A really great blogger would come up with all sorts of fantastic lines about where she had been, and would weave fantasies of the time spent away from the keyboard, drawing you in to celebrate the time spent off-line. But, you know me, ever fact oriented.
I’ve been busy. Really busy. I think all the time of things I’d like to post, but until I get a secretary, my posting is going to be hit or miss.
I’m here today because I’ve come down with an upper respiratory thing that is limiting what I can do. Playing and working on the computer, and reading seems to be the limit at the moment. Luckily, I may have passed the worst of it, or at least I hope so. My-Sister-The-Nurse called to talk with me today, checking up on me. Her best advice was that if it hasn’t cleared up in a couple of days, I need to see the doc. Good advice, I’m sure, and I’ll take Dear Husband with me, as he’s ill now, too.
I looked to see when I posted last, and it was April 27th, my youngest sister’s birthday. Since then, I have had 30 friends from exercise over for a potluck brunch, my quilting bee met, the Arr!! has been put into Lake Michigan, and we have celebrated my oldest granddaughter’s eight’s birthday.
Now, those things do not make for being “really busy.” The other part of the story is that we are going to sell our house. I have been boxing everything that we don’t need for day to day life. I have worked on our private bath and dressing area, the guest rooms, the linen closets, the mudroom pantry and the BOOKSHELVES. My God, who knew how many boxes of books and tapes and DVDs and CDs we own!!!
I believe that I can finish the “non-necessary” packing for all but the kitchen, the studio and the office with one day’s good work. The kitchen will have to be done a few cabinets at a time. There’s just too much to sort through and box up. Besides, the pantry scares me!
I started this project working in the basement. I sorted through holiday decorations, boxed up those I wanted to keep, and divided the rest between garage sale fodder and garbage. We had the Rent-a-Teens come to visit, and they helped by carrying all the garbage up to the garage, and bringing the book boxes to storage in the basement. One girl spent two and a half hours breaking down boxes and organizing them for recycling pick-up. Unfortunately, the basement is going to take a LONG time to finish. I wonder if I could get Heracles to help me…
I hope to be ready to have the house videoed by the end of the month, and open our doors to prospective buyers in July. All this depends of course on how much we can accomplish, and that depends on being able to overcome the gunk we’re dealing with.
I hope that you are all busy, enjoying the summer weather, and WELL! I’ll come check on you.
Category Archives: Def-y’s Categorizing
Tidbits
I saw SIX egrets yesterday (No, Cop Car, I don’t know exactly which kind they were.) I was driving to exercise, and saw two to the right of the road, and four to the left. And, earlier, I saw one of the herons. There must be a shallow spot at that point in the retention pond, because that seems to be a favorite place for fishing for both the herons and egrets.
Spring is really strange. I think we have had below normal temps for the past week, and last month it felt like late June. I’m glad that I didn’t plant anything tender this past week, because we had a hard frost and I would have lost it all.
Several of the iris have bloom stalks! Nothing is open, but give us a little warmth, and I’m sure the buds will open.
Have you heard about “Pink Slime?” Some companies add this sludge to their ground beef. Essentially, it’s assorted meat parts that are ground to a filler and treated with ammonia gas. I discovered that in my area, Target, Whole Foods and Costco do NOT use this filler, so I’ve changed my shopping habits. I stopped at Whole Foods for the first of my shopping today and picked up ground beef, fruit and bread. I also bought a basil plant. My car smelled like and Italian eatery on the way home! *G*
It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, so I’m going to spend the morning boxing things up. I need to begin shifting winter clothes out of my closet, but our weather is not cooperating. I still need sweaters and wraps in the evening.
Dear Husband is clearly ready for spring to land and stay. He asked for Taco Salad for dinner this evening. My new “Cuisine at Home” magazine came, and the cover features a shrimp boil for those of us who are land locked. Sounds like a good idea to me! I think it cooks in one pot, and you eat it like a picnic meal. Very little cleanup!
Dear Husband has an appointment to put the Arr!! into Lake Michigan, May 12th. Boating season is almost upon us. (Quilting days, here we come!)
And last, but not least, today is my little sister’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Frankie! I hope you have a wonderful weekend of celebration, and many, many more to come!
