A Week of Quilting, Meetings, Ava and Weather

One of my goals for this year is to make more quilts, and a second goal related to it is to use up more of the fabric in my stash, or "fabric aging room" as my guild friend Jane S. calls it. So earlier this year I joined a scrap quilting club that is coordinated by another guild friend, Teajuana M. Our first project, begun the last Saturday of March, was a simple arrangement of 5-inch squares. I already had lots of 5-inch squares in Christmas prints that I got in a guild exchange, and had no idea what I would ever make of them, so they seemed perfect for this project. By mid April I had my squares joined according to the directions. It was time to lay the quilt out on the dining room table and slash diagonally through the plain squares. I gritted my teeth and pressed on. After slashing, I sewed new seams, again according to the directions. The pattern is called Twist and Shout.
It was a limited time free pattern by Lyn Brown on her blog.

Here is my finished top, as photo- graphed by Teajuana at our meeting last Saturday, and first published on her blog. By slashing and turning the sections, you get a quilt top "on point" that is more interesting to look at. The green border came from my stash, too. The only new fabric is the cream border with holly leaf print that I bought on sale at the store where we had our March workshop! I am looking forward to quilting this and having my very own Christmas Quilt after all these years! Then we set to work on our next project, Bento Blocks, which I hope to get joined in the next week or so. Both of these projects involved exchanges, which expanded the number of fabrics available without having to buy anything new. I really enjoy this new club and I'm also making more progress on some other long-standing projects as well.

After I left the scrap quilt workshop on Saturday, I drove home under a menacing sky. On the car radio I heard we were under a tornado watch. Suddenly they issued a tornado warning for an area two counties south west of us. Not long after I got home, our county warning sirens went off. We stayed near the TV and the computer, watching radar, until it started to hail. Then we headed for our basement, with Ava in tow. This was the first time she had ever been down there. We heard a little wind and a lot of rain. About 5 p.m. we came back upstairs and the worst part of the storm had passed. There was a lot of damage in southwest St. Louis--Des Peres, Kirkwood, Webster especially. The Weather Service confirmed a small tornado touchdown. We were very fortunate here, with just little branches scattered about and only about 1/2 inch of rain. This was the same day the huge tornado cut an 80-mile path across Mississippi and killed a dozen people.

On Sunday evening we went to a surprise birthday party for DebE, a young woman we have known for a while. She and her sister Kim joined our church over a year ago, and their energy has been a real inspiration. About 15 people gathered in her kitchen and yelled "surprise" when she arrived home from a cake decorating class. Her husband grilled brats and hamburgers and the rest of us brought side dishes or beverages. Dessert was angel food cake and berries. And the evening ended with a fire in the back yard fire pit and adults sitting around, getting smoke in their eyes and toasting marshmallows for s'mores. It was a fun evening, as the kids would say.

Monday Ava went home, but on Tuesday morning she was back as Barb headed out on a long road trip. Ava will be our dog until May 6, unless she spends part of the time with one of Barb's other friends. Tuesday I went to the spring assembly for our area Disciples Women. As study chair, I had arranged the program and it went very well. Brenda B., who is executive director of Isaiah 58 ministries (an anti poverty ministry supported by our church, among others) gave the program and it was well received. I was grateful to have planned 3 programs this year and had them all be successful! Tuesday night, Norm and I went to Soul Care, a spiritual nurture group at our church. It was the last meeting until fall.

Today Norm attacked both our yard and Barb's, using our respective lawn mowers that were both recently repaired. Our two yards look much better now. With the recent rain, everything is SO GREEN! I put out sugar water in feeders for the hummingbirds, who are supposed to arrive any day. And I spent an hour or so this afternoon tuning up two of my three sewing machines. They are all in working order now. Last week our friend Dave B., who is handy with almost any kind of repair, fixed the frayed power cord on my 1950s Featherweight I had inherited from mother. It is now installed in the sewing cabinet my father custom made for it. No other machine sews as quietly and perfectly as this one. It is great for patchwork because it is so accurate. I also cleaned and oiled my 1968 white Featherweight and figured out why it wasn't sewing; I had the bobbin case in wrong and the needle was backwards. It's now in its travel case and ready to go to the next workshop. And the fancy stitching Kenmore, which had pitched a fit as I was trying to finish my Bento Blocks to swap last Saturday, calmed down when I put a different bobbin in it and got it a new spool of thread. So with luck I may get to sew some tomorrow and Friday. Norm has been doing more research about North Carolina in anticipation of our trip. I've been watching rental car prices. Eventually it will all come together. We are starting to get excited!

