A Grand(s) Day - November 9, 2018

I had the nicest weekend.  My 3 granddaughters (ages 4 - 13), who moved 400+ miles away earlier this year, made a surprise visit.  They spent Friday night and all day Saturday with us.  Their boy cousin (age 11) came over on Saturday morning.  We went to a harvest festival, rode horses, went to a movie.  The girls moved to the other grandparents' house Saturday evening, and headed home Monday.  The boy stayed on with us until Sunday evening.

The baby girl's feet were the first to hit the floor Saturday morning.  She found me in my office, drinking my first cup of coffee and reading my email, and she climbed up in my lap.  We snuggled and talked for a few minutes.  When I asked her if she was hungry, she nodded sleepily, but when I said I would go start breakfast, she perked up and asked, "Can I help?"  My plan was to let her cut out the biscuits, but when I reached into the mixing bowl and started "scratching" the dough, she said, "I want to do THAT!"  So I let her.  She did a fine job.

All of my grandchildren are the most creative children in the world.  ;)  They like spending time at my house because I have paint and brushes and fabric and beads and ribbon and yarn and clay.  By now, they've learned how to properly wash a paintbrush, and they've learned to ask, "Can I use these scissors to cut paper?"  See?  I told you they are brilliant.  ;)

Quilting is dangerous work! 8/18/18

About a month ago, I decided that it was time - way past time, in fact - to finish a quilt that had been languishing in my quilt frame for about 2 years.  The problem was that my machine had been acting crazy - skipping stitches, making bird nests under the bottom, breaking the thread every few inches, and just generally acting a fool.  I threatened to sell it, and even took pictures to post on the local sell/swap site; whilst I deliberated, I took the partially-completed quilt off the frame and took it to a quilt shop where I rented a quilting machine to finish it.  Had to spend $20 for a lesson on how to use the danged thing, then $50 for a day's rental.

This rented machine was a doozie.  I put the quilt in the frame, threaded the machine, and sat down in a rolling chair to begin the work.  There was a thick rubber mat in front of the machine - 3 feet wide and as long as the quilt frame - and my chair would not roll on it.  I pushed sideways with my feet several times but the chair would not budge.  The shop lady helped me move the mat, and I went back to work.

The next morning, my right knee was swollen and tight, seemingly for no reason.  It hurt to put weight on it, and I limped around all weekend.  Monday, at work, when I needed to push sideways at my desk, my knee exploded with pain, and I realized what had caused the injury: pushing too hard, sideways, on the mat at the quilt store.  Since my work often involves climbing stairs, the knee gave me a few rough days, but it gradually got better.

At the rented quilting machine, I learned that the thread breakage part of my machine's problem wasn't the machine, it was the thread (it broke almost as badly on the rented machine).  And later, after doing a little research, I learned that if the quilt frame is not level and square, it can cause the machine to sew badly.  I decided to give my old machine another chance.  I had a half-finished quilt top in a box in my sewing room, and I dragged it out and finished it.  The Husband helped me level and square-up the quilt frame.  I cleaned the machine, loaded the quilt, and started the quilting.

The one thing that our leveling and squaring didn't fix was the "bump" in the center of the quilt frame where it joins together.  There must be a way to fix this, but I haven't found it.  It's just a tiny bump, but the sewing machine, gliding smoothly along on rails, hits that bump like it's a concrete wall.  Since there are wheels on both sides of the machine, it hits the wall again when the second set of wheels goes over it.  It causes bobbles in the sewing - all of my quilts have twin sets of bobbles smack down the center.  Today, hitting that bump caused me to SEW THROUGH MY LITTLE FINGER.  TWICE, it happened so fast.

When I finally disentangled myself from the sewing machine, there were 3 inches of thread hanging out of both sides (top and bottom) of my finger.  I came about as close to fainting as I have ever come.


  

Garden Report - 8/4/2018

You know what I think?

I think that gardens ought to be planted in the spring, when juices are flowing and plants are in the mood.

I say this because my last two late-planted gardens (this year's garden was rain-delayed until the end of May) have sucked.

For the plants, it must be like arriving at a party after the guest of honor has gone. 

The squash has managed to struggle, sunburned, through last month's ferocious heat, and they are loaded with blooms, but the plants pop out only a squash or two every few days.  Considering the number of "hills" I planted, I should be giving away squash if they were making properly. 

Same deal with the cucumbers. 

The tomatoes don't seem interested in ripening.  I saw one half-ripe tomato earlier in the week.  Some critter got it before I did.  Some other critter is nibbling at the green tomatoes and dropping them in the ground.  Oh, and a deer (or something of an equivalent size) bedded down ON two of the vines; there's a big "wallow" in the row.

The green beans are blooming half-heartedly.  Maybe they're waiting on cooler weather, like they did one other year. 

Bass-ackwards - 7/25/18

This morning on social media, I saw a post that said something like, "If there's a way to do something wrong, I'll find it."  It made me think about the quilt on my sewing table right now.

There's going to be a wedding in our family in a couple of months.  As I pondered what wedding present to get the couple, I remembered a partially-completed quilt top in a box in my sewing room.  I started this quilt several years ago.  The design is called "Brilliant Cut," referring to the cut of a diamond, which I thought was a mighty appropriate pattern for a wedding gift quilt.  It may be the most complex pattern I've ever attempted.  I worked on it, hot and heavy, for a time, way back when,  then some other project caught my interest, and I put the quilt away.  Monday afternoon I dragged the box out to see how far I'd gotten and whether it would be possible to finish the quilt by the wedding date.

Digging through the box, I found that I'd completed eight of the 16" Brilliant Cut blocks.  Four more blocks just needed one final seam to set the round blocks into their background squares, and these were already pinned and ready to sew.  I finished those in nothing flat.

