oh my!

This morning we got up earlier than normal, and I pulled the curtains back so Bobby could see the fog, and was greeted with this guy:

He appears much larger/fatter than he was last month, and I'm wondering if his swollen chest might have something do with our missing chickens. Usually hawks only eat the pullet sized (teenagers) chicks or younger, but we had three grown chickens go missing last week. He can eat all the squirrels he wants (and there's still plenty hanging around), but leave my birds alone!

 Though I suppose it's possible there are more than one, and this is just the grandpa/grandma of the flock.

And the view above is not zoomed in on the bird, but from the kitchen window. And for those of you wondering, no neither the dogs nor the chickens were in the dog pen.

a new place in town

Garner has a "new" restaurant. I don't know how long it's been there, but we discovered it today, and tried it out tonight. I was reminded of two things:

1. Jimmy & Janie Aldridge teaching our Jr Church at the Cordova Free Will Baptist Church. One of the things we learned was the "missions" chorus to the hymn Where He Leads Me I Will Follow. 

Where he leads me I will follow. What he feeds me I will swallow. Though I may be sick tomorrow, if I can get this down today. 

and 2.  eating at banquets in China. Except there I HAD to eat everything served, or at least half of it, because my hosts were sitting across from me.

We've tried Peruvian chicken before at a place in Raleigh and LOVED it. This place is also Peruvian and sells Rotisserie chicken, with other things. It's called Chio's Rotisserie Chicken.  The chicken here was good (not as good as Alpaca Peruvian Chicken, but okay), and their stir fry and noodles was good. We also tried swiss chard pie (like a quiche) which I had a hard time eating. And the tamale...first two bites were good, but the remaining bites were a struggle. It had a date in it. I don't think I've ever eaten a date before, and I'm not sure I'd try one again. If we ever go back I'll try the chicken sandwich and yucca fries. They had empanadas, which I like, but theirs had raisins in them so we didn't try them. Our taste buds are a little set in their ways, so this was a bit of a stretch for us. But I'm glad we went, even if we were the only ones voluntarily speaking English.

hot pot

There's a new restaurant in Cary, http://www.goodharvestny.com called Good Harvest. It was featured in the paper today. I just watched the video on the website and looked through their menu. It reminded me so much of China! Except the hot pot restaurant we went to there had a large buffet where you went through and picked the food items to take back to your table instead of a paper checklist, and the pots on the tables were connected to gas tanks instead of electric plates. But other than that, it's very similar.  I'm not sure if I'm brave enough to take Bobby or not.

The raw egg...one of the things they had on the table in China was eggs. I forgot that the Chinese "drop" eggs into their soup for flavor and protein, and I put the entire egg in the broth so I could have a boiled egg. We had two directors in the "foreign affairs" department (the area that was in charge of/responsible for us). One of them thought the boiled egg was hysterically funny; the other asked which broth I dropped it into and then refused to eat out of that side of the pot. I guess even though the eggs were clean and washed he didn't consider that very sanitary. I was also reprimanded by the security guard for putting raw meat and raw vegetables on the same plate at the buffet line. I wasn't sure what the big deal was since they were both going into the same pot to cook, but I made sure not to do it again.

deleted and posted

I've been more than a little frustrated with the Quilting page of my blog. You can't put separate entries; it's all one big long page. So if I want to look for something specific, that's not possible without scrolling through a long list. So last night during the Presidential debate I started copying and pasting photos from the Quilt page onto a new blog. Since that page was more for me to keep a record of what I've been working on in some semblance of order, this move made the most sense. So my quilting page on this blog is now deleted, and Random Musings will once again be just that - my musings.  If you want to see my quilt projects, they are now located at http://thehardheadedquilter.blogspot.com

Now back to boring housework!!

ongoing and upcoming

Hudson's Hardware released their chick list for the spring!!!! Every year we try to add at least two new birds to our flock since we often lose birds to predators. This year, since so many of our birds have been hatched from birds we've already had, I'd like to add some "non-family" blood to the flock.

