Friday Fill-in

1. If you were a famous movie star, what types of movies would you star in?   Romantic comedies for sure.  Or maybe action if I could get my butt into shape.  =)
2. What is a vacation you would like to take if money were no object?  Someplace exotic, like Africa or maybe Australia and New Zealand.
3. Did you have pets growing up? Yep!  And because if it I feel like life isn’t complete without 4-legged kids.  I grew up with Golden Retrievers, guinea pigs, and eventually cats.  And I had a horse and a pony, but that was when I was 21.
4. What do you do for exercise? I chase after a very active 20 month old.  And honestly, that’s about it..
5. What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received as a MilSpouse?  It's not really advice anyone gave me, but more of what I've picked up along the way - attitude is everything.  Took me a while to figure that one out, but I finally did.  Also, choose your friends wisely.

Blizzard Bloghop

I thought this might be fun so here’s my intro for the bloghop.

I’m Monica.  I’ve been married to Mark for almost 5 years and we have a 20 month old daughter, Abbie and two weinas (Dachshunds), Oliver and Sadie.  I’m 30 years old. (sidenote: I read 4-5 people intro’s on the bloghop and every single one of them put that they’re 20-something.  I find that highly amusing.)  So maybe I should say I’m 30-something so I can fit in with the cool kids.  But I’m not really 30-something.  I’m 30.  =)

Anyway, after 5 moves in 5 years, we’ve landed in Italy.  This blog is pretty much my online diary (and has been for almost 3 years now) of my life.   I write about everything from marriage, parenting, traveling, quilting, photography, the military lifestyle, living overseas to my random babbling and everything in between.  I use this blog to keep family and friends back home (and around the world) in the loop with what we’ve been up to and I use it as cheap therapy to get my feelings out and receive people’s feedback.

Thanks for stopping by!  I hope you stick around.

Air conditioning?

As I posted about before, we moved our bedroom upstairs in our house.  I love having our room up there, but I am VERY nervous about spending the warmer months up there. 

This part of Italy gets VERY hot and humid in the summer, and last summer, when we were downstairs, with the A/C unit right outside our door, I had issues sleeping because I was so hot.  Now that we’re upstairs, I think it’s going to be even hotter, and we won’t have the A/C unit right outside our door.  I’m wanting to get an A/C unit for our room upstairs, but Mark doesn’t seem to be that interested in getting one.

There’s no such thing as central air/heat in Italy.  Most, if not all, houses are heated by radiators, unless they’re heated by a wood-burning fireplace.  We have one TINY A/C unit, that they installed before we moved in, to cool off our entire house in the summer.  As you can imagine, that doesn’t work out so well.  So I’d really like to get another one for upstairs, but I’ve heard that they can be a real pain because of the water they give off and also you have to vent them somewhere.  If we had to vent it out the window that would pretty much defeat the purpose of having an A/C unit upstairs because the windows here open from the center.  I can either swing both sides of the windows open completely, or I can tip the top of the window open about 8-10 inches.  They don’t have windows here like they do in the States, that mostly just slide up and down.

So what would you do?  Ask the landlord to put in another unit (but we’d have the pay for it), get a portable unit ourselves that we could sell when we leave, or just suck it up and deal with the heat?

Postage Stamp Quilt Along progress

I haven’t been quilting as much as I should be lately.  I’m not sure why, but I guess I haven’t been in the mood.  It seems that when I get Abbie down for a nap or to bed, I just want to relax, and quilting doesn’t seem relaxing to me right now for some reason.

But I have made some progress on my postage stamp quilt.  I’m still figuring out what I’m doing with this quilting stuff and I have issues getting my seams straight.  You’d think it would be easy to sew in a straight line, but I think I have issues lining the fabric up more than anything.  And I didn’t know if I should use the tops or the bottoms of the wavy edges as my guide so I tried to go through the middle and that didn’t always work.  My strips are definitely not even, by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it’ll come together okay anyway.

These strips my look straight, but they’re not…  They’re more straight-ish. 

So then when I went to cut them again, it made it a little difficult because I’d try to line up the bottom edge with a line on my cutting mat, and since it wasn’t exactly straight, cutting was a challenge.  But I got them all cut apart.

And now I’m in the process of sewing them back together in blocks like this.  All the corners of those small squares are supposed to line up perfectly, and mine aren’t even close.  Oops.  But I’m having fun.  I have 3 blocks done, and I have a whole bunch more to do, so I’d better to get work!!

