For the next 5 minutes…

Posted on April 22, 2010 by Suzanne

The boys and I wear approximately the same size shoe.

I have been having an exceptionally hard time lately finding shoes that are comfortable. I can tell, usually right after I’ve slipped a shoe on, and before I even stand up on it, whether or not my right foot is going to like it. It’s my right arch that’s giving me fits, and thankfully, this particularly pair of Asics seems to feel pretty decent. I did ask if I could return these if I don’t wear them outside, but discover that they aren’t actually as comfortable as I’d hoped.

The trick, I found, was to quit shopping in the women’s shoe section and look at the men’s shoes. I hate having big feet. They are long AND wide, which means nothing cute fits. Or feels good.

(Oh, except my Keen’s. I have a deep and abiding love for my Keen sandals…) (oh, and I’ve added a red pair since that post last March…)

I realized later, that I won’t need to return them if *I* don’t like them. Because…yeah. The boys are wearing 9s and 9.5s. (These are a 9.5, which, for those of you keeping track, means I wear a women’s size 11. Like I said: big feet.)

I’ve started exercising, and I’ve needed something to wear for that torture that doesn’t make my feet feel like they need to be amputated (which is what is going on with my current Nikes). I do need to lose weight, but my goal is not weight-loss. No, my goal is this: we are planning our summer vacation, and that vacation will include a fairly significant amount of walking/hiking, that will require a level of fitness that I do not currently possess.

In other words, when we hike the Grand Canyon, I don’t want to get left to die IN the canyon because I was so out of shape that my family left me behind.

It’s good to have goals.

That time of year

Posted on April 20, 2010 by Suzanne

Leaves on the trees,

Tractor in the field,

Dandelions in the yard.

Snappy and Clever Title

Posted on April 11, 2010 by Suzanne

Happy Sunday! Did you do anything exciting this weekend? We had flashes of excitement here and there. Mark got home Friday evening, he’d been in California all week. He and the boys were out playing catch — and got to have their inner pyromaniacs entertained by the burning of the prairie across the road from us.

Every spring they burn it off. It’s a little crazy to watch. You can’t see them in this shot, but there are a handful of our volunteer firefighters standing by, helping out. The dogs were quite entertained by the goings-on. There were a LOT of people for them to bark at.

Saturday morning was really exciting: we picked up Mark’s brand-new truck. It’s a Ford F-150 FX4 SuperCrew with 6.5 foot box. It’s huge. The boys have enough legroom in the back that they could easily be taller than Mark and still be comfortable.

The experience was partly exciting because it almost didn’t happen. We started doing paperwork and discovered that we had misunderstood part of the deal with our rebates/financing options: we thought we were getting a better deal than we were entitled to get.

I hate buying vehicles. And we even like our sales guy!!

We did get things figured out to our satisfaction, but it took forever to go through the delivery. The truck has Microsoft Sync, and we spent most of the time having the salesman explain that, and frankly: Mark and I could have figured it out faster on our own…

It’s very awesome, plus the color matches our house, I think it’s called Red Candy Metallic. Yum.

I finally got some pictures tonight when the boys came home from the farm. I did get 2 phone calls from them while they were gone: Mark’s cell phone is paired with the car (bluetooth) and it has voice commands, so he can push the phone button on the steering wheel, and then say “Call Home” and…voila! They are talking to me!

They brought home the boys’ 4-wheeler, which is why the truck is backed up to the hill: they were getting ready to push the 4-wheeler out on to the grass:

I don’t remember what Will was talking about. I’m surprised he didn’t throw his hands up in his face before I snapped this one:

Come to think of it, that was really all of the excitement for the weekend.

Less exciting, but perhaps more interesting for my quilting viewers, my design wall, although with terrible lighting:

On the left we have Holly and Mistletoe from Where the Cold Wind Blows by Blackbird Designs.

On the right we have some of my Dresden Plates — I posted about receiving these as a gift awhile ago. I’ve now got 4 hand-appliqued blocks done, plus one is about 10 minutes from finishing. Today I decided that I’m going to put 4 of them on yellow to make a wallhanging for the women that gave the blocks to me (I have a total of 40 blocks, and they are big, so it’s not like I’m going to miss the 4 for her…). I’m doing the black and white polka dot version by hand, but I decided to do the yellow on the machine…it takes almost 2 hours for me to hand applique one, and less than 10 on the machine. I’m going to have to resist the urge to switch to the machine for the polka dots…slow is not bad, it’s just…slow! LOL

The applique on the holly and mistletoe quilt: that will be machine, because there are a bazillion leaves and I am NOT doing them by hand. By machine will be slow enough…

Have a great week, I hope it’s exciting, but not TOO exciting.

Suzanne

Quiltmaker Alert

Posted on April 9, 2010 by Suzanne

I got my contributor’s copy a week or 2 ago, but my subscription copy came today:

check out Swirlabout on page 60, you might recognize the machine quilter’s name!

(Image is from and links to the Quiltmaker website. The quilt was designed by Scott Murkin.)

Isn’t it a great quilt??? It was hard to send it back. I quilted this right around the first of the year, and have just been waiting and waiting to be able to mention it.

Where did the day go?

Posted on April 8, 2010 by Suzanne

I’m not sure how it got to be 10 PM. I think I did things today, but I’m not really sure what. No quilting, that’s for sure, unless you count thinking about quilting. Or writing about quilting. I spent part of the afternoon staring at the rough draft for the book about freehand feathers that I’ve been working on for the past, um, 2 years. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to finish this. I did my first book in about 6 weeks! Of course, I pretty much lived and breathed it for 6 weeks, and I’ve got a lot more on my plate these days.

Like…taking the boys shopping for pants. There ought to be a law about that.

The band director is taking the 5th and 6th graders to the symphony in 2 weeks. The conductor came and talked to the kids, which was kind of cool. He explained how things work, talked about the music the orchestra will be playing, that sort of thing.

We got a note the other day about the trip: the director wants the kids to dress up a bit. No jeans. Dang. In our house, the jeans ARE the nice clothes. (The boys haven’t figured out the joy of a well-worn pair of jeans. They are stuck on the stiff-newness of the ones they’ve got…)

They informed me that Ms. Carlson said they could wear khakis, only they kept saying it cocky.

I kept correcting them until I realized (duh) that they were doing it on purpose.

So…I took them to GameStop tonight, followed by McDonald’s (and I snuck in a trip to the music store…), and then we hit Kohl’s. I had them trying on black khakis, and not liking the fit (the 12s were snug, the 14s were tooooo big, and I wanted to buy something that was biggish, so they’d last for next year, but not so big that they looked like they were wearing Dad’s pants…)

In and out of pants we go until someone says, “Why don’t we just wear our band concert pants.”

What?????

Turns out, they already HAVE BLACK PANTS. I had completely forgotten. They are denim, but they are black. (Shaun White jeans, as a matter of fact, aren’t I cool?).