Yesterday

Yesterday:

 It was a quietly eventful weekend.

I finished up two quilt tops and arranged to send them off to be machine quilted. The place where I send them was having a sale—25% off, quite a significant savings—that ended yesterday. Obviously, they won’t get sent off until this week, but I had to finish them to have the measurements to place the order online. Finishing the tops took up quite a bit of my time, but these will be the first two quilts I’ve made in our new home. (I did complete two others that I pieced in the casita, sent off to be quilted prior to the move, but then finished the binding here in the new place.

In the afternoon, I washed up some green and purple fabric and then cut it into 10 inch squares. I had seen a bow tie block that I wanted to try, with an alternating green and purple checkerboard kind of layout. It all made sense in my head, but then the idea ran aground. The colors of the fabric are both too strong and look like Mardi Gras colors to me. Then the bow tie block turned out to be really boring to sew—and had a small payoff, impact-wise, for so much work. So I abandoned that idea and now I’m casting about for how to use this fabric.

The other thing that happened yesterday was that I gave David a haircut. He’s really needed it for quite awhile, but we just kept putting it off and putting it off. Finally, yesterday afternoon, we set up on the front patio and ran an extension cord for the clippers and I cut his hair. It was really more like shearing a sheep, since it was a lot of hair. It did turn out to be a good cut though, if I do say so myself.

What else? I’ve had a lot of energy suddenly. Maybe it’s because I’m sleeping more regularly? By that, I mean, I’m sleeping mostly at night. So I did sleep last night and I got up at 6:00 a.m. this morning and made soup for our lunch. I’ve been meaning to make soup for dinner for a week or more (we had a butternut squash and some parsnips that needed to be used up) and each time I had planned on it, when the time came towards the end of the day, the idea of wrestling with a butternut squash (and onions and carrots and potatoes and parsnips and peppers and garlic and and and) just made me feel tired. That’s just too much chopping for my tired brain to deal with. So I would make cheese sandwiches or nachos or something super simple for dinner instead. Or we’d order takeout.

Speaking of takeout, Dave did redeem himself barbecue-wise over the weekend. I got my chicken and ribs and the world was good again.

Hm, what else? We did some minor excursions over the weekend. We went to Sprouts. We went to the barbecue place. And we went to Wild Birds Unlimited where we spent entirely too much on some birdseed and a feeder to add to our hummingbird feeders. I set up a birdbath with a shallow dish of water on a small pedestal. I haven’t seen any actual bathing, but a few do drink from it.

Our little nest of baby birds is fast becoming a little nest of adolescent birds. Both the mommy bird and the daddy bird participate in feeding. And today, I saw one of the little birds pop out of the nest, flap its wings and sit on the top of the nest for a moment or two. Then it ducked back into the nest. Earlier, the nest had been attacked by a thresher, which is about twice the size of the bird parents (which are sparrows, I believe), but they chased it off (I ran outside too, to yell at it and to see if they needed help) I was afraid that the babies had been injured—and I’ve only seen the one since—but at least one survived and hopefully all three did.

Aside from our little sparrows, I’ve seen little yellow finches, the threshers, quail, and our hummingbirds of course. I like watching them. I would never have said that I’d one day be a bird watcher. (I”m not really a bird watcher, because those people are nuts and travel to look at birds and keep “life lists” of birds that they’ve seen. Me? I just like seeing and hearing our little residents.) I had, while traveling in Australia for uni, to keep track of the birds I saw. The person who I was reporting to knew that I did not like doing it, and she said of bird watching, “It takes a slow mind, easily amused.” Certainly not my brain then (or now).

Our internet it out right now and I am writing this in my word processing program and will post it  to my blog later, when we have internet again. I have a million non-internet things to do, like clean my bathroom and put away the folded laundry and fold the laundry in the dryer and vacuum…but—ugh—I’m thinking a nap and a novel is more my speed right now.