Quilting

In February, I saw in the paper that there was T shirt quilting class being taught nearby. I've always wanted to make one out of my high school and concert tshirts! I thought it would be perfect for Rikki and me to do!

It was to held for 4 consecutive monday nights. We'll we had shitty weather so by the 4th and final Monday we'd only had two classes! Rikki and I ended up going for two entire saturdays as well and we still aren't done.

Turns out I didn't have as many tshirts as I thought either. I had to buy and create additional shirts to get to the 15 that I needed.

Here's a layout of my shirts once I got them cut and fused.


Here's a shot of me working on my "fatties" which is a tshirt attached to a piece of sashing and repeat!


Et Voila! It's my quilt top assembled with the fatties, skinnies, cornerstones and one of the borders.


I've now added a second wider border and it's ready to be backed and quilted! I'm having the quilting done (or I will). Once it's quilted I'll have to take another class to learn how to do the binding.

Long Time No Blog

Wow I can't believe it's been so long.

Happy New Year!~

Kurt and I stayed in last night. We played with the Pooper dog and watched 6 or so episodes of Big Bang Theory. Love that show! We were supposed to go to a wedding reception but we were tired and felt a little under the weather. Then -10 degree weather wasn't much of an incentive to go back outside either.

Today we went to OG and had soup, salad and bread sticks (with $2 off thanks to my coupon!) and then we went and saw It's Complicated. It was great! I found myself smiling thorough out and having some deep belly laughs. I just love Meryl Streep. She seems like a nice lady. I'm not a huge fan of Alec Baldwin but he was good too. Plus how can you not like Steve Martin? We really enjoyed it. The theater was packed (with middle aged people). We quickly walked over to the mall and bought some 50% off calendars and then went and looked at diamonds. Now it's 5:30 pm and we're in for the night and we're perfectly happy!

We had a lovely Christmas. We had Eve Eve at Mom and Dad's with the Steins. We had a special visit from Santa in miniature. The 24th I made shrimp cocktail, shrimp scampi, and lobster tails for the four of us. I have some leftover lobster so I'm going to attempt lobster pot pie. The 25th Mom and Dad and all the kids came here. We had a lovely ham lunch, then presents and a movie in the afternoon. That evening Kurt and I went and saw Sherlock Holmes. It was fun. RD Jr is HOT. I didn't follow all of it and thought it was a little long but it was worth the $5.

A Christmas bonus was seeing/lunching/hanging with an old friend (who is new again). We reconnected on FB and have picked up where we left off. Tara was home from San Francisco so we had lunch. Then she and the fam were at the movies and then I ran into her the next day at Walmart (the center of the smalltown universe doncha know!)

The 26th we left for 3 days in South Dakota with Kurt's side of the family. South Dakota was in the middle of blizzard of a century. We made it out there just fine. We had 4/6 meals the were frozen pizzas, $2.99 lunch of 15 at Long John Silvers, another ham dinner and much snacking, laughing, and game playing. All in All it was a great holiday. As was 2009 a great year!

National Equality March

We spent the weekend in Washington, D.C. where we took part in the National Equality March. We flew to DC with our friend Rikki, Amy, and Sherry. Randi and Matt also joined us. It was one of the coolest, most meaningful experiences of my life. I'm so proud to have been a part of it. We all must continue the fight so that ALL people are treated equally EVERYWHERE.

John Oliver from the Daily Show was there. The segment aired last night Oct 13th.

We marched from the White House to the Capitol.

Here's our Iowa group!

There were so many great signs! There were only a few haters along the way and we peacefully and respectfully drowned them out!

Heading up Pennslyvania Avenue. The estimate of the crowd was 200,000!

We marched right past the White House.

To learn more to donate or to learn how to lobby for equal rights check on http://www.nationalequalitymarch.org/ on the web or on Facebook.

