Blustery Day

When I went to bed last night, I already knew that Other Me was going to lose the swimming argument this morning. Sue and I rescheduled Friday's walk to yesterday. We walked in the rain, but we had our rain gear on, and so we felt especially invincible. I guess. Despite the miserable weather, we always enjoy our time together. She's leaving for a couple of weeks, and so I'll be without my walking partner until she returns. 

You might recall that our usual walking trail has been flooded with all the rain.

We decided to walk in the other direction since most of the flooding happens where our trail begins. We were able to walk from the far end of the trail up to nearly this spot, which actually turns out to be farther than our usual distance. It was kind of fun to see things in reverse, although we were still seeing the usual scenery. We did start a little beyond our usual turn around point. This takes us through a maze of trails in the downtown area of Tigard, Oregon, where we both usually lose our sense of direction. It doesn't matter because the trails all end up in the same place eventually. Yesterday we noted our tax dollars had been put to good use because new signage was up that gave us at least a fighting chance of walking in a relatively straight line.

So all of that to say that I was tired when I went to bed last night and swimming this morning was the furthest thing from my mind. Then when I woke up to gale force winds (just a slight exaggeration), the deal was sealed. I'm going to miss Thursday as well because I'm getting an eye exam that day. I have very good intentions of moving my swimming days to Wednesday and Friday this week. We'll see if Other Me can muster a good argument in favor of that.

Smitty was out most of the day yesterday, each time coming in completely drenched from the rain. He honestly does not seem to mind the rain. However, he does not like cold and wind. Nevertheless, he sat up and took special notice of the young squirrel that scampered across the front of the house. He thought he'd chased them all down to the other end of the field, but drat if there wasn't another little pipsqueak right in front of him! I imagine he'll worry the dead leaves and low shrubs to death looking for it...and you can bet he won't rest until he finds it.

I finished up the second of two stitcheries for the next section of the Gardener's Journal quilt yesterday.

Here are the two stitcheries together.

I'll piece these into the quilt next time I work on it, and it's entirely possible I'll do two sections next time, depending on how it falls on my to-do list.

With those finished, I traced out the next Quilting Snowlady. Of course, I added in the little cat.

And I'm off to a good start on this one.

My sewing room sewing (as opposed to my couch sewing) has been pretty tedious the last few days. I got started on my February Let's Book It project, which is this "Oh, Christmas Tree" wall hanging:

This project is from the Quilting with Bits and Pieces book published by House of White Birches. It's a great scrap project and I pulled most of the fabrics from my tiny scraps bin. The entire project (aside from the borders) is done in half-square triangles. I've spent the past two days cutting 222 2-7/8-inch squares in different colors.

Now I'm in the process of marking them for sewing. When I quit yesterday, I had marked all but the green squares.

I'll finish those up today and then start sewing them together. Of course, once they're cut into half square triangles, they'll need to be trimmed to size. I'm not usually obsessive about accuracy, but with these being what they are, it'll save me frustration down the road to have them all trimmed to size. Although it's been a tedious project thus far, I have a good audio book playing, and I have not minded the process. I'm listening to a trilogy by Bryce Courtenay about Australia. Maybe some of you folks from Down Under are familiar with it. The first book is entitled, The Potato Factory, and so far, it's very good. The reader is excellent.

When I looked at my seeds yesterday, I saw that several of them had sprouted. 

Mike has the bird cam all set up for time lapse photography.

The seeds need to get a little more growth to them, and then we'll start filming. I'm excited to see what we'll get. We're going to set the camera to take a 10-second video every 30 minutes and see what we end up with. Should be a fun experiment.

And that's about all that's going on at the Three Cats Ranch for now. Since I'm not going swimming today, I'm going to shift my housework chores to today's schedule and leave tomorrow and Friday open for swimming. Mt. Laundry has been conquered, and so there isn't much more to do other than to feed the birds and sew. Seems like the day is off to a good start. 

What's on your agenda for today?