Been a long time. I will try to be brief, but it probably won’t work. 🙂
Pat finished the bathroom vent in August. He finished the drywall in the garage in early September(it is a one person job and I don’t know how to do it.) So the things that I was talking about in http://artful-dabbler.livejournal.com/2006/07/28/ are done. 🙂
Then he went to clean the garage and finish some small projects (taping the duct work so that it heats the house more efficiently) and discovered 8 inches of water in the crawl space. So we bought a sump pump and dug a hole and made a french drain and put in new vapor barrier down there. It is keeping pretty dry now. The pump we bought has a 7000 gal per hour capacity, and it took apx 21 hours to drain it. That’s a LOT of water.
Worked for about a week to get the house to where I wouldn’t be embarrassed when Jack came to stay. Lots of piles of tools and on-going projects.
Part of getting that all cleaned up was finally finishing the quilted diaper bag for my co-worker. I like how it turned out, but what a pain in the ass. I may have to make some quilted bags for x-mas presents. Masochist. That’s me.

I picked deep colors because CJ is not a pastel kinda girl. I didn’t find a deep yellow that I liked, so we have all the primaries and tertiaries but that on on the outside. I made a long, narrow strip of quilted fabric (2×2 squares)and cut the pattern pieces out of it. The red was the last on the bolt, so I had more of it and used that for the contrast (straps and top). The inside is yellow fleece that Pat picked out. Flowers and bugs. 🙂 Blue heavy duty sport zipper on the top. The seams were VERY raw, so I used 2 diff widths of binding to finish.

I gave up on the cross stitch for her. Even with a magnifier lamp, it was too hard to see to work on, and my hands just don’t have the dexterity to do the fine needle work anymore.

I finished a scarf for christmas (nice knobby burgundy yarn) and am almost done with another in “colonial blue”. Had to stop for a while cause my hands hurt.

I boxed 135 boxes of files by myself at work over the last week and a half. Between that and working bent over in the crawlspace I have been in pain pretty much all the time. Ya’ll know me tho’. I don’t stop when I should.

Finally went to the doc about the continually worse chest pains. Did some tests and it looks like a combo of anxiety and inflammation in the cartilage between my ribs and sternum and ribs and spine. Just knowing that it isn’t likely to be my heart has made me feel better. Lovely how anxiety feeds anxiety. Phb.

‘nough complainin’

My house is clean, we have a friend staying over, and I get to go to MO in 3 weeks.

My mom called the other day and said, “I want to go to MO, and your dad doesn’t want me to go alone. Wanna go?”
They are going to pay for my ticket!! So much has happened this summer that we weren’t going to be able to go. I NEED to see my grandparents and have really wanted to go somewhere…anywhere. Pat will be here to take care of the animals, so we don’t have to worry about that. It will just be very strange to be apart. We haven’t spent a night separately since the night before we got married 8 years ago.

AND!!!!!
Last Monday (the 18th) was our 6 MONTH NON-SMOKING ANNIVERSARY.
YAY US!!!!!!!!!!!!!!