Lots of thinking going on here!

Lots to update; I've composed many a blog post in my head over the last few days but if I try and do seperate posts, I'll never get around to them. My main thoughts centered around WHY I blog......I know that very few read it and I certainly don't have any great desire to be a writer; it seems odd to send words out into the blogosphere and get nothing back. So I'm still mulling that one over.

Miss R had been getting prank calls on her mobile. She forgets to take it off silent, so wasn't picking them up but there would be 2-3 missed calls and occasionally a disjointed voicemail message that was difficult to decipher and rather silly. From the nature of the messages, we were certain it was someone from her class so I emailed the classroom teacher, not really expecting much. Well, the response was fabulous; the class got a talking to, and it turns out that Miss R wasn't the only one. There haven't been any further calls, so hopefully that is the end of the matter. But it also got me thinking.....my initial reaction to the calls was negative - these girls are picking on Miss R, it's bullying and harrassing, just when I thought things were improving for her socially, it's all been undone - when really I should be focussing on the positive - she's had 5 party invites this year (which is 4 more than last year), she was included in a weekend trip to the movies, she's been asked over to a new friend's house......  I've become so used to fixing the problems that I'm failing to see the huge amounts of progress she's made. This was reinforced by one of the support staff comments in an email I sent regarding some missing information  "All good, I think R has done wonderfully well to keep up with all of the information and expectations etc. good on her!" So my new resolve is not to get so hung up on the negative and focus on the positive! (We'll see how it goes....)

We've advertised the beach house on a holiday website and have had a fantastic response. It's been online for 3 weeks now and we've had over 400 views - you could see the spike in views the day I put the link on Facebook and the day I emailed my workmates but there has been steady interest since then. We've also had 10 booking requests, 4 of whom have paid deposits so that has been very encouraging. I've stopped being so concerned about getting the bookings now, and have turned my thoughts to the more practical side of having a holiday rental - the logistics of keeping track of bookings and payments, cleaning and handing over and collecting keys. I'm still watching every dollar we spend, but hopefully will be able to relax a bit (and buy more fabric) in about 6 months time.

Progress has stopped temporarily on the Music quilt as my lovely Bernina had to go in for a service - over 2 million stitches in 5 years. Not a lot really for the age of the machine, but I'd love to know how many I've added in just 8 months! LOL I dropped it in on Friday and picked it up the following Thursday so I was impressed with the speed of the service. I asked about a new table while I was there - I bought my machine second hand off eBay and didn't know the quilting table was cracked at a corner until I went to use it. It's been superglued about 3 times and is currently held together with duct tape but I hesitated to buy a new table as I could only imagine how expensive they were! Imagine my delight to find out a new table was only around $30....needless to say, I'm now the proud owner of a quilting table that is NOT cracked.

Well there's more but I need to go eat, so will update again later.

Home Improvements

Back on the June long weekend, rather than relax, we built a deck instead. As you do.

Then it turned into a porch....then grew to include a covered pergola.....and now it's finally finished. And I must say, it does look great. But I think those posts should be blue to match the window frames.

I wonder how reliable the stats are?

Because it seems I have a fan in Russia. Wish I knew how to say "hello" in Russian....

And more importantly, how on earth did I fail to notice the little tab at the end called "stats"???? Has it always been there?

Basting

It's the one step in quilt making that I really don't enjoy.