Cats – TooBusyForWork

And it is almost summer!

I am definitely in the mood for getting out again. We haven’t bee out since the last trip at the end of April. For Mother’s Day we had most of the kids and grandkids come over for dinner. It was nicer than just the two of us going somewhere, though I did do the cooking LOL! We had pot roast, carrots, and potatoes so it wasn’t too hard.

The kitten are growing like weeds. They are so well behaved! Never any scratching even when being held against their will. They don’t scratch anything except their scratching post except for my big rolls of batting downstairs. I have had to move them all to an inaccessible spot since that soft batting seemed just right for little kitten climbing. We kept them on kitten food since they were so small, but we are transitioning them to adult cat food now. They seem to like it just fine.

It is hard to get a picture of them playing without it being fuzzy! They were chasing the magic red dot (laser pointer).

Minerva was particularly fond of the doll bed we got for my granddaughter’s birthday

I have been sewing some. The king sized quilt for our bedroom at home has the main center part completed – 80” square. I need to add borders, but I haven’t gotten in the mood. I did finish quilting three quilts for my quilt guild though. As before, just utilitarian meandering, but it keeps me in practice. I am not a person comfortable with completely scrap,quilts, particularly in big pieces. I find these dreadful, but the people who donate fabric to the guild should have no doubt every inch of useable stuff they give to us will be put to good use.

The last one, just before I started quilting it.

I also have made Kevin a pillow case for the travel pillow he uses for his knees at night. We found a little pillow at a truck stop this winter, but it has a satin cover and slips off the bed during the night. A cotton cover keeps it in place better. I am also just finishing up a bunch of bowl cozies I am going to use as small gifts on our upcoming trip.

I modified my fabrication process to pre-wash both fabric and the batting. Then I made sure all three layers (fabric/batting/fabric) are quilted together. Hopefully that help them keep their shape after washing.

We do have the first part of our summer trip planned. In a normal year we would just take off, making reservations only at destinations. This year we are slightly spooked by reports of massive numbers of people on the road, so we made more reservations than normal. We leave on Tuesday, 1 June, to go to Hamilton, MO, home of the Missouri Star Quilt Company and their multiple shops. We will stay there a couple of nights then off to eastern Oklahoma to visit some tourist locations we haven’t seen for 30 years or more. Then we head to Canton Reservoir where I worked as a seasonal park ranger before my senior year in college. I haven’t been back since, so it should be fun. We have reserved a Boondocker’s Welcome site in far eastern Texas off I-40. I figure I will give the hosts a couple of bowl cozies as a thank you. We are hoping for good enough weather to hit up a bunch of Native American sites in New Mexico. Eventually we will head north to Cody, WY for an FMCA chapter rally followed by Gillette, WY for the big FMCA national convention. We then have reservations at Badlands NP during a new moon for Kevin to get some astrophotography done. We will gradually head back to Iowa then, time TBD.

I will be getting some shoulder surgery done when we get back. I have a bone spur that is giving me grief. I have been using cortisone shots to manage it, but I figured it will only get worse. Hopefully there isn’t much rotator cuff involvement. Rehab is something between 2 and 12 weeks, depending on what they have to do. Sigh. Even with an MRI they can’t tell until they get to look inside.

Kevin has been busy making even more modifications and updates to the motorhome. I will post those after we get on the road so I can take good pictures. The expensive one was 600 amp hours of LifeBlue LiFePO4 batteries with internal heaters. I am really looking forward to off-grid camping with those! Some of the less expensive modifications are woodworking and others are 3D printing, and they are quite cool. We even got our yearly diesel maintenance done, this time at the Decorah Truck Country shop. Nice folks. It was a more extensive list than we had for previous yearly, so it also cost more. Sigh. Just the price of owning a diesel motorhome.

And we are off to start packing!

Kittens, restaurants, and shopping

I am striving to be more frequent in my posts. I hope it lasts!

Luna and Minnie are still settling in. Minnie, in particular, still has a tendency to hide whenever she sees our legs. She is perfectly happy to get petted if she is on her cat tower, but she is on the floor and we walk toward her, she gets spooked. I actually wonder if she has been kicked before. Cats can have long memories, even of accidents. Thank goodness we got the two together since they play a lot together. They wouldn’t be nearly as happy with the limited play they get from us, though we do play with them about an hour a day. They are particularly fond of feather sticks.

These are their normal locations. Luna loves to sit on top, surveying her world. Minnie prefers to look at the world from her safe spot. I wish I could show the color of Luna’s eyes; they are a deep golden color that is truly stunning.

