Month: March 2017

First of all, thank you so much for all the emails and pm’s concerning our automobile wreck.  Let me give you a little update.

 

The first, and for a hot second, concern was my left knee, because it did hit the glovebox kind of hard.  But other than a few aches and pains (all completely controllable with Tylenol), I’m fine.  However, there have been some issues with the DH.

 

Bill was fine on Wednesday night when we finally got home, but Thursday he woke up with headaches and double vision.  I tried my best to get him to go to the doctor, but wasn’t successful until Tuesday night.  After hours in the ER (there were 46 people ahead of us, and most of them were dealing with the flu – so there’s an argument for getting the flu shot if there ever was one), and a CT scan later, the doctor told us he had a concussion.  His eyes are almost working independently of each other, so he’s seeing double a great deal.  It’s a symptom that can’t be cured by medicine – only time and eye exercises.  He is better, but I’d appreciate prayers for him.

 

He was better enough today that he volunteered to go with me to a quilt shop in Reynolda Village.  I came away with these two prints…

 

And some gray for the borders of my Country Inn quilt.

Needless to say, even though the granddarlings are back with their parents and the moving situation is no longer such an ordeal for everyone, I didn’t get a lot done this week in my studio.  Next week I swear I’m locking myself in there and not coming out for the week.

I know, I know…there was no blog last week.  Typically, I always announce prior to any blog absence that I’m either away at a class or seminar or I’m on vacation.  That wasn’t the deal last week.  I simply ran out of week before I could get one written.

The last two weeks have been horribly busy at my house.  My daughter and son-in-law are moving.  Notice I didn’t say I was moving.  It is my children that are moving.  However, that meant that I had to do double Mimi-duty.  I’ve had the granddarlings a good bit the last two weeks, which I expected and had planned for.

What I hadn’t planned for was everything and everybody else getting in the middle of this move.  For instance, take Wednesday night.  Please.  Someone take it, because that was the point I really understood the phrase, “I had to laugh to keep from crying.”

It started out as a seemingly wonderful Wednesday.  It was cold and windy, but the weather was clear.  The DH and I had to be at our lawyers’ office at 11 to close on the house that my daughter and son-in-law are moving into.  To set the scene, the last closing we were at, our banker was there.  This time, he wasn’t.  And no one from the lawyers’ office had contacted us (even after repeated attempts to contact them), with the final figure for the closing costs.

Now add this little fact to the above scenario:  Our lawyer was late. Not just 10 minutes, but really late.  Finally, this young and I mean really young kid pops his head through the door and says that our lawyer is busy with another closing and he was going to handle us.  I wasn’t worried.  This was a straight-forward direct from seller-to-buyer transaction with no real estate people in sight.  And it went really, really smoothly until the young lawyer turned to me and asked where the check was.  I promptly pulled out the money market check book and then he shot me a look.

“We need a certified check,” he says.

“You do?”  was my answer, “Because I don’t have one because I was never contacted by this office with a final amount.”

He fumbled for minute and then agreed our banker could wire them the final closing cost by 3 p.m. that afternoon.

No biggie, right?  Should be pretty easy…and in a perfect world, it would be.  However, Wednesday happened to be the day I couldn’t reach him either on his office phone or cell phone.  I called.  And called.  And called.  And got voicemail, after voicemail, after voicemail.  So it’s now 2:30 and I’m reaching panic mode.  If the final payment isn’t made by 3, we must re-do all this paperwork.

Desperate, I finally march my way into the local bank branch and speak with a very nice teller who probably dislikes lawyers as much as I do.  At first, she tells me the person who can help me with a certified check has three customers ahead of me…and now it’s 2:45. I explained the situation to her – I need a wire transfer or certified check, the law firm didn’t let me know the amount until this morning at closing, yada, yada, yada.

Her eyes narrow and she frowns.  “Give me that wire information,” she says.

Which I promptly hand over, listening to her mutter about lawyers under her breath and me agreeing with every syllable she utters.

Five minutes later, I’m out the door with wire receipt in hand, thinking I really need to send this lady flowers next week.

Crisis, avoided, so all is well now, right?

Well the first crisis is.  Later that evening my DH and I have just sat down to eat an early dinner when his phone rings and it’s my son-in-law.  His car has broken down.  On Wendover.  And it’s full of stuff he’s moving from the apartment to the house.  Since I’m eating soup and you can’t put that in a to-go box, we scarf down our meal in record time and head toward Wendover.

And immediately passed him, pulled over on the other side of the road.  For those of you who don’t live in Guilford County, Wendover is Highway 70.  And it’s busy.  Seven lanes of traffic, punctuated by various stop lights, ramps, and people that wouldn’t know what a turn signal is if it jumped up and bit them in the butt.  So, we make our way over to the further-most left hand lane, to make a legal U-turn in order to get back to our son-in-law.  We’re sitting at the stop light, when this older gentleman who probably really doesn’t need to be driving at night slams into the rear of the car.

