Tale of a Shooting Star…

Hallelujah! I stitched last night! 😀 I was exhausted and just wanted to crawl under a blanket and pass out, but I managed to get in a bit of stitching while watching the ladies’ figure skating short program performances. Oh, it was so wonderous; I can’t tell you how good it felt!

But… today is another day. And I am again sidelined by injury. This time, I managed to strain or injure a tendon in my right hand; the tendon attached to my right forefinger. If I wasn’t worried about rebound headaches due to OTC meds, I would take something. It’s a good thing I have a short day tomorrow, as I’m not sure what a day’s worth of keyboarding and touchpad’ing (I haven’t been able to use a mouse in years due to ergonomic issues) will do to it.

Hmmm… I’m whining again. Sorry about that! Are you ready for a little bit more? I dropped the car off at the dealership for the day to get my options installed – fog lights, bass speakers and day/night mirror. And I came home with bass speakers and the day/night mirror. Umm… what? Yeah, the service manager called me half an hour before i was going to leave to go get the car and told me that the fog lights weren’t installed and that he placed another order for them “just in case.” Which tells me that they were supposed to be there (and we were told that everything had come in), but they couldn’t find them when they went to do the installation. I’m not totally wild about having to leave my baby there AGAIN, but they did wash her up very nicely. 🙂 I expect the fog lights to be the biggest deal to install because they are either going to have to cut holes to mount them or replace the bumper in order to accommodate them.

But hey, on the good side, I get to rest my hands and wrists tonight. I’ll put them into the night braces and hopefully sleep my way to less pain. Then tomorrow I see the neurologist and Phoebe sees the vet. Woohoo! 😉

First, I want to say a big “Hi!” and “Thank you for reading!” to some new people who recently left comments in response to last week’s Stitching Blogger’s Question of the Week or elsewhere. So, I’m sending a shout out to Ami, Karin, Heather, Michelle, Anne and Singular Stitches. Thanks for putting up with my random, sometimes boring jibberish. 🙂 And I don’t mind in the least if you don’t want to leave comments. I know how time-consuming it is, but if you happen to feel moved by a particular post, please don’t be shy. Feel free to join in the commenting any time you want!

Second, this weekend went pretty well, though I’m afraid that the Stitch-A-Thon was cut rather short, due to player injury. 😉 I was stitching Saturday morning and while I was a little achy, possible from sleeping too long, I was feeling pretty good. By the time Terry came downstairs, I realized that I was starting to have some burning and pain in my right rotator cuff. That was a sure sign for me to stop, even though I didn’t until a little while later. So, unfortunately, that was the less than glorious end to my Stitch-A-Thon weekend!

Instead, we went out and worked on cleaning out the garage and reorganizing it. Well worth the effort, though I hate it when I pick something up and there’s a spider on it! 🙁 I don’t know if you know, my loyal readers, but I have a very healthy dislike and fear of spiders. There aren’t many things that frighten me (I happen to have a fascination about snakes and have even held one around my neck once), but spiders are NOT my friends. I have repeatedly warned them to stay out of my house. Any spider found inside my domicile is asked for (and shall receive) a death sentence. I’m sorry. I hate killing anything (which is why I make Terry do it), but they have been warned.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. We quickly discovered that the shelving unit Terry had purchased, setup and started using out in the garage a few months ago is not going to hold enough of our junk. I think I might buy some plastic boxes to help hold some of the loose items like my gardening gloves, tools and seeds and other things like automotive fuses, bulbs and other assorted, seemingly “must have” items. We also need hooks to hang the bikes from the ceiling so that we can get them out of the way in a more efficient manner. So, a second shelving unit, some plastic boxes to organize and the bike hooks and then we’ll actually be able to fit 2 cars in the garage again! My poor old baby Grand Am will have to stay outside in the cold until she’s sold. 🙁 We’ll put the cover back on her soon, though. It had blown off earlier with all of the wild winds that we’ve seen this winter. We just need to punch some holes in the cover and use the reinforcements they included to bungee it down so that it hopefully won’t go anywhere.

After a successful endeavor in the garage Saturday afternoon, we sat and watched some TV shows that we had on the Tivo and then a movie. Starz was running their preview weekend and, even though I’m a subscriber, it helps to tape things during their free weekend because they run through a bunch of good stuff very quickly! As long as you don’t mind the occasional tickler at the bottom, reminding you that it’s their free weekend and enticing you to sign up, you can record a lot of movies that aren’t on very often. 😀 We ended up watching The Notebook, which didn’t start until 11PM or so. I enjoyed the whole thing, though Terry thought it moved rather slowly (and he’s probably right). The ending, though, sent us both into a tizzy, with tissues and tears everywhere! I thought that the movie was very good, although I cannot fathom watching it again. Too emotionally draining. But it was good.

The movie didn’t end until sometime after 1 AM. We were both exhausted at this point, so we went upstairs and didn’t get to sleep until after 2 AM. Needless to say that when we both woke up on Sunday (we never wake up at the same time; I always get up hours earlier than Terry does), I was AMAZED to find that it was 2 PM! I must be fighting something off to have slept in that late. 12 hours may be a regularity for Terry on the weekends, but it sure isn’t normal for me! We had barely enough time to run downstairs, eat a bowl of cereal, then come back up, shower and get ready to go. We were meeting people at a Chinese restaurant about 30 minutes away for a buffet dinner and our reservation was at 4 PM!

