August Recap:

1) Finish the word Magic and backstitch border around magic [YES]
2) Finish Ever So Little Zebra [YES]
3) Start/Finish Ever So Little Lions [Started - not finished]
4) Work on Blackwork Dragon [nope]
5) Start stitching Wisdom [nope]

6) Piece "Trip Around the World" Quilt (machine piece) [YES]
7) Piece Ohio Star #10 and #11 [nope]
8) Quilt Cross Hatch Triangles 3 and 4, unbaste the rest [nope]

9) Work on website - start upgrade [YES]

Not bad considering I only stitched for 11.5 hours this month and quilted for 11 hours. Usually I average closer to 30 hours of stitching monthly - but it was a month of vacations without stitching - i'll do better next month :)

Hmmm.. I guess I'm stitching again. I've been stitching for an hour at lunch time at least - that's on the Ever So Little - Lions. I'm about halfway done maybe, this Ever So Little is more stitching than the others. Which reminds me to wrap up my goals for the month today :)

Work is busy which is always good, frustrating but busy and tonight I go back to my uncle's for dinner (it's been 3 weeks since i've been to visit), i'm looking forward to a relaxing weekend not worrying about the website.

I did work on the website last night, I started merging files that I modified a lot, a few more and then I'll move onto the templates on the site so I can start testing things as I do the changes instead of just doing this blindly.

Well it's breakfast time -bagel day is a day early this week :)

Hehehehe - I'm back :) I don't have many pictures as I didn't actually do much stitching - or any stitching I guess. I did however finishing piecing the second amish quilt and here it is:

Click for a larger image.
I'm so glad that is together now, I'm hoping to borrow my mom's sewing machine this weekend and start machine quilting it after a little practice on a smaller quilt I have ready.

Vacation was great - just having a week off to sleep in every day and not worry about things. We went to NYC for a few days and saw a few shows which were of course wonderful. Thursday and Friday we spent home. Of course I had to work on the website so I lost thursday to that completely, but friday I worked on the quilt (finishing all except the outter border), and then watched Alias - finishing up season 2! Saturday I had my work summer outing so we went to that and the rest of the night I did the same as friday (finished the quilt and watched Alias). Sunday after a day out and about I did manage to work on the website for a few hours - after watching 4 episodes from Alias Season 3... man that show is addicting!

Now it's back to work and getting up at 6am. I did manage to go running this morning which is great, we'll see how long that lasts :) I have so much to do on the website, even working on it monday, tuesday and friday night I won't be near half way yet. Next weekend I hope to devote a whole day to working on it again (that equates to about 6 hours).

Hmm.. stitching .. well I did stitch on the Ever So Little -Lions at stitch night on Thursday, Legends hasn't been touched, I spent my car time winding floss on bobbins and reading. Today at lunch I am going to start stitching again though, first priority is to finish the Lions, then work on Legends maybe next week at lunch. Something about summer gets me out of the stitching mood (sitting under a hot lamp to stitch at night is part of it).

Alright back to work - I finished going through emails from last week, I think it's time to head to the lab!

I played Hooky!

Wednesday was my day off to go to the beach house - well we were supposed to head up tuesday night and spend the night up there but plans changed and we had to drive into boston wednesday morning. So we got up to the beach house around noon - but had a blast of course. The water was great, it was hot hot hot outside but not muggy at all.

Then I got talked into staying over wednesday night and spending thursday up there too.. ho hum... so I called work and finally around 1 got a hold of someone and it was no problem so I enjoyed the day. Thursday was really cool out - maybe just 70 degrees. But the water was very warm and my boyfriend bought some boogy boards (?sp) so we had a real blast.

I even made it home for my stitching night with my friend - I didn't get any stitching done but we talked a lot and I got my new stamp sets cut apart and assembled. Of course it makes me want to play with my stamps :)

I made it to work today though - through some really heavy traffic this morning. I think I will work a long day to miss afternoon traffic as best as I can and make up some time from yesterday.
Next week is my vacation week - I can't wait! We head down to NJ tomorrow!! We do come back mid week but I still have the whole week off to relax, quilt - and work on the website :(

I don't plan on blogging next week - at the earliest maybe next thursday but I"m sure I will put picks up when I do - hopefully of Legends, Ever So Little - Lions, and my new quilt which I really need to finish piecing!!! Alright - I must work - and eat some food :)

Ack - no internet yesterday at work .. at all!

