Scraps and Pieces

• Well, Fall Quilt started yesterday with somewhere around 70 women arriving...followed by 50 or so today. They're all wiling away the hours with their sewing machines. This will go on through the whole month of November (minus the week of Thanksgiving) and then one more week in December. I'm much calmer going into it than I was in the spring....maybe because I have done it once or maybe because 90% of the women were signed-up and fully registered before the middle of September. That made getting ready much easier!

• Last night, Andrea and I went to a family's house to play games with some friends of hers. They had several other people over, too. We played Catch Phrase, which is always fun. And we played a game called Four on a Couch. That took me a little bit to get a hang of and it wasn't until I got home and was lying in bed that I knew what I should have been keeping track of (although I guess I did a pretty good job, according to the people I was playing with).

• I think the funnest part, though, was when one of the girls was telling a story about her recent jogging experience. I do live out in the country, surrounded by corn fields and dairy farms. So, lots of cows. I see the around when I'm out jogging, too, but they're usually within their fences. If they've escaped, they stay in their field and leave me alone. Well, she was jogging down a country road like most runners in the 21st century looking down at her iPod rather than what might be in front of her. When she was brought to an abrupt stop by running right into a cow. A cow who wasn't scared of her at all. She tried to scare it out of the road by yelling and throwing rocks, but that only made the cow mad. It came towards her...she got scared...and then tumbled over the side of the road into the swampy ditch.

         "Can you put running shoes in the wash?" she asked.

• Also last evening, Andrea showed me a video of two of her nephews. The older one found a live mouse caught by the tail in a trap. At first, he was scared of it but eventually he picked it up by the trap, the little house jerking around as it tried to get away. His father was asking what he should do with it, but since he wasn't sure, their dad suggested taking it outside. 

         "Oh, yes," the younger boy had now come to look at the mouse. "It needs to go outside."

         "Does it?" their dad asked.

         "Yes," the boy replied. "We need to take it for a walk outside."

• And today I learned from a teenage boy what a Cricket machine is: "A woman's video game console."