Lovelihood

It's been of those long funk-filled days. No inspiration. Just a cat. www.lovelihood.com

With the completion of yesterday's race, fittingly a 10K, my bib collection is now ten deep. And I'm still enjoying my knees enough to keep registering for more races. Go me.

I find myself whistling that old Porgy and Bess standard "Summertime" a lot lately. You know, that one about the living being easy. And The Mr. and I regularly marvel at how good life has been to us. Enjoying a pleasant dinner with our usual bottle of wine on the back deck on a pleasantly climed night, it hits home that we are home. And wouldn't it be nice if it could stay this way forever?

First week at The Boy's day camp/new school has been survived. Exhausting and largely successful, but still ending with us very much in that in-between stage of things that leaves me thinking in snippets of to-dos instead of well-rounded thoughts and direction. I'm hoping the end of next week and heading into the beginning of the school year (!) I'll be feeling less like this little guy.

The inaugural quilting line, this one hemming in the robot. Hand quilting a full-sized quilt is likely an activity best suited for days not 80° and muggy.

Back at the the great tooth loss event of 2011, we (and the tooth fairy) decided to institute a work for pay (you might know it as allowance) system for The Boy. And encouraged him to think up something grand to save up for. Like an iPad of his own. No small task at $5 a week minus smaller expenditures. He'd all but given up hope for amassing enough paydays and/or tooth losses, when a teacher at his day camp forked over, as a sort of reward for being a generally good kid, one million cool ones. Surely enough to afford him his consumer electronic purchase of choice. The Mr. was the one to kill that thrill of having such wealth crumpled up in his pocket. And deliver the very real lesson of currency and devaluation. But I oohed and aahed over his bill this afternoon, and offered to take it off his hands for the real, serviceable dollar that I slipped into his fingers. "I don't need the dollar, Momma. We can share the million dollars." And that's how I'm choosing to remember him on a day when he was otherwise a majorly whiny butt.

Working on test-quilting some swatch sandwiches, some with the walking foot — which, on my basic little machine makes it resemble something Dr. Frankenstein stitched up his monster with — and some with a strand of perle embroidery floss run through a hand-sewing needle. The verdict? The swatches stitched up perfectly evenly and straight under the walking foot, but my poor machine and the little table it sits upon are no match for the weight and drag of a full-sized robot. And forcing the girth of embroidery floss through layers of fabric and batting and more fabric is no cakewalk, either. Looks like I'm going the tried and true route of hand-quilting with plain-old quilting thread. The devil I know.