It was a long day just waiting with nothing to do. I did a little stitching (one hour) and finished the word Magic on Legends. I will have to take a picture tonight maybe. I'm actually going to continue working on the border for a little while - the bottom border around Wisdom, so that I can line up the last dragon better.

Last night I worked on the website for a few hours - hit a problem, I can't upgrade between 3.5.x and 4.0.x at all - I will have to install 4.0.x and then figure out all the changes I have made and re-make those changes! This is a huge problem and I have to email the owner about this now.

Tomorrow I have the day off to go back up to the beach house! Actually we're going up tonight after the gym (yes I'm back to the gym now as of last night) :) Then we'll spend tomorrow on the beach all day and head back tomorrow night - then back to work for 2 days.

We spent all last weekend at the beach - it was great. Saturday the water was really cold but it was hot outside and we still had a blast. Sunday it was cool outside (I wore pants part of the day) but the water was warmer so we spent more time in the water. We really had a great time and it's so nice to wake up to the ocean right there.

4 more days until we head down to NJ/NYC! It's strange not working at all next week - I'm really looking forward to it, even though we get back Tuesday night, I don't have to work until the following monday, giving me lots of time to work on the website and quilt!

Well since the internet is back up I have tons to do :) And I'm hungry...

I made it to stitch :)

And I sure am glad, even though I didn't actually stitch much. I had a meeting late at work but I was able to leave by 6, I of course hit a TON of traffic but made it to stitch around 7. I worked on the Ever So Little - Lions which is coming along really slowly as I didn't do much stitching last night.

Back home I worked on the website more (yea for me) - getting the second update completely finished. We are now up to version 3.5.9 from 3.5.7. The goal is to go to 4.0.X and I think after 3.5.10 I can go to 4.0.0 and then I just have to figure out how high in 4.0 I want to go. I should do a bit of research on that today if I can.

Today I work only until 4 I think, skipping lunch, I don't have much to eat for lunch anyway, just cereal and I haven't been in the stitching mood so I don't need a break really. Then I need to go to walmart and the grocery store tonight to get things for this weekend. Then tomorrow morning I head up bright and early to meet up with my aunt and uncle to head over to their beach house. A weekend of no worries!

Well last night was extremely productive - I got nothing done :)

Not exactly true, I worked late again, getting home around 7, then I started cleaning, got about half of the apartment done. Then I put laundry in and started up another Alias episode while eating my mac n cheese (mmm mmm yummy). Of course that episode ended with a shocker and I just HAD to watch the next one, besides the laundry was now in the drier so I couldn't go to the gym yet anyway.

That episode ended with a bigger cliff hanger so now that the laundry was done I had no excuses - but I skipped the gym and watched the last episode on the disk (this is only disk 2 of season 2 but I'm still waiting for disk 3 which may come tomorrow).

I was really bad then - (not last night - I pretty much just went to bed), but today I looked up Season 2 spoilers and read a few episode guides so I could get an idea about what was going on. Probably shouldn't have done that, but I really wanted to know without waiting. I skimmed and read glimpses, nothing major. Doesn't really bother me to know what's going to happen in about what timeframe, the show is very good and will hold my attention no matter what. That is why I am considering buying season 1 even though I've already watched it all!

Tonight is supposed to be stitch night - but I have a late meeting that I have not yet gotten out of, but I am trying :) If I can't then I will just go home and work on the website as I didn't do that last night either! Wow it's almost lunch time already - I should probably get something done!

Well no quilting last night ... I had to work late so I missed my quilting thing. But I did work on the website last night which is a bonus, got the first update completely finished now, tonight I will start the second update after I run some tests to make sure the other update didn't break anything.

No quilting or stitching yesterday either. I spent my lunch break trying to clone my laptop harddrive to recover everything but it didn't work - it has some bad sectors and couldn't last the hour and a half it takes to clone it. So instead I just installed XP on the new harddrive and then all the other software I might need. Then I was able to boot up my old harddrive for short periods of time and I copied all my files to the network and then booted up on my new harddrive and copied them off the network. So i didn't end up losing any files, just some software programs I had installed. No biggie really, it should run fine this weekend for playing MOHAA at least and I'll keep the old hard drive around in case I think of something on it that I forgot to copy off.

