Bits and pieces

All of us have talents and skills. I like to write, and I think I'm pretty good at it. I take pictures, too.

My wife likes to make quilts, and that is one of her gifts. In recent years, especially since the kids left, she has been working more and more on quilting. We have gone to many quilt shows together.

Last September, she did something really different: She took part in a quilting retreat at a church camp on one of the lakes outside town. She took her machine and fabrics and some other tools along. Since this was her first quilting retreat, she didn't know what to expect, and she was a little overwhelmed. It was more intense and demanding than anything she had been at before. Maybe she felt a little out of her league. Or maybe she wasn't ready for the pace of the work.

Fast forward about 12 months. It's September again, and time for the annual quilt retreat. But this year, she was ready to go. About a week before the camp, we went to a fabric shop and bought a variety of light and dark fabrics for a project they would be working on. Here is what about $60 worth of light and dark fabrics looks like ...



More importantly, I think she was much more mentally ready for the demands of the retreat and the kind of intense work they would be doing. She had been thinking about it for a long time and had everything lined up. On Thursday morning, I drove her to the lake and said good-bye for a few days. (She had her Tracfone with her, but there was no signal out at the lake, so she called me from an office phone each day.)

It was already cool that Thursday, and it got downright cold that night--temperatures fell into the 20s, and we had a good frost, even in town. On top of that, the cabins where the women stayed weren't heated--someone didn't arrange to have the furnace switched on. It was already 62F (17C) inside the cabin when she went to bed that first night. But she had my sleeping bag and a blanket and a warm sweater, and she did all right. Someone drove out to the camp the next day and turned on the heat.

It was a lot of work on preparing and assembling the quilt top, mastering the putzy, time-consuming parts of the job and getting things done right the first time. The group worked on their projects through most of the camp. A lot of work. At some point, my wife decided she had done enough--she was satisfied with what she had done and would complete the project later, at home. The hard part, creating the quilt top, was done. On Sunday morning, she called me and said it was time to pick her up.

So how did the project go? Very well, and she was happy with what she had done. She showed them to her church quilting group a few days later. Here is one of the tops--Max is making sure she displays it right ...



Here is a close-up of the work, where you can see the little pieces better ...



And here is the other quilt top. Again, Max is helping out ...



To tell the truth, Max wasn't there only to help hold up the quilt. He wanted to get petted. My wife and Max have it all worked out. When she sits next to Max to pet him and rub his head, he is against her right thigh. Max likes to get his head rubbed, from both of us. Doesn't this look like a happy kitty? ...



When she sits with Charlie, on the other hand, Charlie sits on her left side. At times, she has both Max and Charlie sitting next to her on the couch, Max on her right and Charlie on her left.

But Charlie's favorite place to sit, of course, is a heated seat. It's upstairs, in front of the computer desk, where I am working on something or another. Look up, Charlie ...



Ah, for the life of a cat!

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Even if I don't have to drive to Detroit for the Michigan high school football finals this fall, we will be going down there for Thanksgiving weekend, anyway.

That's because my older son and his fiancee called recently and invited us to come on down, partly so we can meet her parents. They are busily making plans for the wedding, which is next April.

I may have to be down there anyway for the high school finals--that game would be on Friday morning, while I'm still digesting the turkey. Our local team has reached the state finals in six of the last seven years, so they certainly know their way to Ford Field.

But the whole visit would be so much more enjoyable if I didn't have to deal with that. I've explained why in the past: If I'm down there to cover a state championship game, I'm following others' schedules, adapting to a different time zone (Detroit, like most of Michigan, is one time zone ahead of us), adapting to a different city and way of life -- and right after the game I have to quickly drive home (500+ miles) so I can work on my coverage. Let some other school and reporter have the honor!

But I need to be realistic about these things. Fate says it's totally out of my control, and I can't influence things by worrying about them. So I'll try to put that out of my mind.

****

Did I ever tell you about my new camera? I bought a little red (yes, red!) Nikon camera that can shoot stills and video, and I have been amusing myself with shooting videos over the last month or two ...



What am I going to do with the video? I am testing out video editing software. Maybe I will get into that.

Remember: I am at the very start of the learning curve--I've got a lot to learn, and I don't have any prior experience with video. But I'm a fast learner, so we'll see. First, I have to learn the software. Then I have to learn what I can do with it and how to make a good (or at least halfway decent) video.

So here I am, at the very start of Video Editing 101. Like anything else, it's a matter of trial and error, experience and experiments. Sometimes your experiment works perfectly. And sometimes the science lab explodes.

