Morning Walk

The day got away from me yesterday. I did my slow stitching in the morning. The last of the sundresses is this far along, and I expect I'll finish it off this morning.

Although I reported sunshine yesterday morning, the clouds moved in before I was finished with my slow-stitching. Checking the forecast, the rain wasn't predicted to start until the afternoon. It took a bulldozer, but I got my lazy self out for a walk. Below is our neighbor's house. Smitty and Sadie are working tirelessly at evicting him from the propurrty.

Straight down our driveway, our human neighbor planted daffodils along the portion of the driveway shared with our three closest neighbors. Many years ago, I recall reading in our local paper that bulbs for either the white or the yellow daffodil with the orange center were becoming a rarity. The article requested folks with that particular variety share bulbs at some collection point. Although I've searched for the article, I can't find it. (It was long enough ago to be pre-internet.) So, I can't recall whether it was the white one like this one below...

...or the yellow one like this one below. In either case, our neighbor has us covered.

Still on the shared portion of the driveway, I noticed these tiny flowers hanging from one of the trees along the way.

Also, a pair of Cooper's hawks were circling. They must have a nest nearby. We get a lot of hawks for the same reason cats like it here...there are lots of little munchies running around in our field.

Nearly to the main road, I caught up with our friendly neighbor the horse. Thank goodness, I had a bag of horsey treats in my pocket.

He's sharing his pasture with a different mule from the one we see ordinarily. This one was smaller, and it wouldn't approach the fence no matter how many cookies I offered up. Nothing doing. Our neighbor often boards large equine animals for friends and family, and so I suspect that's what's going on here. He's probably mad about being left behind with strangers.

Okay, so here we go, officially on our way. Some of the blooming things I saw yesterday are common weeds, and it's often difficult to tell whether I'm looking at a flower or a flower bud. Just to be sure, I took pictures anyway.

At the top of the hill, this neighbor has some beautiful blooming trees in their yard.

Here's another of the weed shots.

In a long-ago blog post, I was able to identify this one, but I can't remember what it is.

This is some kind of wild fruit tree.

Here's something new with the red flowering currant in the background.

In the "every little thing" category...this fungus. The cap was smaller than a dime.

Oh, and lookie here...this is something I haven't seen yet this year.

I'd reached my turn-around point by then and took a picture of the valley below.

Testing the new camera's zoom capabilities, I zoomed in on this red barn. You can see it in the image above, about 1/3 of the way down the photo and near the middle.

You can't see this next one in the larger photo because it's outside the frame. But I zoomed in on a barn much farther away to see how well the camera could do, and it isn't too bad.

Then, I zoomed way, way out, far off in the distance. When the camera's lens is extended as far as it can go, I can activate the digital zoom to get even closer. That's what I did in the image below. Digital zoom isn't as good as the zoom provided by the lens, but this isn't too bad. It's a little grainy, but see for yourself.

So, I'm pretty happy with the camera's capabilities, both far away, and close-up.

On my way back home, I noticed this trillium nearly ready to bloom. I love the trilliums. The are my favorite of our native wildflowers.

So you can imagine how excited I was when I found this cluster in bloom just a little way on.

Here are just a few more I noticed toward the end of my walk.

It was already 1:00 p.m. by the time I reached home again. I was starving for lunch and also surprisingly tired. I ended up taking a nap in the afternoon, but got busy on my new sewing project before the end of the day.

My goal was to get all or most of the cutting done. I've cut all the "constant" pieces I'll need for the whole project.

And then I got to work cutting up scraps for the random 2-inch squares. I'm using my smallest scraps for this. Anything that can't be cut into a 2-inch square is getting thrown in the trash. Scraps are taking over my sewing room, and this project is designed to get rid of a goodly portion of them. To complete the first row of blocks, I'll need 180 of these 2-inch pieces. Yesterday I cut 100 of them.

They actually go pretty fast, and so I expect I'll be able to cut the remaining 80 and then start sewing before the end of today.

But first...grocery shopping. I still have food to get through the week, but we are out of our favorite Dove sorbet bars. You have no idea what a disaster that is, and so grocery shopping is a must. Hopefully, I'll have some completed blocks to show you tomorrow.