My 2nd pair of boots.

I really love my first pair of boots that I got last month.  I love them.  If I could wear them every day, I would.  I had ordered a 2nd pair of boots last month because that was Mark’s Christmas gift to me.  I’m not sure why, but I ordered a size 11 thinking they were going to run small, but when I got them they were WAY too big.  (I normally wear a size 9.5.)  I could take them off without unzipping them they were so big.  So I returned them and didn’t order another pair in a smaller size because I was unsure of them. 

Last week I was doing my daily browsing on Amazon.com and came across a pair of Teva boots that I loved.  I kind of bought them on a whim.  They had them in my size and the color I wanted and I took that as a sign from God that they were meant to be mine.  PLUS they were $83 instead of $140…

I got them today, and I LOVE them!!!  Love, love, LOVE them!  They fit perfectly, I love the color, and the leather is really, really soft.  Plus they look great under jeans or over them!  I’m so stinkin’ excited!!!

This picture is more of what the true color is.  I’m not sure why they look so dark in the first picture.

Anyway, I love them!  Plus I got a package from my friend, Billie, and she sent me a cute white shirt from Kohl’s that I wore yesterday and a green Old Navy fleece that I’m wearing right now!  I was really excited to get an unexpected package and it means so much to me that she was thinking of me when she was out and about.  I can feel the love from across the ocean for sure!

Last week I also got a package from my mom that had this purse in it, from my sister, along with thread my mom got me for my quilting.  It had a BUNCH of other stuff in it, as packages from my mom usually do.  I’m very lucky to have friends and family that think about me and send me things on a regular basis.  It truly makes my day week when I get things in the mail from people!  It’s just like Christmas!!  Thank you!!!

PS:  Those of you who send me letters and postcards – I LOVE getting those also, so thank you for taking the time to write to me.  I really means a lot to me and I love writing you back!

Abbie at 20 months

If I didn’t do these monthly updates on Abbie, I don’t think I’d remember a thing about her developmental rate later on.  I already can’t remember what she was doing at a year old, and that was only 8 months ago!

She’s still as strong-willed as ever.  I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s probably not ever going to change, and I’m okay with that.  She’s talking in short sentences now, and when I ask her questions she’s starting to give me answers instead of repeating the question.  She counts to 2 on a regular basis, and has started counting to 3.  She knows 4-5 shapes, and she calls everything she sees “red” when you ask her what color it is.  (Which is odd, because a month ago everything was blue.  Now it’s all red apparently.)  She says pretty much anything I do.  The other day I said “Buongiorno” (Good Morning) to my neighbor while Abbie was in the car, and for 3 days after that, every time we pulled out of the garage she’d be back there saying “Buongiorno!  Buongiorno!”.  I drove on base last week and said “Gracias! Ciao!” (Thanks! Bye!) to the Italian gate guard and every time we go through the gate she says “Gracias!  Ciao!” now.  It’s pretty funny.

I thought I would be able to get her that kitchen set and have her play with it and give me some free time while she was awake.  Wrong.  Mostly she just likes to watch me play with it, so that plan kind of backfired on me.  She loves reading her books, playing with her dolls, and playing tea party.  She is incessantly asking to “shnuggle”, but she’ll sit on your lap for about .0038 seconds before she’s off doing something else.  I have to admit, these times when Mark is gone for extended periods of time, I find myself counting down the minutes until her nap or bedtime quite often.

She’s been opening our front door by herself a lot lately, so I have to make sure it’s locked at all times.  She only wants to go up or down stairs by herself and she does a pretty good job of doing stairs by herself.  She’s still a pretty good eater most of the time, although I, for the LIFE of me, cannot figure out how to get her to quit throwing her food everywhere.  She just randomly throws food all over the kitchen, whether the dogs are inside or not, no matter what she’s eating.  I don’t know how to punish her when she does that because I feel like she’s still a little young to take the food away completely and not let her eat anymore.  ???