When I get a little more advanced in this endeavor, I will upload clips to YouTube and places like that, with links for your amusement. Then you can decide for yourself: beauty or bomb.

Sports of all sorts

This is always one of the busiest parts of the year for me. All because of sports.

First, the Packers and Lions are playing football, and both are doing very well this year (4-0 at the moment). Then, the Brewers and the Tigers are both in the baseball playoffs. Both teams are 2-1 right now and can end their series later tonight. (But the Brewers' game doesn't start until 8:30. :Sigh!: A late night. Maybe I'll try to grab a nap before I have to head out to cover girls volleyball.)

Then, the new NHL season starts on Thursday night. Back to Hockey Night in Canada and the NHL games on Versus. But hockey will only get limited attention until the World Series is over.

More sports is part of my job, covering the local sports scene. Work was very busy last week--I had the U.P. tennis finals, the cross-county volleyball match and the latest wins for both our football teams.

This week, not so much. I've just got volleyball tonight and then football on Friday night. Both are right here in town, so I get to save a little gas.

The big local news is that we finally have a sunny week. The last few weeks have been cool and rainy and windy, but this week it's just the opposite: Highs today are in the low 70s, and I probably could get sunburned in the middle of the day. This weather is about 10-15 degrees warmer than normal.

Our fall color is near its peak right about now. I ought to go out and get some pretty, new pictures before the warm spell ends and cool, gloomy weather arrives for a long, long, long stay.

:Sigh!: I'm not fond of winter.

Out, damned lump!

(Before you read too far: This has a happy ending!)

I have known this about K from the very beginning. I mean, how could I not know about it? It was plain as the nose on your face.

Or rather, the lump on the side of her neck. It was rather obvious.

Here's part of a picture I took the very first time we met, at a fast food place near her home--we had lunch and talked for about an hour. It was in late March. The lump was obvious ...



Since then, we have gotten together from time to time and have had some good times. Indoor swimming pools when it was cool outside. Local lakes during summer. Hikes. Drives. We like to be outdoors.

K works at the customer service desk at a ***mart store. (You would recognize the name in an instant.) During mid summer, she was having work-related problems. She had to work many extra hours because it was the middle of tourist season, and sometimes the management at ***mart only had one person manning the CS desk. Her. She would get tense. And then she made some mistakes; her boss talked to her. "What if they fire me?" she asked me more than once. "I need this job!"

***mart is not shy about firing people, especially this store.

As the work-related stress increased, her neck started bothering her, and she had problems swallowing when she ate or drank. Panic attacks, too. She became more aware of the lump on her neck, which was getting larger. Something else to worry about. It wasn't an easy summer for her.

In late July, during one of my visits, she asked me to drive her to the hospital because she had scheduled an ultrasound test and a visit with her throat specialist. I drove her there, left for a while and picked her up again. The news: The doctor agreed that her lump was getting larger and she should have a needle biopsy of her thyroid. She was worried about that. Would the biopsy, which checks just the area near the needle, miss any cancerous tissue elsewhere in the thyroid? Because, of course, that's what she was worried about.

The doctor agreed, and they agreed to remove the entire lump. Once the date was set, all she could do was wait and arrange for the time away from ***mart. That wasn't so easy--their computerized scheduling system originally assigned her to work on the very day of the surgery, even though she had applied for the time off over a month before. They finally fixed it. (She has insurance through ***-mart, which seems to cover most of the cost.)

We went on our hikes and had our talks during August and early September. The operation was one of the topics, but just one. We talked about other stuff, too--work, family, things we want to do, things we have already done. It obviously didn't get in the way of having a good time on a summer day.

The big day was two weeks ago, on the 19th. My wife and I drove down there that night, had supper with her guy and then we all went to the hospital. She went home the next day, about noon. The tube in her neck was removed the day after that. We visited them again on Thursday--watched a movie and played Uno. We didn't talk about the lump, but we sensed some tension: The lab's report wasn't due until next week.

The final word came last Tuesday during a visit with the doctor. Benign.

She had some neck pain after the operation, but it has been easing. She stopped taking the codeine pills a few days after the surgery. No doubt her neck felt even better after seeing the doctor last week. It's still rather sore, she told me over the weekend.

This Tuesday, she goes back to work at ***mart. But she has made a change there, too--she is not going back to customer service. Instead, she will once again be a cashier. It pays a little less, but it spares her from a lot of stress, and it seems like a wise decision. Let someone else deal with that.

When I see her again (maybe next week), the lump will be gone. Maybe life will start being a bit happier for her again, too. I hope so.