Round the house

 I have been a busy, busy girl since I last posted.  Yeah, I know some of you have the impression that I am always on the go, and sometimes I am.  I can waste a lot of time online but I sure got a good bit of sewing done this week since my wi-fi was not connected for several days!  More about that in a minute.   It is almost 3:30 in the afternoon as I finish up this post and I still haven't checked email or facebook today--believe it or not!  Well, other than to retrieve a document I emailed to myself from the tablet to the desktop, that is.

I set up my base of operations in the kitchen, even though it is not my first choice.   Mainly, I did not want to take down the old Singer to set the New Home up.  I am going to take this one to the sew-in date and want to complete the project on the same machine.  Also I could keep an eye on the critters.  Often when I am at the kitchen table, Oscar just climbs back in his crate since the door is open.  Skyler takes "the upper bunk".  In fact, that is exactly where they are as I write this.

I have been asked to do a demonstration at the sew-in and I picked my method for making an existing block to share with the group.  Even though one designer (Deidre K. Brown) calls her's Split Decision and another Christa Watson calls her version Puzzle Boxes, both of those use entirely different methods to arrive at the same place.    I know because I own both patterns.   I used charms so I'm calling mine "Charming Boxes."

I had hoped to have at least part of the quilt top together for an example.  This morning I made 4 more blocks just to have a bit more variety.  I was using Beach House by Kate Nelligan for Moda.  One of the fabrics included in the line was stylized waves and it just did not translate well to this block pattern. There went 3 out of the mix.  I need 40 blocks for a donation quilts so 2 were not going to make the cut anyway.  I may stick the extras on the back though so they won't go to waste.   Also there were dupes of the fish net looking one in multiple shadings so it was harder to keep those scattered.  Oh well! Initially I had not wanted to use the buoys but those ended up in the mix.

I holed up in the master bedroom arranging and re-arranging the blocks.  Even after I took the picture, I swapped out a couple more.  I have already told you how I feel about moving one and then moving half a dozen more as a result of that first decision.   I am going to use that orange-y red for the binding and backing so that I added a bit more of.  There is one more row that goes on the bottom but I ran out of flannel backed table cloth.  I probably will try to get at least half the top done once I am done with this post and then pack up the sewing stuff.  I hate this mess and clutter all over the kitchen!

My poor critters are getting short shrift this week.  Here Skyler is trying to get me to feed him his treat bite--he had already had it---and I wasn't paying him much attention, other than to take his picture.  You can see below that he was not straying too far away from his food bowl just in case I saw the light?  LOL.

 I finally buckled down and did the taxes on Saturday--while I still had an operational printer.  Turns out that was a good plan.  I may have mentioned that I was going to upgrade to a new desktop as I also had to upgrade from the old Vista platform.   Chrome was not going to recognize it, Microsoft was probably not going to either or already didn't.  The cable company said my modem was outdated for their increased speeds.  And so on---time to bit the bullet.

Well, Sunday was the day to get those boxes opened up after they had sat in the sewing room for 3 or 4 days.  As if my brain was not fried enough after dealing with the tax forms the day before!!  I got things hooked up fairly easily till I got to the wi-fi connection and the printer.  I could NOT get it hooked up.  I could not find the disc for my printer and it is old as well. Now what?  I figures too that I had just gotten new ink cartridges for the old one.  Had to in order to send in those tax forms and have copies for my files.

 I got on the phone with Dell support on Sunday evening after trying and failing.  With the help of the CSR, we picked out a new router and printer.  The router is the same brand as my modem so maybe they would talk to each other better.  The printer is wireless though it would not have had to be.  The price was good.  Those arrived yesterday afternoon.

Oscar has spent a good bit of time outside lately.   I have not actually had to make him go out either.  Sometimes he doesn't want to come back in necessarily but I know he needs to eat or drink.   He has fresh water but doesn't always drink from it.  He gets in and wants out and vice versa.

I had Belles on Tuesday so he HAD to go out even though rain threatened.  We broke up early with just 4 of us there.  I was working on my blocks.  Jane was helping Beverly and Lois pin their tops.  Lois and Jane left soon after.  I waited with Beverly till her husband came to take her too lunch.  Jack invited me to go with them but I declined so I could go rescue my poor pooch.  I think we had 1.5 of rain overnight Tuesday but he did not get caught in it.