She seems to be growing up so fast and it seems like she’s changed so much in just the past few weeks!  I need to start taking more pictures of her.

iPhone pictures

Just a note – my internet really hasn’t been working well all weekend.  I have no clue what’s wrong with it, but of course this happens when Mark isn’t here to fix it.  I have a tiny netbook that seems to be connecting to the internet okay, but our desktop connects for maybe 2 mins out of every 4 hours, and this has been going on for days.  I’m not sure if it’s the internet or the router, but the router is conveniently located in Abbie’s room so I can’t mess with it at all when she’s napping or down for the night.  SUPER annoying to say the least.  One of my biggest pet peeves has got to be internet that works about 5% of the time.  Grrr…

Anyway, here are some pictures I’ve taken over the last month on my iPhone.  I’ve been taking pictures with it every day and trying to send them to Mark, so some of these are those, and some of them are just ones I took before he left.

One of my favorite outfits on her.  Unfortunately it’s getting too short.

She is ALWAYS on her tippy toes.  She’s going to be a little ballerina, I’m sure.

I remember when she was too short to reach the floor when she sat on her bug bike.  Seems like that was just yesterday.

This is how I find her pretty much every morning.  Standing in the corner of her crib with her pony tucked under her arm.

 

“Shnuggling” as she calls it.  “Shnuggle mommy?”

This morning she actually stayed asleep when I went in to get her!  Usually as soon as I open the door she pops her head up and is ready to go.  This morning I turned on her light, messed around with the router for a bit, went and got my camera and took a few pictures of her before I finally woke her up by picking her up.  She was tired!  (You can’t see it, but her pony is tucked under her left arm.  So cute!)

 

And the weina.  Ollie leads a hard life of lounging around all day.  This is his normal position.

I’ll be shocked if this actually posts, but we’ll see!  I have a few blogs started on the desktop, but I have no clue when I’ll actually get them posted since that thing is having big issues now.  This little netbook is too little to do much on, especially blog.  Plus all my pictures are on our desktop!  I hope it all magically starts working soon!

Deployment update

I’m not 100% sure why I still try to plan anything anymore.  I guess old habits die hard or something like that.  I do have to admit though, that I handle change much differently than I did 5 years ago.  It’s all part of learning to be a military spouse, I guess.

As most of you know, Mark was set to deploy within the next few months.  As it turns out, his squadron has too many people to deploy all of them, so they chose a few to stay home, and he was one of the chosen ones.

A few years ago, I would have been ecstatic about this.  My husband isn’t deploying!!  We dodged the bullet!  I’ll get to spend more time with him!  Part of me is still pretty darn excited about it, but another part of me, and maybe a bigger part, is a little unsure about the whole situation.  Career-wise for him, if he doesn’t deploy this time, that’s not exactly good.  And it puts him at risk later on down the road for getting singled out to go on a remote, probably non-flying, deployment.  That would completely suck because it could be for longer than his squadron is going to be gone now (possibly even twice as long) and also I think it would be easier to deal with a deployment when you’re in a squadron that’s deployed.  The wives are all in the same situation and they can all depend on each other and help each other out, which is the way it usually is in a fighter squadron.  If he ends up going on a remote deployment later on, he’ll be the only one, or maybe one of a few, that goes from a squadron , which means you miss out on all that support.

Part of me is wondering why he was chosen to stay behind over other people, but I’m fairly certain I know the answer to that.  He’s one of the newest and least experienced guys in the squadron, so it would make sense that he would stay behind.  And, without stepping on anyone’s toes, I think he’s more family-oriented that your “typical” fighter pilot and I think he’ll take advantage of the extra time he gets with Abbie.

I think I am most disappointed because I was really looking forward to going home and spending time with my parents and friends back in the States.  We were going to travel some and visit relatives in CO and I was going to try to get down to OK to see a few friends also.  I’m ready to go back to the States for a bit.  I’ve been here for 10+ months, and I was excited to be back on US soil.

I guess the upside of this, is that he might still get to deploy at some point during this deployment.  If it ends up that he does deploy later than the rest of the squadron, then really, it’s the ideal situation.  He deploys, but not for the full length of the deployment, but it still counts as a deployment so he wouldn’t be at risk for a remote deployment later on.  He’d get more time with us, but also get to do what he’s been training for for the past 5 years, which is a win-win situation in my book.  And then I’d get to go home and do all the things I’d planned on doing also.  We’re keeping our fingers crossed that this is what will happen and we’re staying optimistic about the whole situation.  I figure it’s all in God’s hands anyway, so I’m going to let Him worry about it and I’m going to live in the “now”, instead of worrying about what’s going to happen months or years down the road.

