New Year's Day!!!

 It's a whole new year on New Year's Day.  Not the one I expected exactly.  It rained most of the night with dark skies greeting us at O-Dark-Thirty.  I wished Cooper a big Happy New Year as I tried to get him to go back to sleep, but that wasn't happening.  We were up at 4:30 am.

My usual New Year breakfast consisting of cinnamon rolls didn't magically appear in the kitchen, so I had cookies instead.  We barely finished breakfast when the rain and hail began in earnest.  I put the screen back up on the patio window three times before just leaving it on the ground where it still remains this morning, that is if the wind hasn't taken it off down the hill.

Three cups of coffee later, which never happens around here, I turned on the Rose Parade.  I was instantly taken back to the year I worked in the float barns freezing to death, gluing tiny brown seeds on a globe before putting thousands of roses in tubes of freezing water.  Yes, most of those roses you see on the floats are individually cut to a specific length and stuffed into tiny tubes to keep them fresh until stuck on the floats just a couple of hours before they take off.

I was watching for these guys, who unfortunately were behind a float that set off fireworks.  Someone apparently didn't know horses are afraid of fireworks.  It also meant they were covered in smoke and not even visible for some time.  At any rate, this is the Merced County Sheriff's Posse in full silver saddle regalia.

That's our Sheriff on the far right.  Make you wonder who's holding down the fort.

Suddenly there was digging at my leg.  I saw the dreaded white stuffing instantly.  There's something about those little squeaky things that makes Cooper want to find it.  

And find it he did before dropping it between the seat cushions, thus the digging.  Surgery was required and amazingly, the squeaker still squeaks.  Not even a week and he tore up his toy.

Which reminded me I had a new bobbin winder to test drive for my quilting machine.  Too bad they don't tell you in big bold letters that the knobs have all been factory set, because what did I do first thing?  I twisted all the knobs to see what they did.  BAD move.

I finally looked up the "how to" on the internet and watched a video.  Okay, I got this.  How hard can it be?  Well ... probably a spool's worth of very expensive wasted thread hard.  There's another learning curve here that is ridiculous.

The spool needs to be wound tight.  The thread kept jumping out of the tension guide.  Suddenly the light bulb went on.  I saw the word Glide on the spool and I remember seeing the same word on another video.  Since I know absolutely nothing about the different kinds of thread, I watched the video intently.  This thread is very slippery.  No ....... really?  

They demonstrated holding it with your fingers to give it even more tension.  FINALLY!!!  I sort of got it ... at least I have one of three bobbins that will probably work, once I get the entire machine to work.

In the meantime, I cooked up a storm .... okay, I took most everything out of the freezer ... and headed off to the Chance Ranch to fix them a good luck Mexican dinner.  There was a slight problem ... their son was there trying to get an app downloaded to Dan's phone to allow him to watch the series 1883.  Two hours later, we were still waiting because the password disappeared.  You know how these phones can be.

At last he got it fixed with Laila's help, although shutting everything off last night may cause problems when trying to reconnect today, but that remains to be seen.  I completely forgot to take pictures of our tamale, taquito, Mexican rice and salad dinner, but I did get a picture of Miss Missy looking exactly like how I felt after eating all that food.  Sweetest rescue kitty ever, just don't try to pick her up and don't mention her svelte figure.

Once back home, I posted a comment about my quilting machine which brought thirteen different ways to fix it.  All involved turning it on or off and unplugging not one, but two connections every single time.  Nothing worked, but I'm getting really good at turning on and unplugging.  

It's a cool 35 degrees now and heading down to 28 by daybreak.  Yup it's really early here.  The wind woke me up at 3:00, 3:15 and 3:47 before I finally said uncle and got up.  Looks like this will continue for the next four days.  So much for warm Arizona!!  It would be the perfect time to stay inside and quilt, right??