Power On!

If you were up early enough, then you know we had significant snowfall last night, and we awakened to a house with no electricity. The power reportedly went out shortly before midnight. We were checking the Portland General Electric website, and the most recent update still had the cause "under investigation," with no "crew dispatched," and an estimated restoration time at 4:00 p.m. Oy. Well, lucky us, because even without updates to the website, the power came back around 1:00 p.m. Yahoo!!! I'm so happy to be able to get back to my planned housekeeping chore that involved running the vacuum around. Surely everyone can understand my excitement at being able to keep up with my housework. Or maybe not.

So anyway...let's pick up with where I left off before my power was so rudely interrupted. When I finished writing my post yesterday morning, I headed back down stairs. This was all I could see of Sadie.

Only her ears and whiskers were showing, but she was snuggle bug warm. Smitty prefers his morning nap in the wide open spaces.

The pieces were cut for the next Shop Hop quilt. I just needed to sew it together. 

This is the 10th block of the 25 I want to make for this quilt. Here are all the blocks I have so far.

It was time to move to the next project on my WIPS list. Next up was the 10th block for the New Mexico Kitchen quilt. Before I can do anything else, I need to make the block background. It took a while to settle on the blue stripe for the tablecloth, but I'm happy with my selection. It was a tightly-woven fabric, and so it took some time to fray the edges.

Next up was to add the lettering. This is always a little tricky, involving the use of three rulers to get them placed right. This block will be celebrating Fajitas...Mike's first choice when we have Mexican food.

Each block for this quilt is accompanied by a recipe. Here is the Fajitas recipe.

And then I went to work adding the design elements. An avocado, an orange bell pepper, an onion, and then I went to work on the plate of fajitas. When I had it this far, it was getting late in the day. 

There was probably enough time to continue on, but the next part on the pattern would involve making and fitting together all the pieces you see below. I'd run out of patience for it by then, and so I decided to wait until today and start freshly fortified.

When I went back upstairs, I found the kitties jockeying for space on Mike's lap. Ordinarily this is Smitty's time of day for lap-sitting, but Sadie had rudely usurped his purrsition. It was very furrustrating.

I left them to work this out among themselves, and went to work on the night's dinner. You might recall I still had a bunch of asparagus from the farmers market. I bought it because I could, and not because I had a plan for it. Then, I remembered this long-ago-acquired recipe from A Taste of Home magazine. (My mother loved that magazine.) This is Asparagus Bacon Quiche, and it is so yummy. I made this for the first time decades ago, in another house, in another land, in another job, etc., etc., etc. It was even pre-quilting days. Anyway, despite all the time that had passed, and given we were still living in the internet dark ages back then, I was surprised to find the recipe posted online.

I was still a working person the last time I made this, and I can recall it seeming like a bit of a to-do to put it together. Now, as a retired person with plenty of time, it didn't seem half bad. I use a Pillsbury pie crust. This one wanted to shrink a little when I baked it...I should have used pie weights. It requires six strips of bacon, cooked and crumbled, and then the asparagus needs to be blanched before you can fill the pie crust for baking. It's worth the effort, though, and all the component parts can be made ahead. So, we enjoyed having this old recipe made new once again, and there will be leftovers for another meal.

Oh yes, and I almost forgot...I didn't have a side dish planned, but I knew I had some zucchini from last year's garden shredded and frozen. It seemed like a good time to make some zucchini bread. My recipe can bake into one large loaf, or three little loaves. I opted for the three little loaves. We had one with our quiche, and I froze the other two.

Okay, so we headed off to bed. We knew snow was in the forecast, and indeed, a couple of inches had fallen when we turned out the light. When we awakened, we were stunned to see this much snowfall in April. In 20 years, we've never seen this much snow so late into the month. Even in the dead of winter, this would be a significant snow event for our part of the world.

Sadly, the cherry trees are already blooming, and so I think that spells doom for our cherry crop this year. I'm just hoping the rest of the landscape survives this insult. I took pictures from different windows. This is the view from where Eliza sits.

From our bedroom window, it looked like this:

There wasn't a breath of wind, and so snow had accumulated on the narrowest of spaces. This is the trellis over our Bleeding Heart. (By the way, the bleeding heart doesn't climb the trellis, but it keeps it from falling over when it gets tall.)

To it's left, this cage and protective shelter (from squirrels) where we plant our cherry tomatoes reminded me of a skeletal wedding cake.

And all of that combined with a power outage made a rather rough start to any day. Having the power outage left me plenty of time for slow-stitching though. I finished off the current section and then moved my hoop down.

There were still hours to kill with no power, and so I've finished about half of the next section as well.

And now, there are no excuses. I need to get at my vacuuming...yay!!!...nay!!!...and then, I'll get back to my quilt block if there's still time in the day. Probably I've wasted enough time for one day. We're expecting more snow tonight. Let's just hope the power stays on.