It’s here – humidity and bugs, both of which make it no fun to work outside. We’ve never experienced such an outbreak of flies that makes me actually hesitant to walk outside.
Telly’s grooming appointment is this morning – I’m going to take Hazel who could use a thorough bathing and toenail trimming. Then it’s back to the lawnmower for me – I’ve never had such thick green grass! At this rate I won’t even have to turn on my irrigation.
My pretend grandchildren are on a family vacation out West – heading for Yellowstone. I told them about our family trip to Yellowstone when I was 15 – I made it miserable for the whole family, the whole trip. I wanted to stay home for the state tournament high school softball tournament and we went on “vacation”. I pouted, cried and carried on the entire trip. Downright miserable.
Reader photos
Cynthia and Larry check nests as part of a volunteer program. I guess Larry is improving from the burn injury but I would imagine not fast enough for him.
Next Fever game is Friday, June 7 at 6:30 on ION which we can actually get.
Signing off from the blog about nothing.
Tuesday was hot (86) and really muggy, but no bugs. This morning, it is muggy again, and we are suppose to get a heavy rain around noon. Our lawn is thick and green this year. Last year it was dry so it got mowed maybe every two weeks. I finally have time this afternoon to sew and I am so looking forward to it. I miss going out west and seeing Yellowstone. We would visit family each year and make a side trip into YNP. After moving up north 10 years ago we only went out west once. We do look at the YNP webcams daily though. Janice from Traverse City area.
Mary, your Angel Reese comment made me laugh out loud! I wonder how she keeps her eyes open- those lashes must be heavy!
Love the Dirty Dozen striped quilts, and I need to download the Tilda pattern. It would make a cute donation for a little girl if borders were added. My family doesn’t want any more quilts but I still want to make them, so I donate most of them.
Mary I love your story about your Yellowstone vacation. I think we have all been bratty and ruined an event. My older sister ruined Christmas one year because she got a Skipper doll instead of a Francie.🙄 I hope the pretend grands are as good as gold. My sister has two horses and said the flies are really bad this year too. She has fly masks on them but one horse hates it. Great quilts; hostas and the bird’s nest is so cool. Did you hear Angel got a double technical and was ejected from the game last night? Some NBA player is going to pay her fine.
Donna Jo – she is a piece of work, isn’t she? One reader asked who she was and my first thought was she is not reading the blog on a regular basis. I refuse to explain things to people who aren’t willing to keep up. The pretend grands are having a great time as far as I’ve heard – Aidan was sick when they left but is recovering.
Don’t be too hard on that blogger. Sometimes your blog about nothing has a lot of comments to read!☺️
great conversations today. i went to the spine doc and got a couple epidurals in my lower back. he warned me that it would probably hurt worse for 48+ hours. the pain hit big within 3 hours. was told to take it easy for several days. all while i’m trying to get backs for four quilts (done) and bindings for those same quilts, i have pulled 2.5″ strips for binding for three of the quilts. all in mostly shades of blues. i want red for the most recent quilt. i don’t make my bindings this size, but when i turn them in to be done by others, that is the size they want. tis hard to remember most of the time. so we have yet again another set-back in being able to get upstairs to the main fabric area and longarm. not exactly what i wanted but it is what it is. hopefully when the back cooperates, i can use those stairs (17 of them) to help lose the extra weight also. the pain had gotten to the point i was barely moving (can sew at machine no problem). bed for me and praying for less pain tomorrow. love love the conversation today. patti in florida
beautiful quilts today, i love the 2 girl quilt, very nice
love those eggs to
i don’t know who that girl Angle Reece at the end? is she someone?
BIG THANK YOU TO CONNIE R IN WISCONSIN ! for the oh so clever Tilda quilt, little girls with chickens —
that we all fell in love with today !!!! Just printed it out from her website FREE PATTERNS – and it will be
next on my list for sure. OR it could be adapted to applique….well, one way or another !
PS to our dear Mary E: see what you are doing???? we all love your blog about nothing — its like a big
ol talking over the back fence to each other, we all are kindred spirits, and then some !
Margie – if the readers begin to interact I have done my job!! Thanks so much!
