Monday, August 31, 2009

Should have pictures.....oh, well

Our nephew's wedding was Saturday....a lovely outdoor wedding and it was a beautiful day for it. It sure got chilly after the sun went down though. We left a little before 10:00 and you could see your breath. Brrrr..........didn't think I'd be saying that for a while!! LOL No pictures, of course. I was travelin' light. Well, not exactly, with bug spray & flashlights in my purse. Actually there wasn't room for the camera.

Sunday was the annual family get-together for my husband's side of the family. Rather poor attendance this year. Hmmmmmm.........could it be because everyone saw each other at the wedding the day before????

I've had some good luck with genealogy research this last week or so. Have you tried the pilot records search at www.familysearch.org? I found my great-grandparents' marriage license and my DH's great-grandfather's death certificate. I found that the search goes better if you capitalize all the names, otherwise it seems to miss things. Then I came home from work today and looked for a few more names. Kept coming up empty so I started doing Google searches for them and found a family tree for my DH's great-grandmother. It was all in German/Dutch and even translated it's difficult to work through it so I sent off an e-mail to the site owner offering to exchange information. Now I have to wait (impatiently) for him to reply. I'm hoping he can send me a report that consists of just DH's great-grandmother's line and not all the rest. I don't know what genealogy software he uses but it certainly does things differently from mine and I find it hard to decipher. It includes lots of things in the report though, like witnesses at weddings and christenings. I hope something comes of it.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

"Working my scraps......"



The piles on the right are considerably larger now and the pile on the left is a lot smaller. The pile of scraps and smaller pieces of material had all been ironed several months ago. I finally got tired of moving the pile and got busy cutting them into 3 1/2", 2 1/2", 2" and 1 1/2" strips. Smaller chunks get cut into 3 1/2" x 6 1/2 bricks. Pieces that don't work as bricks get put on a pile to be cut into smaller squares and short leftover strips get put in the "strings" pile. I have a tub of fabric odds and ends left to press & cut up and a copier paper box of smaller scraps. Right now my cutting hand hurts so the rest of the current pile will wait a couple days for me to finish.

I've printed out several patterns from QUILTVILLE.COM that I want to make some day. I have Fons & Porter's twosy/foursy book as well so I cut some 4 1/2" strips when the piece of fabric is big enough. There's a couple of those I'd like to make someday too. Judging from the amount of fabric I have to use I'll have to live to be a 110 at least.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Quilt finished

Here it is, the quilt my granddaughter will be getting for her confirmation/birthday gift. The pink & green match her room and her favorite color is purple. I hope she likes it. You just never know about teenagers, and she will be 14.

Once I finished quilting & binding those five quilts for the quilt show at the end of July I'll admit I was a little burned out. Quilting & binding this one is easing me back into sewing. Tonight I actually pressed some strips I sewed together quite a while back. They are black/white and will be the four patches in a Bricks & Stepping Stones that's been in the works for a year or more. The bricks are all handdyes that I cut up into bricks and strips. This one has sort of been my quilt club project quilt for all this time. When we don't work on some specific group project I take it along to work on.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

A long day

The sweet corn was ready today, so guess what I've been doing all day....right, getting sweet corn in the freezer. I expected to get out to the patch early and zip through picking it, but after over 4 in. of rain overnight I waited a while for the plants to dry off a little.......wet corn plants and 60 degrees didn't sound like a lot of fun. To top it off the wind blew like crazy sometime in the night & it was all flat on the ground. It's so much fun to pick when that happens. My back was killing me by the time that was finished and it still all had to be husked, scalded & cut off. Would you believe my husband wanted me to cook lunch????? He helped pick & husk so I guess he though he deserved to eat. What with all the messing around it was after 3pm before the first batch was ready to cut off the cob. It's all in the freezer now so that's done for another year. Just another one of those things on the list I like to get checked off. He went to Pierce tonight to get my peaches so sometime this week I'll be doing those......just love eating fresh peaches.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

What a zoo............

That's exactly what the library was yesterday and last night. I wonder if Monday evenings are always that busy............I don't usually work then. It was busy all day, then we had a Library Board meeting, then in the evening it was crazy busy and there was a Quilt Club meeting in the meeting room. Lots of bodies, all the computers running....the poor air conditioner couldn't quite keep up....or maybe it's just showing its age. I know the feeling some days.

I was hoping for a quiet evening so I could spend time with the quilting group but I could only pop in for a little bit from time to time because it was so busy up front. Our friend Lori from SD came to sew with us and I really didn't get much chance to visit with her. After spending the evening with the whole group she probably thinks we're as crazy as a cageful of monkeys. I think I offended a few stitchers with my efforts to keep the noise level down, but if the other patrons start complaining about the noise from the meeting room we could lose our free meeting space.

My neighborhood's been pretty quiet since Sunday evening when my neighbors got a citation for their barking dogs disturbing the whole area. I called the Sheriff's office Sun. morning after they barked for two hours straight & all day on Sat. It's amazing what a citation and the knowledge that they're going to court & paying a fine & court costs can do for keeping the noise level down. Of course it probably means they have to keep the two barking ringleaders in the house all the time, but hey, these are their beloved pets, right? They shouldn't mind living in close quarters with them. All I know is that I feel a lot calmer without all that barking.

The fun continues.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

I can hardly believe it myself..............

I stopped at the store after work to pick up a few things and found out I had won the $50 grocery drawing for July. Talk about surprised...........!!



In this post last January I tell about winning this drawing. What are the chances of it happening twice in the same year? Maybe it's just make up for all the years I never won anything.

Dog Update: Neighbors tell me they barked all day. When I came home from work there was one I'd never seen before in one pen, the one that used to be there had been moved to a pen at a different house and I'm not sure where a couple of them are. One of the Pit Bulls near me was trying to get up on top of the tarp again, still trying to get out. Right now the best I can do is hope for some strategic lightning strikes, but I doubt if I'm THAT LUCKY.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

My rep stands............

Here's the fine machine that has been occupying my time lately.



I'm fond of telling the kids at the Library that there's nothing they can do to the computers that I can't fix. I have a pretty good reputation for getting ailing computers working again.

This one presented quite a challenge. The owner reported popups & other problems. She tried to figure it out but finally brought it to me. Nasty bug, whatever it was. Wouldn't let me boot into Safe Mode, or load programs, or delete programs. Every time it rebooted it got worse. After a couple times it wouldn't reboot at all. The owner hadn't backed anything up so I rebooted from the XP disk and saved some stuff, but not being familiar with programs on the machine & where they stored things I missed some things.

Everything I tried, it shut me out of until all there was left was the startup screen saying how much memory it had & what disks it had. Couldn't even choose a boot disk to reinstall Windows. Finally cleared the BIOS and that fixed it enough to choose a boot drive to reinstall XP. Maybe my memory is faulty but I don't remember ever having to pull the Windows CD out of a computer at the first reboot during installation, but on this one I did. It just kept looping until I figured that one out. Lots of online research required in solving all the problems this one had.

It's ready to go home to its Mom now and has a full compliment of anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-everything software installed.

What I'd really like to do is put a curse on people who like to turn bugs like this loose on the Internet so that whatever they tried to do backfired on to them ten-fold.

Dog Update:
All quiet today...no barking...no dogs seen. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Further dog update: They're back in their pen & seem to be resting. Should be good & ready to bark long into the night.