Well, I did my first 10-minute (plus) daily stint on working on the quilt. I think this will work much better than waiting until the weekends, and then quilting for hours, getting a sore finger in the process.

more about my vacation:

Christmas was pretty good. My brother and sister-in-law came down from Arlington Heights on Christmas Day (they had planned to come on Christmas Eve, but we had a very heavy sudden snowfall, and they were tired from other traveling). Her brother also came down, since he's not married and their folks are in China right now (teaching English).

I guess people liked what I gave them. My brother said "oh, cool" and started flipping through the translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls I gave him, which is pretty high praise from him. My mom laughed when she saw the Fun Fur scarf and said "Oh, I can sing 'Santa Baby' when I wear this scarf" (they had gone to a community musical production where a young woman they knew wore a slinky dress, and, I guess, a boa, and sang "Santa Baby") But she actually wore the scarf out of the house, so I guess she liked it well enough (she's not the kind of person to do things just to make someone else happy).

I got some nice stuff. The biggest present was a 100th anniversary Steiff teddy bear. Because I don't trust the mail *quite* that much, and because I didn't have room in my bag, my folks will bring him down to me on their next visit.

I also got the new Vogue socks book, which I have to say was a bit of a disappointment to me personally - lots of kid and baby socks compared to the number of women's socks, and one of the patterns that I would most want to make (the Koigu socks with the multicolored front and solid back) apparently has an error, because I cannot for the life of me see how you get one segment of the sock one color and the rest another, without carrying the yarn or doing them as flat intarsia (neither of which is mentioned in the instructions). Anyone know if an errata page exists for this book yet?

I also got a really nice set of copper tealight holders - each has a word cut into it, like "Faith" or "Hope" or "Peace" so that when you light a candle in it, the light shines through the word. They're on my mantel right now.

I also got a sweatshirt that has an Edward Gorey drawing on it and the phrase "There's no such thing as too many books". This has become sort of a family joke - one of the reasons I was so eager to move out of the apartment I had been in was that the manager was complaining that I had "too many books" and it was a fire hazard (for the record, I do not smoke, nor did I ever burn candles in that apartment). I tried to explain that the books would not spontaneously combust until the temperature in the apartment reached 451* F, and by then, there would be far more problems than my books, but the manager kept telling me "I'm not going to evict you but you need to get a storage unit and move some of those books out". Anyway. It was a real irritant and frustration at the time, but now that I own the house, it's just one of those "I guess it takes all kinds" sort of things.