But, with that being said, since he’s not deploying when we thought he was, we’re going to try to go on an 11-day Mediterranean cruise this spring!  I’m pretty darn excited about it to be honest, although part of me feels VERY guilty that we could be going on an awesome vacation when many of my friends are dealing with a deployment.  I want to take advantage of our extra time with Mark, but I don’t want people to be upset that we’re off vacationing together when they’re separated from their spouses.  I do feel guilty about that and I would like to think that if the roles were reversed that I would be happy for a friend, even if I was a little jealous, but who knows.  Hopefully people won’t hold it against me.

So there’s the update.  Keep your fingers crossed that the ideal plan works out for us.  If I do end up coming home sometime this summer, I’ll be sure to let you know!

(Taken August 2007 in Wichita, KS)

Friday Fill-in

1. What do you usually want to know about someone when meeting them for the first time?  I guess it depends on where I’m meeting them.  For another military spouse, where they were raised, when they got married, if they have kids – I guess just general stuff.

2. Would you rather know everything about your spouse, or be regularly surprised?
I think I would rather know everything.  I kind of feel like your spouse is the one person you should/can know everything about.  Everyone else can regularly surprise me.  =)

3. If you could live in one city for the rest of your life, where would you live?
Well there are quite a few other cities I’d want to visit before I made up my mind, but I think I could get used to San Diego, or Atlanta, or Washington DC.

4. When you go out of town, what one material thing do you ALWAYS take?
My phone.  Especially now that I have an iPhone.  It’s a camera, computer, phone all in one!

5. Using no more than 10 nouns, and ONLY nouns, describe yourself.
Oh boy…  Wife, mother, daughter, friend, American, crafts, vacations, country, cook, animals

The fog is gone.

 

There’s not been anything too exciting going on here lately.  Abbie and I are in our routine, and the days seem to be going by, slowly but surely.  My internet has been EXTREMELY slow for the past week, and currently, it isn’t working at all, so who knows when I’ll actually get this posted.

It’s been really foggy here for the past 5 days.  Just today (Thursday), the fog finally lifted and I can actually see the mountains again.  It’s kind of weird and dreary living in a cloud.  It was foggy occasionally in northern IL where I grew up, but not for days on end like it is here.  Gets kind of depressing after a while, but it looks like sunnier days are ahead of us.  Now if my damn internet would work, I’d be happy.

I fell down a few stairs here a few days ago.  I’m fine, just a little sore in places.  Luckily I wasn’t carrying anything, specifically Abbie or one of the dogs, so that was good.  All our stairs here are marble with rounded edges, so they’re slippery when you wear socks.  Lesson learned I guess.  The whole incident kind of freaked me out though.  I keep thinking what if something happened to me while Mark was gone?  It could be days before someone here figured out something was wrong.  What would happen to Abbie if I was passed out or something?  I talked to people here often, but not so much that if I didn’t answer my phone they’d think something was wrong.  I usually talk to one of my parents every day, but sometimes I don’t and miss a few days so they wouldn’t think much of it.  The only person I really have set times to talk to is Mark and I think he’d be the one to realize something was wrong before anyone else, even though he’s pretty much the furthest away at this point.  It just scares me to think that something could happen to me at any moment, and while Mark is gone, I’m not sure anyone would pick up on that quickly, which makes me worry for Abbie’s safety.  I guess I’ll just pray nothing bad happens and hope for the best.

I’ve been working on my quilting some.  For quilt #3, I have all my strips sewn together and ironed and I’m in the process of cutting the strips apart so I can sew them together in a different order.

For quilt #4, I have these strips sewn together and now I need to put the sashing and borders on it and the quilt top will be done!  This is a baby quilt so it’ll go together fairly quickly since it’s pretty small.

Other than falling down the stairs and quilting, nothing too exciting is going on.  I did order another pair of boots online off of Amazon, so that’s exciting to me (especially since they were over 40% off!!).  I’ll post a picture of them if my internet ever starts working again.  And I’d ordered batting for my quilts from Hobby Lobby at 40% off, so I’m excited to use that too.

I’ve been taking pictures of Abbie every day, but on my iPhone.  I send Mark a picture or two or a video of her every day and the iPhone definitely makes that easy.  But it makes it harder to put those pictures on here since I don’t put my pictures from my phone on my computer very often.  I’ll have to do that sometime soon.

Hope you’re all having a good January!

Quilting progress!!

