This week I resurrected the first three years of the blog, did a table for Lily so I could get a grip on her plot, did two tables for Nita, worked on her Act Two, and started a Twelve Days, and resurrected a couple of the old He Wrote She Wrote blog. That’s WAY too much screen time, so I also planted a tomato plant and cleaned my bedroom.
I’m feeling very virtuous.
What did you do this week?
This past weekend, DH and I worked on prepping for the painters. We had to cut back some growth from around the house (as well as other overgrown shubberies) and cart the debris off to the yard waste center. So by noon Saturday, I was beat! I’m glad we got it done though. The painters are scheduled for Memorial Day week, and this week we’re socked in with rain every day.
On Sunday, I decided to push through and finish up the two baby quilts. It required that I put borders on them, get the batting and backing together, and then quilt them. That took up the entire day . Last night I finished the binding – and then found Wendy testing their sleepability.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CAZDm6chkzg/
I had a couple of motivations for trying to get these done now. The babies are due in August, so I’d like to get them mailed out soon. I’m also awaiting the results of a biopsy. Preliminary findings showed a form of thyroid cancer – slow moving, definitely curable – but I’m in limbo until the final results come back. I don’t know what/when the next step will happen, or how I’ll feel when that does happen. So, getting these off my plate and out will be one less thing I’ll need to worry about – and it was a good distraction too.
One more quilt to finish binding, then I’ll try to finish that cat quilt for my niece.
I’m so sorry/glad to hear about the test results. I hope the biopsy shows benign but I suppose if a person has to have cancer, slow moving and treatable is the best kind.
Your quilts are gorgeous!
I hope that you get well soon!
Oh good luck!
Your quilts (and cats) are lovely, Nancy. I’m wishing you good news on the test results too.
((((Hugs))))
Hugs. I hope everything turns out well.
Good luck with the waiting for more results and congratulations on the interim good news. I hope the greater detail provides greater hope.
It was nice to see that your gifts are both beautiful and cat approved. After all, who knows more about naps than cats?
Hugs and hoping for good news and a plan.
Best wishes to you, Nancy!
Planted lots of tomato plants, basil, coriander. Apparently it is not possible to have too many coriander plants so we have about 25.
I didn’t ever read He Wrote/She Wrote, so it’s fun to see these outtakes from it! Thanks, Jenny!
I re-arranged my kitchen pantry/bookshelf to put like things with like things; chucked some expired stuff; started thinking that pantries may not be practical for me; alternated between panic and meditations; and worked on my leftover yarn scarf. It’s amazing how many color combinations can be made with ten or so small balls of yarn.
And, of course, I ended up ordering more yarn. My delight at having a project to clear out my stash was real and true, but so was my disappointment in the empty bins. And the yarn I found is so beautiful.
I also found the perfect bag in my stash for holding my scarf project. A cheerful bag with an octopus drawing on it. I posted photos in #workingwednesdaypix
I’m glad that Working Wednesdays are staying, at least for now. : )
Me too! And I really like your octopus bag!
Thanks, Nancy!
I did a lot but this is all the time and energy I have for photos. https://www.instagram.com/p/CAaXMfMAIoR/?igshid=k6yyujw5hpwn
Will try to post some other photos tomorrow. I’m feeling quite fatigued. But I’m working on it.
Lud, I wish I cleaned my room. Hoarding is a terrible thing, even if I am o my a Level 1 hoarder. I have to take solace in not being addicted to substances!!!!
Riker is hilarious. I ought to pay that picture. Laters.
I’m getting a day ahead of myself because this morning I read the HW/SW blogs from yesteryear. Over the last couple of months I’ve read some of Bob’s blog on surviving the pandemic. So I’m putting that intense guy together with your personality and coming up with zany road trip scenarios. In the meantime I have Don’t Look Down on a wait list from the library on e-book, yes I’m in a line waiting. I also checked my paper book tree stash and there it was hiding in plain sight. Looking forward to rereading. Agnes is there, too.
I’ve started working on doing this face mask pattern entirely by hand. God help me.
https://www.craftpassion.com/face-mask-sewing-pattern/
I’m nearing finishing a vest and nearing finishing all the Baby Yodas I was going to pass out to coworkers. Though we are not going back to work any time soon and I’m terrified to go to the post office, so I have no idea if/when anyone will get any 🙁 Oh well.
I also actually GOT INTO the first online show I auditioned for!!!!!!!!!! Score!
I am also signed up to play Beatrice in Much Ado this weekend (I admit, I joined the committee for this online theater troupe, said I’d take over signups, and took advantage of that….but this was literally the only way I’d get cast in the role!), so score!
That’s such a great role! Congratulations.
Other than grocery shopping, chicken roasting and soup making, as well as daily working from home (with minutes to prepare according to someone else’s complicated formatting – argh!), the only thing I accomplished was rescuing two small peony plants and three clumps of iris from the trampling of builders on my deceased neighbor’s property.
