Thursday, October 8, 2020
Wednesday, October 7, 2020
Sunday, October 4, 2020
design wall sewing started
Current COVID-19 US deaths: 214,280
Yesterday - 213,543
So before the debate, Trump was making fun of Biden:
“I don’t wear masks like
him," Trump said. “Every time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be
speaking 200 feet away from me, and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever
seen.”
Who's smarter now???
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My honey was up and out on Saturday (10/3), while I headed once again to my studio. After getting my blog out (a nightmare that took over an hour….my pictures would NOT transfer from my phone…I got a ton of weird errors and eventually had to shut down both phone and computer before things would work. Why can’t anything ever go smoothly?!?!?!), I spent the morning getting my first customer quilt cleaned up. I stopped to have a bite around lunchtime, and continued on to load up another customer quilt onto Xena. But I only got this far:
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| backing loaded, batting and top laid on |
when I said ‘I haven’t sewn in FOREVER and I want to sew!!!’ So I got the rest of my setting triangles cut and laid out:
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| Yes, one missing on lower right....couldn't find for the longest time... it was on the ironing board!! |
and started to sew:
It was a wonderful afternoon sewing and watching MURDOCK MYSTERIES!
It was date night Saturday, so Michael made popcorn and we watched MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY. If you’ve never seen it….you need to….it is delightful!
Saturday, October 3, 2020
customer quilt finished, cookies for golf pro
Current COVID-19 US deaths: 213,543
Yesterday - 212,702
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Michael and Cookie headed out for a walk on Friday (10/2) while I headed downstairs, determined to spend the day in my studio. I had to do a bit of clean-up and get my blog out and by then it was 10 AM and I decided I was hungry and needed some breakfast. With one thing and another, Michael left for errands (LOWE’s, CVS, pierogi store, liquor store, pet store) and I finally made it back downstairs around NOON.
I got my first customer quilt basted, and set up the program and loaded bobbins before kicking it off:
I think I picked a good color for the quilt thread....you can barely see it!
I worked on that all afternoon (with company):
and by dinnertime it was finished:
My honey made potato and cheese pierogis for our dinner while I continued to straighten up and throw out stuff from the living room….it is almost finished and we both love it!!
The golf pro’s birthday is on Saturday, and Michael asked if I could make some cookies for him to take, so that was a quick project after dinner….chocolate cookies….some with peanut butter cups:
Friday, October 2, 2020
gas housers, living room/kitchen disarray
Current COVID-19 US deaths: 212,702
Yesterday - 211,805
I'm sure you've heard that Trump and Melania have tested positive for this corona virus. But I'm sure there's nothing to worry about, after all he has a couple of cures:
4/23/2020 “Suppose that we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” Trump said at a White House coronavirus briefing on 23 April, before continuing: “Supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way.”
He then suggested that ingesting disinfectant might kill the virus: "Is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? It sounds interesting to me, so we'll see. But the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That's pretty powerful."
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Thursday (10/2) was just a crazy day at our house. First up, since we had fresh bread, Michael made gas housers for his breakfast:
After that we continued to move stuff around and continue to de-clutter until I ran out at 11 AM for a haircut! I got home after NOON and had a quick bite before weaving/knitting/spinning friends showed up at 1 PM:
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| Donna |
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| Rosalie |
Pam showed up around 2 (Bill is having radiation treatments every day, so that definitely interferes with her schedule) and we all had a good time out on the lanair.
Angie & Kevin showed up around 1:30 and I headed inside to help shove furniture around (stuff is still pretty much everywhere!!).
We still have a ways to go….and one of our chairs is missing (out being re-upholstered), but we already like the look of things.
It was leftover pizza for an early dinner, a couple of hours of reading and then a little TV before bed.
The best thing was...in clearing out the mirrored buffet, we re-found some beautiful glasses from one of our cruises, so that's what we were drinking out of last night....a fuzzy navel and a vanilla/cherry bomb:
Thursday, October 1, 2020
decluttering living room
Current COVID-19 US deaths: 211,805
Yesterday - 210,797
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My honey had a super early tee time on Wednesday (9/30), so I hopped up to make his breakfast before he left just after 7 AM….it was still kinda dark when he left!
After getting my blog out, Janice and I spent 1-1/2 hours on the phone….SKYPE still isn’t working for us and we don’t know why
:~(....especially since Michael pointed out that we had just SKYPE-d with Marc & Kate and everything worked fine.
After that I started to remove everything from our mirrored buffet in the living room. Along with new rugs, we’ve decided to re-arrange some of our furniture and that was the first step. When my honey came home (they played rather quickly. He said he didn’t play so much as work on his short game, which seemingly deserted him on Monday!), he jumped in to help de-clutter other parts of the living room. It was really nice to do it together so we could talk and ask each other whether or not we should keep things!
Our furry babies didn't quite know what was going on, but as usual, the kitties were fascinated by everything:
Michael ran out and got a pizza for dinner, and we spent the evening watching a silly movie (THE MEG), while I had a heating pad on my shoulder for most of the night. My right shoulder has been bothering me since before the beginning of the year (I remember complaining to my PCP at our January appointment), but washing 44 windows from the lanair really torqued up the pain. I thought maybe putting some heat on it might help…we’ll see.
