Another Vehicle At Our House

Kerry finally found what he wanted. It's a 1976 John Deere tractor with a front loader. He already has all the stuff that goes on the back (brush hog, etc.) but he wanted the front loader.

So here is the list of vehicles that run that are on our five acres:

Honda Element
Volkswagen Jetta turbo diesel
Volkswagen Van (old)
Porsche 911 (old but classic)
Victory motorcycle
Chevy farm truck (old)
Two riding lawn mowers
ATV
Rokon off-road bike (used by hunters but he doesn't hunt)
1956 Ford Tractor
1976 John Deere Tractor with front loader

And

My 2007 Prius.

Halloween, Snow And A Brave Cat

My daughter-in-law Julia loves Halloween; it's her favorite holiday. She sent photos this morning of their first Halloween party in St. Louis.

It turned out to be an afternoon affair complete with homemade goodies and pumpkin carving. They had the party early, because Julia and most of their friends will be playing in the symphony Saturday night.

Another photo came this morning from my brother who lives in Evergreen, CO. It was taken at 4:45 a.m. when the snow was falling on their deck. Just reminds me why I don't want to live in snow country. He loves it, however. Supposed to have three feet in Evergreen today. Schools are closed. He, however, has to work.

As you may remember, we have three Labrador retrievers and two cats here this week. Harry and Darlan are here because their puppy raiser Lia had to go to Vancouver Island for the birth of her first grandchild.

It was even crazier when our friends Steve and Janet were here for two nights earlier this week with their young lab. The cats have kept a pretty low profile during all of this dog chaos.

That is until this morning when Nora, she's the cat on the left in the photo, decided to come into my sewing room where three dogs were sleeping. They chased after her but she was undaunted; she found a place on a soft blanket where she was unreachable by wet noses and settled in.

The dogs sniffed and tried to nuzzled her; she didn't budge. When SHE decided she'd spent enough time in the room, she left with the dogs in hot pursuit, but they didn't outrun a very swift cat.

So that's life at our house. Kerry is having his surgery right now to remove the basil cell carcinoma from his face. I'll keep you posted on that.

Quilt Show Purchases

Mostly I bought colorful silks to go in my next Rose Hughes piece. The photo of what I'm making is shown in the lower center of the photo. To the right is my new rotary cutter that will make scalloped edges. The purple fabric under the rotary cutter has the scalloped edges. I also got to other blades to use to make different edges. The yarn came from a wonderful booth that had yarn for knitters and yarn for fabric artist.

The other big news I hinted at the other day is that I sent the fabric art I made for Rose Hughes to her; she featured it in her blog on Oct. 15, 2009. http://ravenspeakquilts.blogspot.com

She referred her readers to my blog; I've had many new visitors that way. The fabric art she posted today is just plain amazing. Hope you enjoy it all.

Having friends for lunch today. I made a curried butternut squash soup. Fresh tomatoes and a chunk of great bread will round out the meal.

The Quilt Show

My friends Mary Jane, Patricia and I had a great time at the Pacific International Quilt Show in Santa Clara, CA. I have never seen so many outstanding quilts in one large area. "Outstanding" really doesn't do them justice. The show made me realize just how many amazingly creative art quilters there are in the world. My friend Marylee won third place for her wearable art. I'll try to find a picture to show it to you in another post.

This show specialized in art quilts, fabric art and wearable art, which is what I specialize in now; well, for the last two weeks ;>))

The top quilt is from a woman in South Africa. I'm not quite sure how she did it, but I suspect there is a lot of folded fabric in it The second one is an applique quilt done in a very different way. I think if you click on the photos you can see an enlargement.

There were literally thousands of quilters attending this event and hundreds of vendors. Luckily we went to the preview on Wednesday night when there weren't many people there. I could get a sense of the show without the shoulder-to-shoulder people who appeared the next day. And, of course, during the preview I bought something I needed. Well, okay, wanted.

We stayed across the street from the Convention Center at the Hilton Hotel , which was a real treat. Since I retired, I haven't stayed in many of these. In fact,
my Hilton Honors card had expired. The desk clerk was nice enough to fix that.

