Sunny Sunday

It was such a beautiful day yesterday. As much as I was anxious to finish up the Kitten Kaboodle section for the Wind in the Whiskers quilt, it was too pretty to be inside. I spent the morning in the garden. The herb garden needed weeding, although I weeded it just a few weeks ago. The weeds seemed to be getting a second wind. Also, I planted the two zucchini seedlings in the ground. One is getting its true leaves already.

Remember when I showed you the wild strawberries a few weeks ago? There was just one flower. Now they are covered with flowers, and so I expect we'll be seeing some little strawberries soon. Being wild strawberries, they don't amount to much, but they're kind of fun to pop into your mouth on the fly.

This is our sad little apple tree. We planted it many years ago, and it never really has done much. Originally, it was supposed to bear five different kinds of apples...and that was probably our first mistake. Since then, most of the branches of the tree have died off, except for this one little shoot that keeps trying year after year. You can see that even the stake that holds it up has given up the ghost.

I've wanted Mike to take it out, but that's one of those things that just never quite makes it to the top of his priority list. It's okay because it keeps blooming, and it usually makes one or two apples for the deer to eat.

Also, I filled the birdfeeders, watered the annuals, cut off some dead foliage from a few of the plantings, and dug up some of the largest weeds. Mike sprayed most of the weeds, and they are in the process of dying. There are still a few stragglers to be dealt with. Of course, no walk in the garden is complete without my little cat. I looked over my shoulder at one point to see him appearing very angelic. He isn't, but he puts on a good show of it.

This cat, on the other hand, is an angel.

She was out for a while. It was kind of breezy, and I think the sound of the wind was making her anxious. She can't hear other noises over the sound of the wind blowing, and so she was a little nervous about being out. She preferred to spend her time cozied up with her favorite blanket. Mike showed her the fresh catnip, but she paid no attention to it. Apparently, she prefers the dried and smokable kind.

While I was working in the garden, Mike was hard at work on auto repair. He has a 2001 C5 Corvette that he "mothballs" during the winter months. He doesn't drive it in the rain or snow. He actually has put mothballs in the interior during this time to keep the mice out. It didn't work, and so he's also tried dryer sheets. That didn't work either. I forget what he did this year, but that didn't work either. When the weather turned nice recently and he drove it for the first time, he turned on the heater and heard the telltale signs of mouse leavings in the heating and air-conditioning blower fan. When he took it out of the dashboard yesterday, he found this nice little mouse nest all warm and cozy and lined with insulation and well-stocked with mouse poison.

It's supposed to look like this:

In the process of pulling it from the dash, he ended up with mouse poison littering the interior of the car.

He had hoped that cleaning the blower fan would be the extent of the job, but when he turned it on again, he heard more mouse leavings. By the afternoon, he'd taken pretty much the entire interior of the car apart. It's a good thing he knows how to put it all back together. You can just call him Mr. Fix-It. 

Eventually he found the mice...two mice, snuggled up together, dead and mummified. Yuck. I didn't include the picture. You're welcome.

And that was pretty much all I needed to see of that job, so I went inside and got back to work on the Kitten Kaboodle quilt section. The leaves for the daffodils were already cut out.

I needed to make the daffodils. Each daffodil was made up of four pieces. When those were all made, I fused all the parts to the background. That part was pretty scary.

And then, the only thing I had left to do were the butterflies. Those were pretty easy, after having accomplished the daffodils.

And then it was finished. The next time I work on this (probably in July), I'll be doing the last section (7th of seven) called "Don't be Koi". It's a small section, but it looks complicated, just looking at the picture.

I've learned that it's best not to look ahead with these. I'll be getting to it soon enough.

And after that, I was ready to settle down for the rest of the afternoon. Today I have another free day, and I'm going to start quilting the little table runner I made last month.

I have a few ideas about what to do here, but mainly, I'll just let the fabric do the talking. Tomorrow I'll need to head off to the grocery store, and so menu planning is on the agenda too.