Sleep Sewing by Mikayla and Jessica

Mikayla and I finally got together again to work on her quilt. She was tired from a school field trip, I was beat from a Design weekend with RBC, so we were two sleepy sewers.
If the quilt were an Excel worksheet, I guess you could say we are done with 8 rows, and have columns 1-3 sewn together. We were so tired, that was all we could manage. (At this rate we should finish in time for her first grandchild to enjoy it.) It is adorable, and with one more session we should get it done. There is some fun and funky fabric and the red corduroy is really "popping".

FAA chickens

I spent much of the day updating our RBC ADA requirements for grab bars, TP holders, toilets, urinals and drinking fountains, or as the California code calls them,"bubblers."  My mom always calls a drinking fountain a bubbler. I thought it was an Elvenism. It is a real word!
bubbler
noun
a drinking fountain that spouts water
(Are there beer fountains?)
There you go Mom, you are right.

  /ˈbʌblər/ Show Spelled

Team Panda?

Next weekend is the Sea Lion Bowl at SF State. It is the Northern California section of the National Ocean Sciences Bowl. Ernst has a team from his school competing, as he has for the last few years.

There is this one school, which I won't mention the name of, that ALWAYS wins. They are from San Jose. They are unstoppable! The goal isn't to beat them, it is to avoid being crushed by the academic machine that they are.

It is an amazing competition, I am always blown away by how smart the kids are, and how much they have learned about oceanography, boating and sailing terms, weather, geography and ecology. I know only about 5% of the answers. It is great fun, but I get so nervous I can hardly watch. We get to stay at the Ohrenschall Guest house, and there is an awards banquet after.

So the girls decided they wanted a PANDA as their mascot. A PANDA for an ocean themed competition! Here is the logo Ernst had designed for our shirts. Let's hope it intimidates the brainy kids!

A busy week ahead, an RBC weekend followed by a week of proctoring the State Bar Exam. The Sea Lion Bowl will be a nice respite from a busy February. Go Pandas!!!!!

Spring was here

Here are the pictures to prove it. It was warm, it was sunny, it was dog washing, sit on the front porch, better start weeding the yard weather. Now we are back in a bit of winter, brisk and rainy. But I am thrilled, I love rain. Can't get enough, ever.

I am still on the hunt for an old reliable sewing machine. I look on Craigslist all the time. Thought I found one, so my friend Igor drove me there, in case the guy was an ax murderer. Gorgeous house in Granite Bay, but the sewing machine was awful. If someone doesn't even bother to get the yuckie gunk off something they are selling, forget it. So Igor says, I know a lady with sewing machines for sale, lots of them. We drove to this Romanian woman's house, and she has three for sale! Three ancient Singers that look like they could be on Little House on the Prairie, if Pa had put in electricity. So the search goes on.

a blooming Jade is a happy Jade

Molly hates water!

Definition of fender bender

When do you call it a fender bender? When you are the one doing the bending of the fender! That's what we'll call what I did today. Not an accident, that's when the other guy's at fault. Just kind of backed up into someone, we hardly even exchanged paint colors, being that our cars are the same color! I knew I should have listened to Ernst and just stayed home and nursed my cold!

his car

my trailer hitch

Now if we want to talk accidents, perhaps you never saw the doozy Ernst got into back in October. Some have called it Car Jousting, and Ernst lost. It was dark, someone left the school gate half open, and he drove into the gate, still swinging towards him in the car! It hit his arm, then grazed the back of his head and went out the other window. He fortunately leaned into the steering wheel. If he hadn't? I still cringe thinking about it. Ernst just never does anything halfway.

The McDougall Diet is Working

We are coming up on 3 years since Ernst's heart attack and angioplasty with 3 stents. We have been vegan since reading The China Study, and then went on the McDougall Diet 2 years ago - vegan with oils just from foods, not added for cooking. This means no meat, poultry, fish, eggs, or dairy, and no white flour or rice, very little sugar. There actually is a lot to eat besides all that, but it is a lot of work, and a lot of explaining to well meaning people who think we are going to waste away!

