My household at 1:40 PM

Oh boy---it's a LAZY Saturday at the Skatt-Ranch!

Overcast and low 70's.  It's actually a PERFECT day for some outside work, but I'm honestly POOOOOOPED out from my 8 hours of sunny gardening yesterday and 5 hours the evening before.  Paul isn't feeling that greatest, so I convinced him to do some relaxing too.  (His arm didn't need much twisting.)

Cassie's the only one awake with me right now, so she got the whole "licking bowl" to herself from a batch of scotch-a-roos I just made for a family outing tonight with friends.

I wanted something simple to work on OTHER than parking my butt in the recliner with the laptop.  THAT would have been simple, yes....but I actually wanted to accomplish something productive.  I definitely don't have the energy to stand for an hour-or-so at the quilting frame, so I grabbed the Bear Paw blocks and am working on piecing the quilt center.  

Hopefully your Saturday is meaningful!

A finish!

NYE 2012 (73" x 87")

Yup.  I put the binding on tonight (no new picture).  The binding is the same green that shows up throughout the quilt.  And although Candace shared some wonderful name suggestions, I think it'll simply remain as NYE 2012.

So, it has been folded and added to my stash bag of finished quilts.  (OH!  You can see the binding in this picture!)

At the same time, I unfolded and refolded a few quilts that have been not-so-patiently waiting on my QOV pile.  They will eventually make their way to you, Alycia!!!

And then....... wanting to stay on a motivational movement, I loaded Scrappy Picnic and finished off one bobbin's worth of quilting.  I am keeping the pantographs put away, and am trying a free-motion "circuit" pattern.  (Yes Angela---I loaded this BEFORE I read your email response to my 'quilting competition' comment.) :D

This post is taking a bit longer than usual to type up because we have the 10 o'clock news on in the background.  The flooding damage in Duluth is the lead story.   (We are the blue dot in the picture above....Duluth is about 80 miles due-north, right at the western tip of Lake Superior.) 

Here is one article of many that has been written throughout the day about the damage.  A boy amazingly survives a mile-long culvert 'trip,' a dozen animals perish from the Duluth Zoo....the stories continue to evolve.

The power of mother nature!  No matter where you live, there's always the potential for some type of natural disaster.  The good news........ the next 5-day extended forecast shows VERY LITTLE rain.  Time to wring out everything and take a breather.

Really? Another 2 inches???

Candace's rain gauge has seen a LOT of action so far this summer!!  Yesterday another 0.5 inches fell, and today... 1.5 inches (so far) with another line of storms heading our way.  Yes, we've had rain.  Yes, we've had OVER our share of rain, but still not nearly as much as the extreme north of Wisconsin and Eastern Minnesota (Duluth/Superior area).  Massive FLOOOOODING!!!  I feel for everyone who has to live through the damage all this rain is creating.  Thankfully, we haven't been flooded, although we do have water in the basement, but that's been an ongoing problem we've needed to deal with since we built in 2004.  

At least the dill seems to be liking all this rain!  Likewise, the raspberry bushes should be flourishing from all this water too.

Mama has been roaming with her chicks into a bigger expansive area lately.  There have been times where she has even completely left them to go off with the other hens and rooster;  just like pictured here, taken this morning.

Almost in unison, Paul and I were talking about this exact same chick.  His comment towards it was "Eww, ugly duckling?"

WHAT???  My thoughts were COMPLETELY opposite!  The coloring is amazingly unique and gorgeous.  So, what are your thoughts?  Whose side are you going to choose?  Paul's or mine?  Then again, you may simply be thinking...."Guys!  It's a chicken!  Who cares?"   :0)

Tonight when I arrived home from my day-long math assessment workshop, I grabbed the camera for my walk around the yard/garden.  The chickens were hanging out down by the pigpen area, eating what they could scrape up from the pig feed trough.  I spied Big Mama amongst them....with no babies.  At that point, Paul said it was time to gather up the chicks and separate them from Mama.  

So....after securing the help from Cassie, Caitlyn and Candace, we all (minus Paul--he was making bagels in the house) ran around the yard, trying to catch those seven lil' buggars.  

They are all now safe-n-sound in the remodeled chicken pen where we have the other 26 meat-bird chicks.  I'm a little worried about how Big Mama will react and I plan to keep an ear out for her tonight.... to see if she'll be clucking away, trying to call for them.  We've never had to separate a mama and chicks before.  This is new to me.

So, tonight.....my schedule has opened up since Cassie's softball game has been cancelled.  Maybe the New Year's Eve mystery WILL see a finish after all.

