short and sweet

I don't have much to share this week.  A nasty cold caught me last Monday afternoon and had me sleeping as much as I could.  It wasn't awful, but I hate how much it slows me down.

I managed to finish one book:

This one I enjoyed, though there were parts that slogged along, too.

Mary is the Mary you're probably thinking of - mother of Jesus.

Set when she was 14-17 or so, it is her story.  I'm not sure how much was real and how much was imagined, but if true, she knew Joseph before she became pregnant with Jesus.  I always kinda thought some kindly old man took pity on her, but apparently he was her age, a successful artist (carving not just wood, but apparently marble), somewhat well off and good looking and they wanted to be together for a number of years before the pregnancy.

It also tells how her family was kicked out of Nazareth and lived in the desert for a number of years.  Also something I wasn't familiar with, but not something I'd think was made up for this book.

The kicking out was political and there is a lot of warring going on to secure power and her family was caught in the middle of that.  The boring part is all these battles, but they do give you a sense of the dangerous things in this culture.

Mary was a spirited young woman with a mind of her own and parents who let her speak it, which seems dangerous and unlikely for this time, but I also can't imagine the fame she came into could have happened to a mousy, quiet woman.  A few times in the book, she was fleetingly referred to as a witch, but I'm not sure if that was a real accusation at the time.  But looking back at history, definitely I can see how that accusation could have been made of her with the right group of people.

It was enjoyable.  A new take on the bible story - well, a prequel I guess - but not preachy at all.  You know how it ends (she gets pregnant) of course, but I like knowing more.  (Science nerd Katie at her best!)

I also have another book by this author that I read years ago and liked enough to keep on the shelf ("Almost Adam"), so I guess I like this author?

Okay, that wasn't short.  But I also got a phone call from a friend and a text from the boss in the middle of things, so...

Once I was feeling better, the hubby and I canned another round of tomatoes from the garden.

Just 7 quarts, which is all my canner can handle at a time, so it worked out nicely.

And then I finished binding both baby quilts.  Lily helped.

Lily helps with everything.  Whether I want her to or not.  She claws and bites and yells if I tell her no.  I thought by 2 years old she'd have calmed down, but apparently she is working on the human timeline and it's the Terrible Twos.  Good lord, she just turned two.  It's gonna be a long year.

I promise to have full reveal photos of both quilts once I get the labels on.  Next week for the blog!

And yesterday we went to a Detroit Tigers game with the hubby's coworkers.  It was a management team building thing and since many of the managers opted to not go, spouses were invited to fill extra seats.  I'd never been, and it was a bus trip with all the details already worked out, so that was nice.

Inside the stadium, we ate at Bert's, as the sign says, because that is a family nickname for my hubby.  We got mac and cheese with smoked chicken and BBQ sauce on top.  It was delicious.  (And this photo is the only one I took of the whole experience!)

I've been to minor league games (we have a few teams nearby enough to have been a number of times), but this stadium was so much MORE!  The food vendors were so varied (schwarma next to mexican next to ice cream plus the regular hotdogs and peanuts on carts) and there were picnic tables to sit and eat so you didn't have to balance it on your knees and hope the guy next to you didn't knock your beer out of your hand.

It was also so clean.  The bathrooms, the floors, everything.

We had seats behind third base, which I guess is a good spot.  I'm not a big baseball (or any sport) fan, but the hubby said so and I believe him.  The weather was gorgeous, but that sun baked my face, so apparently behind third base is not the best on a super sunny day?

In all, it was fun.

And now I'm trying to play catch up from being sick.  I'm getting there, but still have a pile of chores to take care of.  Time to get back to them!

Happy quilting and gardening and reading,
Katie

no bats, little quilting or reading

If you read my post from last week you'll understand the no bats.  But really, it's what it says.  No bats were found in my house this week.

(Thank goodness because three in a week is the threshold where I need to call in a professional and with two last week, we were getting dangerously close!)

I also mentioned last week that I was going to quilt the baby quilts.

I did!

Freddie helped piece the backs.

I spread them on the floor to lay the quilt on top and see where to cut and this little nutcase burrowed right in.  At least twice for this back and once for the other quilt.

He's usually the chill, aloof cat.  Apparently not last Sunday.

Eventually I got both backs pieced and the longarm prepped and loaded.

Of course the colors are wrong here (why, oh why, can't my phone "see" the same thing I do?), but you can see the swirls going in!

This is the Colour Value Mystery Quilt Along from Canuck quilter.  The mystery is no longer available as a mystery, but you can purchase the pattern.  It's really well-written and easy to do and offers (I think) four sizes!

This will be going to my nephew and his wife for their third child.  If labor doesn't happen on its on before then, she will be induced Tuesday.