After we returned, we watched one final episode of TV left on the Tivo and then we watched the night’s episode of Charmed. Then it was on to the movie 6th Day that I wanted to wipe off to provide more space, but Terry had already watched. Not a bad movie. Good action, decent plot, but Arnold’s acting fell a bit flat. Not surprising, it’s just difficult for him to break out of the pure action movie genre. He seemed totally incapable of expressing real emotions in this movie, so it was a tad bit disappointing. But hey, it’s gone now! 😉

I’m hoping to attempt some stitching again tonight, as I still want/need to finish my second World Trade Center quilt panel this week. In addition, I picked out a piece to stitch for Laura’s memorial quilt, so I will need to kit that one up this week, if I can find the time. I think I need to buy that Organized Expressions software so that I can track with what projects my DMC flosses are kitted!

Hooray! Finally, some snow! It only took until February for us to actually have a couple of days that resemble winter… but it snowed. And boy, did it! Have I ever mentioned how much I love snow? I even like to shovel it… for about 5 minutes. 😛 There’s just something about it, especially when it’s fluffy and sticks to me and everything else. There’s nothing quite like looking out my back door at the woods, with all of the tree and plant branches coated with snow. It makes such a delicate, lacy scene with all of the wild raspberry bushes we have in the back. And the front yard becomes this wonderous, soft, rolling landscape of pristine whiteness. I always hate to have to disturb it by clearing the driveway and the sidewalk, so I’m glad that Terry isn’t awake yet.

It started to flurry sometime yesterday afternoon, getting heavier as time went on. We had the big, fluffy flakes that I like in the beginning and then as it got later into the night, the flakes got smaller and smaller. Terry told me why and it made sense when he said it at night, but for some reason, I can’t recall it well enough to not make an idiot of myself, so I won’t go there. 😉

I have no idea how much snow actually fell during the night. I think we had 4 to 6 inches on the ground by the time we went to bed at 1:00 AM. We were just at the edge of a forecasted 8 to 12 inches total accumulation on the weather maps, and the snow was still falling when we went to sleep. Sometime during the night, though, the wind kicked up, causing all of that gorgeous white stuff to drift. There’s snow plastered against my back door like it’s been sand blasted and it drifted so deeply in the front that it’s about at the level of the front porch.

Imagine my surprise and then displeasure when I realized that I was going to have to shovel in order to let the dog out when I went to the back door this morning! Terry had shoveled out a spot for her last night that should have been reasonably usable, if the snow hadn’t been blown around. There was no trace of it left this morning. The back steps were piled high with snow, so I opened the door and went to grab the shovel that was right near the door when Phoebe ran past me, with no leash, no harness and no tags on – ACK! Fortunately, she only got as far as the second step because the snow was so high, so she stopped long enough for me to pick her up to bring her back in. Little brat! So, with the dog mildly chastized and standing far away from the door, I took the shovel and from the back door, I started shoveling the steps. Okay, good, no problem. I didn’t even have to put shoes on. Woot! Great, three steps cleared and I’m down to the top level of snow on the ground. I reached a little further (still not wanting to put any shoes on and actually go out there) and started to push the shovel to clear out a piece of grass for Phoebe to use and abruptly came to the rude realization that what I thought was the ground was actually another step!

Change of plan, I was actually going to have to stop, put shoes on and go out in that windy mess. Ugh. Did I mention that I love to LOOK at snow? 😆 I do like to be out in it a bit, but usually as a planned, well-dressed endeavor, not with me in my husband’s sneakers (because they were still near the door from when he shoveled last night), a pair of sweat pants and a short-sleeved T-shirt. Yep, that’s me. Too lazy to go retrieve my coat and put it on, I just slipped on Terry’s sneakers, tied them loosely, grabbed the shovel and stepped out. Of course, every time I tossed a shovel full of snow to the side, some of it would come blowing back at me. No matter which side I chose. I only shoveled out a small spot, figuring Terry can shovel out some more later today. Phoebe wasn’t too happy, but she wasn’t able to do what she normally does when she doesn’t like the shoveled area, which is hop out onto the snow and bounce around. No, the snow had drifted to be about as high as she was, so she was going nowhere except this little channel that I had shoveled. Since it only consisted of a shovel’s width, with me just taking a few chunks out of the snow in a straight line, she could barely turn around and wasn’t very pleased with the lack of space in which to do her business. Sorry girl!

I hear a bird tweeting now. I would say that I wish we had filled the bird feeder so that I could see all of the colorful birds flock to it for some food after the snowstorm, but it fell victim to the wet, sticky snow and the overnight sand blasting, as well, so it would not be in very usable shape at this point. I hope that the garage side of the house isn’t too badly drifted, though I know it will be, because Terry will have to shovel himself a path to the shed so he can get the snowblower out. We were supposed to go out to dinner tonight with a couple of other people, but I’m already starting to wonder if I care or not.

Well, for now, it’s stitching time! 😀 Isabelle was wondering what I would be stitching on today. And the answer is… (drumroll please) several things. I need to do the backstitching on the second tuffet piece so that I can put the two together into a tuffet pincushion today. I would also like to stitch part 4 of the mystery sampler, which was released yesterday morning. And then it will be a toss-up between obligation stitching (I’m doing another panel for the WTC quilt, but not with names) and the needlecase SAL. That will be a tough choice. The fun and newness of the needlecase SAL has captured my attention for a couple of nights so far, but my strong sense of obligation will probably tell me that I really need to work on the WTC quilt panel so that I can get it done and back to Mary in the next week or so. Regardless, it’s off to stitch I go!