We ordered our bicycles. Now they are all we can think about, their features, their colors, when exactly they’ll be put together and ready for us, what they’ll feel like to ride, where we’ll go on them. My bike already has a name because last night I had a dream about her: she was racing around, having adventures, and she kept changing from a bike to a dog and back to a bike again. I recognized the dog: it was Daisy, Grandpa’s hunting dog from the 1940s and ’50s. I never knew Daisy, but I saw photos and I always heard her spoken of with great fondness. Somehow the spirit of Daisy has gotten into my new bike, so Daisy is her name too.

Meanwhile, we’ve done a few things while we’re waiting. Yesterday we went to the local movie theater on Coronado Island, called the Village Theatre.

It’s a cute little place, the opposite of a multiplex, with three screens in smallish rooms – our room had 4 rows of 10 seats each. The décor and maintenance are exceptional! The movie we saw was “The Hundred-Foot Journey” with the incomparable Helen Mirren (unless you want to compare her with the equally incomparable Meryl Streep). The young stars, Manish Dayal and French-Canadian actress Charlotte Le Bon, were beyond adorable. Loved the movie, although we should have brought more Kleenex.

This morning at 6:30 we woke up to the sound of artillery! 50-caliber machine guns and mortars that went on for hours. We usually hear colors at 8am from Naval Base San Diego at 32nd Street across the bay, but this barrage was from the beach to the west of us, which is a Navy Amphibious Base Coronado training area. Don’t know what they were doing exactly, but I found this photo on the web that shows what I imagine from what we heard:

After that wake-up call, I headed downtown for the 33rd annual San Diego Quilt Show at the Convention Center. Although not as large as our Quilters Anonymous show up in Monroe, there were over 400 quilts, lots of vendors, and lots of nice quilting ladies thronging the aisles. My favorite was a small art quilt called “Mondrian Improv,” by Carol Sebastian-Neely:

Quilters in 19th-century costume from the Old Town Quilters’ Guild were demonstrating making quilts entirely by hand – a novel idea for many of today’s quilters. They meet once a week in Old Town and sit outside showing passers-by the old skills. I had the pleasure of sitting with them for an hour to put in some stitches on a quilt they had there in a frame.

Made from an unknown design (which looked to me like it had Pennsylvania Dutch influences), the quilt is a replica of what’s believed to be the earliest surviving quilt made in California, sewn in the 1850s by one of San Diego’s most influential early citizens, Señora Juana Machado.