New Orleans...vicariously

DH and my younger two kids got home from New Orleans yesterday. They had a great time, but were very tired. They got in a little sight seeing, attending a lot of large group gatherings, did a lot of walking, and did a service project in the lower 9th Ward in New Orleans. DH was very proud of the group of kids that they worked so hard and cleared 9 lots where other groups cleaned only a couple and quit before lunch time. It's hard to believe that nearly 5 years after Katrina that there is still so much work to be done. This convention, the ELCA Youth Gathering, was the largest convention group to attend in New Orleans since Katrina and numbered around 37,000 people. I'm sure it was a much needed influx of money to the area and each group attending did community service as well, so a lot of work got done. I'm sure a lot of the attendees will be inspired to return and continue helping if possible. A big emphasis of the Gathering was for each person to work for justice in their own community serving the needy, helping others, etc. so I hope that will happen. Anyway, I enjoyed my week at home but didn't quite catch up on all of my work. I've just got two more days of summer school left and then my schedule will be pretty free for completing projects.

Little Sister Quilt

I finally got some quilting done. This little wall hanging had been practically done since March when my thread ran out when I was quilting it and I never got around to finishing it up. It was supposed to be an Easter/Spring quilt, but as usual that didn't quite happen. I've had the basket of artificial lilacs waiting on the mantle all that time. Ha. I guess I'll enjoy looking at it for awhile and then hopefully get something more summery put up. My basket is really a geranium basket and has a special liner and a bunch of geraniums that look nice in it, so I should do something red to match. This quilt is the little sister of one I made for a friends birthday back in March. I kind of like the bigger one better, but it wouldn't have fit in this spot anyway. The flash on the camera made the purple border look really bright, it's really much more subdued and blends better than it looks in the picture.

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Another week of summer school is over! Only one more to go and then I'll have the rest of the summer free. I have enjoyed working with the little special needs kids, they are certainly nicer and better behaved than some of the 5th grade boys were by the end of the school year. This afternoon I'm taking tickets at a playoff baseball game for the level above my son's team. His season was over last Sunday, so he didn't have to miss any games for his trip. Then I'm invited over to some friends for supper, so I won't have to eat leftovers for the third night in a row!

Home Alone!

The rest of the family (except for CS who's still at work in "the cities") is heading to New Orleans tomorrow and will be gone for a whole week. That leaves me at home completely alone! All of you Moms out there know that time alone is a precious commodity, so I'll enjoy every minute of it, start to miss them by the end of the week, and be ready to welcome them home when they get here. I don't have a lot of plans, probably a lunch out with the girls and maybe an evening outing. My main plans when I'm not at work in the morning are to catch up on the housework and yard work and finally get some quilting done. I hope at some point to be able to get some things done to sell and perhaps make a little money. I've often thought that my dream job would be to create things and sell them (earning Lots of money in the process), but that's another story. Anyway, I hope the week turns out as great as I've hoped. A few years ago I probably would have felt guilty about enjoying being away from my family, but no more, sorry. :)

Eeeek a Bat!!

DH and I finally did get out for our anniversary last night. We went to the Harry Potter movie; it was okay for me, but not great and has a very unresolved ending, something I hate. Then we used a gift certificate for Outback Steakhouse and had a great (and huge) meal. Anyway, with that huge meal I didn't sleep the greatest. One of the times I was up I heard this scritchy scratchy noise in the window. I got up to look and here's a bat crawling around in the window!! I'm not a big fan of bats, I mean look at their teeth in that photo above!! So, I wake up DH and he goes over and slams down the window. The only problem, he catches the bats toe (or whatever they have that resembles a toe) under the window. Now just because I don't like bats doesn't mean I want his little toe crushed in my window. So I raise up the window just a smidgeon so he can get it out. Then I went back to bed and had dreams about giant furry bats caught between my windows. This morning he has scrunched himself between the window glass and screen up in a distant corner leaving a little smear of bat blood in the window sill. DH will have to take the window out of it's frame from the outside so he can get away I think. The entire time I'm thinking about those poor girls at camp that all had to have rabies shots because a bat got in their cabin. I guess the current directive is to get the shots if you've had a bat in a room you're sleeping in, but I think I'm okay. On the other hand, rabies is about 99.9% FATAL!! It would be easier if he looked more like this other picture I found:

Misc. and Etc.