Ernst had a nuclear perfusion test last week. We were worried, what would we do if there was more clogging? Most patients begin clogging up again after 3 years. He dreaded another angioplasty. And we were already eating so good, what was next, becoming fruitatarians?

He was supposed to see the cardiologist a few days after the test, but the doctor called and said the appointment was cancelled, his heart is great! What terrific news. The diet is working! Now if we could just do something about his wardrobe?

Love those safety glasses

Ernst in his winter lederhosen!

 I on the other hand seem to be a mess lately. All the stuff that makes Ernst feel great: potatoes, rice, whole grain bread, it all makes me look and feel like the Pillsbury Dough Girl. I have arthritis! I am too young for this!
I felt so amazing this last summer when I went on a raw food diet. It was like a miracle. My hearing even improved. But it is hard, I mean really hard. Being vegan is a walk in the park compared to going raw. Then Kodie died, we got Molly, had the 10-10-10 party, Ernst had his close to death accident, I lost my job, we had the remodel.  All this required comfort food, lots of it!

Raw Food Month August 2010

Our active new addition!

But here I go, I am going to do it again, at least for a month, until the next Moldovan wedding, which is exactly 4 weeks away.  Break out the fruit smoothies, make up some nutty taco mix, dust off the dehydrator, my goodness, it's only food, not like that is important! As we say around here, Life is Better Than Food!

Kodie the Wonder Dog

Snack Door

Kodie the Wonder Quilt

My favorite photo

Geocaching at Butano

Decapitated friends

 I made a quilt in memory of Kodie the Wonder Dog. We had Kodie his last 4 years, but he had our hearts long before we officially adopted him. Last August we knew it was time. We had to call "Dr. Catvorkian" and let him go out in peace.

Any pool in a pinch

"Yep, I diagnosed his heart attack"

Happy Camper

Extended Pack

Fan club

More milkshake please

Ernst's favorite photo

Our fabulous friends and neighbors helped Ernst dig the very large grave in our hard pan soil. Not easy. And then on his last night, Kodie got to swim with his fan club, the girls down the street. After his swim, Dan and his girls, Jason and his boys, Kodie, Ernst and I all hung out on our front lawn. The Boy was eating it up, seemed to look at every passing car and say, Hey I bet your pack isn't this big!
He got a chocolate milkshake as his last treat. He was happy, we were crying our eyes out. Dan came during his lunch hour and helped Ernst bury him. We planted a Yellow Barked Dogwood on his grave, which was appropriate.

 We still miss him, he was a great dog.

Jesse and Jeron, extended pack

My Mom in the Snow

When our family would go to the snow, our Dad would insist on duct taping our mittens to our coat, and our boots to our pants. It was really embarrassing, plus took so much time away from sledding.

But we have to admit now the duct tape was a great idea, if not really hunyocky (an Elven word for which there is no real translation).


So here is my brother Jeff, preparing my Mom to go sledding, carrying on the duct tape tradition.

Quilt Sale on our Street

Got tired of these quilts hanging around. They are just not getting enough views on Etsy. So I put up a sign "Quilts 4 Sale" and waited to see what happened.
Well, I actually didn't sit there twiddling my thumbs, I set up a table on the porch and cut a bunch of vintage chenille bedspreads to smithereens. They were already trashed, I just made them usable to use in quilts.

A woman came by and bought three of my big quilts. I normally don't drive around with large bills in my wallet, thinking, Man I just want to buy me some quilts!!! But there are people like that, thank goodness. She drove off with the quilts, and I went inside to perform the Dance of Joy. Grocery money!

So my experiment worked, now I am just down to 4 baby quilts. Hmm, someone needs to have quads. Jeff and Myra?

I wasn't there that morning...

...when my father passed away.

That song still chokes me up when I hear it.  Another thing that gets me is when I read "He died peacefully at home, surrounded by his loved ones." My dad died twenty years ago today, in the hospital, it wasn't peaceful, and we were all home asleep. I have lamented this for 20 years.

