rain on tulips

I’ve been enjoying our (finally typical) Oregon spring weather the past couple of days, and was trying to figure out how to express how wonderful it is, when I stumbled across this post by Carol:

Where’s Aaron Copeland when I need him? Whole suites could be written about glorious Oregon springtimes, long and slow and cool and changeable. Don’t like the weather now? Wait and it’ll change. Showers and sunbreaks and hail and constant drippy greenery. Raindrops glowing like stars on just-leafing-out maples, reflecting the grey sky as glowingly as Venus. Puddles everywhere, just asking to be stomped in by kids in rainboots and raincoats. Streams rushing, waterfalls gushing, water washing down driveways and gutters. Keep the sunglasses handy, because it’s dazzling when the sun shines. Balanced by the need for windshield wipers on high 15 minutes later as the sky lets loose. And the weather forecast had showers or rain for the next 10 days. The way it oughta be…

A better description I haven’t seen in a long while!

For an example, yesterday GC, EK & I were out running errands. We left one location in bright sunshine and light wind, drove across 2 parking lots to our next destination, and when I opened the door to get EK out, we were hit with a deluge! (Unhappily, I had left my driver’s door open while retrieving EK, so when I sat back down, I soaked the back of my jeans — ewww!) We sat in the van for maybe 10 minutes, building the shopping list and feeding EK. By the time we got out? Sunshine and light breeze again!

OH! How I love Oregon in the Springtime!!

So, I put up all the pictures around my menu bars, and Fuul wrote me this nice little plugin that rotates my pictures for me! I just have to make sure that there are a few images in each of the folders that each .php statement points to, and I have a sudden, dynamic site! (Go ahead! Try it out! Hit refresh, and watch as each of the images changes — or doesn’t! — on the sidebars! Its kind of fun, right up there with slideshows!)

If anyone is interested, let me know and I will be glad to share copies of the plugin! Its quite the fun thing!

So, over the past year, we have been watching Star Wars: Clone Wars on Cartoon Network. I went there tonight, because I had heard rumors that the first 20 chapters were being released onto DVD sometime in this week, and in the process, I stumbled onto

this!!!

(essentially, you can watch all five of the new episodes online — I’m doing it now, as a matter of fact! — one after another! They have been done very well, and it beats clicking through all the saved episodes on my computer!)

Now, I guess I need to run out and buy volume 1!!

Happy Easter! Amazing how another one is here already… time that used to creep by is suddenly tearing right along. The Easter Bunny made his appearance (at least, the filled baskets on the counter says he was here!) and the kids have been hyped on sugar all day. Luckily, he didn’t bring so much candy that it will last longer than say a day or two apiece, but he did remember our family’s love of books, and even found a Fleecy Bunny book for EK.

The kids helped me take the obligatory “First Easter” pictures of EK, bunny ears and all, and they were even pretty cooperative in trying to help arrange an ‘all kids’ picture as well, but EK was just done by then! (The one picture I have here of all 6 of them has a classic pouting look on her face — she was in between screams).

We did have a nice dinner tonight, though: glazed ham, candied yams, green bean casserole, rolls, and jello eggs and jello beans. MMM, mmm!

Hope everyone had a good Easter! (I got pictures this evening from the kids’ cousins: they all had a nice little Easter Egg Hunt… wish we could have been there!)

When I look into the back of my van, I am greeted by six kids and three carseats (only recently graduated from four!) Because we have all these carseats, the kids, essentially, have assigned seats. A couple can swap, but mostly not.

Via Carol, though, I found this site that links page after page of a 1971 Sears catalog, including this child safety page! Wow! I remember when I was a kid wandering around in the back of the car, lying in the back window, and standing up to the dashboard as we coursed down the road! (I’ll not mention riding rollerskates around the back of our cargo van — on the highway!! — when I was 8 … one of those things my kids need never learn!)

Wow! The things I am glad I don’t have to deal with! (How scary to consider driving with the crazies on the road while battling the crazies in the car!)

Now, if they can just start selling the domes of silence in child-sized versions for use in cars… bwahaha!!

I went to karate today, all ready to work mindlessly on forms and combinations and katas , which is really what I needed to lower my stress levels.

What I got, though, was an instructor who thought it would be useful to practice with an opponent, so we could refine some of our combinations. Its a good plan. Its useful, and helps ready me for possible ‘real life’ application of my karate skills. But I like running through stuff solo. Ah well.

