It's Dead, Jim

Probably I shouldn't say something like that since I just had a blood draw yesterday. Not to worry...I still have some blood left in my body, and only a tiny bruise on my arm. No, when I sat down to my desktop computer this morning, it said in "computer" font: BOOTMGR MISSING. No problem, I thought...I'll just call the system administrator to take care of this. He took one look at it and said, "Oh...that isn't good." It seems my hard drive died overnight. Honestly, the cats did not do it. Fortunately, everything is backed up, and so it'll just take some time and cubic dollars to get it fixed.

On a livelier note, we were home and had the groceries put away by 10:30 a.m. yesterday, which left pretty much the whole day for sewing. There was plenty of time for relaxation too. The kitties were in fine form. Smitty headed out digging for gophers right away. When he came back inside, there was some cleaning to do. We just call him Chief Dirty Paws of the Never Wash Tribe.

As for me, I got straight to work on my quilting. I wanted to do some more McTavishing, and so that's where I started. I love all those swirly lines.

For the next petal, I tried a take on something seen on Pinterest. It's kind of interesting. It's just three insy-outsy lines on each side and then filling in with echoing curved lines. Very simple, and I like the effect.

Three petals per day seems to be my limit. For the third one, I tried copying one of the motifs on the diagram I'm working from. I stitched along the left side. From where the final line ended, I made a swirl, and then did a feather all the way around. Then I filled in with a "flame" in each loop of the feather.

I'm having so much fun with this panel, I was inspired to look for another. Hoffman creates several panels for quilting. There's a poinsettia, but I didn't want to do something so Christmassy. On the other hand, this "Leaf" panel has potential. I did a little shopping around to find the best price, and now it is winging its way toward me...or maybe it's "wheeling." I actually have no idea how it's coming, but it is coming. I liked this color, called "December":

Hopefully, I'll live long enough to actually quilt it. The Dream Big panel has been a great way to practice free motion quilting. If you're thinking about giving it a try, I can highly recommend it as a learning tool.

Okay, so there's been something of a drama going on here this week. In nearly 20 years living here at the Three Cats Ranch, we've never had our septic tank pumped. For at least a couple of years, we've been discussing the fact that we've pushed our luck far enough. Now, the time has come and Mike has been searching for the lid of the septic tank for days. He knew generally where it is, and he dug it up the spot with his backhoe, only to find a hunk of concrete. (The previous owner was a concrete contractor.) After that, he tried a FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared) camera...no dice. Then, he went to the county and picked up building plans for our house with exact measurements. Then, he mapped it out using Google Earth, and still couldn't find it. Okay, so there is a "clean-out" opening nearby (don't ask me), and so the next trick was to run a metal snake through the clean-out line and watch with a metal detector to see where it drops off. Only, we don't own a metal detector, and so that meant a trip into town to buy one. Pretty snazzy, huh? Maybe we can use it to hunt buried treasure at some point.

Oh, but we have buried treasure right here, because he found it! As for the treasure, you might want to hold your nose. 

Actually, there's no smell...yet. We'll let the pumper-outer guy worry about that. The next step is to hire a pumper-outer guy to come up and suck it up. After twenty years, I'm guessing there's a lot of sh*t in there.

As we were standing admiring the lid to our septic tank, I happened to look over into the garden to see that one of the giant sunflowers has bloomed. As you look at this image, remember that our fence is eight feet tall.

After snapping that image, I turned around to be greeted by corn tassels. Hello there!

There is lots of corn coming. I expect we'll have corn by the end of next month. Also, I noticed we're getting some flowers on the green beans. I took a picture, but it wasn't very good. You'll just have to take my word for it. And, honestly...would I lie about something like that?

Okay, and so it's been kind of humid here...for us...nothing like you folks down south experience. Nevertheless, we were uncomfortably warm after just a few minutes in the sun. We took a seat on our garden bench. The kitties joined us forthwith. The blur you see behind Smitty is Sadie. It's pretty hard to get a non-blurry picture of her. She is always on the move.

Back inside, I decided the time had come to start sewing together the blocks for "Jenny's Flower Garden." Before I go on though, I want to say that I've decided to change the name of this quilt. I found the design for the quilt in this book:

You can see it there right on the cover. It was designed by Elaine M. Neilson of Seward, Nebraska, and she did a more distinct color scheme with flowers in the center of the flower blocks and a fancy border. I tried that, but my colors are too bright and the center flowers don't show very well. I don't care about that, but what I'm getting at here is that I have no idea who "Jenny" is. 

And so my thoughts took me in another direction. This is a traditional triple Irish chain configuration, and I have some Irish in my ancestry on my paternal grandmother's side. Her name was Ella Richards, and her father immigrated from Ireland at some point in time...I'm not sure when. So all of that to say that I'm changing the name of my quilt to "Ella's Flower Garden" in honor of my Irish ancestry, but mostly in honor of my grandmother, Ella Richards Nelson. 

Getting back to the quilt, I have the first three rows of blocks sewn together.

Before quitting for the day, I had the fourth row sewn together, but it isn't yet sewn to the rest of the quilt. 

This is going together faster than expected, and so I might have a finished quilt top by the end of today.

When I came upstairs to write this post, I left Smitty crashed out on his kitty pole. He's resting up for another long day of hunting gophers.

Yesterday, I forgot to mention, was his gotcha day. Nine years ago, Smitty became the fourth cat to inhabit the Three Cats Ranch. It's hard to believe this little squirt grew in the sexiest mancat alive, but there he is. Eat your heart out, George Clooney. Just look at those bedroom eyes.

Okay, so I have another easy-going day planned for myself today. There is one short housekeeping task to do, and then I'll get back to my sewing. Just FYI, Mike has determined that, in fact, the hard drive on my computer has died. He was able to order another one from Amazon, and it will be delivered today! Simply amazing times we live in. I know I'm supposed to be mad at Amazon, but how can you not love them when they can deliver something to the door so quickly. I'll be mad at them another time.