Baby Faces - October 9, 2021

Granddaughters 2-4 came to visit today (#1 was at a competition with her high school band).  I snagged #4 (she's almost 9 months old), sat her in my lap facing me, and had a short conversation with her.  She laughs at all my jokes.  ;)

After a while, I put her down on the floor, and she crawled around, exploring.  When one of her sisters went to the sewing room, #4 tried to follow.  The sewing room is not fit for human habitation, and is especially off limits to babies who would eat straight pins off the floor.  When the baby put it in high gear and headed toward the sewing room, I called her name, and she stopped, sat down, turned around and looked up at me and - 

Oh, my god - it was her daddy staring up at me from 37+ years ago.

On any given day, I have a hard time summoning clear memories of my sons' infant faces.  Maybe that's because the babies' faces changed so fast in that first year that I didn't have time to get used to them.  

But I remembered today!

"Worse than the Flu" - October 7, 2021

Cousin Roger motored over on his lawnmower Wednesday afternoon.  He turned off the engine and just sat there for a minute or two, seemingly looking off into the distance, but more likely trying to work up the energy to get off the lawnmower.  Finally, he climbed off and headed toward the porch.

As he got about 20 feet away, I hollered, "Roger, don't you bring your covid-infested ass up on my porch.  I mean it."

He stopped in his tracks.  "Man, I'll tell you what . . . this shit is worse than the flu."

He's managed to keep moving, still puttering in his workshop, through sheer force of will.   But he's coughed so much that he's thrown his back out.

He just brought over another box of stuff for me to paint.

Ima spray it with Lysol. 

Big, dumb, dawg - October 6, 2021

My cell phone rang this morning before I'd had my first sip of coffee.  Nobody but my sister dials my phone that early.  I had a mild sense of alarm when I saw that the caller was Son #1.  

Son #1 has a Rottweiler the size of an Angus bull.  His name is Axel.  He weighs about 160 pounds.  He's a sweet-natured dog, and he's pretty smart, but he does what he wants.

Axel had gotten out of the house this morning and had run off and wouldn't come back.  My son's finance had to get to work and couldn't spare the time to go looking for him.  My son wanted to know if I could go over to his house, find the dog, and put him inside the house.  

I understood my son's concern.  A neighbor had threatened to shoot Axel if he caught him on his property.  The same neighbor had shot Axel's girlfriend a year ago when she ventured into his yard.

I quickly put on some clothes, grabbed my coffee cup, and headed to my son's house (four miles away), hoping that Axel's big, dumb ass would be stretched out on the porch when I got there.

He was no where in sight.

I called and called and called.  He did not come.

I got in the car and drove down the road, looking for him, calling his name.  Nothing.

I drove up and down the highway, turned down the side roads.  No Axel.

I went back to my son's house, hoping the dog might have come home while I was driving.  I got out of the car and called some more.  No sign of the dog.

My phone rang as I was getting back in the car to drive around some more.  I figured it was my son, calling to see if I'd found Axel, and I was dreading having to tell him that I had not found the dog.  At  the same time the phone rang, it also beeped with the sound it makes for incoming text messages.  There was a whole stack of them.  

The caller was The Husband, wondering if I'd found Axel.  While I talked to him, I put on my glasses and read the text messages.  Twenty-two minutes earlier, my son had texted, "She found him."  

Axel had been inside the house the whole time.  

Peddling - October 5, 2021

When I came home from work yesterday, there was a big, taped-up box on my back porch.  I knew where it came from:  Cousin Roger.  There were also two camouflage wall sconces on a table.  Since I knew that there's someone in Roger's house who has covid, I sprayed the box and the sconces with disinfectant and left them alone while I did some digitizing work.  Later, I opened the box.  Inside it were the 9 wooden lanterns that I'd sold to a flower shop.  He'd done a good job on them.

As for the sconces, Roger had tried to stencil deer heads on them.  He'd used day-glo orange spray paint, and there was over-spray all around the deer, making them look like they'd been head shot.  I re-painted the deer (with tan paint) and tried to cover up the over-spray with smears of black paint.  

Today I will be taking this stuff - and all the other stuff he's left on my back porch in the last couple of weeks - to the flower shop to see if I can peddle it.  Roger's nervous.  He had made the lanterns an inch shorter than the prototype that I'd shown the flower shop, and I'd given him a butt-chewing over it.  Hopefully, he won't make that mistake again.  

