Yesterday after I took pictures of the Medina Bird, I took some photos of the yard. The camellias are still blooming, the azaleas have gone crazy, and the wisteria is in full bloom. I love the wisteria when it is flowering, but really it is a weed here in the yard. We spend hours x 100 trying to get it out of the other shrubs and bushes. Yet for a few brief weeks it is lovely.
I found a bee busy pollinating the azaleas. Papi swears that the azaleas change colors each year, but after eight years I am not convinced. Who really knows what the bees do because the pollen is so thick here that car washes advertise: Is your car really yellow? You can see some of the powdery film still on the leaves below, but that is really nothing because it is what is left after a day of torrential downpours.
2700 size 11/0 delicas...and more dog hair than I would have liked. This pattern was designed for loomwork, but I square stitched it. About 2/3 of the way through I discovered two-bead square stitch which would have made the work go a bit faster, but I didn't want to change the spacing. Oh well, next time. Being a beginner has its drawbacks.
I learned a lot about needle and thread size on this project. I realized that I should have been using a size smaller needle and probably size B Nymo instead of size D. It took breaking a couple beads to come to this conclusion. For this project, I did switch needles to John James sharps and I love them. They last a long time and do not bend and break like the cheapo needles I was using from the big-box craft store.
I also realized that I should have returned the Transparent Rainbow Inside Color Lined Candle Lit White (those would be the lightest color beads which form the thick scroll at the bottom) because even though these little guys are Delicas, this batch was just the slightest bit larger in diameter. I didn't think that it would make a difference, but I can tell, particularly in the bird's eye and the scrollwork around the bird's tail.
The pattern is Medina Bird from FusionBeads.com. I changed the clasp by square stitching two rows of beads for the base of each strappy thing to give a little more heft. If you want to make this, don't buy the quantities they suggest. Buy one bag of each color. That is all I needed and I have left overs of each color.
I just picked up my little dogs from the groomer. Mostly they were there because it takes most of the day to wash and brush them both, and even the groomer sends them home still shedding out undercoat. They arrived just in time for dinner, but first each had to spend a good five minutes rolling around on the floor trying to reacquire some dog scent. Coltrane needed to thoroughly inspect Mingus, first smelling inside each ear, then going for some butt sniffing, just in case I brought home the wrong brother. Mingus was very singleminded as it was five o'clock: d-i-n-n-e-r. Now that he has eaten, he is settled in beside my chair looking just a bit nervous because it has started to thunder. Poor baby.
Tuesday I walked into the office and found all my guys napping in a dog pile on the futon.
Yesterday I was explaining to someone at work how I feel terrible that when I come home from work all I want is quiet and I don't want to talk or listen to any one. He likes to come home and tell me all about everything. Last week he finished tutoring at the high school. He had come to understand why I was always so tired after I got home from work. On the days he tutored, he would take a nap after work. Today he started tutoring at the middle school. He walked in the door an announced that no one could make a fucking sound for the next two hours. He didn't want to hear anything, and he thought that when he started teaching full-time that we should buy a house in the middle of nowhere. I told him Quitman already was mid. o'nowhere, but he disagrees because he still can catch snatches of playing from the well-behaved children next door.
Oh, what a glorious day. My husband understands me so much better than yesterday. And it turns out that he also realizes that I am a saint and possess unending patience to have quietly suffered all this time.
Sometimes there are moments when I wonder "what put this into my head?" These are not the rare, strange, crazy moments, but the lowly, mundane, pedestrian times when I am doing things I have done a thousand times, but at that particular split-second I make an association that leads to analysis. It is Saturday morning and I have been awake for hours even though it is only 8:30. During this time I have been avoiding all the washing that must be done today - laundry, dogs, dishes, the bathrooms - but a pang of guilt got me to start a load of laundry and while I was looking at the Kirkland 28 lb. bucket of detergent and thinking that perhaps it really did do 200 loads because I bought it on my trip to Cleveland last June and here it is almost April and I've got powder to spare, I reached into my spiffy front-loading machine and it hit me: I sort of miss the old top-loading machines.
My machine has that tiny hole in front, surrounded by a thick black rubber gasket. For some reason when ever I pit my arm in to fill or empty I always think of the milking machines they used on the dairy farm in Holland I stayed at 25 years ago. The inside is stainless steel and it shines next to the gasketing and white enamel on the front of the machine. Yet as I stoop to shove the clothes through the opening, I miss looking down into the wide empty space of the top-loader. It didn't have a little porthole window through which I could catch a glimpse of the water, suds, and fabric mixing together, it used more water, it made more noise, and it didn't clean as well.
I took a look at my old blog this morning and am convinced that someone removed my brain last year and gave me an Abby Normal brain in return. I seems that I could write just a bit better when i started this blog stuff than I now am able. You can check out my old blog at http://loismoon.livejournal.com/
