Randomday with Wreck-it Ralph

Long holiday weekends are great!  We'll be leaving as a family to go see Wreck-it Ralph this afternoon... and maybe catch dinner out afterwards rather than coming home for more turkey.  That way we'll have just enough turkey to make enchiladas for dinner tomorrow.  We were supposed to go to Grandma's for Sunday dinner, but they are in germ-control lockdown over there so the dining room is not open.  So maybe we can sneak Grandma over to have dinner with us.  Kidding about the sneaking... they don't keep Grandma in lockdown.  I'd like to see anyone try!

Yesterday was more of a Purple Friday for me, as I dug into my Anita's Arrowheads quilt block piecing.  I haven't worked on these since the summer, but I want to clear my workspace for other holiday quilt projects, and that means dealing with the purple and multicolored fabrics that have been covering up my cutting area for months.  I figured out how many I still need to make and have been making them.  I started sewing together the blocks into rows and this is about halfway done.  There are now fewer than 20 remaining blocks to piece, and they are going fast.  All the pre-cutting and starching is done.

I did hit one store to buy white thread for quilting my Jack's Chain quilt.  I stood in line at Hancock Fabrics and everything.  Then I set it down on my workspace, and you guessed it, it got jumbled to the center stratum of stuff and I lost it.  I looked for it for half an hour last night before I finally found it.  I wound bobbins with it this morning, but it's been all purple all day today too.  And I don't even like purple that much.  It's a good cause, though, using up purple from my stash.  It may end up as a Cedar Tree auction quilt.  But purple is Quarta's favorite color.

I finished my 11th shawl of 2012, Citron, yesterday.  And I cast on for my 12th, Wingspan, today.

On Thanksgiving day I saw an interesting bird of prey of some kind, perched in the sycamore tree in back, holding a small bird in one claw.  I think but am not sure that the small bird was already dead.  I think the bigger bird was either a Northern Harrier or Northern Goshawk.

Source: bird-of-the-day.blogspot.se via Katherine on Pinterest

The very tall evergreens in the school grounds across the street have been surrounded with orange hazard fencing, and it looks like several of them lost branches in the recent storm.  At least one stand looks like roots are protruding and they will probably have to come down  for safety reasons; maybe all of them.  It will totally change the way the neighborhood birds interact if so.  The seagulls and the ravens use the highest trees and houses surrounding the park to stake out when it is safe to take over the field at the school; it's like the Crips and the Bloods.  Every once in a while neither of those groups is there, and the regular robins and songbirds are out pecking at the dirt.  Sometimes the disgruntled birds end up in our cedar trees, which are next tallest to the ones at the park.  It's all quite the soap opera.

Thanksgiving

Things I am thankful for:

