Such Sweet Hands

I have several projects due next week. I am now officially behind. Today needed to be an efficient day of accomplished errand running. Instead, I overslept and had just enough time to grab the remaining clean clothes I have and throw everything I needed into a bag and run to my car before the “street cleaning” parking tickets were handed out. It was already hot outside at 10 am, but I headed to Pasadena anyway because Pasadena has a Target and craft stores and all the sorts of places I needed to hit in a small enough radius that I could actually get everything done in one trip and return home in time to score a parking spot in the right place to avoid needing to move my car tomorrow morning. (Have I ever mentioned before that my life is often planned around the parking situation?)

Around noon I find myself in line at Target and no plastic or cash in my wallet. And I haven’t eaten yet so my brain is all foggy. I step out of the line and walk to an aisle where I can hide from everyone and fish out a piece of candy from my purse and figure out what I’m going to do. Well, I find the Andes mint right where I left it, except it isn’t in the foil wrapper anymore. It has melted during the hot drive and oozed out of it’s wrapper and onto a ten dollar bill. But, hey! I have ten bucks! ….covered in chocolate! MMMMmmmm. That smell of paper money and melted mint chocolate.

That is how we end up in a target bathroom washing a ten dollar bill. There is a woman in one of the stalls flushing again and again and again. I don’t know what she is up to. When she leaves the stall she looks embarrassed until she see I am using toilet paper to clean chocolate off of money. We don’t even share a glance or a shrug to bond over what is obviously a weird day for each of us. We just go about our business knowing someone else is having a day too.

I buy a bottle of cold water, get in my car and head home…

Now to plan my way out of this “behind schedule” hole.

***Edit***

More!  Did I ever tell ya that my next door neighbor is a voice teacher?  Yeah!  Gutteral voice drills invented to train volume into the voices of people who can’t sing in the first place!  That drove me a bit batty and I still hadn’t eaten enough yet so I was dizzy and mad at the voice lessons so I sorta slammed a door which sent an empty picture flame to the ground.  Tons of shattered glass pieces sit on the kitchen floor waiting to be swept and vacuumed.  Instead, I grab the pint of chocolate dipped caramel cone haagen daas from the freezer and retreat to the bedroom to eat ice cream until I burst while I watch Dharma and Greg.  Sharing the ice cream with Tiger Lilly (only gave her a tiny bit Rob, I promise!) and reading Kim’s comment that I made her laugh out loud have made me feel better.

Yeah, so I have all sorts of stuff to do. And I am excited about every single one of them (well, not changing the cat litter). So I’m coasting through my day bouncing between desk work and house work when it hits again. A tinge in my fingers… a need to play with an idea in my head. But this tinge has nothing to do with a crochet hook, or even knitting needles… embroidery! I’ve had a growing re-interest in sewing lately. I had permanently written off embroidery because hand sewing hurts my hands so much. Then standing in Purl Patchwork it all came to a head… that gorgeous fabric, I must embroider sweet little pieces of gorgeous fabric! I held back from finding and purchasing any proper embroidering tools while I was in New York. I did spend some time geeking out on the new interest, reading the embroidery instruction booklet I purchased at Patchwork on the plane and recalling the feeling of the hours of hand sewing I did years ago as a costume shop intern.

I gave in, because giving in to these little whims usually helps me get more work done in the end. I grabbed a piece of scrap muslin, a spool of old cotton thread and stole a needle from a hotel sewing kit…

Before I ran away for the whirlwind yarn tour of the eastern time zone I had a very busy week. I hoped to get site content out before leaving, but just wasn’t satisfied with things so I decided to keep them under wraps.

I ran a bazillion errands to pull together all the things I needed for a two week trip.

I relished the bird teevee along with the cats. A nest full of baby birds sat right outside our window and the cats and the birds got into quite the war of words. While I was away I’d look at this photo taken from our living room window for a shot of sweet home feelings.

I also put in my first day as an Election Poll Worker… It was a hard day. I thought I’d write out a longer post on this topic, but I think I’ll leave the events mostly in the past. I hope I’ll recover enough to return and help out again. I believe participating in the process is an important thing to do. As for the difficulties of the day, I’ll simply say this: The people who show up at the polls are obviously feeling tense about things. Regardless of their affiliation, emotions seemed to be high and folks forgot that the poll workers are volunteers who believe in the electoral process, not dummies to spew anger on. Many folks were nice, but the mean ones… eek!

I’m home!  It was a fantastic two weeks.  The departure from the habits of my yarn hermitage has done me much good.  I met some great folks and thankfully now have a full plate of new projects in front of me.  I’ve still got great new content brewing for the site.  Things have moved into full gear!

And as soon as this evening (possibly) pics and stories from the trip.

About to run out to the Renegade Craft Fair… Yippeee! It’s been a crazy week… TNNA, road trip with Kim and Shannon, bits of work and meetings and picking up more work and of course visits to yarn stores. I’ll be sharing pics and stories soon. For now, go ask Miss Kim why her toiletries were left to live out the rest of their time in backwoods Pennsylvania…

Playing with one of my swatch boards was a lovely, fun diversion from today’s list of laundry, bill paying, and figuring out why IE makes everything ugly.

IE pixelates my little images.  I try to make them big and clear enough to be worth looking at and small enough to not choke anyone’s browser.  IE doesn’t seem to care I play nice and I’ve learned it pixelates everything.  This image is much finer res than what I’ve been using.  If you use IE, do you see any difference?

Today’s quandry, try to play nice with IE or just tell folks to use something else?

Half of my visitors use IE, and I hate to think that half of you aren’t getting a view of my site that is as nice as I work for it to be.  I have content waiting to go on the site, but am waiting to solve this whole ickiness…

Um, Rob… we need some new dishes

Originally uploaded by such sweet hands.
We have two bowls left and they don’t match… we used to have three bowls that didn’t match… sigh. I often break the dishes. Mixture of clutziness and wonky miswired hands I guess.

This bowl transcended from it’s form and function as bowl when my superman mug slipped from my hands in the sudsy sink. The larger portion of the bowl hopes to find some new function, the large chip feels some relief in finally being it’s own form and hopes to travel the world before settling down into a new use…

Superman mug is sort of smug about it all, knowing I adore that mug and am relieved it lives on.

I was just saying to someone that crochet is my first “language” and knitting is my second.  Because m fingers just know how to speak in crochet so easily.  Which suddenly made me think of school classrooms… one labeled “KSL” for crocheters, weavers, etc learning Knitting as a Second Language and another with “CSL” for Crochet as a Second Language.

Made me giggle, had to share…