1. I have tried and tried to come up with a jazzy, ironic, funny title for this post.  I am utterly unable to do so.  It was just that sort of a day.  Actually, it was a pretty low-keyed day until about 4:30 PM, when I discovered that the twins had gotten into the refrigerator and were having a party with raw eggs and yogurt in the middle of the kitchen floor.  Twins in tub!
2. I washed them both down well and thankfully had rinsed them off.  They were playing in the clean water, swimming and doing cute things.  I was in the bathroom, reading (yes, quality time) but otherwise not paying attention.  David fell down a couple of times and got back up, fine and dandy.  I told him to "Be careful" and continued reading.  He fell again and this time started crying hard.  And thus the fun began.
3. When he started crying hard, I looked up and said, "Awww...did you get a boo-boo?  Let Mommy see," and I pried his hand away from his face, preparing to kiss the boo-boo.  What I saw made me let out a blood-curdling scream, which led to a blood-curdling scream from each of the twins.  If it hadn't been so horrible at the time, it would have been a classic movie moment.  The girls ran upstairs to see what was going on.  What was going on was that David had gashed his nose open right between the eyes.
4. When I say 'gash', I mean gash.  It was at least a quarter of an inch deep and it looked as though part of his nose was caved in.  Scared me half to death, as evidenced by the fact that I screamed at first.  I quickly grabbed my cell phone (also in the bathroom, quality time being what it is), wetted a wash cloth, grabbed David to apply the wash cloth and called the pediatrician's office.  I told the receptionist what had happened and she asked if I could bring him in at 5:15.  I said, "What time is it?"  "5:00"  "No, I can't make it by 5:15."  "How about 5:30?"  "Yes, thank you." Click.
5. The orders started immediately:  "Rachel!  Take Zidy out of the tub and get her dressed.  Abby!  Get your shoes and coat on!  Sarah!  Help me get David dressed."  Meanwhile, I put Neosporin and a bandage on his nose as it continued seeping blood.  We got out of there, dressed to the shoes, in 5 minutes flat.  FlyLady would have been proud of us.
6. The whole way there, I prayed for me to drive safely, for Dave's nose to be ok, and for us not to run into any traffic, as we were cutting it close.  As it happened, David stopped crying, took his bandage off, and babbled to Zidy.  There was not much traffic and we were scheduled to arrive on time....here's the part of the movie where the stressed music starts.  I got to the street where the office is-to find it closed because of construction.  The sign directed me to another street which I knew didn't go near the office.  I made a quick turn into a hotel parking lot to figure out what to do.  As I sat there thinking, I realized that I could see the office building from where I was parked.  It was across a large field that didn't look too overgrown.  So I ordered the girls out of the car and told them to start across the field while I got the twins out of their car seats.  We all booked it across this boggy field and made it only a couple of minutes late to the appointment.  Of course, it took them 30 minutes to get us to the back (WHY?), then 10 minutes to wait to see the doctor.  Who looked at him, told me to take him to Urgent Care to be stitched up.  For this we waited 40 minutes?  Why not tell us when we WALK IN, for Pete's sake!
7. So we started out for Urgent Care, which was 20 minutes further along from our house.  Along the way, Sarah offered to make dinner for us when we got home.  I thought about that kind offer and was about to answer her when this thought popped into my head:  "Did I turn off the burner under the eggs when we left?"  I asked the girls, no one knew.  I thought madly for a while, all the while feeling the tension rising in my chest.  Will the house burn down?  Should I turn around?  Did I even turn on the burner?  I don't remember, I don't remember!"  Finally I told the girls they should pray that I didn't turn the burner on the stove.  When I said that, Sarah said, in a hesitant voice (don't kill the messenger, Mom), "I think you did, Mom."
8. At this point, we were at the exit that we needed to take to get to Urgent Care.  I took the exit, whipped back around, and started back for home, about a 30 minute drive, castigating myself all the while for having left the stupid burner on under the eggs.  If I had any doubts about it, they were cast aside when I opened the door and the smoke billowed out.  Have you ever smelled eggs that are burnt?  Trust me, you don't want to.  The stench was acrid and sulphuric.  I turned off the burner and immediately started opening doors and windows and turning on the fans to air out the house.  Keziah had fallen asleep in the car so I carried her in, put her in bed, and told the girls to stay home and wait for either me or Friend Husband to come home (of course, he was working late that night, but fortunately for us, not very late).
9. I made us pb&j, washed some grapes, and leaped back into the car with David.  He ate his supper while I called Friend Husband and aprised him of all that had happened in the past couple of hours.  He was amazed, to say the least.  I pack more living into 2 hours than some people pack into a week!  We eventually made it to Urgent Care, signed in, and waited.
10. There are always such interesting people waiting at Urgent Care (yes, that's meant to be sarcastic).  There was a couple in the "well child waiting room" that I talked to for a while.  They had a 6-month-old baby and 12-year-old twins.  We talked about twindom while watching the various members of one family file in and out of the back room (what's going on?) and listening to some strident voice yell at his toddler in the sick child area.  After about 90 minutes of waiting, they called us back for the requisite weigh-in and questions...then they looked at his nose.  They decided (as our pediatrician had hours ago) that Dave needed stitches to close the wound and applied a topical numbing gel, a bandage, and sent us out to wait in the waiting room again.
11. David was pretty much bouncing off the walls by this time.  One of my fears when he gets hurt is that someone is going to think I'm abusing him.  He spent last night running into walls, falling flat on his face, and generally being goofy.  The nurses laughed at him and said, "Yep, we see how he got hurt."  He also got to see lots of babies, which he loves.  It was amazing that, while he had this gaping hole in his face, he was smiling and talking to everyone.  He's such a trooper!
12. He continued to be a trooper when they called us back to do the stitches.  We got Dave up on the table and the table lifted up so the doctor didn't have to bend over to do the work and waited and waited and waited for the doctor.  The nurse finally popped her head out and said, "We need Dr. Karen.  We've got a toddler in here that needs stitching."  Meanwhile, David was playing with the toys that Nurse Diane had given him.  We put the straight jacket things around his feet so he couldn't roll off as easily and then Nurse Diane asked me if I wanted to put the rest of him in the restraints.  Knowing how much David loves to be physically restrained, I asked if we could just hold him and see if that worked.  He did marvelously!  Both the nurse and the doctor said that they had never seen a child get stitches as easily as he did (hope that's not a harbinger of things to come!)  While Doctor Karen stitched him up, Nurse Diane held his head steady and I held his hands.  Once he said, "Mama, I stuck!"  I laughed and said, "I know you're stuck, honey.  We want you to be stuck for a while."  Once I asked him if he wanted me to sing him a sleepy song.  He and the doctor said yes, so I started singing "I Am A Poor Wayfaring Stranger", which is what I sing to the twins when they're going to sleep.  I got to the chorus of the first verse and he said, "No sing song!"  Everybody's a critic!
13. We finally got home at 11PM and I put David to bed.  On the way to put myself to bed, I noticed a bump on my collarbone and thought, "Man, it's too early for mosquitoes!"  I went to bed and woke up to generalized itchiness which spread throughout the day.  Hives.  What could be the cause?  Stress, my doctor says.  Or spring allergies.  Or any number of other things that we may never be able to pinpoint.  So my whole body is a writhing red mass of itchiness (except for the inside of my mouth and the bottoms of my feet)...Lovely end to a lovely day.

