Skating Toward Year End...

Boy, what fun we're having this week!  Two weeks and one day to Fiscal Year End at work and I'm running as fast as I can!!

 

There have been some light moments though... my friend Tony's daughter got married recently.  Someone found him this shirt to wear. I nearly snorted tea out through my nose when I saw it!

 

 

Here are a few recently completed projects, some of which have helped maintain my tenuous hold on sanity while the office is screaming around me.

This first one is a panel surrounded by some borders, made for the wall of the Little Lams Academy nursery room.  We all thought this was so adorably appropriate!

 

This is a blue "Yellow Brick Road", or a "Blue Brick Road" if you prefer.  I got it sewn together and now it just needs layering and quilting.  It's about a dozen miscellaneous left-over fat quarters from my blue bin, which NEVER seems to get any emptier!

I started this skinny quilt for the foot of my bed about two years ago.  The quilt on my bed is blue and white, this one is to cover our feet with one extra layer when the Wisconsin winter starts.  Next week, by the look of thing!  (It's nice today but the evening temps have been in the 60's and upper 50's recently!)

This one is called My Favorite Donation Strip Quilt, pattern compliments of Patched Works in Elm Grove WI.  It's easy to sew, easy to cut, looks great either planned or with scrappy interior strips and one repeated edge strip, and you can make extra blocks and make it bigger, but this one is about 45x54.

This quilt...ah, this quilt has been the bane of my summer!  A lady in our church guild bought a half jelly roll in browns, and once it was sewn together it was long and skinny and not what she thought it would be.  Dare I remind you that I once said there are no ugly fabrics, just ugly combos?  Well I think I proved myself wrong (again). 

I'm not much of a brown person, and certainly not these browns!  I tried cutting the quilt into smaller sections, then I found some complementary browns in our church stash, and tried large blocks of those to supplement.  I hated it.  I un-sewed and rearranged.  I still think I hate it, but I hate it less than I originally did.  I originally thought I'd do some applique but lost interest.  I thought I did a better job of laying out the blocks too, but there that one fabric is, lined up like soldiers!

A couple of weeks ago I went to the farmers' market for vegetables, and evidently I bought a duck!!

Carry on and sew to keep calm!

September, the Whole Month and the 11th

September is a month that has always been a big one for my family.  DH and I were married in September, and this year will celebrate our 46th anniversary.  If I did the math correctly...


Our son will celebrate his 45th birthday.  Which is odd considering I'm only 40 years old!  (I had to add a year since Miss A can add -- I used to claim 39 but she's on to me now.)  Happy birthday Kevin!

Two of my brothers have September birthdays.  Happy birthday on the 4th to Chet and on the 6th to Tom.

Kindergarten

Middle school!!

The kids go back to school in earnest, and I love back to school shopping!  Especially the school supplies.  These days the schools have the kids preorder their supplies and they all come in a big package so you don't have to run all over town to get the right size box of crayons or a particular kind of notebook.  You may just need to go for a few special things.  I always buy myself a new box of crayons or colored pencils for the house, and for me! 

My mom showed us how to do these
crayon doodles (this one used markers)
and the grands and I do them now.

Labor Day is one of my favorite holidays - no big meal to prepare, a lot of lazing around the house or the park.  DD and her family go to a local fair, and I take extra vacation days to make it a long weekend.


I'm remembering where I was on Sept. 11, 2001.  I was in Indianapolis with a rental car and no hotel room when the news came that all the airports were closing down.  The people in our office there went a little off the rails and everyone left except me and two other people.  I will never forget that only Louis asked whether I had a place to stay, and invited me to dinner at his home.  Thank you so much Louis, your kindness meant a lot that day.

My company closes its fiscal year on the last Friday in September.  THAT I am not looking forward to... but there are three weeks to go so I guess it will be here before you know it.  I've been preaching for the past two and a half months:  get your invoices submitted, get the purchase orders done, get your expense sheets in.  Then suddenly this week someone said to me "holy cow, there are only three weeks left until the end of the year! Process this quick!!"

To quote a famous movie line, "No sh*t, Sherlock!"

On top of that, this year I have to take three days out of the center of that three weeks to attend a leadership meeting in Charlotte, NC.  That's good news and bad news.  Good news because we've never been invited to that before, us support staff, so we always felt left out and unimportant.  Bad news because we've never been invited before and we always had three days where we were not being interrupted by last minute requests and we could actually get work done!


On top of that is the annual Wastewater Conference that happens during the week of year end close this year.  UGH!


Hoping this is me next month:

Rock on...