Triplets!

I have to share this precious photo that my daughter, Michal Ann, sent me this morning. These are the new babies of her friends in the Denver area. They were able to go home from the hospital this week. We are all so thankful that the babies, Mom, and Dad are all doing fine.

Congratulations Paul and Kristi!

Fabric and Color and Pattern, Oh Yes!

Here are the rugs, towels, washcloths, and fabrics that I've put together for our vintage camper.


I still need to find turquoise kitchen towels, and pot holders; turquoise is evidently not "in" for kitchens currently, at least, not at the local WalMart. I need to visit the Pueblo Target to see what colors they have.


The turquoise and brown fabrics were from the July fat quarters bundle, and the minute I saw them I knew they were just what the camper needed. However, Denise of the Canon City Creative Cloth Closet has been sending out lots of e-mails about new fabrics coming in, so I had to stop by and look and them, and Voila!, a turquoise fabric with colorful southwestern style lizards all over it, which adds the needed Pop to the scheme. Before I received the vintage style fabrics, I had considered doing a Southwestern theme, so now I have melded the retro and the Southwestern.


That all over diaper pattern fabric is what most of the curtains will be made from; and I'm just certain that at some time my Granny had curtains, made from a similar pattern, in her kitchen. Every time I look at it I get deja vu shivers.


The mattress on the permanent bed, in the camper, is also vintage, in that it is a three quarter size, rather than twin or double. Have you tried to find sheets for a three quarter mattress lately. The few places I've found online want a fistful of dollars for their scarce bedding. Since we will be using our sleeping bags, instead of regular bedding, I am going to find a heavy duty tan fabric and make my own fitted mattress cover (slip cover) for the mattress, and have pillow cases made from the various turquoise fabrics to brighten it up. I get the main bed and Joe uses the bed that is made by dropping the table top down into the bench seats. We are too old and large to share that very narrow three quarter bed.


I suppose that when we take our vintage camper for it's maiden camping trip, with us anyway, over the Labor Day weekend, we should take along some bottles of champaign to christen it with; my idea of the best way to christen it, is to drink the champaign. Too bad our local Abbey Winery does not make a champaign.


While looking at the new bolts of fabric at Denise's, I found these on a table in the back classroom space; they hadn't made it to the shelves up front yet. They stopped me dead in my tracks. I have a major thing for Art Deco design, and these are a very modern take on Art Deco in scrumptious rich colors. The purple on the left side is not nearly that dark in person. I don't know what I'm going to do with these, but I've been thinking that I need to find a quilting pattern that looks kind of Art Deco. Maybe something with the Drunkard's Path circles and squares would work.

Here are the fat eighths of Moda's Prairie Paisley, that I mentioned in the previous post, for a quilt for my bed.


You really need to click on these photos to enlarge them to see the colors and patterns better.
















It was sunny and hot (94 degrees) again today; our monsoon rains seem to be over for the year, and when I went out to set the sprinklers on the grass in front of the house, I saw several butterflies gathering nectar from the Butterfly Bushes, in the western shrub border that I planted to screen our place from the neighbors. I really wanted to get a photo of one of them with their wings open to show the brilliant orange color, but they only opened them when they were flying, and I couldn't photograph them when they were moving so fast. I've also got a couple of Rose of Sharon bushes and some old fashioned Sweet Rocket blooming now, and there are always butterflies and hummingbirds enjoying them. There are also a couple of old fashioned rose bushes in this border, but they bloom earlier in the summer. The old roses only bloom for a while in the late Spring or early Summer, unlike the modern roses, that bloom all summer long. I would like to get some climbing roses along the front fence that will bloom all summer. I also crave at least one of the fantastic, eye catching big, bright, hardy Hibiscus that I see blooming
now in some yards in Canon City. It is amazing to me that these tropical looking flowers can survive our winters, but the hardy ones can.


