Quietish

So, anyone posting Sunday Self-Portraits? I noticed that Amy posted hers early. That’s ok; I’m glad to see it. Tripods are indeed good, btw, but one can find ways to get by without them.

Edit:
Ok I’ll just make a list.
Kelly
Amy
Roberta
Cindy
Julie

I intended to spend the whole weekend reading. I envisioned pages and volumes on fire from the sheer speed and vigor in which I read them. I always mean well anyway. I finished The Last Battle in a short few hours on Wednesday, but didn’t get to pick up Eragon until Friday.

Despite the fact that they never go how I expect, I seem to insist on viewing weekends as easy-going regular days that happen be ones with Justin home. By the time we do what usually is much-needed shopping, clean up some, go to church, do something fun with the kids, and find something to eat, I have not found a comfortable, quiet stretch of time to just sit and read or knit or whatever I planned to.

So maybe I’ll finish my book sometime during the week…

Now that my needles are all blissfully bare (except for a stupid cotton dishcloth that I have no intention of picking up anytime soon), I believe I shall spend some time this week communing with my inner booknerd.

While I’m not quite the super reader that Kelly, who is working on reading the entire Western Canon is, I have always fancied myself a bookish person. In recent years though, mothering small children + obsession with hand-monopolizing crafts has made it hard to live up to that image.

The list of things I really MUST read or reread before another year expires is as such:

• The Last Battle. I read the other Narnia books last year but have yet to take any more reading time since The Silver Chair.
• Christopher Paolini’s Eragon, and Eldest. A couple of dear friends went out of their way to get Eragon for me on my birthday, and I have still yet to get to it.
• All the Harry Potter books. Again. I mostly want to reread Half-Blood Prince, but I’m anal and I need to reread them all in sequence to do so.
• The Lord of the Rings

And, of course, I’ll add more to the list as I go along.

So, I’ll go get started. I could easily have The Last Battle read by lunch if I focus. That’ll leave me time to work on my art journal entry.

so that I’ll have options while holed up in a hotel room this week.

• Reading Material

• The Last Battle
• Eragon

• Fairy Tale Sampler

• Nymphadora2 (crossing fingers hard that I will not run out of yarn before the end; it is quite close.)
• yarn for potential new pair of socks
• yarn for new (tweaked from the original pattern) scarf project

Oh, and stuff to keep kids busy.

Please do not panic; I’ll have the computer, email, cell phone, etc, etc. I shall be reachable. Although I should be busy all Friday visiting with Roberta and company. Eeee!! :)

I am, in fact, here and alive. Although some of you did hear from me and if you were one of those lucky people you got to endure my complaints about achiness, headachiness, and general nastiness.

Sorry about that.

I seem to be fully recovered this afternoon with nothing more than a headache this morning. That too has passed *thumbs up*

There are a few updatey things:

I am in computer-issue hell. Or close to it, I guess. Not like in the bowels or anything. But yeah, this weekend my computer was doing its everything-freezes-up-so-now-you-have-to-just-hit-the-power-button-neener-neener dance so I went ahead and restarted. Or tried to. It never rebooted. So I pulled out the back-up laptop while Justin lugged my tower to work with him the next day to try to at least save my pictures and iTunes folder. (PSA: When iTunes tells you to back up your library, just take its word for it. Really.)

The stupid thing actually booted up fine for him after sitting all night, so he went ahead and backed everything up anyway and brought it home. All was fine until Monday when it did it over again.

So now I’m back typing to you from the laptop. I don’t have the patience to deal with Mr. Desktop right now. The fun thing is that Mr. Laptop has a whopping 10G or so hard drive in it. I feel so special.

Being on the laptop isn’t all bad though. It means that this weekend when I am ready to go to Angie’s I can unplug the thing and go. So… woohooo!! I’m grabbing a sampling of crafty projects, getting on a plane, hopefully NOT losing any article of baggage, and flying to Tennessee to do…. well, whatever the heck we feel like. (I assume lots of stitching and Mario Party.) Wheeeeeeeee!

Ahem.
In the meantime I’ve gotten a little reading time in (read: laid around with Prince Caspian because my body hurt too much to sit upright for very long) and knitting.

Oh yes, knitting! My sock-in-progress (SIP, I guess. I think I’ll use that.) now has the starting of a heel.

SIP does already have a name, but I thought I’d throw out another point-opportunity. In the interest of discovering just how predictable I am, I have points to give to the first person to EMAIL me with a correct guess at this lovely sockiness’ name. But not you, Mary. Or you, Katie.

Til later. I’m going to go try to get my photo blog updated now. *sigh*

Aaah. It is nice out tonight. It is in the 70s (Fahrenheit, of course) and raining.

It was still daylight this afternoon when I first thought I heard some thunder. I peeked out the window and the sky was bright blue. Within minutes, though, it was darker and coming down pretty steady.

Just as fast as it came, the rain slowed and took a break. I heard Cian from the porch, “Jamie, look! A rainbow!” Such a neat thing.

I enjoy the rain, when I’m not in it. Whereas I’ve had the classical station on for a few weeks almost non-stop, the sounds from outside my window right now are just enough white noise to make me happy.

Anyhow I apologize for my absence. I’ve not taken the time to write down any thoughts this week. Come to think of it, crafting in general hasn’t been as plentiful since the weekend.

Today I read the The Penultimate Peril, which I’d been waiting on for awhile. The reading of this fell between, I think, false-start numbers 5 and 6 of a knitted sock I’m working on.

