Quilter/Blogger Triumphs at Traffic Court - at High Cost

First, wouldn't this vintage 60s "kettlecloth" (is that what it was called? that nice cotton that came in lots of cute prints with a weave to it) look nice in a little quilt with these fabrics?

A traffic court story follows. In March 2010, I received a ticket that the officer should not have issued. Yesterday made my fourth day spent in the perfectly delightful DeKalb County GA traffic court environment, which is next to the jail. I believe it is an annex of the jail, in fact the traffic violator who was brought up just before me was dragging chains and wearing orange.

There were a few hundred people stuffed into that room. They said there were a hundred people somewhere below in the bowels of the building. The judge said this would take all day. Nobody explained anything. People were getting $1,000 fines, they were getting their driver's licenses taken away, they were being placed on probation, there was talk of jail time. Nobody during the first four hours was getting their ticket dismissed. We were made to stand in line against the courtroom wall for hours at a time. There was no oxygen and often no a/c, sometimes a little, and it was high 80s or 90 yesterday. I was like Private Benjamin when she reported to boot camp: this isn't the traffic court I joined.

New-found Traffic Court Friends:

If you recall, my Honda Fit (with previously not a mark on it) got rear-ended as I waited to enter a surface street from an expressway exit lane. It took an hour and a half for an officer to show up. He didn't answer me when he finally arrived and I said I wanted an accident report. He spent the next 45 minutes arresting the other guy, handcuffs, put him in police car, called a tow truck, towed off his car. Why? Who knows, the officer never spoke to me. Two and a half hours into it, he gave me a citation for failing to clear the roadway. I had cleared the roadway. I had to ask him again for the accident report, the whole purpose of the call. He reluctantly gave me the information. I should have filed a complaint against him but wanted to plead not guilty so was afraid to.

So four traffic court days, and four hours into the fourth day yesterday, they said they were breaking for lunch and we should come back at 2:00 and the judge, overflowing with good will, said he was going to lock the door right at 2:00. The merry little band of security officers downstairs who put you through the detector won't let anybody in until 2:00pm. You do the math. I love threats.

They told everybody to get in line against the wall again to see the clerk. Trust me, nobody knows what is going on throughout this whole thing. I thought maybe this was a fresh group of people who were signing in for the first time (because they mentioned they had another hundred people downstairs waiting for their opportunity to suffer in the courtroom) and that I had gotten caught in an endless loop.

Standing in line, I finally started crying. Crying throughout, I told the clerk "I have already done this". Turns out the purpose of the line was to get a voucher for parking so we wouldn't have to pay twice. I fully expected that we would have to pay twice judging by how we were being treated. Still crying, I said to the security guy who was standing next to the clerk and the judge, "I have been down here four different days about this and still haven't talked to anybody about it" and he said, "I know, I remember you" lol.

I walked out crying into the 90 degree blazing sun and walked to the parking lot. Back again at 2. People were finally so angry that they were grumbling and mumbling at the high penalties imposed; they were cheering at the few dismissals. Security Guy kept admonishing us that court was in session. But people were ready to blow and I was hoping for a revolt because citizens should not be treated this way. I sat there with my head between my knees in complete desperation (the wooden pew had begun to hurt my back; I am sixty years old after all) until 3.

After the traffic violator who was already in jail made his appearance and left again still in chains and his fashionable orange, the judge said "Moe? Mow?" and I knew it was time for Mowery to go up there. Turns out the cop had not showed up for the morning session. He had not shown up for the second session in October 2010, either, apparently. He finally showed when they called him for the third time that afternoon. Why was he scarce? Because he knew he shouldn't have issued that ticket.

He mumbled out the complaint from the computer screen while I held on to each side of the podium, sick and dizzy and wondering how I was going to get through this. Stuff like this scares me and I was so angry. I still hadn't decided whether I was going to ask the officer the questions I had hurriedly written out earlier, which you could do or skip, and then the judge asks you what happened. I only knew this by observing the hundreds of earlier sufferers. The officer said, "judge, honestly, I don't remember this case", the judge looked at me and said, "dismissed". I looked at Security Guy, who gave me a high five. This morning, I wrote a letter to the editor for the first time in my life.

P.S. The officer had not forgotten the case. I was the one who started screaming at top volume when he gave me the citation. I love how Atlanta treats its women.

BB CW #37

#37, Confederate Rose, had a Jo fabric center at first:

Then I realized it was a tulip.