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1. Sarah was, of course, our firstborn child.  Funny thing was, even before I was pregnant, I knew our first child would be a girl.  I could "see" her in my mind's eye and it never occurred to me for a minute that she could be male.
2. She was born a bit after 5PM on 4/5.  I remember the nurse telling me (after I'd been pushing for 2 hours) that if I could just push a little harder, Sarah could be born before she went off shift.  I remember looking at the nurse (who I really liked) and saying, "I.  Don't.  Care."  She weighed 9#, 6 ozs. at birth and was so ginormous that she broke her collar bone being born.
3. Friend Husband picked out her first name, I picked out her second middle name and we both picked out her first middle name.
4. Sarah had her days and nights mixed up for quite some time after she got home.  She slept so little that I hallucinated severely after she was home a few days.
5. Getting her home from the hospital was quite a challenge to begin with.  She was born with 3 heart defects:  ASD, coarctation of the aorta, and a hole in her heart.  She was supposed to have surgery when she was 4 days old but when they did an ultrasound on her heart before the heart surgery, they discovered that the thing they wanted to go in and correct had corrected itself.  Praise God!  Today she merely has a murmur.
6. Sarah was our only binky baby until Keziah came around.  She loved her bink and would pop one in and contemplate the world around her.
7. Sarah is very bright but steadfastly refused to read until she was almost 6 years old.  Did I mention she's also stubborn?
8. Sarah loves to write stories.  She doesn't believe that I also liked to write stories when I was her age.  Mom is just so dull, how could she love the same things I do?  But I do and she does.  Of course, I wrote short stories and poetry and she writes novels...
9. Sarah loves Star Trek:  TOS.  Not The Next Generation, not Voyager, not anything else but TOS.  She considers all others to be mocking of TOS.  I did mention that stubborn streak, didn't I?
10. We started homeschooling mainly because of the issues that Sarah had in public school.  Bringing her home was one of the best things we did for her, IMHO.  She's really bloomed over the last several years and I think that her self-esteem and self-confidence is very strong as a result.  Not to mention that she's had the opportunity to write lots of novels in her spare time.
11. Surprisingly enough, Sarah is interested in writing for a living.  Although I was also interested in that, I never pursued it as seriously as she does and never at as young an age as she has.
12. Sarah is starting to think and act as an adult.  She is dependable, competent, and thoughtful.  She doesn't always enjoy the hijinks which come with being the oldest of 5 children, but she has a lovely soft side that she shows to me on a regular basis.  She continues to surprise and amaze me.
13. So here's to you, Sarah...live long, and prosper.

