Seedy

It was a pretty quiet day today. This morning we were sitting reading email on our iPads when Mike looked out the window and saw this young lady:

She took a good long sniff of the cherry tomato planted in the whiskey barrel behind her, and then she started nibbling on my pansies. All this time, I thought the squirrels were the vermin eating my flowers. Come to find out it's one of Bambi's relatives. I took a few pictures, and then went outside and shooed her away. She ran off into the woods, but then she came back a while later, and I saw her eating the marigolds. Drat! I chased her away again, and then I put out some slices of apple...which are, of course, still sitting there untouched. Hmpf. I'm actually quite surprised she would come up so close to the house, and that she would cross the concrete patio that way. Obviously, nothing is sacred. She doesn't seem particularly timid, and so I'm thinking someone else must be feeding her...apparently, something other than apples.

My guild met last night, and it was kind of fun. It seems nine months ago, the members that wanted to participate brought in lists of their UFO's. Last night's meeting (in lieu of a speaker) was a show and tell of all the completed quilts. There were some 650-plus quilts listed, and around 180 completed. Not a bad showing. To participate required a $3 entry fee, and those were divided up among four winners, chosen at random. Each member got a ticket for each UFO completed, and then there was a random drawing. I haven't been around long enough to have participated, but they'll be doing it again. What the heck? Count me in.

Also, Sue from Alderwood Quilts who is program chair, asked me if I would be willing to write blog posts about events on the Westside Quilters Guild blog. It seems a good way for me to get involved, and so I agreed to it. We haven't worked out all the details yet, but I will be one of five members on the committee and there are some other administrative tasks I can help with as well. I'll say more about that when I know more.

So after chasing the deer around the field this morning, I took Big Bertha in for repair. Yes, her sewing time was very short-lived. The bobbin simply won't click into place as it should, and it keeps popping out. Since I didn't want to hit the new one with the needle, I gave up fairly quickly and took her in this morning. Yes, this is frustrating, but it's a great opportunity for me to practice my patience. Ohmmmmmmmmmmmm. Besides, it gives me more time to spend with my youngest machine, Pfelicity, and she enjoys the attention. 

When I came home, I went to work on the strawberries I picked up at the farmer's market on Saturday. (I almost forgot about them in all the excitement this weekend!)

I made the component parts for strawberry ice cream which consists of the custard and the fruit. Both are cooling in the refrigerator over night, and then I'll freeze the ice cream tomorrow morning. 

There were still plenty of strawberries left over, and so I decided strawberry shortcake would be good for dessert tonight. Trouble is, Mike is avoiding all seeds now since his illness last fall. He will be having a surgery eventually, but he's trying to put it off until he retires in a couple of years, and so all seeds are out...which pretty much means all berries are out. We both love strawberries, and so I got the idea to cut the sides off the strawberries, removing the seeds, and then I separated the middles and the sides into two bowls. I'll eat the seeds, and Mike can have the seedless centers.

It was a little tedious, but it was better than foregoing the strawberry shortcake. It would have worked better with larger berries, and mine were pretty small. So, we'll see how this works. As you can see, there isn't a whole lot left of the strawberry once you cut off the seeds, but I think there's enough there for a single serving. I still have more berries too. I'll probably end up freezing those.

No sewing today. Tomorrow I'm meeting up with a dear old friend from high school who is visiting from Texas. She is a quilter too. She's staying with her mother, who lives in Salem, and so I'm picking her up there. We're going to one of my favorite quilt shops, Greenbaum's Quilted Forest, and then we'll have lunch at a restaurant close by. Then, if we're not shopped out (is that even possible?) we'll head on over to The Cotton Patch, just a little way north. (I've written blog posts about both shops, so if you're curious, you can click on those links.)

Mike just called to say he is on his way home. He also informed me that he got the okay to take four weeks off in September. We've been semi-planning a trip to Minnesota, but no serious planning until we knew for sure he could take the time off. So with that, I'm going to start looking at the maps and planning the trip. Our final destination will be Voyageurs National Park right near the Canadian border. I have some ideas about other places on the way there and on the way back, but nothing for sure yet. It's always fun to plan, and I'm excited that we've been given the go-ahead. More on that later.