How to tell if you need a vacation It's the little thoughts you find scurrying through your head that are the real tip off. The other night I'm driving home, thinking about some things that happened and I thought 'I don't want to go home. I don't want to go anywhere where people know me or where they want to talk with me. Could I drive to alaska? This is why people move and leave no forwarding address. It's the pressure of all this stuff that has to be done, words that have to be said, questions answered. Yes, moving somewhere else would be great. What name would I use?'
Despite all that I did go home. I have tons of stuff to do. Tomorrow I'll be joining my Mom as on air guests of WAMC. We'll do the 11:07 AM slot of Round Table about the quilt show. IAt least it's radio and it doesn't matter so much what you look like, but I think I better go to bed earlier so that I'll at least be rational.
I won't even go into my day today on the quilt show side of things. Let's just say they don't pay me enough.
Let's see, what have I done in the past few days? Worked, of course. Stayed outta trouble, mostly. Sewed, some. Bought fabric, of course. Slept, little. In other words, same ol' same ol'. How about you?
Little by little the blocks get made. This is the second set of pieces waiting for some sewing machine time.
Written at:
5/19/2002 05:38:00 PM
I came home from various errands to find that the baby robins had flown the coop AND that they apparently had been replaced by a flock of chickens. These are actually my neighbor's chickens and he DID ask permission before letting them run free. They're huge. I don't mind, although they do keep kicking the leaves I use for mulch around. Oh well. Don't you think they could leave some eggs by my door? They're big and red and they look rather brainless like chickens do.
Written at:
5/19/2002 05:05:00 PM
Sometimes it's a curse to have a mind that likes to think about numbers. I have 78 small pink squares done. That's about 25 per cent of what I need. Whooo hoooo. They're looking good though. At least, I like them.
I also wanted to mention two books. I received my complimentary copy of the book America: From The Heart This book documents 270 of the 277 quilts displayed at the International Quilt Festival in Houston, November 2001. I couldn't read it all in one sitting, and I wanted to look at all the quilts. So I settled for looking at most of the quilts and randomly reading the statements each quilter displayed with the quilt. It was great to see what a wonderful job they'd done with photographing the quilts. I think mine looks great! And there were the others I knew. 125 of these quilts will be at NYQuilts! June 8-9, 2002.
The other book, which I picked up at Barnes and Noble tonight, was one I hoped would be published and said I would buy it was. While waiting for an answer about another book, I spotted it: Portraits 9/11/01 which is "The Collected 'Portraits of Grief' From The New York Times." Within the weighty tome are all the small biographies that the NYT printed during the period following September 11. It's a black and white book, as you would expect from a newspaper.
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5/17/2002 09:17:00 PM
For Posterity's sake aka You heard it here first
Dave R predicted today:
"On June 18, 2004, Steve Jobs will push a red button and the Clone Wars shall begin, thereby bringing an end to the OS Holy Wars."
It's raining! It's pouring! I went and bought some potatoes and meat to make goulash with the newly-arrived paprika. Not sure what else we'll do this week. I bought pasta so I'll put that away in its safe place. Slept a long time last night. Now I need more coffee it seems to get going.
Oh yes - I almost forgot that my order arrived from Penzeys today. That was quick. I nicked the box open and was rewarded with the wonderful perfumey smell of many spices and herbs. For about $50 I got: tellicherry pepper corns plus some ground pepper, fennel seed, whole nutmegs, sweet hungarian paprika (what a color -- what an aroma - like standing outside on a hot summer day holding a bowl of wonderful ripe peppers), basil, parsley and bay leaves. How nice is that? Very very nice.
Go - you need new spices.
Cooking with old spices (and you KNOW how old yours are) is sinful. Get fresh spices from a good source. Penzeys is not only a good source but very reasonably priced. Go now Enjoy life. Eat well. Escape grocery store spices.
Written at:
5/11/2002 09:08:00 PM
Worked like a busy beaver last night pulling lots of things together for a NYQuilts! expedition to the mall. At the invite of Boscov's who is promoting our show by giving out flyers and putting up photos, we came with our raffle quilt and sat and chatted with people. Mainly we chatted with ourselves, but hey, that's to be expected. I was there all day, but I had a nice rotation of co-sitters to chat with. AND I finished the binding on my October Sky quilt. yeah! only the binding to sew down and a label to make. Phew.
