Brian and I google everything. With me it’s usually cross stitch, recipes, gardening, celebrities, etc. Brian looks up Ford Mustangs, stocks, Beatles, digital cameras (still waiting for him to pick one out) and American Flyer trains. With me being at the age called perimenopause, weird things start to happen, so I typed in ‘the problem’. I happened upon a message board and you know what, what I had was nothing compared to what these poor women were experiencing. This one lady stopped posting last May and I hope she is okay. I feel like I am definitely having problems due to hormones and fibroids. I just ordered two books from Amazon about fibroids. The one book (only 75¢) is by a lady who had a great website called ‘Sex, lies and fibroids’. I can’t get on the site anymore. I could so relate to her! It’s so much fun being in my late 40s.
I also ordered two more cross stitch books– The Cross Stitcher’s Bible and also the CSB Project Book by Jane Greenoff. I’ve been eyeing these two up, so the prices were good, so I ordered them.
Stitchingwise-THE SB question was about ‘one over one’-I’ve done it a few times and it’s hard. I have a few designs that I want to do where you do the lady’s face ‘one over one’.
I was going through my sewing cabinet and ran across a sweet baby design I had half completed about 7 yrs ago. I decided it needed to be finished and I would give it to someone who is expecting. The question was ‘who’? So I remembered a woman in my stitching group just announced her 3rd baby is going to be a girl. She has 10 yr old twin boys! So to me, she is the perfect recipient for the baby gift which will be made into a photo album cover. It’s almost finished and I can see why I put it down-it has some tricky spots in it. I’ll share a photo soon.

Did you miss me? We signed away a great sum of money for the kitchen yesterday, so that is paid for now. The man who has been working with us had trouble with the order form. He double checked to make sure my glaze was on it and it wasn’t (that’s one reason why I orderd from this cabinet company because I loved this color). He got that on and the computer was taxing us for everything. We bought the cabinets, etc in Delaware (tax free). Even though we live in Penna. it won’t be taxed because we are getting them installed by The Home Depot. He needed help to get that off. We wasted a great deal of time waiting. We did get all 31 knob and pulls for free (a special). They are pretty-they have a leaf design (brass) that looks like it is a patina with a white wash.


We went to pay and our card associated with our home equity loan got declined (it’s new!) I ended up writing a check and that went through. I need to talk to the bank about the plastic.
We rushed to church and then the three of us went to a Chinese restaurant. My IBS has been really bad and I ordered the wrong thing-shrimp and asparagus. I should know better. I have not been eating right at all. Greasy pizza and corned beef this past week-I am indeed nuts. My tummy is still spazzing once in a while.
Now the waiting game. The cabinets may not be in for 4-6 weeks, hopefully sooner. And may all this be completed by May 1st as stated on the form. My poor guts can’t take too much more.

Having a good Irish name and a Brian and a Sean, we are indeed having corned beef and cabbage for dinner tonight. It’s in the crockpot cooking as I type. I’m a little Irish, not much, but just enough. My great grandmom’s people were from County Cork-the Deere relatives.
My brother just emailed me the family crest yesterday. To explain why my brother is sending this, I am married to my sister-in-law’s first cousin, so they have the same last names. There is also a famous meteorologist from the 1800s with the same name (thanks to my brother for that info too)! Maybe there will be a famous forecaster in this day and age with the same name, my Sean!

I treated myself to some green and white flowers for today.

That’s my great grandmom’s yo yo quilt on the sofa.

I think that is my brother Dave’s expression. : )
What I am referring to is finding the homepage of an wonderful family that I ran across last night. I am a friend of one of the daughters (I hope I still am). We went to community college together, she was a bridesmaid in my wedding and we pretty much kept in touch until about 2001. Then she stopped sending her Christmas newsletters. From googling her name I found out she started a tutoring business (like a Sylvan Learning Center) and has three children that keep her busy. I’d love to know how she is doing. I know she located in the midwest and all, but I do miss hearing from her. I even ran across a photo of her oldest daughter on her high school website. I can’t believe that is the little baby I held so long ago on my friend’s visit with her mom. I wonder if she still has the pillow I cross stitched for her? (Mrs. P. the matriarch-looks great!)
Anyway, I got to catch up with this family of 11 children (that is amazing in itself) and saw photos and remembered names. Read with tears in my eyes that they lost one of the sisters. Smiled at the baby photos. The youngest sister really contributes to this site and she is an amazing lady. If anyone wants to say ‘hi’ (they have my blog address), please do.