Lately I’ve been trying to quilt a lot.  It seems to make the time go by faster when Mark is gone and I love being able to see that I’m actually making progress!

For my 3rd quilt, I’m using Moda’s Pure by Sweetwater fabric.  It’s interesting because I’ve been looking on Flickr at the photos of everyone else’s fabric that they’re using for the quilt along and I think mine is one of the darkest.  There’s someone else using Pure, but they’re using a light color as their solid and I’m using the Robert Kaufman’s brown.  I’m excited to see how this turns out.  I have 8 of my 16 sets of strips sewn together.  I just need to get the other 8 done and then get them all ironed.

Here’s my progress on my 2nd quilt.  It’s all put together and ready to quilt, but I have no clue how I should quilt this.  Since it’s symmetrical I would guess that I should quilt along the stitch lines, except the only problem with that is that that will bring out the MANY mistakes I made on this quilt.  They’re little mistakes, but many of my seams don’t line up perfectly.  So I’m thinking of trying to free motion quilt it in a stipple pattern.  That would be a first for me though so it’ll probably take me a few months to get up the courage to try that…  We’ll see.  Any suggestions?

(All pinned together and ready to be quilted and a shot of the backing.  I’m going to bind it with a hot pink fabric.)

AND, here’s my fabric for my 4th quilt!  It’s Moda’s Santorini by Lila Tueller.  I’m pretty excited to work with this too!  Not sure when I’ll start this quilt, but hopefully sometime soon!  Either way, I love having stacks of fabric laying around to look at, although they’re kind of expensive decorations…

Lazy Saturday

Today I had plans to go shopping with Brittney, but she cancelled on me, so Abbie and I went by ourselves.  Taking Abbie shopping is hit or miss and I was a little worried about it, but I figured even if she was a bear to deal with, it would be better than sitting in the house by myself all day.  Weekends are hardest when Mark isn’t around, so I like to try to keep busy.  So we headed to Pordenone, which is about 30 mins from us, and went to Decathlon (a cheaper sporting goods store), the mall, and McDonald’s.  I found cheap Old Navy-type long and short sleeved t-shirts, except they’re much better quality, last time we went there and I wanted to get more.  (An XL here is equivalent to a L in the States.)  The ones on the left are long sleeved and the ones on the right are short sleeved.  The colors don’t really come through very well on this picture but you still get the idea.

I wandered around the mall some but didn’t find anything I like, except for a coat, but I didn’t buy it.  They have a grocery store in the mall here so I spent 41E buying noodles and Nutella.  *grins*  Actually I spent 16E on these little Nutella packs that come with these little breadsticks.  They’re SOO good and I wanted to send some to people back home, and then I bought like 10 different kinds of noodles and riso because I wanted to try to make risotto. 

After that Abbie and I had lunch at McDonald’s.  It’s weird sitting in a  restaurant like that, basically by yourself (since Abbie’s not old enough to have a conversation with yet) and listening to everyone around you speaking Italian.  It’s a little intimidating, but kind of fascinating at the same time.  It definitely makes me miss home though, and everything that’s familiar.  I wanted to order honey mustard sauce for our nuggets, but the girl taking my order didn’t speak English.  I kept saying honey mustard (in English) and she kept repeating the list of all the sauces in Italian and the only one I understood was barbeque (because it’s pronounced the same).  After 3 times through that routine, a girl in the line over said one of them to my cashier and said mustard to me.  I need to learn more Italian.

This weekend my house is a pet hotel.  I’m dog-sitting two of my friends dogs.  It’s fun having a menagerie of animals around and I like having 4 animals greet me when I get home.  And I love having big dogs around.  I love my little weinas, but I miss having a big dog.  I’ve already decided our next dog will be big.

Here are Jess and Abner.

Our yard is pretty much a zoo.  That’s Sadie in the foreground running around like a loon, as she always does.  (It’s 55 degrees and sunny today so it was a perfect day to play in the yard for a little bit, except for all the dog poop… Ew.)

Time to go get something done while Abbie naps!