However....

(There's always a "however.")

It will take more than twelve of the 16" blocks to make a good-sized quilt.  Way back when I was originally working on this quilt, I had already decided that there was no way I'd ever finish enough of those blocks to make a big quilt.  I had found a simpler pattern - some type of star pattern - to make blocks to combine with the Brilliant Cut blocks to create a king-sized quilt.  The star blocks included  four-patch blocks situated in the corners in such a way as to create an Irish Chain pattern between the stars and the diamonds.  In the box, there were four completed star blocks and enough already-cut triangles, squares, and polygons to make 9 more.  I went to work.

The problem was that I'd not saved the instructions for assembling the star blocks.  I'd saved a picture of the block and could refer to the the already-completed blocks, but it still took a good bit of guess-work to figure out which way to turn the triangles, and on which side of the polygons they should be sewn.  I made a lot of bad guesses and had to un-sew a lot of seams.  In the process, some of the little triangles and polygons became distorted, and I had to cut new ones.  In short (too late for that?), this project was not nearly as far along as I'd thought, and finishing this quilt top is not going to be the piece of cake I thought it would be.

And then it'll need quilting.

Anyone want to place bets on whether there'll be a finished quilt in time for a September wedding?  ;)

Mulching - 7/18/18

Several years ago, The Husband began to make noises about taking out the boxwood shrubs in front of our house.  I didn't really want the boxwoods taken out.  They'd grown waist high and were doing a pretty good job of shading out the weeds.  Eventually, though, I relented, on the condition that HE should be in charge of keeping the weeds from growing up to the windowsills in the front of the house.  He said he would.

Fast forward to today.  The bed contained two scraggly rose bushes, a few pitiful hostas, one lonely hellebore, an ill-placed mound of creeping myrtle, an assortment of viney weeds (including poison ivy and dewberries), and about 50 little saplings.  When I walked out the front door this morning and saw that mess, I was disgusted, and decided that today would be the day I would do something about it.  After work, I stopped at the garden center and bought ten bags of mulch and some landscape fabric.

The sky was turning dark with rain clouds by the time I unloaded the mulch, and I could hear distant thunder.  Nevertheless, I put on some gloves, gathered some tools, and went to work pulling up weeds.  I dug up the hosta and the hellebore and moved them to a shadier bed in the back yard.  I cut the rose bushes back to nubs so they wouldn't rip my flesh while I worked around them.  About an hour into the job, it started to rain.  I said a bad word or two, and went in the house to start another task I'd set for today, making gazpacho with some tomatoes I'd been given. 

This gazpacho recipe called for fresh, chopped tomatoes, onions, red bell pepper, cucumbers, garlic, vinegar, and tomato juice.  I didn't have any tomato juice, but I had enough tomatoes to make juice, and by the time the juice tomatoes finished cooking, the rain had stopped, and I went back outside to work.

It was muddy, muggy work.  Mosquitoes were singing around my sweat-soaked head.  Horseflies buzzed me.  I soldiered on, and just about the time I laid down the last piece of landscape fabric, The Husband came home from work.  He seemed duly impressed with my progress.  He went inside, changed into shorts and a t-shirt, and came back out on the front porch.

By then, I was putting down the first bag of mulch and was anticipating having some help with the rest.  But no.  HE JUST STOOD THERE AND WATCHED while I did the other 9 bags. 

I am going to poison his dinner tomorrow night.

Plum Jam - 7/17/18

I made plum jam today - 10 pints - from plums I bought at the farmer's market.   They may turn out a little runny, but I believe they'll stay on a biscuit long enough to eat it.  ;)

Canning makes me think about my mother and her friend Evelyn, both of whom used to can anything they could get their hands on.  Tomatoes.  Cucumbers.  Beans.  Fruit.  If either of them had a pressure canner, I never saw it.  They water-bathed everything. 

Most of the fruit we canned was in the form of jelly or preserves, and mostly it was fruit that we foraged.  Evelyn knew where there were good blackberry vines growing in a field, and we'd suit up in long-sleeved shirts, grab hoes (for snakes, and for moving vines to get at the center of the clump) and pickin' buckets, and go after them.  Chiggers would eat us up, but we did it.  Mother and Evelyn would split the berries between them and take them to their separate houses to process.  Afterward, they'd call one another to see how the canning turned out.

"I got seven pints."
"I got six and a sample."

My great-aunt Willie had fig trees in her front yard.  She never did anything with them, except maybe eat a few.  She'd call us when the figs were ripe, and we'd go over and pick them and make fig preserves, which we would share with her.  The thing I remember about picking figs is that it's an itchy job, worse than picking okra. 

I picked my first ripe tomatoes today.  I took one to Nanny's kitchen, washed it, sliced it in half, salted it, and ate it, standing right there at her sink.  It tasted divine.

We picked a few more cucumbers, and left a few to grow bigger.  Nanny took them to use for relish.

The squash vines are loaded with blooms, and there are a couple of little squash that will be ready in a day or two.

The ornery butterbeans are blooming; the green beans are not.

Okra is about 2" tall.  I planted it thick and went back and chopped down what I didn't want.  It seems I did my chopping too early - seeds keep sprouting

Hot, Hot, Hot! - 7/16/18

It seems I was destined to swelter all weekend long.

You may have seen in my previous post that the air-conditioner was not working at my office last week.  No biggie, really, since I wasn't there very much until Friday, when I had to wait for the repairman.  The office was still hot when I left.

