Bursts of creativity

Friday morning I woke up early wanting to cross stitch. Such bursts of energy and enthusiasm are extremely rare with this particular depression of mine, so I got up and found all my old cross stitch stuff, found a pattern I liked, and determined that I was just in need of white embroidery floss. So after the local fabric store opened I called them to determine if they had the floss, which they did, and I went down to pick it up. I felt dumb just writing a check for 50 cents though so I browsed and bought some sock yarn and needles (I already have the book, now I just need the guts to try something as intimidating as socks) and a loverly swatch of oriental panels.

Now, I don't sew. I'm terrible at quilting. But in this burst of energy I bought those panels anyway, so I was going to need help. So I went to my good friend Amber and she helped me go back to the store and find matching material. She is a MASTER quilter, so yesterday I also went to her house and she helped me plan, cut, and sew the whole top for this project together! In one day! Normally something like that would take me, oh, about 3 years, as my friends and family will attest to. I'm excited about it now. Maybe it will take me less than a year to finish! Wouldn't that be a miracle! How do you like it?

Poor kitties!

It's tax refund season, so it's time to take care of the cats with their annual shots, bloodwork, and teeth cleaning. We have to wait until tax season because it's GOL-DURNED EXPENSIVE. Most people I talk to say that they wouldn't spend that much on cats, but they are our babies. If we had been able to have children of our own things might have been different, but as it is we want them to have as long and as comfortable a life as possible so we buy them the good food, get them their shots, and get their teeth cleaned. Unfortunately, one of the things that is required to get their teeth cleaned is they have to be knocked out. (Crud, just trying to get them in place so the vet can get to them gives me huge scratches, so I can understand why they have to be sedated!) After much yowling, and then sedation, then cleaning, we laid them out on the living room floor so they could be comfortable and safe when they woke up. However, they looked so pitiful that my nephew Jeff couldn't resist taking pictures, so here they are. Three dead-looking kitties. I'm glad they forgave me after a few hours...but then, they didn't know that I was going to post pictures of their stupor on the internet for the world to see, did they?

Another review

because I've been feeling like posting for a few days now, and I happen to have a new phone, I will review it.
It's a Palm Pre Plus with Verizon and I like it very much.

The good: Nice, easy interface. Decent built-in software. Syncs with Google for contacts, email and calendar. And it looks stunning ('specially in the shiny purple case I bought for it. :) )!

The bad: Not that many apps available, built in google maps directions aren't very good, boot up time is ridiculously long (2 minutes! We timed it!), battery life is poor (have to charge EVERY DAY even if you don't use it very much) and the sound quality isn't as good as my old Palm Treo on AT&T.

The ugly: When I bought it, the sign said it had turn-by-turn directions. It does, sort of -- VZ Navigator is right there, BUT it costs $9.99 a month to use it! Sure it has traffic and voice navigation, but I don't want to pay an extra $10 a month when my husband's Droid has the same service for FREE! Grrr. Still, I'm tempted simply because our Tom Tom's maps are so bad and expensive to update.

OK, the good list isn't as long as the others. But overall it seems to be a very good phone that does almost exactly everything I need. I like it a lot.

review

Looking at my sister-in-law's blog makes me sad that I don't have any babies to blog about. :( So I'm gonna blog about dishwashing gloves instead.

When I do dishes, I use the hottest water that will come out of the tap. Which means that I have to wear gloves so that I don't scald myself. I used to use those cheap yellow latex gloves you can get at any big box store, but they don't protect from the heat very well and they get holes in them WAY too easily. So about a year ago I found these gloves that I LOVED -- they were thick and tough, keeping out heat and sharp things easily. Unfortunately, they only came in one color (pink) and size (medium) so they were a little small, making them hard to get off, so recently my nephew accidentally put a hole in them by trying to pull them off with his teeth. So I went to Amazon, my ultimate shopping place, and found them in multiple colors and sizes! They are called True Blues and I was able to get a large purple pair and they are absolutely PERFECT -- a little spendy, but if you use gloves, these will easily pay for themselves in the time you're using them.

As promised...

Here are some pictures. Please note the largest moonroof EVAR.

New Car!

Well we finally sold our truck. Part of me misses it, just to be stubbornly sentimental, but most of me is ecstatic. I shouldn't have hated that truck, but I did. It rode rough (needed new shocks) and I had problems with the stick shift and the air bag didn't work and it needed new brakes and it didn't have enough room. SO...to replace it we did a lot of research. Research on models of cars and sales and things like that. Narrowed it down to either a used Subaru Forester or a used Ford Escape Hybrid, since I wanted more room and Jake wanted better gas mileage. Couldn't find anything local so we were preparing to have to travel a bit to get one, but we needed some 'hands on' of different models. So we went to a couple of dealerships to check them out, and lo and behold, one of them had just had a '07 Subaru Forester traded in that day. It was LOADED with extra features that we didn't really need, but the idea of buying locally rather than traveling a few hundred miles was overly appealing to us. We haggled quite a bit and got it down to a manageable payment and now we have a lovely, loaded, pearly white '07 Subaru Forester. I'll post pictures of it at soon as I remember to take a picture in the daylight.

Stuff at the bottom

In case you haven't noticed, I've added a couple of things to the bottom of this blog that you might want to check out. One is a very cool little playlist gadget that has some of my fay-vor-ite songs. Another is some fishies. Click on the fishies and you feed them. Feed them! Feed the fishies!