Fullblown Spring
Usually by the middle of March we are seeing daffodil and tulip greens, with blooms expected in early to mid April. This evening I saw Ice Follies daffodils, forsythia, star magnolia, and squill in bloom. The crocus have fainted from the heat!
We’ve had a week of temps from the upper sixties to the upper seventies. I was talking with Dear Husband today, while standing in the kitchen. I looked out the window and saw a gray squirrel flattened out in the grass in the shade of the house, trying to cool his belly. He looked more like a flying squirrel who had come in for a landing than one of our regular visitors.
I had two golden delicious apples that were on the wrinkled side. I cut them each into 16 pieces and dropped them under the bird feeder during the middle of the week when I filled the feeders. One of the ground squirrels discovered the bounty. He filled his cheeks with seeds and then crammed an apple between his teeth and took off running up the herb garden walkway with his tail straight up in the air. He jumped over the timbers at the end, ran across the lawn and under Dear Husband’s truck to the rough area east of the driveway. I watched him do the same routine twice more before I had to go back to work. Half an hour later, the apples had disappeared! *G* I wonder if he was going to have the family over to share the feast or if he was planning on canning apple pie filling….
Tomorrow, when I go out to take pictures of all the blooms, I’ll check to see if the May apples are in bloom in the grove.
I love spring, but could be go back to the fifty and sixty degree temps and sneak up on it? Please!
Oh, Joy!
I have been blessed today! First of all, we went to the Corned Beef and Cabbage dinner at church, so I got to celebrate with the Irish and didn’t have to cook or clean up. But, there was something even better about our night out.
Each year there is an auction following the dinner. One of my friends, Mary Rinn, passed away at the end of last year. She had been instrumental in creating Scraps on a Mission. I had been making a wonderful, bright baby quilt to show her when we met again, and then she was gone. So, when I was asked if I would contribute a baby quilt to the auction, I said yes. I added a name tag to the quilt saying that it was in memory of Mary Rinn.
I was concerned, in these tight economic times, that no one would want to bid on the quilt. Dear Husband and I discussed it, and came to an amount we could afford to bid. I was actually expecting to win back the quilt I had made.
The crowd was difficult and noisy. The bids were small and slow in coming, despite the fact that the money went to support an excellent cause. I didn’t realize it, but the auctioneer saved my quilt for last. The very first bid blew me out of the water. I never had the chance to bid and sat back and watched the bids increase until it fetched two and a half times what would have been my top bid!
The quilt has gone to a very good home. The woman who won it, remembers Mary fondly, and felt she needed the ties it provided to Mary. When she asked her husband what she could bid, he said, “Whatever it takes.”
Mary, your big heart and generosity have helped others one more time. Thanks!
The Dreaded Filing
I’d so like to tell you that I am a perfect person….that as soon as a piece of paper crosses my desk, I act on it and file it. But the truth is……I hate filing!
I have been doing a lot of spring cleaning recently. I cleaned my bedroom closet, and you can even see the floor now! That went to my head, and I started working on the closet in the guest bedroom. I have a couple more closets to work on, and then I’m going to re-organize the pantries.
But, meanwhile, I decided that I need to tame the boxes of junk and papers in the office. God, I’ll be at this for WEEKS! I took a stack at a time from the desk, and sorted it into personal things, and office business. I got all the office business finished so that I could work on the rest. It seems that I am relatively good about the office, to the detriment of our personal papers.
Part of the problem is that it isn’t always easy to decide HOW or WHERE to file a paper. I’m going to have to overhaul the files so that we can find personal papers once they are filed. It appears that we need an automotive file, with subcategories of repair, titles, and licenses. That was an easy decision. Dear Husband is on Medicare, and knowing what to keep of those papers would be a big help. Right now I have an over-sized binder, and I’m filing it all.
Today, I opened four banker’s boxes, one at a time, and went through everything, sorting it for filing tomorrow. I found a box with electronic equipment, so at that point, I brought up the bag of electronics from my closet and dumped it on the table. I now know what works and what doesn’t. Things that didn’t work have either been pitched out or saved for the electronics pickup. I must have a dozen sets of headphones, and six or more things that probably convert players from battery power to electricity. There’s a headset with a microphone attached. (I bet I could use it as a back up for the computer, for Skype.) I have a complete set of accessories for my CD player for the car, but no CD player. (It died.)