I watch the rebroadcasts of The Daily Show and The Stephen Colbert Show in the morning. Both are satirical views of politics and current events. The Daily Show had a story today about bird hunting. Though nothing new (according to Brian), I found it quite appalling as an animal lover. People go and order say 4 pheasants at $20 each. They can get a bird dog too. They take the birds out of a shed (where they are raised or kept) and the worker ‘plants’ them in the brush. The dog then sniffs them out (this was the only funny part) and the bird gets scared and starts to fly away and then the hunter takes aim and most of the time kills it. The thrill to them is killing a frightened planted bird? I hate hunting of all kinds. I have to put up with a trigger happy neighbor who killed a groundhog in my yard one time without me knowing he was in the yard or that he was going to fire his weapon. That scared the beejeebers out of me.

I meant to write about the Cone-man’s trip to Finland days ago! This was his best show in ages. The last good ones were when he was in Canada a few years ago. So Conan, your forte is going out amongst ‘your’ people and doing things. We need to see your long legs-lol. I am sure this will be in reruns a few times. The whole Finland thing happened when Conan thought he resembled the lady president Targa (close I think)-he does in a way with his pale skin and red hair. He got to meet her too.
Seeing him knocking on doors of apartments to meet fans and no one answering was pretty funny. Seeing him on a dog sled-ha!
I’d love to invite him to ‘Mushroomland’ here in Penna. I can see him harvesting the mushrooms in his white hair net! We could race him in our Tauruses! (He says he still has a ’92 Taurus-we have a ’98 and ’00). I’d love it.
Carl Reiner in on Leno right now. He is one of my favorite guys in his age group (he’s about to turn 84). He’s always been funny, even when he had hair back on the Dick Van Dyke Show.

The contractor came this afternoon. I just signed away a great deal of moola-but it will be so worth it! I have a lot of emotions flowing through me-excitement, apprehension, anxiousness, etc.! Saturday we will go back to the Home Depot and order and pay for the cabinets. All in all, 2 months isn’t that long to wait (we started this in the middle of January). A lot of things have to be in sync-like having the appliances delivered at the right time so the workers can have the old ones disconnected so the delivery guys can haul away the old stuff. And Bill (the guy) said if we ever resell the house we will get something like 104% back in our investment. He said to try and sell a house with outdated electrical work in the kitchen is a no-no. We’ve had the electric reworked a few times-in the family room and for the central air.
Guess what caught my eye on the tv-an inflatable hot tub! This commercial had a guy sitting in one and the secretary came along and handed him papers to go over. Sean looked up inflatable ones on the web and they are like $800-1k! Ouch! But if I had one last night, I bet that knot or whatever in my back would have worked itself out in no time.
My back was so much better today (not my stomach though). I sat again with the heating pad on it when I got up this morning. It didn’t keep me awake last night, thank goodness. I think I pulled something by unscrewing and emptying about 15 bottles of old beverages-really! Think about how you are positioned over the sink when you would do this.
My van is back from inspection and my purse is over $200 lighter. It needed a new turn signal switch. My brother works at the sister station and the guy said he was giving me a 10% discount-yeah on the part-I got $7 off. Big deal.
Stitchingwise-I had to put Independence Hall down for a few days. It’s more than half finished. I picked up Cape May. That blue is hard to work on too. Since I am starting at the top of a rectangle, I flipped the piece and am stitching upsidedown. Us lefties can do that. : )

I am always getting various aches and pains. I know in part this is from having Lyme Disease as it never fully goes away. I know I’m not a kid anymore. I don’t know what I did (well I do know-bending, moving furniture, pulling a too heavy trash out of the can, sitting in the adirondack chair, tensing while getting my teeth cleaned by Carla the carver-you get the picture). After the dentist, I went to the food store. I had lifted heavy drinks and had to pick up a display of cough drop packets I knocked down). So I’m standing there and holy you know what-feels like a drill is hitting my left shoulder blade. I think I was making a few faces as the lady behind me was looking at me oddly. I got all the groceries in the van (it was an ebbing pain) and got home and promptly had Sean unload all the bags. He also had to rub the Icy hot on me. I got a Tylenol and a water and sat down and it felt better. When I had to get dinner set up (I had precooked fried chicken on sale) I had one more episode of stabbing pain when I turned a certain way. I did eat, but Sean suggested the heating pad. I utilized that all evening and I do feel better.
Tv was good-I watched the first hour of American Idol with Sean, then a new show called Sons and Daughters (from the producer of Saturday Night Live and some of it is improvised) and The Amazing Race. I am working diligently on a charity square-Independence Hall. Something didn’t look quite right. The bricks are brown in the chart! So I am backstitching the brown with some rust to make it look like the real building which I’ve been in a few times. It’s doing the trick, but it’s time consuming.
Tomorrow the contractor guy wants to look at the kitchen again. It looks like crap right now. I didn’t feel like doing anything tonight. Brian got me a few more crates, but at 8 pm, I was done for the evening. The guys dropped off the van for me at the station for inspection. No way could I drive again.
Well, I hope I have a good night. Please, oh please. ; )