Slow and steady wins the race, though I am far from the finish line. Each of these squares measures 12 x 12, so hand quilting one of them takes some time. Since I find that after about an hour and a half or two hours max, I start making mistakes, that’s about all I do a day. Yesterday, I hand quilted while watching figure skating in the evening. But I often do it in the late afternoon while listening to Randi Rhodes’ daily show on YouTube. I was a big fan in the Air America days, though that radio station is long gone. I recently rediscovered her and 4 – 6 pm in the afternoon is now my listening/hand quilting time. She’s whip smart and tough as nails.
It’s still very cold at night around here and I wake up in the morning to frost on the car windows and ice in the birdbath. Spring is taking its sweet time. But as I look at the trees, I see the beginning of buds. And I hear lovely bird song in the morning, along with the beautiful cries of the mourning doves. It’s coming.
This morning I walked outside in my flannel PJs and a winter coat to retrieve the New York Times from its place on the driveway. Cold, but lovely. I decided to substitute for Don, who cries out “Good Morning!” to our trees and animal life every morning. He’s not here, so I took over. I think I’ll do that every morning until he returns. He’ll be happy to hear that. And I just might visit our horse friends this afternoon with some carrots. We’ll see.
When the heck is Easter? I never know from year to year. Okay. I looked it up. It’s April 16th. I’m not into doing a whole egg cup series this year. There are plenty of post in the archives about my egg cup collection. But I’ll throw in a photo or two or three in upcoming posts.
Like this one:
Happy Sunday.
I love that Don calls out each morning! He will love that you are doing that while he is gone. As for the egg cups maybe if you have any new one’s you can share with us. I haven’t added to my collection much at all. This year Scout’s birthday is on Easter! She will think all that fun is for her! Enjoy your day. When do you go back to NYC? Hugs!
No new ones, I haven’t bought many at all in the last two years. The figurals, which are my favorites, are harder and harder to find and the ones that I see, I already have. Yay for Scout’s birthday!
Not sure when I go back. I might go for next Saturday’s matinee in order to check in on the show.
It will be in the low 70’s where I am until rains return next week. I’ll be gardening. My trees have leafed out and the irises have emerged. I need todo tip pruning and planting new plants where some have died over the winter. Lots to do. Is your hand quilting following a pattern or random?
No pattern. I have a template that I use that has circles of varying sizes. I just overlap them and choose which size I want as I go. I want it to look whimsical and not planned.
We had some gorgeous sun and 58* yesterday. Glorious. Back to clouds today. Seems about one in every 8 or 9 days we get sun of late. Oh, so tired of the clouds. The birds are full of song in the mornings now. I just mentioned this morning that we need to get the Oriole feeder up and filled next weekend.
I had to mention to you that while in Thailand, my daughter said they are enjoying Morning Glory salad each morning for breakfast. She said it is wonderful. The pictures of it are beautiful.
In about 5 weeks we will soak our MG seeds getting prepared to plant them….. can’t wait! Have a good day, Claudia!!
Today it was sunny and in the mid-fifties, which is positively balmy!
Oh boy, soon we plant morning glory seeds!
Your egg cups and the story about Don greeting the day put a smile on my face. Happy Sunday!
So happy to have put a smile on your face, Jay!
You know I love your egg cups….I’ll take whatever pics I can get. Glad to hear you will continue Don’s morning greetings…I’lll bet that’s soothing. I spent a good portion of yesterday planning out my yard work for the upcoming season. We have small evergreens to replace, hostas to move…other plans we weren’t able to do last summer due to hubby’s hip surgery. The ground is pretty wet here…we’ve been getting a fair amount of rain. So…no yard work for at least a week. Now, we play the waiting game! ;)
We’ve been getting a lot of rain, too – I think more is in the forecast for Tuesday. It is the waiting game and that can be frustrating!