Know what?  I really need a name for that quilt!  Any suggestions?

I really need a finish....

This afternoon, Diamond Fields chain blocks were completed and added to the design wall.  Once pieced, the quilt center will measure approx. 56"x56", so my next task for this design-in-the-making will be to come up with some border treatments.

But, with the middle-of-the-year mark looming on the horizon, and only ONE FINISH under my belt for the year (OMGoodness!!!!!! What?!?!?!)

I finished up the quilting of the New Year's Eve mystery that had been percolating on the quilting frame for the past couple of months. 

With the quilting complete, I got side-tracked with making dinner, and then playing Jarts outside with the girls, which lead to walking around the yard and ooogling the garden, and fruit trees, and playing with the goats, and giving the pigs some grass clippings....and then hanging another load of laundry out on the clothes line....

Basically all of that says that I did not attach the binding yet, so it's not quite a finish yet!  

The next two days are booked with math summative assessment meetings and softball games, so this may not see a finish-finish until Friday.

Progress......

On a completely non-quilting note:
Just took a load of clothes off the line;  9:30PM at night.......BEAUTIFUL outside!
Crickets chirping, but I dare say the frogs are out-croaking the crickets tonight.  Finally a non-rainy evening ( at least for now ).  Storms are tentative to roll in;  under a Tornado watch until 1 AM.  **shrug**

What'cha gonna do?

Walk with me.... a tour

It's wet!  Very wet!

We've had rain, rain and more rain lately.  Yesterday, there was just a long enough break that included sunshine for me and Paul to put some TLC into the garden.  Although we had some showers overnight through this morning, I still spent a few hours out in the garden this morning too.  Temps were ideal!

While walking around in the upper garden, planning out my path to travel with our tiller for the first cultivating job (yesterday---it's WAY too wet today for tilling!)....

IMAGINE my delight when I see oooooooodles of randomly scattered tomato plants!

I couldn't resist......

I grabbed the hand-shovel and starting digging them out for transplant into some open space we still had available (see the holes from my selections?).  When Paul realized what I was doing, he gave me "a look," and proceeded to inform me that they are most likely from our hybrid plants last year, and not heirloom.  

Meaning:  "you don't know what kind of plant you're going to get, Amy."

Well-----so!??!??!  Isn't that part of the fun too?  It's not like we don't have enough space for eleven more unplanned tomato plants. :D  Let's just live on the wild side and see what happens with them!! :P

 

I mean....LOOK!  It's so cute!  How could I pass it up and say..."Sorry buddy!  I didn't plant you this year so you're not important."  :(

And see who else wanted to sprout up this year???  

In additional to oodles of scattered tomato plants, I also transplanted a couple dozen dill sproutlings that were popping up everywhere in the open area too!  Goodness!!!!  It was like a garden-holiday!!!  Those gnomes must have wanted us to have even a bigger garden yet :)

Eventually, I stopped looking!  And the big, bad machine came out.

It wasn't easy tilling over so many tomato plants, but.....

...with 44 plants in our lower garden, and 11 newly transplanted "treasures" .......

Ummm.  Fifty-five (55!) tomato plants MAY just have to suffice... or not?

**chuckle**

Originally, we had 20 plants, and that was going to be it! (pictured towards the 'back' of this picture)

Then our Ag teacher had her Mother's Day sale for FFA, so we purchased 4 more.  

So, THEN we were done!

....

... a few weeks later, while digging through our seed box.... the package of tomato seeds was (accidentally) dumped upside-down.  So.....I shrugged and thought....."might as well plant them in some starter containers.  What's it gonna hurt?  We have the room....let's see what happens."  (I sense a slight measure of deja-vu here).....   

Enter:  20 MORE seedlings (pictured towards the 'front' of the above picture).  They were planted last week and have more than doubled in size!  They are about 3-5 weeks behind the first planting.

And speaking of our first planting:  Our first tomato is starting to form!  Always exciting to see :D

Maybe all this water from last Thursday wasn't too bad afterall :D

During my treasure seeking endeavor, Starz and Tristen (not pictured) kept me in conversation, baaaaing back-n-forth with each other.  They both were crying out for some attention....and for some good-eats!  tsk-tsk....the grass isn't ALWAYS greener, Starz....!

But even Dotty was trying to get some grass through her pen fence.  

On my way down to the lower garden, Daddy Robin was chirping up a rukus, trying to distract me away from the nest.  We don't know how many babies are in the nest, but we know two perished early on.  One egg was booted out of the nest, and a baby had fallen from the nest shortly after hatching (we saw evidence of both of these events on our concrete walk-out).

