Sunday Serenity #128

moar funny pictures
Mom is spending a second night at my brother's house in Portland OR. She is attending one of the annual Bible Conferences the church I was raised in holds and is thus seeing old acquaintances and even some out of town family.

Meanwhile my sister and I have had this time to do with as we please. As I posted last night I was intending to spend the night scanning family photos into my computer. After my sister and I finished rearranging and spring-cleaning the livingroom that is. But that task wasn't finished until 3AM and even though I had done little but watch from out of the way spots and make suggestions, I was exhausted.

I would have helped more if my help wouldn't have put me or other breakables at risk. with my vision issues there wasn't enough light for me to be moving around in a completely chaotic room. So I watched as my sister dusted, vacuumed and decluttered one small area at a time, moving smaller items into boxes and things the size of waste baskets to end tables away from the middle of the room until we had room to maneuver two rocker-recliners and a couch around. My help consisted mostly of directing traffic and describing the vision I had. Her son helped with the heavy lifting of the furniture, including the TV and a coffee table with a polished rock top. We tried three or four arrangements before we settled on one that seemed to provide a nice conversation are that provided face-to-face between the recliners and the couch, allowed viewing of the TV from any position on the couch and allowed room for Mom to maneuver her walker from the hall to her recliner.

When she called it quits at 3, I decided to settle in to test out the new spot we set up for me to work on that sweat pea embroidery. But soon discovered that the last few stitches I'd put in the day before needed to come out to release a four inch loop of thread I'd trapped on the back and while taking them out I discovered that all of the stitches in that section--the right side of a leaf--would have to come out because I'd bunched the fabric inside my stitches so that area of the sweater looked puckered. That happens when you don't control the tension of your thread or the fabric is over or under taut. This is the first time I've embroidered on a knit fabric. I don't think I'll ever choose to do so again.

It took me two hours to take out the stitches that probably took about twenty minutes to put in. By then my eyes were fried so I didn't work on the photo scanning nor the photo taking project I mentioned yesterday. I lay down with the intent to devote today to one or both of those projects. But before I began that this afternoon, I dedcided to back up my files first. And in the process discovered that I am down to under 3 gigs of free space on my 37 gig hard drive. So I decided to do system maintenance today instead. I ran a clean disk which took nearly three hours this evening. And the next step is a defrag. Neither has been done since some time last summer. These were task under the purview of my husband and I've been away from home for five months now and the two moths before that were devoted to the holidays and NaNoWriMo.

So instead of spending the night Mom is away working the scanner on overdrive, I'm going to be reading while the defrag does its thing and maybe even get some extra sleep.