New Year

It’s been a long time since my last post. Things here have been crazy. We all of us worked overtime in order to get the house paid off on time, so we’ll not go homeless this year. 🙂 Always good news.

Our camera died last year but I got a new one now and while I don’t have a lot to show in the way of new work, I will get some pictures taken today or tomorrow and posted here. I’ve missed my blog and I’ve missed reading what everyone else is doing. So I’m glad to be back and will be looking forward to seeing everyone’s current projects!

MRI and CATscan reports are in!

I finally got the results of my MRI and CATscan. First, the good news: I don’t have a brain tumor. Yay! It’s always nice to know that. Now, the other good news: I have 2 herniated discs in my neck, a frontal protruding disc which is causing my swallowing problems and, most likely, the extreme pain I’ve been under these last five weeks, and degenerative disc disease, which to me just says ‘Sorry, honey, you’re getting old.’ This is all good news, because it means at least we know what it is and we can now go about fixing it. I’ve been fighting this pain on again off again for more than a decade. I am so ready for it to be over. I have been referred to a neurosurgeon and I’ll let you know what kind of surgery will be scheduled and when.

Picture Update!

Here we go, tons of pictures. The first is the exchange I received from Lynda A. for our Fair and Square exchange. I love it! Look how beautiful it is. I love colorful patterns and this certainly fits the bill. 🙂

Next is the Totally Useless Stitch Along!

My jar hasn’t progressed a lot in the last month. I’ve not been able to stitch, but I’ve picked it back up again this last weekend and it’s given me a finish! Woot! Happy dances all over the place for my Mirabilia Christmas Flourishes! This is a sucky picture, it doesn’t show any of the metallic threads of the bazillion beads that went into it, but it’s the best I can do.

Next come the Quakers. Beatrix Potter (which looks a little off along the top because of how the cloth and camera are positioned; I promise, it isn’t really–I checked, lol) and Mary Wigham:

And because this ache in my neck and head is making me feel my age, I pulled out a pattern that fit: I Shall Wear Purple. Poem by Jenny Joseph, Pattern by Leisure Arts. 🙂

I think I’ll be done with it on Friday–fingers crossed–but now that I’ve said that on my blog, it’s more likely to be NEXT Friday. lol

Until next time…

Update

Thank you so much for all the well-wishes I’ve received, both publicly and privately. I very much appreciate it.

Okay, stitching first and then I’ll talk about what’s going on medically for those who are interested. I’ve got a lot of picture updates that I have to do, and will hopefully get those listed later today.

I received some beautiful patterns from Deb’s giveaway. As soon as I can stitch again, I’m going to start right in on one. Thank you so much, Deb. I LOVE them!

I also received exchange squares from my Fair and Square partner, Lynda A. She did them in Vikki Clayton silks, a variegated blue and purple color shift that is just perfect for me. My two favorite colors! Thanks so much and I will get pictures posted. I swear.

Now, for the rest of it.

Waffles update!

Waffles is as recovered as he’s going to get, medically, and I think he’s doing much better than anyone expected. He doesn’t close his jaw. He can, but I think he just doesn’t prefer it. So he walks around a little slack-jawed, which fits him since the car accident has left him, let’s face it, a little retarded. He’s an absolute sweetheart personality-wise (we couldn’t have done better on that front if we’d tried), moves his back legs easily now, uses the litter box consistently and eats solid food, so I can deal with all his other little peculiarities.

He has staked out the laundry room for his own, despite all our efforts to install him in either the living room or the office, where we can give him a little more daily attention (after all, who wants to just hang around in the laundry room all day?). But he doesn’t like it out here in the open. I guess there’s too many things for a blind cat can bump into. So, to make it easy for him, we put his own litter box and food and water troughs where he can get at them, and a baby gate across the basement stairs so he won’t fall down them…again.

Anyone who has cats probably knows how they are with empty boxes. Well, for a while there I had a short stack of empty boxes at the top of the stairs, waiting to be shifted down into the basement. Along comes poor blind Waffles, who bumped into one, identified it as being empty, and decided he could not live another day without spending some time hiding in that box. What he didn’t know was this particular box was hanging half on and half off the top stair. The end result was a fast and bumpy ride straight to the bottom where the box flipped end over end and poor Waffles was neatly deposited right into the sump pump well. Fortunately, Michael was in the basement at the time and quickly fished him out again.

Waffles was not amused. He’s also holding Michael completely responsible for the entire unpleasant event and won’t let the poor man anywhere near him.

