From the back porch - 4/19/19 - Moles and other rodents

It's really too chilly to be doing computer work on the back porch today, but here I am, looking out across a yard that's more like a meadow than a "lawn."  In my field of vision (but maybe not in the pic) is a mole trap.  Not a trap, actually.  More like an executioner.  I'd love to see it snap while I'm sitting here.  Moles have turned my yard into a sponge.

I caught one a couple of weeks ago.  For a solid week before that, I'd spent every afternoon stomping down mole trails, trying to locate an active run (they'll dig it back up if they're in there), and moving the trap to a more promising spot.  But it was cold at the time, and the mole wasn't moving if he was in there.  Then, one afternoon when I came home from work, there was a brand new trail blazed across the yard.  I ran out there, yanked up the trap, and re-set it in the active run.  Less than an hour had passed before I got his ass.

He was a big old fat joker, with beaver-like teeth, a pink nose and feet and tail.  His fur was absolutely beautiful.

I work with an older lady with whom I talk about gardening, and she'd been hearing about my MoleQuest, so when I went to work the next day, I told her about catching the mole.  When I told her how beautiful his fur was, it sparked a memory in her.  She said, "My mother told me that they used to make powder puffs out of mole skins."

My mouth dropped open for a second or two.  I'd wasted a perfectly good powder puff.

I have no such plans for the mice we're catching.  In the 30+ years we've lived in this house, we've seen TWO mice, both sighted within the past couple of years.  One was just a few weeks ago.  Little devil ran out from under one bathroom closet door and under another.  We put out two traps, both baited with peanut butter, but the mouse evidently wasn't interested.  When I saw the mouse again a few nights ago, The Husband re-baited the trap with feta cheese.  Within the hour, we got him.

Later that evening, while I was sitting here on the porch, I heard something move in the cabinet behind me.  Two summers ago, I sat out here every evening hearing something move in that cabinet.  I figured it was a mouse and put out some bait.  Kept hearing the noise, though.  It didn't really sound like scampering.  It was more like a thump.  I came out here one night to get something off a table, and there was a SNAKE on this cabinet.  I nearly had a come-apart.  Since then, I do not mess around if I hear something in this cabinet; I get right on it.  So I came inside the other night and announced to The Husband, "THERE'S SOMETHING MOVING IN THE CABINET."  This did sound like scampering, though.  We set another feta cheese trap.  From inside the house, I heard it snap moments later.  Every day since then, we've caught a mouse on the back porch.  I am beginning to wonder if we're now LURING mice to the back porch.

In any case, take note:  Mice cannot resist feta cheese.

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