Best Laid Plans

It was a good day yesterday, even if things didn't go exactly as planned. It was a day for baking bread, and so I had bread dough rising when I wrote yesterday's post. This loaf is made from the No-Knead Crusty White Bread recipe from King Arthur Flour. I like this recipe because the dough can be refrigerated for up to a week, and it will make three loaves.

It's also very tasty...kind of a no-frills approach to bread-baking. The longer it sits in the refrigerator, the more tangy it gets. When I made this last time, the final loaf was baked on the 7th day, and it had a nice sourdough flavor, although it's made with commercial yeast. And that was the only part of the day that went off the way I thought it would.

Matthew called in the morning to say he and Lyndsey would be arriving in about an hour. I didn't really want to get too involved in anything because I anticipated everything would be on hold after they arrived. So, I did my morning's slow stitching, and then spent some time sewing on the binding for the Cardinal Mosaic. I've turned two corners now, and I'm inches from the third corner.

When they were late arriving, I decided I'd at least get started cutting the fabrics for the Guatemala quilt. The blocks look complicated, but the piecing instructions make it look easy. I'll just be sewing lots of short seams for lots of blocks...48 in all. Here's where I'm starting.

The woven fabric is quite different from manufactured cottons. I gave up trying to keep all the lines straight. It's very stretchy, and so accurate cutting is also difficult. It's going to be a soft and puffy quilt when it's finished, I think. I decided to do the cutting as I go with this, and so I cut just the first two pieces for Step 1 along with the short lattice strip. There are five fabrics, and so I cut ten from each. My goal is to piece the blocks randomly with each fabric in use in each part of each block (if that makes sense).

I was just getting started sewing the first pieces together when Mike came home early from work. With this being a 3-day weekend, he's taking today off to make it a 4-day weekend. And then he left early yesterday too...making it a 4 1/2-day weekend.

So it doesn't seem as if much was accomplished yesterday, but it's not a bad showing. With all the cutting done for the first section of the quilt, it should go pretty fast until I need to do more cutting. It'll be mindless sewing...good for listening to an audiobook.

We had a nice dinner with Matthew and Lyndsey. It was good to get a chance to meet Lyndsey. I don't know where their friendship is headed, but they are very cute together. Here's a picture taken while they were still in Guatemala.

Today is our 44th wedding anniversary. Take a look at these two little kids. Mike was barely 23, and I was barely 21.

My mother made my dress and veil. It was a good day. We had just the three-day weekend to honeymoon, and so we spent our wedding night at the Hilton Hotel in San Diego. We arrived at the hotel around 4:30 p.m. and had a drink in the bar before dinner. I can recall the two of us sitting on barstools giggling about what we'd just done. It felt as if we'd crossed some sort of magic threshold into a new dimension. We ate dinner at the hotel restaurant where we ordered a Caesar salad for two, made at the table by our waiter who looked like Telly Savalas. He asked if we were newlyweds, saying we had "the look," and he made the evening special and memorable. As our main course, we ordered chateaubriand for two.

The next day we flew to Las Vegas for a quick honeymoon excursion. We set a gambling limit of $30 for ourselves, and we had the most fun when we reached our last silver dollar. We played roulette, betting only red or black or odd or even, so 50-50 odds. Eventually, we earned back $6 for a total of $7. In the end, we lost it all, but it was good inexpensive fun for about an hour's worth of play. Our plan was to stay in Vista, California, until September, when we moved to Arizona where Mike went to engineering school. A lot of water has passed under that bridge in our 44 years together.

Tonight we'll eat dinner out to celebrate. This morning I'm walking with Sue. After our walk, I need to pick up a few things at the grocery store...just to get through the weekend. Hopefully, I can get back to my sewing this afternoon. We're expecting good weather through the weekend, and so it will feel a little like a staycation for the Memorial Day weekend.