Memory Update

Just a quick note:

As of this weekend, the Raspberry World Memory game is updated with almost 100 new photos. The total number of photos is now 200. Check it out!

And... happy halloween! I have a long list of chores today, so I'm not doing too much to celebrate. But here's a rerun from 2000, the year we put our pumpkin in a tree, and the squirrels ate its face off:

Click to enlarge.

Connecticut sure is pretty in the fall.

In the middle of the state, where we live, the leaves are at their peak right now. Down in Mystic, where I took these pictures earlier this evening, they're still a few days away from their full glory. But the water is pretty no matter what time of year it is. And check out that moon! That picture was taken about two hours before the lunar eclipse -- which I missed during dinner with a bunch of my co-workers -- but look how spooky! It reminds me of those William Blake moons.

Now it's late, and I'm cold, so I'm off to bed. More to come, later this week.

Quick Update

By request, some more cross stitch pictures:



My Munich pal Renee has stitched a couple of these black cat pictures, and I liked hers so much that I bought the book with the patterns before we left Germany. Now I have one of my own. It didn't take long to stitch, probably about 6 hours. I started it last night and finished it this afternoon.



I did the first of these hand towels this spring in Munich and finished the second one last night. Finally! The pattern is grape leaves, and I got it as a kit. It came with way more thread than I needed to stitch the design twice. That's fine, because I think I'll stitch that pattern again -- I really like it.



I finished these months ago in Germany but I was waiting to post the pictures until I washed them -- and I waited to wash them with the other towels from the picture above. So they're finally done. These patterns are old-fashioned DMC ones that I found online, months ago. Now I can't find the web site anymore.

Tonight we're going to a Sweet Adelines show. Two of the choruses from Connecticut are performing. Next week I'll probably begin the process of joining one of these two.

Laptop

So, do you think this model of laptop will fit in the laptop bag it's sitting on top of?



And yes, that is a mini-Langenscheidt's peeking out from under the bag.

Still undecided?

Still undecided?

Go play Hip Hop Debate today!

Thoughts on Friendship

Thoughts on Friendship

Tonight for dinner we had Katynka's pot roast (left over from last night) and Laura W. Petix's macaroni and cheese. I told Marty he's lucky I have friends, otherwise he might end up going hungry.

I really do feel lucky to have friends, and not just for the recipes. Those relationships bring so much to my life, from comfort (like Eliza wrote about yesterday), to hope, to joy. I am truly blessed to have good friends, some of whom I've known for close to 20 years and some I've met in the last 5. Finding people whose company you enjoy is a great thing. And long distance phone calls, a double date on a Friday night, seeing a friendly face at work -- there's just no bad on that list. Friends make my life happier.

I've learned that even folks who aren't close friends add a lot. This time last year, I wasn't really into updating Raspberry World. After over five years on the web, my interest tapered off slowly during 2003, and in October I actually added no entries to my weblog. I wasn't sure if I'd even continue it, at that point. Shortly after that, I got an e-mail from a reader in Munich who had been following my site for a while. She turned out to be a very cool, fun person and we exchanged some great e-mail. We even met a few times for walks and talks, and got along great. We both enjoyed taking pictures of Munich and hunting down arcane information, so we had a lot in common. It was our dialogue, in fact, that really got me back into updating Raspberry World.

Later, after several months, she ended our communication -- passively rather than actively, pretty much by not responding to my e-mail anymore. I didn't take it personally. She was somewhat eccentric, and I figured she had her own reasons. And that's not meant as a slam -- she was eccentric in a way I found completely tolerable. But even if we aren't cut out to be forever friends, I'm grateful for the e-mail we shared through that long German winter. And hey, it got me back into Raspberry World, which makes me happy to this day. I hope I added something positive to her life during the time we were friends, too.

And now I'm getting settled again, about to join a new chorus, and I'm just thinking about how lucky I am to keep meeting more great people. I used to get so hung up on worrying about friendships -- especially when they were changing or shifting or just growing less intense -- but these days I don't worry about those things at all. I'm just grateful for all the ways, big and small, other people enrich my world.

And now for something (not so) completely different...

I don't often talk about my personal beliefs here, but this is something that is close to my heart. Today is National Coming Out Day. If you're lucky enough to have a friend who trusts you enough to come out to you -- today or any day -- I hope you'll think about what it means to them, and how difficult it may have been for them to bring it up at all. There is such an atmosphere of intolerance right now in our culture, with so many states trying to "protect" marriage through legislation, that I feel more strongly than ever that our friends, coworkers, and family members need our support.

One of my best friends came out today. I've always admired her, even back before we knew each other very well, and today I'm just as proud and happy as I can be to say we're friends.

Making Progress... Slowly

Here's one of the cross-stitch projects I've been working on lately. It's a small tablecloth that I started before I left Munich.

This rotation system is really a great idea -- I find that by the time I start getting bored with something, it's about time to start on the next project. I have four things on my list right now, but I think I'm about to finish one (I'll post a picture when I do) and then I'll add another one to my rotation, or maybe a couple more.

The strange thing is, ten hours of stitching really doesn't yield as much visible progress as I expected. However, this does give me a great appreciation for how long it actually takes to finish something big. I think I always underestimated the amount of time I put into completing projects before, but now that I'm tracking it (even casually), I can see that it's a lot more than I realized.



In some ways, working on the house feels like the same thing. We are making progress... but slowly. We still have a lot of boxes to unpack in the study and basement, and a few in the bedroom, but right now we are still going through things and trying to sort out what we want to get rid of. It's slow going.

Today Marty's installing an organizer in my closet so that I can use that space more efficiently; I think that'll help us make some more progress in the bedroom. We both found out many moves ago that once you start getting used to the boxes -- once they become "furniture" -- it is very hard to make any more progress.

I suppose I could take all this time I'm spending on cross stitch and put it into unpacking boxes, but I think it might drive me crazy.

Busy Days

Hey, it's been quiet around these parts. And not just because we've been breaking in our new living room furniture (see illustration above).

It's been a busy couple of weeks. I visited some choruses, we bought some new furniture, Marty went on a couple of business trips, and I started a new job. Yes, you read that right, I am working.

Although we both hated to leave Munich, one of the things I was most looking forward to on getting home was starting work again. I have to admit, though, I didn't think it would happen this quickly! With the help of a good friend, I found a job that I think I'll enjoy and I started two weeks ago. So I haven't had much time for anything else since then.

The new furniture is really pretty. I don't think we'd ever bought living room furniture together before. We always had nice things, but never anything we'd picked out. I really love this stuff! The chair and ottoman in the picture above are black, but the other pieces (the sofa and recliner) are burgundy. It all looks nice in our newly painted living room. Marty's setting up the entertainment center right now.

In the evenings I've been doing a lot of cross stitching. One of my friends in Munich, Renee, got me back into it while I was living there. I did a few small projects in Munich and started a larger one (a tablecloth) that I'm still working on now. I'm stitching on a rotation now, which I read about here, and I just added a new project this week. Also in my rotation I have a piece that I started back in 1992 and never finished. I've made some progress on it though, and now it's half done:



Another thing I did recently was have a bunch of my pictures from Germany printed. I started working backwards, just getting pictures from the last three months of our stay printed, but they turned out nice and now I'm thinking of having more printed, and maybe making some photo albums or something to show them off. I've never tried scrapbooking, you know...