Swimming Up River

 Good morning from cool California.  It's a lovely 52 degrees this morning as Mom Kitty ate herself silly.  I hate to throw away the food Cooper won't eat ... he has such a discerning palate ... so I feed it to the kitties.  There are about three wild ones around here that keep the mice and gophers to a minimum.  Sometimes she leaves some for the fox crew, but not today!!  Although they do get along, she always has her eyes out for the other four legged critters.

Sometimes I feel like I'm swimming up river with the furniture still stashed in every corner of the house.  I finally made a walkway from the living room to the sewing room.  I ran into that table so many times my hip is black and blue.  

Look what I found!!!  There were two big frames wrapped together, part of the whorehouse furniture I was so amazing lucky to get from Jan and Bill Mains.  I had no idea these were there.  It's two portraits from the Civil War.  I always get mixed up on this stuff, but I think the South was the Confederacy led by Robert E Lee (the grey uniforms), and the North was the Union with General Grant (the dark blue uniforms).  If I'm wrong, please correct me because I really paid no attention whatsoever in history class.

So who do you think this is?  I'll unwrap the second one and post it tomorrow.  

That's when I discovered I'm REALLY swimming up river.  I went to the big sewing room closet and pulled out two quilts to be quilted.  Wasn't I surprised when I got to the machine ... they were ALREADY quilted.  I went back to the closet again and again to find not just one or two, but FIVE that need binding sewn on.  That's done by hand!  Good grief ... I'm swimming up a RAGING river!  

I finally found one lone quilt that hasn't been run through the machine.  I guess it will wait until I get a few of these finished.  This requires sitting on the couch, which I'm not all that good at.  

That is evidenced by this picture.  When the pup gets 1/4" from your nose, it's play time.  He gets this excited happy look on his face that cannot be denied.  Though multiple thoughts of things I needed to get done were racing around in my brain, all I did was throw the ball for an hour.  How could I resist that face?

I really do have a big honey-do list, but like any usual husband would do (or so the wives tell me), I'm procrastinating.  It's just so much more fun to see this quilt materialize than it is to swim upstream against the tide of listed items.  I promise today I will get my rig solar panels cleaned. 

In the meantime, I finished four more squares and that piano key at the right.  That's what it's called in quilting land.  I think I have eight of those to go and I'm still not even close to sewing them all together.  It's not going to be easy since this is a king sized quilt.

Trying to get at least one thing off my list, I spent two hours on the computer trying to update the Golden Spike RV Group list.  I sent out one notice of dues, which resulted in five people sending checks.  That's when I discovered the computer list of members and the google groups list of members are not the same.  

All this time they have been kept up by two different people who never crossed paths.  The next thing I know, it's 3 hours later and I still don't think I have it correct.  Google groups lists everything by the first name ... and I can't seem to change it.  It doesn't help that I'd rather do anything else in the world but straighten this out.

And so I went right into fixing dinner.  I'm always swimming uphill in this department.  I was really craving a nice stew, but I only had chicken.  Why not make a chicken stew the same way??  My advice is NO ... do NOT do that. 

Yeah it looks pretty good here, but when I added the rice, it all went south.  It turned into the biggest glop of food you've ever seen.  I don't know what happened to my cooking skills ... but like Elvis, they have definitely left the building.

Yes I ate it and now have an entire crock pot full of it.  I don't even think Kitty Kitty or the Foxy Twins will eat this!!  I'll try not to be wasteful, but I have a feeling most of it will end up in the trash.  I do better with salads ... open the bag, pour out!!

Which reminds me ... I just had a salad with sweet onion dressing.  It's kind of a Cole slaw dressing that I would love to get my hands on.  It's like the Dutch salad dressing I had with Barbara and Tom Westerfield somewhere back east.  Do you remember that Barbara?  I found the recipe once, but have since lost it in internet land.  Does anyone have something similar????

And so ended another day of swimming.  Hopefully today will be much more fruitful.