I was game. I played along. My second time up, I got dropped. From about 2 feet up. Flat on my back. Hit my head. (Granted, the floors are well-padded, but still!)

It hurt when I landed, but not a lot. The pain didn’t really start to set in until I sat down in the van to drive home afterwards. The cramping set in, clear from my hips to my skull. Oh joy.

I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings! Waahhh!!

I finally got enough things tweaked on the template to go ahead and upload the new site!

I’ve added a left-side menu bar, with rotating pictures using a neat plugin designed by Fuul, and my right-side menu bar now runs all the way down the page, instead of dangling off in midair.

If anyone has any problems viewing, or with site speed (I tried to downsize a lot of the pictures so load-time shouldn’t be too awful!) please let me know in comments! Thanks!

(NO! I promise this has not turned into a quilting blog… These are the only two quilts I have worked on this year, and they just happened to fall on the same week!)

Today I got the borders on the second quilt, and got it all pinned to the frames, and the backing lined up. I need to spray baste it tomorrow, then quilt and bind. A couple of hours work. To fit in around karate. But I’m really liking this quilt: its rather eclectic, but gradient and pretty standing there across the room from me! OH, how I wish I had a camera to post pictures of it!)

I got started on the second quilt today — I stayed home this morning with the kids, and Fuul drove to work, and was going to come home and swap out the van at lunch… but that turned into 1pm, then 2, and then it was 4:30, and he figured he’d just finish up for the day and come home after work. So, with nowhere to go, I just kept sewing! I got all the pinwheel squares pieced (32 of them!) and cut and pieced all the plain squares with the pinwheels (63 squares total)! All thats left now is borders and backing and binding! (Maybe I’ll get it done tomorrow? Its been a while since I could kick out a quilt in a couple of days!)

I finished the quilt that I started with the train fabric today! It turned out really nice (aside from a couple of dings when GC stepped through it while I had it pinned to my frames — it wound up pulling through 5 of the pushpins, and tearing off the entire corner (about ¾”) one one side; most was hidden by some generous binding edges, but the one corner still had to be darned to correct the edge of the tear. Mostly I don’t think its too noticible).

I backed the quilt in a grey polar fleece, and didn’t put any batting/filler in. And I made a new discovery: polar fleece on the back of a pieced quilt has both the feeling of a pieced quilt (which I love!) and the soft, fuzziness of polar fleece (which I also love!) Both Fuul and AE asked me to make them blankets with this combination the first time they held them! And, when I figured it out, the cost is pretty similar, polar fleece vs. backing/batting.

OH! And I discovered today that Quilt Basting Spray works really well for machine quilting! I had used it on lots of quilts that I did hand quilting and appliqué on, but I just hadn’t done any real machine work in a while. So, a couple quick sprays, and it all ran through the machine quick and easy, and no puckers in my backing! Yeah! (This type of spray is also available at WalMart for around $6 a can, as opposed to $10-12 at most big-name quilt/fabric shops).

Tomorrow: on to quilt number two! (Remember, I cut out LOTS of squares and triangles, and had a full set of 2 ready to go!)

*can’t wait to get a good camera here again, so I can post a picture of the quilt. Especially since I have this awful habit of making and shipping off quilts before I remember to get photos of them!

And no, its not because I am feeling lazy. It happens that, for the first time since the end of the little league football season and the birth of a new baby and all the year-end holidays collided, I have caught up!!

Yes, you read right! All the laundry hampers in the house are empty (or are harboring only one or two small items, not worthy of a load by themselves), and the drawers and closets are bursting forth with clean clothes ready to wear!

Of course, this now leaves me at the starting gate of the next laundry-related chore: sorting through the assembled clothing, ejecting all that are too old/too stained/too dilapidated to warrant wearing any longer, and executing the perpetual ‘hand-me-down’ dance, where I systematically move one size of clothing down to the next smallest child in an attempt to glean just a little more wear from “Blues Clues” or “Scooby Doo”. Maybe I’ll start that tomorrow!?

I’ve been The Mom™ for 11 years this week; a full third of my life, truth be told. Sometimes it seems as though its still new, and sometimes it feels as though I have been in this role for an eternity.

On those days when I feel like The Mom™ has existed forever, things run smoothly, and I simply coast from one well-worn chore to the next; laundry, dishes, cooking, vacuuming: all tides in the grand scheme of things. Granted, there are those days when storms on the surface will upset the flow, but, given a little time, things settle back into their assigned channels, and the eternal cycle continues.