Hi Mary,
What a fun post. The Tilda chicken quilt is great! We have been having torrential amounts of rain for several weeks. For the first time ever the pump that keeps our cellar dry when the water table is high has been pumping throughout the spring including the whole of May. We usually only need it a couple of times in november and maybe december. I have lost a lot of perennial plants in the garden because it has been so wet: their roots have just rotted away in the sodden ground. The plants that are still alive are incredibly lush and green though, just not many flowers! The plants in the raised beds are doing really well, as it has kept their feet out of the water. And our handkerchief tree (Davidia involucrata) flowered spectacularly for the very first time this spring: the whole tree covered in flower bracts that look just like handkerchiefs. So pretty! We had planted the tree as a year old sapling at our previous home, but dug it up as a three year old tree and took it with us when we moved, we could just fit it in our car! Now it is about 15 years old, huge and has finally reached maturity! So worth it!
Fiona – I think you should take a picture of the handkerchief tree – I don’t know what it is and maybe others don’t either. Some parts of the US including southern Iowa have been flooded with too much rain – here at the farm it’s been fine and I’ve never had such thick beautiful green grass. Last year I was afraid it was literally dying. I can’t believe you dug your tree up and took it with you! That’s devotion!!
Great quilts, plants and birds. My granddaughter would love the pink and purple quilt-her favorite colors.
The picture of Angel Reece says it all. Think we called that a “ho” when I was in high school.
Cleaning the garage today. It’s a hot muggy day. And about ready to rain with chance of severe thunderstorms. Hauling some things to the storage shed, some are piling up for a garage sale and some are heading to the dump. Looks like a two day job as I’m pulling shelves away from the walls and vacuuming too. 😝
I’m the one who made the Tilda girls with hens quilt. It is a free pattern from Tilda’s World- Tilda Henhouse quilt. It had a lot of pieces but not difficult. The pattern has quite a few pages but, most are not necessary to print. The quilt pictured is 30 x 33” so, the blocks are quite large. Fun to make too. I saw a version on Pinterest that showed an additional row of 3 hens across the bottom. It was very cute. Thanks for all the nice comments.
Thank you! I’m glad to hear it’s not too difficult. The quilt I’m preparing to make is the Daydreamer quilt. I was able to get a fat quarter pack and now need to start cutting. Each block has 130 different pieces. It will not be a “weekend quilt” which is good!!
The girls and chicks is so cute. Enjoyed all the quilts and plants. We have had so much rain that everything is big!
It is a weather alert day with a storm coming our way with wind and hail. Ugh! Did errands and groceries this morning just because it wasn’t raining. Hope to work on a quilt this evening if it doesn’t storm.
The flies are thick here. You are lucky to have a nice screened porch.
Stay safe everyone—hope the storm falls apart.
Hot and humid here also. Mary I love the quilt with the chicks and girls. Stay cool.
Carolyn b Shenandoah Valley VA
I hope the “grandkids” have a great time in Yellowstone. I went for my 60th birthday. Most of the tourists were gone, very little traffic, empty seats at the restaurants. It was cool, in my book just right. We went the last week in September. There were lots of Buffalo. I hope they send you pictures, pictures, pictures.
It is a magical place.
We haven’t had tremendous flies yet, but the millers have arrived.
I need to spray for weeds, but the wind is still blowing and I won’t spray with wind.
Does Hazel know she’s going to the groomer? Please take a picture of her when she gets home before she gets dirty!
The thing about Angel Reese is that she’s a talented athlete and I hate to see her waste time being a bad girl or bully or whatever. I would hope she would choose a different path and have some class!
Thanks for the link, Kim. And, to whoever made the one here, I like your version better than the original pattern. I don’t care much for the henhouse block. Yours is adorable! I downloaded the pattern and guess what?!? There are 18 pages of it. I think I will try the girl and chicken blocks only like you did.
The “Chicken Girl” quilt is adorable. I would never make it but it is darn cute! We’ve had the humidity and a few days of heat here in the Quad Cities and I try to be in before the bugs start biting. So far so good.
Our family also had “that” trip to Yellowstone. One brother was 18 and wanted to stay home with his girlfriend. I was 15 almost 16 and moody because being forced to be with my family 24/7 for a week was unbearable as they only time you got privacy was when you were locked in the bathroom and then someone pounded on the door after 3 minutes. Other brother was 14 and generally a pain in the neck. Sisters were 5 and 4. Not a fun trip. It rained and was cold. “Old Faithful” was even having a bad day. I stayed in the back of the station wagon with luggage piled between me and the rest of the family. We saw lots of bear trucks while we were in the park and tossed the bears crackers as we were leaving the park. We found out that evening 3 people had been killed by bears the night before we were there. While I will never forget that trip, I have no desire to go back.
