Working on things

Actually, for me, contentment does come from a couple of things:

1. Working on stuff and feeling like I'm making progress

2. The good little things of life - a nice cup of tea, an amusing t-shirt to wear, good-smelling soap to wash my face with, quiet when I want quiet.

I had both #1 and #2 this weekend.

I did go in and do some work on Friday and Saturday; I mostly formatted the paper for re-submission to another journal. (An interesting comparison: the first place I submitted it, the Instructions to Authors were 14 pages long and full of dire warnings; for the current journal it's about 2 and one of the suggestions does not even match the manner in which recent papers in the journal have been formatted.) I do still have to make the map, which I have been dragging my feet on because I know it's going to be kind of a pain. (Ah, if I were still at ISU! I could go over to their Center for Technology and show the guy what I wanted and he'd produce the map FOR me. Alas, here, we have no such office so those of us who are not super-experts are still left to try to manage on our own. And unlike the translation, there's really no one readily available to hire).

Saturday I came in and sorted a few more soil samples, and also  (dun-dun-DUN) printed out a whole new whack of IRS forms, so I can re-do my taxes (I got some additional paperwork last week, and also, I think I derped how you deal with the K-1 forms. I'm going to have to read the detailed instructions of what-number-goes-where again). That's Tuesday afternoon's duty, as next week is so full of other stuff that I know I won't get the taxes done then, and they really need to be in by the 15th. (I COULD guesstimate what I owe and file an extension, but I'm close enough to done, I think, that it's better just to BE done).

Yes, I could hire someone, and that would probably be the better part of valor in my case, but I'm just stubborn enough to go, "I earned a Ph.D., dammit, I should be smart enough to handle this on my own." (Nevermind that my parents - with 2 Ph.D.s between them and far more years of experience than I have are going to a preparer)

In more fun progress, I finished the Mixtape quilt. Photos will come - well, later. It's supposed to rain all week and unless I can grab a quick photo when I get home this afternoon, I'll have to wait. I also sewed a few more blocks for the ongoing quilt (including a couple featuring jellybeans, in honor of it being Easter). And I finally put together one of my Spoonflower purchases: C the bear (If I read the little signature on him right, he is designed by someone named Carlos Lopez). This is just a simple cut-and-sew panel (as you can see), but it's a cute little bear and I just like the design - the sweater, the slightly bewildered expression, the look as if it is a pencil drawing. I stuffed the bear quite firmly - he has a narrow neck and if you don't stuff things with narrow necks tightly, they get floppy.

I've mentioned before how these kind of cut-and-sew panels were a part of my childhood; I had a number of toys made from them.

Time was when, there was a whole rack of them in fabric stores. Once in a while you will see one now, but not as much as there were back in the 70s and early 80s. Some of the characters were licensed characters - I think I had a Mickey Mouse pillow and I seem to remember when Strawberry Shortcake had her first popularity, there were cut-and-sew panels of the main characters from that. But others were just characters designed by someone at the fabric company: my favorite, when I was a kid, was a giraffe named George, but I also had a blue teddy bear and a burgundy-red cat named Charlie. (I don't remember the bear's name, if he had one. I didn't like him as well as George or Charlie). I think I learned to use a sewing machine putting one of those panels together. And you could also buy already-made dolls from that format: many of the advertising-freebee dolls were like that. (I had a Tony the Tiger and a Jolly Green Giant, later on I bought lots more of those kinds of dolls when I started collecting advertising-premium toys as a teen). Even before my time, when feed sacks were popular, there were dolls and toys printed on feedsacks....so it makes me happy to see the cut-and-sew toy live on through places like Spoonflower. (I also have a couple more to do: a King Charles spaniel pillow in the style of the Staffordshire china spaniels, which I will use as a sofa pillow because the colors go and because it amuses me. And I have a much more complex toy, a corgi puppy that I think I will have to handsew because it has gussets and darts and things to give it more of a shape - it's not really like the flat cut-and-sew panels but more like an actual 3-D toy.

However, this afternoon, if the weather holds, I think it's time to start preparing the garden. I need to get beans in soon if I'm going to do beans, and also I need to clear out all the junk that moved in and grew last summer when I was suffering too badly with hives to feel like dealing with more potentially-allergenic stuff. The hives are (mostly) under control now so I think I can start doing garden-work again. I also bought a couple of packets of nasturtium seeds - I think my front garden is going to be nasturtiums and either zinnias or (if I can find them) calendulas this summer. (Zinnias are not the *best* choice as they tend to get powdery mildew here, but calendulas are sometimes hard to find).