Birthday Report

My birthday was last weekend and we celebrated with three days of socially distanced "yardies," including a lobster dinner with my BIL and SIL, John and Dawn, and a delicious steak dinner with our friends Ray and Paula.  In addition to good food and friends, the weekend was a fun sequence of opening presents.  Paul gave me the lovely flowers shown above along with some good chocolates.  The package that Ben had tucked by his chair the past few weeks, tempting me to open it early, turned out to be a really beautiful hand-blown glass wine decanter made in Italy.  

Ben also gave me a new terry cloth bathrobe and this wonderful lamp made from a big hunk of Himalayan salt.  I think Ben really enjoyed finding these treats on the Internet, and I certainly enjoyed receiving them!  

Boulder County's virus numbers are good, but we're expecting another surge as CU students return to town this month.  In addition, we're in a drought and have had a spell of hot, dry weather.  At the moment there are four major fires burning in the state, including the Grizzley Creek Fire that has closed fifty-seven miles of I-70 through the Glenwood Springs area.   

Drew Litton, Colorado Sun 

Our views of the mountains are obscured by the smoke that is hanging over the Denver/Boulder area,  and while the smell is irritating, the smoke itself does make for amazing red sunsets.    

photo by Ben Mealey

The heat and smoke hasn't stopped us from hiking and we even tried a new-to-us trail, the Anne U. White out-and-back which is up one of the nearby canyons.  This "beloved" trail was destroyed in the September 2013 floods and it took seven years to rebuild it.  So it's not just fires that we contend with here, but also flash floods when heavy rains hit.  

And speaking of hot weather, about three weeks ago it suddenly occurred to us that we since we have central heating, the ducts needed to pump cool air through the house already were in place and we could very easily install air conditioning.  Our nights and early mornings are cool enough, but it does get hot mid-day.  On Friday a crew of competent and nice people came and installed an AC unit.  Now I can more comfortably work in my studio in the summer afternoons.  And on warm nights when the noise of partying students floats up to our open windows, we can close them and we all, and especially that loyal guard dog Turbo, can sleep comfortably.  

As you can tell, we aren't running around doing a lot, but I did get down to the Denver Art Museum to see the two excellent exhibitions it has up now.  One was a comparison of the work of Winslow Homer and Frederick Remington, and it lifted my spirits to see such interesting and beautiful art in person.  The other was "Norman Rockwell: Imaging Freedom," which focused on his popular Four Freedoms paintings, created in 1943 to support the war effort and published by the Saturday Evening Post.  The four separate paintings are shown in the collage below.  The upper left one is Freedom From Want; the upper right is Freedom of Speech; the lower left is Freedom from Fear; and the lower right is Freedom of Worship.      

Viewing them reminded me of how mainstream American culture of the time depicted primarily white people, and the exhibit curators addressed this by showing modern art that provides current takes on the "Four Freedoms" theme.  Here is a recent and powerful one by Pops Peterson, reworking "Freedom From Fear" to show a black family tucking in the children in at night.  In this case the headline of the newspaper the man holds reads "I Can't Breathe," rather than the "Bombings Kill..Horror Hits" headline on the newspaper the man holds in 1943 image.  

The exhibit included some later works by Rockwell, such as "The Golden Rule" .....

...and this one, "The Problem We All Live With," which shows six-year old Ruby Bridges walking to school accompanied by U.S. marshals when black students were first admitted to all white schools in New Orleans school in 1960.     

Getting downtown and into an art museum was a treat.  Nowadays simple pleasures are the mainstays of our lives, such as the arrival of fresh Colorado grown corn and peaches into the local markets.  Sometimes simple is pretty darn good! 

Something New

I'm trying out something new today--the new updated Blogger program--so wish me well!  I've read lots of complaints about the "improvements" so we'll see how it goes. 

The first thing I wanted to tell you about is how my new quilting project is going. In my last post you saw the leaf that I had made following a tutorial posted online by quilt artist Rian Ammerman.

