Quick Update

I am alive. We've had two nights of tornado warnings, last Wednesday night and again Sunday evening. We slept in the basement Wednesday night. Thankfully I hadn't taken care of the Murphy bed yet, so my son and I crashed there and my husband sacked out in his recliner.

My immediate area was spared from storms and damage. There was an EF-2 tornado that went through the Morgan-Monroe Forest. It passed over the highway. We drove by it Friday on the way to my daughter's. In my photos it doesn't look like much, but in real life the damage to the trees was astonishing. Amazingly, there was only one injury reported from this storm, which had a debris ball 2.5 miles wide on the radar. 


After Sunday evening's warnings were done, something in my window caught my eye as I walked into my room. I stood on the bed and found a large walnut tree growing right against the house. 😡 This isn't unheard of; the squirrels stash their nuts everywhere you don't want them. I'm wondering how long this tree has been growing in order to get this tall. 


Oh look, here is that same sneaky tree, hiding behind the hydrangea.
The hydrangea is about six feet tall.

Meanwhile, we've been treating Poppy the chicken's eye injury (we think this was from Peanut pecking at her) with Terramycin and the leftover antibiotic from when Beaker was ill. The swelling has gone down tremendously. My husband tells me he thinks her actual eye is gone. :( She's eating and drinking well, so we'll just have to wait and see. Peanut's back to feeling broody again and it's worked out well because with Peanut staying inside, the roosters are fine with the other three hens. Who knew there would be so much drama with chickens?

Moving over to sewing, which I suppose is what most people want to hear about, I was able to custom-quilt my Beach Bumz quilt. You can scroll back one post to read more details about it.

I'm half way done with the binding on Magnificent Mystery. I haven't been able to work on it much because all the custom quilting, machine binding, and ripping I've been doing have left me with a lot of pain in my shoulder and wrist. 

Besides my own quilting, I've quilted Echoed Curves on Ann L.'s quilt. I also attached the binding to the front. 

I repaired my oops on her other quilt and finished the quilting (Jungle Party). Again, I added the binding to the front. 

I quilted Cassava on the final of her quilts. 

I didn't take pictures of all five bindings, but I did complete them all. They are all ready to go and I will be able to send out an invoice after two weeks of not bringing in any money. 🎉

I quilted Diagonal Plaid Bias on Ann K.'s quilt. I have five of her quilts here right now. I have one fully bound and still need to do the remaining four. 

I quilted Lovely Loops on Sara's quilt. It's really hard to see in my picture, but it looks really good. Lovely Loops is one of my favorites.

I quilted Lei on Mike's first quilt. This one is interesting because he brought me a rubberized upholstery fabric for the backing and binding. I had done a small sample a while ago to make sure I could quilt it. There's no room for error since the holes won't heal. I hadn't considered that I can't use any pins on it. That was kind of interesting.

Out in the yard, I've found a few more day lilies blossoming in their new locations.

The deer don't like the lamb's ear, so I think that is helping protect these next ones.

The bee balm looks really good right now too.

The wildflowers along the property edge look good. 

My husband has been picking all the wild raspberries/blackberries around our yard and he found this plant just off the edge of our property. It's a native Jewelweed, part of the impatiens family. The internet says that if you touch the flower it will spray seeds everywhere. This is the first time we've ever noticed/seen it and it's quite a large patch.


I'll be back next Wednesday with the July OMG link up and Thursday will be my PHD report.

Jumping up onto my soap box now. You can stop reading here if you'd like. 

So...I really dislike AI. I think it has some okay purposes, particularly in the medical research field, but mostly not at the consumer level. However, I suppose when I am using Google Lens to identify a plant, or using Merlin to analyze bird song, that is AI. I know that AI can hallucinate and is often flat-out wrong. Merlin can't tell when a mockingbird is creating other birds' songs even when I can see with my own eyes that there is only a mockingbird nearby. Other than identifying birds and plants, I just do not use it. I feel guilty every time I use it to identify a plant or bird. It annoys me that I can't turn off AI results in search engines. Why aren't the tech bros letting us have a choice? The environmental cost of AI is just astronomical. 

It particularly irritates me when businesses are using it to create images, newsletters, captions, etc. Mostly I just quietly unfollow, but there is one business that's been around for years and years that has recently started sending out multiple emails per day that are full of AI content--they have even been using AI-generated, generic thread images instead of the actual products. Why??? I complained and they were polite, but just said sorry you feel that way. 

It is also annoying that bad actors are stealing others' patterns/images/artwork and creating bastardized versions to sell to an ignorant public. I am shocked at how often people on social media crafting groups cannot tell that an image they have shared is AI-generated. They can't figure out why a pattern they have purchased cannot actually be made as pictured. There are a surprising amount of fake recipe websites too. I see many people who can't figure out that sensational "news stories" or "anonymous" social media comments are AI-generated. All those creepy men followers? AI bots. 

A lady I quilt for is a professor and she says most papers that are submitted to her now are fully AI-generated. At the college level. Where people are paying money to learn a specialized field of their choosing. Ugh. When does it stop? Why are people giving up their voice, their brain power, their clean environment? I keep thinking of the beginning of Wall-E. Or some of the old movies where the robots take over humanity. 

Of course, I can only control my own behavior. That particular store just really was my breaking point this week. And my aunt shared a video of the horrendous noise generated by a data center near her right after that. I just don't see how this can be compatible with life for any significant length of time. 

If you've actually made it all the way down here, kudos. I know it's hard to read tone and maybe I often sound really depressed or whatever. Writing about some of things I'm concerned about helps me process them. In real life I am generally a very sarcastic and fairly quick-witted gen-Xer. I do try to find the humor in most situations, but dang, things are just so heavy right now. Here is something I found funny. I was watching the news report of the USA Water Polo and paused it to take a photo of my nephew. I just realized that there's a random hand in the background that looks like Thing from the Addams Family. 😂

1 comment

  1. Thinking the same. AI is most annoying. Doesn't anyone think about the fact that "artificial" means not true. The perception, knowledge, and experience of what is "real" is slowly disappearing as something that matters.

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