I wonder if I'll ever get back to my studio???
STASH REPORT -
I did cut a bit of fabric during September....so I am up to 123 yards used so far this year!
Wednesday, September 30, 2020
bread, cookies, new rugs
Current COVID-19 US deaths: 210,797
2 days ago - 209,502
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Well – a day or so ago was the first time I’ve tried to include videos in the blog since BLOGSPOT moved to a new platform….and apparently they didn’t work for anyone :~). Sorry, because they were really cute.
Michael left before 8 AM for golf on Monday (9/28), while I did a quick bike ride and threw some laundry in. I did not have a good night’s sleep, so it was very hard to get moving in the morning. I finally got my blog posted just before the NOON sweep, and just headed back upstairs to read my book and doze :~(. Michael got home around 2 PM, with the antibiotics I now must take before any dental procedure, and I left at 2:15 for my dental cleaning. Everything went well and we had a quiet evening.
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My honey picked another beautiful bouquet of hydrangeas (as the weather gets colder, the flowers grow to a deeper color with more of a purple cast):
after which he took me out to breakfast on Tuesday (9/29). We went to Wendy’s and ate in the car before coming home :~). I spent the morning in the kitchen, getting bread made and a new recipe chocolate chip cookies made:
Michael and I have recently ordered new rugs for the hallway and the living room, and he wanted to put them out. But when we started discussing it, we decided we might want to re-arrange everything….so now our living room and kitchen are all in disarray as we figure out what we might want to do……
While we're deciding what to do, we're also cleaning out:
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Don't bother walking a mile in my shoes.
That would be boring. Spend 30 seconds in my head. That'll freak you right out.
Monday, September 28, 2020
Current COVID-19 US deaths: 209,502
Yesterday - 209,208
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I took a quick bike ride Sunday morning (9/27) while Michael had breakfast, and then we dove into finishing up washing our EZE Breeze windows. We were done by 1 PM and spent a pleasant hour on the lanair, enjoying the ‘cleaned up’ view!! Paula stopped down to drop off fabric for a quilt label, and my customer stopped by to pick up that beautiful batik quilt. She was thrilled with the quilting….which made me very happy indeed! Paula and I took a short golf ride to drop off more avocado peels and shells to Pam, and when I got home, I started to load up another customer quilt:
But by the time I got to this, my energy COMPLETELY deserted me and I just sat and watched TV for a bit.
I headed upstairs after that, to read my book, eat the yummy salad my honey made me:
and follow it up with the cold crab and fiery cocktail sauce he bought for dinner. We both read our books until after 8 PM, then settled in front of the TV.
I have to tell you...in the past when I have asked people to vote, the vote almost ALWAYS comes out 50/50, or if there is a little deviation, it is 49/51. But this time, EVERYONE liked layout #2....
which was my favorite as well!! So, I just need to get my setting triangles cut and then I can start sewing it together.
Sunday, September 27, 2020
customer quilt done, champagne & puffy things
Current US COVID-19 deaths: 209,208
Yesterday: 208,483
And for those
of you who think the current pandemic has been handled well, this is a
thoroughly frightening read (I know it’s long, but well worth it):
Months
before Bob Woodward’s book “Rage”
documented President Trump’s efforts to deceive Americans about the peril posed
by covid-19, Robert F. Kennedy’s twenty-six-year-old
grandson tried to blow the whistle on the President’s malfeasance from an
improbable perch—inside Trump’s coronavirus task force.
In April,
Max Kennedy, Jr., despite having signed a nondisclosure agreement, sent an
anonymous complaint to Congress detailing dangerous incompetence in the
Administration’s response to the pandemic. On the phone recently from Hyannis
Port, Massachusetts, Kennedy explained why he’d alerted Congress. “I just
couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I was so distressed and disturbed by what I’d seen.”
How did a
Kennedy end up in a sensitive role in the Trump Administration? After
graduating from Harvard, in 2016, Kennedy did some time at consulting and
investment firms; he planned to take the LSAT in March, but the pandemic
cancelled it. At loose ends, he responded to a friend’s suggestion that he join
a volunteer task force that Jared Kushner was forming, to get vital personal
protective equipment, such as masks, to virus hot spots. Kushner, he was told,
was looking for young generalists who could work long hours for no pay. “I was
torn, to some extent,” Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat, said. “But it was such an
unprecedented time. It didn’t seem political—it seemed larger than the
Administration.” And he knew people who’d been sick. So in March he volunteered
for the White House covid-19 Supply-Chain
Task Force, and drove to Washington.
On his
first day, he showed up at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management
Agency and joined around a dozen other volunteers, all in their twenties,
mostly from the finance sector and with no expertise in procurement or medical
issues. He was surprised to learn that they weren’t to be auxiliaries supporting
the government’s procurement team. “We were the
team,” he said. “We were the entire frontline team for the federal government.”
The volunteers were tasked with finding desperately needed medical supplies
using only their personal laptops and private e-mail accounts.
