February at the Farm

Spent last week in Ohio, combining work, the CWRU board of trustees meeting and a holiday weekend. Some highlights:

Laura, Helen and I visited the annual juried Quilt Show at the Lake Farmpark down the road. What a fantastic show this is, with an extraordinary array of quilts from traditional to very modern - many machine-pieced and/or quilted, but also quite a number that were pieced and/or quilted by hand. There must have been at least a hundred quilts there, mostly from northeastern Ohio. Here were some of our favorites - here's Helen standing in front of her favorite, a blue and violet one that looked like the sea. It always awes me to see the details of a wonderful piece of quilting - I tend to go more for the traditional quilts, and there were many fabulous ones. Look at the beautiful quilting and applique on this simple basket square quilt. Laura's favorite was this incredibly colorful 'mountain landscape' with a riotous field of sunflowers - my photo doesn't do it justice.

Other than quilts, it was Chinese New Year and on Saturday we all went down to Cleveland's 'Asiatown' for dim sum and then visited an Asian grocery with ducks hanging up in the deli, buckets of live critters (crabs, in this case), candy the flavor of vegetables, and other exotic delicacies. Laura bought a bag of durian-flavored candy - against my recommendations - and it was dreadfully stinky! Jack practiced his Chinese (in my day, they taught first-graders French, but now its Chinese!) with the waitress and of course was a hit.

Finally got myself a pair of cross-country skis and so here are some pix of the farm in winter, taken during my first outing. Paul waxed the skis for me, gave me a quick lesson, then sent me off saying, "If you're not back in an hour, Whiskey and I will come looking for you!" Of course then I promptly fell down and thrashed around in the snow for awhile trying to get up - not inspiring in Paul much confidence in my abilities, I'm afraid! Falling down is not fun - not just because it hurts (it really doesn't, so much), but because it's hellish hard to get up without twisting your ankles and hips in directions they simply don't want to go. You can't know what its like until you try to stand up from a prone position with six-foot long boards firmly attached to your feet. But it is glorious to be outdoors with fresh, undisturbed snow, getting some exercise and just being in nature.

On Sunday, the whole family went off to Chapin Forest, where they have groomed trails for cross-country skiing. The packed snow makes it faster to ski on - not so good for moi, as I have a little trouble stopping. Jack has perfected a squatting technique when he goes downhill, where he's almost sitting on his skis and then drags his butt a little when he wants to slow down. No way am I doing that! I get up a head of steam and when its too fast, I fall down. By the end of the trip I was starting to get the hang of a snowplow, but I am still that odd one who prefers to ski UPHILL rather than down! Now I am thinking about knitting for skiing - having observed my bro's taste in knitting hats has inspired me to add one of those 'ear flap' hats to my project list!!