Last night I said I wanted to make more time for quilting, and today I did just that, pondering and ironing and cutting and playing with fabric. The picture above shows what my sewing (a.k.a. dining) room table looks like right now. It’s a good thing we have an eat-in kitchen and rarely host […]

I’ve never done a year in review entry to close out December. (Though last year, I did do the Winter Count, which was sort of the same thing, just stretched out into twelve entries over the course of the month.) I guess I’ve resisted because looking back at what I’ve done leads me to think […]

This is not a new quilt. I finished it in January 1994; it’s a companion piece to one of the Evening Star series quilts (this one, to be specific). Like the wallhanging, this one uses the Evening Star block and the fabrics were chosen to coordinate with the couch in our family room. The small […]

  I meant to go to the zoo this summer. I meant to go to the zoo this fall. I didn’t and here it is winter already but the zoo is still open, so I went. The polar bears were snoozing (for them, it was a nice warm afternoon–40 Fahrenheit) and most of the kangaroos […]

  These two were having a disagreement about who should get to eat the birdseed. The fox squirrel seemed to be winning but the little red squirrel wasn’t going quietly. Too bad I didn’t manage to switch the camera to the “kids & pets” action setting (I have got to study up and start using […]

Something amazing happened last night: I ran (well, jogged) for a little over 25 minutes, in a row, without stopping. Per the Nike+ chip, I averaged 11:43 a mile over 3.53 miles. That’s faster than I ran my 5K three weeks ago. Nothing I’d done up to this point had given me any reason to […]

A friend said she’d like to know more about how I do the labels on my quilts and since I’ve just done one, this seemed like a good time to document my current process. Here are the steps: 1. If it’s a baby quilt, find a picture of the baby if possible. Usually it is […]

I realize that “red” is not the first color that comes to mind when one looks at this scarf. Fortunately, the Red Scarf Project guidelines include the phrase “multicolor hues including red” and allow for many tones of red, so this variegated with a dark red alongside blues and greenish grays (or are they grayish […]

  This is the kind of thing that delights me way more than is reasonable: my socks have the same kind of design on them as my sweater does, patterned stripes in blue and grey and navy. I get a similar buzz when I put fabrics together for a quilt and they coordinate but aren’t […]

Mr. Karen and I revived another Christmas tradition this year: decorating cookies. I bought the dough ready made, but we did roll them out and cut the shapes and bake them ourselves. (They spread more than I’d remembered, so we’ve got some snowmen that are going to have to go to Weight Watchers after the […]

For the first time in a long time, we’ve got a Christmas tree up at our house. It’s the noble Presto-Pine, which we bought in 1988 (I looked it up in the photo album) because I was sad we weren’t going to have a tree that year. I knew it didn’t make sense to buy […]

Sometime after I got to the car at the end of our first day at Snowbasin last week but before I made it to our hotel room that night (I’ll be done writing about this trip soon, I promise), I lost one of my ski gloves. I didn’t discover this until the next morning, so […]

  I’ve almost finished unpacking (from both DC and Utah—the floor of the guest bedroom was awash in my various bags). In the process, I unearthed this hangtag, which I’d made Mr. Karen give me when he took it off his new ski bibs (half price in the shop at Powder Mountain, and much needed […]

Since I’ve finished my big honkin’ Utah trip report and most of my customers are on holiday, I was free to spend much of my lunch hour playing Google’s Image Labeler. I’ve dabbled with other time sucks since I gave up Distributed Proofreaders, but nothing really captured my attention for long until the Image Labeler […]

  Much as I liked the disposable ensign, I decided it was time for a new desktop background. I decided on this one (which I grabbed from here) because it never fails to make me smile. (Looking at the picture from almost four months ago, I chagrined to see that some of the sticky notes […]

Here’s the report I meant to write yesterday. If you’d rather just look at the pictures—and I don’t blame you one bit if you do, because this is a really long entry—see here. Thursday—Travel I took the afternoon off because our flight was at 4-something and I work an hour and a half from the […]