Wednesday was super busy!  I stayed home from walking and got up at 6:30 which was probably a good thing.  3 loads of laundry, grocery errands, other errands, sewing blocks ( I did get done with the numbers required for the top!)  The Fed Ex guy arrived in the lane just as I was getting back from lunch and the grocery errands.  LOL, I was at the mail box in the car when he was coming up the lane from the other end of the loop and he needed in my drive after I pulled in.  He had the printer and router and asked where I wanted them.  I said there by the door was okay but he said, "I can take them inside for you if you want".  Sure!  "Put them on the kitchen table--oops!  Forgot about the sewing machine and all that mess."   He carried them to the living room and I took it from there.    Not too much problems with the hookups but I will have to see what I need to do yet to print wirelessly.  Either I have a "dumbphone" or it is operator error.  Must have missed a step or don't understand what I am to do exactly.  It works fine even though I did have to email myself the revised copy of the handout once I finished tweaking it.  I've been doing that for months anyway.

I was happy when the neighbor's son Paul met me in the lane on his way to pick up some sub sandwiches.  He said his mom would only eat half of hers and to come on over if I wanted to share it with her.  Good food and good company.  After the day I had, I didn't have much energy to want to do much more than throw some yogurt in a bowl.   Crashed and burned once I went to bed too with only a wakeful time around 3:30.  Once I got back to sleep, next thing I knew it was 8:30!  Surprised Oscar wasn't barking or Skyler meowing to get back in the room.  Oscar some mornings is not ready to get up and doesn't even if the door to the crate is open.  Today he almost knocked me down trying to get out to potty!

I DO intend to share the tutorial for my method here on the blog but after the sew-in. Rather than print off umpteen copies of a 6 page document, I will take email addy's for the group or they can look at the instructions here.  Some do not do email or facebook so they can have the few copies I did run.  That was more or less practice to see how the printer software worked anyway!

I had thought about making cookies to take tomorrow but I couldn't decide between Pride of Iowa oatmeal cookies or my favorite, White Chocolate Macadamia Nut.  I will eat more than I should of either of them so they have to be shared.   Also the day is half over, I'm already tired and still want to sew at least half of this quilt top together.   The only other thing I think bake at this point is Apple Butter Bread from Sweet Pea's Kitchen but that's mostly since I just opened a big jar of the stuff when I didn't have any jelly for PBJ the other day, LOL.  I'm out of the notion of wanting to cook anyway short of something for supper.  I told Paul I would make some potato salad for the A game viewing I am invited to attend to go with the burgers he is going to grill.  I was talking with his mom (my neighbor) about the menu before I sat down to write this.  Paul gets the Alabama games on his sports package and invites 4 or 5 others to come watch it.

I know I am all over the map with this post.  I know what I meant even if I have you totally confused.  That's what kind of week it has been--don't know if I am coming or going!  Break over and back to the blocks as I replace one machine for another.   Then I MUST unload the dishwasher from two days ago and re-load.   No knives left in the silverware drawer, after all.

one more time

I do not know what happened to that picture of Skyler yesterday.  I have tried doing it nine different ways from Sunday by now.

The oddest thing is that IS there when I first post it.  Then it seems to disappear  leaving only the dreaded red X in its wake.  What’s more, Firefox does not even show the red X but IE does. 

Meanwhile I am probably just filling that Picassa web album with all kinds of shots of the same picture though I did not look yet to verify that.  Color me clueless at this point.  What in the heck am I doing wrong here?  Is this going to last forever?  It is not showing up on anyone else’s computer either.   I tried to edit the post---browse button is grayed out but it acts like it is loading (click done shows up)---no url code appears.

Thinking that perhaps the picture was too large I resized it---after all, I am using a new digital camera though I normally don’t play with any buttons on it.  So, I’ll try this one more time………………….

contrasts in style

At left my wedding quilt---Mom had started this top as a pass around project with the small quilt group in her town. I believe it was in the late 90's as I made a couple blocks for her after we moved south to Alabama. Not being able to find the pattern name or source, we named it "Fall City Baskets" after the one we saw in an antique store while visiting my grandmother who lived in Fall City, Nebraska at the time.

