Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Good morning, my friends. Hopefully, you're wearing your green this morning. I haven't decided on today's wardrobe, but it will definitely include my Irish socks from actual Ireland.

It's going to be a kitchen day here. I like to get my Irish up for St. Patrick's Day, and so I'm making an Irish themed dinner tonight. We'll have some Irish Brown Bread...a new recipe to me, so I hope it's good. That'll go with our Irish Beef Stew. For dessert we'll have these Bruleed Key Lime Tarts. I made these once before, but it's been 12 years since then. At the time, I wrote a blog post about the process. They aren't hard to make, but they do take some time, and so I'll get started on those right away this morning.

Baking up to yesterday, I had a doctor's appointment. That all went fine. I was meeting a new primary care doctor, and I liked her a lot. I hope she stays around because she's the fourth PCP I've had in five years. She stared me on the generic form of Fosamax for my brittle bones. Does anyone have any experience with Fosamax? It has some possibly troubling side effects, and so I'm hoping I'll be able to tolerate it. Time will tell.

After that, I went to the grocery store to pick up a few things on a limited-time buy one, get one free sale. And with all that going on, it was later in the day when I got home than I expected. It didn't leave much time for sewing. The easiest thing to do was to clip the binding on the Painted Ladies and get busy stitching. When I'd given it all the time I wanted to, I'd turned the first corner.

The kitties were ready and willing to help, but it took me so long to get all the way around with my clips that this happened:

You can hardly blame them. It was time for my nap too.

So after taking a short nap, I went to work getting the machine set up for quilting the Fantastic Felines. In the bobbin, I'm using a black 60 weight Bottom Line thread. 

On top, I'll use this 50 weight black Essential thread. 

Everything looked good tension-wise, and so I went to work, using my Line Tamer ruler to quilt a diagonal grid. I started in a corner and stitched to the opposite corner. From there, I caromed off in different directions as I reached the opposite edge of the quilt.

It was already late in the day by then. My goal for this is to spend an hour per day on it. A good amount of my time yesterday was taken up selecting threads, winding bobbins, and getting ready to quilt. By the time my hour was up, I'd stitched about six lines.

Knowing I needed to pick up some medicine, I suggested we go out for dinner last night. It was nice to do something fun for the day since it started out with a doctor's appointment and a trip to the grocery store. The sun was shining and it was relatively warm. Coming over the top of one of the hills, we had a beautiful view of Mt. Hood.

In the restaurant parking lot, the flowering cherry trees were in bloom.

And that was a nice way to end the day.

Okay, so I have a busy day ahead, and I'm going to get going on it. I'd planned to get back to the treadmill today, but I'll probably put that off until tomorrow. I'll be on my feet for a good part of the day, and that should count for something, right? So I hope y'all have a good day planned for yourselves. Don't drink too much green beer...and definitely don't eat any green snow.