The Week In Review

This week was a humdinger. It started out like any other week. Nothing special, nothing big planned. Just work, work, and more work and the usual family/home commitments. So imagine my surprise when I am an on my home with DS#1 and DS#3 along for the ride, we're going to pick up Chinese for supper, and my truck starts making this jingle-jangle-jingle noise. I turn down the Green Day CD blaring from the CD player and ask DS#1, "Is that the song or the truck." DS#1 responds with, "I'm pretty sure it's the truck." Well I turn the truck around, well order pizza for supper, and head home. I begin to smell this burning smell and my "check gages" light popped on. Well I had been checking my gages since the first sound, nothing, then all of a sudden the truck begins to overheat, steam coming out from under the hood, making this horrible noise. I'm still three blocks from the highway and one right turn and one left turn from home. Not good. I get to the highway, the car in front of me apparently doesn't feel comfortable turning unless there is absolutely nothing visible in either lane for about a mile in each direction, I try to keep from cussing, yelling and flashing a few hand signals, but finally they determine that it's safe to turn, I pull up and begin my right turn, the steering wheel doesn't want to submit to my directions and I have to force it into that right turn, not good, things are getting much worse. I get on the highway, fly to my road, make a hard left turn, the steering wheel is so uncooperative at this moment, I try not to go over 30 on my road but I sure want to be in the driveway. Finally I'm there. I pop the hood, an act my DH has been trying to do for the last year. The main drive belt is shredded under my hood, all over the engine. Did I mention I've DH on the cell phone and here's what I've been told, "Get home, I'll be there after the game, I can't talk any more I'm on second base". Gee babe thanks for caring.

So fast forward a couple of hours. DH gets home with the new belt and proceeds in the dark to fix the truck. I am walking to the house to get my keys and for absolutely no reason under the sun or moon rather, I fall. I don't trip, I just FALL! And boy did I ever fall. My nose slammed into the front door, blood gushed every where, I fall on my knees, they are skinned up pretty good. I look like a kid who's been playing duck, duck, goose on the play ground and losing, and I thought I had rebroken my left wrist. So I'm on the front porch screaming, "MY NOSE, MY NOSE!" DH is trying to figure out what the hell happened, and the DS#1 opens the front door and yells out, "OMG! Your nose! Mom your nose is broke!!!" I get in the house, throw a towel over my nose and start sobbing. Fortunately my nose isn't broken. I felt very fortunate when I woke up Thursday morning, checked the mirror and other than being a tad swollen, my nose was intact and I had no black eyes. My knees another story. I can't remember the last time I had skinned knees. It's so humiliating. My wrist, very lucky, it ached some Thursday and Friday but seems to just have a minor sprain. DH asked me how I managed to fall for no good reason and I told him it was like some invisible hand shoved me to the ground. I'm a klutz, there's no denying it, but, let me tell ya, I can't for the life of me come up with a reasonable solution for how and why I fell. Just one of those questions that will never be answered.

On a positive note my truck is now running. Go DH! He broke two socket wrenches and ended up having to buy a truck part but all in all it worked out a lot cheaper than I thought it would. Usually when one of our vehicles breaks down it usually cost $1500 to repair. No matter what it is, it always cost $1500 to fix. So less than $100 rocks!

Crafty Endeavors

I've been working on Fairy Grandmother. No reason to take a new picture because it doesn't look much different than the last one. It's slow going, I'm really having to pay attention to the area I'm stitching in, lots of marking on the chart and double checking my fabric. It's possible that my grandmother has lung cancer, LUNG CANCER, and the woman has never smoked a day in her life. So I need to get this finished. It represents who she is in my life. My Fairy Grandmother. She made my life bareable when I was a kid. She was the one constant while my parents were both a little nuts. She gave me love and guidance. She loves me for who I am. She wishes I'd go to church but that's another discussion.

I'm also dreaming of quilts. I would really like to finish a few quilts in this lifetime. *insert whiney southern drawl* But they take soooooo looooooong! So I'm taking a page from
Doodle-blog's book and trying to work out a project rotation. I have too many things I want to do and I have got to take control.

