A puttering kind of day

I've been fairly busy all morning long.  Decided I needed to make my sewing room more user friendly 'cause I keep getting the urge to wander on back there and get going on quilt projects.  I moved the table from the corner to the center of the room and brought in a stool so I'll be more apt to have a work area.  Much better.

Then I started looking for a book I was pretty sure I had (but apparently I disposed of it) and as I straightened up the shelves, I found other books I completely forgot I had.  I actually have a pretty good sized library. Everything from cookbooks, health books, how-to books, biographies, history, cartoon books, tons of fiction, high school yearbooks, writing books, and several old children's books.
I hunted everywhere on my computer for a list of those collectables but I must have deleted it on one of those days when I was "cleaning out files."  I've got to quit doing that!

Meanwhile, I thought maybe I would see about listing some of these old books on Ebay. Just because I need more practice at selling online. It's easy to forget but then I've always got Hunter to guide me through as he's big on buying and selling on Ebay.  I set out my stack of books so I can type up a list of the names and years.  Need to research a little bit to see if any are worth more than a dollar or two.

While trying to get a picture of the morning hummingbirds coming in to feed, I decided to hang my Port Townsend pennants alongside my button and small knickknack collections.

Since I was already busy snapping photos around the house, I thought I would try again to understand my camera settings better so I could take a picture with light in the background.  I used my camera, my phone camera, and my old phone camera ('cause it takes halfway decent pictures) but no matter how many settings I used, I still couldn't get a picture that didn't turn out too dark.  Guess I'll just have to always make sure I don't snap photos with light in the background. Also need to start looking around for a better camera.  Mine takes "okay" pictures but I want better shots than I'm getting. Plus the little piece of dirt on the lens seems to be growing and I always have to crop it out. It's a nuisance.

Mary sent me pictures of the turtles that my sister-in-law, Lill Greenwood, made for Jake.  He's such a little ham!

Their neighbors invited him to a birthday party yesterday so he got to go in a jumping tent.  Wish I could have been there to see it.  Mary had him dressed so cute.

I see 'Call the Midwife' starts up again tonight. Good. It's about time.  I also heard 'Downton Abbey' is only having one more season and they're done.  Sigh...  One show I've just recently come to look forward to is  'CBS Sunday Morning'.  It starts at 7 a.m. and is almost always worth paying attention to.

I've been wanting to get back into doing counted cross stitch at night while I'm watching tv but I couldn't find anything to sew that really interested me.  I didn't want something too complicated and that would take me forever but I wanted something worth spending my time on.  I discovered an old magazine I had stored away that had color diagrams of all the state flowers.  I'd looked at it before but found following the color diagrams too hard to keep track of.  So I cut out each page and because the layout was such I could do the whole book that way, I now have a small half page I can mount on  my metal board with a see-thru ruler and magnets. Works much better and while it's time consuming and I don't get a lot done each night, I suspect (if I stick with it) I'll have some pretty nifty flower patterns.  I may make a wall quilt out of them.

I posted a picture on Facebook of me and John in January 1965 when he had just got back from his tour overseas and was meeting his new baby for the first time.  I look like hell in it but he looks pretty good.  I've always liked this picture, mainly because it shows a little bit of the kitchen we had when I was growing up on Kuhn Street. Wish I had more pictures of the inside of my house during my growing-up years. It looks like an electrical cord hanging off the back of the refrigerator but I remember dad's belt hung there when we were kids and he didn't hesitate to use it.  Not that he was abusive; we were just four kids without a mom in the house and determined to get away with everything we could.  Ha!

Saw on Facebook today that Kay Harper passed away. She lived across the hall from my sister down at Claridge Court.  I've probably known her for close to 40 years.  A character.

 Well, time to type up my book list. Golf will be on in an hour too.  Have a good week.