It feels so very odd to be going to restaurants. We spent so many months doing drive through and carry-out I keep forgetting we can actually go into restaurants. So far we have eaten at a couple of Mexican restaurants (with margaritas!), a steak place, and a few breakfast places. We haven’t done any “fine dining” yet, mostly because we don’t have many open where I live. So many restaurants closed or went to greatly reduced menus! Of course that would also mean putting on slacks instead of the jeans I live in, so it is a mixed blessing.

We also have done some shopping, the type where you actually go into a store and look around, not just order online. I bought a bunch of new bedding for,our spare bedrooms plus new towels for the guest bath. Today we went to Trader Joe’s to stock up on some of their specialties. I adore their coconut shrimp, ginger biscuits (British cookies), biscotti (nice small ones that are a treat instead of a complete meal), plus some of their sweets. We can now use our own reusable bags there and at our local grocery stores, a real plus. I am so tired of the thousands of plastic bags we have accumulated. Yes, I take the plastic to the recycle center, but I still prefer the reusable bags for ease of use.

I have been doing some quilt piecing too. I have 2/3 of the main part of a king sized quilt completed. However I can’t find the pieces for the rest of it! I am going to have to bite the bullet and clean my sewing studio completely. I know those pieces are around, but I have so much miscellaneous stuff laying around that I can’t find them! So that is tomorrow’s job. Pray for me!

Not much going on

I just don’t post as much when we aren’t traveling. I actually haven’t been doing much, giving in to a really bad back probably more than I should have. I am now back in PT and taking acetaminophen three times a day. It has helped a lot. I also got a Nursal brand e-stim unit. It helps a lot to loosen sore muscles that have just been overwhelmed with pain.

The big news is we have two new kittens in the house. Luna (black) and Minerva (tabby) came home with us two days ago. They are sisters, six months old, and they are still restricted to our bedroom and bathroom until they get a bit more comfortable though. We decided to call Minerva by a nickname – Minnie. She is just a tiny little thing just over 4 pounds. Her bigger sister is at an average weight of 5.5 pounds. They are really well socialized, very healthy (our vet has already done a checkup), fully immunized, and they have already been chipped. They spent three months in a foster home, so their behavior has been very good.

Luna (left) and Minerva aka Minnie (right)

They each slept on the bed some last night, though they also decided to play with the blind cords at 4:30 in the morning! We haven’t had kittens in a long time, but we knew what we were getting into. That included interrupted sleep.

I have also been playing with my sewing machine some. I ordered a Sew Steady inset for the sewing machine table I keep in the motorhome. Then I started thinking about using that inset as a stand along table for when I go to retreats or just want to sew outside. The inset has no legal, so I asked Kevin for some 3D printed adjustable legs, and he delivered!

Each leg slips onto the suction cup and has adjustable feet to accommodate different surface heights. I love them! I am now going to out the small, old wobbly table that came with the machine into the storage room some place.

I have also been cooking some. I have watched way too many seasons of The Great British Baking Show, and I wanted a lovely desert for Easter. I practiced making a pavlova, and it was wonderful! I even made a home made lemon curd to go with it, but some of my grandkids got sick so no big Easter meal. My son Mark did come up, but he doesn’t really do deserts, so we just had little pastry cases with some lemon curd. Well, and a pot roast, carrots, and potatoes.

We have been planning our summer trip. We will leave the day after Memorial Day, heading to Hamilton, MO where Missouri Star Quilt Company is headquartered. They open in early May after 14-15 months of closure due to COVID, and I am looking forward to it. We will have 2 nights at the campground which gives us one full day in the town. Then we are going to head south to the Bartlesville and Tulsa, OK area. We hope to spend a couple of days at Woolaroc Museum and Wildlife Preserve, a treat we both remember from our childhood. I also want to see the Philbrook Museum of Art and its trove of impressionist paintings. We don’t know how long we will stay in the general area, but probably about a week. We have a Corps of Engineers site reserved at Copan Lake for the Woolaroc visit, then we hope to stay 2-3 days at a Boondocker’s Welcome site nearer Tulsa. After that we don’t have any firm plans, but intend on staying in the northern Oklahoma/southern Kansas/eastern Colorado areas for a few weeks. The next firm commitment is Cody, WY for a FMCA Diesel Club chapter meeting for a few days during the Independence Day holiday. Then off to Devil’s Tower followed by Gillette, WY for the FMCA convention. Then it is to Badlands NP for dark sky photography around the new moon. We intend on being back to Iowa sometime in August, but nothing firm.

We both finished our COVID vaccination series 3 weeks ago. It sure feels good to be back in society again. We are shopping and eating at restaurants again, a lovely treat. Hopefully we can put this nasty disease in our nationwide rear view mirror soon.

I am off to sew. I still need to finish a quilt for our bed, and I need to make a little bag to put the legs for the Sew Steady inset.

