Last night Tom treated to me to a dinner filled with some of my favorites:: bacon wrapped scallops, stuffed peppers and tuna steak.

The stuffed peppers were a complete surprise. Tom dislikes peppers, both cooked and raw. For my part, putting them in any dish only makes that dish better. When we were first married I tried to get him to eat stuffed peppers, but he would only eat the filling – so I gave up making them. Even he was impressed with these. I think its the addition of red peppers instead of green. The red have a sweeter flavor and not the bite of a green pepper. Now I can add this dish to our menu.

He was having such a good time putting this meal together that I couldn’t resist pulling out my camera to record it.

This afternoon we headed to Material Rewards Quilt Shop in Dansvlle, NY. I can’t imagine being in the area and not visiting. I did a bit of damage but had a great time talking with the staff and ‘browsing’. They were working on Kid Comfort Quilts. We talked about being able to use some of our talents to somewhat help ease the burden of military families.

Tonight we are going to the Glen Iris Inn here at the park for dinner. Can’t imagine tonight’s meal topping last night’s!

There's always time to quilt!

First camping trip of the 2010 Season!

Tom surprised me with a trip to Letchworth State Park (southwest of Rochester NY) this week. Normally we begin the camping season at the park on my birthday. This year Kim Einmo gave a workshop and lecture to our guild on the 18^th.  I couldn’t think of a better way to spend my birthday than quilting. So I decided to forgo our annual trip.

Luckily for me, Tom decided that it would be a good idea to delay the trip by a day and to do all the camping preparations (from planning the meals to packing up the camper) himself. The best part – he decided that he would be chief cook and bottle washer for the entire trip. What a treat – I didn’t even have to plan the meals or go shopping.

He wanted to surprise me and have everything ready to go on Wednesday morning, so we didn’t do our normal maintenance checkup before putting the camper on the road.

First mishap – we couldn’t get the hot water heater to work.  OK- we’re camping and ‘roughing it’ so we heated water on the stove for last night’s dinner dishes and decided to use the park showers this morning. Not my favorite thing to do, but you have to do what you have to do.

What a shock when we discovered that the temperature of the water in the public showers was less than tepid.  Just our luck that that they were having hot water problems in that particular bath house also. Murphy’s law I guess.

I was certainly not a happy camper!

Luckily the problem was easily fixed when Tom called our RV mechanic who,  immediately asked, “Did you remember to disengage the water-bypass after flushing out the water lines? (I guess this must be a common oversight by many campers.)

Hooray we now have hot water!  Life is good.

Secondly we discovered we had lost most out of fresh water. So Tom had to crawl under the camper and tighten some of the line connectors. It looks as though we’re all set for now. Thankfully.

So here we are just relaxing and enjoying our get-away. And what better was to enjoy ourselves than doing what we both like the most – quilting for me and photography for Tom. He decided to make a video to put on his blog and I’m working on my Celtic applique. One of the new techniques I learned with this project was to miter the right angle corners when appliqueing the bias strips.  (The technique is also used when sewing the mitered corners of a quilt’s binding).

There’s nothing like quilting while RVing.

There's always time to quilt!

We woke up to a blanket of white this past Mother’s Day.  While our average snow fall in Central New York is normally around 120″, it normally doesn’t  snow after April.  Well Sunday proved to be the exception to the rule.  The last time that I remember a snowfall this late was 14 years ago.  My grandson, who was then 4 at the time, had spent the night before Mother’s Day with us.  He took one look at the snow through our sliding glass door and complained, “It’s not supposed to be snowing now!”

The snow this year was nasty because not only was it a heavy wet snow, but it was accompanied by a heavy, cold wind.  Not pleasant!  To top it off, Tom and I had been asked to display his nature pictures at Baltimore Woods, a not-for-profit organization “promoting environmental awareness, understanding, and responsible natural resource stewardship among all people, especially children.”

On the positive side we were able to set up the nature pictures in a barn (protecting us from the rain and snow but, as is the norm for a barn, it was cold and let every gust of wind that blew through it.   I was tempted to do some jumping jacks – but figured the ‘show’ would turn everyone away.  The snow is gone now – it’s still cold – but as we in this area know ‘If you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes – it’ll change!

There's always time to quilt!