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1. Rachel is 12 today...happy birthday, little girl!  Where has the time gone?
2. Rachel was born on her great-great-grandfather's birthday.
3. She was expected to have been born about a week later (around the time of her older sister's birthday) but the ob/gyn decided to induce earlier because he was worried that she'd "be over 8 ½ pounds".  At 9#, 1½ ozs., she was the smallest of the babies to whom I gave birth.  I told that doctor she was already over 8½ pounds!
4. Rachel has always been a little ray of sunlight.  She was our "happy baby", the one who went with the flow and smiled at everyone, as long as she was fed on time.  She was also one of the two who I had to carry around in a sling for the first year or so of her life because she was extremely happy that way.
5. We celebrated Rachel's birthday on Saturday, as we're having a church meeting starting tonight.  Our tradition is that the birthday person can pick what s/he wants for supper and request a certain dessert.  Rachel picked gumbo with extra shrimp, sweet potato casserole (gag!), garlic cabbage, green salad, asparagus, and chocolate lasagne for her birthday dinner.  And yes, she got it all.
6. Rachel is musically talented.  She has a lovely soprano voice and she plays piano by ear.  (Yes, I know it's not good for her to do that but what do you tell a child who likes to doodle around on the piano?)
7. Rachel was the only one of the children to whom I gave birth who was born at a time when most people are asleep.  She was born around 12:17 in the morning.  She likes that because it means that she's turned a new year in her sleep and she awakens a year older.
8. Rachel loves pickles of all sorts but especially spicy ones!
9. Rachel has always been our vegetable lover.  Once, when she was younger, we had to tell her to eat her cookie first and then she could have more broccoli.
10. Rachel didn't walk until she was 18 months old, the latest by far of all my children (including the twins).  I think that part of that was that we were getting ready to move when she was a year old and older and it was just easier to pick her up and carry her rather than to let her walk.  My late, great mil took a picture of her just as she took her first step.  The picture is just priceless...the look of surprise and delight on her face is so sweet.
11. I've always thought that Rachel looked a great deal like my mother, certainly more so than the rest of us have.
12. Rachel was named Rachel because I loved the name.  (Still do!)  One of her middle names is Joy, after my mother and mil, who shared that or a variant as a middle name.  She has always been a joy in and of herself.
13. Today we are toodling off to the mall because Rachel's grand desire for the last several months has been to get her ears pierced.  Her dad said she had to wait until she was 12.  I think we will probably be there as the store opens.  Despite her plans to the contrary, she popped out of bed early this morning.

