Friday Five

1. What are your favorite ways to relax and unwind?
Stitching (duh), reading, napping, yoga

2. What do you do the moment you get home from work/school/errands?
Kick off my shoes, find Wiley and Widget, kiss them both hello. Hang out with them until Widget bedtime, then get dinner started.

3. What are your favorite aromatherapeutic smells?
Citrus-y smells, especially lemon, baking smells (cinnamon and nutmeg-ish), vanilla.

4. Do you feel more relaxed with a group of friends or hanging out by yourself?
Depends on my mood and the friends in questions. But usually by myself. In a group I often feel pressure to be sparkling and social and witty, and except for a few close friends that is usually an enormous amount of work for me. I'm very good at entertaining myself, so usually I'm just fine all alone.

5. What is something that you feel is relaxing but most people don't?
People who don't stitch don't see how it's relaxing (but most who do agree that it is). I also find both cooking and cleaning relaxing when I'm not under any time or performance pressure to do either

Stitching dilemma

So, I have a whole lot of projects queued up right now. Mostly this is good, especially as I want to implement a budget crunch soon, which means no more supply buying for a little bit. But, I have a dilemma.

I went out on Monday with my oldest friend Elaine, to pick out a sampler for her wedding (she gets married 6 weeks from tomorrow). She picked out this beautiful piece. I got enough of the supplies I need to get started on it, and if I did nothing but stitch in all my free time between now and then, I could probably finish it in time to give it to her on her wedding day. Probably. There is certainly no certainty there. But, I've also committed (in my head) tomaking a number of Christmas presents this year, and it's almost October now. Most of the Christmas presents are quite small, and individually, if I were cracking along, none would take more than a week or so to do.

I can't decide whether I should try to push and get the wedding sampler done in time, and say the hell with the Christmas presents (the two most important ones are near done at this point), or whether I should buckle down, get the Christmas presents out of the way, then start the wedding sampler, with a firm mental commitment of finishing it by January. Technically, I have until a year post-wedding to give her the sampler, and still not be gauche.

I should be out there stitching instead of at the computer angsting about it, I'd bet.

Accidents

I saw the most amusing accident today on my way to lunching wth Miss Shani.

A panel truck had rear-ended a car that was being towed on a tow truck. Its back end was all smooshed in, and it looked like it had gotten impaled on the towing mechanism.

I'm not sure why I found that so funny, but I really did.

In other news, this past weekend, Wiley found a dying crow in our yard. He tried to get it to the animal hospital, but it died before he got it there. When he called the West Nile "hotline" the next day, they said, "Yeah, probably West Nile. Stay away from mosquitos for the rest of the season." Ooooooh, thanks for the incisive advice, guys! On the upside, the bird ruined the cat carrier I've wanted to get rid of for as long as we've owned it.