Item: 1 windmill pattern quilt

The quilt is not finished yet, so maybe the correct term would be quilt-in-progress.  I'm embarrassed to say how long I've been working on it.  I think I started it in 1990.  But then, sometimes it's gone untouched for years at a time, and every stitch that's gone into it so far has been by hand.

Quilting is an old-fashioned pastime -- it's hard to imagine a young person of today engaging in such a low-intensity activity.  In fact, there is a lot of creativity to it--but mostly at the beginning, when you're picking the patterns and materials.  After that it's just repetition, but it starts to take shape and I expect there is a satisfaction in having produced something that's both beautiful and useful.  Not to mention that, if I were a pioneer woman, say, living out on the frontier in a cabin heated only via firewood, it would be only logical to take up a craft which basically requires covering yourself with a blanket.

I was at the beach yesterday and experienced a complete sequence of weather patterns in about 15 minutes.  The sequence goes something like this.  I'm about a third of the distance back to the car when:

1. it starts to rain,
2. it starts to rain harder,
3. I resign myself to getting soaked,
4. the wind picks up,
5. the wind is blowing the rain basically sideways into my left ear,
6. the raindrops start to feel pretty hard,
7. I notice the raindrops are in fact pellets of ice,
8. there's nothing I can do but keep walking,
9. the hail turns back to rain,
10. the rain tapers off,
11. the wind picks up again big-time, and
12. I'm dry again by the time I get back to the car.

All in all, it was a mostly agreeable weekend, finishing off with a lovely dinner party tonight.  And I did do some writing in my journal, plus discovering Zankou Chicken, an ultra yummy and cheap LA establishment which I'm sure I will be going back to.