Celtic Banner

Finally a picture of the blasted Celtic Banner. I know, it's not exactly an art shot but it's the best I can do with my phone. Just for the record I hated stitching it. I just wanted it done. If it wasn't for the fact that my husband had asked for it for years I would have got through the easy part (the alphabet) and had been done with it. I would have rolled it up in a ball and stuffed it away in a closet never to be found again. I substituted a Needle Necessities thread for the 86 or 5 shades of green in each letter. I mentioned that on Marilyn's Garden and was chastised because dear Marilyn designed it that way so it would look like calligraphy. Yeah, well, too bad!! I think mine looks just fine. I hated working with the Wildflowers. I broke needle after needle. I hated the chart with the red and black symbols. I get the reason for the colored symbols but I think if you don't want me to make a copy that it should have been printed on a big enough piece of paper instead of on both sides or put it on two pages. If you don't want me to make a copy at least give me something easier to work with, something a little more indestructible. I tried marking it off with a highlighter but it got impossible to see what the symbols were in the creases and then I had to flip it. With some of the symbols, the squares that were red and black, using the highlighter was a waste of time. The symbol took up the whole square. Chances are really good that this will be my last MLI. I'm going to get rid of my angels and probably just keep some of the earlier Amish designs. All in all, even with the frustration it is a beautiful design.

Hot Cranky Man

It's been hot, hot, hot here. I know it's not up to the standards of the south but when we hit a 90+ degree day we are miserable. Dad had a rough day today. He's not used to living in such a quiet neighborhood with nothing to do and nothing to see. Kids don't even play outside. From our back deck you can see five pools and not a person in them. They should have all pitched in and bought one pool. Anyway, I digress. He complained today that the only thing we do around here is work and sleep. Um, that's what people do when they aren't retired yet. He doesn't like to watch TV so I figure that rules out movies on DVD. He has some library books but is not reading them. He started reading The Great Santini and said it was a good book but the print was too small. So I'll make another trip to the library and see if I can find a hardcover copy.

Thank goodness for hobbies. I have so much stitching and reading I want to do. There are so many movies I want to watch from Netflix, blogs I want to read and did I mention stitching. I'm also addicted to the Food Channel and I have dozens of recipes I want to try and a huge stash to stitch. Did I mention that?

Hopefully he will start to get with the rhythm of the family or I find something for him to do. Maybe jig saw puzzles???

Sandwich generation?

Actually I feel more like part of a triple decker with my husband forced to retire as a mechanic due to neck problems, a 21-year-old son who still lives and home and now my Dad. My Dad just recently turned 92. Last year he had to sell the home he had lived in for 40 years and moved into enriched care. In the past few months he has started to become quite confused and after another bump on the head I took him to the hospital. I was afraid he had another bleed that was making him confused, he was admitted and diagnosed with what I thought was dementia and it was recommended he be placed in a nursing home. What I was told was that a nursing home was cheaper than assisted living and assisted living was self pay so when he ran out of money he would have to go on Medicaid and be transferred to a nursing home which was harder on a demented patient. So after weeks of applying for homes Dad got a bed in a place about 15 minutes from me. I signed all his papers and I brought him up to his room. The social worker told me that in all the four years she had worked there she had never had a patient walk in on his own. After seeing his room I just couldn't do it. He might be a bit loopy but all the residents around him couldn't carry on any kind of conversation, most just sat in chairs in the hallway all day just waiting for the next meal. So I set a plan in motion to bring him home with me. Hey, it was probably the only way I was going to get the spare room painted. Dad spent a week rehabbing and moved in a couple of weeks ago. It has been an adjustment for a morning person to move in with a family of night owls. I feel like I've adopted a 92-year-old.

On the stitching front I finally finished Celtic Banner. I pretty much hated every minute that I stitched on it but it was something my husband asked for. In the end it turned out great. I'll have to post a picture. I think it wasn't so much all the color changes but more the chart itself. There were brown squares and red squares and it was just hard to mark everything off. Because of the paranoia of the designer and the different colored symbols I couldn't make a working copy and since the chart was on both sides of the paper the symbols in the creases were very difficult to read. I think in the future I am going to hold on to the Amish patterns but will get rid of the newer charts that were done in two colors.

The works in progress include The Quaker Mystery Sampler from last year which I work on at home. In my stitching bag I'm carrying around LHN From Sea to Shing Sea and Good Huswife's June Morning. JM is done on black so I reserve that for my away stitching when I am sitting outside. At the rate I'm going that will be in my bag forever. My rotation, if you want to call it that, is after my at-home project is finished I move up the one in my stitching bag and start something new. This way I do finish some projects.

A new year???