But that also means we need to do some repair work on both hen houses we have. The small hen house needs some basic maintenance, like re-attaching the side coverings and the door frame, as well as either repairing or replacing the pen that connects to it. The large hen house needs a little more drastic work. I'm dreaming big here, but I'd like to gut it down to the frame and redesign it. Since we have more than one rooster and the wiring on the pen is getting holes in it (as well as the netting on top, I think now is the perfect time for a new design.  I think with the 8' board, we could easily go to two smaller houses (think duplex) on the same frame with two separate openings into the same pen. That way the roosters would each have their own house (well, two of them would) and hopefully it would decrease some of the pecking between the older hens and the new ones. If we start getting birds the last week of February, then what would give us from now to the middle of March to get both houses done. (We normally start moving birds out of the brooder box into the small house at week 3.)

Upcoming project #2 is the area on the east side of our yard where they re-did part of the road in the paving process. Between the new drainage system and the debris that has been piled in various corners of the woods, rainwater now drains into our yard instead of the the creekbed towards the pond. I'd like to clean out the debris in that area, and create a new creekbed for part of the way until it reconnects with the old one. I think that will save part of our yard. It will still continue to make a culvert in that one section, but there's not much I can do about that part.

And I've almost got my sewing room semi-organized and have an idea of what projects need to be tackled next. It's still overwhelming and a bit formidable, but I'm feeling a tad more confident that I will actually be making progress on things this year. So hopefully, within the next two weeks I'll have something to post in the quilt department. (But I'm making no promises!)

classes

Each year I try to take at least one quilting class. Some years, like this year, I take more than one (depending on cost and time frames of the classes). It seems all the classes are crammed into the first four months of the year this year, and that's okay.

Friday's class was an introduction to machine quilting with a walking foot. For non-sewers, machines have "feet" that are interchangeable depending on the type of fabric and sewing you are doing. Personally, I think they should be called shoes, but they're not. Anyway, I signed up for this class because I know the instructor is an incredible quilter, AND every time I've shown one of my quilts at the store that was quilted with a walking foot she's made a slight face. I figured there must be several things missing in what I've learned so decided to take a class with her. It was well worth it!!

I'll have to post pictures later this afternoon, but the biggest thing was how to knot your thread at the end of the seam without leaving a "nest" (where you see the thread or a bunch of thread on one side of the quilt). I knew how to prevent it at the beginning of a quilt seam, but no one has ever showed a class how to prevent it at the end of a seam before. I was so excited!! Sue also helped me with some tension issues, and answered the questions I had about the differences in needle plates on the machine. My manual says to the use the single hole needle plate when quilting, but when I took a class at the Janome store (where I bought the machine), the quilting instructor said not to do it. The single hole needle plate should be used if doing straight seams with a walking foot, as it prevents the fine points (like where all the points of a star meet) from being pulled downward into the bobbin area. For using wide seams or doing free motion, then the wide space/zigzag plate is okay to use.

While giving us a demo on basting spray (over half our class has never used it and we had questions!), I also learned a new trick to help when pin basting my quilt (mark all center points on each layer's edge and match before pinning), as well as some practical advice on how to stabilize the quilt before doing the detail work that I love to see in quilts.

I was expecting this class to mostly be review since I've had two classes on machine quilting, but this was the most informative and helpful class I've taken on the beginning basics of machine quilting. I don't know if I'll be able to take the second class of the quilt or not, but I certainly plan to work it into my schedule at some point!

registries

I think gift registries can be very good things. It gives you a glimpse into someone's taste and style, allows you to see what a person truly needs/wants, and sometimes can give you a boost into an idea that would be really neat for a gift for a person, even if it's not on their list.  But this week I was more than a little frustrated with one.

Sometimes when a person in our church is having a shower and they've registered for something they need that is more than the average person would spend, I've coordinated a group gift. This week was one of those times. I had checked online, collected the money, but when I went to purchase the gifts at the store, there was not one single thing from the registry at that store. So on Thursday I drove to a nearby town and checked that store. Same thing. I asked a sales clerk about it. This store does not get to order or carry the same brands in every store. They never know what is coming on the truck. The may only get one of an item, and when that sells, that is it. And there's nothing wrong with that, except if you create a registry based on what is in a store, then you'd expect that chain to carry it in most of their stores. I came home a little frustrated and uncertain what to do when I found out that the shower is being postponed because the Mom went into labor three weeks early and delivered a healthy baby boy. So I've ordered all but one of the items online that we had planned to purchase (the high chair is no longer available and can be purchased in a store only). So far only one of the items has shipped. As more and more young  people are creating online registries, it's making it harder and harder to do this as a group.

Meanwhile I'm hoping the "in progress" note on the order means that it will be shipped very soon and will actually arrive before the new shower date.