So that disaster is over, I now have both computers working again and a new monitor for my desktop which is really great! It's so light I can move it wherever I want and I put in on the coffee table last night so I could sit more comfortable on the couch working on the website.

Tonight I have to clean the apartment - the cockroaches are back again - my landlord has "exterminated" twice but the people upstairs live like pigs and they just hide for a bit, there's no lack of food for them up there and when they get really bad I start to see them. This really P***es me off because I bleach down my counters and there really is NO FOOD out for them. I vacuum on a weekly basis but still I have to see them. Last night it was a really large one (we're not talking like in the movies but about an inch long which is TOOOO big). It wasn't running either, it was wierd, I sprayed it with bleach which usually does nothing, but it started walking sluggishly, i think it was trying to drop it's egg sack, so I "chased" it by spraying it with bleach into the sink, then ran the hot water so it went down the drain while I had the trash compactor on. I hope that ended it's life. I ran the hot water for while after that to be sure it didnt' come back up :)
I really can't wait to move, there is NO way I am staying here another year, unfortunately I'm stuck until the end of May with these stupid things and my landlord isn't bright enough to kick the people upstairs out even though they barely pay rent, leave garbage and food all over the place (throw cigarette butts over their porch onto mine), and they've flooded their bathroom twice which results in water coming through my diningroom fan and ruining whatever I have on my table (or ruining my chair like last time because it was puddled there). I hate this so much but what can I do but wait for the lease to be up and try to find another place that's priced similarly for the same space or more.

We have so much furniture now and the apartment is quite large that I couldnt' find an apartment last May that we could fit into... hopefully this coming april it will be easier. UCK i'm so grossed out thinking about these things.

Progress pics!

First, here's Legends Progress at 72 hours (approximately):

Click for a larger image. I changed the colors on the word Magic to be the next darker shades (930 and 931 instead of 931 and 932 I think), as my fabric hid the lighter blue completely.

And after 3 hours of piecing last night - here is where my Trip Around the World quilt is at (7 hours progress):

click for larger image

So last night I decided the quilt was more important than the website as I have my quilt get-together tonight and I wanted to bring my progress. So the website will wait until Wednesday. I spent most of the night cutting the rest of the tubes apart and sewing them together. Some of the rows were completely crooked but once they are together I don't think you can tell as much. This is 2 tubes of strips, so I have to sew one more tube together, I think I will cute the next one in half though and do two smaller ones seperately in the hopes that they come out straighter. This probably won't happen until next week some time though, I need another 2 evenings to get the whole diamond done then I need to add the borders still.

No gym last night which was bad, but I really wanted to finish this much. Tonight after my quilt thing I will definately go to the gym, and tomorrow I need to clean, work on the website and go to the gym, sounds manageable.
My new monitor came in - it looks good too and it's so light!! Now I just have to get rid of my 21" crt which weighs a ton :) And I have my livingroom end table back because the new monitor takes up a tiny space on it - makes the whole room look larger :) My harddrive also arrived so I"m going to go try ghosting that right now so maybe my laptop will be back to working this afternoon - keeping fingers crossed.

Oh - to answer Carol's question, we're not really doing much for vacation, I'm just taking the week off, we have a wedding in NJ on the 20th to attend, then we're going to NYC for 2 nights to see Phantom of the Opera and Blue Man Group and do some general sight seeing. Tuesday on the way back home we'll stop at Six Flags in CT and then visit my sister for dinner. That leaves Wednesday, THursday and Friday to just relax and get things done (work on the website) before my boyfriend starts school up again the following monday....

So... 7 more work days until vacation!!!

A very interesting weekend. But I will keep this short. (relatively)

Legends of the Dragons, I did not get a chance to work on it this weekend - but last week I finished backstitching the border around Magic. So today at lunch I hope to start the word "Magic". I've been winding the project floss for this onto bobbins and would like to get that done before I start on Wisdom anyway.

