A brief return to quilting

For those who may think that I simply skip from project to experiment to project, I present this as evidence that I do so finish (some) things! Granted, the First Grandkid is already three months old, but I know of some grandchildren who were in kindergarten before their crib quilts are finished. It's not a very demanding design, but it's to the Organizer's specs: she said his room theme was going to be elephants, and elephants he got; red and gold ones galumphing all over the quilt. (You can't tell from the picture, but the red pieces actually have gold elephants printed on them.)

Fortunately she didn't add the information that his room theme was going to be grey and ecru elephants. At least this doesn't clash with them, and I explained to her that most of the elephants I'd seen up close and personal were in Tsavo National Park, which has red soil and little rain, so they actually were red - well, covered in red dust. They blended quite well with the landscaps. A little too well. The road from Mombasa to Nairobi was, after you got into the uplands, well over two hundred miles of dead-straight two-lane and it was dangerously easy to get into a sort of driving trance in which you assumed a red elephant in the road ahead was a piece of the distant horizon until you were much too close to him. At which point one would turn off the engine and sit very quietly and politely in the car until the elephant decided to move.(As a matter of principle, I never honk at anything that outweighs me by more than two tons.)

Ah well, that was 40 years ago. I wonder if they've kept that road low-profile and easy to cross in the interests of the wildlife, or if it's been turned into a freeway with fences and occasional bridges over Designated Animal Crossings?

Birth, death, and something in between

It's been that kind of two weeks. I lost a beloved cousin, but gained a grandson; and me, I've been having the kind of pain that probably means one of my degenerate vertebrae has crumbled further. I hope there'll be a way to fix that, but at the moment all I've got is the kind of pain medication that turns me into something like a potted plant. With careful timing I get to use my brain long enough to do errands in the morning and to fix dinner in the evening; the rest of the time I just lay around admiring the latest baby photos and languidly waving my fronds. Fortunately the Organizer keeps a steady stream of pictures. In this one he's scooched up on the little bitty baby quilt I finished just before he was born. The crib quilt...eh, I'm about halfway throughstitching the binding on it. Isn't it strange how even a small quilt turns out to be about six miles around when you get to the binding stage?