Ordinary Days

It's been a series of ordinary days around here and I'm so glad I can say that.  Yesterday's horror reminds me again to appreciate fully all the goodness that life brings despite the fact that, as Kamala Harris said in her remarks last night, "Our hearts keep getting broken."

Ben and I got away for a pleasant trip down to Canyon City, southwest of Colorado Springs to visit our friends Sandy and Gina who just bought a vacation house there as a home base for rock climbing, hiking and fly fishing.  

The area is known for the Royal Gorge, a ten-mile long steep canyon formed by the Arkansas River.  We didn't see that but we did enjoy the beautiful way the city has incorporated the river into a natural park and waterway.    

We visited one of the several wineries, tasting wines and sampling a delicious assortment of appetizers. Although the wine is made on site, the grapes are generally imported from vineyards in other states.  

While Ben and Sandy were rock climbing, Gina and I hiked up to one of the long limestone walls.

It was the maiden out-of-town voyage for our Tesla, and it was fun to figure out just how the super charging works.  The car's computer led us right to a charging station outside a "quickie mart" type of place, so you could use the facilities and get a snack if you wanted during the twenty minutes it took to recharge. 

Back at home the end-of-the-year celebrations for CU students continued.  Seemed like everywhere there were parties, kids getting their photos taken in their graduation gowns, and very full restaurants.  Walking across campus one day Lotus and I ran into a brass band leading what turned out to be the faculty and graduates of the law school as they paraded out of the hall where they had their departmental graduation ceremony.  Coming across a brass band is always exciting and I was intriqued by the array of gowns, hats and stoles and cords that the faculty wore.  

Ben had a birthday!  Doesn't he look great in this photo? This was taken on the way to Canon City, but for his big day we were back home enjoying a feast of seafood from Maine.  

We had ordered scallops, mussels and an unspecified "firm white fish" from Down East Dayboat.   The fish turned out to be Monkfish.  Ever hear of it?  Me, neither!  But I found a super easy "Monkfish with Caper Sauce" recipe from the New York Times cooking site and it was delicious.  Monkfish fillets are thick enough that you can slice them into nice little fillet chunks that soak up the butter sauce.  So good! 

courtesy of the NY Times

When I asked Ben if he'd like me to make him a cake he said he'd really like a piece of the Triple Berry Pie that we had loved at the Lahaina Grill in Maui in January.  It turns out that restaurant posted the recipe in its online newsletter one Christmas and it was easy to make and just as wonderful as what we had in January.   The recipe is here if you want to try it, and you should!  I made the crust in a food processor and it worked out fine.  It's not a flaky crust but a softer, sweeter one and extremely easy to roll out.  

We have two home improvement projects underway, and I do love to have something going on in the house.   One is that we're replacing our old ready made bookcases by the fireplace with ones that will be custom-made to fit the space better.  The two walls next to the fireplace have different dimensions, so each case will be the same height but different widths and, we hope, will look built-in.  The current bookcases are slated to go to other places in the house, so we'll have a net gain of more shelves for the books that we seem to keep buying.  It's going to take another three months or so for the fellows to make the new cases, so we all have to wait a while for this project to be completed. 

 

Meanwhile we're filled with anticipation and are glad to support our local Boulder craftsmen. 

The other project is an outside one.  We replaced part of our yard with xeriscaping, covering the existing grass near the long perennial bed on Collage Avenue with landscape cloth and six yards of mulch, thereby eliminating much of the grass in that area.   Luckily we didn't do the actual work ourselves but had several capable and smart workers come do it so it was all done in five hours.   

We managed to plant eight Dahlia tubers, six tomato plants and several pots of flowers just in time for the temperatures to plunge and for eight inches of "concrete snow" to hit us the day after Ben's birthday. 

This is the third time since we moved here eight years ago that we've had a heavy late snowstorm, so we weren't too freaked out about all that crushing snow and freezing temperatures affecting our plants.  We just covered them up and hoped for the best, and we did pretty well, losing just two stems off of one small tomato plant.  But it made for an exciting day or two!

Finding Joy

The other day I woke up and immediately started to think about the Russian attack on Ukraine, Colorado's drought and our lack of rain, the upcoming mid-term elections, and the new Covid variant.   I also was worried about three family members who are experiencing serious health problems.  

