August life

August is winding down and hopefully the summer is too.  It has been just too hot and humid for too long and I'm hoping some cooler weather will spark some new motivation in me.

The second week of August was marked by Obon which is a week where spirits are supposed to return to the family grave and families will welcome them at the beginning of the week with the scrubbing of the gravestones and with offerings of food and flowers.  Family members will gather for meals and visiting and praying at the familiy altars and after the local Buddhist priest visits and offers prayers, the spirit will be returned to the cemetery.  The usually deserted cemetery (at 6:00 AM when we go walking) had a traffic jam in the parking lot with extra staff directing traffic the first and last days of Obon.

On one of the relatively cooler days of Obon, Tetsu and I took advantage of our overgrown garden to have breakfast outdoors.  We have always enjoyed our weekend garden breakfasts but sadly these open-air mornings will be coming to an end as construction will begin on putting a road behind us and the destruction of Tetsu's garden will have to be done next month.  We've been expecting this change for months and that is why the garden became overgrown as Tetsu didn't see the point of keeping it up when we knew it was going to be torn down...

All this disappears in a few weeks...  

So sometime soon, a temporary protection fence will be put up along where the road is supposed to go and completion date for road and factory is sometime in the future two years from now...  We are trying to be philosophical about the changes... Who knows what wonderful thing will result in the river of life?

While we were eating breakfast, we enjoyed watching the little white flowers (that were behind me in the previous photo) wave and dance in the breeze.  Tetsu would love to move some of these plants that we've enjoyed to somewhere new but we actually own so little land that there probably isn't going to be much salvaged...

I made another little McKenna quilt to gift to a friend who helped me out by bringing back from America a lot of fabric that Leiya had purchased and sent to her parents home.  My friend was going back to the States for the summer and she offered to bring a package if Leiya could get it to her.

And look at this haul from Leiya!  When JoAnn's was going out of business she made a special trip to find fabrics for my next quilt that I'm planning to make for Taiga.  As soon as it gets cool enough upstairs I'm going to close myself up in my sewing room for a few weeks and get to work on a new quilt!  I'm so looking forward to it!

M-san finished the quilt that she was making from my 2 inch squares bin that was overflowing.  I think she had fun when making the flimsy but when she got to the machine quilting she messaged me quite upset that things were not going well for her.  The backing was wrinkling, she didn't like how the big quilting was turning out... she was getting very frustrated.  When she brought the quilt over I advised her to add more stitching to her big quilting and to not worry about the backing (she'd done so much that she did't want to rip it all out and start again) and to consider it a learning experience.  Next time maybe we'll tape the backing to the floor before trying to baste it, and we'll probably be more generous in our application of basting spray.

Really, the patchwork backing hides a lot of the wrinkles.

I had been working with 2 1/2 inch squares and did something completely different from M-san's!

So, the summer was going along normally with me nagging Tetsu not to do too much weed-whacking and outdoor work (he claimed washing the front porch in the heat was a cooling activity) and me going from painting to sewing binding, to tatting to both of us going to the pool.  AND THEN ON SATURDAY NIGHT....

...I managed to slice open my thumb with a vegetable slicer when making dinner!  I spent half an hour holding my thumb and pacing hoping to stop the dripping blood but alas, Tetsu had to take me to the emergency room to have three stitches put in.  That put a damper on painting, sewing, tatting, and swimming, not to mention cooking and washing up.

Tetsu has banned vegetable slicer use in our house.

Actually, I've discovered I can still draw and write if I hold my pen in an awkward way...  I thought I'd figured out how to tat with my bandaged thumb but became frustrated because there was no way for me to fix tatting mistakes without thumb use... Going to the pool or onsen has been forbidden for the next two weeks by doctor's orders.  I haven't even attempted sewing... and today's blogging is going slowly as my touch typing results in me hitting "N" instead of the "space bar" on my computer...  Tetsu is doing all the washing up and we've been eating out more than usual...

Staying positive!

Here's hoping that cool weather is just around the corner!