Good Night

 It's been awhile since I posted. It's been mostly business as usual: The sleep, the same. The therapy, good but wrenching.

Our doggy guest returned home today, so it is quiet in the house tonight. Our dog does not particularly like our doggy guest, though I think that they each, being pack animals, were somewhat comforted by having the other around. They certainly reinforced each other's behaviors, both good and bad.

Speaking of which, we did a preliminary clean up tonight. I swept and mopped the front room (it will have to be done again on the weekend, more comprehensively) and Dave vacuumed other parts of the house. It already smells better; two male dogs in the house are not the most pleasant smelling things. 

After our bit of clean up, we sat down to dinner (grilled cheese sandwiches and salads) that Dave made. We've been eating takeout food about every other day, just because we've both been so tired. Last night we had takeout barbecue. I ordered half a chicken and nearly a pound of ribs, which was plenty because I wanted to have extra for lunch the next day. For my dinner, I had a bit of chicken and coleslaw and then I wrapped all the extra up and put it back into the paper bag it came in. About one in the morning I was up sewing and got hungry again, so I went to the kitchen to have a bit of my chicken and realized that, while we were clearing up after dinner, Dave had accidentally thrown out the extra chicken and ribs. I was very sad. I had a sad bowl of yogurt with a bit of cereal on top instead. Hardly a substitute for barbecue.

But as I said, I've been sewing. A week or so ago, I posted that I had been somewhat mindlessly sewing nine patch blocks together. I sewed up about forty nine patch blocks and then combined them with solid yellow fabric to make eighty half-square triangle blocks. At first I wasn't sure what I was going to do with those, but then I remembered that I had seen a large star quilt made of half-square triangles. So now my half square triangles are coming together into a large star. (When I say large, I mean LARGE. I'm still in the midst of assembling it but when it's done it will be about 88 inches by 90 inches, large enough to cover a queen-sized bed. It will be the largest quilt I've made so far and (hopefully) will only have taken 10 days to complete the quilt top. (I hope to get that done in another day or two so that I can take advantage of a machine quilting sale at the place where I've sent several quilts out to for quilting.)

While I'm sewing, I don't focus on anything but the sewing. But while I'm ironing or trimming blocks, I've been watching or listening to things on Netflix or Prime. I made my way through Tales of the City, the Netflix miniseries based on the books by Armistead Maupin. I listened to a comedy special by Fern Brady, a Scottish comedian who I had seen on Taskmaster. I also started to listen to a comedy special by Alex Borstein but I turned that off because it was aggressively unfunny. I also listened to Barefoot in the Park which I think I saw as a child on Dialing for Dollars one afternoon with my grandmother. 

Those movies or shows don't have the power to distract me from whatever task I'm doing. It's mostly just background noise. What does distract me are the hummingbirds who come to the feeder just outside my window and the nest of tiny baby birds clamoring for attention when the mama bird comes to perch on the edge of the nest and feed them. They're so loud and insistent that you can hear them throughout the house, even with the windows closed. Poor mama bird. I love our little bird friends. There's a freeze warning for tonight and I hope they're all protected enough to be okay.

It's almost two in the morning now and I just had a "midnight" snack. I'm going to pick something to listen to (I'm thinking the new podcast by Julia Louis-Dreyfus because her first guest was Fran Lebowitz who I think is hilarious) and pick up with my sewing.