Tale of a Shooting Star…

I’ve just spent the last 3 hours stitching the scotch stitch border on my rendition of Victoria Sampler’s Spring Banner for my intern. It looks lovely, but once again I find myself wondering if I’m truly that slow of a stitcher or if it’s just my perception?

At any rate, that part is done and all that is left is the blanket stitch edging and the nun’s stitch flap at the top to fold over the bellpull hanger. LOL. Yeah, that’s *all* like it’s no big deal. It’s such a big deal because I have a feeling the blanket stitch edging will take many, many hours and I don’t have much time left. I even brought it with me to work today to see if I can sneak in a little stitching time over lunch or at the end of the day. I never bringing active stitching with me to work normally, but what can I say? I’m DESPERATE! I need enough time to wash and block this piece before I present it to my intern at lunch on Friday, so the remainder has to be done tonight. Period.

Needless to say, I won’t be blogging very actively until this week is over. I’ll try to put up some of my usual quizzes, jokes, etc. in the meantime, but there will be no detailed recap of this past weekend’s visit to Connecticut or of my shopping experience at the Sudberry House sale until this weekend. I’ll be glad when I can actually stop and breathe! There’s nothing like being completely, frantically busy at work and then at home too. Whew!

I was going to blog today about our trip to Connecticut this weekend, but in light of today’s startling news of the passing of ABC News anchor/icon Peter Jennings, I felt it inappropriate to banter about my own small triumphs.

I have to admit my total shock at finding this news tidbit today, as it came only 4 months from Peter’s revealing of his lung cancer diagnosis. I would never have thought that he had such a short period of time left. It brings home the reality of mortality and the short length of our time here on Earth.

Peter Jennings was my favorite news anchor of all of the major networks in the U.S. He reported the events of the world with a measure of quiet competence, compassion and great professionalism unmatched by that of any other news anchor or reporter in the world, in my opinion. In the wake of such fallen media darlings as Dan Rather, the integrity of Peter Jennings will be hard to be replaced. It will take many, many years in the profession for anyone else to develop the kind of reputation that Peter spent decades growing.

I encourage anyone who is interested to take a little bit of time this week to read through some of the many articles on the Internet that chronicle the amazing career of Peter Jennings. He was an incredible man who will be sorely, sorely missed. God speed, Peter Jennings.

We arrived a little after 3PM and were ravenous, so we immediately went to the hotel, checked in and went in search of some early dinner.

When we came back from dinner, we read through some tourist information to see what to do next and I decided to make a stink about the room (no pun intended). You see, we were given what is marked as a non-smoking room, but the moment we walked in the door, I smelled stale smoke. We didn’t stay long in the room initially, but when we got back, it started to affect me and my chest started to get tight. So, enough of that. We went down to the front desk and the woman said she had no rooms open. I don’t think she was very interested in helping us. At ths point, I was in near tears on the way back upstairs. So, I hopped online (free wireless high speed internet access – woohoo!) and started looking for another hotel. I sent Terry back down to twist some arms about dropping the cancellation fee if we checked out right now. (Boy, would I have thrown a fit about that!)

Fortunately, in the elevator on the way down, Terry ran into the manager of housekeeping who asked him how our room was. Well, actually… ! So, he went up to the front desk, talked to someone different from who had just blown us off minutes earlier, who promptly turned to the woman he had just met in the elevator and asked what they could do to make the situation right. So, we’re now in a different room on a completely different floor (the entire floor we were on reeked of smoke) in a lovely, clean-smelling room.

My tears are gone. 🙂

And now I am pleasantly tired, ready for a good night of sleep and then off 20 mins down the road in the morning to meet Robbin and Marietta at Sudberry House!

We’re in south Jersey for the night to drop off the dog and get a little closer to CT to start. We’ll be leaving (hopefully) around 9 AM tomorrow and driving up to Mystic. Saturday morning we’re aiming to be at Sudberry House for 9 AM to be there when they open for the first morning of their first August Saturday garage sales.

I probably won’t post until we come back. There is supposed to be free high speed internet access at the Amerisuites in Mystic and Terry is bringing his laptop along, but I don’t know if I’ll take the time to blog or not. We’ll see! 🙂

I am currently out at a job interview and will reply to you if I fail to get the position. Be prepared for my mood.

You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the office. If I was in, chances are you wouldn’t
have received anything at all.

I will be unable to delete all the unread, worthless emails you send me until I return from holiday on 4 April. Please be patient and your mail will be deleted in the order in which it was received.

Thank you for your email. Your credit card has been charged $5.99 for the first ten words and $1.99 for each additional
word in your message.

The e-mail server is unable to verify your server connection and is unable to deliver this message. Please restart your computer and try sending again. (The beauty of this is that when you return, you can see how many in-duh! -viduals did this over and over).

Thank you for your message, which has been added to a queuing system. You are currently in 352nd place, and can expect to receive a reply in approximately 19 weeks.

I’ve run away to join a different circus.

