Here is a partial pile of fabric I have saved for a future log cabin quilt I’ve been dreaming about. You know yellow is my favourite colour.

I can’t remember what all is in this pile, some Jay McCarroll, Tula Pink, Kate Spain, Lizzie House…it’s all from The Workroom, for sure. Gorgeous, huh? Initially I wanted an ALL yellow log cabin (with purple centre squares), but the McCarroll fabrics changed my mind and now I’m adding light turquoise and pink too. Oh, man. LOOK at that paint splattery fabric, it’s stunning!! I got another bundle of fabrics in the mail yesterday, 12 fat quarters plus a full yard of yellow. So, I think  I have that end of things covered. Now to find more purples and accents!

(Also, because my fabric stash is starting to look a bit overwhelming, I’d like to do a fabric swap with like minded friends, if anyone is interested, lemme know!)

Ok. I loved Rango. I know I’ve been going on about it on twitter and Facebook, but for everyone else in the world? Go see it. Don’t worry about if you have a kid to go with or not, they won’t enjoy it as much as you anyway. I took Ari yesterday and practically gave myself a hernia I was laughing so hard. Maybe it was stress related, I don’t know, but I’m going to see it again, hopefully in the theatre. And it’s NOT in 3D! Woo!

And I also loved The Adjustment Bureau. It’s a smart movie about love. About waiting for love and being true.

We watch Bob’s Burgers each Sunday and I just said to Shannon how much I like it because it’s odd and funny and very silly. The voices are great, it’s a good show. Especially compared to the rest of the crap you get to watch on Sunday night. I haven’t enjoyed an episode of The Simpsons in at least 8 years. And I don’t like Family Guy and I loathe Cleveland. It’s awful.

I’m still going to the gym twice a week but I think I’ve lost the fever for it. My legs hurt when I use the treadmill and it makes the rest of my workout pointless. So yeah, I use the elliptical (or cross trainer as it were) and that hurts way less but still. And swimming is hard. I love the swimming part but I hate the wet hair afterwards part. And swimming caps don’t help. In fact, I don’t really know what a swimming cap is for.

Ok, so other than sewing like crazy (like, literally, CRAZY) I still do knit sometimes and I’m working on a couple other things.

I’ve also been enjoying cooking more lately, I often find myself thinking about how delicious roasted cauliflower is (very!) and what goes well with quinoa (almost anything). Shannon and I ate at Rawlicious last weekend while Ari was at her Oma’s house and I’ve been thinking about going back soon. I had this zuchetti thing, zucchini spiral shredded with tomato sauce all raw and I loved it. And then we shared a piece of ‘cheesecake’ and died and went to the moon. So very delicious, wow. So I’ve been thinking abut making that and then thinking that it’s the type of food best left to the professionals. Like sushi. And pad thai.

On top of everything I haven’t been sleeping much lately. Every night I go to bed and sleep for a couple hours then wake up at about 3:30 and stay awake for about 2 hours. Or longer. Then when I wake up for real for work or…sewing, I’m exhausted. I feel dead. I know why. But I feel more secure if I have my ipad in bed with me. RAH. It’s the IPAD’s FAULT!! But you know? When you’re like, ok, sleep time, good night pillow, good night duvet, good night ipad. Oh, what? Did someone tweet something witty? Is there an email for me? Grr.

Technology will clearly be the death of me.

Ok. I love you all. I’ll post real pictures soon.

The first one is for my dad, it’s a design by Boo Davis. Her work is amazing, buy her book now. NOW. Can you tell it’s a tree? Once this one is finished (I had a minor setback, ahem) I will have a hard time handing it over. It’s going to have a navy back and straight quilting.

The second on is for my mom and is my own design. It looks a lot more complicated than it actually is. Well. It took a lot of work, to be fair, but I simplified my life by buying solid colour jelly rolls, sewing strips of colour to strips of white, and on and on until I got this. The back of it will be red and I’m planning on doing a diagonal quilting pattern. Libs says it’s hard but we’ll see!

These pictures suck, sorry. I’ll take better ones when they’re finished.