Okay, and now me. The doctor called to say my x-rays came back and he has diagnosed me with arthritis. Now, I’ve had arthritis in my hands for twenty years, but I’ve never felt anything like this and I don’t know why it’s come on all of a sudden. For the last five weeks I’ve had ice picks jabbing up into my head with every movement, causing horrendous headaches that crawl up the back of my neck, into my skull, moving laterally through it until all I can feel is a mouthful of displaced pain, throbbing in each and every one of my teeth. A hot pad has been the best thing to help me sleep, but the medications he gave me can’t be taken with painkillers of any kind (up until now, I’ve been popping aspirin like Pez candies just so I could see straight). I go back on the 18th, and will be pushing for a CT scan or MRI to tell if the discs in my neck have herniated.

Lovely squares

I received these squares some time ago, but I just have not been able to see straight long enough to be a good exchange partner. Melissa, I apologize. Your squares are beautiful! I love them.

From my bed of pain…

Once upon a time (oh, about 14 years ago), in a land far, far away (Arkansas), a lovely young woman was driving home from work. Because she was driving home to her handsome Prince Charming, naturally, she was doing all that driving off into the sunset. Which isn’t anywhere near as glamorous as it sounds, since anyone who has ever driving into the sunset knows, that sun is bright, below the visor, and you generally can’t see a darn thing on the the road (is there really even a road out there?) ahead of you.

Anyway, as she came to the road upon which her “castle” (read one-bedroom duplex, right next door to a crazy lady and her sixteen cats), she stopped to make the turn, waiting for traffic to pass and rolling down the carriage window in an effort to see something, anything out ahead of her (like more oncoming traffic headed for her at 40 mph and completely obscured by the brilliance of that blasted sun). When suddenly, the cacophony of screeching brakes behind her alerted her to the fact that she was about to be in an accident.

Flooring the gas pedal in a frantic effort to avoid the unavoidable, our lucky young heroine was fortunate enough to turn what could have been a really bad accident into a minor fender bender. Unfortunately, she also landed herself a really, really bad case of whiplash.

Now, flash forward 14 years….still married to Prince Charming, but no longer in Arkansas (or that duplex, thank the Maker), and the effects of that minor accident are still being felt. After spending that last week in so much pain that I couldn’t move, sleep, lie down, stand up, sit, work at the computer, work at cross stitch, wash dishes, do laundry, anything at all, I finally broke down and called the doctor. My appointment was this morning, and ended in my receiving a fistful of prescriptions, a bunch of x-rays, and enough painkillers that I finally got to sleep for about four hours, which is more than I’ve been able to do since last Friday.

I won’t know the results of the x-rays until next month. Hopefully, he’ll find something wrong with me that can be fixed.

Fair and Square for Lynda

My latest square was just received for the Fair and Square Exchange #14, so it’s okay now to post them here.

This was for Lynda. She mentions on her blog that I must have speedy needles, I stitched this so fast. lol, thank you for the compliment, but every morning I get up and remove the moss from them instead. I am a slow stitcher; that little 55×55 square took 4 days. What I am, instead, is paranoid that I’m going to miss a deadline. So each time one of these new rounds start, I drop everything else and immediate start looking for a pattern based on your likes and dislikes, then I cut my cloth and go to work.

This pattern was actually pretty fun. I cobbled it together from a larger sampler out of the Reader’s Digest Big Book of Cross-Stitch Designs.

I also received an exchange today, but I can’t get a picture of it yet. My husband’s camera is a professional photographer’s camera with, quite literally, a million buttons, dials and knobs all over it. I thought digital camera’s were supposed to be easy! I’ve just spent twenty minutes trying first to get to the right screen to even take a picture, and then trying desperately to put it back on whatever setting DH had left so he wouldn’t know I’d been ‘playing’ with his ‘baby’.

I’ll get a picture taken tonight when he gets home and I’ll post it as soon as I can.

I am deep into my coursework now. It’s taking a little longer than I thought now because I’m making myself retype all the reports I’ve already done. I don’t think I need to be this anal about it, but sadly the heavy yoke of my newfound Type A personality is firmly upon my shoulders.

You know, that’s almost depressing. I have just decided. Today is going to be a break day! My sister set up the Playstation yesterday. By golly, I’m going to go play a game!

Alphabet Giveaway!

If you guys haven’t seen this yet, I seriously recommend popping over and having a look. I was absolutely drooling! I don’t know about you, but personally I think no one can ever have enough alphabet books. lol And this one looks to be a doozy!

