Finish My Piece of Cathy’s RR Finish Biscornu #1 for Christmas Gift for Mom Finish current SOLAK square in progressHahah! Not too bad for holiday time. 😀
It’s 12:00 PM on Christmas Day. The witching hour. 🙂 But all is well in the bustling Magee household. Mom is upstairs taking a comfortable mid-day nap, probably with her tiny Maltese named Celeste nestled with her on the bed. Dad is sitting in the reading room with his planner, doubtless thinking about work. And Terry and I have been in the kitchen for the last hour and a half.
The turkey thawed just in time and is now residing in the oven. 3 batches of stuffing balls (one with no onions, one with the standard family recipe and one with a Magee experimental twist) are ready and that’s half of the battle right there.
All of the presents are unwrapped. And with no little kids in the household, my merriment was derived primary from playing with the turkey as we were working with it. Sing it with me now: “T – U – R – K – E – Y… Turkey… Dance!” At which point, I started flapping its wings. “I can dance if I want to. You can stuff my fat behind….” Oh well. Such is the way of life when you’re mildly sleep deprived and still sick. Right, that’s the excuse. 😉
Terry’s dad will be here shortly and I am lingering downstairs as the welcome committee while Terry takes his shower. Then it will be my turn to go upstairs and I’ll try to sleep for a little bit and then shower, as well.
After that, it’s time to get busy again, as we prepare the broccoli casserole and Terry cuts and ties up his leg of lamb and chucks it in the oven with the turkey. Sit on our hands for another hour or so, then the turkey and lamb come out, the casserole and stuffing balls go in and Terry starts in on the potatoes.
It’s funny how much work goes into this Christmas dinner thing. We haven’t even managed to clear the dining room table yet. 😆 As for me, I am off like Sleeping Beauty to take my nap.
Merry Christmas to All and to All a GREAT DAY!
It’s not yet Christmas Eve, but my parents will be arriving today and the madness will begin, so I doubt that I will have much time to post over the next few days.
I just wanted to take a minute to wish every one of my readers a very happy holiday season, whatever you may celebrate – Hanukkah, Christmas, Winter Solstice, Kwanzaa or something else.
For those of you who took the time to send me personal greetings, be it via snail mail or email, thank you very much! I’m sorry that I cannot write to each of you to thank you personally, but I am still sick and trying desperately to rest up enough to feel well for baking blitz day tomorrow and Christmas the day after.
I had planned to make up a custom holiday greetings graphic as a little gift from me to you, but uh… refer to the above statement. The best laid plans of mice and men…. 😉
Happy Holidays to you all! I’ll be back online in a few days.
Blame it all on Christine…
5 Things You Might Not Know About Me:
1. When I am feeling well, happy and truly hungry, I can pack away more food than you would think possible for someone my size.
2. I am not good about cleaning my house. I just don’t have a lot of free time and when I do, I’d much rather be stitching.
3. I am so terrified of drowning that I was unable to watch the scene in the movie Castaway where the plane crashes into the water without breaking into hysterical sobbing.
4. When I can find the time and motivation, I can bake like a pro.
5. I wish I had a large, gourmet kitchen with multiple wall stoves, tons of counter space and plenty of professional utensils and tools at hand. Oh, and more time. 😉
If you read this and you haven’t already done this meme, consider yourself tagged, if you are so inclined.
I’ve been on my behind for two days with a terrible… something or other. Apparently, ’tis the season to be sick. It started as a little bit of a cough on Monday, but when I woke up on Tuesday morning – BAM! Couldn’t even contemplate getting out of bed. I’ve done nothing for two days except sleep, read and watch TV. Boring! Except for the reading part.
Last night, though, I was finally able to pick up a needle and stitch for a little while. And in that time, I was able to finish my WhimZi for Christmas. Just in time to not be able to decorate my cubicle before January. Oh well! She’ll be ready for next year, at least. So, here is Angel Melody, a limited edition WhimZi design by Just Nan, created to celebrate last year’s 25th anniversary of Needlecraft Corner:
Next season’s WhimZi design of choice, Snow Faces, has just finally arrived today, totally mangled courtesy of the US Postal Service (thanks guys and Happy Holidays right back at ya!). I’m seeing if I can’t get the chart flattened out a little bit between some books and then I will probably stitch that one up over the holidays so it’s ready to go back to work with me on January 3rd.
- My husband and I divorced over religious differences. He thought he was God and I didn’t.
- I don’t suffer from insanity; I enjoy every minute of it.
- I Work Hard Because Millions On Welfare Depend on Me!
- Some people are alive only because it’s illegal to kill them.
- I used to have a handle on life, but it broke.
- Don’t take life too seriously; No one gets out alive.
- You’re just jealous because the voices only talk to me
- Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.
- Earth is the insane asylum for the universe.
- I’m not a complete idiot — Some parts are missing.
