Fall, and the "S" Word

No, not THAT s-word, but one that can be said with the same sneering tone --  snow!

Yes, it snowed on Monday.  Not a lot, and it was melted by 11 a.m.  But it was a shock to wake up to white stuff on the grass and on my patio!

Ugh.  You know what that means -- more is coming!  Time to break out the heavier coat and maybe
some mittens or a scarf.

But then again, it's SWEATER WEATHER!!  I love sweater weather.  It means we're past the heat of summer, those 80 to 90 degree days that make everyone sweaty and sometimes cranky.  Well, in my house they do.  They prompt the debate of 'should we open windows or turn on the air conditioner?'

When we were young we didn't live in air conditioned circumstances.  I remember lying in bed waiting to melt while my body finally decided to drop off to sleep.   I never enjoyed that.  We never had enough fans for everyone's rooms.  Sweat tasted salty and the sheets were sticky.  Ugh.

I didn't live in a place with air conditioning until I got married and our apartment had central air.  What a luxury!  Until someone decided that 72 was a good temperature at which to set it!  After working outdoors all day long, it must have seemed comfortable to DH.  Meanwhile I froze, my fingers and feet were always cold.   I wore a sweater and socks, and he always asked "why are you so cold?"

Dude.  72?

Now 72 is touted as the perfect room temperature.  Who decided that?  I have no idea.

When I worked downtown the engineers loved to discuss the temperature in the office.  Our last office had a high ceilinged area, and a low ceilinged area, and the temp would vary by as much as 10 degrees.  When my boss was in the same office I was in the middle of the low ceilinged area, the warmest part.  Sometimes it was warm enough to make people a little drowsy, especially after lunch!

Once he retired and my new boss was in another state, it didn't matter at all where I sat, so I moved to what was called the High Bay Area.  The ceiling was two stories up.  There were no ceiling fans and no electric fans (or heaters) were allowed in the cubicles.  True to science, warm air rises, and the HBA was generally the cooler spot.  It was good most of the time.

The environmental engineers tried to balance out the heat and humidity.  Their theory is that 72 degrees and low humidity is cooler than 72 and high humidity.  And the 72 degree temp is OK if you're moving around, working near machinery or electronics that give off heat, or are dressed in layers, BUT if you're sitting at a desk in an open area, not moving around, it might be perceived as too cool.

Also, one guy's favorite theory was that women felt the cold less than men.  Men liked the warmer area according to his ideas.  However, I noticed that a lot of the men wore suits, the jacket of which they removed when they went into their offices.

DH and I have decided that when the heat is on, 71 or 72 is good if we're working.  73 is better for evenings when we're sitting around in our condo, with the ceiling fan reversed in the winter to direct the warm air down.  At night it goes down to 64 so I can sleep, and he turns on the heated mattress pad on his side of the bed.  In summer when the air is on, it's set at 75 during the day while we're working, then it goes down to 72 at night for sleeping.  And whenever possible we turn it off and open windows.  However I cannot sleep if it's going to be warmer than 75 overnight! (I told you about the cranky part, right??)

Even with the heat up to 73, he's colder in the winter than I am, because most of the time I wear a sweater.  And socks inside my slippers.  He goes around in a tee shirt with an open flannel shirt on top.  Not buttoned... and he will NOT wear a sweater.

Men.

So the best way to keep warm at my house on a fall evening is to knit or have a cat in your lap.

Works for me...

Blank Slate, Blank Brain

Some days that is the state of my mind.  Blank.  I get up in the morning and my only purpose is to get some breakfast and find the book I'm currently reading.

I know I'm not the only one!  We recently had a very small church quilt guild meeting, and the other ladies seem to have the same feelings.  Some of course have jobs and they have a predetermined list of things to do every day during the work week, but those of us who are retired have endless (or seemingly endless) days with which to do nothing very important.

On one hand it's a blank slate.  Write anything you like!  On the other hand there is no clue or direction, and if you're not energized it can be daunting.

I do have some volunteer jobs that are continuing even though my real part-time job is on hiatus at this time.  However most if it is done at home and on no particular weekly schedule.  And some days I find it hard to remember what day of the week it is.  Good thing my vitamin box has the days of the week on the compartments!  

