Singular Stitches: January 2007

Some of my best friends are flakes!

And they're laying out in the yard! :o)

Last night a couple inches of snow fell, and we got maybe another inch this afternoon (on top of the inch that's been there). Our first real snow of the season!! I'm a happy girl!

From the dining room window:

Standing on the front porch:

DH playing with the zamboni (as my Dad calls it):

Abner really wanting to get outside with Daddy:

And Itchey, watching from the warmth of inside (us girls had the right idea):

Kitty Stitchin'

It was another lovely, quiet weekend, spent snuggled up at home with DH and the kittes. I curled up on the couch in the Ladies' Parlour and worked on the afghan. You'll notice that both Quality Control Inspectors were present to test that its thermal properties were up to scratch.

We also had draperies installed on Saturday in the dining room. It's probably our favorite room in the house for a number of reasons. We just love the wallpaper that the previous owners chose (which makes us wonder what they were ~~smoking~~ thinking when they papered the master bedroom!) and there's a lot of wood, but the view from the window, particularly when there's snow on the ground, is just lovely. For this reason, we never put any window covering up (and neither had the previous owners). The back of our house faces West, so it typically gets the brunt of any wind, and in the summer, it lets sun in from about 2pm to sunset.

So, after much reluctance and discussion, we finally decided to get thermal draperies. (You'd think we were making a decision on some life or death situation! :o)

Unfortunately, this is the most snow we've had all season, but here's the view from the window. That tiny little house looking thing attached to the first tree to the right of the center of the windows is a squirrel feeder my dad made for us. Periodically, I fill it up with peanuts.

Every time one of us sees a squirrel sitting on the feeder, we say "Squirrrrrrrrel!" (Like from Christmas Vacation... :o)

Now, what have I been up to?

Not much, really. It's sad, I can't even remember what my last post was about. I've hardly cross stitched, either. Not intentional, that's just how it worked out. I do have to finish up Vash's RR and get that off to her, too!

I've been pleasure reading. I used to read a lot, but kind of got away from it in college. On The Knitting Doctor's blog, I saw a link to the 2007 "To Be Read" Challenge, where each participant selects 12 books to read over the course of 2007. (Audio books count, too) If you're interested, they're still taking members until the end of January.

Here's my list: (In no particular order…)

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – J. K. Rowling
2. The Eyre Affair – Jasper FForde
3. The Mysteries of Udolpho – Anne Radcliffe
4. Thunderstruck – Erik Larson
5. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
6. Living Dead in Dallas – Charlaine Harris
7. Belladonna – Anne Bishop
8. Od Magic – Patricia McKillip
9. Natural Magick – Miria Liguana
10. The Spirited Walker – Carolyn Kortge
11. Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife – Linda Berdoll
12. Lady Chatterly’s Lover – D. H. Lawrence

I just finished #8 last night, Od Magic, which was *very* good. A great fantasy book with kings and wizards and travelling magicians.

I also started up a very simple, mindless knitting project, probably to counter all that lace knitting I did this fall. It's a lap throw for the family room. I'm using up some Homespun stash, in the Tudor colorway (cream, violet, turquoise, mauve and country blue), and really goes nicely with my chair. When complete, it wll probably be around 3'X5'. (And the cats might acutally let me use it once in a while...)

The majority of my Christmas gifts were handmade this past holiday. After finishing up the knitted gifts, I went to start on my sewn gifts. This was maybe four days before Christmas, but it's quick sewing, so I had plenty of time. *sigh* To make life so much more...interesting, my sewing machine decided to be sick. So, I tearfully called my parents and told my Dad that he would get his Christmas gifts after the holidays after I took my sewing machine to the dealer. (He totally understood)

I've had my machine for about 13 years now, and even though it picked a very inopportune moment to not work, it's the first time I ever had any problems with it. The repair bill damage wasn't bad, and now it has it's lovely purr back.

And here he is with his (relatively new) brother, my serger:

I want to sew more. I've done a little utilitarian sewing, and made some running pants for my Dad, but not regularly for myself like I used to. I've found some great sewing blogs (it all started with Isabelle's) that have been motivating me to pick it up again.

Oh, yeah, I just realized that back on December 18th, it was my one year Blogaversary. My, how time flies when you're having fun!! :o)

Bye, bye, Birdie

Also over the holiday, I worked on Vash's RR. Aren't the designs adorable?? They're freebies from Vermillion (can't find the site right now, but they're out there somewhere...).

The Painted Bunting is the bird I'm stitching. (It was so hard to choose!!) Here's a closeup of my square:

I'm planning to get him done this weekend for a Monday mailing.

Thank you for all the sweet comments about Flora. She's been a dream to stitch, but I'm also trying to cram all the wild, unabandoned stitching in that I can before classes start up again this coming Monday.

Last term I got an A in my Intro to Industrial Engineering class and a B in my Statistics for Engineers class. I was a bit disappointed with the B, but (and I'm not making any excuses), the math overwhelmed me. It was a lot more calculus based math than the Statistics class I took for my MBA. I love calculus (in the immortal words of Wierd Al, 'Do vector calculus just for fun...'), but, as they say, use it or lose it...and I have.

This term, I'm taking Database Management (SQL, here I come!!!!! :o). I am really looking forward to this class. In my daily work, I extensively use Microsoft Access for business analysis and forecasting orders from our Oracle system. I'm an Engineer, so I do have programming in my blood, but nothing like that of an IT Developer. I've really hit boundaries using Access' GUI for queries, and know I could do a lot more (and more easily) entirely creating a query using SQL and not the GUI. Can you tell I'm excited? :o)

A restful holiday indeed

I don't know about where you all are, but for the first day back, it's pretty subdued here at work. Everyone seems to need some time to ease into being in something other than PJs and bunny slippers.

I was actually in the week between Christmas and New Years, but that almost doesn't count, because it's kind of like the tree thing: if there was no one there to see you work (or not), did you really (not) work? :o)

Our time off was spent not doing a whole lot. It was glorious! Although, in an unexpected cleaning fit, I was able to trick DH into some housework just before the new year. I got tired of sticking to the kitchen floor. (because stitching is much more fun than housework!) I was so ambitious, I even took off the cover at the bottom of the fridge, and sucked out enough cat hair to just about knit up a third cat!

DH and I don't exchange gifts, but Santa (a la Mum & Dad) brought me some green stuff so I got a 120G external hard drive for my laptop. Ok, I know, not very exciting, but what can I say, I'm an electronics nerd. My laptop HD is only 30G (Remember when we thought 10M was a lot??) and the remaining space was quickly filling up with music/audio books/podcasts for my iPod (which is 80G). The external drive is now my iPod library.

While I was setting up my new toy, I had plenty of time to do some stitching:

Flora probably got the majority of my time:

I also started a new project, Ye Olde Coffee House (Little House Needleworks):

My RR is back from it's tour of the globe! Wendy was the last to work on it (and really tore it up!) so that I received it just before Christmas Day. I'm counting it as a Christmas present!