A girl and her dog

“The dog was created specially for children.  He is the god of frolic.”  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Friday Fill-in

1. What are you looking forward to most in 2011? Spending time with my husband and possibly going back to the States to visit friends and family.
2. What is something random you do on a boring night when your significant other is away? Ha!  I definitely don’t do anything random.  I mainly do the same thing every single night.  Put Abbie to bed.  Work on crafts for a little bit if I feel like it, or work on the blog.  Make popcorn and pour myself a big glass of water.  Go upstairs to my bedroom and watch TV shows while eating popcorn, chocolate chips and drinking water.  Sit in bed and mess around online on my laptop or write a few letters.  Get ready for bed.  Read in bed until I fall asleep.  It’s pretty much just like that every. single. night.
3. What has been your greatest adventure as a MilSpouse? Moving to Italy is definitely up there.  It’s all been an adventure though from the very beginning.  It was pretty exciting when he selected T-38’s, and then it was pretty exciting when he was selected for F-16’s.  Both of those were pretty pivotal for us because they determined where we’d live and the lifestyle we’d live.  And then thinking we were going to Germany, then Korea, then SC and finally finding out we were actually going to Italy was a pretty trying time.  It’s all been one big adventure and I’m excited to see what the future holds for us!
4. What is the ugliest fashion trend you ever bought into (I’d like to make fun of you, so can you please provide a picture as well)? The God-awful overly hair-sprayed hair trend.  Like where your bangs stood straight up and it looked like you had wings coming out the side of your head?  Yeah, that was bad…  This picture doesn’t have my hair like that, but it’s definitely horrible for many other reasons…  I think this was the beginning of 8th grade??

5.    What was the high point of last month?  Hm…I think Amsterdam was the best part of last month.  I really, really loved going to Amsterdam.  But skiing in Austria was really fun too.  It was beautiful up there.  And having my husband home for Christmas is something I definitely cherish.

Postage Stamp quilt along

I got the fabric today to start my 3rd quilt top, and I’m pretty excited about it!

I bought this from The Fat Quarter Shop and it got here super fast, so I was excited about that.

I’m doing the Postage Stamp Quilt Along because for beginners like me, it’s much easier to follow a tutorial than figure out a pattern from a book.  (Although I am quite proud of myself for figuring out the Confetti quilt pattern.)  I’m already behind a little bit on the quilt along, but hopefully I’ll be able to catch up.  I also want to get my Confetti quilt put together (top, batting, backing) in the near future too, but that requires me clearing off the kitchen table and that’s a job in itself…

I’ll try to post pictures as I go along making this quilt.  Wish me luck!

PS:  The fabric for my 4th quilt is on it’s way too!

Attitude

“Happiness is an attitude.  We either make ourselves miserable, or happy and strong.  The amount of work is the same.”  ~Francesca Reigler

(Taken Nov 2006 in Florida)

Mark has left on another TDY.  This will be our longest one yet, but as I’ve said before, I can’t complain too much because I know many people endure MUCH worse separations than this.  But it’s still hard and I won’t wash his pillowcase until he comes home, just in case.

Last night Abbie was an absolute holy terror.  She’d seriously never been that bad and I’m not quite sure what was going on.  She didn’t really want to have anything to do with Mark, and wanted my undivided attention for about 5 hours straight.  The three of us were sitting on the couch, me in the middle, and Mark was trying to show me something and Abbie was looking at a photo album.  Abbie would reach up and move my face so I was looking at her so she could point stuff out to me in the album.  She just kept saying “mommy” over and over and over until I’d respond and look at her.  It was exhausting.  She threw a huge fit before her bath and after her bath, and when we were putting her to bed.  She only wanted me touching her and if Mark touched her she’d try to slap him.  And if he held her she’d try to claw his face off.  I honestly don’t know where she gets that temper.  My parents have said I was absolutely nothing like that and I don’t think Mark was like that when he was a toddler either, so I’m not sure where this is coming from or how we remedy it.  But it breaks my heart when she’s like that to Mark, especially when it’s the night before he leaves for quite a while.  If she’s like this while he’s gone, I’m not going to last 5 days, let alone 5 weeks.  But she tends to act out much more when Mark is around than when it’s just her and me.  Granted she has her moments with me too, but they’re few and far between.

I’m going to try to keep busy with my quilting while Mark is gone.  I have quite a few projects I have started, want to start or want to finish so it’ll be interesting to see what I accomplish while he’s gone.  But I’ll post more on that later.

Thank God it’s a BEAUTIFUL, sunny, have your windows open type of day here today.  I think that’s God’s little gift to me because it does wonders for my attitude.

“Every day may not be good, but there is something good in every day.” ~Author Unknown