My eyes swept slowly over the pink, burgundy, brown, and green squares looking for loose threads that needed to be clipped. The quilting on it didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped, but it’s finally finished (I’d started making it in 2006). And, I am pleased with the piecing and overall look. The colors and blocks play well together. The zig-zagged brown border, representing a garden wall, was something I’d never tried before. With every quilt, I try to learn a new technique. I folded it up carefully, and went to get the other quilt.
This summer I finally turned both of these queen-sized quilt tops into quilts, sandwiching them with batting and backs. I rented time on a longarm quilting machine at Trains, Fabrics, Etc. quilt shop in Tacoma and made a major dent in my stack of unfinished projects.
This afternoon, I walked through the Gold Gate of the Puyallup Fair holding both quilts. Upstairs in the Pavilion, I filled out the paperwork to enter both of them, and glowed a little when the two ladies checking them in ooohed and aahhed over them. They joined the stacks of quilts that will soon be hanging for thousands to admire.
Another quilter and I rode the elevator downstairs and walked out through the dark, empty, cabinets strewn around the ground floor. We marveled over the way the fair is magically transformed each year from the haphazard skeleton that we were seeing, to the carefully arranged exhibits that we know we will see when it opens. Of course, we’ve both seen something similar before when we’ve taken hundreds of tiny squares of fabric and sewn them into beautiful quilts, each with its own personality.
We agreed that we weren’t entering our quilts expecting to win (although that would be great), but just to see them hanging in the fair, and to be able to tell our friends to go and see them. Nevertheless, as we walked back out through the gate and parted ways, we wished each other, “Good luck!”
Lately, our heater has been kicking on before we get out of bed. When we slide the door open to let the dogs out, there’s a chill in the air whispering that fall is just around the corner.
All summer, we’ve been watching our blueberries. Noting when they first appeared. Watering the bush by hand during rare hot spells. Scratching my head because I could’ve sworn we used to have ripe blueberries for the 4th of July. Watching them plump up and at last, this week, they blushed from green to full-blown, deep blue.
This morning I asked John to take the colander out, and pick some. Muffins or scones? We were impatient, so it was muffins. Steaming hot from the oven and slathered with rapidly melting butter, it’s surprising there were any left for a picture.
I’ll keep picking them as they ripen and bake them into scones and coffee cakes. If there are still any left, I’ll freeze them for a taste of August in deep winter. What a nice way to say good-bye to summer.
Blueberry Muffins
2 cups Bisquick
1/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup milk
2 Tblsp vegetable oil
1 egg
¾ cup fresh blueberries
Heat oven to 400°. Line muffin cups with paper baking cups. Stir all ingredients except blueberries together until just moistened. Fold in blueberries. Divide batter evenly among cups. Bake 13 to 18 minutes until golden brown. Cool slightly; remove from pan.
Laura Keolanui Stark is savoring the last days of summer. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.
Last week just before 2:00 pm, I was working, scoring standardized tests, when I felt a jolt, followed a few seconds later by a second jolt. Earthquake?! While I was ready to dive under the table, my eyes darted around the room, but nobody else seemed to notice anything. I shrugged. I’ve always had a more sensitive sensory system than most people, always been a little more jumpy. If something scary happens in a movie, I usually jump about a half a second before anyone else. An electrician had been working in our area earlier. Maybe he was working on the wiring in the ceiling.
On my 2:00 break, I walked out to my car and called home. Cameras (and therefore cell phones) aren’t allowed on the floor at my job because of strict confidentiality, so I leave my phone in my car. The kids were packing to go back to college. I was calling to see if they needed to know where the extra boxes, tape, etc. were.
Johnny answered, and in an excited voice, asked me if I’d just heard two big explosions. I told him I’d felt two jolts. He said that he heard two huge explosions, big enough to set off house and car alarms in our Puyallup neighborhood. He’d run upstairs from the basement out onto the front porch expecting to see a truck crashed into our house.
He’d called John and Sarah who were in the waiting room at a chiropractor in Tacoma. They had been on westbound Highway 512, and John said he thought something went wrong with his car, maybe a blown tire? Everybody in the lobby listening in on this phone conversation asked, astounded, if the explosion had been felt 11 miles away in Puyallup. Everyone was abuzz.
This was definitely bigger than the guns that rumble regularly from Ft. Lewis maneuvers. There had been a huge natural gas explosion in Tacoma in October 2007 that John and I had felt at our house. Then there was the time they blew up some old dynamite that a construction crew found when they were building a Rite Aid a few miles from our house, over a decade ago. But, this time I’d felt a shock in Auburn, 12 miles north of Puyallup. Puyallup-Auburn-Tacoma: that’s a pretty big, 12-miles-on-each-side, equilateral triangle.
