Sunday, January 06, 2008
It's Starting to Look a Lot Like... Autumn?!?
Hello again everybody! Welcome to The 'bent Needle, 2008 style. (Okay, so it is still the same as the 2007 style, but it is the thought that counts...)
Things here have been a bit hectic and busy and -especially around Thanksgiving- a bit messy too.
Let me explain... Like I said in my last post, we recently switched to DSL. We were ready to speed up things and it was time. Little did we know that it was the beginning of a lot of headaches! The short version goes something like this: we get DSL, we get a nasty virus, it bogs us down, we get it fixed -or so we thought- it bogs us down some more, we get it fixed again and again and again and then FINALLY we get the computer to work in a way that we don't feel uneasy about using it. Grrr, arrrgh!!! Needless to say, we have been tip toeing around this thing for a while and have only recently started feeling safe again. Oh well, at least I have been able to get in some good stitching time.
Well, sort of...
You see, last month was December. (I bet you didn't know that, did you?) Anyway, Kim and I had been planning on taking time off around Giftmess... er, Christmas. Well -at my work at least- December is "let's hurry up and get all this stuff done right now because it is the end of the year" time. Needless to say, it was the most hectic 3 weeks of the year for me. Okay that aside, things ultimately went... well... and Kim and I went on our time off. (Much needed, as I said before.) We went to spend time with Kim's kin and got to see her nieces and nephews and brothers and spread all kinds of holiday cheer too. (See more below...) The girls REALLY liked the personalized books we got for them! We spent a grand total of 3 days there. Plenty of time to stitch, when the nieces weren't having us play with them...
However...
Towards the end of our first visit -yes, we went back later the next week- Kim started to not feel so good. No wonder, considering that the girls were at the tail end of the colds that they had. (Uh oh...) Unfortunately, it turned out that Kim had caught their cold. (The one gift that she wished she could have returned...) Kim ended up not feeling good -okay, her coughing and hacking were rather scary at times- for the remainder of our vacation. Not at all the way we had planned on spending our holiday. (Side note: she went to the doctor and was told that she had viral laryngitis. She is feeling much better now...)
Oh, and the messy part? Well, that was mostly just around Thanksgiving. To try and make a long story short... it was Thanksgiving night, we were cleaning up after our turkey and so forth and then suddenly... (play scary music here) I happen to see that the sink is close to overflowing. (Click on above link.) Suffice to say, it was VERY STINKY in that sink!!! Well, it turned out that the plumbing was way backed up. We called the building maintainence guy and -after quite a bit of persuading- he came over and tried valiantly to unclog it. When he couldn't get it unclogged, he called in The Big Guns at the local plumbing company and -within 15 minutes- things were cleaned out and ready to go. Lots of stuff backed up in the pipes, apparently. Sometimes it can be a real bummer living in a basement apartment... ;-) Oh well, it all worked out in the end and that is the main thing.
And that -in a rather large nutshell- is what has been happening since I last posted. (And let's face it, I just plain ran out of words...)
Everybody have a good week and a happy new year too!
gC