Don't you hate those days where it seems like everything is either broken, breaking, won't work, runs out of batteries, etc? That was my evening last night. SD's car broke down (twice), I was trying to trim bushes with clippers that wouldn't work right, discovered that odor has not left our basement carpet, the dog left 11!!!! little pieces of poop on the family room carpet, the cat barfed, and to top it all off, DH's paycheck was significantly less than expected. I'm sure there were other things I can't think of right now, but I was not a happy camper and feeling very PMSey. Today is going better despite all of the issues above, I guess a good night sleep helped. Thanks for listening.

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I added a few new blogs to my blogroll on the right. Some I've been reading a long time, some are quite new, some quite funny, irreverent, some family life stuff, quite a variety really. People that know me know I have kind of a different sense of humor, a wide variety of tastes, and some curiousity about lives very different than my own. That being said, I do not necessarily endorse everything about each blog, but I've found something I like at each one, so that's why they are there. Enjoy!

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It sounds like DH and I are finally going to go out for our anniversary on Thursday night. We'll probably take in a matinee of the new Harry Potter movie and then use a gift certificate we've had for Outback Steakhouse. I'm looking forward to a night out! The kids are going to the midnight showing of the movie tonight. They like to go to the midnight showings of the big releases to see all of the people in costumes and enjoy the big crowd of teenagers I guess.

Finally Something Quilty

As I mentioned, I went to several quilt shops on Friday. I didn't get much in the way of new things, but I did find a couple of pieces of fabric and a new book. I went with my friends to our Block of the Month club first, so I thought I'd put a picture of this month's block and some of the other things I found.
Here's this month's block, it's from a book called "Wildflower Sampler". The fabrics this year are all batiks and I'm really enjoying the colors. The quilt has a large appliqued piece of a bunch of flowers in the center. I haven't done much with that yet. Here are the rest of the blocks on my design wall in my sewing room. After my experience with last year's BOM, I swore I wouldn't make any mistakes on the blocks, but that went out the window the first month. This month the center block is put together wrong ( the greens should all line up) and I cut the blue blocks with the wrong angle. Oh well, it will all look okay when it's put together.


I found a neat pattern book at the shop in Decorah. It's for making quilts with hexagon blocks. I used the ruler making the block above, but it will be right for these blocks. I got my first Jellyroll (roll of 2 1/2 in. fabric strips) last summer and I'm going to use a pattern from this book to make something from it. I love the look of the 30's style fabrics, so I can't wait to get started on it.By the way I was inspired to post my block of the month by Mrs. Quilty, who has a new blog and happened by to leave some comments for me the other day. Stop over an see her blog if you have a chance.

Skywatch Friday

I haven't done a Skywatch post for quite awhile, but when I saw this sky I thought it would be great. The picture doesn't do justice to how blue the sky was that day, how white and fluffy the clouds were. We live in Southeastern Minnesota and have some summer days that are the most beautiful you can imagine. No humidity, mid 70's, no bugs or wind, simply perfect. Of course not every day is like that; today it's muggy, gray, and feels like rain. We seem to have enough of those kind of days to make us forget that last winter the temperature reached nearly 40 below zero F. Incidentally, this picture was taken at Oxbow Park's Zollman Zoo near Byron, Minnesota. You can look back a couple days to see when I blogged about my trip there.

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Today I'm off for a trip with my girlfriends. I don't have summer school on Fridays, so we're going to quilt class, visit some other quilt shops, and go out for lunch. We hope to make it down to the new shop in Decorah, Iowa. I'll honk so you know I'm there.

It's 7-8-9

Technically, it's 7-8-09, but who cares? The month of July is sure flying by. I started working at summer school on Monday and it's going okay so far. It is a special ed. classroom, so there are 4 adults and 9 kids, so pretty good odds. The kids definitely have challenges, but they are all nice kids and very well behaved so far. Communication is kind of difficult for some of them, but I'm sure that will get better as we all get used to each other. The only bad thing is having to be there by 7:40 when I'm not a morning person. I've been on time so far, three whole days, so I'll have to try to keep that up. I'm done by 11:15, so it all goes pretty fast.