When I finish all this reorganization, I hope to be able to do my taxes. My closets and the office will be infinitely cleaner, and will look airy, and I will be one with the world. Until then……leave sweets on my table and go hide!
Critters and Such
I’ve spent a lot of time in the past two weeks looking out the windows in the kitchen and the “green” room. We’ve had a love affair with the wildlife around us, and frequently spend time watching what they are doing.
We’ve been amazed at the numbers of birds and squirrels we’ve seen lately. Normally we have about four or five grey squirrels under the bird feeders at a time. Of course, they don’t wear little name tags, so there could obviously be a lot more than four squirrels in the area. I was astonished to see thirteen of them under the feeders at one time, all playing well with each other. I started counting them, and called Dear Husband to the window because it was so unusual.
Later that same day, I called him back to the windows to see what had to be the re-staging of the Hitchcock movie “The Birds.” I have NEVER seen so many birds land under the feeders at one time. This was a very large flock of red-winged blackbirds. Those birds are not uncommon visitors, but we’ve never seen them in such numbers before. They covered the ground in a ten-foot circle, so tightly packed that you could barely see the ground, and almost as many were under the second feeder. They were with us for about fifteen minutes before exhausting the seed and moving on.
Mother and I used to have a game we played in the spring, as we watched life return to our area. There was a race to be the first one to say “I saw a robin!” Usually Mother or Dear Husband won that race, but I was looking out the same windows last week and saw a robin on February 27th! “Wait…..there are two. No….Look….THREE. By damn, there are FIVE ROBINS in my back yard!!!” I won the race, Mom. Did you send them to me???
Meanwhile, the shrubs around the feeder looked like Christmas. This winter we’ve had ten to twelve male cardinal visiting at one time plus a lot of lady cardinals. I’m sure they were watching the robins and red-winged blackbirds and felt they needed to get their numbers up. We did a fast count and figured we had seventeen or eighteen male cardinals that morning.
It’s been a wonderful winter, and it looks like spring is on it’s way to visit us. It’s been a joy to get to watch all our visitors.
Yet Livin’
I just can’t believe that it’s been more than a month since I last posted. Usually by now my youngest sister nags me to post, so that she can find out what I’ve been doing, but I saw her and her family just this past weekend and managed to avoid the nagging! lol
Frankie, her husband, her two college age daughters and two dogs came to visit last Saturday. They made the trip up on Saturday morning, thinking about the Portillo’s Italian beef that we planned to have when they arrived. I talked with my sister while they were en route, and took their orders, so that we could keep the delay to a minimum. As it was, I thought i might loose an arm to hungry people when they arrived. The dogs were pretty well behaved! *S*
The “girls” took a short shopping trip in the afternoon. We visited Sur La Table and picked up odds and ends. Dear Husband informed me that I needed to replace the pasta spoon that I’d thrown away. It was plastic, and it looked like we might have been eating little pieces of it as it shredded it’s layers.
From there we strolled through town, stopping at Adagio Teas, Penzy’s spices, and Starbucks. The weather was gorgeous! Not quite spring, but definitely not winter. i noticed that Frankie just declared that winter was over (on Facebook). I agree! My daffodils are about three, maybe four inches high, and they were covered with snow on Friday. I hope they didn’t mind the cold for a day.
We did Kitchen Sink Salad for dinner, and spent the evening chatting. Sunday, I tried to kill everyone with a groaning board of food. We did waffles, bacon, fruit, and an egg casserole for breakfast, and just before everyone had to make a dash for the car and the trip home, we made chicken fajitas. One of the best parts of the visit, well, after all the hugs, was the table conversation, although my youngest niece may want us to find more socially acceptable things to talk about at the table. (No more body function comments! lol)
The visit was just great! I SO miss spending time with them now that the girls have grown up. I suppose it’s an Empty Nester kind of thing, getting used to them beginning their own lives,
Sunday morning, between meals, my youngest niece asked to work with me on one of the tops for the Scraps on a Mission charity. We have been given a lovely run of red, white and black, and black and white fabrics, and I thought the material would make a striking quilt in 5-inch squares. We cut out the squares (the Olfa cutters were flashing!) and I let my niece design the top. I suggested diagonals of red, and then she echoed the red with the darker fabrics, and filled in the rest with the lighter fabrics. It’s a striking 40″ x 40″ quilt that I’m itching to quilt and bind. Thank you, sweetie, for the time spent with me, and for your generosity for my cause. I promise to post a picture when the quilt is finished!