Visitor # 7001 and beyond

In a post last week, I noted that today, April, 21, is the second anniversary of when I started counting visitors to the blog. I was wondering if I could get 7000 by today, and actually we reached that round number yesterday afternoon. I'm not so much interested in how MANY hits I get (although that is nice enough) but WHO is reading. And my stats show me some of that.

Visitor #7000 turned out to be the Google bot taking a look to see if anything I had posted was worth indexing, I guess. From California, the bot visited at 12:58 p.m. yesterday.

Visitor #7001 was a real person, in New Hampshire, who was looking for news about the Bentrotts at 5:48 p.m..

Visitor #7002 was cousin Debi in Tulsa at 7:53 p.m. Sorry I didn't have anything new up, cous!

Visitor #7003 was using Google at 9:27 p.m. from Washington state to find an obituary of the Rev. Arla Elston, whose passing I mentioned in a previous post. This is kind of amazing because the reference to Arla is buried in the middle of the text, actually text I had copied (with attribution) from Norm's FaceBook page. Those search engines can go deep. I'm impressed.

Visitor #7004 WINS THE PRIZE (to be named later) for being the first to visit on April 21. Doug in Ft. Myers logged in at 3:17 a.m. on his iPod Touch. (Some people will do anything, including going without sleep, just to be first in line!) Seriously, hope your insomnia was not brought on by the e-mail I sent you earlier. g-p-l.

Visitor #7005 was bro in law Don in Garden City at 5:50 a.m. He is always up early.

Visitor #7006 was sister in law Kay in Garden City at 7:05 a.m. These two are daily readers and I love you both!

Visitor #7007 was S-I-L Carol in Texas at 9:25 a.m.. Another Mac user and also one who checks every day. See you on FB, too. Love you!

Visitor #7008 is a frequent visitor from Georgia but I don't know who you are. You looked at 10:30 a.m. today. Maybe if you see this, you'll drop me a line at my e-mail (link on my profile) and let me know if you are who I think you might be.

Visitor #7009 at 11:50 hails from Kansas City and was Googling for Haiti blogs and CONASPEH, the ministry there that I've posted about before. Always glad to help such folks find something that they may be looking for. This visitor is intriguing because he/she is running WinNT on a Mac and browsing with Safari. Didn't know one could do that simultaneously!

Visitor #7010 is the Google bot from California again. It went to my link about our Book Club discussing the book Infidel. Hope it's not being driven by that malicious hacker I've been reading about....

Well that's the round up so far of today's visitors. I won't bore readers by listing any more, but just wanted to observe that being in the blogosphere for going on four years (we started in August of 2006) has been eye-opening for me as I have learned how fabulously interconnected friends and family can be through the Internet. As well as how visible our words and pictures can be to people we don't know. I prefer to think of the latter as friends we have not yet met. As I have become more active on FaceBook (where sometimes it seems one can get almost Too Much Information) I realize that a social networking site is easier to use for quick posts about daily activities. But for a long-winded writer like me, the occasional blog post is still very satisfying, and it's much easier to upload and display favorite photos here as well.

Bottom line: Thanks to all who have stopped by with peaceful purposes in mind, and also thanks to the minuscule few who have commented. (In two years I have deleted only 2 unwelcome comments. Both of them were from trolls who wanted to sell something.) Your feedback, whether it's in the comments or in the direct e-mails you send to me, is always welcome.

A Great Spring Weekend

Temperatures are finally more seasonable, and the air seems just right for the many emerging ferns like this one. They all come from one or two lifted from my mother's garden 15 years ago when we sold her house.