Sometimes I feel that the ebb and flow of The Mom™ should just continue running forever and ever, the waves only changing the surface.

But throw in a rock … or a child?? The ripples radiate, the undercurrent is changed forever. Even with the seemingly minor introduction of a little pebble.

In the past several weeks, I have been dealing with the introduction of several little pebbles: five of them, to be exact. All but the baby have begun to insinuate themselves into the tides of kitchen duties, former domain of The Mom™.

The role of The Mom™ has changed from source of the tides, to observer and coordinator of the tides. Its akin to moving out of deep water into a raucus tidal pool: the eddies and waves and undercurrents must all be noted and directed and held in check, or they threaten to overrun the delicate ecosystem that has grown in the eternity of The Mom™.

After the peace of the deep water, the incessant motion of the pools is intimidating: so much going on at once, so much to pay attention to. And yet, though the eternity of deep water has reigned in the kitchen, the novelty of the pools is intriguing, and interesting to observe, and — dare I say? — fun?! Its a strange place now, watching the tides change, watching all the growing currents redirect bits of what once lay still. Strange and fascinating… and a little scary, not knowing where the new waves and tides are going to take us!

I still sit and marvel at the new direction that these pebbles and tides are taking me… and wonder where I’ll be in the future…. In the meantime, it seems, The Mom™ is going to have to sit back and learn to enjoy the ride, no matter where the tides take her!

Grandma left on Thursday to head back home, and I’ve taken most of the weekend to try and get back into the groove of ‘non-houseguest’ life! (Don’t get me wrong: we had a good time having her here, and the kids loved being able to play games with her and show her around the zoo and the science museum, but life just runs in a slightly different channel when you have an extra person under the roof, even for just a few days!)

The kids and I drove her up to the airport (except GC; she had preschool) and said our goodbyes in front of the departures signs. DA complained that there were so many people getting on planes not wearing the prescribed green for St. Patrick’s Day, and they were all out of reach of his pinching fingers. Oh, to be 11 years old, again!

Speaking of which, Happy Birthday, DA!! (on the 17th!) The big One-One!! (How on earth do things like this happen!?)

I had to send my (OK, Grandma’s camera) home with her; we had it here to try and get a new cord for her so she could use it more easily. Didn’t ever find a brand-specific cord, but we did manage to get a nice card-reader and a card adaptor (cheaper than trying to get a adaptor that work work directly with the XD card that was in the camera) that worked really well. I was getting used to having a good digital camera that I could take bunches of pictures with! I’ve been going through photo withdrawals for the past 4 days!

Just before we left for the airport, though, we did take a few minutes to get a couple more pictures! (Had to get the spring family shot, and it was fun to get some with Grandma and the kids and Grandma and the baby!) We actually downloaded them onto our computers in the van on the way to the airport! (Talk about multitasking!)

Holly has an interesting article up about the Terry Schiavo case, entitled, “If You Didn’t Write It, You Didn’t Do It”.

The Terry Schiavo case is simple. It isn’t about right to life, or right to die, or a possibly murderous husband who is attempting public murder now, or a criminal-accomplice-to-attempted-murder judge, or anything else.

It’s a case about documentation.

The first words that come out of a nursing instructor’s mouth on the first day of nursing school — and that pass someone’s lips at least once a day thereafter, are “If you didn’t write it, you didn’t do it.” Followed by, “CYA, people.” CYA. Cover Your Ass.

I would guess that in any profession where the practioners know that at any time, for any reason, they could be called upon to testify in a case they haven’t thought about in seven or ten or more years, the competent instructor will drill this into every student’s head. Cops, lawyers, EMTs …, I’m sure any of them could tell you the same thing I’m going to tell you.

IF YOU DIDN’T WRITE IT, YOU DIDN’T DO IT.

Read the whole thing. Its nice to see someone who looks past the emotional, gut reaction that seems to permeate the news and commentary shows about how sad it is. Its not sad. Its illegal!

I’ve been trying to update my site: worked on a new template (almost done tweaking) and got a bunch of photos uploaded (then downloaded, resized, and reuploaded) for the new template, and have worked to resize some of the previous images I’ve uploaded for the site. Unfortunately, I’m also needing to move them into different folders on the server, necessitating a bunch of ‘tweaking’ to existing posts, to get the pointers correct. (I’ve temporarily given up on that one, though; it will be a slow work in progress to get all the archived pics upgraded. Oh well.)

I do have some other stuff to stick up, or talk about, or babble on incessantly about… even if its all just for me! Ah well!