And….by 2:30…they had to leave. Thank you all, right down to the littlest dog, for having visited. I loved having you here, and hope to visit with you soon. Love you!!
Charity
I have been incredibly busy with three charitable projects in the past couple of months. Let me tell you about them, briefly, I hope.
A dozen women in my exercise group wanted to sing for the vets at Hines VA hospital, and at a local nursing home. We met two times a week to learn the songs, and prepared a 20-25 minute program. I had a tiny solo in one song. The most difficult part of the rehearsal was learning simple movements. I tended to be the one going the wrong direction a good part of the time. The day of the performance at Hines, several of the men in class, and husbands of some of the performers drove us to Hines, and helped us with our presentation. We stayed to talk with the men, and that was the best part of our visit. We raised $205 in cash, and another $500 in personal products and books for the men. IT was a very satisfying experience. I’m so very glad I did it.
I also crocheted 50 six-inch squares for Share a Square. Shelly Tucker is working on assembling the last of 150 afghans for kids who are attending cancer care camps this summer. This will be the last season of this charity, and like many others, I’ll miss it. My crocheting knowledge grew this year. I’ve really enjoyed sitting with Dear Husband while I crochet in the evening. I’m looking forward to being able to see the delivery of the afghans to Camp Quality this summer. Thanks, Shelly, for providing such a lovely experience for us!
And……I have been working on lap sized quilts for kids in cancer care, and for adults at a local nursing home. Unfortunately, the wonderful woman who started Scraps on a Mission passed away a week before Christmas. I miss her terribly. I know the ladies want to continue the work she started, so I’ve been making tops and getting ready for a season of quilting. There will be pictures to follow, probably in a month or so. When my heart is heavy, piecing is a comfort, so these past two years I’ve made a LOT of quilted items!
I believe we all need to pay back our good fortune. I’ve been blessed with a good life and feel that I need to use my talents to do something for those in need. How lucky I am to be able to help others! Yea!!
Snow!
We have finally had a snowfall worth mentioning. Starting early this morning, a fall of the tiniest flakes imaginable began to coat the ground. It looked foggy all day long. By 4:30 this afternoon we had accumulated at least three inches of snow, with more to come.
Dear Husband was cleaning off the area in front of the garage, so I picked up the shovel and cleared the sidewalk. Before I finished, the area where I started was covered. I put down sand and called it quits for both of us.
Just to put your mind to rest, I am VERY careful about my snow shoveling. I use a lightweight molded plastic shovel, and do a lot of pushing, rather than shoveling. When I must pick up a load of snow, it’s small. Both Dear Husband and I have bad backs, so neither of us shows off when shoveling.
The snowstorm is expected to abate by tomorrow morning. I think we’re going to get more than they forecasted last night, but still an amount that is bearable. I had a haircut scheduled this morning, and had to be out when the roads had just started to slick up. There were too many people who were not driving defensively. One of the worst errors was not leaving enough time/room to safely break when they were following someone who was going to turn. I was muttering to myself about stupidity when I turned onto the major route through town, and discovered that I was behind someone going 25 miles an hour. *G*
If you are in the snow belt, drive safely. I can’t afford to loose ANY of my friends or family!
I
Ice
Yup…..the retention ponds had a light layer of ice on Sunday morning. It was supposed to be in the 40s today, so that ice didn’t last long. I think we’re supposed to have colder weather later this week, so the ice was just a taste of the coming winter.
I hope that winter has not shifted by a month. By March I’m really looking forward to warming weather to go along with the longer days. If January and February are supposed to be really crumby, then I vote for Spring to return early!!!