DebMac – here’s another detail – Dad had a new pickup and he rented an overhead topper for two of us, usually Becky and me, to travel in. I laid in the bunk over the cab and pouted – all the way to Yellowstone and back. I do remember loving Old Faithful Inn.
I love Yellowstone, just went last year. We went on a big trip camping every summer. Originally there were 7 of us in an 8 ft pick up camper. The teenagers were like you- testy.i laid up top ( illegal now) and read the biggest book I could find. I had been to 48 states when I graduated and am a good map reader!
I found this pattern offered for free from Tilda, its the girl and chicken quilt pattern: https://www.cottonpatch.co.uk/pdfs/TildaHometown2.pdf
It is such a cute quilt and the little girl is sweetness overload. All of those gigantic Hosta’s are impressive, never seen one so big. I admire folks who have green thumbs. I struggle to keep a cactus going.
Wow Mary, your parents were a lot more tolerant than my parents would have been, or than we were with our kids for that matter. We had a “no whining” policy at home and when we were traveling, and we travelled a lot since we were a military family. They got one warning only. None of this one, two, three stuff that parents do, which drives me crazy. They are all grown now with families of their own and they still love us and chose to live near us, so it all worked out ok.
Our outside camera picked up a coyote walking through our yard last night. We live in a fifty-five plus community in a suburb of Philadelphia. Neighbors have been seeing it for the past week or so. We regularly have a fox run through who doesn’t cause us any problems but a coyote is a little troubling. Last week a bear was hit by a car not too far away.
Sue – my dad was not tolerant and I was really mad at him. I avoided the whole family and stayed to myself in the pickup topper.
I like that girl and chicken quilt as well. I think I remember seeing another quilt with that pattern on your blog. I too have a giant hosta like that. I believe it’s called sum and substance. It is one of my favourites. I will try to take a picture of mine and send it to you along with another favourite of mine a huge maidens hair fern. The first one I bought is huge now. This is the best time of year in my garden everything is up, fully open and so healthy.
I, too, am curious about the girl and chickens quilt. I recognize it as a Tilda pattern (free on their website. I’m curious how it was to piece as my next quilt is a similar one by them and I’m a bit overwhelmed by the complexity.
Humidity is here in PA, too. I was hoping it would hold off a bit longer so I could get more yard work done. Now it’s early morning planting and weeding- dusk means the biting bugs are out. The quilts are all so pretty . Love the girls and chickens! Well, I guess the consensus is – those trashy girls are “twits”. lol Seriously, I cringed when I heard some of the interviews- it’s sad to hear them talk. I have to wonder did they all play in college- did they get a college education? Caitlin has so much class, I just hope she doesn’t get hurt by those thugs. It’s disturbing to hear some use race as an excuse. Caitlin Clark works hard and has proven her skills by her noted accomplishments. Her skin color has nothing to do with that. We need to stop that insanity; they need to all work & play together to better the sport. That feathered nest looks like Tree Swallows. We have a TS nest in one box. The other blue eggs look like Bluebirds. We have 5 Eastern Bluebird eggs in another nest box. Robins also lay blue eggs, but they don’t nest in boxes/cavities. Can’t wait to see Hazel after she’s groomed…and before she digs! xxoo
Ann – you’re right – the feathered nest is tree swallows and the eggs are bluebird eggs – how’d you get so well informed?
I can’t stand the way those girls talk! Have they never been taught grammar? If they even went to college, they surely couldn’t have graduated, could they? I’ve read that Angel’s GPA was 1.8. Caitlin graduated with a 3.64 GPA. Caitlin is humble and Angel is a braggart. This is not a skin color issue.
Mary, you asked how did I know Tree Swallows and Bluebirds? I actually have both species nesting on our property. I never imagined I’d grow up to be Miss Hathaway from the Beverly Hillbillies. (Remember her~ in khaki and binoculars ) I’m a birdwatching nerd.
Ann – yes, I do remember her! These pictures came from another reader and I’ve got to put you in touch with each other.
Ann – the reader who keeps records on birds and nests is Cynthia whose husband Larry recently was burned quite badly – you two have much in common!
Ann, it’s been a VERY LONG time since I thought of Miss Hathaway. Thanks for the laugh!!
