Gah! Is It Friday Again Already?!

The weeks fly by in a whirl of making lunches and folding laundry and cuddling little girls. There are worse ways for a week to fly by, no? Today is a lovely, cool, rainy day and both Grace and Violet are wearing LONG SLEEVES. Shocking! Oh, how I love days like this... I need to plan meals for my next grocery shopping run, and I fear that today's weather means I will be tempted to do nothing but soup and stew and warm, homey comforting foods. Foods which will not taste as good when this nice weather goes away, I suspect.

Rob's mom had her surgery this week and we got some very wonderful news afterwards-- the growth turned out not to be cancer at all! This was a big surprise to everyone and we are feeling very grateful. It turns out it was just the base of where her tonsil used to be acting all weird. Crazy, right? And my parents have a contract signed for a house in the Chicago area, so hopefully they won't be homeless for much longer. They are living right now in a temporary furnished apartment with nearly all their belongings in storage, and I know the sense of unsettled transiency is wearing on them.

I have entirely lost my sewing mojo. I have not sewn a single stitch in about a week now, probably the longest I've gone since Violet's newborn days. I'm not entirely sure why, but I suspect it is a combined result of a) a few failed projects that came in succession (ugly pants for Violet! a non-cute dress for Grace!), b) this cooler weather we've been having (for which I have more clothes that I like, fit into, etc, thus reducing my desperate sewing motivation of, "I have NOTHING TO WEARRRRRRRRR!"), and c) new fall television shows (How I Met Your Mother! Glee! Project Runway!). I am starting to feel the tiniest return of my itch to sew, so hopefully soon I will be happily slicing through fabric and listening to the whir of my serger. The first thing that I really must do is put together a Halloween costume for Grace. That's still a long time from now, but at my current rate of zero sewing projects completed per week, I really should buckle down. The other thing that I suspect might jumpstart my sewing motivation is this book, which I pre-ordered this week and cannot WAIT for. For the uninitiated, Japanese craft books (as well as Japanese textiles) are a thing in sewing/crafting circles. However, they are usually, you guessed it, in Japanese. The brave among us forge ahead anyway, relying on the pictures and diagrams and metric measurements, but I have not been so intrepid. This one, however, has been translated and published for the American market and I am SUPER DUPER EXCITED, especially because the sizing is just perfect for the, uh, consumers of my sewing efforts. It is girls' sizes 4-7, and I can easily grade the patterns down a size to fit Grace right now, and then I can use it for the years ahead.

So I've been on Facebook for a while now and I've so enjoyed catching up on with people from past bits of my life. Scrolling through all those people makes me realize that I am old (well, at least, not young) and that people take such different paths, even when they start from the same places. However, I think one of my favorite parts of Facebook might be the suggested friends-- you know, people who you have friends in common with that Facebook's algorithms think you might know. They are usually people who I do know but am not quite close enough with to "friend". (That's "friend" as a verb, of course.) The more interesting people, though, are those who I don't actually know and who have friends in common with me who I know from totally different realms of life. For instance, there is one person out there who knows both my grad student advisor from the astronomy program at the University of Texas and the Indian-born guitar player I played with at our church in New Haven. Or perhaps more amazingly, there is someone who knows that same guitar player from New Haven (who grew up in India, went to grad school in North Carolina, and now lives in Orlando), a college friend of mine from Texas A&M, a childhood friend from where I grew up in a suburb of Fort Worth, and someone I now go to church with here in Dallas. And perhaps most unlikely of all, there is someone who is friends with 17 of my friends but I have no idea who they are-- in fact, I have never heard of them in my life. Ah, Facebook... Rob has turned a bit sour on the whole phenomenon (too many quizzes, I suppose) but I am hooked.