Amish Quilt (the new one) - I started the new quilt this weekend - Sunday to be exact, I ironed and cut strips then sewed two tubes together which took forever. I started cutting one tube apart and got about 9 strips done, they take a while to cut because my tubes don't fold in half exactly and i have to fuddle with them each cut to make sure they are cutting straight and I get squares instead of squewed squares.

Website - I started updating it yesterday, took a bit of work actually but finally got the update script to work and got the list of files that wouldn't update automatically (this is for the first update only, i think there are 5 or 6 updates total). I will get back to this tonight for a bit and then back to quilting again.

Saturday I went to my stamp party and bought my stamp stuff, it won't arrive until august 25th or so, hopefully by then I"ll be done with piecing my quilt and I can start making some stuff. Once I get my laptop harddrive ghosted (if it works) and I can access all my pictures again, I'm going to send a bunch to walmart to print out and make some scrapbook pages with them. Plus I'll get some beach pictures next week of my cousins.

This week is going to be a long week - I have a lot to get done and hopefully I can get out early on Friday (which means long days until friday).
Countdown - 2 weeks until vacation!!!

Aaaaaag! What a night!

Well I headed out after work - up to my uncle's to meet up with my boyfriend and just hang out for the night. He calls me a few minutes after I had left to tell me his car had died! He was at a truck stop in NH waiting for a tow truck. And our AAA had just run out at the end of July and I hadn't renewed yet (because I have to call to do it since we moved and it had to be tranferred)... needless to say I did the transfer today just in case now! But that didn't help last night.

So he thinks his waterpump went. So he had the car towed to my uncle's and we looked at it. It's leaking coolant all over and makes a noise so my uncle agreed that it's probably the pump. This is not an easy thing to replace on an Audi.. the whole front end must be taken off and the radiator and such disconnected. But he's decided to do it himself because it's about a 12 hour job for a mechanic which means it would cost 1000 in just labor, while he's at it he's going to change the timing belt too which he needs anyway.

That's a new process, he's going to start it next week after he gets the parts he's ordering tonight.

As for me - I just have to go back up tonight if I want to see him at all because he won't be back down until tomorrow. So I'll be going home and then back up to NH for the night then back home tomorrow for my stamp party :)

Almost time to go home - I'm leaving early today so I should pay attention to my conference call now so I can head out as soon as I'm done.

Another day - and I've been winding floss :)

I had a great dinner at my aunt's last night, steak, corn on the cob and green beans. It was really good. Then I drew out a plan for my new quilt based on the quilt she has hanging which is a Trip Around the World but they do something different with the colors and I like the effect so I'm going to mimic it with my own colors.

Then I wound floss. I didn't have many plastic bobbins left but I filled what I did have. I ordered 500 plastic bobbins on ebay yesterday, that should keep me busy for a while :) I also ordered another plastic case to hold floss and 2 small plastic cases to hold project floss which is the first thing I'm winding to make carrying my stuff easier. Eventually I will need probably 6 plastic cases total and I have 2 right now (actually I have 4 but 1 is for beads and another for kreiniks).

I also started reading "The Lord of the Flies" again (I read it in high school), but my boyfriend bought the hardcover edition of that and "Things Fall Apart" (also read in high school), because I wanted to read them over now that I'm a bit more mature and more likely to understand them. I'm looking forward to getting a few more classics in hard cover but our bookcase is full now so I shouldn't be going on a buying spree.

I've been spending a lot of money lately. I need to slow down my spending - but I have been working on the website which will help a lot when I get paid from that. If I get that up and running by the end of August and paid then I have no worries and if I stop spending now, some of that money will go towards christmas spending :)

Well enough about that - I'm playing with some software at work now and of course hitting more walls so now i'm reading the manual to see if that will help... back to fun stuff :)

Happy Dance Picture :)

There's the second Zebra

And Legends progress:

Click for larger image.

I finally got my camera software loaded onto my desktop so I could get these pictures off the camera. Then I spent the rest of the night working on the website which I'm happy to say is now working on my local machine so I can start upgrading it this weekend! I can't wait until that's done!!!!

No stitching last night, I worked until 9 then I watched "Alfie" while winding some floss (i'm slowly converting my stitch bow collection to regular bobbins because they will take less storage space and not get tangled while I'm stitching). We'll see how that goes - I have every dmc color plus duplicates so i'm not hopeful that this will get done anytime soon, plus I need to buy some more plastic bobbins and bobbin boxes.