What with the election going on, and TV not being on its regular schedule due to Covid and all that, I've tended to ignore the outside world a LOT.  (It used to be we watched a regular schedule of programs, so we knew it was Tuesday or whatever.)  I watch very little, and mostly record the occasional thing to watch later.  My hubby watches the news daily, several times in fact.  Mornings he says he's watching the weather, and evenings he's watching for the weather for tomorrow.

Sure.

Our church has been holding in person worship for a while now, social distanced and wearing masks to keep everyone safe as much as possible.  Recently we went back to in person Bible study.  This month's topic was what the Bible says about voting.

No candidates are being discussed, and both sides of the aisle are represented in the congregation.  The Pastor has done a magnificent job of keeping political arguments to a minimum and making discussions center around what the Bible teaches about government, leaders and the roles of Church and State.

The goal is to help people remember where they should be going for 'direction', and it's not necessarily where the world goes.  What does the Bible say about making choices.  Luckily we have good direction there.

I won't bore you with four weeks worth of theology, but what it comes down to is that we're forced to vote for sinners because what other types of people ARE there?  So we have to review ALL the information we can find on candidates, parties and issues.  Read the fine print, and learn to be discerning.  Just because you see it on TV in a 30 second commercial doesn't mean it's true.  Right?

So you go back to what you learned in school.  Listen to your conscience.  Hopefully you can discover whether the candidates are doing the same.  Weigh the

See what's true and what isn't, what meets with God's meaning for humanity and what doesn't... a hard thing.  A person can be for many of the things in which you believe and yet have a couple of opinions that just go against what you hold most dear.

If you're a one-issue voter, maybe it's easier.

Of course all politicians lie at some point or another.  They're just humans after all.

Therefore, here we are on the horns of a dilemma.  As someone in the group said, we're forced to choose between an assortment of not very good choices!  Well, how true is that?

I grew up in the 60's where the saying was 'if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem'.  Ugh, we thought we were so smart.  The older I get the harder it gets to know.  The Statler Brothers sang this line in one of their songs:

Things get complicated when you get past 18.

 

I think I'll go down to the sewing studio and do some fabric therapy.  Yeah, it must be the day I scheduled for project finishing.  I can't see anything else on the calendar!

Sew on...

A Day In The Life...

 What to do, what to do?  The whole day in front of me and nothing scheduled!!

Not today, that was yesterday, and that will be tomorrow.  And Saturday.

Today I got a haircut, and I have a meeting this evening at church.  The excitement of the day? I stopped at Starbucks on the way home from my hair appointment!

I need to make myself a work schedule.  I really do need to schedule some things.  One thing I need to find time for is some exercise... 

I'm afraid of gaining the "Covid 19".  You know, like the freshman 15 but more... like from sitting on the couch watching TV and eating snacks until midnight while watching YouTube videos about things.

Not good.

I should just make a schedule and publish it somewhere so someone holds me accountable.  

Ha!

Tomorrow I need to go down to the sewing studio and put some time on sewing labels on a fireman's jackets.  There's no real deadline, but if I don't make one up, it won't happen until I feel some pressure.

And I need to figure out how to get three or four sweaters knit by Christmas. 

Whew!  That's some pressure!!

Cook on!

Rain Again

It's raining again.  I was thinking that where the world is burning, like the West Coast, they'd probably like to have some of this rain.

I wish I could send it their way.

Miss Kitty and I are just looking out at the weather and thinking gray thoughts.  She IS gray, and I'm knitting on a gray sweater.  We need to have the indoor lights on so I can see what I'm doing.  I'm glad I don't have to go anywhere today because it's in the mid-50s F for temperature.  

It's a good day to sit and knit.

I tossed the stash today looking for some more bulky yarn in a quantity large enough to knit another sweater.  If I do that and find more bulky weight yarn, I might be able to knit the grands some sweaters for Christmas.  That's always a risky proposition because you know how kids are about clothes.  You want to dress them one way and they want to run in the opposite direction!  But I have two approved sweater patterns from the middle girls, and I'm willing to go there.

The one I'm doing is almost done.  One sleeve is nearly finished, and that leaves one more sleeve and a button band to go.  On bulky yarn at three stitches per inch gauge, that could happen this weekend.

I did find a few more yarn choices in bulky.  One is dark chocolate brown, one is deep purple.  I also found another batch of the silver gray that I'm currently using.  I would NOT knit the same sweater in that yarn unless that got the thumbs up from the girls, so I'm looking for another pattern to use.