Came home changed and am currently doing some laundry. I might have to head to bed early tonight - I was up late and cold enough to be uncomfortable part of the night. where are those silly cats when you need them. To make it up to me Bill is currently sitting on my lap purring up a storm. I'm not sure if he's repentant for not keeping me warm last night or if he's just decided that my new NYQ! tshirt (designed by yours truly on this here Mac) needed its share of cat fur. Actually I think I'll go up and sew together a few of those little triangles.
Other exciting news - 300 plus quilts will be on display at NYQuilts! this year. WHOA!
OK, that last post was pretty bitter. I thought about editing it, but hey, I'm a real person. I'm allowed to be ticked off and it happened to all fall that way yesterday. Today was interesting in its own way. Hung up on several times at work. Once by a woman and the rest by "no one there." A couple people were dismissive of me in the store. One couple -- totally bizarre -- the man made a weird dismissive face at me when I greeted them and then really pointedly ignored everyone and everything. They walked in, they walked out. Goodbye. Guess any shreds of warm and fuzzy from the fall are at last gone.
On the other hand, I have to say that the sky light has been really beautiful over the past few days. Wonderfully typical hudson valley sort of light - gold, glowing, shadowed clouds, many shades of blue, grey, you name it. In a word - atmospheric.
First, send me a bunch of emails that consist of Microsoft's idea of html -- taking MS word documents and saving it as html doesn't do it folks. Each email I got (and I got three of them) looked like 130K plus, was total garbage in eudora and when in a snit I cut and pasted all three into a single email to send back to the sender, I tied up my machine with a resulting 600K text email. Took some finessing to get rid of it, but I prevailed, cursing out the sender the whole time. I managed to send her 200K of it back, carefully changing the first and last tags enough that no way could it be interpreted by her MS as anything but text. I believe it was huge tables of books for sale. And she had scooped the email from a little known web page - luckily she didn't email me at all my different domain based emails.
Second choice - send me so many copies of the lastest Windows virus that my email is all screwed up due to bandwidth and server issues. Thanks very much for supporting, guess what - MS again. Folks - if you have to use outlook, at LEAST change your attachment folder's name and location. It's not hard and that alone can help disable viruses. Geesh. Pay for software to check for viruses, update it religiously, or better yet - get a mac.
Third - drive 40 miles an hour in a 55 mph zone and then, in the first and only passing zone, pull out to go around a truck that's creeping up the hill. Only - don't pass them. Just sit in the passing lane at 40 mph with 6 cars behind you. That's the closest to road rage I've ever felt.
Fourth - Be our ISP and respond to my request for assistance with a "we don't know but we think it's because xyz. someone else had a different problem that was sort of the same." Mind you, I had sent a copy of the error message so they could see that it seemed to be a problem on their end, and I was guessing it was due to the pile of 130-200K messages/viruses I'd been spammed with. Why did I think that? Because last week, when I had the same problem, I asked them to manually delete those files and guess what -- the problem went away. Hello - that's a problem on YOUR end folks. Fix it. Instead, when I politely declined their first suggestion and suggested that it was a continuation of last week's problem -- they responded with - oh, well first we need your account name and password and we'll delete files that you tell us to. How about just fixing the problem instead.
OK, now you know. I'm in a totally pissy mood and none of it's my fault.
Big news in Brainard - the robins' eggs have hatched. Now both parents are very busy feeding that crew! I hear them cheeping - feed me! feed me! What a great thing.
On a human note - Ian, from the apple store and his wife Amy had their baby - a girl now named Emma Victoria. awwwwww.
I'm still alive and doing bits of sewing. That's actually a good thing about quilting. You can have multiple projects at various stages, all going on at different rates, all at the same time. Last night i couldn't resist putting a little quilting onto the nine patch quilt. I was SO pleased with how it looks.
Tonight I wanted something a little different so I cut some of the many pink squares into triangles and I've whomped up a bunch of blocks for the "pink" quilt. That looks interesting too.
I think I'm bonding with the folks at work over some things. Some were expressing concern today - where's doug (aka the inventory guy) and why are you doing his job? Well, truth be told, Doug took the day off to follow his passion - he and his dad went to see the movie Spiderman today at 10:30 AM. We managed to hold down the fort pretty well so he could enjoy a day off. One of my co-workers shared some music with me - saying only "this guy was the guitarist for Phish." Well, at least I know how to spell Phish! LOL
Long week. Ugly weather. Unsettled weather in my head as well. Hope to actually make progress in some things this weekend so I can get out from under,.
I really only came downstairs to get the camera so I could take some photos. Stay tuned.
update: I wanted to add my voice to the Verisign Google bomb - an effort to keep people aware of the ineptitude of this company and its mishandling of domain names and registrations. Go here for more information: Verisign
