January catch-up

Things have been crazy busy around here for January.  I retired on January 1st, so you would think I would be a lady of leisure, but not so much!

Retirement entails a lot of paperwork.  Know what happens when your boss is out of the office for the last two weeks you work?  Nothing gets done!  And then the systems don’t show you as an employee anymore, but also don’t show you as a retiree!  You just disappear from everyone’s map.  My medical insurance got cancelled 4 times, every single time they fixed it, the next payroll run cancelled it again.  Didn’t get my pension worked out until yesterday.  And so on, and so on.  Been quite a mess.  But at least I don’t have to do that drive to the office every day.  I do NOT miss that!

We had to move Aunt Katherine again, this time from her assisted living apartment to a “memory care” unit (read that as an early stage dementia unit).  She has Alzheimer’s, not bad enough to completely forget people, but bad enough to scramble her memory.  She can’t remember to take meds, or that she needs to use her walker, or a myriad of other things.  So now she is in a lovely place where she has 24 hours care, but still has a private room and bath.  Not nursing per se, but nurses in the unit 24/7.  We moved her a week ago, and moved her furniture this week (the new place was furnished, but you could bring your own stuff if you liked).  So now all I have to do is find a home for everything from her old apartment that wouldn’t fit into her new place.  We have another 3 weeks before we have to be out of the apartment, so I’ll be working in there several more days to organize and pack up.  Then I will be done with all the constant trips down there, except for once a week laundry duty and visit.  It’s been exhausting to deal with her, so I’m really looking forward to letting the nursing staff take over for most of it.

We finally got some real snow here in northern Illinois.  Of course, I was all the way in the city when the blizzard started, and had a delightful 3 hour drive home!  Much of it has already melted, but the ground is still white, which is what really counts anyway, right?

And a merry medical Christmas to you too!

My husband had his surgery on Monday, and came home last night.  He’s doing well, but slow and ouchy.   His blood sugar is under control pretty well now, they didn’t have to give him any meds for it while in the hospital for 3 days.

Aunt Katherine is still in rehab for her cracked pelvis.  I’ve completed arrangements to have her moved to a different place once she’s done there.  She just can’t be left alone anymore, so she will need to leave her senior independent living apartment, and will move to a memory care unit of a new place, where she will still have her own room and bath, but will have 24/7 caregivers watching over her, giving her meds to her, and will live in a small “neighborhood” of 12 people.  They will have a shared living room, dining room, and activities area.  I think she will ultimately be happier and safer there, although it’s going to be a trauma to move again.  Since she will have a much smaller place, I have tons of furniture, kitchen stuff, etc. to get rid of on the next 6 weeks.

And the biggest thing on the horizon is that I’m retiring from my current job of 31+ years at the end of the year.  I think I’ll sleep for a whole week, then will figure out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.  I’ll be so happy to no longer have a 3 hours round-trip commute, and no longer have to deal with the corporate idiocy.  It’s not a nice world in corporate America anymore…

Houston Quilt Market

I haven’t gotten around to posting about my trip to Quilt Market in Houston at the end of October.  What a whirlwind those 4 days were!

I flew out on Thursday.  Friday morning at 8 am the schedules for the Schoolhouse sessions were available, and I spent the next 2 hours figuring out which presentations to attend for each of the 15 sessions that day.  Overall, Schoolhouse was worthwhile.  2 sessions were a waste of time, with presenters who really had no idea of what they were doing, but the rest were good.  I went to several sessions on website/Facebook marketing, one really good one about pattern/book printing, and two really good ones that showed by example exactly how to energize a crowd and sell your product to shops.  Lynette Anderson of Australia was my favorite.  She had a polished presentation, fabulous completed samples for us to drool over, specific reasons for using the products she used, and even a complete kit for each attendee, including floss and needles, so we could work on the kit that night and bring home a finished project.  I also received one of Sullivan’s new rotary cutting rulers at one of Pat Sloan’s presentations.  These have a sharpening edge on them, which is supposed to sharpen your blade every time you cut.  Time will tell if it works or not.

Sample Spree was held the same night.  What a madhouse!  It reminded me of a crazy flea market, bare concrete floors, unadorned banquet tables, and mobs of people clamoring to buy samples that would be available at the same wholesale price at the trade show the next day!  The Moda booth was 4-6 people deep.  I won’t ever attend that again.  I got the feeling that it was just a shopping frenzy for employees of quilt shops, who aren’t wholesale buyers in the first place, and really shouldn’t be able to buy anything at a wholesale show in the first place.

I purchased several sample block-of-the month patterns, a roll of Quilters Dream wool batting, and some of Superior’s new 40 weight So Fine Thread.  If that weight works as well as their original thinner So Fine in my longarm, I should be able to eliminate using PermaCore thread altogether.  I checked out Wonderfil’s Invisifil thread, and will check out the sample I bought to see if it’s worth purchasing on large cones for the longarm for use in background fills.  It’s 100 weight thread (very fine), and should look similar to YLI silk at a fraction of the price.