Here’s an idea of what the beginning of my mom’s looked like:

1. Downloading books takes about 3 seconds. It’s that fast.

2. Lots of free books. I have downloaded Dickens and Doctorow, Lovecraft and Baum without spending a penny.

3. Book samples. Also free, you can sample books-you get about 3 or 4 chapters, BANG, and then decide if you really want to pay for ‘em.

4. Text-to-speech. It’s not perfect and it’s almost unlistenable, but it was really nice on our return trip to have a robot voice lulling in my ear about true crime.

5. The screen rotates to suit how you hold it. That’s hot.

6. It offers recommended books, depending on your searches and downloads.

7. The screen savers are cool.

8. Amazon has all the different prices listed for books, ie, standard books, kindle, audio etc, so that makes picking stuff out easier too.

9. Built in PDF reader=knitting patterns on the go. Yay!

Here’s what I don’t like about it:

1. People who think it sucks and have no problem telling me it sucks. Ok, whatever, your opinion, that’s nice. The cashier at Chapter’s (yes! I still buy BOOKS!) complained that it’s not backlit (hi, neither are books!) and that the keyboard was too fiddly. Ohhh kaaayyy.

2. Not all books are available yet. Not even close. Nothing by John Irving or CD Payne showed up. No Jeffrey Steingarten or Jilly Cooper either. No Palahniuk or Eggers. Weird.

3. Boring selection of magazines. And newspapers. And no blogs available in Canada yet.

I will not be downloading (I mean, paying) for books I already own, this isn’t going to make my books obsolete, not by a long shot. So the 9 shelves of books in our house have nothing to fear.

And I really enjoyed I Only Roast the Ones I Love by Jeffrey Ross, the first book I bought on Kindle.

YES! It’s a Kindle! And I’ve already plopped 18 books onto it so that ought to keep me somewhat busy on our trip. How cool is this thing anyway?

Other news: I took out my tongue piercing. It was about 16 years old and it was time to go. Felt SO weird for the first few days that I kept licking my top lip because it hadn’t been licked in so long. It’s still weird now, 5 days later, but only when I think about it.

Ok, folks, see you in a week, lots of holiday love to all of you!

xoxo

It still smells like garbage strike here so any and all rain is embraced by me.

Then the rain stopped and blue sky rolled back in bringing a rainbow. It looked so beautiful.

A poem, or a title of a book of poems we had when I was a kid suddenly popped into my head earlier today. I wonder how that works? I mean, I wonder what triggered my brain to think about “A Great Big Ugly Man Came Up and Tied His Horse to Me”?  All the poems were funny (if I remember correctly) and the illustrations are brilliant. I would LOVE to have a copy of this to read with Ari.

It’s great, really interesting story about an engineer who decided he didn’t enjoy the rat race, dropped out and did the one other thing he was good at to make a living: making soup. I’d be thrilled to have someone deliver soup to my hot little hands weekly.

I am looking forward to trying several of his (easier) recipes, the Chompy-Chomp Black Bean Soup, Bouktouf, Chao Tom, Caldo Verde, Mulligatawny, Ashkenazi Matzoh  Ball…it all sounds good to me. Gazpacho? Yes please.

One day I’d like to visit Austin. It sounds like a fun city.

Instead, I picked up a book titled “Making Your FAMILY LIFE Happy” thinking, well, who couldn’t use a little help? I didn’t notice that it was published by Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc in 1978, so it’s a little preachy and a lot out dated. There’s actually a chapter called “Training Children from Infancy”. Mostly I just dig the (uncredited) illustrations, they’re very Jack Chick-esque.

This is the best one, I didn’t notice it my first go round:

Yes, I am very, very much aware that I am in desperate need of a manicure.

As you can see, my copy is old and pretty much on it’s last legs. I keep repairing it with tape and hoping it lasts one more round. You can also tell, from the cover, that this copy, printed in 1978, predates the (brilliant) movie version of the book. John Lithgow is pure genius in it.

I would also heartily recommend Hotel New Hampshire and Cider House Rules, also by John Irving.

ps. I will also recommend not calling my phone with a blocked number. I realize who it is, thanks, your subtlety is wonderful. Please leave me out of your exciting, dramatic life.