I came home and worked on a painting project on the back porch.  The temps were in the high 90s.  The box fan that I set up to blow directly on me just stirred hot air.  Sweat dripped out of my hair onto my project while I worked.  The low temperature that night was in the mid-80s.  Sometime during the night, our power went out.  I woke up in a pool of sweat.

Saturday morning, I pestered The Husband until he finally agreed to replace the belt on my garden tiller.  We went down to the shop and raised the door.  It was like an oven in there.  We opened both doors and turned on the big shop fan, but like the fan on our back porch, it just stirred hot air. 

While The Husband went to work on the tiller, I went out to the garden and discovered that the cucumbers needed to be picked.  I thought that Nanny would want them for cucumber relish, but she had made relish on Friday and didn't want them, so I brought them home and started a batch (two batches, actually) of pickles.  Since this was my first canning adventure of the year, I had to go up in the hot attic for canning equipment.  For the next five hours, I stood over either hot dishwater or a hot stove.  Finally, about 4 o'clock, I got the last of the pickles into the jars.

We were meeting friends that night for dinner and a concert  - Alison Krauss at the Mud Island Amphitheater.  We've been to several concerts at Mud Island (an outdoor venue) on summer days.  Even though the days were hot, after sunset a pleasant, cooling breeze would always blow off the river.  Not this time.  From the minute we got on the tram to ride over to the island, sweat ran down my face and back.  The woman in the seat next to me sat with her legs spraddled, touching mine.  The more I scrunched in to move away from her, the more she spraddled.  Finally, about 30 minutes before the concert was over, I got up and went to the top of the amphitheater, where there was at least a little breeze.  From up top, I could see that some medics carried somebody out on a stretcher a few minutes before the concert was over - heat exhaustion, no doubt.  We rode home, sopping wet, with the car windows down.

Yesterday was another scorcher.  I put a final coat of base paint on my painting project at 7 o'clock in the morning, and it was already like breathing under water.  I did not go outside much after that; my butt was dragging.  To tell the truth, I think I was dehydrated from all the sweating the day before.  After breakfast, napped until lunch time, then I got up and started cooking.  Made a batch of bread, put a roast in the oven for dinner - had both ovens running for a good while.  At 6 o'clock, I finally turned off the stove, and we ate dinner.  In the living room.  Under the ceiling fan. 

An hour after dinner, a fierce storm blew in suddenly.  The power went out again and stayed out for two hours.  It got hot in the house before the power came back on, and I went to sweating again.  We sat out on the back porch for the last hour or so.  It was hot there, too, but at least the air was stirring.

Here's hoping for a cooler week!

My Lucky Day - Friday, 6/13/18

Today seems to be my lucky day (knock on wood, for the day is not over, yet).

The air-conditioner at my office has been on the fritz.  It was 80 degrees at my desk (and rising) when the repairman arrived at 10 a.m.  Fortunately, I did not have to stay while he fixed it.  I high-tailed it out of there around noon.

I'd been pondering a little painting project for a couple of weeks, but hadn't had the time or the materials on hand to work on it.  After leaving the office today, I stopped at the lumber store and bought myself a 1" x 8" x 8' board and some paint, and came home and got to work. 

Now, my project was never intended to be 8 feet long - it's only about 4 feet - but I thought it would be good to have extra wood, to prepare for the inevitable screw-up of the first draft.  Of course, that meant having to saw the board in half.  This prospect did not daunt me.  I have a chop saw.  I probably blogged about the little table saw that The Husband gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago.  Since then, I have also acquired a jigsaw AND a fold-up work table, complete with clamps and such.  Sawing the board in half was not supposed to be an issue.

Well, it turned out to be an issue. 

When I set up the table saw, it would not turn on.  The little red safety switch felt floppy and had no effect when moved.  I thought, Oh, no...the switch is broken.  I decided to flip it over and have a look.  The switch was housed in a plastic box that was attached with screws.  I couldn't see anything of the switch.  Found a screwdriver, unscrewed the box, but could not get access to the red part of the switch.  Put the box back on.  Flipped it back over.  Switched extension cords.  Nothing.

I had a mind to pry off the switch from the front (heck, it wasn't working, anyway, was it? and I still had a chop saw and a jigsaw, didn't I?), but then it occurred to me that maybe this was a common issue that I could read about online, some simple little fix.  So I searched for one.  Nothing.

But here's where my luck started to change:

I had registered the saw when I got it and, wonder of wonders, I still had the confirmation email.  It had a phone number on it.  I called it, and got a nice man on the phone fairly quickly.  I explained the problem:  "This little red safety switch is floppy, and the saw won't turn on." 

He said, "Is the yellow tab securely snapped in?" 
I said, "What yellow tab?"
"There's supposed to be a yellow tab."

Well, I started yammering about a yellow tab, and how I had no idea where - and this is where the REAL luck kicked in - ....

Laying on the floor under the edge of the cabinet where the saw had been stored was a yellow plastic thing, something I probably would have thrown away as extraneous junk the next time I swept the porch.  I don't know how long it had been there - could've been minutes or months.

I picked it up, and it snapped right in place.  I said, "Holy Moly!  Hold on while I see if this works."  I plugged in the saw, hit the switch, and IT WORKED.

I sawed my board in half.  :)

The first coat of paint is drying now.

Garden Report - 7/10/2018

The new belt for the black tiller was in the mailbox today.  I took it down to the shop and laid it near the toolbox, then went to work in the garden for a bit.

The pitiful row of butterbeans has been choked with grass for two weeks.  I have spent my energy elsewhere in the garden, since only 12 plants or so had sprouted on the 60-foot row, but the rest of the garden was in pretty good shape today, so I went to work pulling up grass from around the beans. 

