hopefully something rhetorical

I am!  No blog posts here for far too long, but with good reason.  So, I will be back here soon to share some Christmas presents I was able to make this year, to talk a little about my word for this year, and to share my playlist for the year.  Until then though, this is making me laugh right now!

Unfortunately, with the craziness that has been the last six months for me, I haven’t been working on many quilts, so I didn’t think that I was going to enter the quilt show this fall.  I did last spring, and it was a lot of fun.  New visitors, new ideas, etc.  However, when I started reading through some of the quilts that had been posted, I thought what the heck! So here is my entry

This is a quilt that I have already talked about a great deal in this space, so I won’t go through all the details again.  But, like my entry from last Spring, it was a quilt that had been saved.  This is how it started.

And, the reason I love it so much is that it is one of the most loved quilts I have ever made.  So, again, thanks Amy for giving us a chance to share all our pretties!  You rock!  And, everybody, please go check out everyone’s great work!

A few months ago, when we had just gotten back to Virginia and found our new house, I set out on the quest to find a dining room table.  And, I was successful!  I found a great table for a great price.  I just needed to find the right chairs.  And, I did.

This is the Isabella Chair from Pottery Barn.  We love the one in red.  But, we didn’t love the price tag.  No way that we could justify spending almost $600 for four chairs for a table that was less than $75.  So, we headed down to the Virginia Bazaar to see what we could find. And, again, we hit pay dirt!

We found four chairs that look almost exactly like these that I found on this site (I was too lazy to go out to the garage and take pictures of ours).  And, now that I have seen these chairs, although they are in better shape, I am realizing that the $5 a piece we paid for the four we got made them an amazing deal.  They seem to be circa early 1900′s.  Like I said, ours aren’t in amazing shape.  They need some wood glue and new seats.  We are also going to paint them this color.

It is a great Behr color. And, it will really make the chairs pop.  What is the dilemma you might ask?  Well, the pretty blue gingham fabric on the existing seat covers isn’t going to cut it.  And, I have been looking for some fun fabric that will look great in our kitchen and allow us to pull in a lot of other colors in the same hue as the red above.  And, I have narrowed my choices down to these two.

The first you might recognize as Alexander Henry’s Mocca.  And, I have some of this downstairs.  It is a print I love, but I am concerned about how well it will hold up because it isn’t really decorator or upholstery weight.  The second is a specialty organic fabric from an awesome designer,Daisy Jane , that I have been eying for a while.  It is definitely pricey, but it is perfect, and I love it!

My dilemma is which one?  Now, I know what most of you will say.  With a baby on the way, expensive fabric that we going to be sitting on is probably not a good idea.  But, that is why it is a dilemma.  I am wondering if this should be our one spot to splurge on this project, particularly since we wouldn’t need a ton for the four chairs.

Update on the chairs can be found here!

This summer has been insane.  We moved, bought a new house, lived with my mom, and helped take care of my grandmother.  Somehow in the midst of all the excitement, I didn’t get much crafting done.  Now, I am feel those creative juices slowly flood back in.  I have lots of Christmas ideas, and I think some that I didn’t share from last year (is that really possible?).

Well, the very first order of business was to get caught up on the virtual quilting bee I am signed up for.  These ladies are awesome!  They have the coolest fabrics to work with and the neatest ideas.

As I said, I was really far behind, but I am all caught up now (well, I have one for September to get out, which will happen early next week). But, here are the five blocks I created for my swap partners.

I am really happy with the way they all came out.  But, I am a little in love with all the circles.  I made that one for Edie.  She sent some amazing fabrics and asked for circles.

And, even more exciting, September was my month.  So, I picked some of my favorite Heather Bailey fabrics and the string quilt pattern that Film in the Fridge had posted, and I got to see a sneak peak of one of the first blocks to come back.  I didn’t send enough fabric apparently, but can you see how cool this is going to be?

I am so excited to see this all put together and in our new family room.  It is going to look amazing with pillows in this pattern, don’t you think?

When the boy and I got married (almost 9 years ago!), we didn’t talk a bunch about our wedding song. He took the very hands-off approach with most of the wedding plans, which was probably for the best.  If he had a strong opinion about something, he would share it.  But, most of the decisions were just made.

I thought a lot about our wedding song, though.  Music is kind of our thing, and I wanted something that really spoke to both of us.  We ended up dancing to “Feels Like Home” by Bonnie Raitt, which worked.  It is a great song, and I thought that it worked well because it was a little bit country and a little bit not, just like us. And, I love the lyrics of that song.

However, what I really wanted was a Dave Matthews song.  The boy and I are big fans (although, I know that he isn’t for everyone, so if you don’t like him, then you don’t need to tell me), and we have seen him a ton in concert throughout our relationship, before wedding and after.  And, I was pretty bummed that in 2000 I couldn’t really find a song that worked for the first dance.   We listened to everything we owned, which was everything that they had out.  And, we didn’t really find something that fit all the way.

Since then, we have had quite a few dave songs that have echoed what was going on in our lives.  “Stay or Leave” was our song when the boy was supposed to be sent to Korea.  It fit perfectly.  And, “Steady As We Go” was our Iraq deployment song.

