Dan's Ramblings

Dan here ~

Thursday evening. Today was a sloppy day. Pretty this evening though. 

It was snowing hard last evening and just starting to rain when I went to bed. By this morning most of the snow was gone and mostly slush remained. Carol and I had appointments to pick up new glasses this afternoon in Gray. I am still trying to see out of them. New progressive lenses seem to take awhile to find where the “sweet” spot is. Let’s just say, I haven’t found it yet. Time will tell.

Luckily before we got our little snow over Thanksgiving I had felt like it was a good day and tackled the removal of the loader on the tractor and the mounting of the snowblower. The loader went fine, it’s usually putting it back on is the fun part, the blower went ok, better than last year. It was a struggle but no blood loss or other injuries. The process is about the max this 98 pound curmudgeon can handle. I weigh more than that (not much though), the blower attachment weighs between 50 and 60 pounds which is almost half of me. It’s on until spring and I hope I don’t need it very often.

I often call snow cleanup, snow relocation. I say this because I’m not really removing it, just relocating it to where I want it. I am often out there with my wheel barrow moving some around rather than walking about by the shovel full. I have a new toy on route that will make that easier than the wheel barrow. Time will tell. It is an over grown sled made for hauling “stuff”. I will use it to haul my barrels around as I can still continue cleaning up around here. I will also use it to remove some of the fallen trees that fell into the two ponds. Hopefully it will work well. You got it time will tell.

I have officially declared that leaf removal is complete for the season. 

Had I had my new sled this past week I would have used it to do a last pass and pulled out the last few. They will remain as they are now frozen in place, hopefully until Spring.

Only time will tell us if weather events are to be rain or snow. It used to be that you could predict the weather by the calendar. December, January and February equaled weather events of mostly snow, seldom rain. Today, it no longer matters what the calendar tells us. It is as apt to rain in December now as it is to snow. Much like when we were kids we would be skating on Thanksgiving with often several weeks of ice making weather before any real snow. This made for nice safe conditions for playing on the lakes and ponds. I almost think those days are over.

In the studio: Before I got started on quilt #32, the main voice in my head (Carol) said "clean up your damn work area.” The voices, Timmy and Cindy then said " clean up the fabric and cut into the sizes for half squares and four patches etc.” This I did steady for two days and got a lot of scrap cleaned up and a bin of trimmed and ready to go units. 

Great idea except I normally have been sticking to scrappy so when strip sets are cut from my scraps, I cut them long enough to get 2- 4 patches the same. After two days of making them that way, they tell me that with the pattern they have in mind, I need four 4 patches the same. They had asked for some small 3” finished blocks and I made some. They rejected 4 of them after I had already made them and said I needed to make them over. This time making the four patches and the half squares each the same.

Rejects

Guess what I have been doing since. The blocks are complete and I am working on sashing strips etc.now. Another interesting top with lots to look at. I should have a top to show you next time. Next I will try to do some quicker tops using some of the units deemed unusable for this top. There may be more than one in there.

Enjoy your weekend and stay safe the roads get greasy quick.