A Mish Mash

Or a little of this and that.  We really need to change locations, I feel the blog has been exceedingly boring lately!!  I started the day out with good intentions—I was going to quilt.  Well, I guess I did quilt a little—for about 10 minutes then I spent a hour ripping out what I had stitched!

The folks who purchased our former home and ranch are here and are doing some maintenance work on the house—they rented a sprayer and re-stained the entire outside of the log home.  Today I went down and taught them how to “chink.”

See the white lines between the logs—that is a substance called chink—it is applied between the logs to seal the cracks.  Chink is a latex and sand mixture which is applied using either a special chink gun or a caulk gun.  A very time consuming process, I chinked the inside and outside of our house in which we now live when it was built.  Joe and Tammy want to chink the outside of their home and needed lessons—teacher Janna to the rescue.  We are invited down for dinner tomorrow evening, I’m anxious to see some of the finished work!

I failed to listen to my intuition the other day—when the UPS Store owner told me it would cost a little over $200 to ship that longarm frame I should have said, “and what have you been smoking???”  The two packages weigh close to 250 pounds and the rails are over 10 feet long.  I explained all this and his reply, “well, I can’t imagine it being more than say $300.”  Today he called me with a quote for $867!!!!  Needless to say we are NOT using his UPS Store for shipping!!  I got a quote from Federal Express Freight for $367—Michael can build a crate for the rails and we will take it to the freight terminal in Billings.  We made a flying trip over to Livingston (60 miles one way!!) this afternoon late to get the frame.  Geez!!  The frustration drove me to have ice cream!!!

A few days ago I read Paulette’s blog in which she wrote about going to get a quilting frame—Rick also wrote about their trip.  Paulette and I emailed back and forth a few times about what kind of sewing machine she should have for this new frame.  I gave Paulette my phone number in case she had any more questions.  Imagine our surprise when the phone rang the other afternoon and it was Rick—with Paulette waiting in the background to talk to me.  It was fun to actually talk to blogging friends.

I think today was our smokiest day so far—miserable, smoky enough to make your eyes burn and your throat hurt.