On my way home from work Friday, I stopped at a garden center and bought 12 more tomato plants and some pepper plants.  The garden hasn't been tilled because it's been too wet.  There's an 80% chance of rain Wednesday, so I don't know when we'll get a chance to plant.  

The hyacinth bean vines that I sprouted from seeds are finally in the ground.  I planted them all over the yard, next to anything that they can climb.  When the make-shift "greenhouse" they sprouted in was empty, I re-planted it with zinnia seeds.  

Cousin Jamie next door texted us Saturday evening and said that she'd just watched the mama owl drop a big snake in the owl nest in the tree between our houses.  We grabbed the camera and went out to see if we could get a picture of the babies eating the snake, but of course the nest is too high off the ground for us to see what the babies were doing.  One of them did poke his head up to watch us for a minute.  At night, we hear them squawking.

I spent most of the weekend working on an alphabet for the embroidery machine.  A customer asked for a running-stitch font that would be good for t-shirts, onesies, and other lightweight fabrics.  I wanted to make a true-type font that can be typed like text, but am getting nowhere.  This has been one of the most frustrating things I've done in a while.  

The super-hero quilt is now on Lou-Lou's bed, and she likes it.  :)

Azaleas - April 9, 2021

 

My sister sent me some azaleas that she had dug from her flower beds.  She left them at my niece's house Tuesday, but I've had an unusually busy week and was just able to pick them up today.  Something had knocked over one of the pots and pulled out one of the plants.  I came straight home, planted them, and gave them a good drink of water.  They'll get another good soaking tonight, if the weatherman is correct.  Now, if I can just keep The Husband from chopping them down with the weed-eater.

* * * * * * * * 

The Super-Hero Quilt is done!  I can hardly wait to give it to her.

* * * * * * * * 

There's a nest baby owls - two of them - in a tree at the edge of our yard.

Play Ball! - April 7, 2021

 

Last night was the season opener for LouLou's softball team.  The weather was absolutely perfect; the teams, not so much.  ;)  LouLou played all over the field - short stop, left field, second base.  She got a good hit, struck out, walked.  I have no clue which team won, for I was playing with her younger sisters on the back side of the field and only paid attention to the game when LouLou was up to bat.

I love softball season, just as I loved baseball season when my sons were little.  Fresh air.  Sunshine.  Little kids strutting around in their uniforms.  The noise of the crowd when something happens.  No supper-cooking.  (I slipped away during the last inning to beat the ball-field traffic to a drive-thru window.)

On the way to the ball field, I saw Mr. Vernon planting seeds in his vegetable garden and wondered if he had checked the almanac to see if it was a good planting day.  Last weekend when we went to retrieve our tomato plants from Uncle Jack's greenhouse, we had a discussion about planting days.  He said that last year his running beans bloomed their heads off but produced very few beans.  A seasoned gardener later told Uncle Jack that he had planted on a "bloom day."  I had never heard of such a thing.  Uncle Jack showed me his planting calendar, which indicated that next weekend (the 17th-18th) will be perfect days to plant the garden.

Hopefully, our tomato plants will survive until then.  So far, they are looking very healthy - nice, strong stems and dark green leaves.  They've been living on our front porch in the daytime since we brought them home, but I've been bringing them in at night, except for last night (I forgot to bring them in).  It's supposed to storm tonight.  Remind me to bring them in when I come home from work.  ;)

 

Easter Weekend - April 5, 2021

 

Busy weekend!

I spent half of the day Saturday making dishes for Easter dinner.  Worked on my totem for part of the day.  Late in the afternoon, The Husband and I went over to Uncle Jack's to pick up the tomato seedlings he had been babysitting for me.  He took good care of them.  The seedlings looked great - their stems had grown stout, and they'd put on their first set of real leaves.  

Yesterday, I finished the cooking.  Over-cooked the ham, as usual.  I probably could've skipped the ham altogether and just made a bigger meatloaf, for the meatloaf disappeared right away.

It was good to have all of my kids and grandkids, except for The Grandson, who was with his mother.  

* * * * * * * *

 A couple of weeks ago, PBS aired a documentary about Flannery O'Connor.  I'd heard the name, but had never read anything she'd written, so that night before I went to bed I downloaded a book of her short stories.  Since then, I've read one or two of her stories every night.  They are a little dark for my tastes.  She kills off somebody in nearly every story.  (In the one I read last night, a grandfather killed his favorite grandchild by knocking her in the head with a rock.)  She does have a way with words, though.

* * * * * * * * 

The "totem" is coming along.  I am using one of the straight, smooth, crape myrtle limbs from Nanny's trees.  I peeled off the bark with a pocket knife, drew some figures on the wood with a pencil, and started taking off the material between the figures with a dremel tool.   Mostly, I am just learning what each little attachment does, but I am having big fun with it.  It's one of those activities that puts me in "the zone."  I could do it all day.  I don't know what I'm going to do with this thing once it is finished.  The stick has begun to split at the bottom and will probably split all the way to the top, but I am going to keep working on it just to learn to use the tools.

