Wednesday Hodgepodge

1. April showers bring May flowers...what have you been showered with this month?

 Snow!

This was the view out our front door Monday evening. Yes, this week! We have had snow every week this month. I am SO over the weather here.

2. What is the nature of compassion?  Is it learned or innate?  Can compassion be learned?  If you're a parent is this something you've purposely sought to instill in your children, and if so how?
I think that life teaches compassion.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. ~2 Corinthians 1:3&4

3. Do you prefer to watch romantic comedy or romantic drama...or are you rolling your eyes saying bring on the action flicks?
I'm not a huge fan of action flicks. But then again, it all depends on what the action is. I don't like violent movies at all.  I mean not at all. Just ask my family what I did when they were watching "Last of the Mohicans". **shudder**  I tried to watch it, but the violence was just nasty. I often close my eyes or look away in the theater if there is a particularly violent scene.
Okay, let's move on to the next question....

4.  It's April which means baseball season is officially upon us here in the US of A. Humphrey Bogart is quoted as saying "A hot dog at the ballgame beats roast beef at the Ritz." Agree or Disagree?
Disagree. To me, hot dogs are just okay. I don't remember the last time I ate one. 

5. What's something in your community or city that needs fixing or improving?
The first word that popped into my mind? EVERYTHING. There are so many run-down buildings in this town. There are way too many businesses that have used what I call machine shed architecture. (Imagine metal sided buildings.) It's ugly. There are barely any restaurants above fast food. There isn't a Target.

I'll stop now.

6. Share a song you enjoy that mentions flowers or a specific flower in its title.

Above All by Michael W. Smith

7. April 22nd is Earth Day...do you believe there's life on other planets?  That wasn't the question you were expecting was it? 
There's a song by Larry Norman called UFO. The song talks about Jesus and some of the lyrics are:

He will come back like He promised
With the price already paid
He will gather up His followers
And take them all away.

And if there's life on other planets

Then I'm sure He must know

And He's been there once already

And has died to save their souls.

That's all that really matters.
 

8.  Insert your own random thought here.
This winter that never ends is really getting to me. I feel almost claustrophobic.
Sorry to end on a depressing thought. But this is my reality right now.

A Little Recap and a Little Rant

Last weekend Hubby and I drove the all too normal hour (no movie theater closer than that) to go see a movie, have dinner and shop a little.

The movie we saw was "42". It's about Jackie Robinson -the baseball player who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball back in the mid1940s. Super good movie! Go see it. I highly recommend it!

After we the movie (it was a matinee) we checked the apps on our phones for suggestions of where to eat and drove to the restaurant only to find out there was a 90 minute wait. Sigh. We ended up at a Chipotle. Not very fancy.

We both did a little shopping. I found a couple of things and was given two $10 off coupons.

Since I had those coupons and had been thinking about a couple of other things I had seen, I decided to drive back today and make use of the coupons. 

Ha ha ha. (That is written with a sarcastic font, by the way.)

Can you see the photo of said coupon?  A huge paragraph of exceptions. So no luck on getting the $10 off. Oh well. The stuff I bought was on sale already.

Recruited Random

I've been working on my next quilt project. My sister asked me to make a couple of quilts for a room where her grand-babies will stay when they visit her.  It's fun to work with some new brightly colored fabrics.

I recruited some help in creating that random look. (The random look is really not very random. There's a lot of controlled random going on here.)

(The colors are brighter than they appear in this photo.)

His engineering brain likes working a giant puzzle. I'm blessed to live with that wonderful engineering mind.

April 18, 2013

The winter that 
never ever 
never ever 
never ever 
never ever ends. 
Ever.

A Mid-April Hodgepodge

I'm joining the Wednesday Hodgepodge a little later in the day than I usually do. I typically try to get linked up first thing after midnight, but I was too tired last night. So, even though I may not get as much traffic here today because of the later link-up, I thought I would go ahead and write my way through these questions. (I need something to motivate me to write on this blog.) Head on over to Joyce's  blog to see all those who linked up way earlier than me and go read their posts.

1. April 15th is the deadline for Americans to file their state and federal income tax returns.  What's a job you do on a regular basis that could be described as 'taxing'?
Let's just lump lots of jobs onto one and say housework. Those jobs never end. I remember my mom saying when I was still at home how she tired of thinking of what to fix for supper every night. I didn't understand it much then, but I sure do now!

2. I'm participating in the April A-Z blog challenge, and the Hodgepodge happens to fall on Day O this week. In keeping with that theme...olives, onions, oysters, okra...of the foods mentioned, what's your favorite O food?
OLIVES! I especially love Greek olives. Last New Year's Eve, Hubby and I ate at a nice restaurant and one of the appetizer choices was olives. I ordered some and enjoyed them all by myself. (Hubby isn't a fan.)

I took a picture and texted it to my daughter. We share the love of olives. :)


3. What is something memorable you experienced as a child that your own children (or future children/nieces/nephews) will not get to experience?
My children haven't experienced and my grandchildren will never experience getting up off the couch and walking across the room to change the channel on the television with a switch on the television set itself.

