Pay Me Now or Pay Me Later meets Irony

Ramona has a quilt show this coming week-end. Barbara Vanice, the local Gammill dealer at The Quilted Rose, will be loaning me one of her demo tables for my longarm quilting promotion booth at the quilt show. We did the same thing last year but my friend, Cheryl, and her husband (a truck-owner) were responsible for getting the table from San Diego to Ramona. No small feat, it is about 37 miles away and weighs a metric butt-ton.

Get in the time machine and go back in time to 2002: I decided to buy a comfortable SUV or truck when I moved to the country. My thinking was that since I have to cummute 100 miles a day, I'm not going to squeeze myself into some lawnmover propelled phonebooth. This was going to be my car so I got to choose. I took my husband and son (21 at the time) along for all that mechanical questioning stuff that I did not want to get involved in. As I stepped out of my car, I saw a shiny green Chevy Silverado club cab across the lot. It was love at first sight. I told my husband, "You can talk to the salesman and ask all those car-type questions but I am driving this truck home tonight." It was two years old. I'm too cheap to buy a new car. I loved that truck for 3 and a half years and loved it even more when I paid it off early.

Ok, back in the time machine and set it for February 2007: My son, a journeyman plumber doing construction plumbing, gets a new job. Carrying his tools of the trade around in his mustang was getting a bit tough, especially when their 2nd son was born. Car seats take up lots of room. I decided to give him my truck and buy myself a Chevy Trailblazer. He loves that truck.

Back in the time machine and go to a week ago: I called the rent-a-truck places and was astounded to learn that it was going to cost me $29 a day and 69 cents a mile to rent a truck to move that quilt demo table. Are you kidding me?
Here is the math: $29 X 4 = $120 and .69 X 100 = $69.00 So about $190 to rent a silly truck for the weekend. Hmmm, maybe I could borrow my son's (my) truck for the weekend.

Two days ago: We did the trade, my 2006 Trail Blazer for his (was mine) Silverado. We did this trade in the dark at his job-site at 5:45 a.m. As soon as I sat in it, I noticed that it felt lower than I remembered. After a block of driving it, I was car sick from bouncing around in a vehicle that needs shocks so badly. 3 kids (yes, he has a daughter now, too) are more important than shocks for his truck. Well, I agree with that. They are, afterall, my grandchildren. But back to my truck. I knew without looking that it would need gas so stopped to get gas. Some things never change no matter how much they grow up. Working construction frequently requires driving on unpaved job sites. Under the harsh lights at the gas station, I could see that my green beauty was dusty and dirty. So sad. The more I looked at the truck, the more reality set in. $190 to rent a truck was cheap compared to what it was going to cost me to replace those shocks ($770).

Here I was trying to save some money and ended up spending more. Pay me now or pay me later. The only good thing about it is that now they will be riding around in a more comfortable truck. And I also learned that I clearly still have issues about gift-giving.

Quilting Designs with Helen Squire

OK, I have to admit that I did not expect to get anything from this class going in. My guild, Friendship Quilters of San Diego usually schedules monthly workshops with our guest speakers on weekdays....when the rest of the planet, myself included, are working. So when I heard that the guild had booked a speaker workshop for a Sunday, I figured that since I am one of the biggest whiners about weekday workshops, I had better get to that workshop.

What a pleasant surprise. Helen Squire (of Ask Helen! fame) was a total hit with me. She has seen it all. For over 2 decades she responded to quilting questions as a columnist and went on to work for AQS and the American Quilter magazine. Besides being knowledgeable, she has some wonderful stories about quilting accidents that had me laughing out loud. Her CDs and books have hundreds of patterns and she showed us how to fold them to make new patterns. Great stuff.

We were encouraged to bring quilt tops to class so we could assess them. It was great to hear her experiences and view the quilts with a new set of eyes. "Look at the quilt and tell me what is most important?". It wasn't always the obvious answer.

An altogether educating and enjoyable class. Her newest book comes out during Houston Quilt Market next week and you can be sure that I will be buying Quilting UFOs with Helen.

Surf's Up Laguna Beach 15 feet !

When I was 17, I spent two exciting weeks one summer visiting my cousins who lived in Orange County, California. It was my first time seeing the ocean and it was amazing for this girl raised in west Texas to behold the Pacific. Wow. I still have fond memories of that trip. Besides the requisite trip to Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm, we drove to the beach. There was an old bearded hippie standing on Pacific Coast Highway waving at everybody. My cousin called him the Laguna Beach Greeter. You can get more history on the Greeter from this web-site.

http://www.beachcalifornia.com/beach/laguna-beach-greeter.html

In addition to getting the sunburn of my life on the cloudy beach, I fell in love with the California beach community. The laid back lifestyle, all those palm trees and all those baggy-shorted long-haired surfer boys were just the coolest thing in the world in my innocnet eyes. I couldn't wait to get back to dusty old Texas and regale them with stories of what I saw and my new motto "Surf's Up Laguna Beach - 15 feet". Well, decades later, I moved to California and renewed my love affair with California Beaches. I love all things "beachy".

So when this surfboards quilt landed in the local quilt shop, it was my prize to quilt. Desiree, a San Diego peace officer (yes, cop) made it for her husband, a surfer dude. There were 5 surfboards appliqued on with 4 different colors of water. The back was batik blues and greens with some yellow.

I quilted tranquil water, wavy water and it here and there frothy water. 6 differnent colors of thread for the water and the surfboards. I used Laguna panto (by Jodi Beamish) for the border, appropriate, don't you think? And for the corner pieces, I used a piece of a tropical leaf from the Rotorua panto by one of my favorite designers, Hermione Agee. I SID'd the border. All in all, way too much work for what I was going to get paid but I was happy with it. I hope Desiree and more importantly, her surfer-boy husband, likes it.