Monthly Archives: October 2021

October is Going, Going…..

I can’t get over how quickly the months have passed this year.  I don’t know if it’s because the stores rush us from season to season with things to buy that they want to sell, or if it’s just my age and the time passes much faster.  Remember when you were a child and it was the last couple of weeks before Christmas how long it seemed?  The time seemed to stand still then although it really didn’t and went no faster  or slower than it goes today. Still, I really wish the days were longer sometimes. Especially now that David is getting off work in the early afternoon and I still have things I want to do besides prepare dinner.

I have really grown to hate cooking the last few years. After all, I’ve cooked for various people every meal almost in the last fifty years and it’s getting old.  I never liked to cook in the first place and it gets worse for me the older I get.  Those pre-packaged, ready to cook meals I see on tv look more and more appealing to me, but I know David, with his finicky eating would not like most of them because there are VEGETABLES in most of them.  Not the kind of vegetables he likes such as corn and green beans. Well, those are the only vegetables he likes.  I eat just about every kind of vegetable there is because I was brought up on a farm and we raised all our vegetables and we ate what was put before us.

I don’t know how I got off on that tangent. Oh, yes, the shorter days and having to stop to cook, Ugh.   The days David doesn’t work he will sometimes prepare a meal and I love it. His meals tastes better than mine.  Are you that way?  The food you cook doesn’t taste good, but someone else could make the very same meal and it’s yummy.   I made roast pork loin, green bean bake and mashed potatoes with apple crunch for dessert today.  None of it tasted good to me, but David ate two helpings so it must not have been too bad.

Well, to change the subject.  I have been working on an Autumn quilt for the past month. It has twenty fifteen inch square blocks. Each block has about one hundred pieces in it. It’s been a fun one to make.

David came into my shop the other day and said, “I know you know what each pile of pieces are for, but to me it looks like a jumbled mess!”  I laughed and pointed out each pile and told him the size of the pieces in each one.  There is a method to my madness. I can work in chaos and come out with something in order.

This is just one of the blocks.  I now have the quilt top completed and will show you when I get a good picture of it.  As you can see, there are many different fabrics in this quilt.  I love the Fall colors so much.

Here is a stack of the blocks I had done that particular day.  There was a LOT of cutting of pieces for this quilt. I made a smaller version of it a couple of years ago.  It’s on a chair in my living room so I can look at it all season.  I will really try to remember to get pictures to show you my next blog. I notice I have promised to show things in the past and completely forgotten about showing them when I write new posts. I will try not to do that this time.

Now that I am done with that quilt it is on to making Christmas gifts. I  was going through my fabric boxes getting ideas for what to make and found material I had completely forgotten about but that would go very well into the projects I have planned.  They say the store shelves may be emptier this year for Christmas shopping so I am preparing to make a lot of my gifts.

We had a beautiful rainbow the other day.  We could see it from our front porch. We have been having some rainy days recently.  Yesterday and today have been rather dreary and cold.  But then there comes a rainbow.

We took a drive up to some property we have in the hills of Brown County.  We still don’t know what we will do with that property. We would love to build a log cabin and I have designed exactly what I want, two buildings, one for the living area and kitchen, bath and laundry and the other for the master bedroom and bathroom with an enclosed dog trot between them. And I want another building just for storage and my quilting.  One can dream.  Always.

This is part of our property. It runs down a hill to a little stream at the bottom.  David wants to go over there sometime and bush hog some of the land to make a path to walk.

One of our grandsons played in the championship game of his soccer travel league.

 

We took our lawn chairs and blankets and watched behind the fence.  It was a pretty good spot as his team spent most of their time at this end and we saw a lot of action.

Here he is with his medal.

It is a very nice medal and we are so proud of him.

As we were leaving the game we saw the Hunter’s Moon above us.

It was so beautiful with the clouds all around it.

I managed to get some pretty good pictures of it with my little camera. Looks like Halloween. Do you see the witch flying across its face?  When I was a child and there was a full moon, my mother would scare all us kids by saying she saw the witch flying across the moon.  I was so sure she was right that I saw her, too!

Hope your October has been happy and you have enjoyed the Autumn Days.  Hopefully our trees will be changing their colors in the next week.  Happy Halloween!  Bye.

 

 

 

Making an Old Pool Look Like New

After almost twenty years, the liner on our pool needed to be replaced. The puppies helped its demise along when they fell in and clawed their ways out of the pool.  David gave the pool to himself when he retired. He never golfed, fished, hunted, drove fancy cars or did much but work and come home so it was a well deserved gift to himself and he has used it a lot over the years and we have shared it with others and had pool parties.  But now the pool needed some much needed up keep.

It didn’t help the pool liner that when we got Lucy and Sugar, they both at one time or other fell in and in their efforts to get out, scratched holes in the side of the liner.  David patched it and it has held up well all Summer, but we really could not wait to get the new liner installed.  The pool company has been so busy and has had to wait for our liner to come in, but finally they received it and said they would come and get the job done.

It was an exciting day.

Here is the old pool. It still looks pretty good, but you don’t see all the tears in it. It was really getting rather worn in several places.

A whole pool liner in one little box.

A pump was put in to pump the water out. It was attached to just a regular garden hose so it was going to take a while for all the water to be removed.

Put in the bottom of the deep end, it began to pump. It took three days to pump most of the water out!

The pool looked so sad.

The liner had become brittle and came out in pieces. It’s a wonder we could swim this Summer, but we did.  And the liner held up well until the water was taken out.

 

Out with the old, in with the new.

Two very tanned men put in the liner.  They work outdoors all the time. Thus the tans. See the young man in the hat?  

Well, Miss Molly, when she was let loose, ran right up to him, her little backside wagging so hard and she went up to him and laid on her back and just looked at him. I told David I think she was in love. I have never seen her be so friendly with anyone, including us.  David told me she followed that guy everywhere.  I’m sure he liked that!

The liner in. Those guys knew what they were doing.

Time to fill the pool. The men attached a big hose to a fire hydrant that is in the back street back of our house. It didn’t take nearly as long to fill,  Just a few hours.

Finally looking like our pool again.

This is now what the bottom of our pool looks like. It goes so well with our house and surroundings.  Much better than the tropical look the old pool had.

 

I love how the water looks now. It’s so beautiful in the sunlight.

The water was cold. Way too cold for me to get in, but……

David couldn’t wait. I told him I’d join him next Summer when the water is about 85 degrees,

He is very happy with his “new” pool.

And this is his Albert Einstein look after being in the pool!   We both had a good laugh.

In other news, David has been working on a project. We have a lot of old fencing that he took down and now he’s making new fencing, but of the decorative kind.

Picket fencing to be exact.  We are going to put these around some of the flower beds. He made six of them for me and is making more. I painted them a pine forest green.

My new favorite meal. An Arby’s roast beef sandwich and a Jamocha shake. Yum.  We have two Arby’s in town and one of them makes the shake a little stronger than the other so I always want to get it from that one.

It’s really a meal in itself.

Just wanted to show you the old gate I bought on that country tour we took a few weeks ago.  There is an antique store in town that had one similar to this one for sale and they wanted over a hundred dollars for it!!!!  Just saying, I got this much, much cheaper.  It pays to shop around.  Aren’t the zinnias lovely?  They are beginning to fade now, but I am already planning my garden for next year.

Here’s to an almost new pool and the fun that will go with it. Bye.