The kitten (who is now looking more lanky and feline-like rather than like a ball of fluff), was taking quite the interest in alpha daughter’s pair of pet dwarf African frogs. (They’re tiny things that live in their own ecosystem and stay in water.)  So we decided to move their small aquatic world up into the room where her gerbils are to keep him away from them. (The doors are kept shut.) A few days after this move, Scott and I heard a loud thud and just thought it was the girls making their normal crashing and thud-ing sounds. As it turns out, one of the girls had accidentally locked the kitten in, you guessed it, the gerbil and frog room. He hopped right up on the dresser and knocked over the frogs’ small aquatic world. We had thought he had eaten them until alpha daughter discovered two flat dried up frog bodies that had hopped under the bathroom door to escape the frog-chasing kitten. Fortunately, she isn’t mad at the kitten. She is, however, quite sad that her first ever pets of her own are dead. Now she wants a turtle or a snake; preferably a snake. *sigh*

I’ve done a little bit of stitching since last time, including this bit which I’m going to leave as a mystery for my favorite girls to ponder a guess at. It is a HAED chart (and a full size one at that). It is an active artist and an active chart.  It is also an artist whose work I have drooled over but have never stitched… until now. She has been with HAED for several years, too! This is the middle of the chart and it’s part of a face.

Next up is my new start for the 5th weekend retired artist/chart SAL. I’ve been wanting to start this chart for a while and have tagged this as my guilt-free start for 2009. It’s Linda Ravenscroft’s “Serendipity.” While I’m not sure what is serendipitous about the scene, I love it anyway. I know I’ll be stitching this more often than every 5th weekend. There is something about Linda’s work that I find amazing. I have her “Mask of Colors” going around as a round robin. But other than that, I don’t have any of her other work in progress. I will be getting to part of the tattoo on her arm really soon. It’s next on the top right of my stitching!

My next stitchy picture isn’t all that exciting to see. It’s a square of sparkle and two shades of really pale grey. It’s QS Day Dreaming Fairy by Zindy Nielsen which is the piece I’ve chosen for the 2009 HAED Freebie SAL. I was torn on what to choose because stitching all these neutral colors will drive me bats, but it’s a new artist for me and she’s pretty. She is due to come out this coming weekend for some stitching although maybe I will pull her out a bit earlier.

Speaking of 2009, I’ve made two stitching goals for this year on the HAED front. One is to finish the QS I just mentioned above, and the other is to finish the top row of pages in Christophe Vacher’s Sacred Hour.  I’ve got about 2 1/2 large print pages to go and somewhere in those pages is a face! This was the first HAED chart I ever bought and it is the one I love most of all.

Some restrictions do apply. As in he has to decide to if he will be going ahead with PhD work AND in astrophysics. If it’s not in astrophysics, then a telescope, as cool as this one is, just won’t be as applicable. I also wouldn’t start stitching until he officially starts working on this particular degree.

So can I do 376,425 Xs in the time it takes a 40-something year old to earn his PhD in astrophysics? *nibbles on her fingernails and nervously eyes the pages of the chart* I just thought I would mention that “Marchetti” and “confetti” rhyme and it’s quite applicable for most of the pages.

Stay tuned to see how things turn out! (10 skeins of 310…that’s what happens when it’s something in SPACE, Sue. DUH!)

Duh.

Pictures coming soon! (after I chase the frogs away)

So now I have to decide if I want to stitch this. I think I’ll stay away from it for a while and spend some quality time with the xbox and my DS for a bit. *whimperwhinesob*

The princess of the house has/is (hard to know exactly when as she’s a shelter baby) turning three this month. One look at this picture and you can see why she’s the princess, empress, resident goddess, supreme being, one-to-be-reckoned-with and lady in charge!

Happy 3rd Birthday, Nikki!

Happy 10th Birthday to you too, Fluffernutter, you scared ball of fluff!

Last week we had our usual February “wintery mix” weather. This equates to something that starts off as snow and then meanders through snow mixed with sleet, sleet, sleet mixed with freezing rain and then freezing rain. Sometimes we get snow after that. Last year we got a lovely near foot of that stuff and Mike aptly named it concrete as it took over a week for some of us to be able to get out of our driveways! Last week, however, we ended up with freezing rain. This was unfortunate as it my daughter ended up breaking her arm in ballet class that afternoon and we spent several hours in the emergency room only to emerge with her newly splinted arm to find our car completely encased in ice. (the orthopedic doctor she visited on Valentine’s Day had to put a cast on it — she chose bright pink!)

