Mom DID have a sense of humor!

A Hershey's Candy Kiss! Yikes! The only thing funnier was the year I had to be a mallard duck!

300th Post!

Do I talk a lot or what? Wait, don't answer that! ROFLOL

So to mark the occasion, it's my turn to do a give-away - to pay it forward - to thank all of you who have read my blog, laughed and cried with me, and have politely read through the no-picture blogs. The drawing will be held on Sat. August 4th, noonish o'clock my time. To be entered to win, you just have to leave a non-anonymous (is that a word?) comment here.

I've been pondering this today, and I decided just to fill up a goody bag with quilty things I'd like to get. Maybe I'll get a picture posted of the goody bag before the drawing - if I remember to call Matt about my inability to download pictures again. I keep forgetting to do that until I get home and remember. Sheesh...

Good luck to everyone! And again, thank you for allowing me to be a part of this ring and a part of bloggerland!

Merrily We Applique!

Of course, since I don't have a picture to show, everyone is just going to have to believe me! :)

I've finished the second block of All Things Christmas. The top third of the quilt is done done done!

I bit the bullet and embroidered the arms on the snowman tonight. Question: What needle do you use for two strands of floss? The needle I'm using seems SO fat after using the straw needles for applique!

Note to self: Call Matt tomorrow!! I need pictures!!


Supper: My last bagel. I guess it's time to go to the market. I need to get food this time! LOL. No storage bags, magazines, junk stuff. Real food! Maybe I'll grill this weekend. I can get enough cooked for most of the week. Hmmmm......

Gratitudes:

~ A lot of them!

Magic Won Again This Weekend!

Magic won his sixth blue ribbon this weekend out of 11 field trials he's run so far this season. What a remarkable dog! My boss' other two dogs jammed, so it was a good weekend all around. I really love Magic. Even if he weren't a champion, he's just a wonderful animal.

It's raining here today! Well, SoCal's version of rain. Just enough to totally mess up the freeways this morning. It took me an hour and twenty minutes to get to work. I just hope this rain settles down all the dust and pollutants in the air for a while.

I'm SO Bored!

I was too busy this week to call Matt about my photo problem. And I've had literally dozens of things I wanted to blog about -- but would need pictures to do it up properly.

I decided to look through my old photo albums to see how many Christmas quilts I had pictures of. Look what I found!

Isn't this the most awful, bedraggled Santa you've ever seen? No wonder I looked scared to death! LOL. My mother loved this picture. But then I think I already said she had absolutely no sense of humor.

On the other hand, he DOES look a little folk-arty, in a grungy kinda way. I guess there weren't many Santas to choose from in Sulphur, Louisiana.

OMG, I just thought of the funniest story. When Don was working on his first college degree, with a wife also in college and a new little baby, he decided to work as Santa at Sears in Lake Charles to earn a little extra Christmas money. Okay, Mom was mortified, but Dad and I thought it was great!! (Oh, my, how we loved to mortify Mom!) But I digress.

So Don was all padded up and costumed on his first day as Santa. Dad and I couldn't wait to get over there to check him out. We were standing there watching him when our next door neighbor walked up with her two grandsons. They were such bad little boys ... the terror of the neighborhood ... but they were both absolutely adorable. Blonde hair, blue eyes.

So Todd gets up on Santa's lap first. Santa said, "Todd, have you been a good little boy?" Todd just was shocked that Santa knew his name. I mean, you should have seen the look on this kid's face. He didn't miss a beat, though, and said he had been very good. Santa said, "Well, what about the time..." and proceeded to tell Todd about something bad he had done. His grandmother and Dad and I were laughing so hard. That's when Todd decided it best to start rattling off his Christmas list. Santa said, "Todd, are you sure you deserve all those things after doing ...." and said another bad thing Todd had done.

Todd looked at him for the longest time .... then promptly got down off of Santa's lap, walked over to his Grandma and declared, "I don't like this Santa. Let's go find another one!"

I don't know how many years it was before Todd was told the whole story, but he was a lot better after that! LOL

And just in case Santa is keeping a list and checking it twice ...... I've been VERY good this year!

Gratitudes:

~ I think we've solved a problem at work. Happy dancing!

~ That means no work this weekend! More happy dancing!

~ A nice breeze this evening while walking Daisy.

~ Dinner: potato chips and a banana. (I really must start cooking!)

~ Happiness is box(es) from the Fat Quarter Shop!! sssshhhh........

Tagged by Susan!

Finn's Monday Meme is getting around! Okay, here goes:

Five Things To Do Before I Die:

~ Go to Alaska. It's been a burning desire for years and years. Hearing my friend Jane and her DH talk about when they lived there makes me want to go even more!
~ Go to Ireland. My maternal grandparents were from Ireland. Maybe that's where I get that wee bit o'blarney!
~ Drive across country in a motor home, visiting friends and quilt shops along the way! Oops, better make that an 18-wheeler if quilt shops are involved!
~ Learn to play the fiddle and piano. Not at the same time - but that would be kinda neat! LOL
~ Retire before I die. Preferably before I die. (sigh)

Five Things I Can Do:

~ Figure out how to do most things. Doesn't matter how hard it is. Of course, it's a good thing I learned two Polish curse words so hardly anyone else knows what I'm saying while I'm figuring things out!
~ Unconditionally love.
~ Tap dance. Of course, I'm not as cute doing it as I once was! (sigh)
~ Make a bigger mess than anyone else in the whole world while I'm sewing. Yep, I do! I'll challenge you to a duel on this!
~ Still quote an Edgar Guest poem that my Dad taught me when I was five or six years old.