Did I mention we were driving my car?  Why were we driving my car?  Well, that was because my husband’s SUV is in the shop with airbag issues and my knee still won’t let me climb up into his truck because it’s too far off the ground.  And all of that hits me at once – the fact that if my car is out of commission because of this guy, that I am car-less for God knows how long.

After the day I had, ask me how many shades of red I was seeing?

Fortunately for me and the geezer that hit me my car is drivable.  We get to our son-in-law and call a tow truck.  Meanwhile, my daughter pulls up behind us.  I get in the car with her and she’s going to drive me home and then go into work, since she works third shift.  We pull into my driveway and it’s then I realize that since we had been using my car that evening…and the DH had been driving….he still had my key ring and my house keys were with him.

Yeah….that’s how it’s kind of been for the last two weeks.  So that’s why there was no blog this week and I have pretty much got zilch done this week.

I did get this far with one snowman block…

And I only got this far with my Farmer’s Wife blocks….

And I did get these blocks done for the Halo Medallion.

 

I have finally gotten clearance from the doctor to play on my long-arm again.  I’ve missed Loretta and have already loaded up a new pantograph to play with this weekend.

 

Here’s to a quieter week….

 

Love and Stitches,

Sherri and Sam

There is a theory is the field of science called The Butterfly Effect.  It has its roots in the chaos theory.  Partly used to establish weather patterns, this effect has also been used to explain other aspects of existence and environment.  Edward Lorenz came up with this idea and explained it in 1961 as a strange attractor for values ρ=28, σ = 10, β = 8/3. The butterfly effect or sensitive dependence on initial conditions is the property of a dynamical system that, starting from any of various arbitrarily close alternative initial conditions on the attractor, the iterated points will become arbitrarily spread out from each other.

When I was teaching science, I always explained it as  the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.  In other words, one event, no matter how seemingly small and insignificant, can directly affect so many other things.  A butterfly flaps its wings in my front yard today and tomorrow that may change the weather pattern in Newfoundland.

It’s really not quite that simple, but that’s a good picture of how it works.

Why am I espousing the Butterfly Effect on quilting blog?  In the past, I have referenced that I am a sixth-generation quilter and am researching my family on Ancestry.com.  It has been a long, wild ride and I’m not done yet.  My mother’s family has the quilters, so I have been really digging away on the Perry side.  My mom’s extended family is not from North Carolina.  Many of them came from West Virginia, from McDowell County, from a small town called English (formerly Perryville).  This is one of the poorest, if not the poorest county, in West Virginia and has suffered great poverty.

They were coal miners in a political landscape that was not going to support that vocation, even back then.  So they left, traveled south, settled in Virginia, then in Rockingham and Forsyth counties in North Carolina.

A family leaves one state and settles in another, probably not ever thinking that this one “flap” of those butterfly wings would mean so much.  But without that “flap” I wouldn’t be in High Point and have so many wonderful quilting friends that have taught me so much.  I just find it so fascinating that this one decision changed so many lives for the better.

….

I am still working on my Snowmen Challenge.  Here are some more blocks that I finished last week.

Our Santa’s Loading Dock group met this week.  I have finished my background and have cut out my continents.

We did decide that we needed to change up the timeline.  The floor goes in next, not the snowflakes.  The larger pieces will have to be placed first, so we can work on the placement of the smaller ones, otherwise the spatial relationship will be off.  The floor takes nine yards of purple fabric.  I did a double take on that amount until I realized that the floor extends into the toy shop.  After leaving our meeting, I went home and began to pull my purple batiks.  Ask me, everybody’s favorite purple-holic, how shocked I was to discover I had nowhere near that amount of purple batiks.  Why batik?  It has a firm weave and lends itself to my Scan and Cut as well as it’s a terrific background for the applique.  Those and the Fairy Frost Fabrics are going to be liberally used throughout this quilt.

I’ve got to draw the floor out this week and then cut it apart for my pattern.  Between Linda and Lisa, I already know that the boards in the floor are not even, the angles are odd, and the entire process is going to take patience.  I’m torn between making a transparency and throwing the thing on my projector and tracing it that way, or asking my son-in-law if I give him a scanned copy to print out on our work plodder the exact size that I need.

I think I’m going with my scanned copy first because my knee is still bothering me and it hurts to stand for too long.

The challenge is still there and every time I wonder if this is all too foolish and crazy to undertake, Lisa gives me the side-eye and reminds me that “It’s the year of fearless quilting!”

Good thing I love her so much….

Still Quilting Fearlessly…more or less….

 

Love and Stitches,

Sherri and Sam