Happy birthday, Rachel!

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1. Mount Washmore awaits.
2. Birthday Observed for DD#2 is Saturday and I'm not ready.
3. I should have gone to work out this morning.
4. I am negligent on my blog commenting already (sorry!).
5. I am also negligent on my TT commenting (sorry, again!).
6. The weather has been so nice that it's a pity to be in the basement, on the computer.
7. I'm 107 rows into a cabled scarf and I'd like to finish it.
8. My wrist is bothering me from playing too many Pogo and Neopets games.
9. I need to look into The Grocery Game.
10. I need to figure out how long it's going to take Friend Husband to drive to Felicity this morning.
11. So many books, so little time.
12. Hey, it's mealtime!
13. I don't have much to say today anyway.

1. Every important call is a close one.
2. Think of the danger while things are going smoothly.
3. It's a good thing that life is not as serious as it seems to the waiter.
4. You will travel to exotic places on your next trip.  (I hope not!  We were just planning on Florida!)
5. Discipline is wisdom and vice versa.
6. Your mind is filled with new ideas.
7. Genius does what it must and talent does what it can.
8. Generosity will repay itself sooner than you imagine.
9. Under all that we think lives all we believe.
10. Choose your own path.
11. We make a living by what we get but we make a life by what we give.
12. The good old days were once present too.
13. (This is my favorite...David--one of our twins--got it and we laughed and laughed because it is definitely the twins' credo.)  In unity there is strength.

1.  First, a moment of silence for the demise of Thursday Thirteen.  This is scheduled to be the final installment, unless Leanne decides to sell it to interested parties.

2.  Thanks for all the well-wishes regarding our nasty stomach virus.  Naturally, nothing (like laundry and house cleaning) gets done while Mom is down, so I spent the rest of the week playing catch-up.  Nothing like coming off your deathbed to Mt. Washmore and a cluttered house.  Kinda makes you want to crawl back in and not ever get out again.

3.  Ok, on with the show!  I've never received a speeding ticket.  I have been pulled over a couple of times (most notably last June, when we were leaving camp, but that was for not correcting fast enough and I didn't get a ticket) but never received the ticket.

4.  I've never travelled to Asia.

5.  I've never licked a frozen metal object.  Never even been tempted.  I guess that's due to my moving to the colder climes after I was an adult.

6.  I've never entered a quilt in a juried show.

7.  I've never developed a taste for green tea (yick!)

8.  I've never learned to crochet (I think I have a mental block against it).

9.  Likewise, I've never learned to spin (but it's on my list of things to do).

10.  I've never been a reenactor (but I very much want to be).

11.  I've never knitted anything in the round.

12.  I've never failed a class in school (although calculus in college was a very close miss).

13.  I never finished my Ph.D.  Since I don't use my Master's much, I don't much see the point but there are days when I wish I had.

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1.  More and more I feel like I'm living in some quirky sitcom.  I don't know, maybe it's just the cold weather that's sapping my brain and weirdness is not really happening.

2.  We were part of that lovely ice storm that hit last night.  As expected, we lost some major tree limbs.  We lose major tree limbs in a summer thunderstorm, so I fully expected much more than we lost.