4. Term limits for our elected officials...your thoughts?
I think it's a good thing. A fresh mind is helpful.

5. On April 18th, 1775, Paul Revere made his famous 'midnight ride'...when did you last make a midnight ride?  Perhaps the fate of a nation wasn't hanging in the balance, but tell us where you were headed anyway.
I think the last time we were driving late was when we were driving to Colorado last summer to meet our kids for a week's vacation.  We were driving through Omaha, Nebraska at 10 pm and we thought we'd make it to Lincoln, Nebraska in another hour so we'd stop for a hotel there. We did stop only to be told that there were no hotel rooms available in the whole city. Sigh. I took the wheel, because Hubby was exhausted, and drove another hour to York, Nebraska. Same story there. No rooms. Hubby then called to Grand Island, Nebraska and lo and behold! An available hotel room! So, another hour down the road, we finally got to a hotel. (And can I just say here, that the state of Nebraska decided to resurface the entire length of I-80? We were driving in just two-way traffic and sharing it with all sorts of semi-trucks.) By this time it was 12:30 a.m. It felt good to lay down, I tell ya. But then a thunderstorm rolled through and I didn't get a lot of sleep. Sigh.
(We found out later that the reason for the lack of hotel rooms was that there were Olympic swim trials going on in Lincoln and the College World Series.)

6.  What would freak you out more...a mouse running across your floor or a big fat hairy spider?
A mouse for sure! I can stomp on a spider, but a mouse is just icky. When our son was just a little over a year old, a mouse an through the kitchen when I was feeding him breakfast. I screamed and it made him cry. Poor baby.

7. I love it when people ask me________________________?
I like to talk about quilting. Last fall one of my sisters embarked on a quilting project and called me and emailed me several times to ask me questions about how to do something.  I don't have any quilting buddies in real life so I enjoyed that.

8.  Insert your own random thought here.
Last night Hubby and I were just down-right frustrated with the lack of warm weather up here in the north land this spring. (We're supposed to get more snow tomorrow. Ugh.) We hopped in the car to see if the local ice cream place was open yet. IT WAS! So we indulged in some ice cream, trying to pretend it wasn't 41 degrees and there wasn't a snow bank that hasn't melted yet in front of the car.

Ice cream makes everything better!

A Year is Different

I was scrolling through the pictures on my phone yesterday and came across this picture of Bleeding Hearts plant I took last year.

This plant is on the garage side of the house.  The flowers are so very pretty and cheery!

The date on that picture is April 4, 2012.  A little more than a year ago.

Here's a picture I took yesterday of the exact same spot that Bleeding Heart plant grows.

Honest. Same spot. A year apart.

What have I to say about that? Stinky. This winter has never ended. I feel like we live in Narnia. Always winter. Never spring. Never anything else. 

(Well that's almost the quote....)

This and That

Pretty slow week here in my blog world.

So this post will just be a smidge from here and a smidge from there.

Monday as we were driving back north from a wonderful weekend with our kids (being with them is always wonderful and the fact that it was actually spring there with daffodils and forsythias blooming made it even sweeter), I sarcastically posted this status on my Facebook page:  

We've enjoyed a lovely spring weekend in Kansas.
Back to the land of no spring. Blech.

 I just meant that things hadn't started greening up yet. Little did I know that there was actual truth in it. This morning we got about 8 inches of SNOW! 

The weather this week has just been horrible. Worse than horrible.

I came across this sentiment:::

(Pause)

(New subject)

In other news, our sump pump died yesterday. In the 12 years we have lived in Minnesota, I have concluded that all of the state is a sponge. (The helpful plumber who showed up 6 hours after Hubby called replaced the pump and it's been working hard ever since.)

(Pause)

(New subject)

My sister asked me to make a couple of quilts for a bedroom that her grandbabies will stay in when they visit. I spent part of the day yesterday graphing out the quilt in order to figure our how much fabric I needed for the borders, backing, etc. Before I started beating my head on my sewing table (math is NOT my friend) I hunted for what probably is the best quilting tool I have ever purchased:

There are oodles of charts in there that help figure out yardage for blocks, sashing, borders, backing, etc. Totally love it. Hubby (who I like to call my own personal Human Calculator) (some people marry for money or for love, I married him for his mad math skills) looked over my scribblings. Most were okay, but there was a boo-boo. Not a big deal, but so thankful for his expertise. :)

(Pause)

(New subject)

A friend posted a link to this blog post earlier this week. I wish I could have written the post because it says everything I have been thinking about and working through lately. I wrote this quote from the post on  my Facebook earlier this week:

"It is easy to spout trite Christian platitudes designed to make people feel better with bumper-sticker theology. But insipid axioms do little in the face of the actual brokenness of the world."

I would encourage you to read the post. It will challenge you.

In conclusion, this blog post seems to be a summary of my Facebook activity of the week.