Calico Cottages

 Hello Everyone,

I've been working on Calico Cottages, my newest design.  Many thanks to 'anonymous' who came up with the perfect name for this quilt.

I got as far as putting one of the inner borders on the other night and this is as far as I got.  It is just a figment of my imagination until I nail this idea down.  I try to be different when I design a quilt, and this one floats my boat.  I only used fabrics from my Marcus Fabrics stash.  I had hundreds of 1" strips already cut and were begging to be sewn into a quilt.  Now I still have hundreds of 1" strips left because I kept cutting more and more!

On the home front, we are in Livermore staying with our eldest son and his family.  Mr. Joe has been having some health issues and we've been here a lot lately while he undergoes many tests.  He started having breathing issues with sever shortness of breath and chest pain.  He would walk up to the garage and have to sit down once he got there.

After two chest x-rays, and an MRI, his doctor put him on a round of antibiotics. The antibiotics treatment consisted of only 3 pills......they are very powerful, but the side effects were 5 pages in length.  By the 2nd pill he felt better until the side effects of tendon pain kicked in, and this could last for months.  I call it 'pain of the day' as the pain rotates from one tendon to another.  You know the old game of head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes.  Well Mr. Joe hurts in all of those areas except for his head.

Let's fast forward two months.  Shortness of breath is back with a vengeance. Tendon pain is escalating.  A bronchoscopy of his lungs suggests sarcoidosis which is an abnormal collection of inflammatory cells in his lungs.  But the verdict is still out on this diagnosis.  The good news is that there is NO cancer!

Yesterday he had an ultrasound of his heart, and all is well with that organ.  I was teasing him that he has a heart after all, and he's not the Grinch.  His heart isn't 2 sizes too small, in fact I think he is the most compassionate and kindhearted person I know, except when he's constantly teasing his sister-in-law, Gail.

Today he is having a pulmonary function test.  This should be interesting and will hopefully lead the doctors in the right direction of a diagnosis and then a specific treatment.

This is probably more information than you want to know, but it feels good to talk about what is going on and why I've been pretty quiet lately on my blog.  We didn't tell our kids for months what was going on with their dad, and now I don't think that was the right decision as they want to be involved in every step of his journey.

So, after the test today, we will head back up to the cabin and into a fierce snowstorm.  Hopefully we can get buttoned up inside the cabin before the worst of the storm hits.  We have snow shovels and boots in the car just in case we need to dig our way in.  We will put Mazey to work with the digging part.

Keep Mr. Joe in your prayers for a sound diagnosis and treatment.

Soon,

Lynn