had given Victoria a few years ago.

After school, Hannah brought Levi to put a new string in my piano.  Those strings have become fragile because they’re a bit rusty – perhaps from the humidity in the house last summer when the air conditioning went kaput.  Levi is handling them – and I’m playing them – with kid gloves so we don’t have to replace more than one at a time, and only when necessary, as a piano with all new strings goes out of tune fast, on account of the elasticity in the strings.  It was dreadful trying to keep the poor piano in tune after it was restrung in 1988 following our house fire, when everything got soaked from the firemen’s hoses. 

We had venison meat loaf that evening, made with plenty of eggs and Ritz crackers, and with a ketchup and brown sugar glaze on top.  This was accompanied by Caribbean Blend vegetables (broccoli, carrots, green beans, and strips of red peppers).

Saturday morning was chilly, 47°; but it got up to 64° in the afternoon.  We were issued yet another Red Flag Fire Warning.  The Ashby Fire that started Thursday was at 36.2K acres and 46% contained.  The nearby Minor Fire that had also started Thursday was at 17.0K acres and 7% contained.  Another small fire started to the southeast, near the Nebraska/ Iowa border.  I heard a helicopter go over low in the early morning hours; it was probably measuring fire perimeters.  Depending on the terrain and the wind, it’s often easier to do that at night, when the flames show up better with their infrared sensors, and the absence of solar radiation eliminates false positives from sun-heated rocks.

I spent a good part of the day removing paper from the Constellation quilt blocks.  There are three left to do.  It takes about an hour for each block.

The piano grabbed me once as I walked by, but I managed to tear myself away after four or five songs.

Sunday morning, Palm Sunday, the sun peeked over the horizon about the time I went out to rehang the bird feeders.  The birds heard me come out, and came fluttering in to the backyard trees, sitting there chirping and twittering impatiently, and sometimes making forays to the feeders before I quite had them in place.

The first- and second-graders sang a couple of songs, Hosanna and For God So Loved the World, before Sunday School.  Twelve of those children are related to me; it would’ve been 13 – three of them, granddaughters – if Keira had not been sick.  Carolyn is in the middle row behind the little boy with the light blue tie.  Violet is on the far right, in the dress with yellow collar and cuffs.  The rest of those related to me are great-great-nieces and nephews, and a few second cousins thrice removed, or some such (those, from Larry’s side of the family, as I have no cousins who live here).

Bobby, Hannah, Nathanael, and Levi went to Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, over the weekend, where Bobby preached a couple of services at Pastor Chamberlin’s church.  You’ll recall, he’s the friend who broke his back and his arm when he fell while cutting a tree a couple of weeks ago.  Hannah played the piano.

After leaving Broken Arrow, Bobby, Hannah, Nathanael, and Levi went to visit friends, the Parrows, in Stillwater, Oklahoma, some distance west of Broken Arrow.  They had an enjoyable (and musical) visit, then headed for home.

It was Maria’s birthday; we gave her a Pioneer Woman pitcher, white with blue flowers on it.

It started out as a pretty day here, 61° by 10:30 a.m. on the way up to 86°.  By midafternoon, though, it was all overcast.

Last night when I went out to get the bird feeders, a raccoon was already out there chowing down, as they often are.  This one had himself a different escape route than most of them:  he shinnied into the middle of the triangular steel tower that holds some of the feeders, rising from the ground one story below; then, going down through the interior of it, using it like a 3D ladder, two paws on rungs on either side, he made his way down to the ground and then waddled off through the big flowerbed.  One roly-poly raccoon can make more noise than half a dozen spooked deer.

There was another small wildfire yesterday about 50 miles to our north.  It was started by a malfunction with the electric company’s equipment.  Several fire departments and farmers with big discs worked hard to save a nearby farmhouse and put the fire out.  The one that started over on the Nebraska/Iowa border wound up seven miles long and one mile wide and injured one person before they got it contained.  Another started early yesterday morning about 155 miles to our west near the village of Bertrand.  This picture is from that one.

Almost the entirety of Nebraska is in drought, but we are hoping for and expecting rain and possibly snow tonight and throughout the next week.

Nebraska has over 6 million head of cattle, making it one of the top cattle-producing states in the U.S., with cattle outnumbering people by more than 3 to 1.

The  sparrows are very busy gathering up fluff for their nests.  There’s one little male English sparrow out front that’s trying his bestest to haul off with a glob of dried grass that’s three times bigger than he is.  He gives up, grabs a different piece, flies off – and then returns to give the big dried-grass glob another go.  He can drag it around, but he can’t fly with it; it’s too big, too unwieldy, and too heavy for him.  Others are becoming interested in the goings-on, and one little female sparrow has given it a try; but that piece is just too big for them.

Today is National Pencil Day, so I posted a picture of this quilt, Color Outside the Lines, on my Quilt Talk group.  Thinking I had the pattern, I went upstairs and looked in my bookcase for it.

I didn’t find it (maybe I never bought it at all), but I did find Loren’s baby book.  I need to send it to Richard, Loren’s oldest son.  I’ll take pictures of it first; I find it quite touching, reading what my mother wrote on those old pages from 1938, right up until Loren went to school.

Ah-ha.  I only thought I’d bought this pattern, because I did buy a nifty pattern for a roll-up colored pencil or crayon holder.

The lady who designed this pattern, Kelli Fannin, passed away about three years ago at the age of 54 after a battle with cancer.  The pattern is no longer being printed, and copies are impossible to find.  I reckon I could figure it out, if I had to.  I’ll save the picture for reference, just in case.

Time to put a load of clothes in the dryer, and another in the washing machine!  Tomorrow, I should be able to finish extracting newsprint from the Constellation quilt blocks, and start working on the borders.  The additional fabric I needed arrived last Wednesday and has been cooling its heels ever since.

Here’s one of the minimum-maintenance roads we traversed Thursday.

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