If I had the space and money, I suppose I'd have a botanical garden of my own with an integrated arboretum. Every plant I see, I want. I'll have one of those, and one of those....well maybe one in each color...

Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head

Miraculous! We have had rain and cool temps for three, count them, three days in a row. It has drizzled, thundered, lightninged, and/or downpoured on top of the monsoon rains that we received last week. After the hot, miserably dry spring and summer we've had, this is fantastic! No more dust, shriveled and burned vegetation, not to mention dehydrated skin and hair. The world looks washed, and sparkley. No more red flag fire warning days with smoke hazing the sky. And even though the prairie never greened up in the spring, we now see a shade of green spreading over the hills and gullies; and when the 90 degree temps return later in the week, I am sure the green prairie grass will leap out of the moist earth.


The prairie grasses and flowers have adapted to our hot, dry climate by going into "hibernation"
(actually, animals hibernate and plants do something else, but I can't come up with the proper word at this particular time) during our periodic droughts, ready to spring back into life when the moisture finally returns. The average moisture received here is 12 inches a year, so you can imagine how dry it gets during a drought year. Prairie species have to be tough!


My garden is refreshed and so am I. I even went out during one of the brief dry spells in the early afternoon, fed the birds, and pulled some gigantic weeds that were trying to take over the herb garden, until Joe shooed me back indoors before I could wear myself out. Noone can pull just one! Those deep roots pull out of the moist soil so easily and satisfactorilly (I'm not sure that's really a word, but I tend to like speaking colloquially, even if I have to invent the colloquialisms.)

We are enjoying the vegetables from our garden, they taste good as well as looking good. I chopped up zuchinni, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, garlic from the garden with purchased onion, and made my version of Ratatouille; grated cucumbers into herb flavored yoghurt; and sprinkled celery salt onto juicy sliced tomatoes for meals this weak. Home grown tomatoes actually taste like tomatoes and, as Joe puts it, they don't crunch when you bite them, like what they sell as tomatoes at the grocery stores.



I actually started sewing the new retro curtains for our vintage camper/trailer this evening and found some light and dark turquoise towel sets, while shopping this afternoon, that go with the curtain fabric perfectly. When I sat down at the sewing machine, I was even able to remember how to use the poor neglected thing.


I'm also contemplating making a quilt for my bed using the bundle of Moda's Prairie Paisley fabrics that I purchased from Grandma's Attic Quilting. Since I love both paisley (Persian Pickles) and the prairie, I was intrigued from the time I read that they were coming out with the Prairie Paisley patterns and was overjoyed, when I saw the photos of the fabrics, to find that they were in the shades of blue that I adore. I am very fond of the blue English country floral comforter I've had for ages, but it is beginning to show signs of use by me and my cats. I'm afraid that one more trip to the laundry will shred it.

You Can't Keep A Good Granny Down

Our month long heat wave finally gave way to 3 days of cooler, wet, Monsoon here in Florence. It helps me and my dry, suffering garden feel better. I managed to walk around Toad Haven, without falling down,with the help of my gorgeous Aspen walking stick, handmade for me by granddaughter Mandy. I took lots of photos and even got to pick some ripe tomatoes, eggplant, squash, cucumbers and lettuces. The Romaine lettuce was great as the base of a lemon- dill tuna salad.


Thanks to Dave and Carl, the yardmen who I finally gave up and hired to help me when I couldn't get out to the garden this past month, the worst of the weeds and elm seedlings are gone and I can sit and admire and enjoy the garden without feeling overwhelmed by the work that needed to be done.


It's wonderful to be happy and hopeful again instead of so beat down as I have been. Hopefully, this weak, shaky body will be able to come back from the terrible punishment it has had, due to medication side effects, the past 15 months. I have lost 30 pounds and my clothes are beginning to hang on me. Ain't it Wonderful! Now only 65 more pounds to go. It is much easier now, to not want to gobble the junk I had been stuffing down. I think I was craving more energy and, somehow, thought that more food would help. Of course, it didn't.

