Precipitation!

We had rain!  In Green Bay!  A whole inch of it with thunder and lightning too, at 4:30 AM anyway.  It's the first real rain we've had in June and I'm sure the whole yard around the house sat up and took notice.  Our grass is a lovely neutral shade of tan, except for a ring around the garden where the watering water slops over, but I don't believe in spending money to keep grass green when it's dry like some of the neighbors.  If I go outside after dark I hear sprinklers snicking around in a few directions.  Hell, if I water I'll have to mow.  Not this chicken.  Speaking of chicken, today's Photo A Day June theme is "something we don't know about you."  I wracked my brain last night after supper trying to think of what I haven't told you since I feel like I lay it all out on here every day, but right before I fell asleep I thought of it.  I'm afraid of stairs, all stairs, even the two steps to get from my door to the driveway, even the one step out the door and onto the patio makes me think, just for an instant, that I'm going to fall.  Every.  Time.  I don't even remember ever falling down stairs.  Oh, I've slipped or stumbled a few times, but I've never tumbled down, nothing to explain that irrational fear, but there you are.  I'm afraid of stairs, not up, only down.  I don't let that keep me from bopping down and up when I need yarn or to sew something or get something from the pantry shelves or toss the laundry around, but I invariably grip the railing hard at the top and I tend to lean on or grasp it all the way down, up too (but that's to help drag my fat ass up) but always down.  Always.  I actually spent an hour sitting outside on the patio in the shade yesterday doing nothing.  Not knitting (although I thought about coming in and getting it), not reading, I took my farro salad lunch out there, ate it, and just sat there watching for the hummingbird (only saw a Downy Woodpecker on the suet feeder) and enjoying the day.  For about an hour, then I couldn't stand it and came in and went downstairs to sew another quilt block, the first June one.  I got frustrated trimming my half-square triangle pieces so I zoomed to JoAnn's around 4 PM to get a 4.5" square, noticed how few cars there were in the lot, and walked in to find Skully with her daughter, Skully Jr., and Cookie standing right by the magazine rack in the front there talking.  I caught sight of them, Cookie saw me, and we started laughing; then the other two saw me and cracked up too.  It was totally unplanned serendipity.  We couldn't have done that if we'd planned it.  And I looked like I'd been dragged through a bush backwards, too.  Ah, well, c'est la vie.  They were all taking advantage of the sales on papercrafting supplies so they examined what each had in their basket and I moseyed back to the quilting aisle to get just my ruler thingy and NOTHING ELSE, and I had a coupon--shazam.  We all ended up in the checkout line at the same time.  They called in reinforcements to get the four of us out of the store tout suite.  Probably for the best.  I didn't get the second June block made last night like I thought I would but that's okay because it's a June one, this is June, so I'm essentially caught up.  Would you look at that?  On Friday I was working on the April blocks and now I'm almost finished with the June ones.  Zoom.

June 18--Leonardo da Vinci, Head of a Man in Profile Facing to the Left.  How could da Vinci keep all his ideas in his head, Juliana wondered as she studied the sketch of the man's profile, I'll bet it was buzzing like a beehive in his brain.  The displays had already shown his war machine drawings and his thoughts about flight.  He had so many interest, so many talents.  She admired da Vinci and his penchant for secrecy.  His most spectacular ideas and theories he wrote out in his notebooks but he wrote backwards so that no one could steal them.  Pretty clever.  Since most people couldn't read, it must have looked like code.

Bah.  My brain felt like oatmeal last night, and not with blueberries and walnuts on it like in the new Mickey D's commercial.  (Don't you love that old lady?  "In my day oatmeal had only two ingredients--oat and meal."  Perfect.)  It's a lovely dark and rainy day today.  We need it.  Too bad it's supposed to hit 90 too.  Ah well, can't have everything.  See ya!
--Barbara