Busy days

Saturday, we drove to the Amish farm in Indiana where we usually stop on our way to French Lick. Wilma, the young wife, is going to do the quilting on a quilt top that Grandma pieced together; I would guess it's maybe 80 or 90 years old. To keep her from having to use their money to buy supplies, we took her enough to buy the batting, backing, thread, and anything else she'll need. The road leading up to their house and barns crosses a small stream of water. As I started to drive across, Jerry pointed and said, "Look there!" I was glad he did because I hadn't seen their two boys, around 4 and 5 years old, sitting on the bridge, stacks of rocks piled up next to them. I stopped and asked if they were throwing them into the water and they nodded yes. Of course they had also nodded when I asked if they were fishing. The children don't speak English so they're agreeable about any question you ask them. (It's great their mother and father feels safe enough to let them roam away from the house like that.) A few minutes later, a teen-aged Amish boy gave the two little ones a ride back home in a horse drawn cart! They got another ride when I pulled them around in a red wagon, all three piled in at once.

Yesterday was the unusual, never-before flash flood. It rained over 6 inches in about an hour. With no place for the water to go, it made its own place -- into the basements of many houses, including the main public library and University of Louisville. No estimates have been announced about how much it will cost but it's going to be a doozy. In less than one year, Louisville has experienced:
1. a hurricane last fall (a hurricane in the center of the United States?? YES!)
2. destructive ice storm after which it took months and months to clean up all the broken tree limbs and other debris
3. the flash flood. Weather conditions oddly combined so that the rain storm stalled over Louisville and dropped all the water on our city, water that should have been spread across the state.
This has been a rough year for Louisville.

Today, Nancy, Susan, and I went to Nancy's next door neighbor, Dawn's, house for a demonstration of her embroidery sewing machine. It's amazing. She uses her computer to figure out a design, sends the design to the computer in the machine, selects colors of threads to use, loads the threads, then gives the "go ahead" signal to the machine, then sits back and just watches it do the work. She had set it up to do 4 initials, one for each of the 3 of us and the other for Carole, Nancy's sister who couldn't make it today. While the machine was doing its work, we ate a delicious lunch Dawn had prepared then sat at the table and discussed health care, pregnant daughters-in-law, the car show, Socialism ...the most intense being Obama's proposed health care plan. The machine (or program) messed up but Dawn said she'd do them correctly later and send them to us. She had also done dish towels with embroidered designs, one for each of us!! Generous lady.