I even managed to drive to Canon City today to shop at the health food store and City Market for a few things, and drove home the back way and took lots more photos of the refreshed countrside and the fantastic monsoon thunderheads in the sky. By the time I got home and carried the 2 bags of groceries in, I was shaking and had to collapse to recuperate a while, but it was worth it.

Before the "you know what" hit the fan in early July, Joe and I purchased a vintage, small travel trailer from a neighbor. It is so old it actually has real wood paneling, instead of pressed board or
plastic. Outside it is white with a retro turquoise band around it. June's fat quarters packet of the month from Grandma's Attic Quilting consisted of lovely retro looking turquoise, brown and
cream prints that I thought would be perfect as curtains and pillows for a refurbished camper, so I ordered enough to replace the odds and ends that the fisherman who owned it before scrounged up to cover the windows. Now I have to get Joe to tear out the hideous orange shag carpet and put down something more suitable. As soon as I feel up to sewing again, I will turn that little camper into the cutest thing you've ever seen. [The camper was where I was sleeping the night I had the first mini stroke; and I reveled in the luxury of a bed instead of a camp cot in a tent, even though it wasn't very attractive, yet.]

Maybe we will be able to go camping in the mountains with some of our kids over Labor Day weekend. It's wonderful to be human again, even if tottering!

The first landscape is of a great thunderhead building over Pikes Peak with Castle Rock (next to the Arkansas River) in the foreground. This photo was taken from the back road into Florence from Canon City.

The second landscape is of Florence, down in the River valley, behind the Southfield Coal Mine sign. This bluff has been mined out underneath the ground. We no longer have an active coal mine in the area because the cost of underground mining is prohibitive and we don't want open pits. Wyoming can have all the open pit coal mines they want out in all that empty land. For 150 years good quality coal has been mined in this area and we still have retired miners with Black Lung disease.

You really need to click these landscapes, to enlarge them, to really get an idea of what you are looking at.

The not so great side of the August Monsoons is that there is quite a bit of flash flooding and lightning along the whole front range corridor. On Wednesday, lightning hit the 90 year old steeple of the Catholic Cathedral in Pueblo and started a fire. They are now in the process of determining whether it can be repaired or will have to be removed. I'm hoping they can save it as it is a beautiful, historic feature of Pueblo.

The View From 70 Years

I spent my 70th birthday, July 31, in the ER at St. Mary Corwin Hospital in Pueblo and got moved to the telemetry observation ward around 10:30 that evening attached to all kinds of cords, dials, beepers, etc. It was not anything like I had imagined celebrating. Luckily, after a month of ER and hospital stays the doctors and I feel we have figured out what is going on and I am hopefully now on the way to recovery.

Thanks to being one of the rare cases of Lipitor (for high cholesterol) side effects, I had the year from Hell with the symptoms of Congestive Heart Failure with extreme edema, weakness, and water on the lungs making it difficult to breath. After being clued in by a cousin that his similar symtoms were caused by Lipitor the doctor took me off all Statins and I thought that things were looking up; the CFI symptoms were gone but I became progressively weaker, light headed, confused, and falling. My biggest mistake was to keep forcing myself to go on and do what needed to be done even though I was so tired and weak. Then I had the first TIA that I already blogged about.

After more TIA episodes and ER visits in Canon City, I was so weak and ill and unable to eat and my blood chemistry was very messed up so I was sent back to the ER at St. Mary Corwin Hospital in Pueblo because they had my original test results and better access to specialists and they admitted me for overnight observation. The hospital doctors finally discovered that the reason I has having fainting spells and falling was due to extremely low blood pressure. When lying down the BP was high, when sitting it decreased, when standing and or moving it dropped very low, within just minutes. Exactly opposite of what you would expect.