But, the band’s new album just came out.  And, it has some amazing songs on it!  Including this one, “You and Me.”  And, this would have been our wedding song.  It is just cheesy enough to be awesome!

YOU & ME by Dave Matthews

Wanna pack your bags, Something small
Take what you need and we disappear
Without a trace we’ll be gone, gone
The moon and the stars can follow the car
and then when we get to the ocean
We gonna take a boat to the end of the world
All the way to the end of the world

Oh, and when the kids are old enough
We gonna teach them to fly

You and me together, we could do anything, Baby
You and me together yes, yes

You and I, we’re not tied to the ground
Not falling but rising like rolling around
Eyes closed above the rooftops
Eyes closed, we’re gonna spin through the stars
Our arms wide as the sky
We gonna ride the blue all the way to the end of the world
To the end of the world

Oh, and when the kids are old enough
We gonna teach them to fly

You and me together, we could do anything, Baby
You and me together yes, yes

We can always look back at what we did
All these memories of you and me baby
But right now it’s you and me forever girl
And you know we could do better than anything that we did
You know that you and me, we could do anything

You and me together, we could do anything, Baby
You and me together yeah, yeah
Two of us together, we could do anything, baby
You and me together yeah, yeah
The two of us together yeah, yeah
Two of us together, we could do anything, baby

As promised, we have a new family blog, where (in theory) the boy and I will both post about all the fun family stuff we have going on.  So, that is where all the baby news, etc will be posted.  Please check it out if you are interested!

1. I have a finite number of underwear.  If I don’t do laundry, I won’t have any to wear.
2. Unfortunately, I sleep better with the boy gone in my new growing state.  I need room to sprawl out.
3. The tendency of typepad blogs to only have one post in their RSS feed drives me a little crazy.  How am I supposed to know what people are writing?
4. I am only teaching one class in the fall, and I am kinda excited about the free time I might have.
5. My little brother reminded me that “Things work out for you when you don’t suck!”

Recently, I have been noticing more than a fair share of errors (typos, misspellings, grammar mistakes) in the posts of the many blogs I read.  I don’t know if they have always been there, if people get more lax during the summer, or if I am more sensitive to mistakes because I am not teaching right now.  Who knows.

My friend, Bonnie, wrote about this and gave her blog a spelling disclaimer.  And, the Pioneer Woman has mentioned her disdain for typos as well.

Now, this isn’t all to say that I won’t have an error or two now and then, as I am not claiming my perfection.  I just never know how to handle the mistakes I locate on other people’s blogs.

Should I tell the writer, particularly when there is a glaring mistake in the title of the blog?  Or, should I mind my own business and keep the teacher lady hiding below my surface in check?  Oh, the dilemmas!  Either way, if you ever find a mistake on this blog, please let me know!

Me: Caleb, what do you want for your birthday?

Caleb (our nephew who was turning 5): Oh, lots of stuff!

M: Okay, what do you want me to get you?

C:  Whatever you want!  But, nothing girly!

I love a kid that knows what they want!

Well, we made it to VA.  It has been a pretty crazy three weeks.  This is the breakdown.

• Friday before Memorial Day, we drove to the boy’s mom’s house in Indiana, where we stayed for the night.
• Saturday, we woke up and drove to Ohio for the wedding of our token Air Force buddy.  We stayed there until Tuesday.
• Tuesday, we drove to Michigan to stay with the boy’s grandparents for the night.
• Wednesday, it was back to Indiana to the boy’s mom’s.
• Friday, we went home to Kansas.
• Sunday, we had an open house, and at 6pm that evening, we left for Virginia with the great dane and three cats.  We arrived in VA at 3pm the next afternoon.
• We stayed in VA until we flew back to Kansas on Wednesday.  While we were in VA, we got an offer and sold our house.
• Friday morning, we drove to Oklahoma to see the boy’s family before we moved back to the east coast.  We got home Sunday night.
• Monday and Tuesday, we hung out at our house in Kansas for a few days while we were getting ready for the movers.
• Packers came on Wednesday and Thursday, and the movers came on Friday.
• My wife also flew in from Belgium on Thursday.  In one of those weird twists of Army-fate, she moved to Kansas (albeit Leavenworth instead of Riley) five days before we moved to VA.  It was so wonderful to get to see her and her family over the weekend, though.
• Sunday, my mother and my brother flew in to help us drive to VA.  The four of us and our boxer left in a Penske truck and my car around noon on Monday (our house closed at 1:30, so only owned it for an hour and a half when we moved), and we got here at midnight on Tuesday.  We did stop overnight this time though.  We moved 7,240 pounds of stuff ourselves.
• Thursday, my littlest brother graduated high school, so we had family and friends in town for that.
• Today is father’s day and my mother’s partner’s birthday.
• And tomorrow, the boy goes back to work for the first time in two years or so.

So, that is where I have been and what I have been up to.  So far, we are here and getting settled into VA nicely, and I think we are eager to get settled into a routine soon.  I will post pictures of our cute little summer place above my mother’s garage as soon as we get everything moved in completely.

Thanks for letting me share.   It helps to write it down, so I don’t forget!