Saturday sleep out, weekly roundup

This has become Saturday night routine for the oldest and I. We love it and I look forward to it all week. It's so peaceful out here surrounded by cool air, crickets and cats. We talk, read a couple of books and most nights he tucks in early. Leaving me to:

Journal and paper piecing by lantern light.  There are only 2 more blocks to go, out of a whopping 7. This has taken forever as a couple of them have been picked apart and resewn multiple times. I have an OB appointment next week, conveniently located by the fabric store, so will go and check out background fabrics then. I don't know why I'm leaning towards grey linen for the background? Is quilting linen difficult? Probably it will not be sold in a wide enough measure anyway so this decision might be out of my hands. 

What else? Well, what the heck, let's continue on with cats.

This is Bee's new favorite spot to sleep; perched like a scoop of ice cream on top of a pail of potting soil. Please notice the soft, totally available, pillow not 5 feet away. She also likes to nap in the middle of the gravel driveway.  

I finished By Nightfall this week. Michael Cunningham has such a beautiful way of exploring ordinary lives. Poor Peter. Poor Rebecca. I've noticed a theme in Cunningham's books; while going through the motions of the rut and routine of our lives a person will catch a glimpse of some greater possibility, something more strange and wonderful than what they have (which might be a line from The Hours) These possibilities are never realized and you're left wondering if the memory of possibility is enough to carry the person forward. 

I'm going to try reading Remarkable Creatures for my next book. This was started and abandoned last summer and it seems fair to try to give it one more try. It's about a young woman who discovers a fossil that conflicts with the science and religion of mid? late? 1800's England if I remember correctly.

This card came from Holland. It's adorable. And Marlene suprised me with a pack of London coloring cards in the mail! That was such a wonderful suprise!

The youngest doodling. 

And making a playdoh and dried spaghetti hedgehog. 

I've decided to say "screw it" and have taken him to a couple of shops this week, nothing big just a shoe store and the hardware store for mums. 

It's the first time he's been in stores since probably March and he could not be happier about it. 

The tomato hornworm caterpillars from awhile back hatched. I thought they were supposed to turn into sphinx moths? What the heck is this?

Here it was last week. Huge!

Dalhias are blooming.

These sunflowers are the best.

And hey, look, we grew some peanuts.  This plant looked dead from neglect so I pulled it to plant a mum and look! Three pods! This is pathetic but will be filed under "success!"

I've never had a fresh peanut before. They taste like the boiled peanuts you can buy at roadside stands in the south or canned up north here if you can find them. A real treat.

My dear husband had a birthday and the oldest and I made a cheesecake.  It was good, the best part was the crust with lemon zest. It was from the new Martha Stewart magazine and we somehow ended up with twice as much batter as pan. I friend thinks we used the wrong size springform and she's probably right. Some unbaked batter was frozen to be added to future cakes and brownies and some, sorry, was eaten directly from the mixing bowl with a spoon while on the phone with her.  It was a good birthday day. Did you know a cheesecake calls for 2.5 lbs of cream cheese? Yikes. I don't know if I'll make it again.*

..... and for anyone not familiar with the town we live in, I took this picture over the weekend. That my friends is a lawn tractor poorly parked in the handicapped space outside of the Dollar General.  For anyone not familiar with western Pennsylvania you might see this and think "disabled and without a proper vehicle " but around here it, like driving your farm tractor to the liquor store or kid's pink bicycle while carying a 12 pack, it most likely means "got one too many DUI's and am probably drunk or high as we speak". It's a fine line of luck and choices we balance on, isn't it.

Time to journal a bit, handsew and get some sleep.

ok

I don't know what these will be about but they are fun to baste to the papers.

* it's 4 a.m. and I've just woken from one of those terrible nightmares where you can't move or breathe for awhile afterwards.  It was a very vivid dream about cheesecake. A man crossing a baker and being baked into a large cheesecake. It's going to take awhile to get back to sleep.