Nanny came out to the garden after a bit, and we discussed the cucumbers.  The vines are producing fairly well - we're harvesting a dozen or so every couple of days - but the cucumbers are trying to turn yellow before they get very large.  Today, there were a good many that were the perfect size for pickles, but Nanny wants to make cucumber relish, and she likes big ones for that, but not big yellow ones.  I am afraid that if we try to let them get much bigger, they'll go yellow, first, so I suggested that we go ahead and pick the biggest ones and refrigerate them until we get more.  She didn't much like the idea, but she agreed, and we picked a shopping bag full.  I still don't understand her reluctance to use 20 medium cucumbers instead of 10 big ones in her relish. 

After about two hours in the garden, I decided to call it a day.  When I got back to my house, The Husband was home from work.  As I was taking off my gloves and my gardening apron, I said to him, "The tiller belt came in today." 

He said, not sarcastically, "Oh, good." 

I said, "I took it to the shop and laid it on top of the toolbox, so it'll be handy in case you get a sudden urge to fix something."

He gave me The Look.

I just ignored it, and went to the bathroom to wash my nasty feet. 

The urge to fix something did not arrive this evening. 

Birthday Loot

Look what I got for my birthday!




The Husband and The Grandson hooked me up.  They put it together on the back porch, and I immediately filled it with the compost I've been making.  Had a whole wagon full, and some left over. 

I said to The Grandson, "Let's go spread this around the tomatoes at 5:30 [when the garden is in shade]."  At 5:15, the bottom fell out of the sky, and it rained hard for about 20 minutes.  I wasn't about to drag the wagon, heavy with wet compost, down Nanny's long driveway.

When I came home from work today, I pulled it down there and shoveled compost around all of the tomatoes.  Don't know if it will help them, but it can't hurt them (can it?).  Even had a bit left over to do a few of the squash.

Unfortunately, one of the two cotter pins that holds the handle on came out, and I couldn't find it anywhere.  Thankfully, I caught it before the little peg fell out.  I can get another cotter pin at the hardware store.

We're getting another hard rain shower right this minute. 

Garden Report - July 3, 2018

Well, damn.

Tonight after supper, we went down to the garden to plant okra.  I dragged the big black tiller out of the shed to till up the row.  About 1/4 down the row, the tiller ran out of gas.  I re-filled the tank, and when I tried to crank it again, the pull cord broke.  This tiller has an electric, push-button starter, but it has to be plugged up to electricity to work, and the extension cord wasn't half long enough to reach the garden.  The Husband and I wrestled the tiller to the back door of the shop.  On the way, while wondering why the tiller was so hard to push, we noticed that one of the tires was going flat.  We aired up the tire, plugged up the tiller, and it cranked right up.  Back to the garden I went.  I finished out the row and was about to start back up it for a second tilling when the tiller started making a funny noise.  Soon, the wheels and the tines quit spinning.  The Husband prodded and poked around under the engine cover and discovered that a belt had broken.

Lord, save me from mechanical equipment. 

In truth, I really can't be too mad at this tiller.  In the 8 years or so that I've had it, it has never ONCE failed to crank and/or till.  I do not begrudge it a little TLC after all this time. 

We did manage to get the okra planted.  It's a long row, enough okra for everybody in Tennessee, probably.

I also weeded the tomatoes and fertilized them with some calcium-rich fertilizer.  Maybe that will help the mushy bottom situation.

Nanny found little cucumbers on the bloom-laden vines.  Maybe we'll soon have enough to make pickles and relish.

The squash aren't blooming, yet.  Neither are the green beans.

I still want to plant a few zucchini.

Everybody else is picking their gardens, already, and here I am, still planting seeds.

Fishy things - 7/2/2018

So, far, the garden is not worth reading about.  We walked down there last night to check on the tomato worm situation.  Last week, we pulled off about a dozen worms before they had a chance to do much damage.  Not seeing any new poop yet, so hopefully we have won round one.  That's about the only good news.  The ground has been almost incessantly wet ever since I planted it.  Half of the butterbeans never came up, and I have not had time to plant the skips, nor have I had time (or the seeds) to plant any okra.  And today the farmer came and sprayed his beans again, so the plants that have managed to survive so far may get speckled.  *sigh*

But I didn't sit down to write about the garden.  I sat down to write about fishing.  Sort of.

My daddy loved to fish, and did so every chance he got.  He fished for bait, then he used the bait to fish for bigger fish.  He caught minnows out of a nearby creek, using a hardware cloth trap he made himself.  I watched him do it.  He would lace it together with wire and needle-nosed pliers.  Sometimes, he'd let me do a little of the wiring.  When it was finished, he'd take it down to the creek, bait it with a biscuit, and chunk it in the water.  He'd tie it to something on the bank, and go back the next morning to see if he'd caught anything.  Most of the time, he had, and he'd open the little hatch he'd built into the side, dump the minnows in a 5-gallon bucket half full of creek water, and take them home to await whatever fate he had in store for them. 

He also knitted nets - trammel nets and hoop nets - out of nylon twine, for himself and for others.  He used a wooden mesh pin that he whittled from a spare piece of window facing.  Although he preferred plastic needles, I've seen him carve wooden ones out of a plank with his pocket knife when he was short of time and/or money.  He would drive a nail into the window facing in the living room, and hang a loop on it.  Onto the loop, he would "cast on" his rows.

I used to beg to him to let me knit, and sometimes he would, but he would never let me start a net - he said that the first row was the hardest part - or knit the throat.  He would get a net going, then turn it over to me until either I got bored and wanted to quit or something different had to happen in the process, such as an increase or decrease.  How he calculated the size is a mystery, something he never explained (or I never learned).  I don't know how long the nets were, but I remember him sitting in a kitchen chair on the other side of the living room, knitting on a net that was hung on the nail in the window facing at the opposite end of the room, so they were pretty long.   I don't know how wide they were, either, but I remember him flipping great widths of net when he started new rows, so they were pretty wide, too. 