My father-in-law claims this will be a boy, but they have had multiple appointments where the docs tell them it's a girl.  I guess come Tuesday we'll see who is right!

Once this was done, I kept my "big girl panties" on and loaded up number two!

Again, it looks a little yellow, where the background is a nice white (with confetti squares), but whatever.  You get the idea.

This one got swirls also because I was being lazy and anything custom would just be insane.  (Also, it's a pattern that my longarm seems to tolerate well, even in its state of tantrum throwing.)

The pattern is a mashup of patterns from both of Lori Holt's Vintage Farmgirl books.

Binding has been attached and I've started the hand-sewing side of that, but this week has been a little busy again.

I had Monday off, but I went to lunch with friends, so that took a chunk of the day.  A fun chunk.  I haven't been able to join them in a while.

I worked Tuesday through Friday, alternating opening and closing shifts, which wears me out.  (Working till 9:30pm and then having to be back at 8am is not fun.  You basically start the day exhausted.)

Friday morning I got up and got my tire fixed.  I hope.

And then yesterday, Saturday, I got up and prepped to do a third round of this:

14 more quarts, though three didn't seal in this batch.  Not sure what's going on with that (one I could see had tomato seeds in the seal, but the other two?), but those got frozen, so all is well.  They'll be a little more work to use, but they didn't go to waste.

My house smells like canned tomatoes now.  Even with the windows open most of yesterday (it was cooler out and I'm not complaining!), but I guess it could be worse.

And THEN we headed to the in-laws for a cookout of hotdogs and s'mores.  Might be the last of the season, so I ate two s'mores and an extra marshmallow.

I have been reading, but not a lot.  For a few weeks my right eye has been giving me trouble (I have an eye appointment a week from tomorrow), so I've been wearing glasses instead of contacts and trying to limit my up-close stuff (reading, phone, etc) more to see if that helps.  I think it is, but I still want the doc to tell me it's nothing more than eye strain.  (Fingers crossed that IS all it is!)

So I haven't finished the book I started last week, but I'm enjoying this one, which is nice considering the two before it weren't so great.  I might finish it tonight, but the hubby also has a fantasy football draft this afternoon, of which I am expected to participate (someone has to get the names of the picks on the chart...), so we'll see.

Not much quilting, but I can't complain much about the stuff I've been doing.  I worked all summer to have those tomatoes to can.  I enjoy cookouts when the weather is a little chilly and family is always important.  And work allows me the means to have cats and make those quilts.

Time to go find a cheat sheet for the fantasy football (some dude makes a ranked list of players and the hubby uses that to help choose his team...can you hear my eyes rolling?) and get that printed.  At least it's at a place where I can order good bar food!

Happy quilting and reading and canning!
Katie

busy week, no sewing

What started out as a promising week (they all are!) got busy and I did zero sewing.

But that's okay because I did get some other things done.

Monday was quite a Monday...I got out of the shower to hear chirping.  I very much hoped it was a cricket, but it was not.  The cats had a bat.  And by had, I mean it was on the ground, but alive.  That made for easy disposal (I just scooped it up and deposited it back outside), but no less stress.

And then I got to the grocery store and my tire was flat.  The same tire that on Friday I had asked the guys at the tire and oil change place to look at.  They assured me it was fixed.  I have two air compressors at home that could fill it up, but none at the store.  Thankfully there was a nearby gas station with an air station, so I pumped it back up before heading home.

As I headed to work later that day, I was worried what else would happen, but the day passed without any additional major events.  Yay for that!

The remainder of the week passed fairly uneventfully (blowing up the tire a few times at home now that I know it's a big problem - eventually I'll remember to call the tire place when they're open (think bankers hours) and get a new appointment - since I bought the tires there, the repair is free, but I just have to coordinate a time when we're both available), but busily.  Though I can't tell you exactly how.

Work? Yep.  Anything else?  Ummmm.....

I did run to my local quilt shop for a back for the baby quilt.  Since both babies I've made quilts for are due in September, it's time to get this done.

It's directional and I'll have to piece it, but I can do hard things, right?

I did spend a little time this past week getting the longarm room tidied up.  It wasn't that bad, just hadn't been used in a while, so I cleared up the cobwebs and wiped down the table on the back where the cats like to hang out.

Today I plan to get both baby quilts quilted.  Fingers crossed the machine behaves.  (But the hubby is here to help me troubleshoot, so there's that.)

I did finish one book.

Last week I had just started it and had high hopes.

It was not a good book.

I mean, maybe 80-ish years ago when it was published it was good, but it was a story about nothing really.  Maybe it made more sense then?

A wealthy young couple is in the middle east, vacationing, and neither is happy.  A male friend is with them to make things more complicated.  They meet another couple (mother and son, but maybe not?) that makes things even more ridiculous.