Whether I win or not, I’m going to need to get a copy of this one. 😀

July Finish

Just a quick post today. I’ve got schoolwork and real work waiting for me, but I wanted to post a few finishes first. The first is my square for the Fair and Square Summer Round. My partner has received it, so it’s now safe to show on here.

This is a Delft tile image, the pattern of which can be found in Reader’s Digest Big Book of Cross-Stitch Designs. I sort of modified the existing pattern to fit F&S’s size restrictions.

The second is my break from bigger projects. I couldn’t resist, although when I asked the hubby to come take a picture of it and he got his first look at it, he laughed and then said I wasn’t going to hang that anywhere in the house. It does not, he said, get to be my new motto.

It is, of course, Lizzie Kate’s Housework Never Killed. I changed a couple of the colors because…well, one because I didn’t have it and I wasn’t about to stop stitching just because it was 11pm and the local floss shop refuses to adopt a 24-hour schedule, my politely persistent requests notwithstanding, and the other because I just plain didn’t like it.

Now, I’m off to be productive in the real world! Woot! And I should hopefully get caught up on what exciting projects are consuming all the rest of you by this weekend. Double woot!

Finally Some Progress…

Well, I guess you can see straight off, the fabric isn’t black. I never did make it to Tulsa to the cross stitch shop. So, instead I had to make do with what fabric I already had. I had a real burning desire to do something ‘different’. So I found the last piece of black fabric that I own, but knew instantly that it was too small. No problem, I thought. I’ve always wanted to try 1 over 1. So I dug out some really nifty colors, which would hopefully stand out bright against the black, and got started.

Come to find out, I’m blind as a bat and 1 over 1 wasn’t helping. I struggled my way through half of the first motif before deciding the only way I would ever finish this over 1 was through the use of a powerful microscope. So I ripped it all out and put it back.

Stuck with plain ol’ white fabric, but still wanting to do something different, I then thought I’d try my hand at coffee dyeing. I downloaded instructions, got the supplies ready, got the pot of coffee, cut my square of fabric and then stood there, fabric in hand, coffee before me, considering the instructions. I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say, the end result was not the creation of a wonderfully ‘aged’ piece of material, but that of a shambling gray-haired woman, wandering the dark halls of this big house, petting her swatch of cloth and muttering, “It’s all right. Shhh…shhh…You can stay white. I’m sorry…so sorry…You can stay white…”

Once I pulled myself back together again, I printed out the pattern and finally got started. Or so I thought. With my pristine, puritanical white fabric in my lap, I started picking through thread choices. Still wanting to do something fairly original, I picked through four different color pallets, alternately stitching and picking out that first motif another four times before I finally settled on this: DMC 321, 310, and 841. I’m not following any particular rule about where I place the colors. I am…deep breath here…winging it, but I’m happy with the results so far. 🙂

As for the design itself, I have tried really, really hard to follow the actual pattern, but the inconsistencies are driving me crazy. I’m fixing the errors as I see them and as I go. I realize Mary was only nine when she did this, but as I was picking out that first motif for the seventh and final time, all I kept (ungraciously, I know) thinking was: where was that grumpy sewing instructor and her trusty ruler while little Mary was making all these mistakes? One of my pioneer ancestors at 11 years old was given a journal the day before her family set off from the East coast to the West. Now, we know this because she, quite bitterly and with a vocabulary better than most high school graduates would use, recorded receiving this stupid journal, which she now had to write in each and every day, while her brothers got pocket knives, boots, hats, and in one case, a rifle, i.e. the “good” gifts.

What stands out in my mind was the entry she made regarding her mother’s method of schooling. She had to do it in cross stitch. Here’s this very smart and very disgruntled 11 year old, after traveling was done, having to then do all this needlepoint instead of being able to play with her brothers and peers, and she’s recounting–very, very bitterly–about trying to hurry and finish her stitching just as fast as possible so she could play, too. And her mother caught her doing it and smacked her hands. Five times. Each. And then, not only did she have to rip out everything and start all over again, but she had to do it with hurting hands AND it was dark before she finished so she never did get to play. Not with anyone. She had to go to bed instead. Stupid journal. Stupid stitching. And she was going to ‘lose’ them both in the first river they came to.

I don’t know about the stitching, but fortunately, she changed her mind regarding the journal. 🙂 Have a good week and may your stitches all be neat, straight, and properly, unhurriedly placed.