The Iowa State Fair

Everyone I know went to the State Fair. I wanted to go too! I saw the bank was going on Wednesday for $33. It seemed like a bargain to me, but everyone was laughing that it would be me and a bunch of blue-hairs. Plus, the flyer didn't specifically say it included fair admission. ****sidebar*** I have this happen to me all the time – I have conversations with people that say “pacifically” in place of “specifically”. ****

I asked Kurt if he was interested in going. He really wasn't so I considered my options. My parents were going to go so I checked with them. Well they were going to DSM on Monday and stay until Wednesday. Since Kurt was going to on a business trip Tuesday and Wednesday that wasn't a viable option. I called the Wonder Twin. He was already there. Dang. I called Rikki. She, Amy and Amy's parents were going on Thursday. I could go by myself, but that didn't sound like much fun. When Kurt got home from work I said to him, “I really really really want to go to the State Fair”. He snapped at me, “Well then go!”

Drama!

Rikki ended up offering to go with me. She said she was fine with going twice. Since the kids are irresponsible and didn't take Francis out once when I had my root canal and was gone for 11 hours, I kenneled him.

Tuesday, Rikki and I went to the fair. It rained almost all the way there. We parked at a high school and took a shuttle in for $2 bucks. As we got off the bus, it quit raining. Some people that were sitting in front of us and eavesdropping on our inane conversation gave us an extra ticket! It only cost us $5 each to get in. Sweet! More money for food! We quickly went through the 4-H building and then went in search of turkey legs and a pork chop on a stick.

Marn called to see where we were. They had spent an hour on University attempting to get to the parking lot. I told her we were in front of the round horse barn getting our food. She said she was there, too! I looked around and she was probably 50 yards away. I was gnawing on my turkey leg and Rikki was chomping on her pork chop on a stick. Marn said, “how long have you to been here?” We said, “maybe 15 minutes.” We came to eat after all!

She, Ryan and Todd were having a funnel cake. Ryan was telling us a story and explaining how he smelled a witch in their bathroom the day before. He said something else hilarious. He was real chatty and then wanted out of the stroller so he could stomp in puddles. We went through the discovery garden with them. Marn is a master gardener and does her volunteer hours in one of the beds there. Ryan was running through the flower tunnels and stomping in more puddles. He gave me a hug and a kiss as he flew by on his way to another run through the tunnel. Rikki and I continued on our journey.

We saw the butter cow and the butter Shawn Johnson. I agree with Jen – thunder thighs! Plus, I think the butter Shawn Johnson may be taller than the real one!

I got a free boiled egg on a stick. We went through the Cultural Center and looked at the photography and art. There was some very cool stuff and some very weird stuff. Such as a taxidermied beaver coming out of a television. Huh? We had some root beer (not as good as I would have liked) and what is possibly my new favorite fair food. It was in bar form. It was a hunk of peppermint ice cream with and Oreo bottom and a fudge topping. It was FAN TAS TIC!! We consumed it so quick we didn't even get a decent picture. At $4.50 it was a bargain!

We had our handwriting analyzed for our personalities, watched outhouse races, had some free Iowa samples (cheese, beef sticks, popcorn and seasonings, chocolate), looked at the crazy people paying $25 to get flung into the sky via a slingshot/ejector seat, walked through the horse barn and then got our last fair food. Rikki got some cheese curds and I got a gater tater. Which is a potato cut into a continuous ribbon and fried. Then smothered with some cheese. We barely ate any of either one. We waddled back to the bus and headed north

Rikki is such a good friend to go twice in one week. I couldn't do it!

He's Arrived

Kurt left for Manila yesterday at 9:20 am. He arrived there today at 9:10 am. There's a 13 hour time difference. I put a Manila clock over on the left of the blog. I just enabled layouts so now I might actually be able to put cool things on here! I do not understand or know anything about html code. I can't even paste it in correctly!

Japan Airlines had a cool Internet tracker thing so I could "see" where his plane was on its journey. He flew through Tokyo.

I'm just chilling. I watered plants. I'm trying to pay bills (now that we want them to arrive, they don't). I need to do some laundry and general clean up stuff. I'm also hauling what scrap stuff I can lift upstairs to the new room.

This afternoon I'm going to get the car serviced. Then Mom and I are going to a wake for my friend, Rick. He passed away on Sunday. He was only 39. He leaves behind 3 young children and his wife. Though we've mainly communicated via Christmas cards the last few years, we had a lot of fun times together. I photographed their wedding. He, too, was killed by cancer. It's ridiculous the amount of money being spent on this oil war when we could be trying to cure cancer!

Only 189 days of Bush left.