P-ing

This week has flown by.  Busy at work, as usual.  Free time has been spent on P things.  

My middlest son started a Minecraft server, so I've been joining him and his friends playing on that.  After a small bit of exploration I found a cherry tree forest and made my home there.  I'm not usually a fan of pink, but the colors of the cherry petals is pastel-y enough to be pleasant.

Hubby's Pa came by for a short visit this week.  Wednesday night we brought a shephard's pie over to the boys' apartment so he could see them.

I started and finished a quick sewing project.  I found a pattern online for a wine bag and made it, intending it as a hostess gift for my niece when we go over to her house for Christmas.

Finally, I've read two books of prose this week.  (OK, I'm stretching the P with that one.)  The first and second books of John Scalzi's Old Man's War novels.  Hubby has the first and fourth on Kindle, and he kindly got the second and third for me from the local library.  Good stories, quick reads.

Tomorrow morning I get a haircut, the first one in about nine months.  I'll probably get about five inches pruned off, and I'll be good for another nine months.  I'm obviously not fussy about my looks, never have been.  I've had the same hair style for 30 years, long hair pulled back in a head band.  Easy to take care of.  Which is good, because I'm all about the easy peasy.

Someone is not the only someone

Sioux Falls, etc.

We made a quick jaunt with B&G last weekend to Sioux Falls in a sorta celebration of G's 21st birthday.  On the way we ate lunch at Channel Inn (not an inn at all, just a small bar/grill) on Hall Lake in Fairmont, per G's request.  He loves being near lakes, rivers, oceans.  The food was fine, nothing special, but the view was lovely.

Photo from VisitFairmont

In Sioux Falls we visited the falls, looked at big fancy houses (one of G's favorite pastimes), and drove around spotting things hubby remembered from when he lived there as a child.  The pink rock is jasper, or Sioux quartzite, which is found all over that region.

We ate supper at Roots of Brazil, an expensive restaurant serving not-great food.  Next morning we had better eats at the Phillips Avenue Diner, our usual breakfast spot whenever we visit.  Then we headed home.  On the way we passed by a farm with a large collection of windmills.  Hubby thought they should have had a large Don Quixote in the midst.

We stopped at Pipestone National Monument for an hour or two.  I've never been there before and it's been on my wish list.  They had carvers inside the visitor center, demonstrating their craft and chatting with folks.  Pipestone (catlinite) is a soft red rock that runs in veins through much harder quartzite in a few areas of North America.  It's been used for centuries by the Dakota and Lakota people for traditional carvings and crafts, including ceremonial pipe making.

 

Photo from Horsekeeping LLC

It would have been a lovely visit except that while climbing some steep uneven steps the nerve in my hip twinged again, and I spent the rest of the ride home in discomfort.  A few years ago I injured my hip while walking down a hallway, and couldn't walk without a cane for several months.  Multiple xrays, MRIs and a cortisone shot revealed supposedly nothing, and the orthopedic doctors were less than helpful, sending me to physical therapy without giving me any useful information.  The physical therapist surmised I had a nerve impingement, which is basically a pinched nerve.  In any case, since then once or twice a year it flares up and I have to stay off my feet for a few days, walking gingerly with a cane for a couple of weeks til it settles down.  

Fortunately my activities this week (besides work) haven't involved a lot of walking.  Hubby peeled and cut up the remainder of our harvested apples, made a large apple crisp, and we placed the rest into freezer bags for tasty winter desserts.  I clipped elderberry clusters from our bushes, froze them, then stripped the berries from their stems into a bowl.  Another hour of using tweezers to pick out the small stem bits and green berries and I had a full quart of ripe purple berries.  Those were also placed into a freezer bag for future syrup making.

I also went through the mass of overgrown aloe and spider plants on my plant shelf.  I was cut-throat over what I kept and what got chucked into the compost pile.  

Just a wee bit root-bound

I've kept five aloes, three spiders, and one ivy.  I put a few more cuttings of ivy into a jar on the window.

My sister smuggled the original ivy from England many years ago

I've done a bit of quilting, trying to finish B's flannel shirt quilt so I can move onto other projects.  I have a rule that I can't be working on more than three sewing projects at once, to push me to finish the ones I start.  Right now I have B's flannel quilt and my chain rail fence quilt going, so I could technically start a third but I really want to finish B's first.  I'm about half-way done with the quilting on that one, and after that just the binding to do.  Then I'll need to wash it and run a lint brush over the whole thing because SOMEONE thinks it is the best thing in the world to sleep on. 