Johnny and I speculated that President Obama was in Seattle. Maybe it had something to do with him. Maybe something happened, and they had to get fighter jets up in the air from McChord Air Force Base and there was a sonic boom. Johnny said there wasn’t anything on T.V. I told him to go online to see what he could find. With that, my 15-minute break was up, and I headed back into the building.
I made what I hoped was a casual announcement to my group, and asked if they’d heard anything about an explosion or anything unusual while they were on break. Nobody had felt or heard anything. I started scoring and tried to concentrate.
What if Mt. Rainier had blown? Aren’t we in a valley? If a lahar of ice and mud was gushing down from Mt. Rainier, I tried to remember how deep it would be. Two stories? Three stories? Would the overpass over Highway 167 be high enough to be safe? They always said that it would be faster to go on foot than everybody getting in their cars and creating a traffic jam. (Maybe that was advice for tsunamis in Hawaii. Oh well!) I’d better try to run up the hill, to Highway 18. I was calculating in my head how long it would take me to run there. Ten minutes, fifteen? Puyallup had sirens to warn everybody. Did Auburn? How long would it take a lahar to reach Auburn?
Tom, who sits next to me, interrupted my mental evacuation planning. He suggested I ask the secretary to get online and see what she could find out. I hesitated. He assured me that if the Site Manager was there, she’d check it out. I agreed, and added that she’d make a big announcement about it. She was good at ferreting out information and making announcements. But I still hesitated. I didn’t want to be Chicken Little running around clucking about the sky falling, especially since nobody else had felt or heard anything. What if it wasn’t anything? Then I’d be flagged as a hysterical nutcase.
There are other businesses in the building. I was pretty sure that someone in one of those offices was online, and if anything big happened, they’d let us know. If worse came to worst, Johnny had the main number here and would call to sound the alarm, wouldn’t he? I spent the rest of the afternoon scoring papers, and in the back of my mind, wondering what had happened, feeling a little on edge.
At 4:30 I hurried out to my car, and called home. As I asked Johnny what had happened, my phone beeped that I had a text message simultaneously with Johnny asking why I hadn’t checked his text message. Here’s what it said:
Mom, KOMO 4 news reports that an unknown aircraft breached Presidential restricted airspace and that two F-15 fighter jets were scrambled from Portland, OR. Apparently they flew well above supersonic to Seattle, and created sonic booms that were heard throughout the region. No news yet on whether they shot down the other aircraft or what. –Johnny
Apparently while I was estimating how long it would take me to run up the hill to Hwy. 18 to avoid a volcanic mudflow, Johnny was calculating how long it would take a jet traveling at Mach 2.5 (about 1900 mph) to fly from Portland to Seattle (145 miles), an impressive 10 minutes, about the same time for me to get out of a lahar’s path.
The wayward float plane was flying from the east side of Washington. The pilot didn’t file a flight plan, and didn’t realize that Obama’s visit created a 10-mile, no-fly airspace. The jets intercepted him. The Secret Service questioned and released him.
The headine the next day in The News Tribune was “Boom. Boom. Rrrring. Scrambled fighter jets in turn scramble South Sound 911 network.” It reported that residents from Olympia to Federal Way (40 miles apart) streamed into the streets when the thunderous booms shook the region about 1:50 p.m., and so many people in Pierce County dialed 911 the switchboard couldn’t keep up.
And so the mystery was solved. It’s kind of interesting that it even was a mystery with an Air Force base and Boeing in the region, and a basketball team named the Seattle SuperSonics. But, it’s nice to know that people are paying attention, and it’s even more reassuring to know that our military is ever vigilant, and the best in the world. On Tuesday, August 18, 2010, throughout the Puget Sound, we all got to experience “the sound of freedom.”
Laura Keolanui Stark tries to live by the Girl Scout motto, “Be prepared.” She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.
“Better late than never!” That seems to be the theme for me this summer. To start with, summer took forever to arrive. While the rest of the country swelters, we’ve been waiting for the temperatures to rise into the 80s. It’s August, and wake up temperatures here have still been in the 50s. I can’t complain too much though, it’s great sleeping weather, and by the afternoon, it’s warm enough for shorts.
