Insomnia

Sigh...  It's pre-dawn (5am) and I'm sitting here listening to birds rather than sleeping.  They're loud.  But I do love to hear them.  I can also hear the dogs rattling their collars so I guess they'll want to go out in a few minutes, despite the early hour.

Not much to show & tell coming out of The Sandbox lately.  I have been sewing but it's a big mystery quilt project with nothing of substance to show yet.  To make it a mystery it's done in bits and pieces...lots of pieces!  Makes it hard to see progress.  I've started putting the large corner sections together and pinned the bits up on the wall for a photo to see the effect.  If nothing else, it sure is going to be colorful!

The work on the porch progresses.  The ceiling is painted.  Trim needs to be finished.  We got far enough along yesterday evening (fan reassembled and furniture placed) to be able to have our very late dinner on the porch.  I'll go out and take pictures later.

Spring is still springing.  Yesterday I decided to rake out the garden and under the bushes in the front.  I encountered a toad (good), a huge slug (nasty but ok) and at least one snake (not ok!). The dogwood is in bloom and the azaleas are starting.

We have fairy rings of hostas.  I guess they need dividing and moving.

The raised garden has been put together and is waiting for dirt.

And the new bird houses have nests.  :-)

A lovely moss and fluff chickadee nest.  :-)

My Christmas cactuses are blooming again. (!?)

And the ever-present turtles are enjoying the amazing weather too.

Today is supposed to be another day in the 80s!  My northern heart still goes pitter-patter with excitement over each lovely warm day in March.  Amazing!  LOL

Due East

This morning I woke totally out of sorts.  Poor Tramp.  Send him a sympathy card.  It was a gorgeous day though.  For breakfast I had peanut butter and jelly (did I say I was out of sorts?) and sat in the sun eating it and listening to the birds carry on outside.  I think the dogs enjoyed the quiet moment too....at least when they weren't drooling over my sandwich.  :-)

After some needlessly roundabout discussion (I believe I said I was out of sorts), the project for the weekend turned out to be the back porch.  The screens are/were old and ripped and the dogs have just made them worse.  After we ripped down the screens it was amazing how much brighter the porch became! Not that you can tell from this picture of course.

The Tramp changed the ceiling fan for my fave red one.  Now we have light on the porch after dark too.  :-)

At some point this morning (again with the roundabout discussion) we decided the only way to really lighten up the porch was to paint all that dark beadboard.  Heh.  I love the look of beadboard, but painting it is an evil job.  Sigh.  But the first coat of white is on!  We only quit because it was getting dark.  I want to get the job done!  We are scrimping and saving all the bits of trim we tore off to get to get the screens down and I must have spent over an hour as the light was fading, painting all the bits (another evil job).  After scrubbing all the skin off my hands along with the paint (house paint with built in primer--also pretty evil), we went out for some comfort food.  Buffalo chicken fingers for The Tramp and fully loaded pizza for us both.  :-p

Here's some food for thought.  (I made a pun!)  Did you ever notice, while doing a DIY project...ostensibly to save a bunch of money...how much money you spend on takeout and restaurant food because you are too exhausted to cook and the kitchen is a disaster anyway because of the detritus from your DIY job???  Hmmmmm??

After pizza we stood on the porch for a while admiring the supermoon.  Very cool.  It managed to look very Halloweeny in the tree branches.  Not a bad photo for an iPhone either.  I love the effect.

While I was finishing up painting in the dusk we started to hear a strange noise off in the distance.  We listened and speculated but couldn't figure out what it was.  Of course when we went out front to the car, we discovered it was some kind of peepers on the pond.  Duh.  So I recorded a little video of the sound, with the moon (due east) and the red reflection on the road from the streetlight.  It's quite loud.  (turn up your sound)  Of course Charlie squawked and Maisy barked at a distant dog.  :-)

Maybe they will sing me to sleep.  :-)

Live and learn

Lots of reasons to say "live and learn" today.  Not the least of which is trying to figure out exactly what is going on in Japan and to determine what is the best course of action (or non-action)...whether you are close or far away.  As usual, I don't believe the media is doing anyone a service.  This post is rather well said: Post from Tokyo.  Not the first I have read with that opinion, Japanese and not.  Quilting blogger, Tanya, also voices her confusion over conflicting information.  It's no wonder The Tramp spends a considerable amount of time reading forums about self-sufficiency and preparing for the worst.  Sigh.

Using my Walkmeter information I learned today that one of our favorite walks is 1.72 miles.  Yesterday I took that same route with Ngaire and Ivy.  It took quite a while for Ngaire to settle down and my arms and shoulders were sore last night.

 I'm struggling to find ways of calming Ngaire down.  It's hard to tell if she is fearful or just nervous or what.  When we got home I made them lie down in the yard and just stood there for about 20 minutes until they appeared calm.  It possibly made a bit of a difference in today's walk with Ngaire and Maisy.  Maybe.

If nothing else, it was a gorgeous morning for a walk.  :-)

Back at home, I spent some quality (I hope) time with Charlie.  We sat in the sun in front of the big window while we ate my Cheerios.  :-)  He started out on my shoulder, nibbling on my ears (ouch) and pulling little hairs on my neck (ouch!)