1. God is good.
2. Steve, who celebrated his birthday today.  He's a perfect square (he was before, but it's official this year), the straight-man counterpoint to my flaky creative side.
3. Daniel, who is spending break with his Aunt Deb and family in Philadelphia, and skyped us earlier today.
4. Secundus, who after much effort broke the 3.0 barrier last quarter.
5. Tertia, who is looking forward to singing carols for the official Vancouver Christmas tree lighting tomorrow, and may even get to see Santa Claus (and the mayor).
6. Quarta, who figured out today that helping to do dishes the old-fashioned way went really fast when you have help and company.
7. Grandma C., who came over for dinner and played cribbage and watched football.
8. Grandpa B., who skyped me this morning as I was eating breakfast before getting the turkey started.  And Grandma Deb and her parents too, hoping they had a nice Thanksgiving in Scottsdale.
9. My sister Beth, who shared the Peanuts video above.  Methinks Thanksgiving in Scotland is just not the same as here.  She also shared the clip about the flying turkeys from WKRP in Cincinnati, which has great nostalgic value in our family.
10. My sister Sarah, her family, and brother Andy in Virginia.
11. Steve's sister Kristine, who called him and chatted this afternoon, and her family in Arizona.
12. Our home is comfortable.  The patched roof is holding, apparently, and the gutter on the south side has just been cleaned out so the basement is dry again.
13. Our home is in America, and America is a country to be thankful for.
14. Steve's job is steady.
15. Our church, 1st OPC in Portland, and the many friends we have there.
16. Grove City College is providing an excellent education for Daniel.
17. Cedar Tree is providing an excellent education for Secundus and Quarta.
18. The Vancouver Public School District provides an excellent education for Tertia, with many opportunities we could not possibly give her.
19. Cedar Tree received its accreditation through the Association of Classical Christian Schools, with commendations in Latin (!) and several other areas.  This makes it one of the top 25 ACCS schools in the nation.
20. My job teaching at Cedar Tree is challenging, enriching, exhausting, and (because of the age of the students I teach mainly) makes me laugh.
21. My friends and co-workers at Cedar Tree.
22. My little blog project, which keeps me off the streets and has become incredibly fun and rewarding for me.
23. My wonderful blog readers, who come from all over and seem to find my blog worth reading.
24. My hobbies of knitting and quilting, which provide a creative outlet and more or less constant blog fodder.
25. My well-thumbed copy of the November 1994 issue of Bon Appetit, which taught me that turkey gravy tastes really good with sherry.
26. ...and that the turkey will be succulent if you rub softened butter with herbs underneath the skin before roasting.
27. My JennAire range has a convect-roast feature with a meat probe that ended the cooking exactly when the turkey reached 180 degrees.  Ordinarily I don't like appliances that are smarter than I am but this was fun to watch.
28. A really nice side dish: drained hominy, corn, simmered in half-and-half with some chopped green chiles and cilantro.  Also from that issue of Bon Appetit.
29. The turkey will provide several more meals.  I made turkey stock in two batches and have four large containers of stock in the freezer and fridge.  The meat itself... well, Hugo was almost 22 pounds.
30. I don't have to go shopping tomorrow unless I want to.  I don't have to cook tomorrow unless I want to.

Finished Feathered Star

Here is my finished Feathered Star.  Long story: begun in 1999 as a group challenge to make a Feathered Star and add elaborate borders; but pregnancy and moving got in the way and I finally decided to slap a few simple borders on it an call it good as part of Judy L.'s UFO challenge this year.  Then I machine quilted it with freeform feathers all in one day, 2 Saturdays ago.  I am amazed at how much I like the feathers and I want to do freeform feathers on my Farmer's Wife quilt now, too.

You can kind of see the feathers on the back in this shot a little better.  I also skipped the label and wrote the pertinent info right on the back of the quilt.  And today, I hung it up above the piano in the living room.  That doesn't count as cleaning the living room, unfortunately, but it spiffs it up a little.

Jack's Chain is on the Megaquilter but I still haven't begun the quilting.

We've been having quite the weather events lately.  Monday morning early there was a small earthquake, epicenter just a few miles from here.  That evening the rain was falling so hard and the leaves were clogging up the gutters so that the basement flooded.  Then yesterday afternoon, apparently we had a microburst or random small tornado go through the neighborhood and it flattened a section of fence.

It snapped the support post off at the base, which was rotten.  Fencing company will come in a week to replace.  So no Black Friday shopping for this family!

For the yarn-along, I'll use this photo from last week.  I'm on the final ruffled edge of Citron, but it still looks like a pile of red.  I may run out of yarn before the 11 rows of the ruffle, so it may be a short ruffle.  I just finished reading The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs.  It was okay, but I didn't love it.  The whole hard-edged New York City girl-power chick-lit, f-word, shacking-up, loving Planned Parenthood scene kind of turns me off, actually.  I liked The Shop on Blossom Street, and obviously the knitting theme is something I enjoy in real life, but chick-lit in general isn't my favorite.

Thanksgiving cooking is going on.  I roasted 2 squash and 1 mystery pumpkin today.  It's the mystery pumpkin that was growing in the compost pile, the one with green stripes; the orange mystery pumpkin behind it had been sitting on our front porch for a few weeks and had a couple bad spots so it got put back in the compost pile for next year.  After a bit of internet research I'm convinced the green stripey pumpkin is actually a pumpkin and is not a poisonous gourd.  The butternut squash in the center and the squash that looks like a pumpkin on the right both came from Grace's Garden.  The one on the right had a weird name that I can't remember and was extremely hard-shelled; I roasted it for about an hour before I could cut it in half.  I made our Thanksgiving pumpkin pies with the actual pumpkin and froze the squash for soups this winter.  We will also have a grape pie and a blueberry pie.  Tomorrow, besides being Thanksgiving, is also Steve's birthday.  He requested the blueberry pie.  And Stove Top stuffing instead of homemade.

