The Week That Was

 Valery has come and gone and I miss her so much. She's been gone from Ozark for about 10 hours and is now visiting Kevin and Rachel in Kansas City before returning to Sacramento tomorrow. She did an amazing amount of house work helping me to prepare my house for showing and hopefully, selling. But, we also took some time out for fun. She arrived on Saturday and I immediately put her to work helping me prepare to host a book club meeting on Monday night. We read The Art of Racing in the Rain and I gave Valery my copy to read before the meeting. It's a light book and a quick read, so she was able to finish it and participate in the discussion. It's a good group and we had a good discussion even if it wasn't a real meaty book. Nice women, good food, a beautiful evening, who could ask for more?

My friend Sue Walker mentioned a few weeks ago that kayaking was on her bucket list. She'd never tried it and wanted to give it a whirl. I told her my sister has done quite a bit of kayaking and would be coming to visit and I suggested that an outing with Ben, Logan and the two women might be fun. I volunteered to hold down the picnic table while they did their thing on the water. At the last minute, Sue's husband, John, decided he would also like to try kayaking. Problem is, the wind had come up and no kayaks were being rented. So, we had a picnic and observed wildlife at Lake Springfield. 

 Wild life included these turtle eggs by the side of the lake. Valery reports that they had disappeared by the next day. Valery's friend, Ron, interrupted his visit with his sister in Tennessee to drive over to Missouri and spend a couple of days with us. Naturally, I found a couple of chores to keep him busy.

 

This morning we went to the Farmer's Market in Springfield and I picked up a week's supply of vegetables from Sarah at Millsap Farm's booth.The produce was gorgeous, it was good to see Sarah again, and the market is really splendid. We tried to make it to Ozark's Thursday night market, but it was folding up just as we arrived, although I did manage did buy a couple dozen eggs.

 Here's a quilt I finished at long last. I wanted it quilted by a professional long arm quilter, but I had a tough time finding someone to do custom quilting for me. All the really good quilters have such long waiting lists that you never get to the top of the list unless you have an "in" with them. I finally found someone (Vickie Crowe) who had a list only about three months long and here's the result: 

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The color in the picture of the whole quilt is more accurate, the bottom one is too yellow, but if you click on the bottom photo, you can see the quilting detail pretty well. I think she did a beautiful job.