He and his wife loved these plants, and it was super sad to see them trying to bloom with backhoe track marks and orange spray paint all over the garden bed. But I saved some.
This week, I helped some pottery friends fire the gas kiln, which abruptly got way more exciting than usual when flames started erupting from a place they definitely should not have been. All was well in the end, but let’s just say that it was another good reminder that most of us are rather compromised by pandemic-related stress right now.
Less excitingly, I’m working my way through a tiresome cloud of self-pity today. Just too many situations in my life right now where I feel like the only grown-up in the room, or where people are demanding that I fix their problems and attend to their emotional needs. It’s hard not to feel like I would rather be the person who neglects to complete several vital safety measures when shutting down the gas kiln last week, rather than the person who everyone turns to to deal with the resulting semi-emergency this week, you know? Well, not literally, but it’s a big dumb mood today.
Lucky me, I only have a few hours of calls and meetings and whatnot on this beautiful Wednesday, so will spend the rest of the day poor-babying myself with sunshine, baking, hot showers, and art-making.
I did some gardening, spent some time working on the preparations for reopening the artists’ cooperative shop I run on May 29th, and made some (although not much) progress on the outline for the new cozy.
Also realized I have a new witchcraft book coming out from St. Martin’s Press July 7th that I haven’t been promoting at all, so I started to work on that. Oy.
To top things off, when we had a major storm last Friday, my (semi-permanent) House Guest discovered a leak in the ceiling. Directly over her bed, of course. *headdesk* This is leak #2 in a less than 9 year old roof, but I may end up having to put on a new one. In the meanwhile, I have ordered a new bed with drawers underneath to put in the other upstairs room, since she has been using a futon plus a mattress that was never really intended for long-term use. Now we get to put the new bed together, and move the futon out of the first room (it’s going to replace a friend’s disgusting old couch) along with most of the House Guest’s belongings, so we can hack the ceiling apart and fix it. Oh, the joy.
Like I said on Sunday, we spent Saturday out garden/plant shopping and we ate at a restaurant (very weird but very clean, probably much cleaner than in January. Seriously, what restaurant sanitized the salt and pepper shakers between customers?). Sunday was clean up and Tuesday we took a load of stuff to the dump.
Monday was a holiday (Victoria Day) and I was going to go get some more plants but the garden centre I wanted to go to wasn’t supposed to be open until 11 and that was too late for me. Then, on Monday morning, they announced they were opening at 9 – which I didn’t see until it was too late to be there for 9. It turned out for the best because it poured and I wound up not feeling very well at all.
Paul and I did watch The Princess Bride last week, he had never seen it and it was “okay.” I think he had more fun watching me try to refrain from reciting all the lines, something I failed miserably at. He does now, finally, understand Once Upon a Deadpool. We have started Willow but haven’t had a chance to finish it yet. Next up, if we can find it, is Legend.
He thought The Princess Bride was only “okay”? Inconceivable!
Okay, just because I think it is one of the most delightful movies of all time doesn’t mean that he has to. At least he watched it before passing judgement.
I’m going to get him to watch it again sometime soon and take away his iPad so he has to pay attention. His favourite movie is A River Runs Through It and I swear every time he watches it, he is hoping for a different ending.
He was shocked Vizzini died. I don’t think he was expecting that.
Gardening, boxed up the party glassware, and got rid of a cataract. 🙂 Well, the surgeon did most of the work on the last one, but I was there!
Unlike Jenny, I’m a linear writer, and this past week I hit about 50% of the work in progress and the usual wall. So I reread it all focussing on pace and plotting and found a couple holes that needed filling. It also gave me a chance to update my outline (yes, it’s in Excel) so now I know what still needs to be covered and hopefully the last half will fall reasonably neatly into place.
Other than that, we planted all our annuals so the backyard has some colour.
I use a spreadsheet for plotting too (albeit not in excel, just a custom-created table in my word processing software)!
I like the illusion of control. I know it’s an illusion, because none of my books have ended up identical to the spreadsheet. But it makes me feel like I know what I’m doing. 🙂
This week I lurked as you resurrected the first three years of the blog, did a table for Lily so you could get a grip on her plot, did two tables for Nita, worked on her Act Two, and started a Twelve Days, and resurrected a couple of the old He Wrote She Wrote blog. That was WAY too much screen time, so I also ate a tomato and some onion slices with cheddar cheese, catsup and brown mustard on a couple of Ballpark Already-Been-Cooked-So-Just-Nuke-‘Em hamburgers on brioche buns and nearly cleaned my bedroom.
I’m feeling very virtuous, too. 🙂
LOL, Gary!
