Time Flies...

Its very hard to believe that its Christmas time already. Today is my last day at work for the rest of the year, and it seems like the last few months have completely flown by. Its been such a push the last few weeks to get everything done at work and at home. The company I now work for requires that EVERYONE in the company writes their performance appraisals and have them submitted by December 31st. It seems somewhat silly to me that they should be due right at the busiest time of year. Everyone is trying to get designs and drawings completed early because its the end of the year and people are on vacation. The company also wants to close out all their financial books by December 31st, so all travel charges and lots of other little things have to be done. It just makes a crazy time of year even crazier.

Unfortunately, I don't have my Christmas shopping done yet. Its about 90% complete, but I still have to get something else for my dad, something for one of my sisters and one of my brothers and I have to get something for my brother-in-law. Plus, my husband and I are traveling to Florida from the 26th to the 31st, so we have had to get the travel arrangements squared away. Oh - I have to get a Christmas gift for my husband. Ugh! I received a $300 award from work earlier this month, and spent it getting a GPS system for my husband and I. Its a Christmas present to both of us, but I still need to get something for him. The hardest thing is that he doesn't really want anything, so I have to figure out what he would like but won't say he wants.

Because of all this other stuff, I really haven't been doing any quilting. I did get two quilts tied, but I haven't been able to find the time (or the energy) to determine how wide my binding needs to be. Once I do that, then I can cut the fabric for the binding and at least use the machine to sew it on the front side (the back side needs to be hand sewn). I still have at least two other baby quilts to make by March. I have fabric for one of them, but I haven't done anything with it (I haven't even washed it yet). Hopefully the next few days before the Christmas craziness and traveling starts I'll be able to get started on some of the work. But knowing me, I'll just want to be lazy and watch TV for a while. At least my needlepoint has been making progress as I've been watching TV.

In case I don't post anything until next year.... Happy Holidays!

Christmas Party

This past weekend my husband and I had an awesome Christmas party for our friends at our house. Its the first time we've had people over in a while because it was just too much while I was in school. We had a great time and it was nice to get everyone together again for an evening. It was one of those evenings when everyone eats a lot of food and sits around and talks and then all of a sudden you look at the clock and its midnight already.

We decided afterwards that we definitely need to get a bigger dining room table as we could barely fit 10 people around our current dining room table and our kitchen table combined. We even had to borrow a chair from my husband's sister (who lives up the road from us) because we didn't have enough chairs in the house. We're definitely going to have a party again, but it will be a while before we do it.

We were both up around 7am on Saturday morning to start cleaning the house and then we spent all afternoon cooking and preparing food for the evening. Sunday morning, of course, we ended up doing cleanup from the night before. We ended up running our dishwasher three times to clear all the dishes and we spent about an hour cleaning the pots and platters that couldn't go in the dishwasher.

"Tea Runs"

So this past weekend, a friend and I finally made our necessary fall tea run. We had put it off for a few months due to my being in school and her having oral surgery, but we finally made it on Saturday.

Our absolute favorite store is located in Millerton, NY and its called Harney & Sons (http://www.harney.com/). They have truly awesome tea and have a great tasting room. In their tasting room, you can taste just about any of the teas before you actually buy it. I'm told they used to do unlimited tasting, but now they try to limit you to two different teas which I don't really blame them as I could spend all day tasting teas. Although, with the amount of refills my friend and I had, they probably would have let us taste tea all day.

Anyway we had an awesome day of tea tasting, and buying of course. I ended up with three or four new teas (I must say the 1st Flush Darjeeling is excellent) and a new teapot. :-)