My two gift quilts made it to Utah okay. One of them is already hanging in its new home and the other is waiting for a trip to Montana. I gave the Yellow Rose to an old friend and Delectable Pathways to her daughter. There are a few quilts that I probably would never give away, but I am mostly a process person rather than a product person. So stockpiling quilts when people have praised them and are reliably good quilt keepers seems silly.

 My current project is moving along nicely. My husband went camping so there are no pictures yet, but it is a variation of a Sunburst quilt. Since there are numerous blocks of that name, I should identify this one as Marti Mitchell's version, made far easier by her sturdy templates. I never expected to enjoy hand piecing and hand sewing quilts but I am addicted now. I don't think that this version can be paper pieced though it could be machine sewn if I were so inclined, but sewing the short seams involved by hand removes some of the frustration that sewing errors cause if I go too fast. Plus some spots on this require spinning the pieces around a sewn spot to guarantee nice sharp points and that reminds me of origami so it's quite fun to see the nice points when the pieces are pressed.

 

 Three post pandemic stories from just yesterday although I am almost certainly jumping the gun on the "post" part:

We moved into our current house just before Thanksgiving in 2019. That means we never really got to know the neighbors but everyone is now making tentative forays into meeting new people again. Yesterday my immediate next door neighbor came over. She told me that she was so glad that we moved in because the previous owner was obnoxious. Apparently she told the neighbor that the only "colored" people allowed in her house were maids and service people. Having my husband and I, a mixed race couple, move in made her amused. It sort of makes me amused too. The same neighbor told me that one of the other people who live on our street asked her if my husband were the Japanese gardener. That's so offensive that it ends up being funny.

Another story involves one of the kids that I tutored years ago. This young man ended up going to Yale, majored in economics and worked as an analyst at the Fed immediately after graduation. After a couple of years of that experience he applied to graduate school and initially intended to go to business school but when Harvard Law School accepted him he jumped at the chance. That was immediately before the pandemic so his first year of law school that just ended was not in Cambridge but in his parents' house in Utah. He just got his first year "grades". As he reported, his overall scores were simply average and he was disappointed, but every first year student has to take writing courses. In those, he was designated a Dean's Scholar which means that he was either the #1 or #2 in the class of 70 students. Pretty darn cool. He told me it was because of my stern tutelage all those years ago when he was still a teenager. Smile.

 Okay, so Trump thinks that he can simply be reinstalled in the White House because Mike Lindell told him so. Sort of reminds me of when my sister was small and she wanted a magic wand. My mother decorated a dowel and gave it to her at which point my sister pointed the wand at my mother and said, "Poof, disappear!" 

Why am I even writing about this? Well I have posted photos of flowers that we have produced in our yard but this week there was one that fits in with Lindell's and my sister's fantasy thinking.

This is an amaryllis that arrived from nowhere. Not only did we not plant this bulb, amaryllis don't typically get planted outdoors, primarily showing up at Christmas in a box, discarded after bloom. They are definitely not frost hardy and Pennsylvania can be quite cold in the winter.

Any thoughts on this strange phenomenon?