Okay, not exactly but close. The Lizzie's have started a SAL blog and some others have started blogs. I learned how to make cool backgrounds. That's my first attempt at a picture. Not so bad. As you can see we are enjoying (NOT) winter here and that is the view from my deck. Next step will be to share stitching pictures.

Lots has happened since May. I worked all summer. I bit off a little bit more than I could chew with the 1500 lines I mentioned in the last post, you know back in May, and I spent a good part of the summer in my office working. We got way back up and lost some of the work to another company. At first I was devastated due to the loss of money but then decided it was probably a good thing. I had no time to do anything else before. Now I don't obsess too much about work. I actually have had time to read and do a bunch more stitching.

I finished stitching Quaker Christmas and I must say I was pretty impressed with myself. I think this year I'm going to concentrate on some smaller things. I finally finished a Christmas present, did a freebie design for another friend. The first will definitely be a pillow, the second I'm not sure yet. Now I'm working on Workbasket's Quaker Owl.



That's it for now.

I have a blog

You thought I forgot. On the work front - I stayed on with the National Company working part time, three hours four mornings a week. The hospital limited me to 1000 lines a day which was kind of a paltry pay check so this gave me about $600 a month more and since I got paid from them twice a month versus every other Friday from the hospital I felt like I had my own money. Then in April the hospital took on more work and asked me to do 1500 a day so I was able to quit the other. They have been a part of my life for over 20 years but with the pay check getting smaller and the stress getting higher my last day was March 31 and for one solid month, every single day the Impact Room called to ask me to work OT. Not even having it acknowledged that I had quit really made the break a whole lot easier.

So now I'm reading again and stitching. In April I stitched and old Sisters and Best Friends piece for my cousins' wedding. During the week I'm working on Quaker Christmas and on the weekends I am working on the Quaker Mystery Sampler. I'm using the DMC Variations that is the reds/purples on Lakeside Linen Magnolia. I am quite pleased with it.

Right now I'm totally absorbed in Stephen King's Duma Key. I'm not a fan of horror but that man can totally suck me in.

Friday? or Thursday?

I still feel like I'm supposed to be on "sick" time but that makes for a lousy pay check. I finally logged into the hospital about 11:30. I thought for sure I would get my 1000 lines today but not to be. It's Friday and I feel like I should relax a little but I have to work on Saturdays now so I have to think it's really like a Thursday. Clear as mud, hey?? Kate and Emma from the hospital were talking today and they said how they missed having me in the office because I was fun and made things more relaxed and calm. MMM, wonder if DH feels the same way about having me around.

On Monday I talked to my supervisor in the National Company and told her I wanted one more week of PTO. By the end of the day both her and my work force coordinator were let go along with 100 or so others across the country. I did get an e-mail from my new supervisor who said she can't wait to start working together and she will have an awsome team but, oh, by the way I'll be on vacation until Monday. The end of the pay period is tomorrow and I hope she has enough time to add the PTO to my time sheet.

Yesterday coming home I was walking in the house carrying my purse, a drink and the mail. On the way up the stairs my dog, Oliver, ran passed me the mail started to fall and I tripped up the steps. Of course I landed on my bad knee and braced myself with my right arm. My shoulder felt pretty sore last night but feels a little bit better today. It just takes double the amount of time to do anything and the men folk are no help at all.

I finished knitting a dish cloth and now I want to try knitting those bath mitts. I have this vision of making little gifts of the bath mitt and a bar of the Hummingbird Farm lavender soap. http://www.hummingbirdlavender.com

I keep looking at my stash and I so want to stitch. I hope I get the okay this week to get rid of the sling. I have Ink Circles, This Heart of Mine started and I'm just loving it.

A long road

It's just been a crazy month. My computer from the hospital was delivered on August 17. After a bit of moving around and buying adapters I now have 2 computers on my desk with 1 keyboard, 1 mouse and 1 monitor. I spent 2 weeks working full time for both jobs so mostly I slept or I worked.

I had my shoulder surgery last Wednesday, the 5th. It's been a nice vacation. Now a week later I'm able to type, obviously. Moving my arm over to the mouse was a little painful so I moved it to the keyboard tray, which I don't use for my keyboard but makes a nice place for my TV remotes. I'm still not able to stitch as my shoulder needs to be immobile other than exercise time but I have done a little knitting.

I paid my huge fine at the library and I am now able to take books out again. I didn't realize how much I missed going to the library until I was able to bring books home again and order more on-line. Reading is just such an important part of me that I don't want to let it go again. I'm reading my Bookholics messages again. I couldn't see the point before. The others were so excited about new books and making recommendations and I couldn't read them unless I purchased them; but if I purchased them then I wouldn't have money to pay the fine. Anyway in the past week I read James Lee Burke's Julie Blon's Bounce and Lillian Jackson Braun's The Cat Who Smelled a Rat. Just easy enough to understand while taking Vicodin.

Until next time!!