The next morning, Scott risked life and limb to take some lovely pictures… this is the part where ice can be lovely. Fortunately, he didn’t need any casts, Ace bandages or other boo-boo mending gear. These are some Crape Myrtles. We live far enough south that they love growing here. Of course, after they burst into bloom, we usually get a wicked windstorm and all the flowers blow down the street… or into the pool. *sigh*

Some of you may recall when the white pine tree fell on our house last year. That was due to wind and shallow tree roots. Of course, it doesn’t keep me from worrying that another one of the huge pine trees around will do the same even though the arborist has assured us that the remaining pines are stable. They really droop when weighed down with ice, but in this closeup, they don’t look so menacing. In this area, residential power lines have to be underground, so I don’t have that worry on my property. Whew!

We have a myriad of shrubby things around outside and when we built the house, our landscaper was very good about having the tags left on things, but that would still require me to either trapse outside into the cold and try and find the tags on nine year old shrubs or dig out the landscape plan and translate his really long latin-y names into the more common names that we know. So instead you just get my swell description of a hibernating bush with ice-covered berries on it. It’s still quite pretty!

Meanwhile, inside the house, life goes on and my Ziggy sleeps through everything without a care in the world… not even that there’s a stuffed bunny (affectionately called “Bun Bun” by Lindsey) perched on his back. Ahhhhh, to be able to relax like my ZigZig! He does curl up next to my head in the morning so I can rest my cheek on him so I have a purring pillow, so life is stripey and purrrrrrfect!

I finished something! *does a little jig* But I can’t show you yet ’cause the recipient won’t get it until Sunday. So you’ll have to wait until after then for me to post a picture. Nyah nyah! While I’m in brat mode, I’ll mention that Kat is being so mean not letting us start Chatelaine’s Secret Victorian Garden (MX) yet! *sticks out her bottom lip until it reaches the floor*

So to make me feel better, I’ll leave you with my favorite holiday cartoon…

*giggles*

I promptly grabbed a pencil and wrote in my cookbook, “Don’t use the food processor! Very bad things happen!”

It is now 11pm and I have just finished making a lovely batch of pie dough using my mixer. I’ll roll it out tomorrow morning, stick it back in the fridge and work on the apple compote. Then make some pretty apple slices and put them on top and then caramelize and voila! One French apple tart! (I hope.)

Pictures forthcoming. (I hope.)

For now… I’m off to bed and wish my pie dough happy glutenizing.

Having friends who live right across the street who are taking a year off is a totally awesome thing because they can 1: be home when the topic-of-my-week falls on the house and 2: can stand in their second floor hallway and take “Wow!” pictures like this one! (Thanks, Mike!)
Thanks to our next door neighbors, we were able to save our lawn and borrow their driveway onto which what looked like a small truck-like thing was driven. Well, when this thing was unfolded, there was one huge crane there as you can see! There was a guy on our roof who tied the tree to the crane, and then the tree was lifted to a vertical position at which point it was chain-sawed through at it’s base. Then my girls, from within the house, bellowed, “TIMBER!” as the tree was gently set down on our lawn. Then the chainsaws had at the tree and all that was left was a stump. Oh, right… and some holes in my roof. No need to squint, Mike has a great zoom on his camera, too!
What you can’t see clearly of the large hole on the bottom is that it’s actually a gash of sorts, where the tree branch pierced the roof and ripped downwards. OUCH! That had to hurt the house and the tree! What’s even more sad is that there was a second pine tree that was next to the one that fell that also had to be removed. It had a fungal growth at it’s base that had weakened the roots on the side next to the house. So we could have gone through this again during the next wind storm. (That’s a big no thank you!) So what I see when I look outside and down from my sunroom window now is two piles of white pine wood chips which are all that is left of the stumps.
This is actually quite sad. I do have a lovely view, but having a lovely view framed with pine trees was even better. *sigh*

But, enough about my trees. I’ve blogged it out and I’m done talking about it. I got a hug from up north!! *bounces around* Mermaid Thinking arrived in my mailbox yesterday from Sonya! Thank you thank you thank you thank yooooooooooou!! *giggles* I sent Sonya this thank you card that says “You deserve a million thanks!” and it has these two cute little guys talking and saying “thank you” over and over and over in different voices… and I mentioned to her that if she waited for them to say it all 1 million times that she was more blonde than I was! My guess is that between the two of us we did hear all 1 million thank yous because those little guys are cute! Thanks a bunch, Sonya!! *super big HUGS!!* I cut the fabric and printed the chart and then had to de-Nikki and de-Ziggy fur the fabric because the phone rang as I was cutting it and they decided to sprawl on it… but you get the idea… I’m all bouncy!

Hey, it’s CC on 3! Did everyone dig out their Character Creations projects?

‘Scuse me… I have to go buy some “violet” poster board, pink glitter glue and pink girly paper that will make nice photo backgrounds… there, that’ll give you something to prod me to blog about next week when the “violet” glittery thing is done!