The BP meds had been greatly increased, to help run off the retained water when the Lipitor was causing the edema. Now that I no longer suffered from edema the BP medicine dosage was

way too high. So we stopped the blood thinner and BP meds and will now start over from scratch to get my BP stabilized at a healthy level. Hopefully Mother Nature will do what she's been trying to do all along, get to equilibrium, this time without help or hindrance from meds.

I am home, Kat and Mandy have been with me this past week; I am beginning to regain my appetite, but am still going to eat a healthy diet to lose more of my excess weight and take that strain off my body and systems. My muscles are so weak that I have to begin slowly to regain muscle strenth and be able to once again live a normally active life.

I am very weak but at least not hopeless, which is how I've felt for the past month. Maybe one of these days I will feel good enough to be interested in making quilts again. Normally, I would not bore you all with these medical details, but if someone else out there is having a similar problem, they need to know the effect that Lipitor had on me. I am told that it is extremely rare, but had my cousin not clued me in, and I had kept on taking the Statins, I might not even be here to write this blog.

Thank you to all my quilting buddies who have been encouraging me during this experience, even when I've been unable to read or write blogs.

Even when ill I need to have flower photos, so here are the flowers in front of my doctor's clinic.

Transient Ischemic Attack

Whaaat?!! Dear Friends, today I came home from St. Mary-Corwin Hospital in Pueblo after a 2 day stay for that weird bunch of words in my title. TIA is commonly called a mini stroke.

Derek, Granddaughter, Lindsay, and Great Grandbaby Shawn.

The past 2 weeks, as I have been quite busy taxiing Mom to doctor and dentist appointments and preparing for the annual family get together in Fowler for Missouri Day, I have gotten progressively weaker and tireder and more forgetful than usual. Since their was no food left in Mom's house, where we were all going to be staying, I had to plan, and shop for food and supplies, as well as get some necessary items in our "new" retro camper trailer, so Joe and I would have a place to sleep. I knew something was wrong to make me so weak and tired, but I didn't have time to think about it, and next week I would call the doctor to discuss the problem.



On the way down, Mom and I followed Joe pulling the trailer with his business small truck, which we had not used before. We were concerned that the tires might not hold up. They did. The truck ran over something and had a blowout, and since it came without a spare, we had to find someplace to buy a new tire and have it mounted at 8 o'clock in the evening. We drove to a nearby WalMart which had a tire store and found that they had closed at 8, but we found a worker about to close one of the big pull down doors and when he heard our sad tale, he agreed to sell us a tire and mount it for us. Sometimes you still come upon an angel unawares.



Mom and I got to Fowler at around 11 at night and I was falling down, crying exhausted (well I didn't but I wanted to). We enjoyed the parade the next morning at which my children's father and his sister were parade marshall's, and had a great day walking in the park and visiting with old friends and watching Grandson Evan and Great Grandaughter Kaylee riding ponies.


It was my brother, Steve's, 50th high school reunion and he had been invited to display some of his photographs in the art show. He presented them in the form of giclee prints on canvas and they are even more spectacular than seeing them online.




We went to bed late and when I woke in the middle of the night, for the reason that old women have to get up in the middle of the night, my lower left face felt as if I had been to the dentist and had a shot as well as feeling as if there was a strange thick portion of my inside cheek. I didn't feel bad, just strange, so I went back to bed. When I finally came to the front of the one bathroom line, I looked at my face and saw that my left side of my mouth and my left jowel were drooping. I've worked for so many years with seniors I realized that this was not a good sign. I went to the living room and told Joe that we needed to get me to a hospital right away, even though it was hard to take it seriously since I didn't feel any worse than I had for a while.


