Along for the ride

It's been eons since a road trip with my sister. Today I packed up the towels for delivery for Bonnie's studio open house, and opened my phone to maps to put in the address of the studio. Instead, I called my sister. She said she would "just eat this sandwich and jump in your car."

First, my driving. I go where I'm told. I have no sense of direction, I have not knowledge of where things are in relation to others. And yes, I drove twelve or fifteen thousand miles a year to art shows, and never was late, in twenty years. Including the pit stop for a new radiator, on the way to the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Occasionally Jan said stay in this lane, or move over a lane. Then she said "exit here," on US224. I sprung to attention. "But the map program had me on 71!"

"Aren't we going to Seville?" she asked. I affirmed. Maphead (as I've called her for fifty years), said "well, then, we'll take 224." Don't ask me about the time she took a farm road between fields to reach a camp ground in Pennsylvania, "because this is the way we came ten years ago." She still was in her twenties, at the time.

She spent the trip down telling me about her difficulty in finding the repair man, among the several who maintain her quilting machine, who would focus in on the part she knew was the problem. One replaced everything in the thread path, one re-timed the machine to an inch of its life, one did I don't remember what. 

Yesterday, in desperation, she called Jerry, who maintained our machines back in the weaving days. She found him in and took the sewing head up to him in Cleveland. She had to wait an hour, and would have waited several. 

When he finished the problem he'd come into the shop for, and started on hers, he undid all the previous fixes, then announced the basket needed replaced.  "That's what I've told them!" Jan announced, relieved.  The basket is the part of any sewing machine that houses the bobbin. She knows how the machines work.

Already today she has been in her studio and quilted a small quilt, just to see that once again her machine quilts perfectly.

And on the way home we talked about my 'burning desire" (family joke) to open a web site to sell towels. An interesting desire, these days when I have no wholesale accounts for supplies and little hope of securing them. But, you never know. Our last business began as an acorn, too.

My plan is to contact my old computer guru and run my plan past him. I've researched several web site hosts; I wonder if he will think I have found the best of them.

Photo opportunities these last several years have been botched by my stays in rehab facilities. So today I detoured after dropping Jan back home, to see what is left.

Here is the interlaced arch over Truxell. I am way too late this year.

Here is an oak, a little further along the road, and not yet bare. And here is the outcome of my plan to overwinter a mandevilla, or three:

I do not have enough windows suitable for situating any mandevilla. My helpers reminded me mandevilla and cat do not mix. I briefly consulted my phone, and learned the two emerging and half frozen Gerbera daisy buds would not harm my cat. That is fortunate, because as leaves turn crisp and can be broken away, Toby does.