I recall holding big wooden hoops upright while he laced the nets onto them (he would let me use them as hula hoops until he needed them).  He generally used 5 hoops, but I didn't pay much attention to the shape of the net when it was finished, or how he sewed them up. 

Lately, the subject of net-making has crossed my path from several directions, and I decided to see if I could make some.  Last week, I made a minnow trap out of hardware cloth.  Had to get some online hints about how to make the throat, and wrestling that mother into place by myself was a mess (now I see why Daddy let me help him!), but otherwise things went well. 

Then the subject of hoop nets came up . . . .

It's too early to tell if it's "so far, so good."

From the back porch - 6/19/18

Ahhhhhhhh...porch sittin'.  Nothin' like it. 

We've been gone for a few days - took a trip to east Tennessee to pick up our camper (which you could read about here ( http://susanshappytrails.blogspot.com ), if you're interested).  Things had changed when we got back home. 

For one thing, it's suddenly BLAZING HOT, pretty near too hot to sit out here until it's plumb dark, and even then the air is sticky and thick. 

For another, my daylilies and phlox and bee balm have begun to bloom.  Last fall, I divided some of the daylilies and scattered them around the yard.  They are showing out this year.

My "yard tomato" - one I planted in a bucket in the back yard - was lush and beautiful and had a golf-ball-sized tomato on it when we left.  When we got back, it was a skeleton, thanks to the four cigar-sized tomato worms I found on it.  They'd also eaten the bottom out of the one tomato.  :(  I put on some gloves, pulled the worms off, and drowned them in a bucket, for they were far too big and juicy to stomp, and instant death was too good for them.  I hope the plant recovers.

Last Sunday morning before we left, I planted 12 hills of yellow squash seeds, and they're all up, which is something of a miracle since the seeds were about 3 years old.  Nanny said that we got a big rain on Tuesday; I guess the warmth and moisture reconstituted whatever spark of life remained in those old seeds.  Amazing.  Now I need to dig through the seed bucket for some okra.  It should have been in the ground for a month, already, but my stash of "'round tu-its" has been scarce.

The cucumbers and green beans are growing like crazy.  Tomatoes are looking good, so far.  The butterbeans continue to be contrary; only half of the seeds sprouted, and they were fresh seeds!





 

Beans and cucumbers up! 6//5/2018

We've got a good stand of green beans - looks like every seed we planted came up.  Ditto for the cucumbers.

The butterbeans . . . well, they're being persnickety, as usual.  Yesterday, it looked like about every other seed came up.  I'm going to give the laggers a couple more days, then I'm going to replant the skips.

Still haven't planted the squash.  It's just been too stinkin' wet. 

The tomatoes are looking good.  I need to spray them again, for blight.  I also need to get the hay and the compost from my yard to the garden, but that's been a problem. 

And if I don't get all that stuff done before the weekend is over, it probably won't get done for two more weeks. 

Garden report - 5/28/2018

This Memorial Day has been a pleasant day.  My brother invited my sister and me to his house for a barbeque lunch.  It was a fun visit.  He showed off his vegetable garden, which is WAY ahead of my garden.  His squash plants are blooming, and he has pretty good-sized green tomatoes on the vines. 

Nanny invited us to supper about an hour after we came home from my brother's house.  After we'd cleaned up the dishes, I went outside, fired up the tiller, and re-tilled the three rows I opened up yesterday morning.  We set up another hog-wire fence for the green beans to run on (I planted tomatoes along last year's green bean fence), and planted a row of green beans on either side of it.  We planted one long row of butterbeans, and several hills of cucumbers.  The ground is damp enough that the seeds ought to sprout right on up.

That new fence might be a surprise for the deer that move across Nanny's back yard at night.  :)

First planting - 5/26/08

The rows I tilled up last week sat empty until yesterday.  When I got home from work, I looked over to the flower bed where I had set the tray of 24 tomato plants and 6 jalapeno pepper plants that I'd brought home a week earlier.  They were wilted.  BAD wilted.  I came straight into the house, put on my gardening shoes, and went to the garden.  Though the rows were still too wet to till, I did it, anyway, and when I got that soil loosened up, I mashed the tomatoes down in the mud an headed home.  It was supposed to rain again that night; Mother Nature could water them in, I thought.

Well, it didn't rain, but I guess there was already enough moisture in the mud, because when I went to check on them this morning, they were perked up.  I opened up two more rows with the tiller, planted the 6 jalapeno peppers, and came back home, intending to re-group and go back to the garden this evening, once the sun had dried up the rows a little bit. 

But, instead, I played Zelda with The Grandson.  :)

Speaking of Zelda, I'd like to give a big high five to the creators of that game (and, no, I am not being paid for this).  Zelda came out in the '80's, I believe, but I never played it until a few years ago, when I bought Skyward Sword for the grandchildren to play.  It is a "hero's quest" story - a theme as old as time - and it is fabulous.  The Grandson was too little to read the captions, so I sat with him while he played and read the words for him.  As soon as he went home, I grabbed the controller and started a new game for myself.  I was hooked like a fish.

There are a lot of fun things for kids to do in the game:  whack things with a sword, ride birds, chunk pumpkins, catch butterflies....  But Link, the hero, has to earn his equipment through hard work, and he has to learn how to use his tools before he can get anywhere.  He never, never kills another human, only monsters and troublesome things.  He does good things for people in his community.  This is the kind of game I am happy for the kids to play.