Five Things I Cannot Do .... Yet:

~ Hand quilt
~ Remember some things - but that's getting better.
~ Eat tuna fish - but I'm not sure I really want to do that .... ever!
~ Get used to this heat here. 13 years and I still can't handle it. Wonder if it's the location or the fact that I'm post-menopausal! :)
~ Say Massachusetts. It comes out Massa-chew-sits. Seriously. Guess I can't ever live there!

Five Things That Make a Man Attractive To Me:
~ Intelligence. Okay, maybe I could forego this if they're drop-dead gorgeous!
~ Attentiveness
~ A good dancer
~ A sense of humor
~ A cute butt! (sigh)

Five Celebrity Crushes: (only five?)
~ Hugh Grant
~ Clint Black
~ Mel Gibson - okay, you gotta admit he's cute!
~ Harrison Ford
~ George Clooney! (sigh)

Five People I'd like to Do This .... If they want:
~ Anyone who is interested!

Sunday Ramblings

I'm pictureless again. (sigh) The camera is working fine -although those rechargable batteries sure don't last long before they have to be recharged. It's the HP Photosmart Premier program. It doesn't recognize me any longer. But I'm not surprised by that. I'm kinda getting used to being ignored! LOL

So today mental pictures will have to suffice. Where do I start?

Went into the office today. But before I drove to the office, I stopped by Ginger's. I mean, after all, it was almost on the way to the office! Really! I picked up a few FQs for my loggy neutrals. I really want to get back to making those. I was hungry on the way there, but I had to stop at the ATM machine first. Oops, the ATM machine was past Sonic Burger, and you can't go back the other way in traffic very easily at that point. Oh, well, I'll get something more nutritious on the way to the office.

Well, when I get to Ginger's, I always head straight to the fridge for something cold to drink, and they always have snacks out on the counter. So two cookies later, I'm not hungry any more. Oh, and I'm feeling a bit righteous about not eating a big burger and fries. I mean, two cookies are a whole lot better for me than all that food, right?

Three or four hours later, I'm heading home from the office and stopped by my friendly neighborhood Albertson's. I just needed bread that I forgot to get last weekend to go with all those deli cuts. (Geez, I hope they did okay in the freezer.) And I had to pick up some more of those neat Ziploc Big Bags. The XL ones I got last weekend are really too big, so I picked up a box of L's to see if those will work better. Oh, and since I'm in there anyway, I grabbed a box of those 2.5 gallon Hefty zip bags. Turns out those are a good size for applique projects. And since I'm still there, a couple of quilty magazines found their way into my shopping cart. $90.37 cents later I headed home with my bread. Might this explain how my stash got so big?

So I'm home to my messy house which I totally avoided cleaning this weekend. Wait, I take that back. I turned on the dishwasher before I left the house today because I would need a clean coffee cup in the morning. That thing is so loud that I only turn it on when I'm leaving. And I did put a set of sheets to wash. Because those have been sitting there needing to be washed for a week, and now I need to change the set on my bed again. I refuse to have more than two sets of sheets. (Okay, I have three sets but one is so raggedy I don't admit to owning them.) This stems from my mother having three linen closets stuffed with brand-new sets of sheets still in the wrappers. She went nuts every time one of the department stores had a white sale. When she died, my brother and I spent almost a whole day boxing up those things. Neither one of us could use them because they were all double bed size. They went to Goodwill still packaged. Honestly, there must have been 100 of them. Excuse me while I go get those in the dryer. BRB.

Okay. I'm back. Phew, housework is SO hard!

On the quilty front, I got the pumpkin block appliqued this weekend. Just need to do a little embroidery on it. I have a picture that I'll post as soon as I become a known entity again with the HP software. But fair warning, it's a pumpkin on steroids! As a matter of fact, it's a pumpkin on steriods with serious alignment issues. I honest to Pete had that thing basted down just right. I don't know how the center piece of the pumpkin got so wonky. I'm debating whether to unstitch it and straighten it up. Maybe I'll just let bloggers vote on it. In my defense here, the stem on the pumpkin is supposed to be slightly off center. I think that's what threw my eye off. Well, that sounds like a good excuse anyway. But, hey, it's folk art! Maybe it needs to stay wonky!

I'm heading over there right now to start prepping All Things Christmas Block 2! I have fallen totally in love with this quilt. And I'm going to stick to my resolution to do the block each month. So far so good. One down ......... lol

I had the TV on the Lifetime Channel all day yesterday while I was stitching the pumpkin. Hours and hours on end. I really wasn't paying it much attention -- until it dawned on me how depressing all those sad stories were. No wonder I was feeling grumpy last night.

Oh, and dinner tonight? A piece of fried chicken from the deli. I was still hungry, so I ate a banana. And I was still hungry, so I ate an orange. Might this explain how my stash got so big?

Gratitudes:

~ No eyes rolling from blogger friends about my long post with no pictures. At least not yet!
~ Packages - nuf said.
~ Decision made that next Sunday the borders are going on the giterdun.