Christmas decorating - pleasure or just plain work

I suppose things would be different if I wasn't single and have more decorations than most families of fifteen do. It's not like I can convince myself to do the same thing year after year. How I envy those people who have their trees with white lights and a few baubles and that's it. I'm going for simplicity this year if simplicity can be found in a closet full of decos. My new colour scheme doesn't go with many of my deccies so I have to disguise the colour scheme. And where am I putting the Christmas tree this year??? When it's done it's always lovely but getting there will take a week. I should be like my Sister and keep my tree up all year round. Maybe not.

Libraries - enablers of book addiction

or just a great place to get something to read? How can it be I always go for one book and come back with three? I am a book junkie. I do not want to give back any of these books. I personally pay for at least one librarian with my fines and they never get any new craft books I like but I still come out with books. Libraries are pushers. They inject reading material into my arms. I tell them not to let me have more than one book but they always give me a taste of something new and know I will be unable to resist. How cruel can one institution be to someone as weak as myself? Excuse me I have to go now and read a new book.

pulling that long thread

getting ready for Christmas. I wish I had a real chimney then I wouldn't have to clean. I'd use the excuse that Santa was just going to get the room all dusty and sooty when he roars down the chimney with my presents. No such luck. An electric fireplace does not give soot so it's the vacuum cleaner for me today. Cleaning just highlights the fact that I will have to do it regularly before the threat of holiday visitors is over.
I'm thinking of sewing the cats festive longjohns to try to keep them from shedding. They sew sheep into bags to keep their fleece clean so why not cats? Yeah, I know - they're cats. They'd never fall for it. Soon the real trial comes when I have to face my wall of boxes of Christmas dekkies which double in size the minute they come out of the closet. Too much stuff - I have too much stuff. My dehoarding bag is at the ready with it's maw wide open for donations.

pirates aplenty

Who robbed me of one of my hotmail accounts and why is hotmail asking me a million questions about my account like I would know the answer? I am terrorized at the loss of all that pornish junk mail about Viagra and Russian women who reallllly love you already and are ripe for a marriage bed - any marriage bed. I can enlarge my penis to a massive extent but need to ignore it will be a three foot long shoestring. The fact I never had a penis withstanding. Would I like to see naked women with huge butts pointing at my face like twin beachballs or breasts the size of helicopters? Fat women want you! That Nigerian fellow has inheritance money for me despite the fact that my people haven't been black since humans first walked out of Africa and found the first air conditioning in the frozen north. As a woman I don't want to gawk at other women's private parts, need viagara, or find husbands for these hard eyed Russian women. Come to think of it do I really want this hotmail account back???  Hmmm.....

cinnamon dreams

Christmas is coming
I'll be getting fat
Please put a cinnamon bun in this old girl's hat.
Actually I would prefer it in my hand. I have an obsession with cinnamon buns of the original Pillsbury type. I try my best to limit them or I'd nosh them every day of the year. Snow is my cinna benchmark. I can have them when it snows and since I live in an area where you would think we get a lot of snow but don't I have to sit by the window with my face pressed to the glass trying to will a few visible flakes. Since it has been proven that dogs can read minds, particularly when you're thinking foodly goodness, my puppers joins me and keeps me company drooling on my foot. I'm in a weather anomaly where ten miles in each direction can have snow and we, at the bottom of our geological bowl, get zip as happened last week. Flurries are predicted on Thursday so throw up a prayer to the Godness of Buns for me. If my post is unintelligible on Thursday it's because typing while covered in cinnamon icing tends to make your hands sticky and puts your brain on holding pattern.

growing older gracefully tips

..........Well I've got nothing for this. The best revenge is not to grow old gracefully. I had a dream. A dream that can no longer be realized thanks to technology. For years I planned to spend my retirement as a "Screaming Mary" yelling abuse at total strangers and talking to myself very loudly. No quiet retirement for me. I was going to abuse people for fun and power. Thanks to the invention of the bluetooth headsets you can no longer tell if someone is talking to themselves, and off their meds, or they're having an actual conversation on their phones. Talk about grand plans gone wrong! Damn technological advances! What about my need to act out as a crazy woman?

