An Everything Day

Good morning, my friends. It's been a beautiful couple of days here at the Three Cats Ranch. It was the warmest day of the year so far yesterday. I took this picture of our indoor thermometer around dinner time yesterday.

There you go...that's what I'm talkin' about. We're expecting at least one more good day of weather before it turns cool and showery again. Certainly, it has that "spring has arrived" feel about it. If the idiom holds true, however, sailors should take warning. There was a red sky this morning.

So I filled my yesterday with a little of everything. As I mentioned, it was National Blueberry Pie Day, and so I went straight to work staying in compliance. This is a Blueberry Pecan Streusel Pie for Two.

When it comes to turning a dessert recipe into a dessert "for two," pies are the easiest. You start with a little 6-inch pie plate, available on Amazon. Then...you take any recipe you like and cut it in half. The baking times tend to be about the same, but I always check them early. I used a Pillsbury refrigerated pie crust, rather than a frozen one. You can find the link to the full-on version of the recipe right here.

While I was doing this, the kitties were enjoying a morning sunbath on their respective levels of the kitty tree.

Smitty gets the top shelf in the morning. However, he has given her a purrmanent purrmit to have the top shelf in the afternoon. Looking at that picture, I'd say there's a cat missing on the second shelf. 

Outside, I noticed this squirrel. He's probably wondering where his brethren went. When I took this picture, we'd trapped five. We got another one later in the afternoon. It might have been this one.

We're pretty sure we've captured the ones that were storing their nuts in our basement ceiling. Mike is going to fill in the hole with dirt first so they can dig their way out if they need to. If there's no digging activity, he'll fill it in with concrete. The squirrel above is a California ground squirrel. We refer to them as "grey diggers." Below is the other squirrel that inhabits our field. It's a red tree squirrel.

They are about half the size of the grey diggers, and very quick. They'll allow us to walk within just a few feet of them, and they'll look us straight in the eye as we talk to them. I believe their quickness allows them to be bolder when they're approached. Most of the damage done by our squirrels is done by the grey diggers, but I've read these red guys can be guilty of larceny as well.

So I picked myself a bucket o' weeds yesterday. I picked most all of them except what's growing in the culinary herb garden. The herb garden next on my list of gardening chores. The whole bed needs to be cleaned up. The tulips at the front door are starting to show their petals.

The vine behind them is the wisteria. It's starting to leaf out. I hope we get some flowers from it this year. It replaced one that died a few years ago, and this one has yet to bloom.

Around the back side of the house, the star magnolia is in full bloom right now. It really needs to be groomed. 

Star magnolia is more of a shrub than a tree, but this one has grown so tall it's turned into kind of a shapeless mess. I've seen them all trimmed at the bottom to a single "trunk," to give them a more tree-like shape. Mike keeps threatening to do something to it, but so far, it's continuing to grow its own way.

Turning around, the peonies are coming up great guns. The one on the left gets less sunshine than the rest, and so it's a little slower to get started. It does have several shoots, and when it gains some height, it will get more sunlight, and earlier in the day.

Okay, so it was time for lunch, and then I was able to get some sewing done. As I mentioned a few days ago, these are the fabrics I could choose from for the donation quilt.

I'd already decided to use the crayon fabric on the right when I came up short with the one on the left. From there, I had to decide which fabrics to use from the fat quarter grouping. Two fat quarters would get me the 15 four-patches I needed, but I knew that the letters would be upside down on one half of the four-patch. Nevertheless, I started sewing strip sets together when I realized I still had more fat quarters to choose from. If I chose two more colors, I could have all the letters facing the right direction. When I was finished, sewing together the first one, it looked like this:

And because I'd used two more fat quarters, I ended up with 30 four-patches...enough for two quilts. I'll only make one for now and save the others for another quilt down the road. I'll need a new focus fabric too. Crayons are what I happen to have in my stash, but I could put any juvenile fabric with these.

So then I cut the blocks from the focus fabric and started sewing the blocks into rows.

For good measure, Sadie purrformed the snuggleability test on the focus fabric, and gave it very pawsitive marks.

When I was ready to quit for the day, I had the center portion of the quilt top all sewn together.

When I pick it up again (today, hopefully), I'll add the two borders shown below, and then it will be ready for quilting and binding.

I'm calling this quilt "Technicolor."

Upstairs, I found the kitties sharing the same sunbeam for their afternoon sunbath. Smitty has forgiven us for the insult of the day before.

This morning, I'm heading off to the farmer's market with Erik and Mae. We're going to the big Portland Farmer's Market downtown, which is quite a treat. It is routinely listed as one of the best markets in the country. There's always lots to see there. Sometimes we see the unipiper, which is probably the most Portlandia thing about our fair city.

When I get home, I'll spend a little time broadcasting the wildflower seeds into the bee garden, and then I'll get back to my sewing. Enjoy your Saturday, everybody.