If I could spin this, I could have some fantastic yarn!

Miss Kitty said "That's not funny!"

LOL!

Knit on...

Yesterday's Squirrel Has a Beaded Cousin

It's going to rain off and on all day today, according to the hubster/weather authority.  That's nice in a way, because it lessens the threat of guilt for doing what I really wanted to do today, which is going into the sewing room.

But then package delivery happened, and here I am at the computer talking about the day's haul. But not of sewing items, those are still on the way.  I did get beads.  I ordered some seed beads from a couple of places because I'm knitting some beaded bracelets, and they're like potato chips -- you can't do just one.  

In September when I signed up for Vogue Knitting Live and a class with Laura Nelkin on beaded knitting I just pulled some random beads out of my little stash along with some random sock yarn scraps.  Nothing really matched or had any relationship to each other.  The resulting swatch turned out to look halfway decent though -- anything blinged up looks nice I guess!

I stopped when I ran out of beads.  I guess it's sort of a pattern... I get a little 'regular' on the randomness sometimes.  That must come from living for 49 years with Mr. OCD.

So next step was ordering a bracelet kit from Laura Nelkin's website, since that's how you get the patterns, and the one I got came with leather ends with snaps inserted so it was a win-win.  I was also digging in the knitting stash and found a couple of additional LN kits that I'd purchased back in the dark ages from a local yarn shop, but was not in love with the color combos.  I don't know what I was matching when I bought those but my taste has changed. So off I went to the world wide web and bead shops on line.

I've purchased beads on line before, so I knew a couple of sources, Auntie's Beads, Shipwreck Beads, Fire Mountain Gems... Laura had warned us about shopping on line at some places, where they keep telling you "only 275 more items to get to the next discount level".  LOL!  Not really 275, but it keeps you shopping to see what happens!

The problem was that the quantities made price comparisons difficult.  Just how many #6 beads make up 25 grams?  8.9 grams?  40 grams?  Does it make them less expensive when you buy the larger package even without a discount? 

Some patterns say you need 250 beads, some say 250 grams.  If the description doesn't give a count of beads per gram, what to do, what to do?  Like the teeshirt says, you said there'd be no math!!😖

So I ordered several packages of different sizes from three sources in order to do the eyeball test, and then did the math on price per gram.  If your eyes glaze over at the mention of unit pricing, skip down to the pictures.  Laura recommended Japanese beads, so I stuck with those brands.

Auntie's Beads: I bought four different packs.  I didn't buy the same beads in each place so this is not an apples to apples comparison.  These were 25 gram packets, which was a lot of beads, and the price ended up being 11 to 13 cents per gram before shipping.  Beads alone were $12.39.  No discount was received and shipping was $3.95.  So after shipping charges were applied that made the average price 16.3 cents per gram for Miyuki seed beads, two kinds of size 6 beads and two of size 8.

Lima Beads, somewhere I'd never tried, had TOHO beads, sizes 6 and 8, and a few colors in size 3.  Size 3 is larger than size 6, and 6 is larger than 8.  I got a little wild on this order because the packages were small, so I got more colors.  (Made sense to me at the time.)  Beads added up to $22.70 for 17 vials of 8.9 grams each. That was 14.59 cents per gram, but I got a 15% discount off my first order and that brought it down to 12.75 cents.  Shipping was free on this order, I must have reached a threshold.  They also sent me a stick of red licorice.

I still have a package coming from Fire Mountain.  You have to order 14 items before any discount kicks in, and I stopped short of that.  The unit prices on what I did order went from 14.5 cents per gram for some #6 beads to 7.9 cents for some tiny #11s.  Total for beads was 31.22 or 13 cents per gram and that increased to 16.35 cents per gram after tax and shipping.  They were the only ones who charged sales tax.

The Lima Beads haul.

The Auntie's package.

So what have I learned?  Nothing too profound.  

• I like getting things in the mail.  
• You don't need to be a math genius to spend a lot of money on craft supplies.
• Beads come in dozens of different packet sizes.  
• Not every website carries every size.  I only found big #3 beads in one place.
• Discounts are enticing but can lead you to overspend.
• There are a LOT of beads in even an 8.9 gram tube!
• I'm not counting individual beads.  It's like guessing how many jelly beans are in a mason jar.

