All Kinds of Stuff

Last night while on my way home from going to see the midwife with my pregnant neighbor and her family--I'm invited to participate in the birth--I was talking to my best friend Cassie on the phone. Her mother is one of the artsiest people I know. When we were growing up she would go through phases, cross stitching, crewel, making pillows, teddy bears, porcelian dolls, baking extravagantly decorated cakes, homebaked bread, sketching plants. You name it she did it. It was always fun hanging out at Cassie's house because you never knew what her mother would be doing on that particular day. Last night Cassie told me that her mother had taken up sketching portraits and that she was sketching pictures of all the family. Very cool. She also told me that right now her house was pretty much an art gallery displaying all her mother's artwork. Is that not the coolest thing or what? One of my goals with my home is to not have the same stuff on my walls as everyone else. I have a print or two, but for the most part the stuff on our walls are things I've stitched, photos we've taken or family has sent us, and I'm working on the DH to do a few paintings for me. I've seen some great paintings in Coastal Living on other people's walls and I think he could create a reasonable facsimile for me. If I could paint like my husband I'd have an easel set up in the living room all the time, drop cloths over the floor and furniture. Yes, I would. But he only makes time to paint when football season is over and softball hasn't started yet. Ok, back to Cassie's mom, I think she was the one that opened my eyes to the art of cross stitch. Sure my neighbor stitched shop models and had some awesome Paula Vaughn's on her walls that she had stitched but Cassie's mom always made it feel like art instead of needlework. I guess I notice the difference in her feelings about it and my aunt's. My aunt loves to sew, she teaches it at the high school level, but she never understood the attraction to handwork when she could create some pretty awesome artwork using fabric and applique on her sewing machine in a fraction of the time it takes to cross stitch something. Cassie's mom on the other hand just embraced the act of cross stitching, saw it as art and it'd get finished when it got finished. It wasn't a race to get it finished and up on the wall, it was a process, and when it was finished, then she'd decide what to do with it. She's one of those people that embraces her hobbies, her art, as obsessively as I embrace cross stitching. I stitch because I can't not cross stitch. It's a huge part of me. So much a part of me that even people that know don't know me that well but know my husband know that I stitch. Kind of freaked me out the first time one of his coworkers who I know but don't really "know" mentioned my stitching to me. So either my DH can't think of anything to say about me to his friends other than I stitch or he thinks it's pretty cool. I was so glad I called Cassie yesterday, I needed to be inspired and whenever I hear what her mom is doing, I get motivated to start working on my own stuff again.

The last few days have been busy with holiday stuff, cleaning up a flooded bathroom(that seems to be a continuing theme around here, 2005: The Year of the Constantly Flooded Bathroom), going to see a midwife, and having not one, but two Starbuck's Peppermint Mocha coffees. Are those things to die for or what? Those are definitely worth $4 a cup. Tastes just like an Andes after dinner mint. Fortunately for me there are no Starbucks within a 15 mile radius so I only get to treat myself to those when I venture into the big city, but then I treat myself on the way to where ever I might be going and then again on the way home.

We woke up this morning to a flat on the car, let me tell ya how fortunate I feel that this did not happen when I was cruising along the scenic highway in Pensacola yesterday about 6 pm. YIKES! Then the truck wouldn't start this morning so the DH missed his carpool and had to drive the Improbability Drive(85 Surburban and we've been calling it the Improbability Drive since the early 90s. I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy long before it was a movie.) all the way to work, $20 worth of gas barely got him there. So instead of more cleaning today, a goal and yes I used the "g" word is to have a clean house by Christmas Eve and keep it that way through the end of 2006, 2 0 0 6! All the clutter is stifling my creativity. I don't need that right now but I digress, I'll be at the store that we shall not name getting a new tire put on the car. What a waste of $100 right here at the holidays. Oh and to add to my loser image at the moment I completely forgot to get a teacher gift or anything for the bus driver. The kids have school on Monday so I hope to get something together for DS#3's teacher over the weekend.