Love the happy faces on your egg cups. Great colors on that quilt, my Mother ( rest her quilting soul,one year in a few weeks) would be proud of you. She had a great life filed it up very nicely, hey! 98 and healthy up until the week before ,I’l sign up for that. I could not quilt or make pie crust I can hear my Mother saying” That’s because you don’t keep trying) she was right I gave up. I am a cross stitch person anyway. Enjoy your Sunday too, I have started raking today.
98! How wonderful for you and for her – a long, long life with good health, to boot!
Pie crusts – even though I LOVE pie more than anything – are hard for me, too. My grandmother and mom made great pie crusts.
The lovely quilt and your unique egg cups give this post a magical feel.
Spring is on it’s way!
Believe-
Monica
I’m believing. It’s coming slowly, but today is the first day that I’ve truly felt it is around the corner, Monica!
Wonderful tradition for you and Don welcoming the morning by saying hello to your homestead and all those who share it with you. The egg cups always bring smiles and love seeing them all lined up on their shelves. Quilting while listening to a favorite radio program sounds like a much needed pleasant calming time. The city we lived in for many years had a Sunday evening radio program called Theater of the Mind that gave me the opportunity to listen to favorite old radio programs. My favorite (to the point of obsession ) was The Halls of Ivy. Pure heaven now I can listen to it any time on Old Time Radio.
Especially love spring and for me it always brings a burst of energy! Wishing you and Don a great long distance visit. Dianne
Theater of the Mind…I don’t know that I’ve heard of that, but I’ll have to investigate it!
I felt lighter today as it was sunny for the first time in a long time and I could see the first plants emerging from the garden!
What a beautiful quilt full of spring-like colors! I envy people who have the talent – and patience – to quilt. Thankfully my mother, who did, has given me some beautiful quilted pieces of hers to treasure. When yours is done, I hope you post lots of pictures so we can all admire it.
The Don ‘good morning’ thing is a lovely tradition to keep alive and well for him while he’s temporarily away! Would make me feel closer to him, across the miles…
I was just thinking of your horses a couple of days ago and thinking of whether you’d visit them soon.
I’m exhausted. Although also well satisfied. We have been ON THE GO around here the past few days, squeezing in everything we need to do when my husband has the rare days off over these past few months. Everywhere we seem to go in this southern area of California right now, the green hills are alive with wild mustard, so it’s this mix of gorgeous spring greens, chartreuse and yellow from all that RAIN we’ve had!
We were in Santa Barbara County yesterday (took a bit of a journey!) and the hills/mountains are carpeted in healthy green all the way down the cliffs to that blue, blue sea which was a sight I didn’t want to leave. Lots of tourists all over the beaches, though, because I think Spring Break/Easter vacations have hit…maybe…(seems to happen at different times over a period of weeks)…so, there’s row upon row of motor homes parked on the beach highways and just too, too many people. But, you can’t blame them, because the weather, although hazy and I feel too humid, at least for me, is in the 70s.
And times are hard but the beach is free; I love seeing large groups of people, playing beach ball, frolicking in the surf, their BBQs set up and food tables under stick-in-the-sand canopies/umbrellas; grandpas asleep in their beach chairs; babies with those darling little sun hats atop their heads; a few brave surfers (the Pacific is COLD water); kids just having the time of their lives in little lagoons here and there (warm pools left behind when the tide goes out). I love it so much I could paint it all, if I painted these days like I used to when I was younger.
Food always tastes better at the beach, even if you get sand in it! The smells of suntan lotion have been replaced with that of sunblock in this day and age, thank goodness on the one hand of course, but…oh…the beach fills all the senses, with the gulls flying overhead, the sound of the waves, the color of beach towels and bathing suits, the smell of seaweed and ocean, the feel of the sand squishing through your toes and salt spray on your lips. Heaven on Earth.
I’m like you; had to look up what date Easter fell this year. Because of the stores hawking Easter well BEFORE Easter, I feel like I’ve been looking at Easter eggs and baskets for weeks now, which sort of kills the thrill for me although, of course, like Christmas, we really do need to remember the reason for the season.