looking forward while looking to the past

Since my grasp on time passing is pretty thin I have to sometimes give myself a project to look back. This project was transferring all my slides to digital copies for the computer. These moments in time haven't been observed for many, many years and it's a surprise to see us so young. Luckily for genetics I may have grey hair but my skin is like a teenager's. Vanity is my name.

a lesson from a pattern

and that lesson is no matter how careful people are giving instructions for the pattern they can be wrong and it's up to you to fix it or run. How much like my life is this current project where I follow directions and find out the main block measurement is wrong? I'm not really a person who likes to follow other's directions and if I do my work is much less successful than when I do what I think is right and go my own road. Blocks cut, block corners added, everything pressed, it's half an inch smaller than the directions said it would be. Now is the time to throw my hands up and run. Drawing on my decades (Gads that sounds horrible) of fixing problems of others I persevered on and redrew the dimensions and recut the pieces. I can be grateful they were too large rather than too small. Now it's pieced I look back and know that when I follow my instincts, and not other's instructions, I can fix just about everything. This holds me in good stead for the future years. Damn the mistakes and full speed ahead.

Fiddling?

while Rome burns or am I testing my own belief? I spent yesterday sewing which is something I haven't done for years. I fancy myself a quilter but what have I produced? What have I completed that is worthwhile? Quilting is a metaphor for my life. I sewed up my life in my work for the ten years and what did I complete that is tangible and worthwhile? My talents and abilities helped many people day after day but what did it mean to me? Did I receive any real pleasure from it? Any accolades for such good and precise work? I don't kid myself in any way - my work was very good as it always is. It has been my personal life which I let flow away in the guise of work being all. Work has been like a quilt top which is well made and interesting to look at but has been left unquilted so it is only half done. My personal life is a UFO. Now I need to believe that my quilt of life is worth finishing.

Views from the centre block

Perfection is a mental condition that only sees the errors and not the successes. I stand back and look at my work. What I see makes my mind start listing it's complaints about the minor problems which will be unnoticeable when the project is done. There's nothing serious so, for once, I'm leaving everything as is. Can't spend the next 40 years worrying about the invisible.

waves crashing on the beach

Sunshine, relatively balmy air for Fall, and waves crashing on the beach. A wonderful combination.

Numero two

In my drive to have different types of days I usually experience I took my Sister to Lens Mills and Michaels and managed to - gasp! - buy no fabric or chachkas from either store. My major purchases were a pin cushion - which I got 50% off for a grand total of $1.50 - and two spools of cotton thread. Considering my shopping addiction I think I did pretttty good. I also got some piecing done on the blocks but an flummoxed on how to put the rows together. All in all a successful day for a person of my prime years.

Day one!

As of 1110p last night I am sixty years old. I'm still gobsmacked at the idea. Thank goodness I inherited my Mother's side of the familys skin. I have suddenly realized how vain I am or shall I say self-centred? So what is different about day one? Lunch with a friend then a drive in the country. Definitely something different.

The edge is now

Approximately 11pm tonight the hand on the clock of years hits sixty. My last few hours of the fifties are upon me. I'm ready for the next forty years being an improvement in some way. Gotta find that passion. Chuckie is my passion. Dogs, cats, doing as I please, not being told what to do, having control and flexibility, all are passions of one sort or another. What to do? I feel so positive today.

Let the sun shine!

I am mesmerized, not in a bad way, that this is my last day of fifty+ years and tomorrow I start a new decade. It is so funny that it comes as such a surprise. It isn't even like it's just a page turning. It's more like waiting for the next book it's the Harry Potter series except I don't get  a magic wand which is probably a good thing because I would use it liberally and no politician in the world could ever lie again. I get to keep Severus Snape. I think I will celebrate today by doing all my laundry, working on my quilt, and vacuum up the detritus of the decade which seems to be ground into my carpet. A great way to start the new decade by sleeping on a bed covered with sun-sweet fresh sheets and pillowcases.

Standing on the edge

Here I am, surprised as heck, on the edge. Sixty years old in two days. 60!? Sixty! How did this happen? Why didn't I notice? No one is more surprised than I am. Sixty! Wow! I never had a sense of time passing like many do. Here I am seventeen one day and sixty the next. What to do with my next forty years? What to do, what to do? When I have been to the unemployment training groups every trainer says now is the time to look to your passions for your future. Better get a passion real soon. What will it be? I float like a hot air balloon following the currents of air until I cool off. Looking for land.