I finally got the software at work that i'm trying to test out working so today I hope to test it out and have some results by the end of the day. Then tonight i go to my aunt's for dinner and maybe i'll get a little stitching done. For now -it's off to have fun with work :)

Uck - still no pictures it's been a long two days fighting with computers. With my laptop harddrive out I've been using my desktop at home. Well I was working on the website last night trying to get that to work locally on my machine at home and it was so close, and then I installed some things that have completely messed it up - completely, it won't open at all now! I was working on that until 10 last night and I finally gave up for the night. This came after a day at work fighting with a program that just wouldn't work for me.

So then I watched the last hour of The Sixth Sense (on tv), while finishing up the Ever So Little - Zebra - I know I really need some pictures but I didn't even boot my computer into windows last night, hopefully I will do that tonight.

At lunch today I hope to work on Legends for a bit, finally, it's been a while!
And today I've been wrestling with a new computer program that I just installed and I'm supposed to be evaluating but it's causing problems!

UGGGGGGG... just had to let that out.

Anyhow - I did a little shopping this morning and ordered a new laptop hard drive - 60GB (i had a 40), and it was only 80 dollars or so. Then I also ordered a flat panel 17" monitor for only 200 dollars and a DVD burner for my computer (another 40 dollars). So I spent a lot of money but all on good stuff and I can't wait to fix my laptop and play with my new monitor. Finally get rid of the 21" monitor that i have hogging half my livingroom!

That stuff might arrive by this weekend which would be really great but I can't ghost my hard drive until monday -well maybe i can, i might bring home the stuff for it and try it out on my desktop. Lots of fun stuff.

So tonight will be more working on the website, i'm going to try to uninstall a bunch of stuff then start over installing things. My original problem was getting the SSL cert stuff working but I seem to have messed up the php stuff, but if i can get it back to the point it was at before messing with it i'll be a happy camper! And I can start the upgrade process this weekend maybe.

Hopefully pics tomorrow...

August Goals:

1) Finish the word Magic and backstitch border around magic
2) Finish Ever So Little Zebra
3) Start/Finish Ever So Little Lions
4) Work on Blackwork Dragon
5) Start stitching Wisdom

6) Piece "Trip Around the World" Quilt (machine piece)
7) Piece Ohio Star #10 and #11
8) Quilt Cross Hatch Triangles 3 and 4, unbaste the rest

9) Work on website - start upgrade

Monday. And no pictures :( Ho hum. My laptop hard drive is dying. Rather slowly but still dying. I currently do not have it in my laptop at all in the hopes that if I buy a new one I can ghost this one and have an exact replica of it. So my laptop is not being used in windows at all which means I have no photo software to download pictures off my camera.

I do have another computer, my desktop computer which is dual boot (has windows and linux). So I will try to find my HP software and install it on my desktop tonight to get some pictures of my stitching progres... progress.... yes there is progress.

Let's see, I had friday off to take the GRE's, which didn't go too badly. Then I unwound the rest of friday watching Alias. My boyfriend got home and we watched the rest of Alias Season 1 and the movie The Usual Suspects. I really can't wait to watch season 2!!!

Saturday we drove back home to my parent's house, in the car I stitched on the second Ever So Little - Zebra that I started Thursday night at stitch night. The rest of Saturday I spent helping out my dad clean out the attic - and I think i'm paying for that (i'm allergic to dust horribly and that with the mold I think is making me sick.).

Saturday night I crashed around 10 and Sunday I slept in until 10 :) Then we headed home after lunch with a desk for the bedroom, my parents will get it back some time after I can afford to buy a new desk but for now this was going unused so I borrowed it :)

After getting that all set up and eating plenty of ice cream and other junk food I decided to work a bit more on my Ever So Little - Zebra, I now have only 1 and 1/2 stripes left to finish him, maybe i can finish him at lunch today... oh that reminds me - I must put up my goals for the month :)

Legends didn't get any attention, this month I hope to finish the border around Magic and the word Magic and start on Wisdom at some point but first my focus will be on my new quilt. And now I must check out how I did on my goals this month and set some new ones!