Have you Tinkled Today?

The rain cleared up for a few hours yesterday morning, and Jim hooked up the auger to the tractor and dug the holes for the eleven cypress trees, and got them all planted. He ended up putting them alongside the road over on the side area where the shop will go. They’re supposed to be very fast growing trees and will offer us more privacy.

It was a great day to plant, as it rained for hours later on, giving the trees a good soaking. I would have held off until Fall to plant them, but Jim wanted to get them in the ground. I’ll likely have to water them the rest of the summer though.

Later on he installed the iron cafe rods I got for the downstairs windows. Love the rods, not so sure about recycling my old lace panels on them though. I’ll have to play around with that and see what the treatments need to be. Lace panels… don’t think that’s going to work. I have 50 yards of white muslin that would make wonderful panels… but I’m going to have to wait for inspiration, it’s not coming to me at the moment.

We had a very boring dinner as I forgot all about taking something out yesterday, I ended up pressure cooking a cup of red beans that I had soaking for something else, and having them over rice. No veggie, no bread, no dessert.

While pinto beans are my absolute favorite, small red or black beans are also really good on rice. I pressure cook mine with onions, garlic, a couple of bay leaves, either Tabasco sauce or preferable whatever peppers I have fresh (diced), some herbs (oregano, thyme) and 3 cups of water (I like them a bit soupy if serving over rice, otherwise 2 cups is plenty).

Pintos are also wonderful if you pressure cook them, then drain and simmer them in ale or lager, with some bacon and onion and peppers.

Click for larger viewBernina finally put out a patch to make My Label compatible with Vista, woohoo! I already had it running on my iMac, but that resolved the graphical issues with the icons not displaying right. However, my 3D model continues to display all in gray (which is okay, it still works, it’s just colorless) but I’m sure that would be because when running in a virtual machine, the actual video card drivers aren’t used, just a generic Windows driver is initialized instead. Hopefully, when VMware Fusion 2.0 comes out soon, that will go away as I believe 3D support will be enabled in it. That’s the single flaw I’ve found yet in any of my sewing software installed in the Virtual Machine on my iMac.

I’m slowly working my way through the Summer Wine corner block. I will finish this one, and it will be either my chair back or a pillow cover, but this type of detailed applique work is NOT for me! I’ll happily line up and split large embroidery designs, and rehoop them all day long, but cutting around a gazillion teensy pieces of fabric… nope, not going to happen. I will not be making the quilt. LOL