In June, my friend Carol called to plan the details of this year’s quilt shop hop. We talked for twenty minutes before she gave me a calendar reality check. I kept talking about where we were going to go on Thursday. She finally said, “You do realize that Thursday, the first day of shop hop, is tomorrow.” Yikes! I thought shop hop was the following week!
Following the surprise announcement to my family, frenzied searches on Mapquest, a late-night trip to the ATM machine, and general panic and mayhem on my part, I managed to pull it together and start shop hopping on about 12 hours notice. And a very good shop hop it was, complete with ferry rides and crepes, and the accidental discovery of one the best Italian restaurants I’ve ever eaten in: Il Lucano, tucked humbly in beside a kayak store in Gig Harbor.
In keeping with my weird summer time warp, a week after Independence Day, I finished up two Americana quilt tops that Carol and I started two years ago. They weren’t the full size quilts we’d initially planned. I figured they’d get more use in our houses as wall hangings. They didn’t hang in our homes this 4th of July, but maybe they’ll be quilted and ready to hang next year.
What inspired the get-those-quilts-done burst? Our friends from Louisiana were coming to visit, so of course I dedicated much valuable time cleaning my sewing area because visitors always head right to that area of the house! Not! John and Johnny usually decide to clean the garage, because that’s also an area where we entertain guests. Who knows why our brains work this way?
When we moved into this house, 10-1/2 years ago, I wanted to fix up the swing set in the backyard. It had one lonely, decrepit swing, but space for two. I’d bought another swing to join the solo one. Our friends have three young kids, so, once again, I asked if John or Johnny could put the “new” swing up. Johnny took me up on it, but we couldn’t find the first swing I’d bought. I think I’d given up, and donated it to Goodwill, so we ended up buying two new ones. My “babies” are now 18 and 22, but when the new swings went up, they were happy to test them out. Our friends’ kids spent a lot of fun time on them too, and it was nice to hear little ones playing in our backyard again.
On the last day of their visit, before anyone else in the house was up, John woke me up saying in a hushed voice, “Laura, we have a big problem.” I followed him out into the hallway where a gagging smell hit me. John answered my unspoken question, “T-Bone had diarrhea all over the house.”
We don’t usually steam clean the carpets until the beginning of September, but due to what we now call Poopfest 2010, there was a whole lot of steam cleaning and mopping going on. After a trip to the vet and a round of antibiotics that he’s just finishing up, T-Bone’s feeling better. So is Suzie. She caught the same bacterial infection. The carpet cleaning is the only case this summer of better earlier than never.
On a more pleasant and certainly better smelling topic, I wanted to make strawberry jam again this summer, but with all that was going on, I missed the fresh Puyallup valley strawberries. When the raspberries came out, I was too busy to make jam, so I froze the berries that kept mysteriously appearing on my kitchen counter courtesy of WSU farmland. (They will probably become sorbet). Finally, when I got a free day, I assembled the jars and other jam-making equipment. Apricots were the fruit that was ripe and available, so apricot jam is what I’ve been savoring on toasted Costco croissants.
I didn’t feel guilty eating those croissants because at Zumba we were learning a new routine for the National Day of Dance 2010 from the TV program, “So You Think You Can Dance.” I watched the video on You Tube Thursday, and practiced it in class on Friday. Saturday was the day that we rolled it out. I managed to keep up with most of it; not bad considering I was relying on last minute cramming to learn the routine.
Tuesday I spent the day quilting a pink, brown, and green quilt top that I started in 2006. I drove to a quilt shop in Tacoma to quilt it on a longarm machine. The shop owner suggested a quilting pattern that stretched my abilities, but it’s done and ready for a binding.
That night a close friend from John’s University of Hawaii days flew in from Texas on business. We got to spend a few hours together reminiscing over dinner. He was one of the big encouragers of me writing this blog. Thanks Ed!
Wednesday, we met some other friends for lunch. It was a lunch spent remembering good times, but with a little sadness mixed in. They’re moving out of state. On Monday I found out that they were leaving on Friday. Another "Yikes!" moment. Liz and Steve are the parents of Johnny’s best friend, Dave. We’ve spent the last 11 years growing these boys into men, shuttling them back and forth to each others’ houses when they were little, standing beside each other watching them play roller hockey, comparing notes on colleges when they were choosing where to go. There’s a special bond between parents who’ve raised their kids together. We wish them all the best.
All of the above are my excuses for not writing a single blog during the month of July. But, I’m writing now. Better late than never!
Laura Keolanui Stark is probably dealing with some other unplanned, unforeseen surprise event or emergency. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@ gmail.com