Paul finished up the newly renovated Chicken house.

And the birds moved in officially yesterday.

It's CRAZY how fast these buggars grow!  It's hard to tell from the pictures, but two weeks ago, they were cute-n-cuddly and SMALL.  

Paul mentioned probably selecting a couple lucky chickens in two more weeks to take part in our rotisserie ferris-wheel ride.  Oh, WHO will the lucky one(s) be?!?!?

:D

A local store remarkably had some strawberry plants in stock when we were "out looking" yesterday. Since our strawberry patch is nearing the end of its production life, we picked up 36 plants; two different types.  I planted 18 this morning;  the other 18 Paul wants to plant.

WHEW!

I also have pictures from our Sunday visit with Paul's namesake, but those will need to wait for another post.  But, I'll leave you with a snapshot of one small area of their amazing home/land/garden.

I hope your day is filled with whatever you feel "counts."

:0)

Happy Tuesday!

Heavy sigh...

Why does one area get flooded with rain when another area in the state rarely sees a drop of heavenly-sent rain??? Oh you poor, poor garden!  You won't need to see water for another couple of weeks once today's rain is through!  Between Thursday and today, I bet we've seen (and yet to see) 6+ inches of rain!!!!!!!  Our beans and peas had troughs of topsoil eroded away; our mounded items are doing okay.  TOMORROW, the garden will receive LOADS of TLC!

BEFORE the rain hit today (or at least the bigger lines of storms), Cassie had her 2nd tournament of the summer softball season.  Despite losing early on in the tournament, Cassie had an incredible day at the plate, hitting the green (out-field) quite a few times!  She was 4 of 5 at-bat.  One homerun (scoring 3 runs), one triple (scoring 2 runs), one double (scoring 2 runs) and one single (scoring 2 runs);  nothing like needing to mix it up!  She really brought the hits when the team needed it except in the end.  The team was down one run and she found herself at bat;  and she went down swinging;  her only non-hit of the day :(  Still super proud of her overall bats today though!!!!

Taking a moment to catch up with yesterday.....

Paul did some small construction on our quonset so that we can have a better house for out 26 meat chickens.  Pictures like this remind me of when Judy talks about how much nicer the chicken coops seem to be versus our houses :)

While he was doing that, Candace helped me pick our first batch of strawberries and then made a batch of strawberry jam.  Naturally, we needed to try it out on a piece of bread (we scraped the bowl clean!)

I also spent a few hours working on some connector blocks for the Diamond Fields blocks;  nothing worth taking a picture of yet.

And now..... we're relaxing with some Tom and Jerry cartoons.  I could head downstairs, but......bleh.  Not really in the mood.  So off to catch up on everyone else's day.

Happy Saturday

Diamond Fields

Angela (soscrappy) gave SUCH an excellent name idea for my "stumped" block yesterday.  "Diamond Fields" is a perfect fit for this block.

After paying bills this morning (bleh! Anyone else procrastinate with bill paying?)... I pieced together twenty blocks from all the units I had pre-sewn previously.

And then......ummmmmmm.......  Now what?  This literally is a design in the making;  no pre-plans or much thought of how to tie them together.  Therefore, I pulled...and sat back... and looked...and pulled...and pondered....  (yeah, we all know this dance, right?)

And then I thought maybe to GO BIG with the baby and come up with a connector block....

And this is where I needed to leave things for the afternoon because we had some unexpected visitors in the form of Paul's parents.  They arrived at noon and stayed until a little after 3:00, just visiting on their way up to the Farm for the weekend.

OH!  And all that rain today!?!?!?!?!?!  Oh the poor, poor tomato plants.  It's a good thing they are hilled up;  they may just be okay once the water seeps into the ground.  I don't have any official reading on how much rain we received today, however an acquaintance said his gauge read 2 inches at 3:00.  

A portion of our neighbor's field was turned into a swimming pool.  At one point today, I was considering calling the Olympic Committee to request to host the 2012 Summer swimming events in our garden and neighbor's field.

All-in-all, due to the rain and visitors, it has been a rather lazy day.  Caitlyn put "The Call of the Wild" DVD into the player around 3:30;  we purchased it about a month ago and haven't watched any episodes yet.  I don't recall hearing about this series at all, but the 2-hour pilot was excellent, and we paused the 2nd episode in order to start dinner.  Speaking of which, time for me to skidaddle back to preparing it.