How the Trees Fared

Hurricane Ian hit us with winds of 60-75 mph according to the estimates I've seen, and we did have some damage to our old oak tree. Our new trees, however, did surprisingly well. Here's our orange tree, which we almost lost to frost last winter. It didn't produce any fruit this year, but it didn't lose any branches during the storm, and it's starting to show new growth.

Our lemon tree also survived the hurricane intact, if a bit wind-blown.

We removed nearly all the blooms when it flowered, but left a couple intact to see what would happen, and now we have a few baby lemons growing.

One thing I felt bad about with Hurricane Ian was our grapefruit tree, which was loaded up with fruit that won't be ripe for a few more months. I even predicted to my guy that we would lose them all to the storm.

Very startled and super happy that I was wrong -- we didn't lose a single grapefruit.

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Old Loves & Such

My guy kindly bought me my favorite Chinese take out the other night, and my fortune cookie offered up an interesting story starter: This sounds sweet, right? Only the first thing I thought of was an old love coming back from the dead . . . . must be October. In other lovely news, my favorite hand-dyed thread artist, Lorraine from Colour Complements , is moving her business from Etsy to her own web site. Many of my favorite sellers on Etsy are leaving due to the whole "free shipping" coercion debacle, which has also soured me on the site. To show support I did a little shopping at Lorraine's web site and got in these: I love her threads and trims; you simply can't buy anything like them anywhere. Her work makes my specialty thread box look like a treasure chest: At night I'm spending just as hour working on quilting the scrap project runner, and I'm making slow progress: I'll keep quilting the runner while I try to decide on a design for t...

Progress

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Love Means This

Invested in a couple of hand-dyed bundles from one of my favorite fabric artists. This one said "Make me into something for Valentine's Day." So I went for a quilted and embellished tote. I kept thinking about what love means to me as I worked on it. Here's the finished tote. Although I was tempted to embellish with beads and pins, I got sick and only felt well enough to do a little stitching every night. As I worked I thought about how often love seems disappointing to us, especially when it fails to live up to our expectations. But now that I've experienced love in many forms, I can say that it's made me a better person than I might have been without it. Love is a precious thing, and should be appreciated in all its forms. I am very grateful for the love of my guy, my child and my friends who have stuck with me all these years. That's you two, in case you're wondering. :) Also finally found something to do with a ve...

Valerean

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