As I looked out the bathroom window at another day of high winds and fire-threat warnings, I recognized my unhappy mood and I thought "Joy is a hard commodity to find nowadays. " Then I noticed the flickering of branches on the big pine near the window. I watched for a bit until I realized that two black-capped chickadees were flitting about in the branches looking for bugs and pine nuts to eat.  We don't see many chickadees around our yard and these were mighty cute as they jumped around the tree branches.  While I quietly observed them I could feel my tensions decreasing as a lighter and happier mood replaced my earlier worries, and I remembered that I had a choice about how to greet the day.  

Melissa McMasters from Memphis, TN, United States, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Here are some things that have made me smile lately.  

I very much enjoyed making this colorful and easy quilt recently.   I started with lucious hand-dyed suede-like fabrics from the "scrap grab bags" sold by Cherrywood Fabrics and inserted a batik strip into each scrap, randomly choosing the strips from a variety of prints and widths.  Then I cut the scraps with their inset batik strips into 5" blocks and placed them on my design wall, rearranging them until I liked the flow of colors across the quilt.  I loved the glow of the fabrics and the patterns made by the inset strips.

I quilted the top with straight lines, enjoying the process on my wonderful Bernina Q20 quilting machine.  Unlike some projects, this one went smoothly at every stage and I feel happy every time I look at the finished piece. 

And the back is a lot of fun, too! 

The other day Ben and I got a real kick out of helping Paul when he needed to buy thirteen jumbo bags of popcorn from Costco.  Paul works at a bakery that makes salted Caramel covered popcorn and he offered to pick up the uncoated popcorn when the regular supplier couldn't make the scheduled delivery.  We went with him just for the fun of it.  It's not every day you get to buy so many giant bags of popcorn!

Packing the bags into the Tesla was a good test of its storage capacity.  Since there's no engine or spare tire to take up space, the bags all fit into 1) the trunk, 2) the extra trunk under the main trunk, and 3) the "frunk," which is the smaller trunk up in the front where the engine would usually be.   

Although we've had many wind-filled cold days lately, we've also had a couple of pretty sunny and warm ones, too,  which were perfect for cleaning off the patio and unveiling the fire table and the grill.  Sitting out on the patio is one of my favorite things and especially fun when Ben is with me.

One evening on the patio Ben took some interesting photos of me on the iPhone using settings available when you're in the Portrait mode.   Cool, yes? 

Not to be outdone, I took some of Ben on another night. 

We couldn't leave Turbo out of our portrait sessions.  

Although we've had many "red flag" days lately with high fire warnings,  we've only had one additional fire and it was a small grass fire that was extinguished quickly.  On Monday Ben and I did a hike over near the NCAR fire which had evacuated 19,000 homes a couple of weeks ago.   We walked up to a spot that appeared to have been used by the fire fighters as they staged their work.  In the foreground are the stumps of trees they cut to establish a perimeter and you can see the blackened area where the fire burned across a gulch before it was stopped by the fire fighters.  

Here's a couple of other views across to the burned gulch.  The fire burned about 100 acres, but we could just see a small part of it. 

 

We've been getting out more lately, which certainly makes life more interesting. Yesterday I went with a friend to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to see an exhibition featuring Egyptian art.   

Once upon a time I studied Egyptian art as part of my art history degree, but it's been a long time since I've seen any.  The exhibit included several statues, such as this one of a scribe dating from 2400 BC., which rang the memory bell in my brain.  I must have had to memorize this one for a test! 

There were many bas reliefs on display, and I really liked how the exhibit designers superimposed broken reliefs on drawings of the full piece, so you could easily see what was being depicted.  

And Ben and I actually got out to hear live music that wasn't Paul's band.  We attended a small and casual performance by an artist named Emma Rose and her band, The Sound of Honey, at ETown, a local venue primarily featuring folk musicians.  Emma's soft and honey-like music, along with a nice spread of food from several local eateries, was all very enjoyable.   

courtesy of silverliningmag.com

Tomorrow is Easter and we're celebrating over here with Ben's brother, John, and his family.  Ham and mac & cheese with lobster are on the menu and I made us a little Easter centerpiece with eggs and a bunny to mark the occasion.  I dyed the eggs with natural dyes from cabbage and tumeric, using instructions from Gabriel Blair's blog at Design Mom.   

Easter means Spring, and while it is still cold here, plants are beginning to show themselves again and the spring garden cleanup is underway.  I've cut back the lavendar plants and trimmed most of the old stalks from the perennials,  so the big bed on the north side of the house is looking good. 

I always enjoy this work since it reveals the plants hiding under the leaves and pine cones.