Easter Dinner Prep - April 3, 2021

 

It seems like forever since we've hosted Easter dinner at our house - it may have been years - but we're doing it this year.  As far as I know, all of the kids and grandkids are coming, plus Nanny.  I got up early this morning and made a list of the old favorite dishes, went to the grocery store before the crowd arrived, and came back home and started cooking. 

Ham

Meatloaf (because The Granddaughters say "YAY!" when they find out we're having meatloaf)

Scalloped potatoes

Corn casserole

Green bean casserole

7-layer salad

Deviled eggs

Chocolate cream pie with whipped cream

Coconut cake (I cheated and bought a cake from the grocery store)

Everything is stirred up and ready to bake, except for the potatoes.  I'll cook them and the meat tomorrow.  

Because one of my sons is working night shift tonight, and the other is working day shift tomorrow, we'll be eating supper instead of lunch.  

* * * * * * * * * 

I went to visit my sister yesterday.  We've been promising to swap yard plants since last summer, but we haven't gotten together because of the virus.  Now that we've both been vaccinated, we felt safe enough to have lunch together, along with my niece and my sister's grandsons.  It sure was good to see everyone.  The weather was wonderful, and we spent a lot of time outside, admiring my sister's garden.  

I came home with a rose bush, an azalea bush, a hydrangea, some columbine, and some red lobelia.  On the drive home, I planned where to put everything, and within 30 minutes of arrival, it was all in the ground.  I'm especially stoked about the rose bush.  It is a "New Dawn," a fragrant, faintly pink climbing rose.  We had one, once upon a time, growing on an arch over a garden path, but it came down with rose rosette disease and I had to dig it up.  That was several years ago.  Hopefully, the rosette disease has left the premises by now.

Totems and Such - April 2, 2021

 

Back around Christmas, one of my regular Etsy customers asked me to create a font for her, something light-weight that would be good for t-shirts.  I had never done a font, but I said I would give it a try.  It turned out to be harder than I expected, in more ways than one.  First, I had to create the stitches for the letters, themselves, then I had to - or rather wanted to - figure out how to make them a true-type font so that my customer could simply type words instead of cutting/pasting individual letters to make words.  After a couple of days of working on the alphabet, I got side-tracked and moved on to something else.  My customer has rattled my cage about this font a couple of times since then, most recently while I was in east Tennessee.  I promised her I would try again when I got home, so yesterday I sat down and created the remaining letters.  They are still not in true font form - she'll still have to cut/paste letters to make words - but she should be able to manage until I do figure out how to make a font.

While I was working on the letters, I heard Cousin Roger coming around the back of the house on his lawnmower.  He had come over here last week while I was working on a "totem" that I was attempting to carve on the stick I'd saved from Nanny's crape myrtles.  By that time, I had peeled all of the bark off of my stick and was trying to carve shapes with a Dremel.  I switched off the Dremel when he came to the porch.

"Whatchoo doin'?" he asked.

"Carving a totem."

I could almost hear bells dinging in his head.

"How'd you get that bark off?"

"Pocket knife."

So yesterday, he rode his lawnmower over here to see if I had any marbles.  It seems one of the crape myrtle limbs we gave him had a crook on one end that reminded him of a snake head; he was in the process of carving a walking stick out of the limb, and he wanted marbles to make the snake's eyes.  Once upon a time I probably could have found him some marbles, but it's been a minute since I've seen any around here.  I do, however, have a plastic bin full of beads for jewelry-making, and I plunked the bin down in front of him and told him to help himself.  He chose two green turquoise beads for the eyes.

As Roger was digging through the bead bin, he commented how hard it was to carve the stick with a knife, and he kept glancing over at the Dremel that I'd left laying on a table.  I did not volunteer to let him use it.  

Before he left, he said that he'd finished refurbishing our swing and would bring it over.  The Husband said he'd come get it in the truck.  After Roger left, I said to The Husband, "Tell Roger we'll give him $75 for the swing, or if he thinks he can sell it for more than that, he can sell it."  (I could buy that same kind of swing for $85 new.)  We didn't have $75 in cash in the house, but we did have a $100 bill left over from our trip money.  I knew that Roger probably didn't have $25 in his pocket, so I went to the store and bought a bag of chips, a package of hot dogs, and a couple of other little things, hoping to break the $100 bill.  Wouldn't you know, my total turned out to be $13, which left $87 in change, and the heifer behind the counter would not give me two tens for a $20.  So we ended up paying Roger $80 for the swing.  

Maybe he can buy himself a Dremel with it.  ;)

Home Again - April 1, 2021

 

We're back from our trip to East Tennessee.  Left on Sunday morning, took the interstate (which we hate to do).  We had two fun days, mostly driving around to sight-see and playing with The Granddaughters, started home yesterday.

The interstate drive up there was everything we hate about interstate travel - big wrecks, traffic jams, 18-wheelers jetting by - and so we decided to take the backroads on the way home.  The return trip was a lot more interesting, but it took 10 hours from driveway to driveway, partly because the navigator (me) slacked off on the job, and partly because we took a detour down Natchez Trace Parkway just to see it.  Our butts were seriously tired of the truck seat by the time we got home.