Guest blogger: I'm pasting below an account of our weekend that Norm wrote in a note on Sunday for his FaceBook page. It covers most of the highlights:

Yesterday was a beautiful Spring Saturday. At book club, the discussion with friends of the book "3 Cups of Tea" was as lively and wide-ranging as previous monthly gatherings. In the afternoon, home to snack, nap, then waken to wonderful Spring sunlight. At 3 I [Norm] saw the beginning of the Cards/Mets game, and checked in on the game from time to time over the next couple of hours. The newly repaired lawn mower arrived from the repair shop about 5, so I drove to the gas station for mower gas, mowed ½ of the yard, then followed that by eating a wonderful Judi-prepared dinner, and followed that with mowing the remainder of the yard, still checking in on the baseball game. Finally settled down to watch the game around 7 p.m. And it went on and oooonnnn, and ooooooonnnnn. 3 hours later, close to 10pm the game ended with the Cards losing. 7 hours of baseball; 20 innings, almost as long as it takes for us to drive to Tulsa from St. Louis.

Today, Sunday, was just as beautiful, refreshingly cool. The grass and the new leaves outdo themselves in greenness. The church class discussion this morning centered on how our faith informs and changes the judgments we make about people whose judgments and life styles differ from our own. Thought-provoking and faith-provoking. Worship gave us moments to sing, celebrate the presence of our Lord, recognize the influence of people who have gone on before us--including the Rev. Arla Elston, pastor of our church back in the 1980's and before that Judi's campus minister, in the 1960's, at the University of Arkansas. [Note from Judi: we believe Arla's memorial service will be this coming Thursday in Pomona, Calif. More to come.] The sermon, preached by our seminarian student pastor forced us to recognize how the religion of consumerism in our society often betrays our Christian faith. Following worship there was time to share stories and faith with Rev. Melissa, a Mennonite pastor in Colorado who had spent time worshiping with us a few years ago. On vacation, she returned to worship at our church so that her cup of faith could be refilled. Thank God for the lively faith of Melissa. This evening Judi and I spent a long time discussing and telling stories out of our family histories, in part because she has this project to write a narrative about her four great grandmothers. I am remembering that my parents would have been married 83 years this past week! It has been a good weekend, a weekend when I have felt more energy than I have felt since my surgery more than two weeks ago. Thank God for this weekend!

I'll add that the Cardinal-Mets game tonight was much more satisfactory, and all we watched were innings 5 -9. This week we have several events coming up: Elders' Circle at our church on Wednesday, knitting circle here on Thursday, and I have a scrap quilt club workshop on Saturday. Plus I hope to move the geraniums outside. The oak pollen has ended, the oak trash is about through falling. Indeed, we are getting maple keys in the back yard now. We are also getting excited about our summer vacation trip. We now have registration and hotel reservations for Quadrennial, plus our air reservations. We are still working on the rest of the itinerary to visit Linville and McElyea sites in NC, plus finding the best deal on a rental car. As for June 16-20, we have our hotel reservation and our registration made for the Colby High School reunion as well. If you will be in Colby for that, we can't wait to see you!

Suddenly Everything is Green, Even the Driveway!

This week is redbud week, crabapple week, and lilac week. It is also a preview of next week, which will be dogwood week and azalea week. Norm said he even saw an iris in bloom up the street this morning while walking Ava.

It feels like most of the flowering bushes and trees are about a week early. Even though the winter seemed cold and unending I guess it wasn't that cold over all. And when it warmed up, it went from the 40s to the 80s in about a week, and it has stayed there. We are supposed to get a cool down this weekend, but only to the upper 60s and still no night freezes. I think it might be safe to move the geraniums outside.

We have been pleasantly surprised that our "color magic" tulips we bought a few years ago have continued to bloom each year. Usually tulips just fade away after a couple of seasons, unless they are known to be "perennial" tulips. I saw some in the Breck's catalog today and may order more to plant next fall.