I forgot my pillow, which was a bummer. The bed was good, but the pillows were way to hard for me. But after walking miles in the convention hall I managed to sleep amazingly well both nights. One thing that helped me with the walking was my Sprongs. It's a shoe with a spring (literally) in the sole and the heel. My hips and knees did not bother me at all. I had brought along pain patches (love them) and Tylenol but didn't need either.

I do love staying in this type of hotel because you can drop your towels on the floor and someone else picks them up, there is room service and a bar and restaurant where you just sign for stuff.

Mary Jane and Patricia had different plans for dinner so I dined in the hotel both nights. The first night I had a rather unacceptable seafood pesto tortellini (not enough garlic or basil) but the second night I struck pay dirt with a spinach salad with feta cheese, walnuts and pear. The pear turned out to be from a can so I didn't eat it.

This morning I had room service. Divine. One thing that was a shock was the quality of the in-room coffee maker. It was a Cuisinart, which made one or two cups...in the cups. It was good coffee and they had real half and half. Well that's all for tonight.

Tomorrow I'll show you what I bought and something else very exciting.

Harleen Resting

She was spayed today so is home resting under a blanket because she was shivering. Pretty dopey from the meds. Our vet said that some people don't want to pay for post-op pain meds. She considers that cruel so gives them something even though no one pays for it. We paid for Harleen to get the full dose.

Vet also found a foxtail in her nose. I thought she had one from yesterday when she spent a good part of the afternoon searching for cat and turkey poop on the property. This involved a lot of sniffing. One of those sniffs brought the offending foxtail into her nose. I saw it; not a pretty sight.

She also had her nails trimmed so she is ready for a date and no need for condoms.

That's all; 1.4 inches of rain so far today. Going to my bookgroup tonight. Discussing Thrity Umrigar's book, "The Space Between Us." Great book.

Fabric Art: The Learning Process

I had so much fun creating this artwork; it's 18" x 24". I've always had trouble following directions so this is a perfect form of fabric art for me. There really are no directions. I started this piece in Rose Hughes class a couple of weeks ago. See www.rosehughes.com for my inspiration. She is amazing.

I left her class with the fabric part put together and lots of ideas on how to embellish it. I was really stymied at first. Couldn't let go of the idea that there must be something I should do. I would wake up during the night thinking about the piece. Then I realized I could do anything I wanted.

I started very hesitantly on the outer fabrics. I learned to love beads; I own a lot more now that I did before the class. Plus I made several of the little puff balls from wool roving that I talked about in my last blog. They are decorated with beads too. One has a bright purple button; looks like an eyeball.

But the center was staring blankly back at me. Then I got the idea for the backwards "C" in the middle. I think of it as the Milky Way. The best part of all of this is if you don't like it you can take it out and start over.

I kept wondering when I would be done; somehow I knew just a few minutes ago. Click on it to bigify so you can see some of the smaller details.

I'm absolutely in love with this type of quilting. No rules and lots of bling.

Next on my sewing table is a pattern from Rose Hughes; it's a landscape that measures 35 x 35. This one is going to take a bit longer. It's called a "New Pathway." Thank you Rose Hughes.

A New Use For Knee High Nylons

This is what my work table looks like these days ever since I took the Rose Hughes class. It's all about using your imagination with fabric and embellishments. The term "embellishments" is a very broad one.

In the foreground by the scissors you see five little puff balls of color. They came from the funny looking nearly sausage-like thing right above them. Above all of this is wool roving that I bought on line. It's one pound of 12 different colors. You use the roving plus 3 layers of batting to form little colorful balls, which you place in the knee high nylons; you tie a knot after the ball and then go on to placing the next colorful ball in the nylon. I got 13 balls in one sock. Then you put the whole thing in the wash with your clothes; once it's done washing then you put it in the dryer. The best part is when you open the sock and find the little colorful puff balls you've created.

I've sewn beads on some of the puff balls and used them on the abstract art piece I'm creating. You will see it eventually. It is so much fun to create art this way. More on all of this later.

