The best laid plans . . .

aren't going to happen - at least for now.  We are having a heat wave here in the Pacific Northwest, which is almost unheard of in June.  It comes with a humidity index far above normal.  Yesterday was 89 degrees, but with the humidity it felt at least 10 degrees higher.  By Monday and Tuesday we are predicted to hit 99 or even higher.  And we have no air conditioning.

All this means that work in the sewing room is almost at a standstill.  The last thing I want to do is turn on the iron.  It is amazing how quickly an iron can send the temperature in the room skyrocketing.  So much for the applique prep I planned to do.  So much for making binding.  At 10:30 last night it finally cooled off enough for me to tolerate fabric on my lap, so I started quilting another quilt.  Thursday night I finished quilting the fourth quilt this month, but binding will just have to wait, as it is 95 degrees upstairs in the room where my Pfaff and its walking foot live.

So, while I wait for the temperatures to revert to normal, I'll just post some pictures.  The first is the quilt I just finished quilting.  Instead of an all-over grid, I did a background grid with applique details quilted.  The curving quilting on the flag gives the illusion of movement.  I'm amazed how quickly I finished this.  The border quilting isn't white - I've not yet sponged off the chalk.

Visiting the three quilt shops in Bend, Oregon was a highlight of our camping trip last week.  I started my stash of batiks in anticipation of combining them with reproductions for the "Edyta Sitar" look.

 

I also purchased a nice selection of beautiful hand dyed Prescentia "Finca" threads, something I've wanted for some time.  I'm using them to hand quilt the small quilt started last night.

 

On Thursday I kept my friend Kim company on a trip north to "Momma Made It" - our favorite quilt shop in Longview Washington.  Of course I took advantage of the opportunity to fill a couple holes in my stash, and add to my growing batik collection.  Sharon, the owner, has added batiks to the reproduction fabrics that are the backbone of her shop offerings.  I can tell right now - it is going to be hard to keep track of what batiks I've already purchased so I don't duplicate any on future quilt shop trips.

 

I see a blue quilt in my future with either sashings or alternate setting squares of cheddar - I'm just not sure what quilt block I want to base it on.

Tuesday report

The baby shower was very nice on Sunday - thank goodness! I always get really nervous when I entertain. We had about 20 people - and barely managed to squeeze them all into the room. I took very few pictures as it turned out, so I cant' show much until I get a picture disk from a coworker of Rebecca's that took lots and lots of pictures. The weather was horrible for the day - heavy rain and wind - which prevented one couple from traveling down for the party - but everyone else made it. We had just the right amount of food and the cake was super delicious. Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting - can't beat that!

Somehow in the middle of the preparations I managed to complete the second snowball block. It's similar to the first one - just a wee bit different. Tonight I'll start on an eagle block - the easier blocks are all done for now.

The storms hitting western Washington have been completely devastating during the last 24 -36 hours. Winds of over 100 miles battered the coastline. All roads between here and the coast are closed. The major north-south highway - I-5 - is closed about halfway up Washington state at Centralia-Chehalis. The water is over 10 feet deep across the freeway. The only available detour is a 440 mile trip over the mountain passes and through eastern Washington. The railroads are shut down also because of tracks under water. Some areas of the state are estimated to be without power for the next 6-8 days. Generators are not going to be much good because they are already running out of fuel and no roads are open for fuel trucks to come in. The best news coverage picture-wise is from one of the Seattle papers. Here is a link. The first picture you see is the town where my longarm reps live. They were evacuated yesterday and have no idea whether their home is underwater or not.

Luckily we didn't fare so badly. Lots and lots of down tree limbs and some flooded roadways, but as far as I know homes are OK and no local loss of life. One local bridge over a major creek is now closed until spring due to damage, but that's it as far as I know. It's going to take a long time to clean up from this.

Friday - I am SO glad it is Friday

Wednesday night did not go below freezing, so by yesterday afternoon roads were basically clear of snow. They were wet, however, which wasn't a good thing because it DID get below freezing last night. I went in to work a bit late - still sleeping more due to my fall - so I was still home when my husband called from school to tell me it was raining and still below freezing. I watched for ice all the way to work but didn't see any and had no trouble driving.