Political Tuesdays - Quotes for the Culture Wars

Source: google.com via Katherine on Pinterest

Last week I wrote a bit of a downer of a post.  A friend said it was "too depressing for words," and that is how pretty much everyone of my acquaintance who cares about a Biblical world view and the future of the American republic feels.  I'm convinced that post-election, we really are on a slow but inevitable slide toward barbarism.  I hope it won't come in my lifetime or my children's, but America does seem to have abandoned her position as a shining city on a hill and is a little more like a welfare state in a moral vacuum.  I feel most intensely for my friends in the pro-life movement, who have worked passionately for nearly 40 years and now see even their religious institutions forced to support the culture of death.

I'm not going to waste any time on people who refuse to work within the system we have but still complain that Mitt Romney is a "RINO" and could never have been elected.  Their lack of a vote made no difference; the barbarians are already within the gates anyway.  (And no, this is not a reference to the Hispanic vote, which I believe will ultimately go to the Republicans).  But as the above cartoon illustrates, barbarians lack a certain sophistication of thought.  It's awfully easy to outthink them, and for those of us who enjoy such things, it is fun to watch them fail.  It would be more enjoyable if it did not also involve the fall of our own civilization, though.

And, truth be told, it has been a week of many domestic eruptions and tomorrow is the biggest cooking day of the year and I have hearth fires to tend.  So I have just a few random quotes to share today.

"Accustom yourself to look first to the dreadful consequences of failure; then fix your eye on the glorious prize which is before you; and when your strength begins to fail, and your spirits are well nigh exhausted, let the animating view rekindle your resolution, and call forth in renewed vigor the fainting energies of your soul."
-William Wilberforce-

(This has been making the rounds of my pro-life friends on Facebook.  One of the things that attracted me to Steve way back when was that he lent me a biography of Wilberforce to read.  And the slave trade was, ultimately, abolished, as I pray abortion will be someday.)

The second quote is from Redeemed Reader.  They are having a Hobbit read-along; this quote is from J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth by Bradley Birzer.

When one of the riders asks Aragorn how to discern right and wrong in complicated times, Aragorn responds: ‘As he has ever judged,’ for ‘good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”

That one made me think of the Teleprompter-dependent President as similar to the Voice of Saruman, and that brought on a fit of giggles.  That will have to do for today.  I'm off for what I hope will be a quiet evening of knitting and tomorrow, a quiet day of baking and cleaning.

Design "Wall" and stash report

It's not really the design wall, but I've mounted Jack's Chain onto the Megaquilter and hope to start the quilting process soon.  I was so encouraged by finishing up the Feathered Star quilting, that I want to see if I can get this one to Tertia for Christmas.  It will be a simpler quilting pattern, maybe with a few spinning feather fans in the hexagons but everything else will be point-to-point arcs.  I apparently do not have any true white thread, only off-white, so will have to pick some up first.

Hope to share pictures of the finished Feathered Star soon.  It's one of my favorites ever!

Here are the candied chestnuts I made that I couldn't get access to the main computer to load Saturday.  As I pointed out, they don't really look that great.

Here are the girls having a gun battle after discovering an old, no-longer functional Nerf gun somewhere.  Tertia was looking fierce; Quarta tried to fend off nonexistent Nerf pellets with a pillow.

Quarta really wanted her turn to pose with the big gun when she saw I had the camera.  Tertia was having none of that.

She gave Quarta the old, non-functional squirt gun and kept the big one for herself. 

Stash report:

Fabric used this week: 6 yards (a vintage queen-size sheet) for backing Jack
Fabric used year to date: 82 yards
Added this week: 0 yards
Added year to date: 28 yards
Net used for 2012: 54 yards

Yarn used this week: 0 yards
Yarn used year to date: 7064 yards
Yarn added this week: 0 yards
Yarn added year to date: 3503 yards (all handspun, not purchased)
Net used for 2012: 3561 yards

Rainy Randomday

It's wet outside.  Very wet.  Wet enough that I don't really want to go out and run errands.  So I translated my Latin assignments (Caesar and Bede) and baked up a batch of granola.  My class quizzes were graded yesterday, I'm still ignoring all the housecleaning that needs to be done, and I may even aspire to sitting on the couch and knitting or finishing the binding on my feathered star.  I should load Jack's Chain onto the Megaquilter, but even that might be too much...