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We're off to Northfield to a baseball game this afternoon. It's about an hours drive. We used to go through there all the time when we lived farther North, but I haven't been there for years. I'll take my camera along and see what I find. Who knows, I might find another little treasure like I did last week. I hope the rain will hold off. Last night the double header got canceled for heavy rain, so it was nice to have the evening off. I had a terrible tension headache all day, so it was nice to just stay home and rest. I feel a lot better today.

Oxbow Park

DH and I had most of the afternoon free yesterday, so we made a little excursion to Oxbow Park. It's a nice county park with hiking trails, a campground, and a little zoo also. I had taken the kids there a few times in the past, but DH had never been there as he informed me on the drive over. It was a beautiful day for such a trip and we enjoyed looking at the animals at the zoo, the log cabin, and doing the little hiking loop by the river. I'm sure Jeanelle over at Midlife by Farmlight will get a chuckle out of the calf being a zoo exhibit. Where else can we citified folk scratch a calf's ears?? Anyway, my last picture is of a mysterious 8 foot tall week with a red stalk. There were several growing around the river and it was new to me. If anyone knows what it is, let me know. This was kind of the start of DH and I trying to get in the habit of regular exercise. He's chaperoning the kid's youth group trip to New Orleans later this month and will be doing a lot of walking, so he needs to get in shape for that. Both of us have some extra winter poundage to lose, so there's no time like the present to start working on it.

Red, White, and Blue

Happy Fourth of July!! Here's some red, white and blue from my flowers. From the top: red Asian lily, red dianthus, white goat's beard bush (top) and white hosta flowers, some kind of white volunteer flower, blue clematis, and blue sweet William. You can see the rain drops on the flowers in the pictures I took today. They needed a nice little drink, but I hope it will dry off later today. We are going to a friends house for a BBQ and then downtown to watch the fireworks display. In the mean time I'm catching up on some household chores. Hope you are enjoying your day too!!

Jewel Box Bank

Here's a few pictures of the Jewel Box bank on the town square in Owatonna Minnesota. I was exploring for a while the other day when TB had a baseball game there and actually had my camera with me for a change. This bank was completed in 1908, had subsequent additions and renovations, and was designed by Louis Sullivan a teacher of Frank Lloyd Wright. These buildings are pretty rare, but coincidentally our bank when we lived in Grinnell Iowa was very similar. Here's a link that shows pictures of both of those and some others too. Here's another one with a slide show and more information that you probably want. Enjoy!

My Trip to "The Cities"

True Minnesotans usually refer to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area as "The Cities" and that's where I had some summer highlights a couple of weeks ago. SD was doing her freshmen orientation for college and since I've been through it all before with CS, I decided to skip most of the parent stuff and head off on my own. While she was having her orientation, I visited several prime locations, some new for me and some that I had visited in the past. Pictured above is the Weisman Art Museum, a wacky building with some wacky art inside. I don't "get" a lot of it. To me, a picture of a cardboard box with other pictures glued onto it (some upside down) isn't really art. Neither is a Petunia that is supposedly a new life form because some scientist put some of his own DNA in it. (An entire room was devoted to this "Etunia") It has a fun gift shop though where I bought a couple of buttons for my daughter's collection that she puts on her purse. On the right, there is a picture up the river where you can see the wreckage of the 35W bridge laid out and the new bridge in the background. I guess the new bridge lights up in different colors at night, but haven't seen that yet.Here's a picture of the stone arch bridge. "A gently S-curving bridge was built by railway baron James J. Hill in 1883 to speed his trains across the Mississippi River. Now beautifully restored, the bridge provides serene transit for walkers, joggers and anybody who wants the best possible view of St. Anthony Falls, whose churning power first made Minneapolis a milling capital." You can see more of the Falls in the picture looking towards downtown. Lastly here is a picture of the Prospect Part Water Tower. It was referred to as a "witch's hat" water tower and was built in 1913 on the highest natural land area in Minneapolis. My son goes by it on the bus every day on his way to work and wondered what it was, so we ventured by while I was there.

It helped that the weather was perfect while I was there. CS and I went and saw the movie UP and then ate at an outdoor restaurant and walked in the St. Anthony Falls area that evening. I thought while I was there that it might be my only vacation this summer and even though it was only a couple of days, it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed spending the time with my kids too. I almost forgot because I don't have pictures, but I also went to Glad Creations, a famous Minneapolis quilt shop and Engebritson's, a Scandinavian shop of epic proportions. I bought a little something at both shops, but could have spent a lot of money if I had it.