Lynn, thanks for the compliment on my quilting stitches. It's one of those things that I'm good at, but I can't really explain how or why I got good at it...I've been quilting for a good 15 years, and before that I did a lot of handsewing (going back to when I was a kid and wasn't allowed to use the sewing machine), so it may just be long experience.

Or it may be that I have small hands. One of my mother's friends claims that my mother and I are good at delicate work because we have small hands (and the friend does not - she is perhaps using it as an excuse, I don't know.)

I have been working more on the quilt lately, and it makes me happy to be getting somewhere towards finishing it. (Perhaps this weekend I should post a photo of just why I want to get it finished up sometime soon).

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Oh, and guess what?



Monster butt!

I started another one of those monsters last night. This one is made of some fluffy lime-green novelty Yarn Bee yarn (yeah, I know, I slag on Yarn Bee a lot here, but this yarn isn't so bad.) And some Red Heart in a pale yellow that's almost the color of glow-in-the-dark things when they're not glowing. (You know what I mean by that?)

This one's going to be a girl monster, and either be a girl-cousin or girlfriend to Olaf. Tentative name is Ivy, but I'm going to wait until she's done to see how it suits her. I also had the thought of tying little ribbon bows on her "knobbles," like a little girl with pigtails, not sure how that will look, but I'll see.


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I don't know how much it's made the national news, but around where I live, and in North Texas, there's been an unbelievable amount of rain and lots of flooding. Something like five or eight people died - some when their homes were washed away by a wall of water. It's pretty terrible. Lots of people stranded in their cars. (I have a student who works as a police dispatcher; she said that several days have just been crazy with all the calls coming in from people who drove through high water and got stranded.)

They had to evacuate the animals from the Frank Buck Zoo in Gainesville the other day (they all got out safely, and my understanding is that they're now back safely).

I mean, I'm glad the drought is over, and I generally like rain, but not when it threatens people's lives or destroys their property.

I hope maybe we'll get a few dry days (at least) so the creeks can go down and people can start cleaning things up.