Relentless Inquiry

A very busy weekend, and preceding week, and week before that… I think I see a theme going here.

Friday was errands, get into work late, stay late (like 9pm, ugh).

Saturday was a Day of Prolonged Adventure, in which our protagonists got up at oh-dark-hundred to go to the DeAnza ham radio fleamarket (where moderate treasure was found), then proceeded to downtown Mt View for a bank visit for Mike to sign the safe deposit card, then to wander the Art & Wine festival for a couple of hours before meeting up for lunch with our friend Hal, in town over the weekend from Oregon. After lunch, Mike had to scoot off to the annual Seafood Dinner Dance held by his scuba club, their major yearly fund-raiser, to be volunteer cleaning & serving crew, and to take pix for their newsletter. I hung out with Hal for a while, then he wandered off to do things, I sauntered the festival a little and ended up in Eddie's Quilting Bee.

They decided “If you can't lick 'em, join 'em” and held an Anniversary Sale during the festival– the store was packed, 30% off on *everything*. It was such a success that they're going to do it annually at the festival. I picked up fabric for 3 more of the dresses I'm enjoying, and overheard someone talking about quilting for Katrina survivors. The shop was staying open in the back room, with one of the sewing instructors volunteering her time, and piles of donated fabric plus class machines available. I've always meant to learn to quilt, and figured this would be a good time.

I started at about 5:45pm, and by 8:45pm I had a 60 x 80 quilt top finished, made of long parallel rows of 8-inch strips. Some strips were patched together from half-strips for variety, and for the central column I did a contrasting quarter-strip on top and appliqued a heart on it. I used mostly purple florals, and wish I had a picture of the quilt top. They have some experienced quilters who are batting and backing the quilts, then another set of folks doing the actual quilt-through of them. But I had no idea it was so potentially easy, and you can be sure I'm going to keep doing it.

If you're local and want to learn to quilt in real-time w/o taking a class, and do something useful at the same time, they're keeping the classroom area open and staffed from 9am to 9pm the rest of the Saturdays and Thursdays in September for Katrina quilts. If you have fabric to donate, it would be very welcome!

Sunday was I Canned Stuff day. Well, actually, it started out as “fix the home directory server, so the staff admin wouldn't have to drive down from Tracy”. I live 5 minutes away from the client, so I was cool with going and taking a look. That took about an hour and a half (big journaled file system, multiple reboots). Then I came back and got breakfast and coffee, and started in on my day.

I now have 6 quarts of stewed tomatoes, 8 pints of bread-n-butter pickles with splenda instead of sugar, 5 half-pints of golden glow pickles (a cinnamon & clove & brown sugar pickle), and 2 half-pints of tart apple using the rest of the golden glow syrup. Woot. Not bad for a first time. The tomatos had been prepped on Monday, and relegated to the depths of the fridge. They were rebubbled for hotpack.

Mike was greatly admirous of the Actual Canning Process, going so far as to marvel at items like the whole spices in the pickle jars. I pointed out that for my generational and geographical cohort (New Englanders born in the early 60's), *not* knowing how to can or having previously canned, at my age, would be equivalent to a Long Islander not knowing how to use the IRT maps to get around NYC. He was still highly impressed, and reiterated the advantages of marrying a 'farm girl'. Hey, I'll take the spousal ego boo, I'm not proud. 🙂

In between waiting for the canner to finish, I unpacked a couple dozen boxes of books. Mike concentrated doing something with the font of chaos that is His Room , mostly putting up a set of gorilla-rack shelves. I love those things. We've had this set about 8 – 10 years, first in the garage at 8 Trees, then in the storage unit, and now in Mike's Room. Bonk 'em together or apart with a rubber mallet, they're awesome.