A Look Back At Giddiness

I was a bit early with my fall giddiness. The new fleece jacket I ordered in early September was not worn until yesterday. We had many 100+ days that were made more unbearable because I was really ready for cool weather.

But it finally happened yesterday when we woke up to a cold wind blowing through the house. It wasn't cold by Midwest standards, but it felt lovely. My sister was shocked that it was that cold. People never realize that we do have all four seasons in California; they are just more moderate than theirs.

Also, I saw my first white-crowned sparrow foraging for food under the bird feeders. They always visit for winter. He/she must have gotten the memo that the heat was gone. The Northern Flickers won't be far behind. Their rat-a-tat-tat on our eaves is their seasonal hello. That loosens up the insects for a Flicker meal.

I have five quarts of beef stock in my new freezer so I'm set to make soup for those cold nights that I am anticipating with glee.

The photo is for you cat and dog lovers. It's Harleen and Nora cuddling. Taking Harleen to the dog park today for the first time. As a service dog in training she wasn't supposed to go, but now that she's a "pet" she gets to go.

Puppies and Visitors

I'm a bit behind in blogging. We've had lots of overnight visitors and other distractions that have kept me from my keyboard. Lia, a puppy raiser and breeder caretaker for CCI, and her son Isaac came last Saturday on their way to Santa Rosa to turn in seven adorable 8-week old lab puppies at Canine Companions for Independence. She had the pups mom, Darlan, with her as well as Harry, Harleen's brother. With Harleen that totaled 10 dogs.

The pups were so much fun to snuggle with. I could sit and watch them play for hours. Harry and Harleen, as you can see, had their own special way of playing. Harry is the brute in the red collar. He is due for turn in to advanced training on Nov. 21st this year. Lia took him to Santa Rosa for hip x-rays to see if he has the same problem Harleen has. I sure hope not.

They all left on Sunday morning (9 dogs and two people in one car) and on Monday my sister, her husband Neil and son Adam arrived. Today we are headed for Lake Tahoe where it promises to be a lot cooler than here. It's been in the high 90s and low 100s since they got here. Neil and Adam fly home Saturday. Vicky gets to stay an extra week. Yippee.

Where I've Been For The Last Two Days

Her name is Rose Hughes; she created the piece pictured here. If you want to see more of her wonderful works of art go to
http://www.rosehughes.com

This piece is entitled Pathways I and it's 30" x 30".

I can't even begin to explain her process for doing this. It looks more difficult than it is.

She has a book out called "Dream Landscapes" which tells how she does it. If you are a quilter and are thinking about art quilting, her book is the place to start. Or better yet her class. She's teaching a painting on fabric class next year at Sisters, Oregon. I intend to be there.

You have to let go of your inhibitions and forget everything you learned about quilting. Just go for the gusto. I had so much fun. And she is a great teacher.

Our Freezer Is Full

Here it is in all its 7.5 cubic foot glory. Beef on the top two shelves. Then pork and then chicken and beef bones on the bottom. Lamb on the door. Our ice maker in the refrigerator freezer is turned on for a change. There is lots of room to make tomato sauce and stash it in the refrigerator freezer. I'm a very happy locavore today. All that meat is pasture raised from the surrounding area.

A Small Freezer For A Locavore Family

We have been thinking about this purchase for quite some time. We have a wonderfully larger freezer drawer on the bottom of our refrigerator. But as we get more and more into eating locally, we were fast running out of space. In fact, we had turned off the ice maker to make room for pasture-raised meat from the meat club. We don't need anything really big. The one pictured here is from Sears. It's 7.5 cu. ft. It's about 46 inches tall and 25 inches wide.

We will not have boxes in our freezer as the picture shows. This will probably be where the meat goes each month. I'm tired of pulling everything out of the current freezer to find what we want.

Sears had a sale so it was $303 before tax. I thought that was a pretty good deal. We pick it up on Tuesday. Another big step into the locavore world.

Kentucky Reunion

I've been struggling with how to write about the reunion. The food was fabulous, the setting (as you can tell from the pictures) was fabulous and the people were so friendly and warm. So what do I write about?