The details are not pleasant, my Dad had a very rare cancer in his leg muscle, he had a really drastic surgery that left him with limited use of his leg, he endured horrific pain and spent a lot of time in two periods of hospital stays, about 6 months apart. We spent a lot of time at UC Davis Med Center, Tower 8, Oncology floor. We loved his doctors and nurses, and despite the sadness, we had some good moments as a family. So now, on February 3, 2011 I am choosing to remember some of the funny things that happened during that really awful time. Here are a few:

After my Dad's biopsy, which was a surgery in itself, he was in the hospital for several days. One of the interns was really handsome, and Joanne just thought he was adorable. One day Joanne and I show up to visit. My Dad tells us he told Doctor Cutie that his daughter "had taken quite a shine" to him. Joanne was mortified, I was amused. This doctor came and went all the time and there was no way to avoid seeing him. So then Dad says Doctor Cutie had asked him which daughter? The one with darker hair, my Dad told him. That is me, the daughter with darker hair! Joanne was off the hook and now I was mortified. We had a good laugh over that. Leave it to my Dad to mix up his daughters.

When he was back for his final stay, the first Gulf War broke out. My Dad was always a news junkie, loved to read the paper cover to cover, always kept up with world events. Before he got really bad, my Mom paid for a service at the hospital that gave him better meals, a daily newspaper and free cable. Otherwise he got no TV, just this hokey UC Davis medical channel. When he got so bad off that he couldn't benefit anymore, my Mom stopped paying the extra fee. So we just had the medical channel on. My Dad still watched it, and with all his medication thought that the shows on germs, T-cells and the immune system, and weird shots of body functions were news items on the Gulf War. So we would assure him, yeah Dad, that is the US army, they are winning the war. It made him happy.

We thought he was really losing it when he kept fiddling with his IV and wanted to tangle it in the hand grip bar for lifting himself up from bed. We would come in and he would have it all wrapped around, we couldn't figure out why. Then my brother Jeff arrived from New York, he knew exactly what Dad was doing. He was working. My dad had been a pipe fitter his whole adult life. He was stringing conduit. So my brother set up this contraption so my dad could "work." A pipe fitter to the end.

Medicare made him a complicated contraption for his bad leg, but it sat in the corner, he would never use it. A total waste of money. He joked that if they would spend all that money that late in the game, maybe they could pay for the hearing aids he never did get? And why not a face lift, and an eye job would be nice! And when they couldn't get his pain under control, which was always, he would say that the hospital was so close to Oak Park, just please go down and find a drug dealer on the corner, get him some drugs that would work.  When it would get bad, I would call my brother Jim, because I knew he would call and yell at the nurses for us to get my Dad more pain medicine. But my father's jokes through his pain made an awful situation easier to take.

Toward the end, it got very difficult for all of us. We could only be in his room for so long, it was really intense. My Mom had come to the hospital, but was with my sister Janice, gearing herself to come in. I told my Dad that Mom was there, did he want to see her? "Hell, yes" he said. Those were the last words I heard from him. I went to get my Mom, told her what he said, and she just melted. In those two words my Dad said volumes. Not eloquent, but those words were just perfect to express who my dad was and what was important to him.

I wasn't there that morning when my father passed away. None of us know what his last words were. But the last words I heard him say are precious to me. Did he love my Mom? Did he love us kids? Did he know we loved him? And most important, did he live a peaceful life, surrounded by his loved ones? Excuse my language, but "Hell yes," he did.

Elliot's Pop Pop-GGP Quilt

Here is the Out of Africa, Made in China, Born in the USA Elliot. When Elliot's great grandfather (Pop Pop) died recently, we acquired some of his clothes and we were sorting through them. I saw the flannel and cotton shirts, and that was that, I was going to make a rag quilt for Elliot.
I got another shirt from his great grandpa Perry (GGP), added in a pair of Ernst's jeans and Elliot got his very manly, very large baby blanket.
Enjoy it little big man, drool on it, drag it around the house, I made it nice and sturdy for you.