Halloween Bike Ride!

For the last couple of years we have always done a Halloween Bike Ride.  So since I am back working on my riding muscles again, we headed out and rode about 5 miles!  Knee is getting better and better!

An I had on my orange Halloween Spider Web shirt!

I love the colors in the fields at this time of the year.  We have these yellow flowers on the road out the back of  our subdivision but by the time i got the camera together on the road out the parish had done its semi-annual bush hogging down that road and destroyed them.  But there were some left in the fields off the main road.  It is nice that the sidewalks got put in when they widened the road!

Just found what the yellow flowers are!  Yellow Leafcups.  they are a member of the Aster family, I would have given odds it was a sunflower type!   See it here Yellow Wildflowers

I can see several quilts from this group of photos!  See which ones you like best!

Cat tails in the sun

This is my favorite

Cat tails and yellow flowers

cat tails in the wind

Flower and barbed wire

Cat Tails

Great color in the field

Golden Rod

Tallow Tree Color

Yellow flowers close

Fence row

10.8 Miles

We rode yesterday on some trails in town.  The weather has been cool lately, dipping into the 50's the last two nights.  And the humidity has been in the 30's.  That may seem high to many of you lucky people, but here the humidity sits at 70-100 on any given day.  When we get a 30's day the sky is blue blue blue and clear clear clear.

When you run through the shade it actually feels cool!  And your sweat evaporates like it is supposed to do and cools you off.  Most days you just walk around covered in a fine layer of sweat.







The trees are so green and the water in the lakes looks so inviting.

But when we got back to Dan's for pizza, wine and chocolate ice cream, the pool was the first place we headed.

Bike Riding Blues

Today was not just a great day.....it was an AWESOME day to be on bikes and with friends!

Searching for something?

I am going to break this up into several posts because the pictures are so fabulously full of color and fun.

My lens seems not
to be opening, hmm

We started out as we start out many of our rides, at the State Capitol Building Downtown.  We rode around looking at the incredible views of the lake and the flowers and the area surrounding the Capitol Building where Huey P. Long (Uncle Huey) is buried.  I must say, he does live in a beautiful place now!

Then we headed downtown to North Blvd, where we have the Mystic Krewe of Mutts Parade actually, and listened to some jazzy Jazz.  There were two stages set up and the performers alternated between the two so the spectators had to move between them about 50 feet.  We had a place backstage and had a bird's eye view of everything, shade and all.  The temps were perfect, warm in the sun and breezy wonderful in the shade.  We did stop for a sugar free snowball and it was soooo good!

Johnny Winters is playing right now, but Frank and I didn't stay, we had dogs to attend to.  Dan and Amber did stay to hear him play.  I guess they ate the festival food for dinner: hot cajun sausage, grillades, cotton candy, Boudreaux's Daquaris and gumbo with potato salad dolloped in it.  Can't get more Cajun Blues than that!

When we hit the Mississippi River Structure we saw the water was really dramatically low if you think about the flood.  I will do a comparison in a later post, I took some specific pictures for that.  Here we are all together, I made them take a group shot, even though some of them did not want to.  Yes, it was the pretty one.  You can see me, I have the  red helmet hair!  And the totally gorgeous skinny body that looks like it belongs to someone else!

This is a great picture of the Old State Capitol.  It used to be closer to the Mississippi but the river has changed course a bit and now it just sits on what appears to be a hill overlooking the river.  It is stately and functions as a really great interactive history museum.

I love my camera, it does panoramic shots.  And here are some nearly 360 degree panos of Baton Rouge skyline and the Mississippi River.  We were standing on the River Boat Structure out in the river.  What you see there is the USS Kidd from WWII.

I sure hope your day was a beautiful as mine!  

Biking in the Neighborhood with Tiny Tiny Trees

Lake side of weir

River side of weir

The first bike ride of the year with the group of biker friends.  Sounds like we are motorcycle tough guys, huh?  LOL.  We are actually only bicycle tough guys!  The ride took us through White Oak and over one of the lakes outside the area.  There is a weir connecting the lake with the Amite River.  The weir controls the lake level and thus keeps the beautiful houses from flooding.  We have to cross the weir over a neat wooden bridge.  This is the first time in several years that I have seen the water so high.  I am going to try to find an older drier picture to compare.

We biked 11.8 miles in about 2 hours with a really stiff headwind!





Then we treated ourselves to lunch at Magoo's.  Magoo's is the new favorite of the guys particularly because they have Hot Dogs done 5 ways.

This is my dinner


This is Frank's dinner (Hot Dog with bun under a ton of french fries covered with chili and cheese.



I wanted his, but ate only mine!