Unfortunately, other folks had a lot more problems than we did with the downed trees.  (See second picture above.) Our neighbor across the street lost several huge chunks of trees, not just limbs and one fell across her roof and tore down a part of her gutter.  The lady next to her had a similar thing happen as well.  Everyone was ok but it's quite a mess.  It looked like a war zone when we were driving to lunch today.

3.  And why were we driving to lunch today?  Well, because the university that Friend Husband works at was closed for a record-setting second day in a row.  Generally speaking, when we get to have Friend Husband home unexpectedly, we go eat at a nearby Chinese buffet.  While we were there, Keziah spontaneously reached out and gave Sarah a big hug.  Sarah was so delighted that she wanted to preserve the moment photographically.

And Friend Husband and I also enjoyed our brood and each other along with the yummy Chinese buffet.  We did have to laugh, though, when they seated us in an entire section by ourselves.  Oooh, our own private dining room...how about that?

(Um, no, it was not my idea to take this picture.  Obviously.)

4.  After going out for lunch, we dropped by our local Meijer for those all-important snowtime supplies:  Perler Beads, bananas, and (I'm embarrassed to admit) yarn.  Meijer had their clearance yarn on for about 90% off the original price.  Who can resist cheap stash?  Not this girl.  I finally had to leave when my eyes were getting glazed over, my breathing rapid, and my pulse thready.  But I acquired some more lovelies for my stash.  And I taught my son the all-important skill of scanning a UPC code to ascertain what the actual cost of an item is.  Every two-year-old needs to know that.  He also got a small yarn appreciation tutorial.  Mainly it consisted of having him pet the very soft yarns.  His wife will thank me some day.  Here are the goods:

5.  I took this lovely ice picture in the parking lot of our local Meijer.  Friend Husband is the most long-suffering, understanding man who ever walked the earth.  When we finished unloading the new stash, I mean the groceries into the Big Green Van, I told him I'd take the carts over to the corral.  His chivalrous nature bade him question my motives and I told him it was because I wanted to take a picture of this sign:

6.  Everything everywhere was covered with the most beautiful icy fringe.  It was a glorious, terrible, beautiful sight.  It looked like Narnia everywhere.  I tried to take a bunch of pictures but I could not even attempt to do it justice.

7.  Friend Husband just shrugged and got into the Big Green Van with the children.  The people who were sitting next to the cart corral did think it was a bit peculiar that 1) I was walking around the Meijer parking lot with a camera and 2) I was taking a picture of a cart corral sign.  Sometimes I just have to follow the inscrutible exhortations of my bizarre nature.

8.  Just like this morning, when I went out to shovel ice off the driveway.  I quickly discovered that it would be more prudent to leave the snow and its layer of sleet and ice mixture atop the blacktop so as to give it more traction.  Instead, I walked around taking pictures of the silent icy wonder that was my yard (and those of my neighbors).

9.  Neighbor

Neighbor

10.  Some of our front yard trees. 

If you look closely at this one, you can see the branch cracked at the top.  If we get the winds that I hear we're going to get, this one will be on the ground tomorrow.

  Leave your toys outside and you might not find them until the thaw!

11.  This bush and its twin across the driveway were squashed down about half again as tall as they normally are.  I hope we don't lose too much of them because birds nest in there.

12.  The terrible, icy beauty after the storm.

13.  My very favorite part of the aftermath was breaking all the ice off the cars this morning.  What a glorious sound of destruction!  It sounded just like smashing glass. 