- Out of my mind. Back in five minutes.
- NyQuil, the stuffy, sneezy, why-the-heck-is-the-room-spinning medicine.
- God must love stupid people; He made so many.
- The gene pool could use a little chlorine.
- Consciousness: That annoying time between naps.
- Ever stop to think, and forget to start again?
- Being “over the hill” is much better than being under it!
- Wrinkled Was Not One of the Things I Wanted to Be When I Grew up.
- Procrastinate Now!
- I Have a Degree in Liberal Arts; Do You Want Fries With That?
- A hangover is the wrath of grapes.
- A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance
- Stupidity is not a handicap. Park elsewhere!
- They call it PMS because MadCow Disease was already taken.
- He who dies with the most toys is nonetheless dead.
- A picture is worth a thousand words, but it uses up three thousand times the memory.
- Ham and eggs. A day’s work for a chicken, a lifetime commitment for a pig.
- The trouble with life is there’s no background music.
- The original point and click interface was a Smith and Wesson.
- I smile! because I don’t know what the hell is going on.
I was so excited Sunday night, I could have peed my pants. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but you know what I mean.
Sandie Vanosdall of The Sweetheart Tree called me! Me, little old me. Isn’t that crazy? I really enjoyed talking to her; she’s really a lovely person, very nice and easy to converse with. I am going to send her some samples of my work and then, hopefully, I will officially become one of her model stitchers. 😀 I can’t get over it, I am just SO excited. Her designs are the perfect size for me and it would be such a treat to work for one of my all time favorite designers ever. We were discussing payment and other specifics about model stitching for her and I asked if I could just be paid in stash, since any money she paid me would likely just be turned around and spent on her designs. 😆
I don’t want to get my hopes up too high until she sees my work and approves it, but since I’m not exactly new to model stitching or anything, I’m hoping that there won’t be any issues. She was happy to hear that I do hardanger work, so I guess that will help me get my foot in the door, as well. I can’t wait until Christmas is over and the postal system has cleared out a bit so that I can send my samples and see what she thinks!
Well, the technician scoped out the job this morning. The fiber will be installed this afternoon, probably while I’m at my first appointment with a psychiatrist. Which means the switch will happen soon.
Good news, though, especially for Isabelle and Zohrah, who have an ISP that doesn’t follow standard operating procedures. 😉 Terry has come up with an idea that will allow us to make the change, but also to service requests to the old address until our T1 contract ends at the end of January. If his plan works, everyone will still be able to get in while all of your service providers catch up with the change.
We’ll see what happens!
I am going to continue bumping up this post for the next several days to make sure as many of you read it as possible:
Most of you will remember this summer’s famous outage where some of you were unable to access my blog for over a week due to a server address change that took its sweet time getting around the world. Well, I hate to tell you, but it’s about to happen again.
Our 5-year contract on the T1 circuit to our house (to support our web business) ends in late January and just in time, they have run fiber optic service (FIOS) to our development. They ran the fiber over the summer and have been wiring the utility poles and making the connections for months. Finally, the service is available. Terry was checking on a regular basis for the service to become available for sign-up and as soon as they opened the service to our address, he signed us up. They came this weekend to dig the trench and lay the conduit run up to our house for the fiber. I’m not sure if they actually pulled the fiber through the conduit or not, but once that is done, all that remains is for a technician to come out, hook it into the box at the outside of the house and run the necessary wiring into the basement.
All of that tech junk was probably Greek to many of you, but the bottom line is that sometime this week, our entire range of IP addresses are going to change. And this means that our server addresses are going to change again. Which means that, once again, many of you will be unable to get to my blog for anywhere from two days to a month (depending on your internet service provider). Rest assured that I will still be here and still be posting. You’ll just have to keep trying every day or so until you can get to me again.
I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but this switch is going to cut our monthly internet bill roughly in half (and if you knew how much we were paying for the T1, you would probably choke), so there was never a question as to whether or not we would make the change. I just hope that I won’t lose any readers. Please stick with me! 😀
This SBQ was suggested by Carol and is:
Do you have any good internet links to tutorials for your favorite finishing techniques that you would like to share?
I purposefully put off answering this question right away. Partially because I didn’t have links to any tutorials that others haven’t already mentioned. But also because I’ve had some tutorials of my own that I have had waiting in the wings for months and just never published.
I finally sat down and put everything together today and published three tutorials, two of them with pictures. I also organized my blog pages a bit better. So now, when you look at the right sidebar under Pages, you will see a couple of different categories: Challenges, Finishing Instructions and Lists. Under Finishing Instructions is where you will find my new tutorials for Basic Cording, Bellpulls and Biscornus.
I would appreciate if some of you would proofread the tutorials and provide me with some feedback. There may be some typos and all sorts of other mistakes. I was just sick of looking at them by the time I was done. 🙂