Back porch findings

He has been wearing me out with texts and phone calls since I gave him my cell number.  I'm about ready to block him.  When I said this to The Husband (who is Roger's blood relative), he said, "Aw, don't do that.  Roger's quarantined, and doesn't have anybody to talk to."  I said, "YOU talk to him."

Roger called yesterday about 5 minutes after I got home.  I hadn't even had time to pee.  He sounded stopped-up, and when I asked after his health, he confessed that he now has covid.  He said he feels like he has a sinus infection, and can't smell or taste, but otherwise he's not too bad.  He says he still feels like working in his shop.  

When I come home with his money for the lanterns, I'm going to leave it on his porch and run!

To the Rescue! - October 3, 2021

Friday night when I went to bed, my laptop was trying to recover from the brain-washing I gave it Friday afternoon.  It wasn't quite a "format c colon" (only you old computer geeks might get that), but it was close.

By morning, it had come out of its coma, and I ran some other updates that finally got it performing as it should.  Thank goodness!  I had digitizing work to do.  Spent most of the day running back and forth between the porch (where my laptop was) and the sewing room.  The challenge in digitizing embroidery designs is that it is not a "wysiwyg" (another geek word).  Punching hundreds - thousands! - of threads into the weave of fabric alters the shape of the fabric; it pushes some stitches outward and pulls others inward.  What looks like a perfect circle on the computer screen sews more like a flattened circle at the embroidery machine.  This means that the computer design needs to be elongated/stretched so that it comes out round when sewn.  It's something of a crap shoot.  I did three different test-sews, and never got it right yesterday.

I worked on the design again this morning.  On top of the push/pull problem, other things needed adjusting.  I'd been working on it half the morning when the telephone rang.

It was our son.  He and his family have a new camper, and took it out on its maiden voyage this weekend.  When they packed up to head for home, the truck would not start.  The problem seemed to be with the ignition key.  Our son wanted us to go to his house, get the spare key, and bring it to them.  So I quit what I was doing, and we hit the road to their campsite, three hours away.

We were about 30 miles from our destination when The Son called.  The truck key had suddenly started working.  They were hitched up and ready to roll.  We did a bat-turn in the nearest parking lot, and pulled over to wait for them.  They'd gone camping with another family, and that other family was transporting two of the grandkids because there wasn't enough from for everybody in The Son's truck.  We met up with them all in the parking lot, took custody of the two grandkids, and joined the procession home. 

Back at the son's house, I sat on the tailgate of The Husband's truck and played with the Rotten Little Baby while the other adults unhitched the camper.  (She finally got a tooth, and you can see it when she grins.)  I gave her a short strip of duct tape, which entertained us all for a few minutes.  

After I got home, I tested the embroidery design again.  

It's better, but still not right.  :-/

*#(!*) Computer - October 2, 2021

Back in January, I bought a new laptop.  It is (was?) a beast - fast processor, lots of memory, lots of data storage space.  The difference in speed between it and my old computer was incredible.  Tell it to do something, and BOOM! it did it.

Over the last few days, however, it hasn't been responding as it used to do.  I kept getting notifications that it needed to be updated, but every time I would tell it to update, the update would fail.  Yesterday, I decided to get to the bottom of the problem.

Big mistake.

Long story short, I ended up having to "restore" the operating system.  The process started just after noon and was still ongoing when I went to bed last night.  And it's still acting a little funny.  And some of my programs are gone.  I can re-install, but it's a pain, and I have work to do.  Thankfully, all of my data seems to be intact.

 After mowing the pasture last weekend, The Husband told me that there were lots of ripe tomatoes and peppers in the garden.  I had not been to the garden for several weeks.  For a solid month (or more), I was plagued by a sinus/ear infection and simply did not feel like working in the garden.  Then I started helping Cousin Roger with his woodworking projects.  I neither knew nor cared what was going on in the garden.

But one afternoon this week, I went to the garden to get a few ripe tomatoes for supper.  

The Husband wasn't kidding; there ARE "lots" of ripe tomatoes and peppers in the garden.  I ought t go pick them and do something with them.  I haven't made any salsa or pepper jelly, yet.  Maybe I should do that this weekend.  Maybe.

* * * * * * * * 

Roger called yesterday afternoon.  He's still feeling fine, though his girlfriend is puny from covid.  He had something he wanted to show me, but since I've banned him from the premises for a couple of weeks, he asked me to give him my cell phone number so that he could show me a picture of what he'd done.  Reluctantly, I gave him the number.  

I will probably regret that decision.