Where Have I Been?!?

And the answer is – I don’t know! In all honesty, I spend WAY too much time on Facebook. I really need to tone that down a little bit, but several of the games that I play have this “hook” where bad things happen if you don’t log into them once a day. So, I do. Those are actually the easy ones, where I can stop in briefly and be done with it. There are others, though, that I have allowed to be far too time-consuming. I have to admit that it is much easier to update people with a quick sentence or two every couple of days than it is to write a full blog entry. So, for those of you who still keep up with me, if I’m not friends with you on Facebook already and you are on there, send me a friend request or let me know and I’ll send you one.

Add to that Facebook addiction a plethora of overtime at work (being salaried sucks) and you get very little “me” time. In fact, most of my downtime lately has come courtesy of headaches which keep me off of the computer. This has allowed me time to read, which is something I love to do, but haven’t had/made time for in quite a while. Jenn (don’t go to her blog looking for any content, as she’s gotten caught up in Facebook, as well), Annette, and several other bad, bad, evil ladies have coerced me into the lives of the Black Dagger Brotherhood, on which I have become hooked. I’ve read the first two books in the series and even mailed my extra copy of the first one (I bought one at an actual brick-and-mortar bookstore and then promptly ordered the set from Amazon) to Cathy, whom I think may also now be hooked. Just passing along the evil, I guess. I also snuck a Monica Ferris book into the mix yesterday. Someday I will get back to Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. I have several books to catch up on before I make it to the latest one, which was actually written by another fantasy author using the late Jordan’s notes. There are still 2 books left to close out the series; Jordan certainly was good about leaving a lot of loose ends from book to book. I just really have not felt that I have the time to sit down and get into a complex, 900+ page book. You really need to allot a good chunk of time to really immerse yourself in that world properly. So, rather quick and light material is just where I’m at right now.

I’ve been considering getting a Kindle from Amazon so that I can carry any book I like with me, but Amazon is currently is an argument with one of the big publishing houses so I can’t get books like the latest in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series. Thanks, Steve Jobs. Way to be a jerk and ruin it for the consumers.

I’m hoping that Amazon has worked out an agreement before my birthday so that I can get a Kindle and save some room on my bookshelves for my existing collection.

On the stitching front, I am working on my entry for the Spring Biscornu contest on the Victoria Sampler Yahoo! group. The deadline is May 10th, which is rapidly approaching. I originally thought that it was funny that the deadline was so far out from the beginning of the contest, but now I am very grateful. It took me a couple of hours just to kit up my selection of fabric and thread colors for the design, then I modified the design of the hardanger sections, only to realize after stitching one side that what I did wasn’t very different from Thea’s design. Rats. I’m hoping that what I came up with for the other side of the biscornu will be a little more effective.

And just to prove that I have actually stitched something, I ran upstairs and took a scan of side 1 of the biscornu:

The effect of the overdyed pearl cottons in the hardanger sections ended up being way too subtle, as did some of the floss colors that I chose to coordinate with them. Unfortunately, this seems to happen to me with fair regularity. You’d think I would have learned by now, but they truly do look better in person, in my opinion. The trick will be to get decent photographs of them for the contest. I see special lighting and Terry’s light box in my future.