Well, now that was not fun… somehow I managed to delete the admin panel from my sidebar. Took me a while to find out how to log in so I could post! LOL

Anyway….

I’m possibly getting ahead of myself a bit, but I decided it’s time to start putting out feelers.  I’m getting close to completing Mirabilia’s Christmas Elf Fairy and wondered if anyone out there is interested in her.  I’ll be honest, none of the other Mirabilias are catching my eye, and I’ve been on the Abstinence Wagon for so long that I have no idea what’s out there anymore. So this could be an adventure!

Work is going great. The boss has been letting me loose on new projects with little to no instruction, which honestly feels wonderful. The old boss never would have given me the kind of freedom I have here. Of course, Boss looks over everything after I’ve done it, but since it’s all going out over his name, that’s only natural and expected.

School is now done for the kids. Thank goodness, because I don’t know how much more of Buggie’s horribly terribly awful attitude I could have handled.  I do remember how bad Junior year was, and I didn’t even bother with ACT or SAT testing because I knew I was just going to end up at the local community college if anything. So I was sympathetic to the stress, but dang.

My calling at church is going very well. We’ve planned several good workshops and seminars for the next few months, and we’re starting to think about our big service project that we’ll do with the young women near the end of the year. Sadly, the charity I was really hoping for, Feed My Starving Children, is currently booked through about February of next year. So I’m keeping my eye open for cancellations, just in case.

The kids are doing well. Buggie ended up getting a 29 on the ACT without knowing any physics or finishing the written portion. Yeah, getting into college won’t be a problem for her. Paying for it, however, looks like it will be a big problem for me.

And I am stitching!  I’ve been working on the Christmas fairy during work and a crocheted baby blanket at church. Of course, I don’t have easy access to my camera for status pictures… LOL

The Stitching Blogger’s Questions have returned! Thank you, Lee!

Suppose we say that there are two types of stitchers.

There are those who enjoy the “process” of stitching.  They stitch for stitching’s sake and if something gets finished, so much the better, but it’s not necessarily the end goal.   Primarily, it’s the application of needle and thread to cloth that makes them happiest.

Then there are those who are “project” stitchers.  They move steadily through their projects, certainly enjoying their stitching time, but finding their greatest joy in the completed stitching.

If you had to pick one to describe yourself, which type of stitcher would you be?  I imagine that we could all say that we fall somewhere in between, but really think hard about this and try to pick just one.  And once you’ve decided whether you’re a Process or Project stitcher, tell us if your recognize that approach in other parts of your life.

I am absolutely a process stitcher.  I also has SADD – Stitcher’s Attention Deficit Disorder. Both of which might just explain my many UFOs.

Cross stitch (and lately crochet as well) is my therapy, my mental disconnect. It allows me to break away from whatever is stressing me and get back on an even keel.  When I was commuting to Chicago’s Loop for work, it was the best way I knew to get out of secretary mode and into mom mode.

Out of many hundreds of completed projects, I have less than two dozen completely finished at home. Possibly less than a dozen.  Oh, I’ve finish-finished more, but most of them get given away immediately once they’ve been mounted. I tend to not do the finishing until I know who is going to get that piece and why. I have a large file of fuffies waiting to be identified as gifts for someone.

My mommy got me goodies!

No, not the pictures, the cross stitch kit to make them!

See, when I was little, I absolutely adored the Holly Hobbie character. According to Wikipedia, the character was originally un-named and was “born” right about the same time as I was. I had several dolls, and my very first ever pair of glasses had small images of the blue girl on the temples.

A few years ago, someone came out with an updated version of Holly Hobbie. Probably the same jerks who decided to reboot Strawberry Shortcake and Rainbow Brite. Yuck yuck yuck. Stop frackin with my childhood. I did give the new Holly a try, honest. But the new Holly shared absolutely nothing in common with the girl in blue calico patchwork of the 70s, and the TV show that served as the foundation for the relaunch was – IMHO – more of the same little girl drivel that serves as the force behind most of the shows on Nickelodeon and Disney lately. Maybe I’m just too old, but eww.

So anyway, Mom was out shopping this last week, getting an embroidery hoop and needles so she could do some cross stitch pillows she got from someone somewhere. And she spotted this kit. She almost didn’t buy it because of the price, but she knew what my reaction would be when I saw it and decided that alone was worth it.