The latest Zelda - "Breath of the Wild" - came out in March last year, when the Nintendo Switch came out.  I raced out, bought the game, and then spent months trying to locate a Switch.   Finally found one in September.  This Zelda has lots of logic puzzles and side quests.    Even though I've already beaten the big bad guy at the end, I'm still solving puzzles and looking for hidden things.  The monsters are funny.  They sniff the air when they sense Link is around, and laugh at him when they deflect his hit.  And, best of all, they rejuvenate when the moon is right, so he can beat them up over and over.  ;)

The Grandson idolizes Link.  Now that he's a good reader, I'm going to find him some hero books. 

A Sad Day :( 5/23/2019

This morning, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and I am very, very sad.

My "baby boy" and his family are moving away today, and my heart is breaking.

We've known for quite some time that this day was coming.  Last summer, my son learned that his job position would be eliminated in the not-so-distant future, and he began looking for other employment.  He found a good job working for the same employer, but it required him to move to east Tennessee.  In March of this year, he started his new job.  Since it was so close to the end of the school year, his wife and children stayed behind to finish school, sell the house, and prepare for the move.  The separation has been hard on them all, and part of me is glad that my son and family will be together again.

But Tennessee is a long state, and from our home in the lower left-hand corner to their new home in the upper right-hand corner is almost 500 miles. 

For months, I've been telling myself that lots of parents/grandparents live far away from their children/grandchildren, that it is a situation that can be survived. 

Still . . . .

Breaking Ground - 5/15/2018

Work on this year's vegetable garden commenced yesterday.  I might have started sooner, but we had a cold, wet spring, plus I've been waiting for the farmer to do his Rounding-Up in the bean field so that the drift doesn't kill my garden plants.  He sprayed the field late last week, so yesterday I dragged the tiller out of the shed and tilled up a few rows.  One day this week, if it doesn't rain, I'm going to put some tomatoes, squash seeds, and green beans in the ground.

I am going to do what I did last year:  till up the rows, and mow the grass in the middles.  Last year, I got some of my rows too close to run the lawnmower between them.  Yesterday, I parked the lawnmower at the end of a row, parked the tiller beside it, sighted a tree at the other end of the garden, and aimed the tiller at it.  Hopefully, I got the distance right this time.  (My row is a little crooked, but Pop-Pop used to say, "You c'n plant more on a crooked row.")  I sprinkled some 6-12-12 down the rows and tilled it in. 

Before I plant anything, I want to put down some compost.  My sister gave me one of those tumbling things, and I have been working on compost since last fall.  I've made a big batch or two and have hemmed it up with four bales of hay placed in a square.  It's mostly kitchen waste, shredded cardboard boxes and paper, and dry leaves.  But it looks black and rich.  Getting it from my yard to the garden will be a job.  I'll have to wheelbarrow it across the road and down a long, bumpy gravel  driveway and will probably dump it before making it to the garden.   

On second thought, a wagon would work better for this, wouldn't it?  I may go shopping tomorrow.

Tomorrow may be a tough day.  We just got home from seeing the band Chicago perform live.  It's after midnight, and we both have to work tomorrow.  We arrived downtown early and had time to eat dinner and have a few drinks.  I had a couple more at the concert and butt-danced in my seat the whole time.  It was wonderful.  So I'm worn out and half loopy and ought to be in the bed instead of writing this, but I'm still sort of "juiced" in more ways than one.  :) 

From the back porch - 5/2/2018

I got my act together a little early this morning, and so there's time for a little porch-sitting before work.  Morning porch-sitting is the best.  Everything - even the wildlife - is fresh and rested, damp, fragrant.  Squirrels and birds and chipmunks dig and poke and scratch.

The birdhouse on the living room window is silent this morning; the babies have flown the nest.  As I was sitting on the porch Sunday evening, I heard a thump as one of the parent birds landed on the birdhouse roof with a bit of food in its beak.  Over the weekend, the bird parents had begun to feed their four babies from above, from the slanted roof of the birdhouse, instead of from the landing peg at the front of the box.  I guess it was coaxing the babies to poke their heads farther out of the nest.  In any case, one of the babies got over-eager and fell plumb out.  It caught itself on the window screen and clung there, chirping and fluttering, for a good five minutes as its parents flew back and forth, seemingly hysterical.

I watched this drama, trying to decide if the parents had wanted the baby to fall out of the nest and were praising it for a job well done and were calling out the rest of the siblings, or if they were well and truly panicked that one had left the nest prematurely.  The former seemed unlikely, as it was getting dark and, to me, a bad time to begin flight training.  All of the other babies were hunkered down in the box, chirping softly, as if they were saying to one another, "Gah!  Can you believe what Frankie did?  He's gonna get it when Mom gets home."  The parents continued to fly to the top of the birdhouse and chirp.  I could not tell what they were saying.  After a while they resumed feeding the remaining babies in the nest.  Meanwhile, the renegade baby continued to cling to the window screen, panting, exhausted.

Intervention seemed necessary.  I put on some gloves with the intention of gently capturing the baby and putting him back in the nest, but as I reached out, the baby squealed and fluttered to the ground ten feet away.  He hopped into a patch of daylilies at the back of the house and went silent.

The Husband had been watching all this from his recliner, and he came out, put on the gloves, and started scratching around in the daylilies, looking for the prodigal child.  The baby squawked and flapped and tumbled and finally grabbed hold of the vents on the A/C unit, and The Husband gently caught him and eased him back in the hole in the front of the box.  When he turned the bird loose, one of its little toothpick legs was left hanging limply out of the hole.  I gently pushed it in with my forefinger.  The bird did not move.