Craft on...

Squirrel!! Squirrel!!

It seems like every day I wake up with a plan.  I know exactly what I want to do today.

And then... 

Yesterday was laundry day.  On Mondays I generally do the laundry and while it's running I stay upstairs in the area of the laundry room and do some computer work or clean and when that's done I can read or knit until the laundry is done.  We generally have only three or four loads, depending upon if it's the week to wash the bedding.  But with each load taking an hour, that shoots the day.

This past week, I started the laundry, but the computer was down in the kitchen, so after I cleaned upstairs, I went into the second bedroom to look for some yarn for a project I had in mind for a Christmas gift.  

Two hours later, after the washer had chimed twice and then given up, I had three bins of yarn on the floor and was deep into pulling three OTHER projects and reorganizing the bulky yarn.

THEN I had to put it all back.  LOL!

The good news is that I DID find a project I could start and that will knit up quickly, since it's bulky and I'm knitting a size small.  However... 

Well I did manage to finish the laundry except for the towels which are sitting in the dryer one day later, just waiting for me to come back to fold them.

Then I pulled out a bunch of yarn that was gifted to me two houses ago, when I was still working so at LEAST two years ago.  It's 100% acrylic, from a chain store, and was part of a haul from a co-worker whose mother had it for a number of years before she developed dementia and could no longer knit.  It's smelling a bit oily and it feels like it's coated.  I think old acrylic yarn sometimes starts to deteriorate when it's binned in plastic, and it develops a funky feel.  When that happens, it just needs to get tossed.

Which breaks my heart, but it's too icky to use, and why inflict it upon someone else who might buy it at the Goodwill??  Just grit your teeth and toss!  In my defense I didn't spend any money on it.  Does that help?

After a trip to the freezer to pull out something for dinner, I remembered to bring up the pile of pillow cases I sewed last week.  (I forgot to bring up the box of staples I pulled out of the downstairs desk though.)  DH claimed the Badgers one for his pillow.  The others are now in the closet.  Some could end up being gifted, since they're kind of juvenile, IMHO.  :-)

In case you thought I forgot about the title of this post, I came upstairs with nothing from the freezer.

We ordered a pizza delivery.

BTW did you know there is a shortage of pepperoni due to covid?  I did not know that before yesterday... but my cousin posted to FB that she could not find something in the store and that sparked a discussion of random shortages.

   

Evidently it's aged sausage like pepperoni and salami, artificial sweeteners that go into diet soda, and canned pumpkin in my area.  Thanksgiving is going to be a bummer if the pumpkin thing is true.

This weekend had me thinking about the pumpkin cranberry muffins that I used to buy from the coffee shop where I worked, back when I actually went to an office.  They were over a dollar each back then and probably had a calorie count that was triple digits, but they were so delicious.  I would drive downtown for one of them right now, if I knew I could get one.

Let's research recipes for cranberry pumpkin muffins...

It's after twelve, what was I going to do today??

Bake on...

49 Years

 When I was younger there was a bad joke going around that went like this:  A guy says to his buddies "my wife and I have been married for three wonderful years".  And his buddy says "But I thought you got married in 1955!  Bada-bump!  I told you it was a bad joke...

The hubster and I have been married since 1971.  Yes, I WAS a child bride... hahaha!  I had just turned 20 that year, and I was working full time and I had my own apartment.  I had a junker car and a sewing machine, and what more could a girl ask for??  

My car needed brakes and I didn't make a lot of money so I had to try to find different ways to get to work.  The bus ride was an hour and a half long.  I ended up bumming rides from some co-workers, and that's how I ended up car-pooling with the guy whom I would eventually marry.  Long story short, I traded in the car for a husband!

It's been 49 pretty good years.  Some were better than others, but there were some very nice ones and a few that approached spectacular. 

Now we're both retired and settled into our routines.  He gets his lottery tickets every week and I always tell him to buy a winner this week.  He entertains himself while I go on my sewing jaunts, and I knit if he decides to watch a bad movie.  

We got this.

Anyway, that's our story and we're stickin' to it!

Mr Excitement!

Sew on...

Six Hundred Posts!!

 This blog post is number 600!  Congrats to you if you have been following me and have managed to slog through all 600... poor things!

