Beginning of the End

Mike's final week of work has arrived! Holy smokes. Each of us worried that it would never get here, and this month of April has really dragged. Day after day of rain hasn't helped. In spite of all of that, I think this week is going to fly by. There's a little send-off for him this Thursday, and I'm invited. Then Friday, he'll just go in for half a day and call it quits. For good. He hasn't ruled out the possibility of doing short-term projects in the future, but for at least the next year, his calendar will be free and clear of anything work related. We are both itching to get on the road and do some traveling.

But, alas. There's still the next few days to get through with the old mundane stuff of cooking, sewing, gardening, and cats. Always the cats. Sadie's new harness arrived yesterday. As you can see, she loves it already!

The dragged herself around on the carpet for a while trying to rub it off. This was actually a pretty good test. I was a little dismayed to see that it fastens only with velcro, and I worried how well it would hold. As it turns out, it's pretty stout velcro, and her pulling herself around didn't budge it. It has the advantage of being much easier to put on than the previous buckles. I just laid it on her back and then used my hands to wrap it around her little body, and voila! Fastened in! The challenge will be keeping the cat fuzz from taking the "stick" out of the velcro over time. Also, we'll have to get her outside to see if pulling at the leash will cause the tabs to pull loose.

She's quite fashionable, don't you think? That red bandana is very becoming next to her black fur.

Puh-leeze! Get it off! Get it off of me right now!

Wow Sadie...what did you do to offend the kitty gods? Can't help you with this one, my furriend. No thumbs, you know...

So, I took pitty and only made her wear it for a few minutes. She's a petite little thing, and the extra small size is just right. If she grows any more, however, we'll need a larger size. Her face is still kittenish, but we're not really sure about her age. She could grow a little larger, but time will have to reveal that secret.

Also in yesterday's deliveries was this new book announcing my newest thing-I've-never-tried-but-really-want-to-learn.

During CSA season, some of my fellow CSAers are into fermenting some of the veggies, and their concoctions always look so tasty. I decided I wanted to make an effort to learn how to ferment some stuff, and so I found this book, which is widely considered to be the bible of fermentation. It's something of a tome at nearly 500 pages of small print. There aren't even very many pictures! So...some light reading to keep me busy in our travels. I'll get a start on it some time today, but it's going to be a commitment to get through the whole thing. Possibly, I won't need to read it all in order to get started.

As for today's activities, I just have a couple of short housekeeping tasks to take care of. Also, I started my bread dough rising this morning. That will probably take most of the day before it's time to bake. As for sewing, I've been considering my options now that I have quilts for quilting. I'll probably put off starting on those until the beginning of May. For the remainder of the month, I'd like to work on some blocks.

Some weirdo started this challenge a few years ago called the NewFO Challenge. She even had a little gadget for it,

and she roped a bunch of silly quilters into joining her in starting a new project every month with no need to ever finish anything! Can you imagine? And some of those quilters have never forgiven her for this foray into madness. And I had so danged many projects going that it was complete insanity, and so I actually had to put some of them on the proverbial backburner in order to start whittling the list down to a manageable size.

Fast forward to today, and I'm down to just about eight projects (not including embroidery and quilts to be quilted) with just two still on the backburner. That all changes today because I'm going to get back to work on those remaining two projects this week. First up will be the next block(s) for the Pony Express quilt.

That's how the quilt looks if I were to finish it in the same way it was made originally, but I had some problems with this pattern. Now I'm doing my own thing with it. I wrote about this some in a previous blog post. I'm embarrassed to say that the last time I worked on this quilt was at the end of March in 2014 when I made this block:

So after a three year delay, I'm ready to get back at it, and that's where I'll start today.

The other project I'm taking off the backburner is this little quilt called "The Birds Return." I was all ready to blame my friend Sharon and her "Let's Book It" challenge, but no. It's the crazy cat lady and her NewFO Challenge again. It's the cover quilt from this book:

When I was working on this "regularly" (as if there was anything regular about this), I was making a vertical row at a time. And I'm hanging my head in shame in admitting that the last time I worked on this quilt was in January of 2014, when I completed the second vertical row:

So, I'm kind of determined to get a little more accomplished on each of those quilts this week. On the bright side, these are both scrap quilts and my stash of scraps is bigger than ever!!!

Here it is noon, and I haven't done a thing. Better get to it.