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1. Cincinnati received between 5 and 7 inches of snow Tuesday afternoon, depending on what part of the city was reporting.
2. Cincinnati is very funny about its snow.  Every snow storm is treated like news of an impending nuclear strike.  It's jokingly called "the white death" around here.
3. I've never been able to understand that.  Having been raised as I was in Austin, Texas, I have a healthy love for and respect for snow.  In Austin, a snow like this would be a major emergency.  But this makes sense, as Austin has no snowplows, salt trucks, or any snow removal plans or equipment.  Cincinnati has.  I don't know why it's such a big stinking deal but it is.
4. I guess I'm rather non-chalant about the white death due to my 6 year sojourn in Columbia, MO, where snow is accepted as a matter of course.  The first winter we lived there, it snowed at the end of November and continued to snow throughout the winter.  It never got warm enough to melt the white stuff, but the street crews did an excellent job of keeping it off the roads, so I never gave it a thought.  It was rather difficult to get it off our driveway to get out onto the road.  For some reason, I don't believe we purchased a snow shovel until we moved to Northern KY.  We'd occasionally go hack at the snow with our garden shovel, treat it with salt, and be off on our merry ways.
5. Although 7 inches of snow would be watched in Columbia, I don't recall its being the reason for closing the schools.  I could be wrong, though, as I did not have school-aged children when we lived there.
6. I do not ever recall the university closing, though.  I do remember, when I was hugely pregnant with Sarah, waddling out to my car (a tee-tiny VW Rabbit) and driving in to school.  I also remember having a tremendous snowball fight with Friend Husband in the parking lot after school and amusing my advisor and her husband greatly. 
7. Somehow along the way, I became the designated snow shoveler for the family.  I think it started in this way:  Friend Husband, being a man with no body fat, hates the cold.  I, being a woman with tremendous reserves of body fat, plus Scandanavian ancestry to boot, don't mind it so much.  So, while he's inside getting ready for work and doing Bible study with the girls, I'm outside moving the white stuff out of the way so he can leave for work on time.
8. This last snow came down like rain.  At first it drifted down lazily, but by the time we were through with our grocery shopping and leaving for home, it was coming down in a hurry. 
9. I love to watch it snow.  It's so much prettier than rain and so much less messy when it gets tracked into the house.
10. As you may have seen on my video yesterday, Lucy the Wonder Dog also loves the snow.  Unfortunately, she seems to have sprained her doggy paw leaping about like a maniac.  Or perhaps she sprained it in her mad dash when she ran away from me yesterday afternoon.  Another wonderful thing about snow:  you can more easily track your runaway mutt through it.
11. I forgot to mention that this snow was extremely light and dry, unlike the last snow we had.  Not good for snowballs or sledding (doesn't turn to ice as easily) but excellent for shoveling off the driveway.
12. Yes, we still have school when it snows.  We also have long breaks where the children can run amok in the white stuff with the neighbor children who didn't have school.
13. When it's snowy outside, it's comfy to knit and quilt inside.  'Nuff said.

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1. In quilting, man-made fibers are bad. In knitting they are wonderful.

2. A shop hop is still a shop hop, no matter which craft you persue.

3. Unknitting is no more fun than unsewing.

4. Many people look at you strangely, no matter which project you haul out to work on in a public place.

5.  Likewise, people will always come up to you and say, "My grandmother used to do that," as if you knew her and was her contemporary.

6.  People have no concept how much time/energy goes into making a quilt (or something knitted) and have no compunction about asking you do do something for them.  My standard reply with regard to quilting is, "No, but I'll teach you to do it yourself."

7.  Perhaps other people are different, but I have to concentrate when I knit.  For me, hand-quilting is a no-brainer.

8.  I could see doing both crafts in the summer, if time permitted but I think both crafts are something warm and cozy to do in the depths of winter.

9.  Stash is just a wonderful thing, whether it's yarn or fabric.

10.  Ditto free patterns.

11.  There is a saying in quilting, "I never met a quilter I didn't like."  Well, I've met a couple, but by and large quilters are generous, funny, cool people.  I don't know enough knitters IRL but the knitting books I've read and the blogs I've read would suggest that it is the same with knitters.

12.  It's a beautiful thing to make something that will be an heirloom, whether it's a quilt or a knitted sweater.  Not that I've made a knitted heirloom yet, but you get the picture.  It is like a tiny bit of yourself lasts.