I have probably told you this story before but my husband and I were a couple for a very, very long time before we got married--one of those "are you sitting down?" moments when informing my parents. This top went to the hand quilters soon after my call. When we traveled back to Illinois to visit some months later, my family gave us a wedding reception and we were presented with the quilt and a trip to Sea Palms Resort on St. Simon's Island, GA. What fun! I love the quilt as it uses my beloved 30's prints, some real ones and repros. Mom has since replicated the quilt for herself--only fair since she gave us the original one.


So what should I see at the quilt show a couple of weeks ago? This one---wider handle, less "petals" in the arc. I believe that the owner/maker? said that the pattern was found in a magazine. Close but not quite it. Mom drafted hers up from the picture of the one we saw so that might account for some of the variances. While I like the scrappiness of the one at the show (and I am a nut for yellow fabric), I think mine is prettier and not as clunky looking.

I haven't even touched the machine in two days. I guess I have still found a way to wait till almost the last minute to work on that round robin after all. Two blocks are done, one is just barely started and I need 5 of them.

So what have I been doing instead? A big chunk of one day was spent getting an upgraded tracfone coded in over the phone and then adding the phonebook to it while deleting the numbers from the old phone. I guess the system in my area is switching from the old analog type and that would render the old phone useless. I didn't have to pay for it except for the time involvement. I kept messing up the text for the names and it was taking way longer than it should have to teach this old broad some new tricks.

Yesterday it was uploading some CDs into my music software and re-loading the MP3 player--twice. Danged error messages were messing up the works and only half of what I wanted got added due to some snafu or another. How could I upload to their software and it not recognize the format I used??? Annoying and again, time consuming.

What I DID get done instead while I watched the computer screens was some more knitting rounds on my headband tube to cover my ears while I walk (the ear muffs are pinchy and my hat makes my head sweat too much). I think I am about halfway there. I told Cher the other day that I would be lucky to have the thing done by spring but perhaps that was an exaggeration, LOL. Great ambitions to knit up some mittens from the same "Lipstick" Red Heart yarn---now that probably WOULD take till spring. DJ said I could make him some new headcovers from that pretty yarn---yeah, right! Two sets of those was enough, thank you very much.

On the trying to get fit front, this week I've added an afternoon stroll up and down our little lane a couple of times--a bit of an incline on both ends to boost the calorie burn but still haven't started my strength training though I have my ducks in a row. Definitely getting the 10, 000 steps thing in--more, if I have errands to run. I sometimes add an extra lap around the park as I did this morning making it 3.08 miles. My neighbor's are having a garage sale and have a bike for sale---I have considered it but then think of the added expense of a helmet, bike rack and probably will pass especially since I won't even get on DJ's exercise bike and pedal to nowhere. Keep walking for now.

So back to the machine with me and some stuff I have taped on the DVR--have my own little "Cold Case" and "Without a Trace" marathon this weekend.

aha!

I learn something more about html everyday. Good thing! Someday when I don't have much of anything else I feel like doing I AM going to review the chapters on the web design self study I had done before. It is a challenge to me and makes those brain cells work a bit plus makes me a little bit better informed for tweaking my blog template.

Pam commented to me yesterday off post that I didn't have a view profile link on my blog. I knew I didn't because I had not wanted it to say "About Me" like everyone else's set up. There are other ways to get there if you really want to see it, I had though. BUT there is that challenge again--see if I could put it back in.

I know Finn has the same blog set up as I do Bowman's Minima which is somewhat of a blank slate so I snuck a peek at how it SHOULD read, got my own profile html to plug in and the view button is back. BUT it was not aligned at center. No biggie but it sorta bugged me when the rest of it was where I wanted it.

The light bulb just went off--you have to have the paragraph opening and THEN the centering tags---not the other way around and of course, the closing tags in the same sequence. No wonder it hadn't worked before. I finally have the graphic garden and power blogger button centered, the view profile tag that I just added back too----only took me a year to figure this out, LOL.

Not much going on here this morning. We have had some rain but the temps are hovering in the mid 30's. If the freezing stuff comes, it will depend on what the temperatures are later in the day and naturally, if we have precipitation. Electricity is still on though I know that others in the US are not so lucky with this wild winter weather. I threw some beef stew in the crockpot for supper and baked a spice cake from a free with "over 25 bucks purchase" at Winn Dixie. (still gotta frost it) So a few more stitches in the May snowman---basically just a clump of flowers and this thing is done. I'll quilt a bit after lunch if I feel so inclined but something tells me I'll keep putzing with this block if only to have a quilty picture for "blog fodder".