Not the Best Week Ever.

This week is getting off to a bad start. My mom is back in the hospital for a couple of problems, one of which may require surgery if it doesn't resolve. She had just started driving again after her broken hip last year and drove herself to the hospital on Saturday. It's sad to see this happen when she was doing so well.

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It's been great to have some warmer weather and we're getting rid of a lot of snow, unfortunately some of it is coming into our basement. DH and I took turns getting up all night to sop up the water so it wouldn't get into the carpet. This happens every so often when we have a lot of rain, but usually not so early in the season. DH is going to tear into the wall this afternoon to see what's going on. I have this dream of having the problem resolved and new carpet before SD's graduation this spring, but that would take money.

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Money...enough said!

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We're having a meeting after school today to find out how the school board is going to cut about 9 million from the budget for next year. I don't think my job is too much in danger, but I could lose hours which would hardly make it worth keeping.

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If all this weren't enough for one week I also have a cold that's leaving me feeling pretty miserable. On a brighter note, I have some fun quilt projects going. I'm on a deadline for one of them so I hope to get a picture posted of it tomorrow.

Strip Twist Quilt

Here's the Strip Twist quilt I have been working on. I got the pattern from Bonnie Hunter's Quiltville site. She mentioned this quilt on her blog (Jan. 29th) as a Superbowl project. I watched the Superbowl, but worked on it earlier in the week and I had it about finished by game time. It went together really easily and it was fun to play around with the squares to get them in a way I liked. It was a little outside the box for me, but I really like how it turned out. I stayed away from colors I don't usually like in quilts-yellow, orange, and purple-and concentrated on the reds, blues, and greens I have the most of. By the end I ran out of light prints to use, so I could use some more of that in my stash. I was thinking about donating it to the silent auction at church, but when I got done it had so many pieces from quilts I've made in the past that I don't think I can part with it. It will be kind of a memory quilt. Tomorrow when we have our block of the month class, I'm going to pick out something for a strip of border about 5 inches all the way around. I'm thinking about a dark Kansas Troubles print. I still haven't gotten the outside border done on last year's block of the month, so I should get going on that too.

My Attention Span

I've been having a few issues with my attention span lately, usually while blogging. The other night while perusing some of my favorite blogs, I smelled popcorn. "Mmmm, popcorn" I was thinking, "I'd like to have some". About that time my brain kicked in and I remembered that I had just put a bag in the microwave. A snack sized bag at that! That puts my current attention span at less than 1 minute and 45 seconds.

Belated Happy Groundhog Day!

There's something I like about Groundhog Day. It's a little strange I know, but I get a little excited about it. DH and I watched the "Groundhog Day" movie last night, it's one of my favorites too. Maybe it has something to do with the feeling that even though we will always have at least 6 more weeks of winter, at least it seems like Spring is getting closer. We had some nicer weather this last weekend with sunshine and temps above freezing for the first time this year. Today, however, it was back to the deep freeze with windchills in the -20 range. Anyway, I'm starting to feel like the worst is over where winter is concerned. I know I've been dwelling on the weather a bit lately, but it has been soooo bad this year that I can't help it.

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I decided that it's New Year's resolution update time. I admit that I've failed in all or in part in all of my resolutions. Why do I even bother? Looking back I realized that sewing more wasn't even one of my resolutions. That I've been doing a lot better on. I completed another quilt top this week and just have to add the outer sashing. I promise to post a picture soon.

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It was a pretty busy day today with a training at work this morning, my regular hours this afternoon, a school board input session after work and an orchestra concert tonight. At work this afternoon, a little guy I often work with told me I looked sick and asked if I slept well the night before. I admitted I wasn't feeling the greatest and went to check my temp in the nurse's office out of curiosity. I was 100.5, so I took some ibuprofen and I hope I'll be able to fight off whatever it was. I must have looked pretty bad today for a third grader to notice, I'll have to spend a little more time on hair and make-up tomorrow. :)

Finished projects

Like I mentioned last week, I spent most of the day on Friday at a sewing get-together with a couple of friends. We take our sewing machines and supplies over to our church where we can spread out, work part of the day, go for lunch, and come back and finish up without having to worry about leaving everything out. I worked on what I'm calling the Cardinal Quilt the entire day. I had worked on it a lot before Christmas, but it took me the whole day to cut and sew the last two rows of blocks and the dark purple border. On Saturday I finished up the borders and pieced the back, so it's ready to be quilted once I get it put together with the batting. Last night I made the table runner. It was a fun pattern I saw online. I used a charm square pack, sewed into two nine patch blocks and then cut in half from top to bottom and side to side. I ended up with 8 smaller blocks to randomly sew together. I was complaining Friday that I'm not good at "random". My cardinal quilt was supposed to have the printed blocks in a random pattern, but I ended up with three in a row down the middle, but I'm hoping no one but me will notice. The cardinal quilt is for CS, so his bed looks nice when he's not home. Ha. It turned out pretty large for a twin bed, so I think he'll be able to use it for a larger bed too. Hopefully he'll appreciate it some day. The runner is for a silent auction we're having at church. It's to raise funds for the summer youth trip my younger two and my husband are going on in July. My idea with naming my blog "Sew Many Days" was that I would have projects like this to show quite often. Hopefully it won't be so long before the next one.