Originally when I started blogging, I was writing because I wanted to keep track of things, remember things, and because I felt a compulsion to write them down.  I had been doing diaries off and on, I have one I kept of our anniversary trip to Hawaii, and sometimes I'd keep notebooks and fill them with thoughts during trips or conventions.  

Maybe when I'm older and my memories aren't that clear I will pull those books down and read about what I was doing in 1986 and say "wow, I guess I must have had fun"!

So this is #600.  Sorry, there are no prizes, no give-aways, just more of the same worthless rambling.  :-)

Things to do today include baking a lemon pound cake for tomorrow and escaping to the sewing studio because DH is watching golf.  Yeah, excitement to no end.

A couple from whom we lived across the street in our last home will be coming for coffee tomorrow afternoon.  He's suffering from Lymphoma and has had his last chemo treatment.  She's become a good friend of mine and we discuss knitting and sewing while the guys talk sports or the lack of yardwork required when you live in a condo. Thus the baking.

I finally sewed all the blocks together for the Kaffe Fassett mystery quilt from two years ago... the mystery was why we all jumped in to sew it, because there were only two types of blocks and only the fabric choices changed.  People who bought it moaned about the lack of variety, and the layout was not very imaginative.  The only 'redeeming quality' was that the checkerboard block taught the importance of careful cutting and accurate seaming.

The finished size was something like 82x82".  I wanted mine to be bigger, to cover a queen sized bed, so I planned to use the extra pieces for a border.  I don't know why but it never occurred to me to think about lining up the blocks in the border with the blocks in the quilt.  I plead brain clog or Old-Timers!

I put it up on the design was and dang!  Two sides line up just fine, and the other two... not a bit.

This is the design wall during the assembly process.  The border includes strips of the checkerboards that were left over.

Today's sewing room project will be un-sewing two sides of a BIG quilt, realigning the pieces at patching my errors, and stitching them back on.

The phone camera can be your friend in cases like this.  I just finished up a sample for the shop.  I was being so careful because it's not my quilt nor my quilt shop.  I made sure the directional fabric as cut correctly, and tried to get as many gnomes and words face up as I could.

The quilt has one inner border, a round of squares and four outer borders.  

This kit is available where I work in person or on line at quilt-agious.com.  Not that I'm pushing it or that I get anything out of it if you purchase the kit, but it's dang cute!

Can you see my mistake?  Ugh!

Lucky for me the fix was relatively easy.  I just opened the seams around the top row of blocks, turned it over and sewed it back in using some partial seams to I didn't have to take off the four outer borders.

Think before you sew!!  I should have it tattooed on my forearm!

Anyway, all is well again.  Sample delivered, all pants hemmed and delivered, kits cut and patterns bagged for the next church guild meeting, now it's time to get to some of my own sewing.

Happy 600th.  Stitch on...

Wrong Time, Wrong Place!

I'm always in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Or so it seems lately.

I wanted to do a post about finishing my granddaughter's sweater... except that I have seemingly forgotten where I put the cord that would connect my phone to this computer, and I can't remember my Facebook password to download it from that posting, and the password bible is upstairs and I'm on the ground floor.  See what I mean?

It's my husband's fault that the cord I have doesn't work.

He's the reason we went and got new phones a couple of weeks ago.  We each had a Samsung phone, he had an S6 and I had an S7.  They were fine for what we needed to do, but he kept missing calls (is it his hearing or the phone??) and his battery wouldn't stay charged so off we went.  We ended up with the S20.

Which of course has a completely different sized connection... and the charger that we have down here has two phone ends that connect to the wall outlet, not a phone end and a USB like the S7.

GRRR.

Lucky for me I'm an Amazon order-er in the best sense of the word.  I ordered a box of cord connectors of various lengths for the new phones and they came in 2 days.  My DH had purchased a new recliner last year and it has a USB outlet, so he can charge his phone while he sleeps in the chair.  And of course it didn't fit the new phone.  And he had the new style charger cable too... no USB end.

Thankfully we're all connected again, in the right types of outlets!

My work here is done.

Knit on...

Post 598, Happy Birthday Baby Brother!

 Today is September 4, 2020.  A lot of years ago, my mother went to the hospital in Milwaukee Wisconsin and gave birth to her seventh child and fifth son, my litte brother Chet.