Do you, dear reader, have any idea how many projects I have floating around in my brain? I have a mile long list of cross stitch projects I want to start, add to that the mile long list I have started, and then the next mile long list of projects I want to kit up. It's a never ending cycle. Then the crochet basket is getting pretty full. I've been buying some yarn for afghans. I love Maxine's house on Judging Amy. Afghans everywhere. It just looks warm and cozy. It also comforts me to see Amy wrapped up in a crocheted afghan instead of a quilt. It seems like on tv everyone has a beautiful quilt to seek comfort in, it's nice to see someone wrapped up in a good old 70s era acrylic afghan. It's more real. At least from my viewpoint. We didn't have a house full of quilts, for that matter we didn't have a house full of afghans either, but there were one or two nice scratchy acrylic afghans that someone's sister's cousin made way back when and somehow ended up in our house on the back of the couch. But I digress, I've been stocking up on yarn, yep, acrylic. I can't help it, it's cheap, it comes in lots of colors and feeds my stashing need. It comforts me to know it's here when I get inspired to crochet and start yet another new project. Also anyone notice that acrylic yarn isn't near as scratchy as it used to be? After a couple of washings the few afghans I've finished are so soft. I do think I'm going to start splurging on Caron Simply Soft for afghans. It's harder to find around here but I like the feel of it better than RH's SuperSaver acrylic. Not being a snob, when I want to crochet I'm grateful for whatever I have on hand, but it really is nice to be able to work with nicer yarn. I'm really in love with LionBrand Woolease and have an afghan pattern here that's kitted up with the Woolease, can't wait until I have time to start it. It's just a little pricier to kit up afghans using the Woolease but I see myself reaching for it more and more and it's not like it's outrageously priced, I just have to plan to take a little longer gathering supplies when I want to use it for an afghan. The one thing about the readily available acrylic yarn at the store who shall not be named, it's easy to get, easy on the budget and as I mentioned before comes in so many colors. Oh and now I'm hoarding up #10 thread for thread crochet when I have time to sit down and work on my advanced crocheting skills.

But now on to quilting. I have a plan. I'm going to start buying a couple of yards of fabric every week. Yes, I've mentioned this before and didn't follow through. Now I'm going to. I'm going to create a fabric stash beyond belief, ok, I'm exaggerating, but I am going to start buying a yard of fabric I like just because I like it, not because I have a plan for it. I've been fairly good over the years about not hoarding up fabric. I try to buy everything in yard cuts if possible even if a fat quarter would do just because I like the idea of having left over fabric for something else and might as well have enough to actually do something with, than to just have enough to make me kick myself and say, "Why didn't I just buy a yard?" Don't get me wrong, when I was buying fabric for DS#3's 9 Patch I Spy I wouldn't buy anything but 1/4 yd cuts of novelty fabrics. I'm not crazy or independently wealthy but for the most part I do prefer to buy a yard instead of smaller cuts. I'm just weird that way. I have quite a few quilts on the drawing board and will hopefully bring them to life when I break down and fork over the big bucks for EQ5. The Electric Quilt software. If anyone around here carried it locally I'd have it in my hot little hands right now but no one seems to stock it. It's $110 from Keepsake Quilting. Normally I wouldn't even consider buying this, this talk about a luxury item, but I've been wanting it for about 2 yrs now, one of those things I just won't let go of so I'm planning on ordering it next week. I would have ordered it this week but the whole truck thing kind of threw me for a loop emotionally and financially so what's one more week after waiting for 2 years? Although I'm pretty sure once I get the EQ5 I'll spend more time designing fabulous quilts than actually creating them but maybe it'll be just the motivation I need to really throw myself into quilting. I'm planning on cutting out DS#1's Ohio Star Quilt this weekend. My one hold up you might ask? I have lost two boxes of quilting pins. You know the ones with the big white ball on top so you can easily see it when it drops on the floor? Two flippin' boxes! That is the very same reason I have not finished DS#3's quilt top. I have no way of pinning the sashing to the quilt to sew them on. My sewing machine is threaded ready to go but nope, no freakin' pins! I spent most of Thursday looking for them. I thought I really might know where they were but the joke was on me. They were no where to be found. I gave up after about three hours of organizing and cleaning and a spider momma and her thousand babies came running out of their house after me. YIKES!