Then yesterday afternoon I was letting my muscles recover and I cut out another quilt called The Neighborhood from the vast amount of scraps I have stored in various places around the house.  And today I cut out Tiny Tiny Trees to shade the Tiny Tiny Houses!

Sashing blocks notwithstanding, I have several options to lay out the trees.  They can be interspersed amongst the houses and offer them some shady respite from the sunny days.

Or they can be used as a border around the entire quilt or even just blocks of houses within the quilt.   I only have two made so it is difficult to see, you just have to imagine.

Inventing the Tiny Tiny Trees for the Tiny Tiny Houses was a work in frustration.  I tend to design my own stuff, which means I have to invent it from scratch rather than letting someone else work out the bugs.  Some of my bugs were small but some were big.  Like I had the method of cutting 30 degree trees down, got a phone call, and got lost in the methodology!  And I sewed the test tree patch on backwards to the foundation paper.  And when I sewed the sky sides on the tree one time, I sewed both of them in one patch and searched and searched for the other one in frustration.  I made a replacement, and found the original when I went to sew that new one on.  Sigh.........

house block pieces

These are some of the fabrics I used for The Neighborhood quilt.  It is a 20 block quilt, 10 different houses and 10 off blocks that connect the houses like roads and gardens.  Each house is a unique combination of 16 patches that change in color and position.  Well, you will just have to see it when I get the blocks working.  Each block is clipped together with its components since there is no way I could ever get the right piece

garden blocks pieces

 back to the right block.  I had to draw complicated diagrams and use mathematical algorithms to figure out how many of what went where.


You can see my drawings over here. I was quite pleased with the way I worked each block out.  They will be fairly simple to put together, so I will do them at retreat.

I have a number of quilts to get quilted so I am thinking to spend the rest of the week on doing that.

Maybe.  Maybe not.

glen

Biking, beets and just being Dantastic!

I am still looking for a good mystery quilt for the guild this coming year. If you have any ideas for me, let me know. If I have to pay for one, that is fine, I have done that before.  I need one that will take us out 9 or 10 months.  I am considering a paper pieced beauty, but am still want to look at traditional options.

Because the threat of rain was fairly high for Sunday, we hit the bike trails on Saturday. 

We headed to the Farmer's Market to pick up some beets. Those beets I got last week were so good I wanted more. I told the Farmer how good they were and he doubled my batch! I got 4 batches of beets for $4.00. Can't BEET that with a stick! LOL. (Don't you just love veggie humor?)  See the beets sticking out of his bike pack.  I also got some sweet sweet Meyer Lemons.

At the Arsenal Museum we rode up the steep embankment that holds the cannon that overlook the Capitol Lakes.  The Lakes reflect the Capitol Building and provide lots of trains and park space.

Here are Frank and I sitting on a cannon.  

 There were lots of families taking pictures for their Christmas Cards.  We rode by one woman breastfeeding an infant on a bench and the boys were all like.....did you see that?  We have all been married for a thousand years, you would have thought they would have seen that before, huh?  It still knocked Dan over the embankment!

We headed back to the State Capitol Building again but this time BEET a path toward the Governor's Mansion for a quick wave to Bobby Jindal.  He must have been BEET and sleeping in because we did not see a soul!

We rode past the Dept of Environmental Quality Labs into the Industrial Section behind the Mansion.  It was quite interesting, not a person was around on a Saturday.  We did see a couple of police cruisers on their BEETS through the area just making sure everything was fine so we didn't feel so alone. 

We wanted to eat at Capitol Grocery in Spanish Town but they were not serving food on the weekends.  See the sad flamingos?  They are the symbol of the Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade.  We headed toward Chelsea's instead.

At Chelsea's we literally ate under the overpass.  That is the front door you see there.  The food was incredible and we decided to head back there via the golf course trail next week and get the food we didn't order this time. Dan said the place was Dan-tastic.  We all agreed, but Amber gave him the evil eye.  What can we not say?, she asked.  Dan-tastic, he replied.  But it really was Dan-tastic!

Then on to Carrie's house to make biscotti for her office.  I also brought the makings of almond bark.  We made Chocolate Almond Biscotti,  Chocolate Cherry Almond Biscotti and Almond and Orange Biscotti.  My favorite was the Chocolate Almond but the Chocolate Cherry was superb.  The two long loafs are the Chocolate Cherry ones waiting for their second baking.  i still have three more I want to make for this year.

The boys watched LSU end their season's play without a single loss by BEETING the Georgia Bulldogs.  LSU fans are so fickle, they love winners and hate losers.  When the LSU season is 11 and 1 they want to fire the coach for losing that one game. 

glen