Yes, I have lost my mind and started working on socks. Shells and I were talking just a bit ago and it occurred to me that I really am the type to jump off the deep end. When I started scrapbooking, I really went for it. When I tried to teach myself piano, I skipped easy stuff. It was too boring. Cross stitching? Went straight for Teresa Wentzler designs.

Since the time that I picked up my size US10 knitting needles and figured out how to garter stitch, I have drooled over the notion of making hats, socks, and sweaters. Then on my birthday I added a couple skeins of sock yarn (6673) to my stash, unaware that it would scream to me every time I walked past. I mean, SCREAM. I could hardly be in the same room as that wool.

Once the urge got really bad, it only took a couple of days (while complaining to my oh so fortunate friends about how insane I felt) before I broke down and tried it out. So far sock number one has, oh, zero rounds of knitting on it. I get a few rounds in and decide I don’t like the rib pattern I’m working or find I’ve dropped a stitch. Eventually I will get it. I have yet to drown using the deep-end method.

Now I just have to overcome this pesky wool allergy.

Til later.

• Aquadoodle CHECK
• 3 knitting projects CHECK
• 4 cross stitch projects CHECK
• 5 of the 7 Chronicles of Narnia books CHECK
• laptop CHECK
• Harry Potter Uno cards CHECK
• french press CHECK

All packed and ready to spend the week at a hotel in Ft. Smith, Arkansas. Will have internet access.

Progress.

Some days, all I have desire to do is cross stitch. In a perfect world… And yeah I’ve done the “x” thing before in my journal, but I think its clever and it fit ;-)

I happily made some progress on this, day two, of my Elemental Dragons project:

And I started a new book.

That’s it, yay!

But really I was not entirely lazy! I read The Second Summer of the Sisterhood this morning and stitched on my new project all afternoon until just a bit ago.

So I’m happy.

I was sitting here awhile ago writing up some ideas for scrapbook-page journaling when the dam broke. When I get going with something creative, sometimes inspiration begins to flood and it won’t stop. Not that I don’t welcome it. I want more. I think I need more; I would like to avoid being consistently boring. This particular surge of creative energy brought me several pages worth of journaling outlines, and the bulk of this post.

No offence to all of my wonderful friends and family who have been so supportive and encouraging in my efforts to take over the world become a really good scrapbooker, but my scrapbook pages really suck.

I’ve been thinking about my journaling a lot lately. I need to go back and count, but I think that I have mentioned needing to scrap or needing to write journaling at least a few times in the last couple of weeks. Did I scrap anything like I said I would? No. But I think I have found my problem. I have been blocked. Not really with scrapbooking supplies or design concepts, but with my journaling. I recognize now that I have really been letting myself down with the majority of the journaling in my scrapbooks. This realization is a little scary for me, because while I don’t yet fully understand what this will mean to me and my previously-created pages, I think my style (which I still have yet to really define) may be on the brink of a renaissance.

Eep. That sounds like a lot of work.

The thing is, reading and writing have been very important to me for a long time but because of my limited time, and lately, my lack of motivation, I have been slack. Journaling is also massively important in scrapbooking, or rather, memory-keeping, and I guess I’m becoming convicted that it needs to take center stage in my pages. But then, most of the journaling I have written is in no way worthy of being center stage. With my life as it is, I whip out 2 or 3 lines of mediocre journaling that fits nicely in a little spot I’ve left on the page I have already designed.

I haven’t been all the way through Clean and Simple Scrapbooking yet, but Cathy Z.’s chapter on writing journaling rings so true for me. A lot of her points are actually things I likely have recommended to other people, but the hypocrite that I am has failed to take the advice myself. So now I have some renewed goals, thanks to Cathy:
1. Write first. Sometimes the words and the memory are more significant than the photo.
2. Say a lot. Why not? Someone sometime might really enjoy knowing what I thought about something. At least I can hope so.
3. Design my layouts so that my journaling does not appear to be an afterthought. I don’t want to hinder myself by making my thoughts fit into a 3×3 square.

Which reminds me: I need to take my non-scrapbook journaling more seriously. For the same reasons my pages suck, my blog has also sucked. I don’t know if I have been uninspired, haven’t had enough time, or have just been unwilling to devote the time to just writing. I used to like to write. Yeah, it is crazy I know. Poetry. Fiction. I even liked writing papers for school most of the time. I was impressed with my own ability insert pieces of my personality into non-fiction things.

My mom thinks I am a good writer. I haven’t really felt like I need her approval to do anything, but she confided once that she thought or maybe assumed I would become a writer. Her considering me a writer makes me want to be a writer.

I admit, when I was in middle school, I wanted to be a writer. With every profession I might have tried, my poor self-image has led me to believe that I am simply not smart, talented, or good-looking enough to do whatever it is I fancy at the moment, and my ambitions fade. There are lots of fields I haven’t even considered and I wonder how many things I could really have the aptitude for without knowing it.

It is not to say that I am a sad, depressed person who is always down on herself. I used to be that person but I think it is safe to say that nowadays I mostly like who I am. I do have my moments though, and often doubt myself, but here and there I catch glimpses of a me that is in fact talented and well-equipped for a task. I am encouraged.

So I think I might scrapbook tonight. Feel free to hold me to it.

In other news, I finished the kids’ Halloween robes and scarves. Picture to come. I’m very close to being done with Futurecast. Picture to come. Today I started reading on the Lemony Snicket books. I am almost through with book two. They are very quick and easy reads, and I like them so far, I think.