After a few seconds, I began to worry.  Was the baby bird in shock?  Had it passed out cold from fear?  Was it dead?  If so, would it smother one or more of its siblings?  I watched as the parents flew back and forth with food.  First, two heads poked out from beneath the stunned/dead bird, then three.  But little number 4 remained still, piled atop his siblings.

I worried about this all day yesterday.  Should we not have intervened?

When I got home from work, the nest was empty, as far as I could tell (the hole in the house is a little too high off the ground for me to see into it).  I didn't see a bird carcass on the ground, so I assumed that either the baby had eventually "come to" and was happily flying with its family, or it had not survived and had been eaten by a scavenger (or, worse, was decomposing in the nest). 

I am happy to report that, by the end of the evening, we learned that all four babies had survived.  About dusk, I heard a thump as mama bird landed atop the birdhouse.  Soon, four fluffy little babies came careening in, like tiny kamikaze planes.  They all missed the landing peg and briefly velcroed themselves to the porch- and window-screens until they could re-orient and flutter back into their home.  I guessed they hadn't quite perfected their navigation skills.  I don't know if they spent the night in there or not, but they're not at home this morning.

And, with that, I find that I am no longer running early for work.

From the back porch - 4/27/2018

It is 1:30 on a Friday afternoon.  I am sitting on my back porch, eating a bite of lunch.  To my right, attached to the living room window, is a birdhouse full of baby birds that hatched last weekend.  It's hard to tell how many babies are in there.  The sun hits the birdhouse this time of day, and I think the babies are hot, because a couple of them have their heads poked out of the nest, and their mouths are open, like they're panting.  Or maybe they're just trying to be first in line for the next feeding.  Wonder how the parents keep straight on who has eaten and who has not?  Do they say, in bird language, "I'll feed Bryan and Margaret.  You get Jeff and Nancy."?

We have a skunk in the neighborhood.  I saw him earlier this week, sauntering down the tree line between us and our neighbor.  I guess it's best to just leave him be, and not challenge his territory.  A couple of years ago, one was perfuming the neighborhood a couple of times a week, and the elderly folks on the hill concurred that he needed to go.  Nanny saw him walking across the bottom one day, and grabbed a shotgun from behind the back door, thrust it into The Husband's hands, and told him to shoot it.  But he missed, and missed a couple more times, and every time he'd fire, so would the skunk.  The sun was just right, and I could see a puff of mist behind the skunk every time the gun went off.  It looked plumb involuntary, like a sneeze or a grunt.

Anyway....

To my left, outside the porch, there is an upside-down Power Wheels Jeep and an upside-down pink Power Wheels Escalade.  I turned them over last fall so that they would not get filled up with leaves and such.  Now, I hear something thumping under one of them.

I hope it's not the skunk.

Kenzie's Quilt - 4/14/18

Greetings.

The macrame project discussed in my previous post remains unfinished.  (Act surprised.) 

The actual macrame part is finished, but the finishing is not finished.  Here's the deal: 

The instructions suggested un-twisting the long, dangling ends of the cords.  I liked the look, so I pulled a chair up to the project and picked up a cord - one of the short ones, about 6" long.  To my surprise, I discovered that the cotton rope I had used was actually braided, not twisted, over a nylon cord.  I was able to un-braid it with a tiny crochet hook.  As you might imagine, this took a while, and I pondered whether or not I had the staying power to do all the ropes.  I liked the look of the un-braided strings, though, and decided to go for it.  I snipped out the nylon cord and moved to the next braid.  To cut to the chase, this un-braiding process created a myriad of problems.  The longest cords (of which there are many) are LONG; they don't un-braid in a minute, like the short ones do.  The nylon core "stumps" that remain in the knotted part cause problems; some of them slid out on their own initiative, while others stubbornedly refused to budge. 

The project remains half-un-braided, and draped over a chair (with a bunch of other junk) in a spare bedroom.  It can be salvaged, I think, but I am not in the mood to fool with it. 

Besides, I have another project I need to do.

I must make quilts for two granddaughters.

Granddaughter McKenzie's quilt is up next.  I took her to the fabric store and asked her to pick ONE fabric for her quilt.  She picked a bold neon stripe on a black background.  Since then, I have been pondering how to use it.  Inspiration struck Thursday afternoon.  I shopped for complementary fabrics yesterday.  The fabrics have been washed, dried, starched and iron.  Let the sewing begin!


 

The Twisty Stick - 2/13/18

For months (okay...fifteen years), I have been pondering putting something pretty over our bed.

(We need something in that bare spot to the right, too, but that's another story.)

As you can see, there's not much space between the ceiling and the top of the headboard - maybe 2 feet.  I can't really imagine a painting there.  I thought about chopping a big grapevine wreath in half (the half-circle would nicely mimic the shape of the headboard) and arranging flowers and ribbons on it, but when I think of all the dust and cobwebs it would collect over the years (I keep things I  like forever), the thought of sleeping under it kind of grosses me out.  I thought about a series of plaques or doo-dads of some sort, but haven't found anything that grabs me.  I thought about a "saying" - you know, those vinyl letters that you stick on the wall that say stuff like "Always Kiss Me Goodnight" - but . . . .  Nah.

So.  What to do?

I have been clueless, until today, when I stumbled upon the idea of a macrame wall hanging.

Enter the twisty stick.

Last fall, I decided I'd had it with a crape myrtle tree growing near the front of our house.  We did not plant this tree; it was a "volunteer."  Evidently, a bird pooped a seed it had eaten in someone else's yard, for the tree that resulted from it bloomed a lavender color we don't have among the other crape myrtles in our yard.  The bird's aim was a little off, and the seed landed about a foot to the right of where I would've planted it.  But we let it grow. 