Mid-Winter Nothingness

Here's a few random thoughts, not a lot different from most of my posts, but at least you're forewarned. I keep thinking I need to work on being able to do a 5-minute post. I think too much about what I'm writing, processing as I go along, which is great sometimes, but sometimes I just need to get it out there and move on. I like it when my posts are pretty, well thought out, and perhaps even meaningful, but like they say about quilting, "done is better than perfect". I don't think I'm alone in feeling that my blog posts are like my journal. I've been known to look back to check on dates things happened to reinforce my poor memory. Perhaps that's why I feel that I should be posting more frequently, it's certainly not the public clamoring for my every word. I do really appreciate my readers and the comments I get however.

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I really enjoyed watching so much of the inauguration festivities on Tuesday. I'm not a very political person, so it's not that, but there are several reasons I liked it. Seeing so many people gathered peacefully in one place and thinking about those gathered in many, many other places around the country and the world really meant something to me. I realize there are a lot of dissenters, but I think the majority of those watching felt hope and pride in our country for the first time in a long time, the first time ever for some. It was profound to think of the dream of Martin Luther King coming true in one aspect anyway. I admit that I liked the pageantry also; the words, the music, the parade, the coming together of past leaders and their families, our new and past leaders showing respect towards one another. The other thing is the feeling that despite obvious differences, the Obamas are more like me than any other first family in the past. We're practically contemporaries age-wise, we're parents of school age children, we're not from a background of privilege and wealth. I think others identify with them also. I'm going to give them a chance anyway, something not everyone is willing to do unfortunately. I definitely have the hope that my family will be better off in four years than we are now, but I'm willing to accept that it will probably get worse before it gets better.

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Speaking of getting worse, I'm not going to be at all surprised if I lose my job at the end of this school year. My school district is planning to cut nearly 15 million dollars from the budget in the next year. It's really unfortunate and I know many will lose jobs, many necessary programs will be cut, and the educational quality for the students can't help but be adversely affected. I hate to say it, but I'm glad my kids are nearly done with high school if this is going to be what it's like.

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Today was the last day of the semester for school, we're halfway done. We have the day off tomorrow. The kids have a ski trip with the church youth and I'm getting together with a bunch of friends to sew all day. Yeah!! Poor DH is working all day, but he found out unexpectedly that he has Saturday off, so that will be nice.

My Long Weekend

The weekend sure flew by and here it is Monday already. We don't have school today for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, so I'll be trying to tie up the loose ends from my weekend as I do most Mondays. Do you ever notice how so many things never get done because of all the mundane things that we feel must be done first? I don't think I ever really get done with the house cleaning, dishes, laundry, etc. and I have the mind-set that I need to before I do the fun stuff like sewing and going through photographs. It's funny how I find time for blogging and drinking coffee.

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One of the highlights of the weekend was going out with friends to see Gran Torino and have dinner out afterward. It was a great movie, both funny and touching, really the kind of movie where you laugh and cry. Clint Eastwood played the lead, a recently widowed retired Detroit autoworker who still lives in the old neighborhood. The neighborhood has vastly changed, becoming home to many immigrants, mostly Hmong, and the movie follows his relationship with the family next door. Their son, Thao is the other main character. He's a young man trying to find his way without a lot of opportunity except for the local gang trying to recruit and initiate him. It had a lot of themes, but mostly had to do with the racism of Clint's character and his enlightenment as the movie went on. I think most people can relate to it and probably know older people in their family very similar to him. Even without all of the racial epithets, there are a lot of people out there with the same kind of racism born from ignorance and lack of opportunity to experience diversity. Of course there are plenty of others who are taught to be racist and pursue it with a vengeance. Naming their child Adolf Hitler comes to mind. It will be an exciting day tomorrow with the inauguration. I believe that it's a great sign, but there is still a long way to go where racism is concerned in this country. In reading blogs before the election, I was appalled at some of the anti-Obama entries. Not all of them were coming from a racist perspective, but many were. Sweet little ladies who suddenly had this voracious interest in politics and would never have admitted that it had anything to do with racism. Anyway, I would highly recommend this movie, there was complete silence and many people in tears when it was over, attesting to its' powerful message.(Edited: I decided that I had better put in a cautionary note that this movie is rated "R", has a significant amount of foul language, violence, and racial epithets. I know that it is not everyone's cup of tea, however, I saw many older folks in the audience, really a cross section of (white) society.)

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The rest of the weekend was quickly consumed by painting the basement floor (pictures another day), taking CS back to college, bringing Quicken up to date, laundry, cleaning, etc. Oh yeah, and watching the Gopher hockey team sweep St. Cloud. I hope to get some sewing done today, but first I have to clean up the cat barf on the carpet and wash the dishes.