AND, FINALLY, THIS ONE TAKES THE CAKE:

I will be out of the office for the next 2 weeks for medical reasons. When I return, please refer to me as ‘Margaret’ instead of ‘Steve’.

No, I’m not talking about stitching as exercise. 🙂 Terry and I went to the driving range last night for an hour. Since it’s been probably 9 months or more since I last hit a golf ball, I had pretty much forgotten all of the technique that I had previously developed (if you can even call it that). So, for starting from scratch, I hit a couple of very nice shots… every once in a blue moon. I’ll have to set up the nets in the back yard and start practicing at home again.

Surprisingly, I’m not very sore today. I figured I would be, but I’m just a bit stiff. Nothing some regular, mild stretching won’t fix and I don’t even feel the need to take anything, which is amazing for me. Now if I can just get the painful red spot on each thumb to die down, I’ll be in good shape. At least the blisters don’t seem to have filled up, so I think they’ll heal and go away. And yes, for the record, I do use a glove on the left hand. The blisters are on the right hand, making me wonder if I need to either switch hands with the glove or have one on each…

And now for the pet peeve rant. Or not… [long rant about web design deleted] I’m just not going to get into it and I would hate to offend people unnecessarily, so nevermind. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to express my frustration without risk. In the meantime, suffice it to say that I am really tired of wasting my time redoing the work of people who claim to know what they are doing! I’d be much better off doing it myself. *sigh* It would certainly take a lot less time than having to repeatedly hold people’s hands and then to try to make sense of what they’ve attempted to do in order to fix everything before it’s usable. It’s a serious case of too many people with too few skills, too great a desire to learn something that they apparently cannot and too big of an ego to admit defeat. Just please don’t tell me that you know HTML when you can barely use a WSIWYG editor and have no idea how to clean up the actual HTML produced! 🙂

“It’s that time of year to take our annual senior citizen test.”
Exercise of the brain is as important as exercise of the muscles. As we grow older, it’s important that we keep mentally alert, The saying; “If you don’t use it, you will lose it” also applies to the brain, so… Below is a very private way to gauge your loss or non-loss of intelligence. So, take the following test presented here and determine if you are losin it or are still “with it.” The spaces below are so you don’t see the answers until you have made your answer.

OK, relax, clear your mind and… begin.

WELL MAYBE NOT THAT CLEAR!

1. What do you put in a toaster?

Answer: “bread.”? If you said “toast,” then give up now and go do something else. Try not to hurt yourself. If you said, “bread,” go to Question 2.

2. Say “silk” five times. Now spell “silk.” What do cows drink?

Answer: Cows drink water. If you said “milk,” please do not attempt the next question. Your brain is obviously over stressed and may even overheat. It may be that you need to content yourself with reading something more appropriate such as Children’s World. If you said “water” then proceed to question 3.

3. If a red house is made from red bricks and a blue house is made from blue bricks and a pink house is made from pink bricks and a black house is made from black bricks, what is a green house made from?

Answer: Greenhouses are made from glass. If you said “green bricks,” what the devil are you still doing here reading these questions? If you said “glass,” then go on to Question 4.

4. It’s twenty years ago, and a plane is flying at 20,000 feet over Germany (If you will recall, Germany at the time was politically divided i! nto West Germany and East Germany.) Anyway, during the flight, TWO of the engines fail. The pilot, realizing that the last remaining engine is also failing, decides on a crash landing procedure. Unfortunately the engine fails before he has time and the plane fatally crashes smack in the middle of “no man’s land” between East Germany and
West Germany. Where would you bury the survivors??? East Germany or West Germany or in “no man’s land”?

Answer: You don’t, of course, bury survivors.

If you said ANYTHING else, you are a real dunce and you must NEVER try to rescue anyone from a plane crash. Your efforts would not be appreciated. If you said, “Don’t bury the survivors”, then proceed to the next question.

5. Without using a calculator – You are driving a bus from London to Milford Haven in Wales. In London, 17 people get on the bus. In Reading, six people get off the bus and nine people get on. In Swindon, two people get off and four get on. In Cardiff, 11 people get off and 16 people get on. In Swansea, three people get off and five people get on. In Carmathen, six people get off and three get on. You then arrive at Milford Haven. What was the name of the bus driver?

Answer: Oh, for crying out loud!??

Don’t you remember your own name?? It was YOU!!

I have to say, I can’t decide whether it seems like I’ve been blogging for longer or if it seems like I started just yesterday. Whatever the case may be, my first blog entry was entered one year ago today. We’ll see if the blogging trend in general continues, but I have enjoyed posting bits and pieces of myself out on the web. Now, if only anyone was reading! LOL.

Just for kicks, I’ll post a link to that fateful first entry. Keep in mind that everything between that and October 18th of last year was lost in a backup blunder, but I still had a text file with the first entry in it, so I was able to put it back when the chaos died down.

Be forewarned… this first entry was one heck of a rant. 🙂