Resort living

No pictures because we have very limited internet here at Craggy Wash BLM campground north of Lake Havasu.

We stayed at the Fortuna de Oro RV Resort in Yuma for a week. This is the first time we have stayed at a real upscale resort. My, but they can keep you busy! There are clubs for every interest, live music most afternoons/early evenings, planned Happy Hours, pickleball leagues and tournaments, softball, a golf course (but we don’t golf), etc. Quite impressive. We took the opportunity to listen to music a few evenings, I visited the quilt group twice (they have their own room at the resort), and we road our bikes around and around. This place is huge with about 1200 sites. Many are year around places, either park models or RVs, but there are a number of people here for a few days or a few months. We actually liked it so much we are pretty sure we will plan for two months there next year, February and March. Too early to make any final decisions though because the reservations aren’t refundable!

While in Yuma we also wandered around the town some. Decent restaurants, more shopping than I remembered from some day trips we made before. We did get the motorhome washed and waxed. Papi’s RV Wash gave very good results, but they were hours late! They were able to get rid of the brush marks on the side from close encounters tears with bushes and trees. The coach looks wonderful! We also went to a local community theater presentation fo Godspell, fun though pretty amateurish, and last night we went to an outdoor concert known as “Howling at the Moon”. Yup, 3000 people in lawn chairs listening to music, talking with friends, and, when the full moon came up over the mountain, howling at the moon. They do it once a month. We got to see some of our friends from Quartzsite so it was extra fun.

We were on the road from Yuma to Quartzsite by 10:00. Our black tank has not been draining well, so we set up an appointment to have the black and the gray tanks power flushed by “The RV Procologist” (love the name). It turns out the problem was that Lily had managed to put a sock in the toilet and we must have flushed it down in the dark! We can’t figure out any other way it could have gotten there. We have found a few of her stuffed mice in the toilet bowl in the past, but obviously this one must have been done at night. Oh, and they offered us the sock back, but I declined LOL!

We then drove on to a BLM dispersed camping site know as Craggy Wash. It is so lovely I wish I could put up pictures. Only a mile off Hwy 95 right at the north edge of the Lake Havasu airport, it is very quiet even though there are a number of rigs ranging from vans to a teardrop to trailers, fifth wheels, and motorhomes. Only a couple of generators going, and I hope they stop soon. Tomorrow morning early we are heading to Death Valley, hoping to spend a few days at Stovepipe Wells followed by another few days at Furnace Creek. We have seen a few flowers in the southern area beginning to bloom, and I am hoping to see some good blooms in DVNP.

I will post some more pictures if I get service at Stovepipe, but it is iffy.

Back home with good stuff and bad stuff

The first day back in the sticks and bricks house I basically just slept! It took us a couple of days to move the things back to the house – clothes, food in the refrigerator, etc.

We are catching up on medical appointments, so I had a small cyst removed from my face. I was lucky enough to,score a quick appointment due to someone else canceling. It left me with a couple of stitches right under my eye, a real bother. It is hard to keep a bandage on it, yet the dermatologist says I have to do so to minimize scarring. Ugh. I get the stitches out in a couple of days thank goodness. Everything should be fine by Christmas pictures at least.

The really bad stuff if that we finally had to have one of our cats, Minou, euthanized. I cried and cried. She was 15 years old, and we knew she was basically on hospice care, but that doesn’t mean I was ready for it. I became aware how few pictures I had of her. She was all black and hard to get a photograph, but that isn’t much of an excuse. She looked like an Egyptian cat goddess.

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5911773B-B1DB-4D47-9790-13153CD7571F — She loved sleeping on her back.

i also have been doing some cooking and sewing. The cooking was mostly in the Instant Pot. I made red curry with a bottle of curry sauce, some chicken thighs, rice, and miscellaneous vegetables – peppers, mushrooms, sugar snap peas. I used the pot in pot method, and it worked wonderfully. I also made beef stroganoff again, though I used more seasoning this time plus a bunch more mushrooms. Delicious.

The sewing was slow. I just haven’t been able to get in the mood, but I finally got motivated to complete a Quilts for Kids project. Super simple, and I got to enjoy the quilting process. I ended up using an all over leaf meander since the focus fabric had trees on it.

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BTW, this comes as a precut kit so I take no responsibility for the poor cutting!

i have never had a bad kit from Quilts for Kids before, but I rejected the second kit I was given. The pattern was designed for strip piecing, but they gave me random lengths of fabric of all different lengths plus some smaller pieces that were cut to 7” instead of the needed 6 1/2”. My time is worth too much to mess with randomness, so I am giving it back with a complaint. This is from the relatively new local group,so I think it is probably just growing pains.