Doggie Dreams and Stitching Queens

I’m working from home today, as poor Terry is still in bed with a cold. It will be a sick day for him, which is a good thing because he desperately needs the rest. He hasn’t slept well in days, maybe even weeks. So, here I am, laptop in lap (with a heat-safe pad in between so I don’t burn my legs), putting off my work. It’s Friday and there don’t seem to be a lot of people in, looking at my IM contact lists, so it is going to be a slow day. Good for me, if I can manage to switch gears and get back into my Java programming. I only have one JSP left to write to front-end the application I wrote a couple of months ago, but I’ve been working in Lotus in the interim and so Java is looking pretty foreign to me at the moment. I’m hoping everything will start to fall into place again once I get into it a little more and really focus on it.

Anyway, the dog is laying in her usual “Queenie” spot. Her royal highness like to plant herself on the soft, cushy arm of the sofa. She’s in REM sleep right now and/or dreaming, so everytime I glance over at her, something else is twitching. Her whole nose was going crazy earlier. Sometimes her eyes are half-open and darting all around. Her little paws twitch a little bit sometimes, as do her ears very faintly. Uh-oh, she just woke up! I wonder if the sound of my typing woke her? Of course, I couldn’t help myself and just had to pet her royal cuteness, which caused her to climb down from her throne, seeking more cuddles.

On to the stitching queens. You know, I truly wish that I had the prowess of you ladies in the stitching blogosphere. I would love to be a speedy stitcher, particularly like Carol. I have no idea how you can handle a full-time job during the day, manage to clean the house, work with all of those beautiful flowers in your garden and still stitch like the wind, Carol! I would also like to have even a fraction of Becky’s extraordinary finishing talents. You post such lovely finishes every week (if not every day), Becky!

Don’t worry if I didn’t mention your name specifically. There are plenty of stitchers out there who I envy; I’m just drawing a blank at the moment. But more to the point, if I had the quick fingers of Carol, I would be finished with the baby sampler already. As it is, I made good progress last night, completing the border. Yes, I know, I owe a picture, but I set myself a deadline of the end of September for this one and I refuse to change that, even if I started anew less than 2 weeks ago. I’ll be running a race against the clock tonight to finish before midnight, but I am determined to finish this! I just have the words “Cute as a button” to stitch, along with the dotted line below them, and then the backstitched personalization, which I already charted out, fortunately. The final touch is to add some buttons that I bought at WalMart when I bought the fabric for the pillow and then I’ll be done. I will be ecstatically happy dancing if I can pull it off.

This weekend is dedicated to model stitching… as is every weekend until I finish this project. I am nearly 2/3 done, so hopefully it won’t take too many more weekends to complete. In fact, I’ll be able to work on them during the week once I’ve finished the baby sampler, so maybe I can get it done that much more quickly. Once that’s done, I have to figure out what WIPs to get back to. I’ve lost my place since starting the model stitching project. 😆 I guess I’ll pull the next WIPs according to any deadlines that I have set in my stash list.