Airports and airplanes, that is. I took a quick trip out to San Francisco last week for work. We arrived Sunday afternoon, with the hopes of catching up with a friend from college Sunday night, but we had left the house at 2 AM and were absolutely exhausted when we got in. We hit the hotel restaurant for a late lunch and then pretty much slept until Monday. Seriously. We had planned to go into the city on Monday, but Terry felt unwell and I had a headache, so we spent the day in the hotel. Tuesday was a full day at Big Red, I mean Oracle, with a riverboat dinner cruise that night which I ended up having to skip because I was feeling feverish and nauseous. Wednesday saw another 6+ hours at Oracle and then off to the airport to wait for our red eye flight. I was awake from 6 AM Wednesday until 1 or 2 PM Thursday, when we finally arrived home, not counting snooze time on the planes. It was a brutal trip and I’m still paying for it headache-wise, but it was well worth it from a professional standpoint.
So, anyway, the point is that I spent a good chunk of time in airports and airplanes while flying out and back. The cheapest flights went to SFO by way of Atlanta, which extended that time even more. Yes, I could have gotten a direct flight, but it was excessively expensive and I was paying for Terry to fly out with me, so a couple of hundred dollars made a difference. The worst part was arriving at SFO Wednesday evening, expecting to be able to get our bags checked in, scoot through security and then get a relaxing dinner and hang out near the gate. Not so much, it turns out. Air Tran must only run red eye flights out of SFO, so the desk doesn’t even open until 8:30 PM. That really sucked. We had to walk over to the international terminal to find a food court and hang out there for a couple of hours and then back to wait for another 2 hours in front of the Air Tran desk. Bah. Lessons learned, though!
As far as stitching goes, many of you remember the Just Nan Butterfly Heart design that I stitched multiple times in colors of the rainbow back in 2008, right? Unfortunately, the purples that I had picked out and stitched early on in that project were dusty and the remaining colors that I chose later did not work with the purples. I started a new purple instance back then, but put it down when I realized that the shading between the 3 (sequential) floss colors in the DMC line was not subtle enough. Well, prior to leaving for San Francisco, I decided that this would be a perfect design to travel with (as it had been in the past), so I ripped out all of the old stitching (more than 50% of the design) and kitted it up with another set of purples to try. I guess the third time is a charm because it worked out well this time. I started the design on the plane out from Atlanta to San Francisco and ended up finishing it in the SFO airport before leaving to come home.
Now I just need to choose some fabrics to piece my 6 rainbow colored instances of this design together into a bellpull. I guess I’ll have to gather up the pieces and take them to the nearest Joann store when I have some time.
