They made me play baseball tonight

Posted on May 22, 2009 by Suzanne

And I’m going to have a pair of ball-shaped bruises, one each leg, to prove it.

And by “play baseball” I mean act as catcher during batting practice. Mark pitches, one boy bats, the other plays outfield.

And by “act as catcher” I mean stand as far away from the plate as I can, and let the balls hit the backstop before I grab them. Clearly I wasn’t very good, vis-a-vis the aforementioned matching bruises.

I’ve long accepted that I’m afraid of the ball. Damn thing HURTS when it hits you, seems like a pretty reasonable fear.

Baseball practice was a follow-up to a wienie roast (with smores for dessert). Yum.

In the news

Posted on September 11, 2008 by Suzanne

http://www.traerstarclipper.com/News/articles.asp?articleID=1882

Articles are only active on the paper’s website for about a week, I think.

New Life

Posted on September 11, 2008 by Suzanne

My brother and his wife now have THREE awesome kids. Sofia and Dylan’s baby brother Darren was born yesterday.

Gee, I guess someone better finish the quilt they are making.

Irritation

Posted on September 6, 2008 by Suzanne

I started working on a new shop sample this morning. Right away discovered an error in the cutting instructions. Went to the designers site to find that they did have updated instructions, and was surprised to see how vastly different the update was from the original.

And now, I’ve discovered that the update has an error as well. Minor, but still.

I’ve now got two blocks made, but I’m so irritated with the whole thing, I don’t even want to keep going on it right now.

Phooey.

How’s your day going? Irritation free, I hope.

Suzanne

Updated later in the afternoon: earlier, I sent an e-mail to the author of the book that I was discussing above. I am happy to say that I received a very nice phone call from her, in which she apologized for the frustration and let me know that the revised revision would be on their site as soon as possible, it was supposed to have been there already, but….

Anyway, she assured me that this was the only pattern in the book that had such problems, and that the second printing of the book would be out in a few weeks, with all of the corrections in place.

Needless to say, I am no longer irritated — I was really pleasantly surprised to have gotten a personal phone call, and I’m feeling better about getting on with the project.

Having self-published my own projects, I know that no matter how many times you go through something you’ve written, errors creep by. I still recall, many months after my first book came out, when my brother was reading it and found a really blatant grammatical error. I am glad that to find out that this designer was on top of the problem, and took the time to take care of me.

I’m sure you are wondering WHO this is, and in a couple of days, when my sample is pieced, I’ll fill you in….

Two days down, 178 to go

Posted on August 22, 2008 by Suzanne

Actually, the boys have come home from school, excited about the prospects of 4th grade. Joe’s teacher is funny — cracks lots of jokes (which he, as a budding humorist, appreciates), plus both boys seem kind of excited about the daily assignment notebooks that they were given, it seems very “official” I think. That’ll probably last about a week.

I have a new knitting student — I gave Mark his first lesson. He cast on 16 stitches and knit about 3 rows. After showing him what to do, I walked away. The look of intense concentration was pretty impressive. I’m not sure if he’s enjoying it or not. Maybe once his engineer’s brain figures out exactly what it is he is doing.

Speaking of knitting:

dsc06795 Two days down, 178 to go

I’m sure you aren’t suprirsed to see that my alternate color is white. Our school colors are Red and White, so this seemed like a natural choice. I nearly had to rip it all apart a little bit ago, though. I dropped a stitch and got interrupted and when I went back to try to pick up the stitch I couldn’t figure it out.

The getting interrupted was the problem, because I had placed one of thel oose loops back on a needle and forgotten that I’d done so. Here I was with the correct number of a stitches on the needles, but I clearly had a dropped stitch. Plus I was trying to put it back on going in the wrong direction. Once I got myself straightened out I was OK. I think.

I get to go see the movie Mamma Mia tonight — I’ve had the Abba tunes tuck in my head for days (weeks…) now, and I’m looking forward to seeing the movie.

TTFN-

Suzanne