By the time I got to work it had stopped raining and was above freezing - in fact the temperature had risen just above freezing when I left the house. I had to park on the far side of the employee lot in the last space available because I was the last here. The lot was still slushy and ugly looking, so I walked carefully. I'd gone about 4 steps past the cars when - can you believe this? - I slipped on ice again! This time I went down on my left "cheek", soaking my hip and pants leg all the way to my foot, plus my coat. I couldn't believe I'd done it again! At least this time I didn't fall as hard and didn't hit my head. I tried to stand up but it was so slick I couldn't, and I finally crawled on my hands and knees back to the cars so I had something to hold on to when I stood up. This time a member coming through drive-up saw me - they have to go through the employee lot to get to our drive-up window. She got out of her truck and came over to make sure I was OK, and was able to walk me across the ice on the lot to the employee entrance because she had good heavy outdoor boots with traction on her feet.

I still love snow, and love to see it fall, but I've certainly had enough dealing with ice to last a lifetime. Thank goodness I am seeing the chiropractor at 5:00 today. I sent an email to our facilities manager suggesting that it's past time to come up with a better way of dealing with parking lots in wintry weather like this. I've also had enough of sitting at work in pain, which is why I'm SO glad it's Friday.

Enough of my griping - I don't usually do this sort of thing. I just HATE being negative!

I finished quilting Sophie's Stars last night. Tonight I hope to get the binding machine stitched on. I'm heading north to Longview tomorrow with Fred to attend a retirement seminar, so I can take my hand stitching with me. Now that I've finished all my obligations other than making one small appliqué block, I'm really excited about choosing my next UFO project to work on. So many choices - how can one ever decide!

I laughed when I read the comment left by Karen on my last post - I guess I really do have food on my brain LOL! Yes Karen, I meant to type "Hand and Foot". This is a new card game Rick and Rebecca learned a few weeks ago that they taught us. I guess it's a variety of Canasta that uses 6 decks of cards. It's lots of fun, and we've played nothing else since they taught us. I googled "hand and foot" and "card game" and found several sites that list the rules - none of which are just like we play it. We stopped at Costco last night and one of the things we got was a box of 12 decks of playing cards so we can be all set to play it at our house also. It's a great two-person game also, so I figure Fred and I can play it - if I ever stop quilting and he stops watching TV long enough for us to do so LOL!

************
Gratitudes:
1.Surviving my second fall in three days with just bruises and soreness
2. Fridays
3. Warming temperatures
4. Gandalf, my longarm machine
5. Lots of boxes of scraps to play with this weekend

************

More snow - a surprise this time

My mother always said, "Be careful what you wish for because your wish just might come true."

Today I certainly got my wish for more snow. This storm was somewhat unexpected, and certainly a lot bigger than anyone expected. I didn't even look outside when I got up at 5:00 a.m because I didn't realize there was a possibility of snow. My husband said something about it having snowed a little during the night. I ran to the window but it wasn't doing anything at the moment.

Within 5-10 minutes it started again. Just as Fred was heading out the door at 5:55 the phone rang - the phone tree telling him - school was cancelled. At least this time they called before he left - unlike last week when they cancelled it just as he got there. He was NOT a happy camper as he hates having to make up days in June. I had a class to teach at 8:00 so I left home at 6:30. I slid just a little going out of the neighborhood, but the snow was so dry that it was blowing off the freeway and my 10 mile commute wasn't a problem at all.

Move forward to about 8:00. Snow has been falling hard now since before 6:00 a.m. I've heard from two of my students, who are having a lot of trouble driving. The others apparently don't know who to call because I don't hear from them. One of them actually gets there about 30 minutes late, so I tell her to head home or to her branch. In the meantime I'm the only person in the building besides the drive-up teller who got there about 5 minutes after she was to open.

