The mystery quilt is designed....

so give me a couple of days and I will work it out over a few weeks - as a little teaser it is called 'The trip to Morocco" and is the first in the series of a number of 'trips'!! 

So I made it back from the Florida trip and the electronic 'sunpass' device had me sprinting through the tolls on the Florida Turnpike - I love the look of panic from the drivers behind me who see the South Carolina plate in the Sunpass lane thinking 'she's in the wrong lane....'.  It was good to visit with my aunt - she is my only family here in the US.

I am so excited about the trip to the AQS show in Des Moines.  It will be a very long trip and I am going to be alone - someone has to run the studio for the week that I am gone - come on people, it's getting close to Christmas!! 

But for tonight - it's been a long day - I finally managed a run (6 laps of the track in a veeeeery  slow time - about three miles) but at least I got out there - time for bed.  Tomorrow will be faster - I promised Caper.  She ran with me and was not impressed.

So the mystery qulit will start soon and will be fun - come join me......

Well it has been an interesting week so far.....

and it's not over yet.  I have to thank J.P. big time for the free tickets to the Clemson game on Saturday - it was a blast!  I love live football and I went to my first NFL stadium game in Cincinnati in 1975 with my aunt and uncle.  I was a green (very green) seventeen year old visiting from Wales - I did not have a clue as to what was going on.  Then when Michael was about nine years old I took him to a game held at Crystal Palace in London where the commentator explained the game and it finally began to make sense - that was 26 years ago.  I have been a major football fan ever since.  At times it has required some serious effort to be a Dolphins, Packers and Panthers fan - but I just hang in there! 

So Sunday morning the girls arrive at work to find that there has been a break in at the kennel - they did everything just right.  They took pictures (how did we manage without smart phones?) and called the police.  It is very unlikely that we will find the culprit, but fortunately they were too high, drunk or stupid to find anything.  The cash register was turned off but they obviously couldn't work out how to turn it on (Duh!) so they left with nothing.  Just some damage to the window with the a/c unit which will not take much to fix.  New procedures now about putting the cash away in a lock box at night - we keep learning.  Oh and I need to remember to lock my gate between the kennel and the house.......

Off to Florida on Friday to visit my aunt - driving back Tuesday, so just a short visit.  Things are getting busy around here, thank goodness!  I can really feel the Christmas rush starting and there is a ton of stuff to do before the AQS show in Des Moines, Iowa.  

Anyway - stuff got done in the back yard over the weekend.  The honeysuckle was getting out of hand......

 

Hello - there is the deck!  It looks so much better and is ready to paint.

 

 

And the back deck was looking awful.

 

 

Hot tub has been empty and needing cleaning for weeks - I had thought to sell it, but then I thought of those colder winter days when it is so nice to sit in the hot water.

 

 

There will be more pictures of the progress once the painting has been finished.

 

 

 

Caper wants out and that door needs painting - ask the lovely Lindsay how long the painter's tape has been on the glass!!

 

 

 

 

And whatever it is, is out here somewhere - if I could just find it.

 

 

 

 Thank you W.G - the daisies are lovely!!

 

 

 Sometimes a bunch of cheerful flowers is enough to make my day - heartfelt thanks.

Now there was a bunch of other stuff I was going to spout at you tonight, but I need to get some other tasks done before the trip.  But I am going to use the time on the journey (about 11 hours each way) to review all that I am trying to achieve and to make some decisions about my direction and my priorities.  It's been a very hectic couple of years and I need to regroup. 

I also want to make this blog more about quilting (as I have mentioned before) so look for a mystery quilt when I get back - it's a mystery to me right now so we'll discover it together!! 

See you all when I get back and I will update you on my journey - keep safe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Passwords are beginning to drive me crazy......

apparently they should all be different, shouldn't use a pet's name (or yours), should have upper and lower case (or lower case only..), should (should not) include strange characters, should be 8 characters long (or more, or less) and SHOULD NOT BE WRITTEN DOWN.  So just how am I supposed to remember them all!!!!?

There is one (government driven) requirement where I have to go when I hire someone new (and I bet they are monitoring me now!) that requires me to change the password every time I log on - so I have to know the last password I used, invent a new one and confirm it, and it has to be totally different from any I have used before - so no incrementing the ending numbers.  And I SHOULD NOT WRITE THEM DOWN.  Ok government peeps - I am 56 years old, I have a few too many glasses of wine at night, I work too many hours every day and I have hormones - I don't always know WHAT DAY IT IS, never mind the password I used last time I logged on - so there is my rant for this week.  Can we move on to retina recognition on the personal computer in the next week or so - pretty please?

It has been a busy weekend - Labor Day and all that it entails.  The kennel was very busy and the lovely Lindsay did a sterling job of staying in control of upwards of 80 dogs.

I will post pictures later of the work done by myself and the engineer to clear the honeysuckle that was attempting to eat my house.  There was one very interesting side affect to the removal of the honeysuckle - tonight J.P. was watching out of the studio window and saw a very perplexed hummingbird hovering over the (very empty) feeder that I had left outside and never filled.  He (she) then huffed off to somewhere else to find food.  I had not realized that the hummingbirds were still around and had been feeding off the honeysuckle flowers - Oh, shame on me - starving the hummingbirds.  So I made some syrup and I hope that they will be back tomorrow and forgive my transgression.  All that said - the garden looks so much better now!

The U.S Open is still on and so it is wall to wall tennis in my house.  Both of the TV's are set to the channel showing the tennis and if anyone hates tennis - I am so sorry!  You are so out of luck!  And it has been very exciting.

So - drum roll please - I.D. your quilt is finished so expect a call tomorrow.  Crazy quilting lady, this puppy has been on the frame forever, has challenged me to the point of insanity and is utterly gorgeous!!  I cannot wait until you see it - but the rest of the blog followers are going to have to wait until you have seen it and enjoyed the fabulousness!  Thank you so much for trusting me with this beauty.

Let me head back to the tennis while I am still awake and I will try to post pictures in the next day or so - the lesson of the I.D. quilt is the same as the Chinese (or someone's) proverb - the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, or something like that, which is the same as the journey of a million stitches begins with the first one.  Wow - I just took the last one!!!