Hey June!

The post title refers both to Gudrun Erla's latest GE Designs Quilt Along coming up this weekend (and yes, I look forward to taking part in it!) and also a return to the blog after a too long away break.  I never expected after posting daily in April for Frédérique's  ABC Quilt Challenge that I would not have posted anything more for almost two months!  Admittedly though, after focusing on the blog for all of April, life pushed its way back in for May and June and kept me too preoccupied to post.  

For starters, the weekend before the last day of the challenge was the opening day for our community garden's 2021 growing season.  Each year we hold a parade and opening day activities in partnership with the Little League whose fields are next door to our garden.  There was also a pop-up pantry distribution set up outside our two lots that day.  

The report on the day's events from our community paper.

In addition, this is a big Mayoral election year in NYC (I voted in the primary this morning) and there was also an election for new terms for the people serving on our community's Co-op Board.  So there were plenty of city and community candidates at the garden event and then many candidate forums to attend (virtually) or watch in the weeks that followed. 

In the first week of May, DH and I picked up the plants ordered from Grow NYC for our community garden.

Among them (left front corner of the cart) are this year's plant starts for our community garden to grow Serrano Peppers for Small Axe Peppers.  What we grow and harvest will go towards making their Serrano Hot Sauce.  For the last three years we have been one of many community gardens in our city that are paid to grow peppers for the company.  In the last couple of years the company has also expanded their community garden growers program nationally.  Our garden uses our earnings to buy the sauce at cost which we then sell as a fundraiser at our garden events.  

This year, our garden has also been hosting the Ecology Club of a new charter school in our community.  They first visited us back in April and then set up to come on Friday afternoons since the start of May and until the school year ends in June.  We gave them their own garden bed to use as a growing lab and they help us with general garden maintenance tasks.  I and another member supervised them in helping to plant the pepper plant starts we had picked up.  

May also meant many celebration days too with Mother's Day and a milestone birthday for me (the big 6-0!).  June brought in Father's Day and the same big birthday for my DH.  Also in May, I got to make my first post-vaccination, in-person, overnight weekend visit to a good friend in New Jersey (who had also celebrated the same milestone birthday this year). We had a good time that weekend only marred by having our car engine seize up when DH came out to pick me up!   

The good news is that it turns out to be a known issue with our model of car and the company covers replacement of the engine under a warranty.  So while the repairs cost us nothing, the weeks it took to get a new engine and get it installed wound up completely upending our plans to travel down to my MIL's in North Carolina for DH's two week vacation that we had scheduled for this month.  We were supposed to spend his birthday weekend down there but alas that did not come to be!  

The worse part was that the cancellation of our trip meant that the second Quilt Retreat my MIL and I had looked forward to having during our stay was also nixed!  So all this goodness will have to be unpacked and put to use at home in the coming weeks instead.

All packed up for a retreat and no way to go!

This is not to say I haven't sewn or quilted at all during this time --- how else would I keep my sanity with all of this going on?!?  I do have a few finishes (one is in the picture above and another that I'm am working on now) that I'll hopefully get to report in a "Finished Or Not Friday" post later this week.  There's also a lot of stuff that I want to spend this week catching up on.  

So there will be plenty more things to report on as the summer continues to unfold.  Here's to hoping that the rest of the summer can be just a little more "quilt focused" going forward!