It grew taller than our roof.  As it grew, a stray tendril of jessamine (from a plant we'd cut down years ago) found a limb and twined around it.  Initially, I thought this would be pretty cool.  In our back yard, we have a crape myrtle that became fully entwined with stray sweet autumn clematis.  Amazingly, they co-exist peacefully.  The clematis begins to bloom just as the crape myrtle blooms start to fade, and the effect is that the tree sort of changes color from magenta to white.  Of course, I knew that the "volunteer" tree and the jessamine vine would not bloom at the same time, but I thought the tree might make a nice support for the jessamine.

Wrong. 

The crape myrtle grew up to be spindly (I guess it tried to out-run the jessamine), with a big clump of jessamine at the top, like a giant Tootsie-Roll sucker, and the least little wind, or snow, or ice would bend the vine-choked crape myrtle over until it nearly touched the ground.  It looked plumb ridiculous.  So this fall, when I was cutting back a neighboring shrub, I went to work on the crape myrtle with the loppers.  As it turned out, we had to break out the chainsaw, but within minutes, the crape myrtle was (probably temporarily) gone.

But one of the sticks had grown twisted from hosting the jessamine all those years, and it was too cool to throw away.  It has been living in a corner on my back porch ever since, waiting on its perfect use. 

What do you think?  Maybe not necessarily THIS pattern, but something similar - a macrame wall hanging on a piece of the twisty stick. 

Now, all I have to do is learn how to macrame.

Snow! 1-12-2018

Yesterday, my boss (the best boss ever) said, "If it's bad in the morning, don't come to work.  In fact, don't worry about coming in whether it snows or not."  I had somehow missed the memo that bad weather was coming our way.  It was 60 degrees outside, and so I just shrugged and said, "Okay," and started making plans for how to use the bonus day off.  Earlier in the week, I'd had the idea that it would be nice to make our grandchildren some trinket boxes for their rooms, a place for the little treasures they accumulate.  We'd have a long weekend to work on the first one.  So before I left work, I searched the internet for a free wooden box pattern, and on the way home I stopped at the lumber store and bought lumber, screws, and hardware to make boxes.

Last night at 6 p.m., it was still 60 degrees and drizzling rain.  This morning at 4 a.m., I woke up to the sound of sleet pelting our bedroom window.  By daybreak, our yard was covered with ice pellets.  By mid-morning, the sleet had changed to snow.

I am pacing like a caged cat, worrying about the family driving to and from work on these icy roads.  Thank goodness I have a project for today!

Raccoon Turd Reminiscence - 1/4/18

I was looking through some pictures on my computer tonight, and ran across a folder containing pictures we took during a trip to Eureka Springs, Arkansas a few years ago.  It was a fun trip.  We rented a cabin on Bear Lake, which we used as a base for day trips all over that corner of Arkansas.  It was a one-room cabin on the 2nd floor of a 4-cabin unit.  We got there middle of the afternoon, checked in, and hauled our suitcases up the stairs.  Halfway up, I spied an actual TURD on one of the steps.  It looked like it probably came out of a medium-sized dog, maybe a cocker spaniel or poodle.  It was fairly fresh.  I said to The Husband, "Ewww...there's an actual turd on the step...don't step in it.  I hope this is not a bad sign."  We took our suitcases inside and were relieved to find that the room was very clean and well equipped - little kitchenette at one end, sitting area at the other, bed in between.  Big old tacky jacuzzi tub right in the middle of the room....

We stowed our stuff and went outside to check out the view, and after a little bit we headed back to the car to do some sight-seeing.  On the way down the steps, we saw the poop again.  The Husband got a stick and raked it off the step so we wouldn't step in it when we came back.  We drove around and scouted out a couple of places we wanted to explore the next day.  We ate burgers at a biker bar, and went back to the cabin.

There was another turd on the step, and one or two more on the balcony.

I said, "For crying out loud, who would let their dog POOP ON THE PORCH!"

The Husband said it might be a raccoon.

As far as I knew, I'd never seen raccoon poop, nor even imagined what it might be like, so I allowed that he could be right, but, based on the number of poops, I also wondered if the 'coon had a digestive issue.  And then I looked up.

He had company.

We laughed and laughed.

* * * * *

January 2, 2018

Well, I have knitted myself the ugliest pair of house shoes in the world.

I have used this pattern multiple times.  It requires 100% wool yarn.  The pattern makes shoes that would fit Big Foot until they've been washed in hot water, at which time the wool shrinks, and the shoes become thick and toasty warm.  They stretch a bit with wear but can be washed and re-shrunk. 

The first pair I knitted (a few years ago) was PERFECT - nice medium blue color, fit just right, etc.   The Husband (whose feet are not much larger than mine) coveted them and promptly claimed them for himself, and then did not wear them.  I confiscated them back and eventually wore holes in both soles.  Two weeks ago, when the little toe on my right foot bore a new hole and poked out of the side of the shoe like it was hitch-hiking, I started another pair with the only 100% wool yarn I had at hand, camouflage yarn I'd intended to use for a man's toboggan some day. 

Nothing about this pair is perfect.  For starters, they're butt ugly.  And, because I made a mistake in binding off the knitting, when I washed them in hot water, the opening got too tight before the soles got small enough, resulting in 1" "spoilers" at the heels. 

I ended up snipping around the openings to loosen the fit around my ankles.

And, because the shoes did not shrink quite enough, they are a little drafty.



But I have resolved for 2018 to look for silver linings in dark clouds.  In this instance, I can expect with a fair amount of confidence that The Husband will not be coveting these shoes.  :)