We get an email asking about branch coverage. All over town our branches are short because most staff can't make it out of their neighborhoods. So I stay in the branch to help as well as I can - I've tellered only 1 day in the last 12 years! I told them not to give me a cash drawer except as a last resort, so I'm doing transfers, taking check deposits, and anything else that doesn't involve cash. Another suppport department person showed up about 10:00 - she couldn't get to our Operations Center but lived fairly close to us. Only two people who actually work in the branch got in. It was a very interesting day!

Management decided to close at 4:00 - I don't know what took them so long! Though we'd been busy most of the day we'd slowed way down, so I felt OK about leaving about 2:30. I went outside, walking very carefully, and did fine until I stepped onto the parking lot to get into the CRV. I was about 2 steps from the door when my feet went totally out from under me on the ice beneath the snow. I fell flat on my back and knocked the back of my head on the pavement. Lucky for me I guess I've got a hard head. I didn't black out and was able to drive home just fine - at a top speed of 20 mph. At least everyone on the roads seemed to be driving with good sense.

So tonight I'm home with a bad headache from the fall. Tangled Threads is cancelled because with temperatures dropping now no one should be on the road. I just hope my headache doesn't keep me from quilting tonight and is gone when I get up tomorrow. I don't think I'm setting my alarm. This time I'm prepared - I cancelled the class I'm supposed to be teaching tomorrow - just in case.

************
Gratitudes:
1. A safe commute home for my kids and myself
2. A beautiful white winter wonderland outside
3. Not hurting myself badly when I fell
4. Leftover pizza so I didn't have to cook dinner
5. A snug, warm house

************

More snow and only four to go

When we awoke this morning there wasn't any more snow that we had last night. Maybe an inch and the most. I just knew it wouldn't last, so I hung around home as long as possible before heading to work, but it still was pretty dark. I didn't let that stop me from running around taking a few more pictures. What is it about that white stuff that makes so many of us grown ups act just like children again?

I took the first two pictures about 7:00 this morning. The first is of our house. I had to take four before I held my breath enough that there wasn't cloudy breath obscuring half the picture! The second is our crabapple tree at the edge of the driveway. You can see some remaining pink from the sunrise to the east. I took the third about a half hour later when I got to work. It's from our second floor facing east. Beautiful Mt. Hood is rising in the distance just to the right of the larger tree in the middle of the picture. I hope you can see it if you enlarge the shot. Right now it's covered with snow so it's about the same color as the sky. The cloud is floating just above the mountain.

As expected, by the time I headed home from work just before 4:00 p.m. the snow was pretty much gone except in the shade and on the north side of the building. High for the day was 37 so the roads were almost all bare, but where trees shaded the road a lot there were still a few treacherous patches of ice. Tonight it's crystal clear and very cold; that's the weather we are expecting for the next few days. Looks like not much golf for my hubby this weekend either!

Cher stayed home in Portland tonight - I don't blame her - so I decided not to attend the big guild meeting. They were having a national speaker who makes beautiful quilts, but not anything I'd ever be interested in making. So I decided I'd rather stay home to see how much more progress I could make on Sophie's Stars. In spite of a few relapses into Quilters Dyslexia I still finished all of the blocks but the four in the center. Here you see them on the design wall. The center four blocks are like the other half-and-half blocks except there will be a soft green where the white is in the other blocks. I'm really liking how this is turning out! Tomorrow I should have no trouble finishing those last four blocks, and then I can start sewing them all together. My goal is to have this quilted by the end of the three day weekend, and hopefully have at least the machine stitching done on the binding also. Time will tell I guess. Saturday afternoon my daughter and I head into Beaverton - a suburb southwest of Portland, Oregon - for a baby shower for Chelsea. I may not get that much sewing done that day. I still have Sunday and Monday, but I also need to get the third Army quilt quilted. Lots to do - and I'll love every minute of it!

Now I really must head for bed - it's not the weekend yet and I must get up for work tomorrow a.m.