I’ve been having trouble settling down to writing, in part because I don’t have any hard deadlines right now. need to wait until the fall to submit a proposal to continue the garlic farm mysteries, and another project is on submission (but getting rejections, except my agent never uses the R word and instead comes up with a number of euphemisms that sounds so much less harsh, and at least today’s had some positive feedback on elements I thought might be a turn-off, but that she liked).
On the more productive side, I delivered 100 masks yesterday, for a total of 315 (not counting 50 or so to friends and family). The need is winding down as for-profit entities are taking over, so I probably won’t make many more. I was ready to take a break anyway, but it’s a little sad too, because I had a very Argh-like community with the other mask-sewers of makemasks2020.org
Okay, time to go attack a bramble that the guy who mows my lawn (for free; neighbor) finds annoying.
It was chemo week so I didn’t get alot done. But I got another new grandbaby! I’m not sure why, but they seem to come in lots. A few years ago we got three and this year we got two. Since I married my husband after his kids were grown and married, I’m enjoying being able to spoil the little ones without doing much work. I am also grateful that his kids let me spoil the little ones.
Phred, I have the image of chubby babies floating down towards you, out of the blue.
Planted 4 tomato, 4 pepper, and a couple of basil plants (love basil). Also cleaned the kitchen. Oh, and baked the Japanese milk bread. It came out well, but sweet. I don’t have anything else planned for this week except the everyday dog walk. I’m going back to Pratchett’s witches now.
I worked in 3-D this week! I have one more day of school, then we are DONE. Tonight I finished a grouping of social media posts and I can probably consider that mostly done as well.
I’m cleaning up and updating my computer a bit at a time.
I also worked on clearing the last of my uncle’s library out of his place. It was wistful, but I can now manage the dispersal of his media much easier.
I also went on a bike ride and a walk, so I’m feeling the effects of this uptick in activity, but it’s mostly the good kind of achy-ness, so that’s cool.
It was a rough weekend (loved one in ER, water in basement – both fine now). I worked a bunch today and thought I’d done pretty well for Tuesday. Fortunately, I realized it’s Wednesday in time to set up my office for a major video call Thursday. And then it will be Friday! I think.
I’m dragging. Not getting enough done at work or at home. It was a hard week. Nothing major but a lot of things that just hit me hard One friends mother died and another friends father died; they had both been ill for years but still sad. I turned 60 and realized that while I’m fine being older it made me realize I’m in tbe higher risk group for COVID 19 (ok one day older doesn’t really mean anything but it shook me), I had a doctor check up to follow up on a skin cancer and while I’m fine it was a shock to realize she felt the check up was urgent. Maybe hardest was realizing that I may not see my daughter for a year or two—she is in London—and probably won’t see her for Christmas.
Trying to regroup and catch up.
I seem to remember it took a while to integrate turning 60. I thought it wouldn’t/shouldn’t affect me, but it did seem to be a turning point. I think many of us find it coincides with other things that change your perspective a bit.
I have had an unproductive week. I got to go back to work for two weeks (yay!) but have been stood down again since last Wednesday and won’t get any more work until mid-June at the earliest. So I mostly wallowed in “What the hell am I going to do for the next month?” although I also forced myself to make real food, knitted a set of fingerless mittens, and worked on my ankle rehab. Small victories, I guess.
The contractor is working again. Yesterday, in the pouring rain, the cabinet maker and his man delivered the kitchen island and cabinets. I stayed out of the way as my daughter was at home Zooming with students, and I had the dog, Max, hanging out at my place.
This morning I decided to sweep up the sawdust in the carport. Noticed drops of blood, a smear of red, what looked like a bloodied foot print outside my door, and my imagination ran wild. Perhaps a feral cat (we do have some in the neighborhood) caught a rat, or a baby possum, and tortured it. A human, injured, tried to raise me from a deep sleep in need of attention, but failed. A bad, bad man shot by another bad man, spent part of his last minutes on my porch.
Of course, I could not speak with my daughter as it was graduation day at school
( even though virtual she was still super busy) so my imagination ran wild while each time I stepped around the evidence and awaited her homecoming. She looked at the blood, shrugged and said, “Oh yeah, Daniel cut himself yesterday when he was getting a cabinet off the truck.”
What an anticlimax.
I saw friends! In person!! We’ve unwound a lock of the NZ lockdown and I’m very pleased.
And I spent a bunch of hours organising a group of 10 people to plant 200 baby trees. We’re spending this weekend clearing a track through gorse and blackberry to plant them into, then next weekend planting. It’s taking an amazing amount of phone calls and FB messages to line up the people and gear for it but I think I’ve got there. Good practice for my near-phobia against phone calls.
Yesterday I made a card for the father-to-be at work, showing the progress I’ve made on the baby afghan and promising to have it done before the child is a year old. If the baby is not being born today, labor will be induced tomorrow, so I have a distant deadline. Am I working on the afghan today, on my day off? No.