Yes, indeed, the tiny chicks are tree swallows! The blue eggs are Bluebirds. They need a nest cavity and the Gilbertson Bluebird nestbox is perfect for them. I check them weekly as a part of the Minnesota Master Naturalist volunteer program and the BBRP BlueBird Recovery Project.. The monitoring is the responsibility I take on when putting up the nestboxes as a member of BBRP, and I use the hours for being an active Master Naturalist, and I walk about 3 miles checking houses, so good in many ways. Four years ago when I did this for the first time, no birds nested, there had been many migrating birds that died because of extremely cold weather that year. Plus I send photos to iNaturalist and record birds singing and the Merlin Bird ID can record their sounds and identify them, so it is a great learning experience. Robins do have blue eggs, they are larger and the nest is different, mud and grass.
Cindy – I hope Ann sees this – I think it’s so interesting. We’ve had the best selection of birds this year! And they’re still here in June – I so hope they stay most of the summer – I really feed a lots of sunflower seeds!
Yesterday when I gathered eggs, I found a tiny round blue egg that looks just like the ones in the bucket. Birds get in our henhouse all the time and help themselves to the chicken’s food. I think they roost in there at night, too. Could one of them have laid an egg in a nestbox?? Nature can be startling at times.
Yes, the girls and the chickens….adorable!
Hope Hazel has a great bath.
Good morning, Mary, I emailed a picture of our hostas in our back yard. There are a few others that are that big. By the big pine trees they aren’t that big . We have had a lot of rain and not real hot weather. I
walked with Randy this am early on the golf course. I am his “caddy” as he only carries 4 clubs. Don’t like bugs or the humidity either. Have not heard the cicadas here. Mary, you have such a beautiful acreage.
Enjoy all the pictures that are posted. Thank you for taking the time for everything. Thank you for letting us know when the next game is.
Please, no more angel reese. She’s a bag and we don’t want to waste valuable space on her. The women are a bunch of ——, but that sells tickets. Keeps them on tv, in the spotlight. Caitlyn has just emboldened them. However, I hope she doesn’t get seriously hurt. Off to go tie quilts for the women’s shelter. We were donated some tops, so we’re making them for outreach.
You have to have a lot of confidence in yourself to play in the Women’s pro basketball league. Baptism by fire for Caitlin Clark.
I love hostas. By they really can’t take the sun. I have two that look pretty good for this time of year. Spring is always best. I took a large one out that would always get burnt in the late afternoon sun.
Lucky Hazel to go to the groomer i had my granddaughter give Buster a bath out back on one of our warmer days. Keep sending messages to the groomer that wouldn’t get answered. Didn’t know what to think.
Hope those flies don’t last for you. At least you have refuge in the porch.
I was about 14 when Dad took four of the kids out west to the National parks camping. My older sister did all the cleaning after all the meals. I think I was a brat. She had made a deal with my younger sister and I that she’s wash dishes in the summer if she could have the school year off. I don’t think she was anticipating camping for six weeks without the dishwasher!!! Those were the days. I wish I had been more helpful to her. She was the best big sister.
I think angel has very low self esteem. Sounds strange but generally people who love to call attn to themselves it makes them feel important in their own eyes. Yes a pathetic twit that girl.
OH MY the girl with the chicken is way too cute ! Is it a pattern, please ????
The girl with the chicken is a free pattern from Tilda’s World.
Google “Tilda’s World” and look under free patterns in “Collections” in Free Patterns.
The pattern is called “Tilda Hometown Henhouse Quilt”
Thank you Glenda for the pattern information. I think it is so cute!
Just an fyi there are many pieces to create one girl. I’ve cut my fabric or at least bagged each girl with the correct fabrics. I’ve not gone d as my further but it’s such a sweet quilt and hope to get started soon, however my B 570 is giving me issues. Thank goodness I have two other machines to sew with 😉
I love love love the little girl with the chickens quilt! Whatever is the pattern please.
Donna from WI- love your quilt, is there a pattern name? Looks like a Villa Rosa pattern?
2. Why the tree air freshener in the bird nest?
3. Angel Reece – yep, we watch bball to see her, NOT. What a selfcentered twit.
I love summer, but hate bugs and humidity too. Are the cicadas out at your house yet? We haven’t heard them here.
Yes. Why is there a tree air freshener in the bird nest?
We put the sir fresheners inside to ward off black gnats. Just a slight vanilla fragrance seems to be working..