The big story here is the POLLEN. Those tracks you see in the driveway aren't in the dust; that is pollen out there. Most is from our 85-year old oak tree but almost all the trees bloomed at once this year. The oak is a little early, too. The squirrels don't mind; they have been digging in all the flower pots looking for acorns and the tree can't produce soon enough to suit them.
Miraculously, neither of our allergies have kicked in yet. Usually the pines (not yet producing) or the locust trees get me--the latter almost always bloom the first weekend of May, but they will probably be early, too.

Today Norm was able to get back to our water exercise class, and he has been busy taking Ava out on walks, too. Suddenly everything is getting dry and he has been stringing soaker hoses. We hope to see our repaired lawnmower return home from the shop by this Friday; the clumps of grass are getting kind of high out back. Yesterday we had something of an adventure when Norm discovered what appeared to be a young opossum lodged in a neighbor's trash can. We tipped the can and left it where the critter could crawl out at nightfall, which apparently it did. We seem to have seen a lot of wildlife around here over the years..a fox, hawk in the garage, turkey in the yard, and now opossums two years in a row, in addition to moles, voles, rabbits, squirrels and tons of birds, including some very noisy grackles with fledglings where we hear them squawk for more food all day.

Visitor # 6900

Visitor #6900 comes from Mineral Wells, Texas. Hi, Maxine and Roy! Glad I finally got something new posted for you to read. Home Stories is first and foremost for our family and far-flung friends and it always makes me smile when I can tell that one of them has been checking in! Hope all is well down there in Texas!

Now, it is only 11 days until April 21, the 2nd anniversary of when I started counting, not when I started blogging. But can we get to an even 7000? Or more? Time and persistence will tell. Certainly an average of 3500 "hits" a year, or 9.6 a day, is pretty small potatoes in the blogging world, but all of those views give me a reason to keep writing. And, I know that if I want more people dropping in, I need to post more frequently. And about news that is worth reading.

Wilma Mankiller, Cherokee Chief

Back home in Oklahoma, there is a memorial service today honoring Wilma Mankiller, former principal chief (the first and so far only woman to hold that office) of the Cherokee Nation. Her books have been in my library for a while and since she was just a tad younger than me, we shared a generation of consciousness about justice and action to make the lives of ordinary people better. May she rest forever in peace and may her family be comforted by the memory of all the good she accomplished. The Tulsa World has an article about the memorial service here, and a comprehensive multimedia package about her life, here.

DOC and UCC visit CONASPEH in Haiti

This post from April 6 provides details of a visit by the general ministers of both the UCC and Disciples of Christ to the Global Mission partners in Haiti, House of Hope and CONASPEH. I'm posting it because I still get hits from people searching for news about these missions. Click here for the post Hope for Haiti.

The slide show on this report doesn't seem to be working, but you can follow this link to an album of photographs one of the Global Ministries executives took on the trip.

Easter Just Flew By

It seemed like Easter came early this year, without a lot of warning, and left just as quickly. Kind of like the flowers in our garden. I have an album of photos I took just before Palm Sunday and all of those flowers, except the pansies, have dropped their petals now. A week ago there were no buds on the oak tree, and today the asphalt driveway is covered with so much yellow pollen it looks green! These daffodils and grape hyacinths greeted us on Easter. Blue and yellow is one of my favorite color combinations in the garden.

I set the dining table for four although it looked like we would have only ourselves here for Easter dinner. Then a day or two before, our friends Mike and Sandy found themselves free, so we did a joint feast and had a wonderful time. I keep Easter chicks and rabbits that are handmade and use them over every year, in a traditional basket. We used to dye hard-boiled eggs as well, but this year, with Norm's outpatient procedure on the Thursday before, we just didn't have time. (Norm is just fine, not to worry.) Norm observes that I seem to really enjoy my Easter rituals, and that's true. It is a holiday I remember being celebrated with my grandparents...my grandfather hiding eggs in tufts of grass in the yard for me to find; getting dressed up for church although it was cold and I had to put a coat over my spring dress; eating deviled eggs and potato salad with either ham or fried chicken, and a dessert of strawberry shortcake. We did have Florida strawberries, and the lemon jello cake that Sandy made. Yum. The place mats are Norm's craft--he has been weaving on a lap loom this winter and these are the marvelous result. They didn't start out to be place mats, but I kidnapped them.