Space spider

There's a five-legged spider space robot who's taken up residence in my lamp.  Its needs are simple, just a sunny spot by the window and the occasional slice of cheese.  It prefers brie, but is happy with anything except cheap feta.

Cider

We made cider today.  We have two mature apple trees on the east side of our house, and they bore enough apples this year to bring out the cider press.  After three hours of washing, grinding and pressing we got six tasty gallons, plus another quart that hubby and I drank on the spot.  One gallon will go to O and E, one to G and B, and one to hubby's father who gave us the press several years ago.  I also set aside several dozen of the better apples for freezing, for future apple crisps.

About six years ago we planted about ten additional fruit trees around the property.  They have done ok, not great.  We don't exactly do any active management such as pruning, cleaning up windfall, trapping insects, etc.  So doing ok is the best we can hope for I suppose.  On those newer trees the apples this year were very wormy and mushy.  And we neglected to pick the unripe pears before they became overripe on the branch, so no love there.  Pears are persnickety when it comes to harvesting.

I won't post any pictures of my garden, as it is a huge mess of weeds.  I planted it in April and May, then my job got extra spicy crazy for the next four months and I had no time or energy to tend to anything.  We got a decent amount of tomatoes before the blight set in, and our garlic harvest was good, but everything else kinda went by the wayside.  We've had no rain for about three weeks, so when I tried digging some potatoes this afternoon my spade hit rock-hard clay soil.  But the flowers have done well, and the bees and birds and butterflies do appreciate them.

Not a clever title

I think my biggest problem with this blog thing, other than my intense innate laziness, is my intense innate introversion.  I don't like talking to people I don't know really really well.  It's not that I'm unskilled in it, I do it all the time for my job, but on a personal level I don't enjoy it.  And a blog is just too much like talking to people I don't know.  Worrying about saying the wrong thing, saying something stupid, being judged for what I say or how I look.  And that worry drives me crazy, because I would really rather not care what other people think.  And for the most part in my everyday life I don't care what people think, but social media does strange things to people.

I considered making the blog private, and just have it as a personal journal.  It's still something I may do.  But honestly, it's been so long since I've posted and my life is really not that enthralling so I doubt anyone reads it anymore.  

So, essentially, I just want to throw stuff into this blog occasionally without worry about people reading it and thinking bad things about me.  So, that's what I'll try to do.  Screw interesting topics, clever titles, witty insights and cohesive thoughts.  Ima just gonna write what I wanna write, when I wanna write it.  Do what you will, I couldn't care less.  Mostly.

Last fall I took up sewing and quilting.  Like, big time.  Got a sparkly new sewing machine.  (My old one is 30 years old and is having tension issues.)  I rearranged my sun room into a sewing room.  Started hoarding fabric, buying tools, watching YT videos, learning as much as I could.  I joined a very active quilt guild in town.  Our next meeting is tomorrow night - eek! - I've just remembered I've got to make a name tag before then.

I've sewed (sewn?) a lot of stuff over the last 10 months, including quilts, table runners, tote bags, hot pads, aprons, holiday decor, etc.  I enjoy it, but not excessively that I need to do it everyday.  Just like with my other hobbies (gardening, soap making, reading, video games, etc.) I have periods of ebb and flo.  Some days I feel like being creative and productive, other days I feel like binging Netflix.  That's just the way I am.

Anywho, today I made a thing.  Can you guess what it is?  (Why am I asking this when I've already established no one reads this blog?)

It's an ironing board!  With my quilting, I needed a larger size (24"x48") ironing board that I could keep out all the time on a table near my sewing machine.  I found a couple of YT tutorials, got my hubby to buy me a piece of plywood and trim the corners, and made it.  It was pretty easy.  The hardest part was finding 100% pure cotton batting without scrim - I didn't have any in my stash and the local Walmart didn't carry any.  We were heading to Mankato this evening anyway, so we stopped by JoAnn's and I got some there.

So, yay for me!  I'll try it out officially tomorrow.  Right now it's very late and I should head to bed.