The ER took it seriously and I went to the head of the class and after a short time of examination, explanation and a cat scan of my brain (I really have one) I was sent upstairs and hooked up to monitors and switched from Ursula to the hospital oxygen. I will not discuss trying to rest or sleep in a hospital, but they treated me very well. First thing next morning I was wheeled for an ultra sound of my Carotid Arteries and an MRI of my brain. I then received an Echo Cardiogram (remember my piece "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" from last July's
hospitalization? In the meantime I tried to pass out in the bathroom while washing my face and soon had an unbelievable number of people and equipment in my room and was no longer allowed to walk across the few steps to the bathroom without assistance. [I learned that I have to be careful of being active in hot places or outside on hot days, as heat is also a stressor for me, which explains my bad experiences the last 2 Julys. The thermostat in my room was malfunctioning and the heat got up to 80 with it turned completely down.]


By the end of the day the facial numbness and droop went away and I was just so tired and had a miserable headache all night. The Neurologist/Neuro Surgeon was supposed to come review my case and see me at about 8 in the evening to make the final decision of what was wrong and what treatment I needed. I finally gave up and tried to sleep at a little after 10. At a quarter to 11 the lights came on and the poor, extremely busy Neurologist touched my shoulder to wake me and discuss my case.


The good news came this morning that I could go home before noon. I had had a TIA, which unlike an actual stroke, did not leave me with permanent after effects. The best news is that the Carotid Arteries are not blocked and I am not in danger of another TIA or full blown stroke if I am a good girl and take care of myself. I have a new, expensive prescription to keep the platelets from clumping, and I am to eat the same type of diet I've used the last month to lose fat, exercise moderately, and not get overly tired.


"Tenting tonight in the old Metzner National Campground." [The small two bedroom house could not contain all of us, so we camped.]



When we got home I was completely wiped out and I am having the emotional fall out that comes with these types of episodes. I felt that having finally started to improve my health this past month, I didn't deserve this. My daughter, Kat, told me it's like when you start deep cleaning your skin, for a while you break out worse because the toxins and impurities are coming out. She said that having made this healthly change and started on a new path, the toxins are coming out, and I can then be much better. I like to think she is right, and I am already seeing how continuing to drive myself all my life, using food as the carrot in front of the donkey to keep driving myself when I should rest is probably one of the things that has brought this on; especially this past year when I have been so physically stressed by the horrible side effects of Lipitor, not to mention the loss of my father and taking on the responsibility of looking after my Mom. [My typing is worse than usual due to my brain being a bit jumbled by the TIA, I'm constantly having to type backwards and then forwards again.]


My daughter, Michal Ann, is coming down to help me tomorrow, and my foster Granddaughter, Amber is staying with me, to help out, tonight and tomorrow till she goes to work at 6 pm. The family is rallying and we will work out how to handle the things that need to be handled without stressing myself. What was the old song, "I will survive"? I think I may have made it to the Graduate Institute of the School of Hard Knocks.


To make up for all this venting and and warning to others, I am including some photos of the good times at Fowler's Annual Missouri Day 2008.


When I checked my e-mail back log this evening I got a very pleasant surprise from Debra S. in
her blog; she has chosen Toad Haven Annex to receive one of her
Brilliante Weblog Premio 2008 Award awards. I felt so honored to receive this from my online quilt and blog mentor, when I have been feeling that I hadn't been doing a very good job recently. I will be considering this award and will make my choices in the near future, "God willing and the creek don't rise."

God Bless America!

God Bless America With--

Peace for all who are troubled;

Grace for all who are needy;

Courage for all who fear;

Strength for all who are weary;

Faith for all who are seeking;

Hope for all who are uncertain;

Protection for all who serve;

Wisdom for all who lead.

-Roy Lessin


Like all the other kids, I loved the fireworks,last night, over Skyline Drive.


Check out my post on Quilter's Lounge to see why Fran has been so scarce lately, not quilting, doing little blogging, and not getting around to reading blogs very often.


As a bonus I have some great info for those of you who are trying to shed some pounds, or just eat more healthily.


Sorry for the difficult to read big blob of a blog, but Blogspot isn't taking directions too well and refuses to put in my paragraph breaks.