As the days passed, and the death count climbed, Kennedy was
alarmed at the way the President was downplaying the crisis. “I knew from that
room that he was saying things that just weren’t true,” he said. Trump told the
public that the government was doing all it could, but the P.P.E. emergency was
being managed by a handful of amateurs. “It was the number of people who show
up to an after-school event, not to run the greatest crisis in a hundred
years,” Kennedy said. “It was such a mismatch of personnel. It was one of the
largest mobilization problems ever. It was so unbelievably colossal and
gargantuan. The fact that they didn’t want to get any more people was so
upsetting.”
Kennedy
believes that the Administration relied on volunteers in order to sidestep
government experts and thereby “control the narrative.” He said that Brad
Smith, one of the political appointees who directed the task force, pressured
him to create a model fudging the projected number of fatalities; Smith wanted
the model to predict a high of a hundred thousand U.S. deaths, claiming that
the experts’ models were “too severe.” Kennedy said that he told Smith, “I
don’t know the first thing about disease modelling,” and declined the
assignment. (A spokesman said that Smith did not recall the conversation.) To
date, nearly two hundred thousand Americans have died.
The
volunteers were also instructed to prioritize requests from the President’s
friends and supporters. According to Kennedy, the group paid special attention
to Jeanine Pirro, the Fox News personality. Pirro, Kennedy said, was
“particularly aggressive,” and demanded that masks be shipped to a hospital she
favored. The volunteers were also told to direct millions of dollars’ worth of
supplies to only five preselected distributors. Kennedy was asked to draft a
justification for this decision, but refused. “Hundreds of people were sending
e-mails every day offering P.P.E.,” he said, but no one in charge responded
effectively. “We were super frustrated we couldn’t get the government to do
more.”
In the
end, the task force failed to procure enough equipment, leaving medical
workers, including Kennedy’s cousin, to improvise by wearing garbage bags and
makeshift or pre-worn masks. States were left to fend for themselves, bidding
against one another for scarce supplies. Kennedy was disgusted to see that the
political appointees who supervised him were hailing Trump as “a marketing
genius,” because, Kennedy said they’d told him, “he personally came up with the
strategy of blaming the states.” The response was in line with what Kennedy
calls the White House mantra: that government doesn’t work, and “that the worst
thing we could do was step on the toes of the private sector.”
Kushner
came by the fema office a few
times, once to ask the flailing volunteers what three things they most needed,
and promising fixes by the end of the day. He had “an air of self-importance,”
Kennedy recalled. “But I never saw a single thing that Kushner promised
change.” After two or three weeks of growing distress, Kennedy wrote his
complaint, addressing it to the House Oversight Committee, hoping that Congress
would step in. Meanwhile, the task force stopped meeting in person, because a
member tested positive for covid-19. In April,
Kennedy quit, and he has since gone to work on the Democrats’ 2020 election
efforts. He decided to defy the N.D.A., which he does not think can legally
stifle him from expressing his opinion, and he is featured in a new
documentary, “Totally Under Control,” from the director Alex Gibney. Kennedy
said, “If you see something that might be illegal, and cause thousands of
civilian lives to be lost, a person has to speak out.” The Administration’s
coronavirus response, he said, “was like a family office meets organized crime,
melded with ‘Lord of the Flies.’ It was a government of chaos.’’ (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/28/a-young-kennedy-in-kushnerland-turned-whistle-blower?fbclid=IwAR146u4ezfGzerubDa4I7DRhPDhHFqTNWdwrlEDyDfFy9anJUYJ_i2szpRM)
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I think it was still dark when Michael left for golf on Saturday (9/26). I picked up my last free bagel and then settled in to get my blog out. Once that was done, I finished off the second half of my customer quilt. Due to the pattern of quilting, I had a lot of ends to tie in for such a small quilt, but by mid-afternoon, it was done:
The back is almost as pretty as the front…
and for such a simple pattern, I think it is a beautiful quilt.
I got the wire for quilt hanging threaded through the library quilt and it is now hanging in my front hall. And you know something? The more I look at this quilt…the more I like it! You know, I had someone ask me why I continued to collect reading sayings when I didn’t think the head librarian at Indian Land would go for a quilt. Well, my brain finally woke up and remembered something. Originally, I never intended a reading quilt for the library…I wanted to make it for the 2nd or 3rd grade class at Clinton School. Then the teacher I was working with left….and after many tries over a couple years…no one from the school ever seemed interested in the quilts I was sending…or anything else….so I moved on. With all of those embroideries, I guess I started then to think about a library quilt….and here we are several years later. Maybe someday there will be one in our Del Webb library….who knows.
My honey came home from golf with a score of 86 and one birdie, but he had also had heart flutters yet again, so he sacked out on the couch for about an hour until he felt better. Cookie kept playing with her 'blankie' trying to entice him to get up (see videos at end).
By then it was 4 PM and we were both hungry, so we decided to start our date night a bit early. We did puffy things:
and saved our champagne:
to go with popcorn and Mrs. Maisel. We were celebrating the completion of the library quilt, surviving another week….and a serendipitous moment of ‘quelle horreur’ in the car :~).
Cookie saying 'dad!!! get up and play with me!!!'