Her First Phone Call Home

This morning I received my first phone call from PW.  That is her on the right with her finger on her ear.  I can understand why she did that cuz I could hear a lot of noise in the background and now I can see where it was coming from.  I gathered from browsing through the pictures that it looks like the drill sergeants instructed them to stand in formation and pull their cell phones out of their personal belongings and then gave them a certain amount of time to call someone.  She was talking pretty fast and didn't say much, but she did actually sound like she was doing okay!  :-)  And that was what I mostly needed to know, but we also needed her address.  She wouldn't (or couldn't?) give me her address, but told me that she was in "Echo 113".  I didn't know until later that that meant she was in Echo Company, 1st Battalion, 13th Regiment.  And from that, Chuck was able to find her on their Facebook.  They just posted some pictures today and I think (but not sure) that they post pictures every other Monday.  There are all kinds of information on the Facebook page that I still need to read, but according to that, her graduation date will be July 2nd.

Here are a few other pictures of her that I found:



 Here they had just gotten loaded off of some white buses. (this was before she called me, according to the sequence of the pictures in the photo album on FB)

far right, back row

From what I gathered, they got separated into their four color groups.

She is in the "yellow" group, which, according to the Facebook page, means she's in the 4th Platoon (the Yellow Renegades).  And with that, we have her address!!  So I will definitely be writing her a letter today.

I can't wait until they post more pictures!!  This is only the beginning.  I hope to see photos of the adventures that are soon to come.  There are more pictures than these with her in it, but these are the best ones.  I am downloading all of them as I find them, and will make a scrapbook for her.  Oh dear, another scrapbook to do............................

Our Last Potluck (For Now)

Our church congregation has potluck every week, but today's potluck was extra special cuz it was the last one (sniffle!, sniffle!).  Well, not really.  It was the last one in our current building.  The good news is that our current building was sold (closing date is in a couple weeks from now) and we are in the process of building a new one for us to meet in.  The bad news is that the new building isn't ready for us to move into yet, so for the next several months we will be in the transitional phase.  The people buying our current building will be turning it into a funeral home, but they said we can still worship there on Sundays while we wait for our new building to be ready for us.  But we won't be able to use the kitchen anymore, so that is why today was our last potluck, but for me in particular, it means a little bit more than no more potlucks.  I have had the privilege of preparing the potluck drinks every week for the past several years; I'm guessing I've been doing it for about ten years now.  It means I have to get there about an hour early,  and it's one of those "thankless jobs" that not very many people are willing to commit to.  But I really really really really enjoy doing it!!!  Not only does it give me a special place (a special work to do) in the congregation, but it also gives me an opportunity to talk with people that I normally don't get a chance to talk to, plus I get to listen to conversations of other people that gather around the coffee pot, and sometimes I hear some pretty interesting stuff.  There is a reason why we prefer to call our potlucks "fellowship meals"; for me, the fellowship starts with making the drinks, and I am really going to miss that!

Here is the counter that I work behind:

I prepare the water, lemonade, unsweetened tea, sweetened tea, and of course the coffee.

It sure won't feel right not starting my Sundays this way anymore.

Here are some photos from potluck:

(Notice Chuck way in the back holding Dominic)

Of course Chuck had to hog Dominic:

He is SO ready to be a grandpa!  Unfortunately, that is not in our near future.  Every Sunday Chuck seeks him out and insists on holding him.

Look at all those desserts!  99.9% of the time I have the willpower to not even look at this table because I usually have sweets at home to eat, and I know that the last thing I need is more sweets to eat on top of the sweets that I have home.  

Anyhoo, today after church was over, Chuck and I started packing things up.  Since I'm the one that makes the drinks, I wanted to be sure and pack that stuff myself; otherwise I won't know where anything is later.  It felt really weird boxing all that stuff up because I kept thinking "won't I need that?"  I am so used to needing that stuff every week that I had to keep reminding myself that I will NOT be needing it again for awhile.  It just feels..........weird.  And kinda sad.

I wanted to post a picture of what our new building looks like, but I never got around to taking a picture of it, so maybe that will come later.

I will close with a picture of Bossy showing off her nice fuzzy arm.

She Serves Her Country

About a month ago, our daughter Kayla (PeeWee) did something that might change her life forever.  If it doesn't change her life, it will definitely make an impact.  She swore in to join the Army Reserves.

And last night she left for Basic Training.

Here the recruiter is helping her get her boarding passes.  And then he set it up so me and Chuck could go into the terminal with her.  So here we sit and wait.

