Tale of a Shooting Star…

Woohoo! I’m leaving work in about two hours and won’t be back in until lunchtime on Monday (if at all; might work from home that day). I’m so excited, which is a good thing because the endorphins from my excitement are helping to override a headache I’ve had since this morning. 🙂

I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve, waiting for my birthday on Sunday. That seems silly and it feels odds since I have felt pretty blah about my past couple of birthdays. I think the fact that I’m actively going to be celebrating with friends and family is part of what has me wound up. The other part is that my parents are coming in tonight and will be here until Monday morning. I don’t normally get excited about parental visits (even though I’m very close with them), so again, I’m not sure what’s going on, but I’ll take it! 😉

So, I will probably line up a couple of automatic posts over the next few days just to keep my readers entertained, unless I feel like logging on and blogging. I still have a lot of housework to do so that everything looks nice and clean and as organized as possible for company on Sunday. I officially gave up last night on painting any more trim. It doesn’t look like Terry’s going to have the time to put it all up in the rooms before Sunday anyway and I was really draining myself of energy by coming home every night and painting for hours. I hadn’t gotten enough sleep on Tuesday night, so by the time I got home from work last night, I just wanted to lay down and take a nap, so I did! I reminded myself that this weekend is about ME, not about my house! LOL

I’m also bouncing around in my chair because I’ve had a totally successful day at work in a very short time span. I know most of you won’t understand, but it is SO satisfying when you write a bunch of code and it works on the first try! It’s a geek thing, I know, but it makes me feel REALLY good to get things working quickly and painlessly. I had two such events today, back to back. Things that I thought would take forever to figure out took no time at all and within about 2 hours, I finished everything I had on my list to do today. WOOOHOOOOOO! Makes me feel better about taking some time off. 😀

So, now it’s time to go home, clean up, eat and wait for my parents to arrive.

Recently, I overheard a mother and daughter in their last moments together at the airport as the daughter’s departure had been announced.

Standing near the security gate, they hugged and the mother said, “I love you and I wish you enough.”

The daughter replied, “Mom, our life together has been more than enough. Your love is all I ever needed. I wish you enough, too, Mom”

They kissed and the daughter left. The mother walked over to the window where I sat. Standing there, I could see she wanted and needed to cry. I tried not to intrude on her privacy but she welcomed me in by asking, “Did you ever say good-bye to someone knowing it would be forever?”

“Yes, I have,” I replied. “Forgive me for asking but why is this a forever good-bye?”

“I am old and she lives so far away. I have challenges ahead and the reality is the next trip back will be for my funeral,” she said.

“When you were saying good-bye, I heard you say, “I wish you enough.”” May I ask what that means?”

She began to smile. “That’s a wish that has been handed down from other generations. My parents used to say it to everyone.”

She paused a moment and looked up as if trying to remember it in detail and she smiled even more. “When we said ‘I wish you enough’ we were wanting the other person to have a life filled with just enough good things to sustain them .”

Then turning toward me, she shared the following, reciting it from memory:

“I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright.
I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun more.
I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive.
I wish you enough pain so that the smallest joys in life appear much bigger.
I wish you enough gain to satisfy your wanting.
I wish you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess.
I wish you enough hellos to get you through the final good-bye.”

She then began to cry and walked away.

They say it takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them, and an entire life to forget them.

TAKE TIME TO LIVE!

To all my friends and loved ones, I WISH YOU ENOUGH!

I’ve been out of work for 4 days – it’s driving me nuts and I’m bored out of my mind! Dressed in sweatpants, a sweatshirt, with a blanket on my legs and a scarf wrapped around my neck, I must be quite the… erm, unique… sight. I haven’t been to work, haven’t been out of the house, haven’t really been away from either the bed or the couch. No stitching, no computer time, not much tv time, nada. Just a lot of sleep and as little focusing of my eyes as possible. *sigh* I don’t know when the last time was that I was sick like this…

But hey, like the title says, at least it’s not that asian bird flu! Here’s hoping for a decent weekend of feeling better so I can actually get up off of my butt for a little while. 🙂

Today’s “Stitching Blogger’s Question” was suggested by Outi and is:

How do you `non-hoopists’ who use a rotation system handle it (as it seems to be lot easier if you are in good terms with hoop)? Do you have several scroll frames? Do you use Q-snaps or maybe something completely different? Or do you just have one or two big projects and others are small enough to be kept in hand while stitching?

😆 Do I have several scroll frames? That’s an amusing question, as my house is littered with what seems like a ton of scroll frames. Seriously, I might have ten frames in total, but it feels like a lot. I also have two Q-snaps and a few little hoops still in use for small ornaments. In addition, I do work some projects in hand, but I prefer some sort of artificial tensioner so that it’s not so hard on my hands.

I woke up with a nasty cold today that really made me feel like doing nothing but sleep. Figuring that this would be a bad time to work on model stitching (ya think?), I decided to make my first tuffet. I’ve been dying to do this for a while, since I first saw Judith Tuttle’s (Twisted Oaks Designs) tuffet in her Stitching Treasures II chartpak.

So, I had the idea a night or two ago to finish my first tuffet out of two pieces that I had already made from a Dinky Dyes kit I purchased as CATS last year for a Hardanger Scissor Fob. I ended up making two of them out of the same kit, with fibers to spare and they were about the right size to do an experiment. And here it is:

I’m too lazy to take a picture and upload it to give you an idea of the 3-D aspect of it. Let me know if you really want to see it, but it’s pretty much the same kind of dimensions as what you see in Judith’s picture.