Motivation Found

Yesterday I finally found my motivation after grocery shopping. Frustration over not finding what I’m looking for.

Nothing angers me more than having a coupon for Lucky Charms at a dollar ninety nine for up to four boxes and they’re out of the size the coupon is good for. Figures. Of course, it didn’t help that I went on the last day the coupon was good for at this particular grocery store, so I suppose I will have to take some of the blame. Still, it makes me wonder if once they sell out of a certain amount they simply hoard the rest in the stockroom so as to not lose too much money on this incredible deal.

With all that aggravated energy running through me, I decided to mow the lawn. Of course, being the first time to start the mower in five months, it took nearly all that energy out of me just to get it going. Seriously, I spent like a half an hour trying to start the damn thing. Fortunately we have such a small patch of lawn that it only took about ten minutes to mow the whole thing, even with it getting stuck in the incredibly soft and squishy ground… and getting caught on a tennis ball. Whoops. I’d call it grass, but lawn is more accurate as more than fifty percent of it is, well, not so much.

Somehow I managed to find my motivation renewed as I started hacking away at the climbing rose in the front yard by the porch. After trimming off all the wild growing branches, it made me think about getting some other climbing pants for the rest of the front porch since there are three unused trellises attached to it. However, the thought was only fleeting as I wanted to clean out the garden boxes and flower pots. Hopefully the Dahlia tubers will show some signs that they are planning on blooming again this year before we plant anything else in the pots, or perhaps I just need to leave the center open. Then again, they are summer blooming so I might not see any green until the next month or two when the weather is more consistently warm. I suppose I just need a little patience because I also want to start planting seeds for vegetables and lettuces, but the frosty mornings are saying otherwise.

Dealing with Disappointment

Ask anyone and they’ll tell you I’m terrible at dealing with, well, just about anything. Especially when there are emotions involved.

Perhaps there is a little bit of leeway in trying to describe how I deal with life. When I’m sad or grieving I tend to use humor more than usual. Actually I tend to use humor in a lot of circumstances. Making a joke in the middle of a very serious argument, however, is not always recommended, and rarely does it have the intended effect, but I can’t help it sometimes. That would be like telling a dog not to bark or a cat not to meow. I don’t know if it is possible for me not to inject humor into just about any circumstance, and I have the scars on my tongue from literally having to bite it in order to not say it aloud sometimes.

Now anger and frustration have a fairly odd effect on me. I get the urge to clean. I don’t know if it is a psychological therapy, one where taking something not in order or dirty and making it look all shiny and new, is the reason for it. Of course, I could have gotten it from my stepmother who I’m fairly certain went on cleaning sprees after having to deal with her ex-husband, so maybe this was a learned behavior. Actually, curiously, my dad tends to crack jokes at inopportune times as well so maybe it is part nature and part nurture. Either way, the house gets clean as I take out my anger on the toilet bowl before flushing it down.

However, currently I’m having difficulty figuring just where to place my emotions as they all seem to be jumbled together where our kids are involved. It’s been months since we’ve seen them and while I have slowly been taking reminders of them and putting them out of sight I still can’t figure out just how to deal with such a loss. It has especially been difficult since we were supposed to finally see them again last night and in typical fashion it never happened. I don’t know why I even allow myself to get my hopes up any more. I don’t know why I can’t get past the denial stage that we very possibly will never see them again. I don’t know why I can’t let go. Wait. Yes I do. Because I love those boys more than I ever should have allowed myself to.

Of Quilts and Beer

Last night as I was working on another project for my sister’s baby shower, which, by the way, is tomorrow, I realized that part of the instructions were, well, not in the tutorial I was using. Thank goodness I know a thing or two about sewing!

The project I’m working on requires handles. The tutorial I’m using shows how to cut the pieces out for the handles but not the actual process used to get them from a semi-raw state to semi-finished product. Instead it simply says “Attach handles over such and such area” and magically shows them completely ready to go. They didn’t look like that before? How do we get from quilt-sandwich to handles? Alas, previous experience needed to come into play. Or the ability to read ahead in the tutorial for another similar but not the same type of handle.

Anyway, so I know what I need to do and begin sewing down lengthwise on the pieces I cut out from my quilt-sandwich (pieced top, batting center, backing, all quilted together before being cut into various sized pieces) with the right sides facing. I then attempted to turn the piece right side out. Let’s just say this is easier said than done. After a half an hour of trying to push through small sections at a time and breaking some chopsticks in the process I resorted to beating the living daylights out of the poor tube. I didn’t say that my previous experience was based off of anything I read out of a book or the internet, but rather a simple deduction of what will be the easiest way to make the damned thing right side out.

So here I am, shoving a little bit of the handle into a small portion that I’ve already gotten right side out and then holding onto the bottom edge of the piece while I whack it against the futon frame over and over again. This took a good thirty minutes. One handle down. Yeah. Instead of starting the next one I go to the kitchen, peruse our beer selection, grab one, open it, take a long swig, and return to my craft room to begin the torture all over again. I swear the beer made the second handle go by much faster, but the clock on the wall said otherwise.

After all was said and done, the handles were completed and attached where they needed to go without too much fuss. Now all I have to do is put the rest of the project together, bake, frost and decorate some cakes, wrap everything that needs wrapping, go to work, come home, finish everything I didn’t get done, go to bed, go to work in the morning, come home and finish whatever I didn’t the night before and pack it all up to go to the baby shower. Exciting. That and all the bruises up and down my right arm and index finger should prove to start some interesting conversations.

“Oh my! Were you in a fight?”

“Only with my latest sewing project. I wouldn’t have gotten through it without the help of beer.”