Then he got interested in the cell phone making camera noises.

Climbed down my arm to investigate.

Checked behind the phone.

Then decided it was good to nibble on.

Hard to tell what this is a picture of.  Beak?  Tongue?  ?

Ok.  That's done.

Back up the sweatshirt hill.

Oh look!  There's the other ear to chew on.

Sore shoulders are also due to quilting yesterday.  Oh how quickly we get out of practice!  I agreed to quilt this charity quilt pieced by Mom.

Simple large meander in the center, but what to do with the border?  I spotted Wiggly Woven Lines on Leah Day's weblog and decided to try it.  This is the good corner.

I thought, nice, this is pretty straight forward, just jump right on in.  Well!  How easily I am fooled.  It didn't take me long to realize it actually requires a bit of thought and planning.   Duh.  Once again I'm reminded I'm not a critical thinker and I need to stop and think things through.  Ah well.  Someone is going to enjoy the quilt just fine.  :-)  Today I have to finish a wheelchair quilt to hand in tonight.  Oh my sore shoulders......

Live and learn.  

(naming posts is the hardest part)

I picked up my new glasses yesterday and went back today to get them adjusted. Oh my did they hurt! Now if I can just get over feeling sick and dizzy while wearing them.... Sigh.

The weather was incredible over the weekend.  The Tramp and I took a lovely long walk Saturday....without the dogs.   I took this photo of the gorgeous blue sky while we rested in the park.

I downloaded a cool app for my iPhone called Walkmeter.  Not only does it record your walk time, the app uses the GPS to capture distance, pace, calories and all kinds of statistics you choose.  It also shows your route on Google Maps and when you are done you can name and save the route if you want, record the statistics for future reference and record it on the calendar.  You can compete against yourself or others too.  Being a bit of a map geek I got a real bang out of seeing our route superimposed over Google Maps.  It's not 100% accurate, but darned close.  I never would have known we walked almost four miles!  And I also now know it's about at the three mile mark when my feet start to hurt. Hence the rest in the park.  :-)

The turtles enjoyed the weather too.  This big one held it's ground as I crept closer for a picture.

The other ones were here and there watching the neighborhood action.

Sunday morning was very lazy.  :-)

Today, after the trip to get the glasses adjusted, I baked bread, made a batch of dog stew, and got busy with some sewing.  The plan is to have two charity quilts ready to go to the guild meeting on Thursday.

Oops.

I didn't realize how long it had been since I posted. Mom called me on it today.  Moms just love to point out things like that. Always.  :-)

I don't think there is much that can be said about what is going on in Japan.  Just keep praying.

MD and SIL came for a visit.  Baby is due in May and it was a joy to see and pat the belly.  :-)  I also finished and gave them their wedding quilt and let it get away without a photo.  I guess I just couldn't take my eyes off the belly.  LOL

Dog training has been ongoing. Mostly successful....some days.  The thing we haven't been able to conquer yet is walking all three dogs together. Ngaire especially, gets extremely frantic and anxious if we all go out together and we haven't figured out why or how to calm her down. Sigh. So still a work in progress.  I think we need to try taking much more time waiting for them to calm down before we leave the house.  Maybe.  On this occasion we managed to get two of them to lie down and at least look calm.

But Maisy was so excited she couldn't settle down.  Every time we told her to sit she managed to sit further away until she was finally in the kitchen!  Too funny.

I've switched Ivy back to her head collar and it seems to be working better.  Bad photo!  In going for the calm-submissive thing I'm never sure what to do with Ivy.  She is always submissive....but never calm.  So the head collar gave her something to think about.

We've been in severe drought this spring so the recent rains have been a blessing.  The creek was actually babbling! When I took the photo I was focused on the water and didn't notice what looks like writing on the railing.  I'll have to go back and see what it is.  Heh.
 

Blogger is acting funny today.  I have to add each photo one at a time.  Hmmmm.  Hope it sorts itself out.  Anyway.....each day the pond is prettier and there is more to see on our walks.  I'm just loving springtime.  :-)

As the weather was amazing, today we did some gardening and while we worked the ducks and geese on the pond were very active.  One little mallard female was being ganged up on by three males, who chased each other all around the pond...for hours.  The ring-necked ducks were putting up a bit of a flap as well.  The geese and mergansers didn't seem quite so charged up by hormones and the warm day.  And it was warm!  I better get all my heavy gardening done soon.  It's going to be summer any day now.  Sheesh.

Charlie shared a bit of my breakfast earlier this week.  Only toast crumbs though.  There is just something weird about giving a bird egg to eat.  Same with chicken.  Yes I know birds eat birds, but just not in my house thank you!

 And I have been sewing.  This quilt is a wedding gift.  I took some photos while it was up on the wall to make sure I liked the placement of the blocks.  It's a square-in-a-square made with a Spumoni Bali Pop.  I've sewn the top together and it's waiting for me to buy the backing and binding fabrics.  Love the colors.