Dropped the quilt and backing off yesterday. She didn't ask for a deposit from me (it says on the brochure that you're supposed to pay a 25% deposit) because, as she said "Oh, I know you."

I guess spending a couple hundred dollars at a place over the course of six months does that.

The quilt is supposed to be done Saturday. And she had one ahead of it, and one she was almost done with in the machine. Which makes me think - it's about $100 for a day's work, is what it looks like. Surely it's more lucrative than the shop. I hope she doesn't shut the shop down in favor of full-time machine quilting. And I also thought - what a way to make a living, having happy people come in with finished projects and then finishing them even more for them. Saving someone's bacon, doubtless, on a wedding/baby/new-home gift they just won't have time to quilt themselves. Being party to all the family events, all the gift-giving and gift-planning, all of that. It must be sort of a happy career. (But no, I wouldn't want it, it looks wicked boring to sit and trace pantographs all day long. And it would be boring stuff yet concentration-requiring - as I learned from my tiny foray into sewing-machine quilting over the summer). I'm happy to pay her to do it for me. It should be about $130 with tax, which isn't so bad.

Still, it would be nice to just deal with happy people all the time. (Oh, I'm sure she doesn't, I'm sure she gets her share of deadbeats and people who pretend to be dissatisfied so they can try to winkle out of paying, or people who bring in quilts that won't lie flat and then swear that they were perfect, etc., etc. But it's fun to fantasize about being an artisan).

I guess I'm experiencing a tiny little sort of mid-life (or perhaps, I hope, quarter-life) crisis. (One of my colleagues said he went through one at 35...) I wake up in the morning and wonder if my life is always going to be like this - always hectic, always two weeks out of the month when I'm hardly home in the evening, always being tapped to do things I really don't have time to do, always dealing with difficult and needy students, always eating lunch at my desk? I can deal with looking at things through a one-inch frame - one day at a time or one week at a time - but trying to project into the future scares me. And yet again, I need to project in the future if I am not going to wash up on the shores of 60 and wonder where the time went, and why I never did anything but go to work, go to church, and go home.

I don't know. I have a pretty good life, and yet, I don't know. I think of all the different paths I might have tried to take - being an artisan, living off the land (yes, there was a time that idea appealed to me), actively pursuing the issue of finding a husband, getting married, and being a homemaker, being a writer (no, I'm not good enough, I've decided that), doing research full-time, working as a lab-tech somewhere so I can go home at five leaving my briefcase at the office, even changing my religious affilation and becoming some kind of member of a religious order....I don't know if any of those would have been better.

I do know that I'm tired, and I'm reaching the point of the semester where it's an effort to remain cheerful and unharried no matter what happens. I do know I'm not particularly looking forward to the youth thing this evening, for fear of carryover from last week. I do know that my allergies are really bad and are probably contributing to how I feel right now.

I did add a few more rows to the Tilling the Soil vest last night. It's 9" long now; it needs to be 13" before I get to do anything new and different on it.