Eagle Adventure, and Shopping, Deferred

I've been letting the chickens free-roam in the backyard.  Wonderful Husband and I hammered some 4' t-stakes into the ground in a few places and have hooked rabbit fencing into them to keep the ladies from getting out into the front yard.  Perfect, I thought!

Until yesterday, around 6pm, when I was halfway across the yard, and looked up to find a bald eagle, talons extended, in the air about 4' above my chickens, clearly looking for a chicken dinner.

"HEY!" I bellowed, in my best "What The Heck Do You Think You're Doing?!" mom-voice.

The eagle took note of me, and decided it had better places to be.  (Kind of stupid, but then bald eagles reputedly are.  Seriously, if it came down to a fight between us, I might be bigger but it has a beak, talons, and no moral compass.  The eagle would win, easily.)

Two of my ladies were at the verge of the brush between us and the neighbors; I got out the scratch grains and lured them into their coop and shut them in.  Another was deep in the brush and clucking in distress now that the threat was gone; after a bit she came out and likewise got put in for the night.  The last two hens I was worried about, as they weren't responding at all, but about half an hour later they reappeared from where they'd squeezed between the propane tank and its fencing.  Clever girls!  So, Bald Eagle: 0, Team Flock Mama: 1.

Unrelated to the above, it has been two weeks since Wonderful Husband and I got our second Moderna shots, so we are now fully vaccinated!  But we are also still wearing masks.  We had planned to celebrate by going to Ikea this weekend and looking at outdoor/lawn furniture.  Except that it's Memorial Day this weekend, so nopenopenope.  And starting next week, my sister is back at work after her brain surgery has (mostly) resolved itself.  So my parents will be taking care of Niecelet on weekends.  I am not dropping all three grandkids on my parents, no matter how much they say they can handle it.  Niecelet on her own is a handful; adding my two to the mix devolves rapidly into chaos.  And we can't take the boys with us to Ikea; Jazzy still will not wear a mask.  So I guess lawn furniture gets to wait another year....

Catching Up

No pictures, I'm afraid.  But I've finally got the quilt for my inlaws basted!  Now I just need to quilt it.  And, y'know, steam-mop the basting spray off the floor.

Jazzy has started extended-day preschool two days a week - it's an hour to an hour and a half longer, so I'm packing him a lunch now.  But there was an opening for the rest of this school year (a whole month or so) and his teachers thought he might benefit from it.

Squiddle, meanwhile, has finally been shown Episode IV in honor of Star Wars day.  His favorite character (so far, we're paused just after the escape from the Death Star) is Darth Vader, because of the music.  I... cannot argue that?  Though I do have to say, rewatching the film for the first time in several years, I'm discovering anew how much Episodes V, VI, I, II, III, and Rogue-1 influence and reinterpret my understanding of the movie.  (Example: Obi-Wan: "This is your father's lightsaber. He wanted you to have it, when you were old enough."  Me: "Obi-Wan, you lying fuck.")

The veggie garden is finally fully planted, in a very intensive square-foot gardening way.  The raspberry and boysenberry beds have chives and parsnips in with them.  The strawberries will be sharing space with bush beans, peas, and, if I can find some starts or seeds, cucumbers.  Another bed is two kinds of beets, two kinds of carrots, two kinds of scallions, and leeks.  The next bed is 4 tomatoes (each a different variety), basil, dill, two kinds of squash, and thyme.  And the last bed is oregano, parsley, more parsnips, Swiss chard, monarda, borage, luffas, and Minnesota Midget melons.

My fruit trees are almost finished flowering.  I've decided that the ones I planted last year, I'm going to pluck the fruit off while tiny and give them one more year to develop root strength.  (The persimmon trees, hurrah, are finally putting out a few leaves and proving they're not dead sticks.)  Time to turn my attention to the blueberry bushes next, I guess.  That plus working out a decent-sized run for the chickens, who are giving us more eggs than we can eat.

And with that, I'm off to bed!

Spring Things

It's a dreary, drizzly day, so I'm working on tidying, dusting, and revamping my desk/sewing area with an eye toward decluttering and ending up with streamlined, increased functionality.

I've also been working on things out in the garden.  I added three more 4'x8' beds!  And promptly turned two of them and one of last year's into permanent berry beds, so I've not actually gained more space for things like carrots and tomatoes.

Two of the new beds got trellises built in them, as they've been planted with boysenberries and raspberries:

There's trellis wires between the posts now, to weave the vines up and through.  And more soil, both sieved from the grass we dug up, but also purchased.  The fun part of building the beds was that the ground not only slants east-west, but also north-south!  So the northwest corner of each bed is only two or three inches above the ground, but in order to have relatively level beds, the southeast corners had to be shored up like this:

The other major thing I've been working on is making 289 5" blocks:

And turning them into a 50th anniversary gift for Wonderful Husband's parents:

It's not done yet - the quilting and binding still need to be finished.  But I think it came out nicely, I'm proud of the work, and, most importantly, they like it!

Cookie Jar

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an empty biscuit (cookie) tin must be in want of sewing supplies.

This pepparkakkor tin is currently filling up with 5" quilt blocks.

(I took this picture a couple days ago.  Now the roof and driveway behind the tin is white.  I haven't measured the back deck yet, but we've likely got somewhere in the 3"-4" range.  And the snow's still falling.)

On January 31, I Made Bread

My post title is a riff on graffiti from the gladiators' barracks of Pompeii.  Where I would like to visit someday.

Meantime!

*rolls up to the quarantine, 8 months late, bearing Starbucks*

Today I made bread!

I've had the book Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day for a while now.  Yesterday I decided I wanted to actually use it, so I prepped the dough, popped it in the fridge, and then this morning baked the above two loaves, which accompanied dinner at my parents' tonight.  They came out pretty well, like a light slightly sourdough.  I might try baguettes tomorrow morning.  If I stick with this, I think I'll invest in a new baking stone and pizza peel.  Ours got respectively broken and downsized in the interstate move.

Being me, I also baked a blackberry pie to go with:

They always end up looking vampiric when I cut smiley faces for vents.  It's why I usually stick with either the pi symbol or a heart.

Ten for the stack

Writing word count: 453.  Finally hitting some uber-sweet drama that I've been plotting for rather a long time.

Sewing: ten more Garden Party blocks done:

Which brings me up to forty blocks.  But I haven't cut tomorrow's set out yet.

New Project!

Today's writing word count: 533.

Today was a getting stuff done day!  (Even I have those once in a while.)

I cooked, I cleaned, I finally got the baby quilts mailed off to my cousin and my friend.  And I also got started on my next sewing project.

Bonnie Hunter's Garden Party!  It's found in her Addicted To Scraps book.

I had apparently started working on the blocks while we were living in the apartment, because I found fifteen finished ones, and pieces cut for another five, which I stitched up over the weekend.  Today I pulled out the appropriate size strip bin, and cut and sewed another ten blocks, bringing my current total to 30:

Since these blocks finish at 5", it takes rather a lot of them to make a quilt!  (The pattern calls for 100... but I kind of want to enlarge it slightly? 121 if I do.)  I've got my next ten blocks cut and stacked, ready to stitch tomorrow.