This year we plan to replace some of the north side lawn between the perennial bed and the bushes around the house with xeriscaping.  With the continuing drought, it makes sense to eliminate water-hungry grass where we don't need it.  We'll have plenty of pretty green grass in other parts of our yard.   

Here you can see how we've used a rope to outline the placement of the new mulch.  All the grass to the right of the rope will be gone, leaving just a green path between the area next to the house and the perennial bed by the street.  Watch this spot!  

Around Here

Around here... 

...I had to laugh at the weather forecast published in today's paper, with its terse prediction of "Hot" and  "Not so hot."  Expecially funny when I remember that this time last year we were having our first snow and our first freeze. 

So glad that's not happening this year since we have a good crop of tomatoes and are eagerly watching for our cucumbers to get big enough to pick. 

Around here...

Despite our current high temperatures, autumn is definitely in the air.  One sign is the abundance of ripening fruit on the trees in our neighborhood.  Apples are plentiful and we've already made the first apple crisp of the season from the bountiful tree across the street.  No one has offered me any plums yet, but I see them on my daily walks and would love to try making something from them.  

Around here...

Paul got a commision to paint a door with his signature spray-painted planets, creating a piece of garden art to decorate a friend's fence.  I think it looks pretty cool and may ask him to make one for us.   

Around here...

...I'm excitedly awaiting the delivery of a Bernina Q20 machine which is made just for doing free-motion quilting.  It's a "mid-arm" quilting machine, coming to me without automation and with a table instead of a frame.  Both automation and a frame can be added at some future point if I want them, but for now I didn't want the learning curve it would take to figure out how to work the automated program and to load a quilt on a frame. The mid-arm style allows me to continue moving the quilt under the needle, as I'm used to.  It will just be much easier and faster using this machine and large table than the sewing machine I use for constructing quilt tops.  This table is powered so I can raise it up and stand to quilt if I want to, or use the table as a counter-height surface to work on.   I'm pretty excited and am happy that I realized there was space for a Q20 in our newly decorated basement once we got rid of a couple pieces of superfluous furniture.      

Around here...

I took Turbo to a new place to walk this morning, the Cottonwood Trail,  a flat 2.4 mile out-and-back walk through old farmland on the northern outskirts of the city.  Can you see the mountains in the background of this picture?  Maybe not, as the smoke from various out-of-state fires continues to cause a great deal of haze over the front range.   

Most of the trail was shaded by big cottonwood trees, but at the end there was a large open field full of prairie dogs.  Turbo was extremely interested in them! If you look where Turbo is looking you'll see one of the hundreds that were out there this morning, all energetically chirping out their warnings as Turbo approached.  Of course I wasn't going to let Turbo run after them, but they didn't know that! 

Just in case you don't usually see a prairie dog, here's a close up of one who has popped up out of its burrow.  I find them quite interesting and even cute, but they aren't well regarded in the agricultural areas around here as they make big holes in the ground, perfect for tripping horses, and generally making farming very difficult.  

The prairie dogs weren't the only thing that Turbo noticed on his walk today.  This glove on a fence post was very unusual, so of course he had to growl at it!

And speaking of Turbo, I can't help but include this cute photo of him happily hanging out in the backyard with one of his many balls.  

Around here...

..While waiting for my new machine I've been putzing around the studio cleaning up and finding old uncompleted projects along the way.  One was this small 8x10" layered piece of silver and black fabrics that I had long ago fused together with a soldering iron.  I also used that tool to cut through the layers to reveal the black fabric on the bottom.  I decided it was worth finishing up so I mounted it on some yellow linen/cotton fabric I bought when I was in Ohio, and fused a nice silver binding on the edges.  It was okay, but needed something else.  

 How about making the top right circle silver and making the lines on the right more visible?  Yep, that's better.   

Around here....

....We're back to wearing masks again whenever we're indoors in a public space.  I don't quite get this, since we're at a 4% positivity rate and are 80% vaccinated, and I do find it annoying to be taking a step backwards.  But I'm not arguing; I just do my part so things don't get worse.  Already some of the in-person events (like in-person quilt group meetings) are retreating back to Zoom sessions.  And I see that Maui has again curtailed the capacity numbers for its restaurants and tourist excursions. (We're watching developments in Hawaii as we have a trip to Maui planned for January.)  Hoping for the best!

Well, let's end with a pretty picture!  

Around here....

....I'm enjoying our lovely dahlias which are in the height of their blooming period.  With any luck our first hard frost will hold out for a while so we can fully enjoy their splendor.