13.  Both quilting and knitting calm my mind and give me back something that my brain needs to function better.  When I worked in a quilting shop, I used to tell the customers, with complete seriousness, that quilting was good therapy...and you had something physical to show for it at the end.  And I can look at a quilt that I've made, run my fingers over the quilting stitches, and remember what was going on in my life when I did it.  Sometimes I'm very glad that quilts can't talk.

1. Never cut paper with fabric scissors.

2. Never use Mother's fabric scissors. Period.

3. Don't ask where something is if it is not where it is supposed to be (a lecture will be forthcoming).

4. Love your sisters (and now, your brother) because one day Mom & Dad will be dead and they're all you'll have.

5. Absolutely stop and smell the roses (lilacs, petunias, whatever).

6. If you feel bad, you might need to poop.

7. If you're upset, get a snack and take a nap. Then make the decision.

8. Life is not fair. Make the best of it.

9. Always have a book or a project ready to pick up in case of a delay.

10. Moms love kisses and hugs.

11. Moms don't like to be interrupted on the phone or on the computer.

12. Food = love

13. Chocolate can cure most ills.

1.  You have to understand that I've been quilting for 14 years and knitting is a new thing for me.  I think I may have been knitting a month now...woohoo!

2.  I'm sure this is very good for my brain.  Why am I sure of this?  Because I have to concentrate so hard on what I'm doing in order to catch my mistakes before they get out of hand.

3.  After finishing (yay!) two projects (yes, they were dishcloths but they're finished), I decided to branch out into a scarf.  Unfortunately, I chose a difficult yarn and really raspy needles to work with.  It's becoming a pain.

4.  I did start another dishcloth today as well.  I think I may have a dishcloth fetish.

5.  Did you note that I now have two projects "on the needles"?

6.  One of the reasons that I wanted to learn to knit is that I thought it was a dying art.  Little did I know that by the time I learned to do it, movie stars would be taking it up.

7.  I'm very proud of myself for sometimes being able to figure out how to fix my messed-up knitting when my son has grabbed it and made a run for it, thus discombobulating the whole thing.

8.  I am not very proud that I still don't know what frogging is.

9.  It's a little frustrating (ok, a lot frustrating) to be beginning a new craft when I have some facility at another.  I am probably a good intermediate quilter.  I can figure out patterns on my own and I (and my family) are extremely conversant in the ways of quilting.  I'm wandering around lost in the forest of knitting.  And that frustrates me.

10.  It occured to me today that this might be God's sneaky way of teaching me patience.

11.  Or teaching me to be in the moment.

12.  Because He knows that I no longer pray for him to help me with my patience.

13.  (The last time I did that, he gave me toddler twins!)

 Links to other Thursday Thirteens! 1. (leave your link in comments, I’ll add you here!)

1.  Do my Bible reading.

2.  Cruise the 'net.

3.  Write my Thursday Thirteen

4.  Comment on blogs

5.  Knit my dishcloth.  (By the way, the one displayed yesterday was not one of the "ugly" ones.  That is one that I finished yesterday that I thought looked pretty good.  The other ones resemble Frankenstein's monster.  Sort of.)

6.  Piece the rest of the 9-patch swap blocks.

7.  Piece the block I'm to make for a quilt we're donating to the library.

8.  Read The Prison Angel, which is one of the books I'm reading right now.

9.  Go to the mall.

10.  Work on the New Year's letter I'd like to get sent out by tomorrow.

11.  Grade papers, enter grades, lesson plan for next week. 

12.  Write a letter.

13.  Go back to bed!

Links to other Thursday Thirteens! 1. (leave your link in comments, I’ll add you here!)

This is the entry that got delayed due to the retirement of Greg Wiggle.  Yes, it is true.  I have no life.

1. What a lovely thing a garden is!  I wish I had my notebook or computer or something outside with