I literally SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEd when she handed it to me. I cannot remember the last time I saw a *real* Holly Hobbie picture. And when Mom told me it was mine, I squeeeeeeeeeeeed again. I don’t know if I’ll be able to resist stitching her for long LOL. I’m not as interested in blue boy, never was, but I know I’ll just *have* to stitch him as well to have the set up on the wall.

I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaack!!

It’s been an insane couple weeks here, mostly because of figuring out new routines and then having them all immediately tossed out the window when Spring Break hit.  Just a few more days of that left, at least.

I have even been stitching! Not as much as I would like, but still more than I had been.  I’m mostly working on Chrissy the Christmas Fairy on my lunch breaks and occasionally working on Autumn Sunset at home. 

As for work, I’m in a nearby suburb.  My boss owns the building we’re in.  The office is on the second floor of a downtown building with lots of huge windows that face to the south, so lots of sunlight, and a Starbucks below me.  I love the smell of coffee but not the taste, so its proximity is only a small temptation because of their peppermint hot chocolate.  And a raw chocolate boutique is in negotiations to move into the currently empty first floor space next to Starbucks.  I don’t know if that will be dangerous, the sample they brought in yesterday didn’t interest me much, but I think I need to check out their website to see what else they might have.

I’m not sure if the RSS is actually updating afte rall. That last post never did show up on my reader.  So I may have gotten excited about that for nothing. If anyone out there using Wordpress has suggestions, I would appreciate it.  I would also love to get my dashboard to showme all tags and not just my “most used” ones.

And right now I am SOOOOOOOOOOooo loving this Akami spam filter system.  Yeesh, I wander away for a little bit and come back to 35 spam comments plus 5 new spam user sign-ups.

I clearly have too many places to share certain types of information… I completely forgot to post here and now it’s a non-issue.

I had a series of interviews for a temp-to-perm job the last two weeks. I ended up not getting it, but I’m not upset about it. Over the course of the nearly 3 weeks since I was first contacted to determine my interest, we went from “occasional overtime” to “a couple days a month” to “I’m so backed up that you’re going to be putting in 2-3 hours a day every day for 4-6 weeks”. The interviews went really well and in the end it was down to me and one other candidate. They ended up going with the other person in the end, and I think it was because I have kids and they were concerned about my ability to work that much overtime. I had family lined up and ready to cover so I could take it, even though I was having doubts myself. In the end, I’m glad that she decided to pass me over. It would have been nice to have gotten all that overtime pay, but it would have been a major strain on the family situation. I do have other irons in the fire.

I’m back in the stitching groove as well, putting several hours into Autumn Sunset Sampler as well as working on a crocheted scarf during church. Half an hour a day, one day a week…. this is an awfully slow scarf. Then again, so are all of my other projects lately.

I had an interview yesterday with an attorney in a nearby suburb. The job sounds great, he sounds like he’s interested in me, but he’s not planning to have someone start until after tax season. The office is very sterile, and that concerns me because I work much better with music and he does not like having music playing in the office (I asked because of how bare people’s desks are). I’ll take it if offered and I’m still available.

I then had a phone interview today – yes, on Saturday – for a work-from-home typing opportunity for an attorney downtown. He’s temporarily displaced from his office because of an environmental issue, and his assistant recently relocated to another state. So there’s a possibility of an office position once things get settled down in the building. It almost sounds like I’ve got the work-from-home portion clinched, at least, but I’m not counting on it because that’s just the way things seem to go for me.

I also have a potential interview for next week with yet another office. The coordinator at the staffing agency called on Friday to feel out my interest level, she’s trying to get more info and has my availability so she can go ahead and schedule the interview for me without further delay.

And I’m stitching! I spent a little time on the Christmas Fairy while at my parents’ house last week, plus a couple hours today on Autumn’s Sunset Sampler while playing an online game with my father.

The import old posts project is on hold at the moment, mostly just because I had other things that were grabbing my attention. I’ll get back to that sooner or later.

And odd, I’m now seeing an RSS error on my dashboard… “XML Error, out of memory at line 1, column 0″. Make any sense to anyone?