Here's the link to my photos. Paste it into your browser.
http://picasaweb.google.com/countrygirl12445/KentuckyReunion2009#

Answer: The fact that I am jealous of a family that cares so much for each other that people travel many miles to be there once a year to celebrate the fact that they are related. No bickering just lots of love and joy. I don't think it's just southern hospitality. I could tell by the way they interacted that they really like each other.

No wonder my brother loves his in-laws so much. They love him warts and all.

That's what I wanted from my family. My parents did not set a very good example. My dad stopped speaking to his older brother in 1948 over a disagreement about $400. They died on the same day of the same horrible disease, emphysema. So we never really saw that part of the family. I have cousins I've never met.

Kerry has the type of family that I wanted; they really love each other and have fun together. So my brother and I both found great families. I wish that for everyone.

Giddiness

I felt an excitement this morning when I woke up. At first, I couldn't figure out why. But then it hit me, it was the second day of September; once again we had made it through another northern California summer. Not that the heat is over with entirely, but we are closer to the end than we were a month ago.

Summers are tough for me. The heat can be nearly unbearable (not Phoenix unbearable) but unbearable enough to make me feel like a prisoner in my own home. We close up the house so it feels like a tomb; that saves on the electric bills.

I worked hard to make the best of it. Quilting really helps; I get focused on a project and I forget that if I got outside I would practically melt. It's weird, but my sweating is mostly confined to my head, especially behind my ears. Very weird.

But here I sit on the precipice of fall. I'm ready.

To celebrate I ordered a new fleece jacket. We keep the house pretty cold in the non-summer months so fleece is the way I dress. I'm getting a beet red, zip up polar tech fleece. It should be here some time late next week.

I can bring out my soup recipes soon and get ready to go for evening walks without fainting from the heat. And pretty soon the rain will turn the hillsides a lush green.

Meanwhile we are off to Ohio and Kentucky tomorrow for my sister-in-law's family reunion. Never been before and really looking forward to it. Back on Monday. See you then.

One Local Summer: Final Meal, Week 13

This is one of two meals that I cooked this week with local ingredients.

First, a pot roast in my crock pot. Last Tuesday I got beef bones from one of my favorite vendors at the farmer's market in Roseville, Chaffin Farms. I've been making chicken and vegetable stock all along but had not tried my hand at beef stock.

These bones provided a tasty step toward that stock. I added the bones, garlic, onions, a potato and a few carrots and cooked it all for about 12 hours.

I poured the stock over the chuck roast in my crock pot. Added my usual carrots, potatoes, more onions and seasoning and let it cook away for 8 hours. It was the best pot roast I've ever made; I really think the stock made all the difference.

Second, we had friends for dinner last night. Kerry barbecued tri-tip as usual (I had to make another batch of barbecue sauce). I made spinach, mushroom risotto using homemade chicken broth from Chaffin Farm chickens. I love risotto in any form; even though it was 107 outside I managed to keep stirring without melting away. I had the air conditioning turned down to 76.

I had planned to serve sliced tomatoes from our garden but all of a sudden our orchard had a bunch of ripe pears, and I had blue cheese and walnuts. So a salad of home grown pears, roasted walnuts leftover from last year's farmer's market and bleu cheese topped with a vinaigrette dressing.

I also made salsa for the first time to go with chips (not homemade) for an appetizer. We had cantaloupe for dessert. It was so sweet.

This week I want to try my hand at making sun dill pickles. I'll let you know how it all turns out.

Harleen News

She has hip dysplasia, which is not good. CCI will be releasing her from the program. We will adopt her. No question there. I have not talked to the CCI vet yet to get anything more than the diagnosis.

So, how do I feel; very sad. I'm surprised at that. But after some soul-searching and talking with Kerry, I've realized that one of the reasons I wanted to be a puppy raiser is that I thought this would guarantee that I would not have to watch another old dog die. I would just keep getting puppies and turning them over for advanced training. Somebody else would witness their demise.

Prior to CCI, I rescued Golden Retrievers who had been abandoned or given up. I took the old ones because at the time I had a very small backyard in Alameda. Emily came into my life when she was abandoned in the night box at the Fremont pound in the Bay Area. She was sweet, docile and loving. I bought a dog handicap ramp for her to get into my SUV. She couldn't jump and I couldn't lift her. I fell in love and adopted her. Kerry and I moved her to the country with us. She developed epilepsy and died about a year later. That was so hard.

