Another Crochet WIP Finished

Crocheted Dishrag

Another of the many projects I had going for my sister.  This is the fifth one of those I've finished since Christmas Eve and the 9th overall.  Plus have made significant progress on two large projects.  By keeping small to medium sized projects within reach or on my person (pockets, wrist bags, etc) I'm making use of many stray minutes throughout the day.

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Chocolate On My Bubblegum

Looking at these I hear a voice, an echo of that old candy commercial, saying:
You got chocolate on my bubblegum.

These three bookmarks were part of a set of four I made for my sister to give to her friend on her birthday.  The birthday was over a month ago but I just got these three dressed up last night, or rather the wee hours of this morning, so they could go with my sister today on her excursion out of town which would include a meetup with her friend.  

I'd finished the first one--a simple shell stitch with a single ribbon threaded thru the center--in time to go into the gift bag last month.  Then since I missed the deadline on these three I continued to procrastinate until I learned another visit with the friend was coming up this weekend.

And even then I waited until after midnight this morning to start working on them.  The crocheting part had been long done.  It was the dreaded tucking of the tails and the sewing on of the buttons that had me playing hide-an-go seek with the item on my todo list. 

I did enjoy the project once I got involved.  It has been quite awhile since I last did a series of fancy dress ups for the bookmarks.  In fact I think the last time was for my nieces xmas gifts and the time before that was when I was here at Mom's last summer.

That has a lot to do with how hard it was to set up a workstation that was safe from my cat Merlin who spent as much time on the bed in that room at my in-laws as I did.  He loved the ribbons and beads and buttons!

This was one of the things I was really looking forward to about having my own home.  And I actually did get to put my nieces bookmarks together at the new house on Xmas day itself--the day before we started moving in.  Which got me very excited about how it would be once we had moved in and I had a good workstation set up that I didn't have to put away when it was time for Ed to sleep and a door I could close against Merlin.

Then my long planned trip to Mom's got extended from two weeks to a month and since I got here has been extended repeatedly every time the planned day for leaving approaches.  Like happened again last week.  Now I've been here for nine weeks I think and there is at least one more but since next Saturday hasn't already been designated travel day I'm not holding much hope that it will be..  But I imagine it will be the first Saturday in April at the latest.

Meanwhile my new house seems more like a faded dream than reality.  My mental images of that room at my in-laws are ten times more vivid than those of the new place which I got to spend only ten days in all of which were devoted to packing and unpacking and packing for the trip.

I'm hoping to go to bed early tonight and by early I mean before 3am but I'm hoping even before midnight as I didn't lay down this morning until 8am and had to be up by 11:00 in order to have time to wake up and drink my coffee leisurely before it was time to fix lunch for Mom, my nephew and myself.  I also had dinner duty but my sister had made that easy by picking up TV dinners.  Thank goodness because I've been a bit out of it today.

It is my own fault.  First for procrastinating the task of dressing up the bookmarks and second for not going to bed as soonn as they were done at 4am.  Instead I returned to Mockingjay, book 3 of The Hunger Games and read until 8am.  I tried to stop at 6. But gave myself a few more minutes and within ten minutes I had passed that point in a story where stopping is nearly impossible.

This afternoon I started Jodi Picoult's House Rules.  I could easily sit up all night reading this story but I know better.  To do that twice in a row would be begging for a virus to move in on me.  Besides I'm not deep enough into the story yet to make it hard to stop so it seems wiser to get caught up on sleep tonight and save the allnighter for when I'm past the halfway to three-quarters mark.

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Well It's Pro Something

And it aint prolific.

Or productive.

Or progress.

Or probative of proficiency and professionalism.

Oh the things I get up to to avoid looking at my script. When I'm not watching DVD or streaming videos or month old news on podcasts, I'm cleaning out my email inbox and electronic files, downloading and installing updates, clipping my fingernails, picking at cat scratch scabs, or staring at the white half-moons on my thumbs as they lay on the space bar as though I've not seen them since I was six months old.

And for someone who purportedly has intractable insomnia, nap attacks have been thick as the leaves in a 19th century Russian novel.

