New Skills

Norris had surgery on his right hand today to correct a trigger finger that has been bothering him for years.

Norris is busily trying to solve the daily Sudoku, using only his normally less adept left hand to write his notations in the edges of the tiny squares. So far so good -- but the local anesthesia still has his right hand pretty numb. That means he's feeling pretty lively, not yet on the strong pain medication prescribed.

He'll be wearing that thick bandage on his right arm until a week from today.

Thanksgiving in Chattanooga

For Thanksgiving this year, Norris and Cheryl traveled to N. Georgia to spend the holiday with Norris' mother. Instead of cooking at home, the three of us had our Thanksgiving feast at the Chattanooga Choo Choo, a hotel and restaurant located in the former Chattanooga train station. Here Norris and his mother pose in front of the namesake Choo Choo.

It was a balmy 75 degrees that day as we walked thru the gardens surrounding the old station. Here Norris' mother is seen next to some of the many roses that were in bloom around the station

Although it was Thanksgiving Day, the decor in the train station had already shifted to a Christmas focus.

name that quilt....

Cheryl has almost finished this quilt -

The quilting motif in the setting squares and triangles is one Cheryl came up with -- adopted from a jewelry ad.

Wool batting makes the design pouf nicely.



We don't really know why quilts need names, but we do know why they need labels. We've just ordered the hanging device for it, so Cheryl has a few days to make and attach a label. But the label should include the quilt's name. Any suggestions? There are some fancifully colored birds in the fabric of six of the twelve pieced blocks, a subdued floral in the other six.

Veteran's Day

Fall ends abruptly - not so fast!

We had a hard freeze this weekend, and watched blustery winds blowing leaves about while the snow fell (but didn't stick). We figured that was the end of our fall color show, but we were not really taking into account a few holdouts -

Most of the maples are bare but there are some tall ones in the neighborhood - and this skinny one in our "wildflower meadow"- that are still brilliant red.


Our early blooming rhododendron came out with a few blossoms recently and they are hanging on. You have to look hard to find them.


All the annuals were hit hard by the freeze, but we still have the Autumn Ferns, and these Dusty Millers on the front walk that survived last winter and thrived.


But the most special plants currently are our American Beeches - here is one showing mostly brown but still some yellow.

And a little lower in the yard, this one still has bits of beautiful green mixed with the brown and yellow.

And just a few more feet away, across the road, is one that is still entirely rich green, tipped with a bit of yellow on the upper branches. This is truly a "four season" tree - it holds onto its brown leaves through the winter, though they will turn paler and end up a light tan shade. Come February, when the sun shines on it, those leaves will glow like flowers.



And then there's our Tiger Cat, who likes to remind us of his good looks.

Placemat anyone?

Sorry we haven't been posting much - Cheryl has been down with a cold. We had our (unseasonal) first snowfalls this week, but none of it stayed around for photography.

But Cheryl has just completed final touches on a project she made in a class on collage and monoprinting about 6 weeks ago. The instructor was Bernie Rowell, the artist who did the Bluebird collage quilt we have a print of (see a photo of her quilt here). We used Sherwin Williams interior latex paints to apply paints to commercially printed fabric, then cut that up to make a small "art piece".


The instructor provided all the raw materials - not too much and not a wide variety of fabric and paint - so students could concentrate on the techniques. Class members had to use their imaginations to come up with shapes to work with. Cheryl's quilt is pretty tame, with none of the metallics that Bernie uses in her quilts to add life. (They were available but students were all running out of steam by the time they came out.) The two white and two orange fabrics that make the background were left in their original state, but all the other fabrics have paint. Even the binding (the striped outer edge) is made entirely of little squares cut from the few remnants of the painted fabrics. The piece was already bound when it came home, so it took a little ingenuity to figure out how to get it onto the quilting machine so that Cheryl could finally do what she's comfortable with - a lot of additional quilting! It always looks funny to put such a tiny quilt on the 12 foot table of the longarm.

The piece was made as a learning experience and has no other purpose. It's exactly the size of a placemat. Bernie mounts her pieces and has them framed. This one is more likely going to serve as a cat-mat.

Training Fire

Today the RCFD burned down a hundred year old farmhouse that is on land that will be turned into a housing development. The house was used as a training burn, which means that fires are lit in the house, then extinguished and re-lit. Each time the fire is re-lit, a team goes into the house, finds the fire, and puts it out with a minimum amount of water so it can be lit again. The object is to get as many fires lit and extinguished as possible before the structure becomes unsafe. In this picture, the first fire has just been lit off and is already spreading into the attic where it wasn't supposed to go.

2 minutes later, heavy smoke was pushing out the whole length of the attic and it seemed like we might lose the house on the first fire. The 100-year old wood was very dry and really wanted to burn. Fortunately, the first fire was brought under control and the firefighters were able to re-light it 33 times after that.
This picture was taken from a different side, where the fire fighters would make their entrance into the house. Most of the cloud coming out of the house at this point is not smoke, but is steam from the water that had been put on the fire
In this picture, a team is entered the house to find their way up the stairs in the dark to get water on the fire burning on the second floor.
After 34 fires (and 3 hours later), it was determined that the structure was no longer safe so the house was set ablaze for the final time.
The water being put on the fire at this point is just to try to control the amount of flaming embers that were being carried around the neighborhood. The spray coming from the top of the fire truck on the right is just being used to cool the firetruck itself, which was being exposed to a lot of radiant heat.
By lunchtime, there wasn't much left.