For Linda

I recently received this in my Inbox...

You haven't posted anything since april 4. Time to report back to work! Some of us check almost every day, and I'm always disappointed when there's nothing there! Hope everything is ok.
Love you!

Obviously, some people are missing me, even if it's only family. Who knew?

So, here goes.

When I was a kid and had a project of any kind to do, I would always clean my room first. At the time, I secretly admitted that it was a form of procrastination, but really, at 10:30 at night, once my room was clean, I always felt energized and ready to go.

I’m still like that. When I have projects, I have a hard time functioning when my space is too messy. It just makes it hard to focus. So, I always clean up first. The area is usually a disaster when I'm done, but at least it starts out clean.

The problem is that a month or so ago, Jeff and I decided to paint the kitchen. And at the same time, I also thought it would be great to make new curtains. But half way through making the curtains, I realized that it would be a whole lot easier if I first moved my sewing table into my new office/workroom. Then I could walk all the way around the table instead of having access to it on just one side. (Here's the table after an especially crazy Halloween/Birthday season. That's fur from Joey's costume all over the place.)

Now let me explain about my sewing table. It belonged to my mom who used to work for an interior designer making drapes and curtains and that sort of thing. She needed a huge table. To get the table into one of our old houses, my uncle had to cut the thing in half so it would fit down the stairs. As Jeff and I began to move it down the hall from our laundry room to my new office, we realized that it needed to be cut down again.

So, we put the moving project on hold. I had a brief flash of sanity and realized that surgery on the table was just one more thing on my plate that I couldn't handle, a wafer thin mint you might say. And yes part of my brain was saying It's only a tiny little thin one. But, I fought the urge and I began to shove all the various crap I’d pulled out from under the table into any available space I could find in the new office.

The new office is now completely full of stuff. And all my sewing stuff is somewhere amongst the piles.

Every time I go in there for something, I cringe.

Eventually the situation came down to this… it was 2 days before Jeff’s 40^th birthday party, only two thirds of the curtains were finished and hanging up and I needed to prepare food for somewhere between 50 and 100 people [Note- when someone sends you an Evite, please, for the love of God, respond to it.]

Luckily, Jenny has a Costco membership, lots of serving platters and a generous heart, so she helped with the shopping and food prep. Jeff’s mom helped too. Without those two, it would have been a disaster.

All of this is really just a very long explanation as to why I have no pictures of my finished kitchen or of my new office/workroom, two projects that have taken an inordinate amount of my time the last month and which I planned to post about.

I do have pictures from the party, though.

Doesn't Aurora look fantastic without her hair?

This is Kam and his two Uncle Matts. (Jeff's brother and my brother.)


And one of Jeff's friends brought a bottle of Patron so they all had to do shots. Ugghh.

Jenny actually laid down on the floor to take this one.

Oh, and my apologies for the strange Mr. Creosote, crafting analogy. I wrote this late last night and have decided to leave it in because it so accurately describes my deranged state of mind lately.