Don't ask me what I was doing that day, probably watching the other kids while the parental unit was at the hospital.  Probably St. Luke's Hospital, because back then that's where everyone went to have babies.  Heck, I had two babies there!  Nowadays there are choices, and at least two other hospitals in the area have large, fancy obstetrics areas with private rooms and special meals for new parents, the works!

Anyway, happy 60th birthday to my favorite baby brother!  

He's the one at the bottom left, shortest and smallest, with the light jacket and dark tie.  There was one more boy after him, that's the baby in the center.  My sister and I grew up in a sea of testosterone, and thus both of us have awesome people skills and can cope with almost any disaster you can name.

My brothers, I laugh because I love them and there's nothing they can do about it!!

Here is one of the cutest couples in the fam, Brother Chet and wife Bobbie.

There is no better way to spend my 598th post!

Although, I must admit that the new furniture is a nice bonus...  On July 2 we went to a big furniture store and bought a new couch and loveseat.  Our old couch and chair were still pretty good looking but after years of kids and others bouncing on them, and one knee surgery making it hard to get up from low-lying seating, we took the plunge.

It only took me about 15 minutes to find what I wanted.  Then it took another 20 minutes to make the purchase.  We left the store thinking that in the promised 30 days we'd be sitting pretty.

Ha.

In 30 days the couch was in the warehouse, but the loveseat had a slight delay when we checked on line for status.  Oh well, only a week or so, right?  We arranged for Salvation Army to pick up the old stuff, and figured I had an extra chair in the bedroom that I could sit in for a few days.  And DH has his recliner which is fairly new and not being replaced.

At 45 days, the loveseat said 'end of August'.  That meant another two weeks.

Oh well, what's another two weeks?

Ha ha.

Finally at the end of the day on August 23 the status of the loveseat was 'in the warehouse'.  I went on line to arrange a delivery date. The first available day for delivery was SEPTEMBER 3!!

Agghhh!

Good thing we don't buy furniture more often.

Anyway here's the view from my couch:

Ahhh!  It was worth the wait!

Sew on...

Recent Acquisitions and Some Projects

Yesterday I ventured out to do some Stash Acquisition.  The day was so lovely, in the mid-seventies and sunny, the sky was such a beautiful blue with some fluffy clouds that looked like they had been painted there by Bob whatever his name was on Public Television.

First I stopped by the quilt shop to drop off some Christmas samples I had finished, and catch up with Cat and Julia.  Then after a run through the drive thru at McD's to pick up a diet Coke I headed out to our local Ben Franklin.  Sadly BF is closing in October due to downturn in business over all this Covid madness.  Being a locally owned franchise cannot be easy in this market.  They don't do internet sales although I think they WERE doing curbside pickup.

For me, the joy of Ben's was the browsing.  They have nearly every craft you can imagine.  Markers, crayons, beads, yarn, embroidery floss, framing for your projects, fabric and fabric and fabric... and of course all of those cute kitchy things that have sassy sayings and need dusting but don't really serve any purpose!  And costume jewelry, if you needed a holiday pin for your sweater or coat this was the place.

Things are now at 30% off, so I thought I'd wander up there to see what they have in DMC Floss.  Turns out that the floss is in very low supply, but I did pick up about 40 skeins that I didn't have, so I'm filling out my chart.  I got most of the very low numbers (1-35) that came out within the last couple of years, plus some of the 3000s, of which I previously had none.  This price was 55 cents times .7 which makes them a bargain at like 38 cents each!  

Last night after DH went to bed I started working on a new pattern I picked up, a verse from Psalm 118.  This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.  Our pastor opens every service with that verse.  He says the first half and the congregation responds with the last part.

There's a big border so I spent about an hour plotting out the edges and putting in some basting every 10 thread groups in some 14 count linen.  Then I started on the border... and got into such a Zen mode that I stitched until 11:30 p.m.  Not my usual.  But I found full episodes of Midsomer Murders on YouTube and they run for an hour and a half with no interruptions so I just put my feet up and viola!

While I was in Oconomowoc I stopped at my son's house.  It was kind of an emergency... I had decided I didn't need to use the rest room at Ben's, but once in the car, it became more urgent.  He lives literally five minutes up the road, so I figured if he was home I'd have a visit and use the facilities in one stop.  And if he had not been home I would have gone to McD's, and probably purchased another diet Coke!  That would be over my one a week limit, but oh well...