I also picked up a ton of brochures to look through when I have spare time.  Just about every booth pressed a brochure into my hand as I walked by.

The most amazing part of Market were the fabric company booths.  Dozens of  stations in each manufacturers’ area where shop owners could sit with a rep and choose  fabric to be sent to their shops.  I don’t know how the shop owners do it.  There were sooooo many fabric lines available, my head was spinning.  How do they choose, and get it right for their particular shop’s customers???  I’m glad I don’t have to make the choices.  But now I understand why each shop seems to have different fabrics.  No one could possibly have it all!

One of the designers had an I-Pad with a Square for taking credit card orders, and she was nice enough to show me how it worked.  I definitely have to do some research on it.  It looked so simple to use, and she said it was really cost-effective for her business.

We stayed at the Hilton Americas, and it was a fabulous hotel.  The staff there was smiling and ready to help with anything – every single one of them.  I’ve never stayed at a more pleasant hotel.  And it didn’t hurt that it was directly connected to the convention center with a catwalk.

More medical fun…

My husband was supposed to have surgery next Monday to remove a polyp in his colon that just won’t go away.  When he went in for the preop tests, we got a shock.  His blood sugar was 579!  (For reference, around 100 is a good number.)  They immediately cancelled the surgery, and we scrambled to find a doctor who could see him the day before Thanksgiving.  He’s now on two meds, getting a crash course on how to eat with diabetes, and has his blood sugar down to 213 this morning!  Still way too high, but gradually coming down.  The doctor said the one drug will take time to work, so as long as it’s coming down gradually, it’s OK.  We’ve rescheduled the surgery for December 19, hoping that his sugar level will be acceptable by then.

We were by ourselves for Thanksgiving, so Thanksgiving dinner was homemade chicken soup and salad.  Low carb, no temptation to eat candied sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, etc.

All I want for Christmas are diabetic cookbooks.  Never a dull moment around here…

Another UFO quilted

I just finished longarm quilting the first quilt I ever made – I finished the top in 1997.  Why is it that longarmers quilt everyone else’s tops, but not their own?

This quilt top was completely hand-pieced and hand-appliqued.  I was crazy enough to even match the plaid in the sashing and borders!  I made this top in a beginner hand-piecing class – it was supposed to be 6 blocks in a wall-hanging.  I had to make 12 blocks, with pieced cornerstones and appliqued border corners.  Yes, I should belong to overachievers anonymous. 

I forgot how much I liked this quilt.  I still love the colors in it.

Here is the whole top unquilted, along with some of the blocks quilted.  Not all of the quilting showed up very well in my photos:

Aunt Katherine update

We took Aunt Katherine back to the ortho surgeon this week, and he said her hip is healing pretty well, the stress fractures aren’t cracking further.  Three more weeks with limited mobility, adding a little more weight to that leg in weeks two and three.  So another 3 weeks of 24/7 caregivers.  Hopefully that will be the end of the caregivers.  We’ve gone through so many of them that I feel like I’m always down there telling yet another one what she needs to do.  They never communicate with each other worth a hoot.  I scheduled a couple of days off Friday and Monday, but it looks like I have to drive the 120 mile round trip to set up new caregivers both days.  So much for that.

Funny thing – you think that people who care for the elderly for a living know how to do basic stuff like wash dishes and do laundry – NOT!  In the last 6 weeks, they went through as much laundry detergent as I would have used in 2-1/2 years!  Along with 6 bottles of dishwashing soap, 40 rolls of paper towels, and enough toilet paper for a school of 1200 kids.   So I’m now teaching 3rd worlders how to do basic housekeeping chores.  And paying them $229/day while they practice. Do not get old…

Seeing Dots

I fell in love with a fabric line called “Ta Dot” when I saw it a few months ago.  This week I decided to use the colorway with big shocking pink polka dots as a background for a new applique design.  The dots are about 1/2 inch across!  Not my normal style, but who knows – maybe I’m expanding!

I’ve just drawn out the design on tracing paper and cut out the pieces.  Took hours to pull fabric from my stash and angst over which to use, and in what part of the design.  Here are a few photos of the pieces laying out on the table, so you can get an idea of what I’m planning.  I’ll probably start the hand appliqueing this weekend.

Broken hip

Finally found out yesterday that Aunt Katherine’s hip has stress fractures in two places, so it’s another 3-4 weeks immobile for her.  If it doesn’t heal properly, she’s looking at surgery to put it back together again.

It took 3 weeks to find out what was going on, and all because the emergency room sent her home saying she was just fine 2 hours after her fall.  What a fiasco.  She will never go to that hospital again!

How a sewing machine makes a stitch

Have you ever seen how a sewing machine actually makes a stitch?  Check this out:

Wild turkeys again

I’ve seen the mama turkey and her 4 little turkey chicks several times now, but this is the first time I managed to catch any kind of photo.  They move like greased lightning!  They were standing on my front porch when I woke up, and I ran to grab my camera before they ran out of sight.  These photos aren’t very clear, taken quickly through the window screens, but at least you can get an idea.