August 29, 2011 - Catching up on the Month - Part 2

So since JW has been so obsessed, I've fallen off the wagon and have been spending lots of hours quilting.  I had bought this Christmas Fairy Panel so decided to make a little wall hanging to decorate for the holidays.  They have made a number of fairy panels using the drawings of Cicely Mary Barker an artist from the early 1900's who was renowned for her illustrations of fairies and flowers.  Granted, I know it is too early in the year to be spending time quilting - that is for winter when the temperatures drop but since I have tons of fabric and nothing else to do with my time at the moment, I decided to sew up some of the things on my list.

I've made several baby quilts in the past 3 weeks plus a few more tops to turn into baby quilts.  I've also been hand quilting JM's kitten quilt so hope to get that to her a little later next month.  I got MS's to her last fall.

August 29, I had to run out to the Mail Trail branch of the post office.  We had a notice that the IRS had sent us a letter that we had to sign for - that was scary and I spent time over the weekend wondering what they could possibly want.  The Mail Trail branch is the farthest one away from us but it is the one that all of us out of town have to go to to pick up any packages.  There is always a long line and so you can pretty much count on a 20-30 minute wait.

After picking up the letters, I decided while I was so close, I'd drive through the airport and take a couple of pictures of the Aurora Borealis sculpture that is over the exit road.  When the sun is out, it changes colors at different points on the road.

Little pond near the airport

This is the sculpture as seen from a distance.  You can see in the reflection the pink color  - it was that color on the actual sculpture also but for some reason the camera didn't pick it up correctly.  I then drove over to go under the sculpture and at that point, the bottom third was green the middle third white and the top third was a lilac color.  No place to stop so I took a picture through the windshield.  It shows a little color but not as much as in person.

I have decided that I need to go back over with my camera on manual focus not automatic and see if the colors come out better.

From there, I decided to go to Creamer's field and see how the birds are doing.

The gathering of the birds has started as they prepare for their migration south.  The whole field is filled with geese and sand hill cranes.

Over the weekend, they had the annual sand hill crane festival - I had wanted to go but forgot until late Sunday afternoon.

On my way home, I decided to stop by LARS to see if the musk ox were out in the front pen.  The facility was closed for the day but there were a few musk ox out near the front.

This little bird was kind enough to pose on the fence for me before flying off with his friend.

Because of the double fencing around the whole place, all pictures had to be taken through the small holes of the outer fence which didn't make for extremely great pictures.

After leaving LARS, I ran into some construction on Ballaine Road about a mile and a half from the house.  They had traffic stopped as they were patching a small spot in the road.  Due to the permafrost in this area they have a lot of difficulty keeping the road up and this is the 2nd patching this summer.  They stopped me for about 10 minutes until 2 more cars were stopped behind me and then they stopped construction to let us through.

I got home in time to fix dinner.  As for the IRS letter, it's for 2009 taxes - one of our financial companies keeps telling the IRS that we have taken a distribution so the IRS thinks we owe taxes on it.  While instead, it is a rollover and we never touch the money so the good news is, we don't owe them anything .... at least not at this time.