Day 30: Reporting from Thunder Bay

Okay.  This was not the smoothest day I've ever had.  Extra long orthodontist appointment (Emily), last minute packing because there's been no time to pack ahead, a flight that was delayed 1 1/2 hours.

There have been no stunning photos taken.  No revelations (though quite a bit of time to read).  No time to sightsee.

I did, however, make the outside of my travel journal from the packaging from my dinner morsel.

While it isn't perfect - mostly because I didn't dare pack scissors,,, - I think I totally impressed the heck out of my seat buddy.  I'm hindered in continuing because I forgot to pack a glue stick.  I'm sure I'll come up with one tomorrow.

Day 29: School's out for the summer

I can't pass through this day without humming some portion of that song to myself.  Was that really all we played on that day when I was in school?

Anyway, I survived it.  Somehow the last few days of school for my kids always seems like a massive rush for me.  No matter how I plan ahead, it always seems to be a half-assed scramble to the finish line.  Same old, same old, this year.  So any chances of art were pretty much zero today.

But I will take just the smallest bit of creative credit for these:

Daniel with his reading award

Emily with her grad diploma

Have I said lately how proud I am of my kids?

I have to say though, two days in June auditoriums has left me rather washed out ... I'm going to go fall into bed now.

Day 28: One day of relative freedom left...

The kids are out of  school tomorrow.

Half of me always looks forward to this.  Getting the household ball rolling in time for the kids to make it to school is always a challenge for me.  When we can switch to getting up when we want to and doing stuff when we want to really takes the pressure off me.

However, it also means that I enter Introvert Hell.  Company, 24/7.  Sigh.

This week's creative work involves Teachers' Gifts.  I think I am looking forward to next year when I don't have to do anything for Emily's teachers.

Open

So what are they?  Origami paper boxes with hand knit scarves and a lavender sachet for good measure.  As always, the kids chose the colours of their gifts.

Closed

Whew.  Done with time to spare.  Yeah, me.

Day 27: OMG, someone is reading my blog!

I was just running through the blogs I check out and my cousin Helen commented about my blog: http://viewsfrommidlife.blogspot.com/ .  It's nice to know someone is out there!  I'll have to pick up the pace on the face project now that she went to all that effort.  The other pictures are awesome, too.  Too bad I don't have a dog who'll keep still that long.

Monday is organizing day so Before:

My desk

and After:



Though, to be honest, mostly I scraped off the excess and put it in the pile to the right.  My studio rather took the brunt of the renovations downstairs.  If I thought I had everything sorted, that's gone by the boards now.  But I couldn't start finishing things up here until I had one surface clear and one seat empty.

Of course, I am getting to the difficult questions now.  Like how do you store things like this?

In case, you're wondering: it's a pin board for drying round things.

I also noticed that I should change my calendar.  This isn't a good sign for my work ethic.

Emily 4

For the second time, I have had a laptop accident.  Thankfully this one only broke the power cord, which is annoyingly expensive but replaceable.  It did cause a slight delay in the post, however.

Emily wanted to post this today.  It took multiple tries to get it on film.  Gravity sucks (and dog tails swish).

Day 25: Burn! Burn! Burn! (to Everything There Is a Season)

A massively productive day for me today.

I took some stuff to a friend's garage sale.  I didn't intend to stay but I ended up staying and selling some stuff.  I made about twenty dollars (whoo hoo) and didn't bring the box of extra stuff back(WHOO HOO).

The kids and I arranged the cranes to count them and I made 1055 cranes.  I won't include a photo since I had so many yesterday.

I had a long nap.  I know, I know, this doesn't sound productive but I've been rather burning my candle at both ends lately and I'm bagged.  Squeezing in extra sleep is a huge bonus.

I burned the CD's for both churches' July services today.  During the summer, I get four Sundays off.  It is becoming harder to find (and pay for) a substitute organist.  For the last few years, I have been recording the hymns and burning them onto CD's to be played while I'm away.  This is a fair amount of extra work for me but I'm developing a library so I don't have to record them all every year.

For some reason, it is always an exercise in technical frustration.  Every year, the computer comes up with new and interesting ways to fail.  This year, Mark needed to uninstall and upgrade the CD burning program.  Why?  Who knows.  Last year, we had trouble with the headphones being 'seized' by another program.  Two years ago, random failure of the ejection of the CD tray.  Given that all of this technology works fine separately, I'm assuming the components don't play well with others.

Still, I have burned them all!

And five days ahead of time, so I can drop them off at church tomorrow and essentially be done before my vacation.  Not a bad day.

Day 24: Yippee!

What is this?

This is a box of approximately 1000 cranes.  Hand folded origami cranes.  To raise money for Japanese tsunami relief.  I raised $585 to be doubled by Mark's company, AMD.

They were folded from 2" square pieces of paper.

It is traditional to fold the last crane from a square of gold foil paper.

Now, where was I?

P.S.  Happy Birthday, Mark.