I got up to do my usual workout and was wheezing after 20 minutes, so I decided to bail. I'm not sure whether it's the elm pollen or the fact that although it was ostensibly the youth group kids painting the new Youth room last night, it was actually my co-leader and I who did most of the work.

I had tried to find a respirator but the guy at Lowe's that I asked waved me towards a shelf that had only those little paper masks on it, and claimed no knowledge of them selling anything else. And I was irritated enough at that point (had been roaming the store for about 15 minutes and could not find the other thing I had gone for) that I just left, empty-handed.

So it's entirely possible that paint fumes - although I had the windows and the door of the room wide open - have temporarily destroyed my wind.

(I'm trying hard not to be irritated with the kids but this seems to be the general pattern of ANY volunteer work I do - I'm buckling down and going "I will get this done if it kills me" and most of the other people are standing around and talking.

It bugs me though that I feel like I cannot take a deep enough breath. And if I try, I start coughing.

I did finish the blocks for the sea glass quilt but did not have the energy to think about laying them out or starting to set them together.

I also started cutting the pieces for the County Lines quilt using that Ooh-la-la fabric. As I have half-yard pieces of some of these, I feel a little less nervous about cutting. One of the challenges with fat quarter quilts is that sometimes the fat quarters are a bit smaller than what the pattern writer expects (or the fabric company uses GREAT HONKING LARGE white spaces on the selvedge to print information on and reduces the usable amount of fabric). More than once I've had to add an extra fat quarter or two to a quilt, or use scraps I had on hand, because although I cut perfectly, the fat quarter was just not quite big enough.

Lately, I've taken to vetting patterns carefully to be sure they aren't ones that assume a fat quarter is precisely 18 by 22 inches (oh, dream on, pattern writers) and that they can call for every bit of that 22 inches.