Traveled today to an area about an hour from here which has a wholesale/retail nursery, back in the canyons (mostly wholesale), which is where we bought most of our plants and trees when we overhauled our landscaping, front, sides & rear yard & hillside, just over two years ago in an attempt to tear out decades-long growth that had overtaken my folks’ home and which wasn’t attractive or beneficial, and xeriscape to a point, creating an environment which still held color but which would be more drought-resistant (low water plants and drip irrigation). We lost so many plants that year of first planting because it was so, so hot here, and we were under water restriction. So, today, a few replacements…more blue ceanothus (Calif lilac although some call it lavender), some interesting tiny succulents I found, a ‘Barbara Karst’ bougainvillea I plan to train to a pot (just the ‘normal’ color for bougainvillea; the magenta which I so loved from my other house; I miss it) and a very unusual, to me, plant in a good-size pot (over my budget but I couldn’t resist, which is what happens to me if you get me in a good nursery) called a filotrodendrum and it’s the most marvelous golden-yellow flower (like a darker yellow); I hope I don’t kill it! And then we bought a beautiful, beautiful rosebush (again, over my budget…my husband isn’t too happy with me at the moment!) that is the most velvety ombre orange, like a tequila sunrise. It had to be a special rose, because it’s replacing one that my grandfather planted for my mom in the mid-50s at this house, which he’d grafted from the roses she grew up with (which he’d planted in Los Angeles in about 1918 at the small house he built where she was born; the house is still there). I’m so sad this heirloom-style bush finally died but at least I’m replacing it with an absolutely magnificent rose, so it was worth every penny. I swoon for roses. But this is the swooniest.
I hope you made yourself a delicious veggie dinner tonight, Claudia. It’s hard to cook for one, I know. But you’re worth it, and you’ve got to keep your energy up for all that spring planting. I’m so glad you’re seeing signs of spring now; you must be SO weary of cold, cold, cold!
I love bougainvillea. I never got the chance to plant it when we were living in San Diego, as we were renting. But I think it’s so, so lovely!
I am getting tired of cooking for myself as I’ve never liked cooking and Don does it better than I do. And coffee tastes better when he makes it!
Ah, I know.
I aspire to cook. I love the idea of cooking. But the bottom line is, I could never cook and don’t like to do it. And I collect cookbooks like crazy.
Makes no sense.
xo
I am so sorry Don is going to be gone so long. At least Spring will be keeping you busy. If winter ever decides to leave, that is! LOL I know you keep really busy in the Spring. That will definitely help pass the time.’
Happy Spring.
Judy
I can’t wait to get busy outside, cleaning up the garden and mulching, etc.
Theater of the Mind was a local radio show on
Theater of the Mind was a local radio show on WRUF-
WUFT (University of Florida) hosted by Bill Sabis. Bill was a
civil engineer and had an engineering company but had a passion for radio programs from the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. He amassed a huge collection of old radio programs as a hobby. Don’t remember how it came about, but as the knowledge of his collection became known, he was given the opportunity to share his collection on WUFT. He had an excellent distinctive radio voice and starting in the late 70’s, his program ran for 25 years. His passion, knowledge, and insight for the radio programs was very much like Robert Osborne’s for movies. Named Theater of the Mind, the program ran for several hours starting at 8pm on Sunday nights. Made it tricky for me because Masterpiece and Mystery on PBS overlapped the time frame They were separate shows then, but I always taped those anyway for us to watch again. I had Bill on in the bedroom and PBS on in the living room! I would check Bill’s lineup and usually didn’t listen to the westerns or frightening horror Poe type stories. Read an article about Bill and by the end of the program run, about 30% of the listeners were under 15. He has given his listeners memories that are a testament to Bill and the quality of the program. I once heard that all radio waves ever transmitted are still traveling around in space. I hope it’s true and all those wonderful hours of Bill’s Theater of the Mind programing are still wafting around out in the universe. Dianne
It sounds like it was wonderful. I love old radio shows.