Twenty years ago today, I met the little fuzzy dog that became the very love of my life. If you've never married and never had kids, you wonder if you have the capacity to be a mom, and then you trek through the cornfields of Ligonier, Indiana to find out that you do, in fact, have the ability to love something more than you could have ever imagined.
Thank you, Stewey.
Mommie Dearest loves and misses you.
She is large, Dearies. I enjoyed every single placement of every single little itty bitty drill. According to my notes, I started this one on April 21st, so a little over two months isn't too bad, in my humble opinion.
This kit came from Diamond Art Club and is called Copeton Floral Lilac. It measures 26x36 inches and has 60 different drills, plus a special square sparkly one.
No idea what the heck I'll do with it. I've just been hanging the larger ones I've finished on the door knob of my china cabinet. Like with stitching, I love doing this whole diamond painting thing for the process of it rather than the final product.
Hope your day was wonderful! What shenanigans were had? Come tell me all about it!
Here we are on a Summer Monday. The sun is trying to decide if it wants to come out fully today, but according to the weather report, thunderstorms might just be the order of the day instead. I contemplated a morning splosh, but as soon as I started for the laundry room to fetch my big girl swimming suit, I heard a rumble of what I presume to be thunder.
(But it could be the trash truck emptying the dumpster at the end of the parking lot.)
In any event, I have a bit of progress on Patriotic Tweet, as well as a plan for the remainder of the day. I finished Moby Dick and watched several good YouTube lectures on it, and am now getting ready to dive into Mrs Dalloway. I just looked back through my BoB, and discovered that I read it back in 1999 right after I had read The Hours by Michael Cunningham, but for the life of me cannot remember it. I do, however, remember the movie version of The Hours, and might see about watching that this afternoon if I finish my binge of Billions.
I might also have a big diamond painting finish to share in the next day or two. I have come to the last section of the big floral with birds that I have been playing with since April!
Hmmm. If I time this right, I will have a big book finish, a small/medium stitching finish, and a huge dp finish all within days of one another! WooHoo! If that's not a cause for celebration, I don't know what is!
What are you celebrating today? Come tell me all about it!
Apparently, this is a new thing that you do for a toddler on their birthday...have all of their favorite toys greet them at their door in the morning with balloons.
Do you suppose this would work with a big ass cup of coffee, a stack of books, and a basket full of stitchy projects for a portly old broken down Spinster of a certain age?
(Asking for a friend).
This was a delightful stitch from start to finish, Dearies! I stitched it with the threads that were on the chart, with the exception of a DMC substitute for the red. I also made a minor change to the color of the letters...the chart called for them to be dark brown, but I went with blue instead.
Labwork is done for the day, as is my treat...I stopped for a trenta cold brew at the Starbucks, and have been savoring every single sip of it!
Happy Friday to one and all! I hope your weekend is full of fun! What's on the menu?
Yet another craptastic photograph for you, Dearies! I'm sorry for the poor quality, but for the life of me, I can't seem to get it together today with this silly contraption.
I have the stars and white stripes of the flag and the lettering at the bottom to finish, and then we can chuck this one into the big bin under the big girl sleigh bed and move on to the next. I have absolutely no idea what that "next" will be, but I am simply in it for the therapy at this point rather than the finished product. I seem to be enjoying the quiet routine of stitching more than ever at this point, and the crazypants frenzy of days gone by has become just a memory.
(Remember how nuts I used to be with rotations and flitting between projects like a three-hundred pound hummingbird? I look back on some of my posts from that time and wonder who that girl was! So much energy...so much activity...so many shenanagins!)
(The funny thing is...I wouldn't change one single minute of any of it!)
Today is going to be a rest day. If I can manage it, I'm going to try to get myself into the pool to move around a bit. I think it's supposed to be hot and humid, so the water will feel especially nice! I really enjoyed the cool sunny days we had, but methinks the A/C is going to stay on for the duration!
I hope this finds you happy and healthy and full of joy today. Are you stitching/knitting/painting/crafting something that blows your skirt up? Come tell me all about it!
I seem to have a hitch in my giddy-up today, Dearies. So I'm doing what any sensible Spinster should do...I'm watching the rain and listening to the birds and gearing up for a bit of reading.
Yes, Moby Dick was absolutely on my Great Books Seminar reading list somewhere during my tenure as a student, but for the life of me I cannot remember having read it. My copy from those days is highlighted and annotated and broken in, but I don't know if I did that while reading, or if I frantically made notes at the discussion table like I was wont to do.
(What can I say? I was a TERRIBLE student and had absolutely no business being in college when I was. I don't say this to demean myself...it's just the plain truth of the matter. I was a complete disaster at Notre Dame, and couldn't get out of my own way. I had the emotional maturity of a seven-year old, was socially inept, and completely overwhelmed academically.)
I am, though, immensely grateful that I can now go back and re-visit things a bit, and thanks to a few new YouTube subscriptions, I'm learning how to deep-read. I found a podcast called Read Well, and I have really enjoyed listening to the host (Eddie) teach me how to get more out of my reading...when I want to...by deep reading.
I am still enjoying "casual" reading before bed (Owen Meany), but a few hours a day of concentrated study seems to be very good for my tiny little brain. This and my new morning journaling practice have really been good for the circus that's usually in my head, and I find that even my stitching and diamond painting time has benefitted.
So, despite some ugh-ish-ness, I'm determined to pull my britches up and soldier on. A few quiet hours won't kill me, and there's still plenty of time this week to run around like a hamster.
How are you doing today? Is life in your corner of the world wonderfully swell? I hope so, and I hope you'll come tell me all about it.
I've learned a very important fact about myself. I always thought that I was completely incapable of stitching painted canvases. Turns out that I'm not incapable, I just need a little help picking stitches. So I have promised myself that I will work on some of the lovely canvases I have up there in the studio, but that I'll do so with the help of a stitch guide. (I justify this by the rationalization that we can't all be experts at everything, can we?) So my hope is that I will be able to incorporate a few more painted canvases into my half-assed rotation system (that changes daily, by the way), so stay tuned.
I'll leave you with a picture of what I assume to be a bird's egg? Stewey stumbled across it when we stepped outside to get the mail today. At first I thought it was one of those candy-coated malt ball thingies that you get around Easter time, but when I reached for it, Stewey promptly smacked my hand away and proceeded to protect the damn thing as if he had laid it himself. Damn dog.