So I texted, and sure enough he was home.  One of the grands needed him to be chauffer that day so he was working from his kitchen.  So we had a nice chat, I got a hug and had a nice little break from all my heavy shopping!

😁

On the way up there, I had encountered the dreaded summer plague of the midwest, road improvements.  I realize we have a short summer, but sometimes - and I used to work for traffic engineers so I totally get it that the road have to be maintained and all that.  But do they have to jazz up so many of my normal routes?

Mike P would say yes, you travel the most popular roads and they get more wear and tear and need improvements more frequently.  And you know EVERYONE hates potholes!!

SO I was in the tiny town of Genesee, most famous for being the home of Ten Chimneys, the home of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine, and on a two lane highway I got stopped in a line of northbound traffic for about five to seven minutes. 

   

    

Once we got started again I could see that the southbound lane was about 3 inches lower, so it must be a complete overhaul.  About halfway through, I got stopped again by another flagman so a small road grader could cross the road.  Altogether the delay was about 15 minutes, or about 1/3 of my normal trip.

And that is the big story of a summer Tuesday in Wisconsin.  The late Walter Cronkite might say "and that's the way it is, August 18, 2020."

Keep calm and sew on...

Thursdays

Thursdays are such fun days.  On a scale of 1 to 7, I think Thursday is a total 10!

 

Why, you ask?

• There are very few meetings in my life that happen on Thursdays.
• Thanksgiving...   

• Tomorrow is Friday!!
• DH goes out to run errands and visit on Thursday so I have several hours of silence.
• Laundry and cleaning happen on other days.

There's just so little pressure to DO on Thursdays.  It's a day to relax and plan and figure out what's happening the rest of the week.  And these days when my brain is so fuzzy most of the time, that is such a blessing.  A day to plan to do nothing!  Wow!

  

Within the next two weeks we have a major family event or two, so today is kind of the respite before the big storm.

Miss E leaves for college shortly.  Dang!  The whole summer went by without me even thinking about this, and now it's upon us.  I am praying that things go smoothly and she settles in and loves it.  She's always been kind of an anxious little person, carrying the worries of the world in her backpack.  I will send minute by minute instructions to the angels to walk with her.  Only one person is allowed to go with her (what with Covid and all) so the rest of us will do our worrying at home.  😧

Also next week is DH's birthday.  My daughter and granddaughters consider this a National Holiday, well maybe just a family holiday.  Considering how little DH enjoys fuss made over him, I think he would think something's missing if we didn't.  There is likely to be cake enjoyed, in any case.

Hopefully chocolate.

Progress continues on the Harry Styles sweater.  I swear the panels are getting more boring over time.  Probably because I do not know anything about Harry, nor do I care... too old I guess!

Yesterday I pulled DMC Floss for the cross stitch kits I recently received in the mail.  I have a whole collection of floss wound on cards in plastic boxes.  This was a gift from my daughter, who got them from a lady at work whose mother maybe??  decided to get rid of them or passed away and she had to got rid of them.  They turned out to be almost all of the colors from number 150 to number 930.  

The charts I have included many numbers that were higher than that because there are now numbers that are 4 digits, beginning with 3s.  For some reason DMC skipped the 1 and 2 thousands.  Anyway, I pulled a color chart with chips of color to see if I could find substitutes for the ones I don't have.

Turns out it's easier just to order new skeins.

I found a site, Lovecraft dot com, that has them for 60 cents right now.  Even with $5 shipping, that to me is more comfortable than running out to JoAnns.  Although when I think about it, I should have gone up to Ben Franklin, which is closing in October, and shopped there.  Oh well, next time.

Funny, I've been watching a LOT of YouTube, mostly because it's summer and there is so litte on TV that is new/good/worth the time.  

I sometimes watch stuff that is in my list of SUGGESTED videos, and I ran across Brenda and the Serial Starter (or Serial Stitcher on some of their stuff).  I blame them for the resurgence in interest I have in cross stitching.  

They do very nice presentations, they're knowledgeable and friendly and just humorous enough to be entertaining without being silly and boring.  I'm thoroughly enjoying their whole series.   They are both prodigious stitchers, as you can probably guess from seeing the wall behind them.

Anyway, time to get up and walk around... all this sitting at the computer means I should probably NOT eat the cake!

Stitch on...