Substituted this rose, which is from the Richmond Rose Civil War line:

It was Quilt Drop-Off Day yesterday for the East Cobb Quilt Show next Saturday. I took over my Les Fleurs du Jardin:

I changed the pattern here and there, simplifying in some places, especially the bottom border. The pots were often off-balance and asymmetrical. I know this is a spontaneous and creative style, but it made me crazy, so I redrew them to be balanced and symmetrical.

Also put in Springboro Christmas. I am going to work up a pattern for this one...

also put in this one called Old Swedish and will do a pattern for this one as well. It's the one that was inspired by a quilt in Old Swedish Quilts:

BB CW #36 and the Homefront (Rain?)

Am glued to the interactive radar map and praying that the rain does not bypass Atlanta. Am expecting a break in the long-present 90s daily high at last.

Went to an Open House last week-end in my neighborhood; we were asked to remove our shoes. There are my red moccasins, the only shoes with orthotics :-) :

At the last Prairie Women session, Muriel P. showed us a Color Cubes game from her childhood, where you arranged the cubes to make various quilt blocks:

Here is Show and Tell from the last Repro Divas class (now called Vintage Design Group):

This is mine, done with some of the Petite Ecole French General fabric I recently found in north Georgia:

Latest BB CW block:

And the quilt so far:

Best of all, Timothy is home on leave. He emerged from the MARTA station looking the same as ever, misleading because he had some incredible experiences (some tragic) as you can imagine, was in a lot of combat, and is only still here by luck. We spent the day together yesterday. He is celebrating his 22nd today in Athens with friends, including a friend with the same birthday:

BB CW and a Phone Call

BB CW #35:


I was glued to the Weather Channel for a few days as they said a hundred year storm was coming to the entire eastern U.S. coast. I didn't hear from Timothy before Irene's U.S. landfall, which, I would like to point out, was probably about 11 feet from his Marines barracks right on the ocean in Jacksonville NC. Once landfall was underway there, I figured there was definitely no chance of a call. At what was probably the storm's height there, the phone rang. Timmy was confined to the room, water was blowing in around the door (which opens to the ocean and a flimsy catwalk). There was water running down the walls because he is on the top floor and the roof was leaking, the power was out, and he only had one book. He was bored, so we talked for an hour.

Saturday Evening, This Past Week, and Welcome Back Home

Last week's BB CW:

First attempt at this week's BB CW. No go:

2nd version:

Never did I think I would ever say this to people after seven years of misery working in the school system, but with this totally unexpected school relocation, I am working with teachers who have smiles on their faces, who walk up to me and say "you will love working here", and "we have a wonderful principal". Believe me, I have never experienced anything like this in the past seven years (that seem like a hundred). I am stunned at this stroke of good luck.

Am so glad to report that Timothy is back on U.S. soil as of Wednesday night. You can imagine the relief. He got a phone and called Thursday night. That Marines hotline recording said he would be back on Monday evening. What if I had driven the eight hours up there only to discover no Timothy? I would have had to drive back because of work without seeing him. He came back with only a few men; he thinks they forgot about them because they were in Kyrgyzstan for an unseemly length of time before moving on to Germany and were the very last of his group to get back. At his home base barracks, there was no toilet paper or sheets in his room. The door does not lock and the air conditioning unit does not work. They are putting the a/c unit against the door for a lock. He received a small card that thanked him for his service to his country and a gift card from McDonald's. Hm. What is wrong with this picture :-) ?

He says they are terrified of the traffic going by in so many lanes and so fast and that he thinks it will be a long time before he can put a foot on bare ground rather than the tufts of grass that signify no mines underground. What I think is that we should all be nice to one another. I'm just saying.

He will come home on leave September 2nd.

Two Saturdays and the Week In Between

Last Saturday, when I found the two-sided antique quilt in Cleveland GA, I stopped at this cute antique shop on the way:

Also saw these quilts at the same mall in Cleveland:

Have I shown this one before lol? It looks familiar:

I had so much fabric stacked on the stair railings. It was time to fold them and put them away in Stash, but I had so many good combinations and hated the thought of losing them. So I took pictures:

This Saturday's BB CW:

I have good news to report about Day Job. You aren't going to believe how good this is. Day Job resumed last Tuesday. I drove down to that school, wondering how on earth I was going to face even one more hour of its misery, let alone 190 days, leaning over the steering wheel, crying. Nobody was there. I was early. I decided to check PATS, the job listing, for a different position. My current job was listed. Uh oh. Did they decide to put me out of my misery and fire me? This would perhaps be a good time to check work email. Which I hadn't all summer. A terse HR email from a week earlier: "You have been re-assigned to --- School". Holy Sweet Rembrandt!!! Ladies, I grabbed my refrigerator like it was a box of popcorn and zoomed off to the new school. New School is two miles from my house. It is a wonderful location. Not only is there another librarian (so many of the schools have been reduced to one, which is not enough to cover the workload), there are two other librarians. Three??? I am so happy.