It got to almost 80 degrees on Easter, which was a little too warm, but some warmth is welcome after a March that was cooler than average. This is the first spring for bulbs in the planter by the new wall out front. This area is still emerging and I will have more pictures soon. We planted the pansies and violas on March 31 and they were promptly joined by that many more that had over- wintered or re- seeded from last year. On the day we planted, we were not too sure where all of the hostas were, because they hadn't emerged. Two days later, they were obvious!

Grape Hyacinths, it turns out, are some of Norm's favorites. We bought a mixture of dark and light blue and white. Looks like the middle tones are missing here, but they may come up in a day or two. We thought they would do well next to the rock wall that Matt built, and they have.

Last summer we planted some perennial pinks out back by the driveway and enjoyed their cheerful flowers. Well, the hardy little souls survived the winter, even having a big mound of snow from the driveway dumped on them a couple of times. On April 1, a blossom had already opened. Guess I won't have to look for anything for that spot this year!

I am always trying to push my camera farther than it can really go, but I had to try to capture these emerging hosta blades with drops of moisture still clinging to them from a rain we had the night before. I love being retired because that means (usually) that I can take a few extra minutes to just prowl around the yard and look for something different to photograph. (You can try clicking on the photo to enlarge it.)

A tour of the spring garden is in many ways like a visit from old friends. I have no idea how long this purple hyacinth has been in the perennial border out back that Bob and Lois planted many years ago. I've planted other colors of hyacinths out front and they last a couple of years at most. But Old Purple is the Old Faithful of the plant world. Glad to see you again!


These jonquils are the ones I mentioned in an earlier post, that we trans- planted from my parents' yard in Tulsa over 20 years ago. (My dad was there to supervise the digging, and he died in '89, so.....) We had a big stand of them at our Ferguson house and we dug some bulbs for our move to Bel Nor in 2001. They are among the last to bloom, but I find it cheering and comforting to see them brightening their corner near the raspberry patch. Like the Easter story, they offer a hint of the everlasting while recalling some of the best memories of yesterday.

A Wild Turkey in Our Yard!

We were eating our cereal this morning when neighbor Barb called, all excited. "There's a wild turkey walking down your driveway! Ava is going crazy!" We went out, but saw no sign of it so we thought it must have flown away. A few minutes later, Barb called again. "It's in your front yard!" Sure enough, right there near the tulips, a turkey in the grass. I ran to get the camera and tried to silently open the front door. The turkey hopped over the wall and started walking south on the parking strip next to the street. It went about three houses down, then turned and went through another neighbor's back yard, heading east. Quite the excitement.

Last year we saw a wild turkey in the spring when driving with our friends Mike and Sandy in nearby St. Vincent county park. We think this is a hen, and we wonder why she was scouting through our neighborhood today. Is she looking for a nest site? I read in Birds of Missouri by Stan Tekiela that these turkeys were almost extinct in Missouri by the 1930s and bringing them back has been a conservation success story. Domestic turkeys are descended from them. They eat insects, seeds and fruit. This one was walking very deliberately, but Tekiela says they are strong fliers that can approach 60 mph and also fly straight up. They have excellent hearing and eyesight that is 3x better than humans. "At night, they roost in trees." Guess we should look up in the early mornings from now on! Gobble, gobble!

A Blessed Easter

A quick note to wish everyone a Happy Easter! We had an incredible worship service at church today, which followed a very tasty pot luck breakfast. Then this afternoon we joined forces with our good friends Mike and Sandy for a quiet Easter dinner here. With thunder in the background, I think I'll pull the plug on MCKBK for now but will try to get some photos of our spring posted soon. We are concerned about Norm's brother Harold, who was airlifted to Denver this afternoon for treatment that wasn't available in NW KS. Praying for you to get well soon!