When I heard the news about Harleen, I relived the night we went to see Emily after she had died at the emergency vet clinic in Roseville. She just wouldn't stop seizing no matter what the vet did.

So now Harleen is categorized as "Change of Career" or COC in CCI jargon. She's not quite sure what to do with the new freedom she has now as a pet. We need to get her spayed. Then we will face whatever needs to be done for her hips. A part of me wants another puppy sometime in the future; maybe this time I won't have to watch it die. That's the news for today.

Death

I recently found a Rufous-Sided Towhee dead on our front porch. As you can see, they are beautiful birds who visit us only in the summer when they come to the suet feeder. They like the peanut butter best.

I suspect he died when he flew into a window of our sitting room. My friend Rondi who lives in Chicago is going to nail me for this one. She's an advocate of lots of good causes. One of them is protecting birds from flying into windows and dying. Can you cut me a tiny bit of slack for this one?

I didn't see it's stiff body until Kerry told me it was there. I know that a predator would come along and carry it off, but it did not seem a fitting end for such a colorful bird. So I dug a shallow grave in our raised flower bed and buried it among the daffodil bulbs that will rise from the earth in the spring.

A week later my cat Nora was sitting in the window of my sitting room. All of a sudden a red-shouldered hawk smashed into that window. Nora jumped, I jumped and the hawk fell to the deck. He/she shook himself and took off into the big oak tree in front of the house. The hawk thought she was dinner. She never knew that she wasn't.

So death and near-death come in many forms. My former father-in-law and my son's grandfather died on June 22. He simply fell over after watching his favorite kind of movie (western) and having a scotch. He was 90.

A few days ago Ted Kennedy died after a 15-month battle with a terribly ferocious cancer. I feel sad about all of these deaths. Is any of these deaths better than the other? That's not for me to say.

Another Reason I Love Obama

He has this book with him to read on his vacation. Several other books make up the collection; they all tell you that this is a man of eclectic reading taste. Kent Haruf is a wonderful author that gets into the hearts and minds of ordinary people leading ordinary lives; we find out they are not so ordinary after all.

I love to read; it started when I was in grade school and ended up in the hospital a lot with pneumonia. My mother got me books from the library and thus began my lifelong love of books.
They introduce you to people you might never have known, take you to places both physical and psychological that you might not get to and fill your mind with images both sad and happy.

Here are some of the books I've read this year: Madonnas of Leningrad, Widow of the South, Three Cups of Tea, My Sister's Keeper, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, Saving Fish from Drowning, Edgar Sawtelle, The Space Between Us, and Friday Night Knitting Club.

In case you think I'm a reading snob, I love Stewart Woods (especially on CD), Janet Evanovich, and Diane Mott Davidson (her recipes are delicious). I'm also a big fan of Elizabeth George mysteries. I've read them all.

Reading has made my world a much better one. What have you read this year that you'd recommend?

One Local Summer: Week 12

I figured you all were tired of looking at my BBQed flank steak (we love flank steak) so I just took a picture of the dish that went with it. It's a tomato, potato, onion, zucchini gratin with bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese. The best part is it makes great leftovers for lunch. I used up the last of my BBQ sauce on the boneless pork loin that is in the crock pot for dinner tonight so I have to make more of that. I'm also dehydrating red and green peppers. I had so many that I knew they would go bad before I used them. Next time I do this I won't cut them so small. They will go into a Ziploc bag in the freezer. The freezer, you ask? Yes, I discovered the hard way that even though they seem dry to me, if there are any tiny droplets of moisture the bugs creep in. So anything I dehydrate goes into the freezer.

Also made two loaves of zucchini bread that used up five zucchini. I have a few more to go so I think we will have zucchini fritters this week.

A Must Read Article in Time Magazine

America's food crisis and how to fix it is the subject of this great article. I hope you will read it. It's why Kerry and I eat the way we do.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1917458,00.html