And then there's Free Cell, Minesweeper and Mahjong...

...and of course LOLcats...

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Should I Go Hide Under the Bed?

I was tagged by Adelle. This was the first time for me so I'm not sure which is the worse in blog etiquette: to not accept the challenge or to impose it on the next ones. I'm not even sure I 'know' enough bloggers well enough to fill the quota on this tag. Having fretted for two days, I have decided that just doing it is the only thing that will shut up that indecisive 'should I? or shouldn't ?' litany and give the whole thing closure for me.

At least this isn't any more imposing of a challenge than a Thursday Thirteen so I am selecting my victims from TT and Monday Poetry Train participants who have commented more than once on my my TT and Poetry Train posts. At least I know they enjoy memes and don't hate visiting Joystory. It goes without saying that I love to visit every one of their blogs and do so frequently. Which isn't reflected in my sidebar only because I have not been updating my sidebar since I started participating in TT last October. (see #4 below) To sweeten the pot for them I am also going to link their names to their blogs when I tag them even though it is is not one of the rules of this meme. (Personally I think it should be as that would be a better motivator for participants, and appears to be one of the points of viral memes. But I didn't write the rules for this one.)

So here goes:

A. Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves.
B. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed.
C. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

1. I am legally blind due to RP aka retinitis pigmentosa a genetic degenerative disease that progressively destroys peripheral vision. I have almost zero night vision and even in the best lighted conditions am limited to less than twelve degrees vision in each eye out of the 180 degrees of normal peripheral vision.

2. We can only trace it back five generations from me because my mother's mother's father's mother did not know her own family history. She was raised by the Indians from age three, when the leader of the raid on her parent's farmstead found her in the pickle barrel where her parents had hidden her after the rest of her family had been slaughtered. He was in awe of her blond curls. She was raised as his daughter until she was at least eighteen and returned to the White man's civilization as the bride of a missionary/trader with the tribe. (Umm. Does that count as a fact about me?)

3. I fret a lot about big and small stuff. Lot of wasted energy and time. It is part of the Anxiety/Depression mood disorder I've had since at least age four but wasn't diagnosed officially until I was nearly forty.

4. I am such a procrastinator! I should spell it in 20pt font but then I would hate they way it looks on the page. Which leads to:

5. I am such a perfectionist! I should spell it in 28pt font but....well you get the picture. And it isn't the kind of perfectionism that actually produces order and well-made finished projects. Rather....

6. I am easily discouraged by mistakes or the inability to make a project turn out the way I envision it or stay on schedule and then I stop working on it and let it set, taking up space in my environment and mind for weeks, months or years, unwilling to give up on it entire but only returning to it maybe five percent of the time. The major successes that have resulted from a small percentage of those makes it that much harder to say a final bub-bye to those that really are dead in the water.

7. This includes staying organized in my environment, including my workspace and schedule. I crave organization, I visualize it in great detail but can never seem to achieve it. And of course my being a hoarder of all kinds of ridiculous stuff does not help at all. You can find the post that lists said stuff via labels if you dare. Hoarding was bad enough when I had my own home but...

8. Since August 2001 we have been living with my husband's parents in the small second bedroom of a single-wide trailer house. With two cats on leashes: Gremlyn and Merlin. Until we lost Gremlyn in March. With the litter box, cat's food and water dishes, bed, entertainment center and my jerryrigged office made of stacked cardboard boxes and a board, there isn't enough standing room for two people. This room has not been thoroughly cleaned since I started spending race day Saturdays watching my husband's elderly grandmother two years ago instead of using that time with the family out of the house to do a major cleaning. I'm fretting about this now because we are about to inherit a new bed from his grandma, who passed on earlier this month, and I am nervous about having to take down my 'office' and put it back together, as interrupting my projects has repercussions (see #6 above) and freaking about what we might find under the bed.

So I'm tagging:


Rhian / Crowwoman
Susan Helene Gottfried
Wylie Kinson
Robin L. Rotham
Tink
L^2
Gattina
Candyminx

Sorry gals. Should I go hide under the bed?

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