*************
Gratitudes:
1. Recovery from Quilters Dyslexia
2. Finding some Peppermint Mocha Coffeemate at Fred Meyer - and on sale!
3. Old TV shows on DVD - more about this later
4. Feeling like a kid again running around in the snow
5. Special packages in the mail - more about these later too

*************

Happy dancing

Did you all hear me whooping and hollering about 5:00 this afternoon? And see me happy dancing all over the sidewalk outside my office? The snow finally came! It started snowing about 4:00 while I was teaching my class - tiny round balls of snow that looked more like hail but were softer like snow is soft. By the time I let my class out just before 5:00 it was really snow. I got home and called my hubby on his cell, and learned he'd left Seattle an hour earlier than planned and was about a mile and a half away filling his tank at Costco. Once I new he'd gotten home safely I really started the happy dancing!

Wednesday's we always have dinner and play games with Rick and Rebecca so we headed over there. Three of us went out for dinner; Rick stayed home because the cold weather was making his legs unstable and wobbly and he'd had to stay home from work. We decided to go to Subway to pick up sandwiches, and by the time we got back to their house with the sandwiches we'd decided we'd drop Rebecca off and head home. Roads were covered and getting slippery, the temperature was dropping dangerously close to freezing, and we figured it was better if we weren't out on the road about 9:00 p.m. when it will have turned to ice for sure.

So we are home. Fred is upstairs watching hockey. After begging bits of sandwich from me Shadow went upstairs to beg from him. And I got the camera out and ran around like a mad woman outside just in case it's all gone by the time it gets light tomorrow. Fred is sure school will be cancelled, and I'm hoping the credit union decides to open at 10:00 a.m. with no early drive-up. The disappointing part is that it wasn't light enough to see it falling beautifully, but the good part is that it didn't start sticking and getting slick until the night time rush hour commute was past. I was really surprised at how well the pictures turned out. I guess the light of the flash reflects off the snow better than it would normally in the darkness. Now I have an unexpected hour and a half to work on Sophie's Stars. I miss not being able to spend the evening with our kids, but we will make it up later. In the meantime I could hardly wait to post my pictures. This won't seem like much to most of you, but to us it's huge. We get this much snow - an inch or more - only once every few years.

So that noise you heard about 5:00 Pacific Standard Time? That was me, happy dancing in the falling snow on the sidewalk outside my office.

************
Gratitudes:
1. A safe trip home from Seattle for Fred
2. Snowfall that is sticking
3. Watching the neighboorhood kids build a snowman in the dark on the lawn across the street
4. Watching our 16 year old dog act like a puppy, running around outside in the snow
5. Catching falling snowflakes on my tongue like I did when I was a child

*************

I am so sorry if I offended anyone . . .

with my last post. It certainly wasn't my intention! If you knew me better you'd know that I neither think nor write between the lines. What you see is what you get. In no way did I mean to imply anything about the current political situation in our country and our military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yes, I do hate war, but at the same time I fully support our servicemen and women. They have committed part of their lives to serving this country, and they are committed to go where our leaders send them. I was feeling nostalgic and reflective, brought on from listening to the likes of Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary - that's all. If anyone read any criticism of our troops in my post it was certainly not intentional.

I can only hope that the lack of comments is due to (1) Blogger being down so long this morning, (2) you are all very busy quilting and living your own lives, (3) Bloglines doesn't recognize my new post because I wrote it just before everything went down this morning, and (4) people are still having trouble with the commenting screen being blank for a long time when trying to access it. I've never gone this long without a comment since I started blogging, and the site meter shows people have visited today.

If you did take offense at my post I sincerely apologize. Please let me know in a private email, as I will be very happy to delete whatever is offensive to people. You have all become my dear friends, and it hurts me deeply to think that what I wrote has brought grief - however temporarily - to anyone.

On an entirely different note - we are supposed to get snow tomorrow! Not much here on the valley floor - maybe an inch or two. But enough to watch it come down - so pretty! I've mixed feelings about it this time. My hubby went to a math conference in Seattle after school today and will be driving home late tomorrow afternoon. Three hours on I-5. I hope the snow is off the roads and no more is falling by the time he is heading home.