 Since then I've added a background of white and beige batiks and a border of hand-dyed fall fabrics I bought from Cherrywood Fabrics a year or so ago.   The border will be cut down a couple of inches after I quilt the whole piece.  And I'll do that after I add nice dark main and side stems on the leaf.   The whole thing is about 24x36" and should look great over my fireplace this fall. 

The reason I was interested in trying out Rian's technique was to learn a way of making a drawing and then creating it in fabric.  Most of the ways of doing this involved "working backwards" as you move from your drawing to the pattern pieces and then the fabric.  I about went crazy doing this on my "Longing for Travel"  quilt and the Stargazer flower I made for my sister-in-law, Dawn, and wanted to learn a reliable method that I could do with confidence.  Having admired Rian's work, I was tickled when she began posting her tutorials and even more tickled when they actually worked for me! In the photo below you can see the step of tracing the drawing in reverse.    

And here is how it ends up in the proper orientation as you construct it according to Rian's steps.  

Well, so far the new Blogger isn't tormenting me, so I'll tell you a few other things that have been happening around here. 

Paul's long-time friend from back east came to visit Boulder with his girlfriend, Bella!  We haven't seen him since he was here in January of 2015, so this was quite exciting, and to have it happen in these Covid-19 times made it even more special.  Here's the two boys way back at Paul's 4th birthday.  Aren't they the cutest?  

Here's Bryan now with Bella, having hiked the long, steep, and beautiful Rattlesnake Gulch trail with Ben as their guide.  

It was great to catch up and particularly nice that he came out when Paul's band, The Fists of the Proletariat, had a gig.  Despite Paul's healing shoulder, he was able to play and Bryan seemed to get a kick out of it.  It was a treat to see Bryan again and I think he and Bella really enjoyed hiking and rock climbing and otherwise enjoying the wonders of Boulder while they were here. 

 

Speaking of healing shoulders reminds me of the bill for Paul's surgery, which was to "bundle up" and "reattach" muscles that had separated from a bone during the three times that he dislocated his shoulder.   Can you believe it cost over $33,000!! And that didn't include the bill from the surgeon or the anesthesiologist.  Now, of course, we didn't have to pay that whole bill due to our wonderful "plan allowance" but it sure gives you pause.  I'm just so thankful he had the surgery now and not after he goes off our plan in a few years.    

We're still mostly staying home.  Boulder County has nice low Covid numbers and we all want to keep it that way.  One side affect of all this staying home is little but effective improvements around the house.  This morning I got inspired to clean out the drawer that holds our plastic glass containers; you know, the type you put leftovers in.  Yes, those very same ones that seem to mysteriously reproduce when you're not looking.  Before you know it you have so many that you can't close the drawer without swearing.  So I went through them and put about half in the recycle bin for tomorrow's pickup and now the drawer is nice and uncluttered.  

And while I was at it, I switched the position of Turbo's crate and the hall trash can so the crate no longer blocks the drawer holding all those plastic and glass treasures.  Voila! Now we can open the drawer all the way!  Now why didn't I think of this months ago? 

The new Blogger continues to work and now it's started raining again.  We've had a lot of rain in the afternoons and evenings the past couple of days, which is great, but I do hope it won't rain Friday or Saturday night since we're having my birthday "yardies" then.   And I get to open my present from Ben, which is still "hidden" next to his recliner in the living room.  

The rain reminds me of how nicely the garden is doing this year and how I recently decided I needed to plant a few colorful flowers around the front door.  I had planted zinnas but for some reason they didn't  thrive and they weren't bringing me any joy when I walked up to the house.  So in a "life is too short for wilting flowers" move I took them out and replaced them with some pretty pink and red geraniums.   So far they doing well, and I smile whenever I come up the walk and see them. 

 

Before my luck with the new Blogger runs out I'm going to end with another something new.  This time a new hike we tried today, the Anne U. White trail.  It's a 3.7 mile out and back up a pretty canyon with lots of beautiful rock formations.  The main attraction is that you cross a stream so many times that you lose count, walking or jumping from rock to rock to make the crossings, which is quite fun, especially this time of year when the stream has hardly any water in it.  It was Turbo's first time making that type of crossing and he was quite the trooper!    

Linking to my friend LeeAnna's "I Like Thursdays" at Not Afraid of Color