Steve and I watched Gigi last night.  Neither of us knew what it was about before.  (Pretty young French girl being groomed by her grandmother and great-aunt to be a rich man's mistress).  We're glad we didn't offer it as a treat to the girls, who like musicals.  Can I just say that I will never again be able to see Maurice Chevalier as anything but a creeper?  I mean really, "Thank heaven for little girls?"  Could that even be made today?

Steve was channel-surfing and watching a bit of Lawrence of Arabia yesterday.  That spurred him to look up Lawrence.  Apparently, Lawrence was not his real name; his father's name was Chapman, but because he left his first family and had several children with the governess, they adopted the name Lawrence later on.  So add Lawrence of Arabia to Johnny Appleseed as yet another Chapman who is famous, but not by that name.  We'd like to trade them for the guy who shot John Lennon.

Lawrence of Arabia is one of those movies I just don't get.  I made one good-faith effort to stay awake through it, but I have very hazy memories of desert warfare and political intrigue, only to be jolted awake every so often by the stirring theme music and stunning scenery.  Steve tells me it's a classic political drama.  And I liked West Wing (I know... but it was because of the writing).  So I really should watch it again some decade.

Secundus just called on his cell phone.  He spent the night with a friend in Beaverton and will need to be picked up at the Max station in an hour.  And Daniel is apparently arrived safe after numerous rides and transfers at Steve's sister's house in Philadelphia, where he will spend Thanksgiving week.  It is making me feel old and strange, having kids becoming so independent.  It will definitely be strange and quiet next week when Daniel is NOT with us for Thanksgiving.

After reading so many Redwall books, Quarta asked to make candied chestnuts when we saw chestnuts at the farmer's market.  So a few days ago I tried this recipe with her.  We used to have a couple of chestnut trees when I was growing up, but I had forgotten the unique texture that chestnuts have.  I took a picture but our main computer - not my laptop - is having epilepsy or something.  And truly, the picture does not look that appetizing.  The jury is out on whether the kids like candied chestnuts.  Quarta is gamely trying to like them but was a little discouraged by the reaction of her school friends, only one of whom even tried them.  The rest of them said they looked like brains... which they do, kind of.

Steve has been on the phone with the Dell tech support people in India quite a bit lately, but the computer still freezes up when you try to get it warmed up after hibernation.  I was going to upload the candied chestnuts picture and this time, it started making a high-pitched whistling noise (I didn't even notice it at first because it sounded almost exactly like my left ear).  Nice.  I don't know how many pictures I'll be able to add to the blog for awhile!  But again, I don't think you're missing much with the candied chestnuts.  They taste better than they look.

I just received the Round Robin letter that has been making the rounds between me and 5 of my college friends for over 20 years now.  There, now I've admitted to it in the blog, and I'm committed to sending it off again before Thanksgiving.  If I can't get the computer that's attached to the printer to work, I might even have to write it by hand.

WIP Wednesday

Saturday I finally did it.  My UFO Feathered Star had been loaded onto the Megaquilter frame for a few weeks.  I never had the time or energy to get to it, and I was fearful of the freeform feathers that I was determined to machine quilt on there.  But I worked on it all day, off and on (it's only a wall quilt size) and I got all the feathers done, and I'm really, really happy with them!  Here you can see the feathery whirligig I quilted into the center octagon.

And here is a sample of the background squares and inner border with leaves and vines.  The quilt is being bound now and may even be a finish soon.  I'm so glad I ordered the replacement tracks for the Megaquilter; it's doing its thing very nicely now.  I'm going to try to get Jack's Chain loaded up on there soon.  Now that I can do freeform feathers, I won't be afraid of quilting anymore.  Or at least, I shouldn't.

For the yarn-along, this is my Citron shawl.  I'm starting the final repeat, and it's lots of comforting stockinette stitch.  It will be my 11th in the 12 shawls in 2012 challenge that I am insanely trying to complete.  I finished reading the Mark of Athena (latest in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series) and it was a lot of fun but to tell the truth, most of my reading lately has been grading and work related, or the news over at the Drudge Report.