Eventually they shake the extra people, but the husband ends up with typhoid and (spoiler alert - stop reading here!) he dies.  The wife wanders off into the desert and hitches a ride with a caravan.  The male friend is looking for her, along with a lot of other people, and of course eventually they find her.  But I think she's gone batshit crazy in the meantime.  Maybe she already was.

The descriptions of the landscape were nice.  But otherwise it was all just a bunch of words that I had to slog through.

Would not recommend.

It took all week to get it read because I just couldn't get into it and kept getting distracted and putting it down.

I'll start another tonight.  Hoping for a good one after two not so great ones in a row.

In other news (sorry, no cat photos again), I canned another 14 quarts of tomatoes yesterday, between resetting the pressure switch on the pump so we could have water.

(We have a plumber coming today to fix it - he was here yesterday and reset it, but the problem persists.  The hubby was going to replace it, but couldn't figure out how to get power to the pump off, even turning every off in the fuse box (he thinks), so a professional is in order.)

We also did the canning with the air conditioner off, though we didn't realize it.  In the process of turning everything off and on, the hubby managed to think the breaker for the A/C was not hooked to anything, so though the blower was going, the condenser outside was not.  Thankfully it wasn't super hot, but after a quick run for dinner and the house hadn't cooled one bit, we went investigating.  That one we figured out.

And THEN!  At 4am, I got up to use the bathroom and noticed some things amiss upstairs on my way back up and discovered the cats "pointing."  There was ANOTHER bat hanging from the molding around an upstairs closet.  Being stationary made it easier to swoop him to the floor and scoop him up and get him back outside with his friend from Monday.

So.

I hope we're done with drama for a bit.

Happy quilting!

Katie

catching up

This week has been more about catching up from the week away than quilting.  Of course, I'm also procrastinating finishing (quilting) three quilts, so I suppose there's a method to my madness?

I did sew some for the cat rescue.

Two more pieces of fabric knocked out and a third is cut and waiting for the actual sewing part...

This one is really cute!  Actually, since one of the volunteers purchased these on the last day JoAnn's was open, they're all pretty cute.  Way better than a stash purge, which is what I more often get.  But it doesn't matter.  The kitties don't mind.

I finished the last book I started on vacation...

I've read at least one book by this author in the past and remembered it was fairly good, so when I found this one, I snagged it.

It started out a little slow.  It's an autobiography of sorts, sharing stories of his time as a high school English teacher in New York.  Of course, the stories are all entertaining and funny, because who wants to hear about the boring stuff?

He categorizes himself as timid and quiet, but anyone who can have a teaching career of 30 years anywhere must be much less timid and quiet than they believe.  I think I would have enjoyed having him as a teacher - he seems to really care about the students and wants to connect with them in a way that makes them want to learn instead of just slogging through the material.

It was a good book, but I came away feeling like I only got a few minutes of highlight reels and not a real sense of his teaching for the duration of his career.  And like I said above, the boring stuff would have been boring, but also maybe fleshed it out a little more to realize it was more than chaos and trouble.

And next up, please forgive the photo on the cover, I had nothing to do with it:

The blurb on the back made it sound better than it was.

The story of a younger man who finds himself in the advertising business, I think either I didn't get the humor, or it wasn't nearly as good (or funny) as the blurb made me think it would be.

The man gets a job writing advertisements for American products that are slowly starting to trickle into Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.  But it seems he is either drunk or high or both a lot of the time, so we get a lot of ramblings while he is inebriated.  I have no idea if things he says are happening really happened, as they often seem improbable, but are also probably possible.  (I know it's fiction, but still...)

Most of the advertisements I don't understand.

Okay, a lot of the book I don't quite understand.

And towards the end, it sort of becomes one big conspiracy theory as well.

I think it is supposed to be literary fiction, so, you know, fancier words and longer sentences and bigger concepts and all that.  I think the fact it was set in Russia did not help me.

Would not recommend.  I don't even feel like I learned much about the Russian culture, which is the least I can hope for a bad book.

I started a new one last night.  It seems better.

And this morning, I got up and harvested the ripe tomatoes and currently have seven quarts processing in my canner!  The plants are just starting to yield ripe tomatoes (we've eaten a few of the really early ones), so there will be a bunch more to come, but since I didn't just go buy a bushel, they'll be processed about seven quarts at a time - all my canner can handle at once.

They have been delicious to eat as well.  I'd about given up eating tomatoes because those from the grocery store taste awful - even the "vine ripened" ones - but these fresh from my garden taste like delicious tomatoes!

Happy quilting and gardening and reading and canning!

Katie

PS No kitty photos today - last night Finn got poo on my bed in the middle of the night, so I ended up on the sofa while my sheets went in the washer.  I think there's a nap in the forecast today.  And maybe I'll remember to take some photos of the stinker?