away sweetly

 

This cloth has been hanging on the design wall patiently waiting its turn. Could be it never gets cut up or incorporated into a larger thing, it's so strong and singular all on its own.

Look down there in the foreground at the little Christmas cactus playing at being an Easter bunny.

                 ~~~

I went "up country" on Sunday to stay over and spend the day with Charlie because they had no school on Monday for some administrative business. It was a welcome break. It's a shock seeing him after two weeks he's growing so fast. We've dispensed with the booster seat but there is still a wicker basket of toys and other crap in the back seat.

Sunday night another rainstorm blew through but Monday was glorious. He wanted me to time him running around the house with the stopwatch on my phone. Lucky me hit the camera button instead. 

All the neighboring herds were out enjoying the new grass. Sheep, cattle, cows, burros, horses. You can hear them from time to time mooing. 

Earlier in the day we had Poker 101 instead of boring math practice. Still, there was money involved. Adding, subtraction, probability, odds. He is discovering that math is in everything one way or another.

Hilariously, he learned to bluff accidentally and I learned that I have zero poker face.

 Sunday afternoon poker was a family tradition at my house. I joke that I was raised in the Church of the Inside Straight.

My family moved to the country when I was seven. Each Sunday my relatives would come for lunch and spend the afternoon into dinnertime playing nickel/dime poker around the kitchen table. Ballentine beer and the air blue with cigarette and cigar smoke. My Dad was a Charlie as was his father.

My Mom scuttled around the players in the tight kitchen cleaning up after dinner. My grandmother took over the TV in the living room. Kids were banished from the kitchen, but I had mastered the art of sitting quietly and was allowed to perch on a stool behind my Dad or my uncle and observe what was usually a friendly game. 

Holding a lame pair of sixes, my Dad leaned back to confer with me, silently. Stay or fold? Me, ever the wise guy, pushed a dime from his pile into the pot. We won that hand, but I was never allowed to sit in and play on my own. That would have been too much acknowledgment for a girl child.

Somehow, that distance was important to my understanding of the game, the people, and that my place would not be in their world in just a few years. 

Charlie and I laughed and learned as we went along, hand after hand. Later, I found a high-stakes poker tournament on TV and waited for him to spot the difference. He could tell that even with their poker faces on, they were anxious, and crabby even the big winner. On his own, he picked up that professional gamblers had flushed all the fun out of the game.

We went out to play.

Springing

Well, there's a familiar sight.

This view from the stitching chair is a bit more cramped looking but much more functional. Big J is plugged in and ready to rock.

A pre-dawn thunderstorm had the cats trampling me out of my dreams. Just as well. Stuff to do and traveling later today. 

The greening is on us and I have a bunch of new seeds for the woodchip pile. The area needs to be tossed a bit with a rake and some stubborn shrubs taken down to their roots first. 

Cheating

 

Country storm

 

I picked Charlie up from school Friday afternoon. Waiting in the car in a complex pickup routine is nerve-racking. 

Still, it's efficient.

Robin Hood did his daily read with me. Some how, fifteen minutes spiraled into an hour. He makes me laugh out loud.

Jake got home minutes before the strong thunderstorms with hints of tornadoes. We were out on the front porch two minutes when the wind brought the rain in on us. Rather than drive home, I stayed the night. 

The cat crew were not happy about their ringleader skipping town.

Spring sounds wet

 

They are out there. There's a little tributary from the creek creeping through the woods almost to the property line. Not clear exactly why but the frogs are loving it. Still, they've moved into the pool and have started playing with their plastic combs after dark. 

No matter what the weather is doing, I haven't lifted a finger toward the garden. I am excited about taking cuttings from Jake's camellia. Such an exotic and yet research tells me they are ubiquitous in old Georgia gardens. Some kind of snobbery going on, which is evident when you price one at Lowe's or Home Depot.

The deck is a huge mess. Jake wants me to get rid of the fiber grow pots because they will rot the wood they sit on. I love them because they are covered with the greenest moss. Maybe I'll put some pallets underneath them. Cheap fix. 

It's only going to be flowers out there this year. (If you know, you know.) Vegetables come from Publix or Kroger.

So here, the thread is ready, patiently waiting for me to find a patch of mindlessness to start measuring and winding. Better Call Saul or Game of Thrones will do the trick but for the moment, when I watch TV, I sit on the floor in front of the TV at attention because The Last of Us is on. Right now I'm delaying watching the latest episode because the show is emotionally exhausting.

I cleaned and oiled the Janome this morning. Reacquainting myself with all his many tricks and wiles. I will be putting both the Featherweight and the 99K up for sale. It's a sin to let them languish the way I have.  This one gets the job done beautifully. This is a little test piece of that heavy linen using a modified herringbone to join two finished edges. The rest is just silly stuff, but I've worked it before and might work it again when patience with hand work runs out.

There was a fabulous complex dream last night. A minor character wants a much bigger role They have so much to say it's hard to tell if they are good or evil. 

it's keyboard time.