I always think about my daddy on St. Patrick's Day.
It was 1974. I was a freshman in high school. My parents and I were sitting at the dinner table when Daddy said, "What happened to your arm?"
I looked at my arm. On my upper arm, about where you get a shot, there was a big purple knot. "Oh, Tommy ______________ pinched me in art class."
Daddy made a mad face. "You tell him I said if he does that again - "
"I pinched him first," I said. "It's St. Patrick's Day. I thought he wasn't wearing any green, so I pinched him. But there was green on the buttons of his jean jacket, so he pinched me back."
"Oh. Well, then you had it coming."
Turnabout is fair play. :)
I'm sitting on the back porch, watching the birds scrap over the birdseeds I tossed out earlier. My sister told me about a bird call recognition app; it's running on my phone right now, the list of "birds heard" growing by the second. I'm so glad she told me about this app. It has really upped my knowledge of what goes on around here.
On the back porch is a tray of tomato plants that I bought at the greenhouse on Friday. They sat out in the weather during the storms we had over the weekend, but I was afraid to leave them out last night. It's a good thing I brought them in, for we had a frost last night.
It was cold and windy over the weekend. I mostly stayed inside. Saturday, I tried to carve a little bunny. Things went well until the knife slipped and it lost its fluffy tail. A few minutes later, it lost an ear. I shall finish this rabbit with two ears and a tail if I have to carve him down to the size of a butterbean.
Saturday afternoon, I found in our mailbox another craft kit from my BFF. This one is a wooden birdhouse, shaped like a camper, held together with nuts and bolts. It was fairly easy to assemble, though I did need The Husband to turn the bolts while I held the pieces together. After it was all assembled, it occurred to me that I should have painted it BEFORE we assembled it. The wood is thin. and one of the doo-dads broke while I was flipping the thing around to paint it. The first coat of paint is well dried by now. I may work on it a little more today.
Yesterday, I worked on the quilt. It lay stretched out on the ironing board, two rows of 4 blocks with its guts showing. Last week, I'd joined the rows by sewing the backing seams together on the sewing machine and had trimmed away the excess batting and folded the top seam allowances back. To finish joining the rows, I needed to join the batting and stitch the top seam by hand.
This seam is 72" long, and I dreaded hand sewing it. In constructing the individual rows, I'd held the top seams together with pins for the hand sewing. (I have scratches on my arms from encounters with the pins as I wrestled the blocks in my lap.) These seams were only 18" long, and they'd given me fits trying to keep them neat and even. I needed a better plan for the 72" seam.
I pinned the top seam allowance and basted it in place on the sewing machine. Once the seam was secure, I could take out the pins and handle the quilt without too much bloodshed. The machine basting held the seam neatly in place while I did the blind stitching. I made it halfway down that long seam before my hands gave out. I'll finish it tonight.
Tomorrow is the day I meet the state archive folks to give them a tour of our archive space. I'm going to the office a little early to see if I can score some face time with The Boss.
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