I went away for less than a week and came back to 1634 messages in my work e-mail inbox (no joke), so I did not have time to write up a full trip report today. I will, however, make time to write a review of our dinner at the mentioned-yesterday Star Noodle Parlor, because I […]

I didn’t intend to take four days off from the Internet just then. I did plan to take some time off work and go to Utah with Mr. Karen to ski, which is exactly what happened. I brought the laptop with me and imagined I’d get online each day after we got back from the […]

It’s been months since I last shared additions to my fabric stash, which makes sense because I haven’t been making many additions. I have bought a few things lately, which I was reminded of when I went to put something away in the closet and saw the stack of prints waiting to be put away […]

When I stopped to mail some holiday cards this morning, I snapped a picture of the view:   The only reason wanted to take that photo was to contrast it with the shot I’d taken 24 hours before, when I stopped to mail the cards I got done before the cards I mailed this morning; […]

I got so distracted by the race numbers yesterday that I forgot about the weekend squirrel antics. A few weeks ago we noticed the birdfeeder out of skew on the treadle; we suspected a fox squirrel. A while after that, when I was not home, Mr. Karen witnessed a demonstration of how such a thing […]

The race results are up online from the 5K I did on Saturday. Hoo boy, there’s a lot to be discouraged about there if I choose to see it that way. The top female finisher took only 17 minutes and 37 seconds, a 5:40 pace. Five forty! I can’t even imagine. I doubt I ever […]

Monday is no prize, but Sunday gets my vote for the most depressing day of the week. It’s Sunday when I realize I’ve pretty much wasted more than half of my weekend. It’s Sunday when it becomes clear that I’ve so far failed to make any noticeable dent in the list of things I wanted […]

Here I am smiling before my first 5K, which I did this morning. Mr. Karen came to watch even thought it meant getting up early on a weekend, which neither of us are very keen to do. We had an hour’s drive to get there, too. I didn’t end up having quite as much time […]

Remember when I was pissed at the FM transmitter I’d gotten for my nano and was going to take it back to the store? Well, I didn’t take it (the transmitter) back, but I did take it (my cursing) back and am no longer annoyed with it. Two events led to this change of heart. […]

Introducing my second finished object for the Red Scarf Project. This is the Woven Pattern Scarf from the book Vogue Knitting Scarves Two, which I checked out from the library. I only started it a few weeks ago, so it worked up really quickly. No surprise there, I guess, since it calls for bulky yarn […]

I reached a significant milestone in my running career last night—it was below freezing and there was snow on the ground and I still went out and did a workout. I know other people do stuff like that all the time, but those people are dedicated, those people are athletes. I don’t see myself as […]

  There’s an astonishing amount of stuff at my mom’s house, and since I once lived there, every now and then stuff of mine surfaces—like this sweater I made, which I’d completely forgotten about it. It’s crocheted and small, and since I haven’t done that or been that for some time, I’m guessing I finished […]

As I said last night, I’m back from D.C. (is it okay to call it that, or is it dorky, like calling Las Vegas just “Vegas”? and if it’s okay, should it be just “DC” without the periods? and if I have an internal monologue like this as I write each sentence, will I ever […]

I’m back home from Washington D.C. and most likely will have more to say about that later, but now I’m tired and just want to take another Airborne and relax and not have to think too much about which words go together. In the meantime, please contemplate the pretty, pretty colors in this picture I […]

By the time we went to have dinner last night, the weather had turned from unseasonably warm to seasonably cold. Warm, filling comfort food sounded good, and the restaurant had lobster macaroni and cheese on the menu. Perfect—familiar but fancy, yummy yet fitting for a celebration of being with friends I rarely get to see. […]

I have been to many places and seen many things. Not everywhere and not everything, of course. I’ve never lived in the Hamptons, for instance, and I’ve never personally seen the back bar at the ale house in Louisville, for another. Today I am Washington, D.C., a city I’ve been to before—four times? five? I […]