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:
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