Very late for work at LQS, so bye for now.

Glad I Visited the Antique Mall

I just got this quilt at a mall in Cleveland GA. The dealer said that she purchased it at an estate sale close to the Georgia-Florida state line. It is pieced on both sides and has so many neat old prints, many of which appear to be very early, even to my rather untrained eye:

A friend told me that it looks like some of the fabrics date to 1830-1880 based on pictures in Eileen Trestain's Dating Fabrics: A Color Guide 1800-1960. It has sort of a "my ancestors were English" look to it, don't you think?

It isn't in as good shape as it looks in the pictures, lumpy batting, some fabrics shattered, etc. It is mostly fascinating because of the enormous variety of prints. I may pick it apart to have a supply of antique fabrics to make small wall hangings with and to keep as a little repository for fabric study. It is hand-pieced, of course, and tied rather than quilted, so the picking won't be too bad.

BB CW #31:

BB CW #30

Precious Rembrandt:

and the latest BB CW block, Peterson's Stars and Stripes. Continued thanks to Barbara Brackman for posting this series. It's a dilly!

Pigtown Designs is a very enjoyable blog if you want to check it out.

Mid-July and Counting

It has been so hot:

But yesterday, we got some serous relief and it has been heaven: overcast, temperatures lower than a citywide oven, and even some a bit of rain. Heaven.

Made this tote (pattern in current Quilts magazine). The photo is Marcie Patch's grandfather, 1907, thank you for letting me borrow it, Marcie!

The latest BB CW block:

So strange. The advertisement on the right side of Flickr when I posted this on the Civil War Quilts group was about being careful at a railroad crossing. Which is the name of this block. But I didn't say so. How did the troll engines know that?

BB CW #28, the Swap Gift that did not get Swapped, and Digitizing

Can you believe I had to miss the LQS employee party last Christmas because of a day job faculty meeting?? Oh, the angst. So here is the swap gift I made for that party that unfortunately did not get swapped lol:

We were to make a quilt using a Little Quilts pattern. These are currently on display in the LQS.

For several years, I haven't touched my embroidery digitizing software. My old ME computer that housed it went on the blink and I was in a bit of a quandary about switching things over to a newer computer because my embroidery machine takes a floppy diskette, and I wondered whether to try to fix such an old computer. If you can believe it, I felt very sentimental about throwing the ME computer out, old as it was, because I had really learned about computers on it, adding memory, fixing problems, doing reformats (ME systems were so unstable and needed that sometimes), and other things. Finally decided to throw it out, though, which meant throwing out equipment that matched it in age, so it was quite the clean-out. Sorry, old ME!

Meanwhile, the next oldest computer, XP, went on the blink. Good grief. It would not do a System Restore for any date in this century, and it refused to do a Destructive Recovery several times, so I toodled off to Fry's to get a new computer. I had been thinking about doing that for a while anyway. When I got back, the XP had given up and done a Recovery, so then I had two computers to get set up again and install all of the software on, and more and more. The new computer has a 27" screen!!

My point is, and I do have one, is that I got the Embird digitizing software up and going complete with external floppy drive on the XP computer. I have spent thousands of hours digitizing, so of course I had to look through my designs and gloat over the good ones and wonder at the bad. Below are three purchased and free designs that I put together along with a fill background that I stitched out years ago for a chair seat (the chair is a somewhat odd oriental style and I thought this collage fit it nicely):

I have digitized several of Timothy's childhood drawings (thank goodness he didn't do these as an adult, eh?), like this one:

And of course here is BB CW #28:

When the XP crashed, I lost my password information for the Flickr group where we post our BB CW blocks, so I can't post it. I have tried every password I have ever used and am reduced to begging Yahoo to let me use Flickr again. So far they replied and asked me where I went on my honeymoon. I don't remember ever answering that as a Secret Question, since I didn't really go on one, just a few days in Helen, Georgia. Not looking good so far.