The recruiter told her she had to be at the airport between 6:00 - 6:30, even though her plane didn't leave until 9:06.  But that's part of the military:  "hurry up and wait" is what they do a lot, so I guess she will have to get used to that.

This is my last image of her:

This is a bad picture, but she was actually smiling.  She said she was more excited than nervous.  I don't know how soon that will quickly die after she gets there, but hopefully she will maintain a good attitude.  

So, now that she's out of the way, I have the big task of cleaning her room.  Thankfully I have plenty of time to get that done cuz I'm gonna need it.  I would post a picture of her room here, but that would be too embarrassing.  Just use your imagination - it's pretty bad.  It is my hope that her military experience will kill some of her bad habits.

I also have other ways of staying busy to help me not worry about her so much.  For one thing, I started my indoor garden seeds.

My beets are already coming up.

I've also got some bigger pots started.  The three round ones are my pumpkin plants, and I have four square ones that I started some corn in.  Yes, I am going to try growing corn!  In Alaska! Is it possible?  I purchased a hybrid seed that was developed in Fairbanks.  The plants are kind of "dwarfish" and the ears will be smaller than the typical ears, but they are supposed to grow well in cooler soil and cooler climates.  So I figured I'd try it since I don't have much to lose.  I also have 10 tomato plants started.  I plan to can most of them - canning tomatoes will be a new experience for me.  Never done any canning before.

Chuck changed his plans a couple times regarding what we should do about a greenhouse.  The nice ones are SO expensive, so he was gonna just experiment with a crude "makeshift" greenhouse by using PVC pipes and Visqueen. But then we went to Costco (to buy PW a duffel bag for her trip), and they had a greenhouse there on display.  We ended up buying one cuz for the price, we thought they were pretty nice. And they only had two left, so we figured we'd better buy one (the lady at the checkout said that she wanted to buy the last one before it was gone).  I will send a picture of it after we get it set up.  I think that might be a while yet though cuz the temps cooled down and we got some snow last night.

I was expecting that and waiting for it.  I will not be fooled again.

Anyhoo, another thing I'm keeping myself busy with is quilting.  I did finally finish Steph's quilt.

This is the last stitch on the whole entire thing.  I was gonna have a whole different post dedicated to it, but I wanted to include a picture of Steph with it.  But I don't know when I'll see her again, so I decided to just throw it in with this post.

Here is a picture of the whole quilt, all done.  At last!  It takes a long time to sew a quilt top together by hand.

Right now it's at the cleaners.  It was all full of cat hair and I didn't want to give it to her like that, even though she has a cat and a dog of her own, so it probably didn't matter.

Here is the next quilt I'm working on:

It's not a very good picture, but it should look something like this when it's done.  I saw a model of it on display at the quilt store about 2-1/2 years ago and bought everything I needed for it.  It took me this long to start working on it cuz I wanted to finish Steph's quilt first.  Anyhoo, I was disappointed cuz the first thing I discovered was that whoever cut the panels off the bolt did a very sloppy job.  They cut too close to the panels so I couldn't make my panel blocks as large as they were supposed to be, which meant I had to readjust the measurements of the borders that go around the panels, in order to make those blocks the right size.  But now that I got them the right size, everything else seems to be falling into place okay.  The other thing is that I didn't have one of the fabrics cuz when I bought all of the materials, they were out of two of the fabrics need to make this.  One of them I found on-line and am still waiting for it to come in (should be here any day now).  The other fabric I'm looking for is the back panel.  But I can look for that later when I need it.  However, this one seems to be coming together really fast cuz I'm not hand-sewing it.  Also it's not made up of a million little pieces like Steph's quilt.

A while ago I mentioned that I had purchased some spelt flour to experiment with.  I made the spelt soda bread that I was telling you about.

It turned out okay, but I probably won't make it again.  It had kind of a grainy texture and tasted like bran cereal.  Not that that's a bad thing - I happen to like bran cereal.  But this bread was kinda dense; I like fluffier light breads. 

These were the ingredients in this recipe:

I couldn't find any sheep's yogurt so just used regular Greek yogurt.  But I think the dense texture came from the fact that it used ONLY spelt flour.    There are other recipes on websites that I can try that are supposed to result in lighter fluffier breads, so I will give some of those a whirl.  In the meantime, I am using the leftover spelt flour to mix into other recipes like cookies and pancakes, anything that uses plain ol' white flour - I like to mix in something healthier with it.

Well, that's about all I have to say for now.

Bossy says hello: