Merry (belated) Christmas and Happy New Year!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and that 2014 brings you nothing but joy and happiness.

I'm off school right now but there's plenty going on without that. I haven't been stitching all that much because I've been working on Christmas knitting. I'm still not done, believe it or not, but I have one scarf left!

I'm also almost done with page two of my Still Life with Parrot, but I'll wait to finish before posting that photo. Only about 400 stitches of that left! I was going to stitch it over New Year's Eve but I ended up going to bed a little after 10. And it felt glorious.

I do have some Christmas goodies to share, however. First, Handsome Helpful Fiancé got me a new HAED! Of course he always says I have more than enough charts. Just goes to show how wonderful he is. Without further ado, my new chart:

Randal Spangler's Library Adventures.

As if that wasn't enough, Lesli has (once again) spoiled me and kitted up my Space Traveler:

Absolutely amazing.

That's not even counting all the other ways I've been spoiled this Christmas.

I'll keep this short. All the best wishes for everyone in the new year! Looking forward to some new starts this year, finishing school, and being able to keep up with all your blogs once again.

Happy Stitching!

Still Life with Parrot #4

I had prepared this photo to share a few days ago and somehow I never got around to it. I've been feeling that way with a lot of aspects of my life right now: just can't get around to it. It kind of feels like everyone needs something from me and I just want to lock myself in my room with a Do Not Disturb sign and do my own thing. It is what it is, however, and I'll deal with it and move on. Until then, STITCHING! Keep in mind I have done quite a bit more since this photo was taken, but I'll share that in a few days.

Before:

After:

It's coming along quite nicely, I think.

Last week was kind of a strange week. Most of it was spent with temperatures in the high 70s and low 80s. Thursday, it was 81. And then Friday it was 28. That night we had freezing rain. Following by more freezing rain and snow on Saturday. It got to the point where on Sunday I couldn't get into my car from the driver's side because the layer of ice was so thick. I couldn't open the door from the inside, either, and the window was so solid that I couldn't punch the ice out. Monday everything melted and this coming week we're supposed to be in the high 70s again. My body is so confused. I can handle the cold and I can handle the heat. Here are some photos to give you an idea of how things looked.

This is my car's antenna, if that gives you any indication of how thick the ice was on my car. I have a really cool shot of the back of my car with icicles all over it and the thickness of the ice warping the Toyota logo, but it also has my license plate number in it and I'm paranoid so... sorry :(

We had a lot of broken tree branches in the neighborhood. Here's a bush outside my apartment.

That stuff on the left looks like snow. And at one point it was. Before it was covered by freezing rain and became solid ice. There was basically no surface you could walk on without almost dying. Handsome Helpful Fiancé and I took a nice stroll down the stairs and across the sidewalk which almost ended tragically.

Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed those. Stay warm and happy stitching everyone!

Still Life with Parrot, 3

Thank you, everyone, for the wonderful kind words about our engagement photos. I have 10.5 months of planning left so crossing fingers. I was supposed to call the florist today and I didn't. I'll have to call them tomorrow. Either way, I'm super stressed out (mostly because of school) but hanging in there. Not much stitching done, but here it is anyway.

Before:

After:

This one is actually a really quick stitch. It's on 18 count and also there are only about 3,000 stitches per page versus my usual 7,000. However, making Christmas gifts has significantly slowed my progress. That and the fact that my to do list always seems to grow and never shrink, no matter how much I've actually gotten done. I'm whining, I know.

With that, happy stitching everyone!

College page 13 and vacation part 2

I'll start with the stitching. I finished page 13 of College! So, without further ado, here are the before and afters.

Before:

After:

With that, I'm 56% done with College. Handsome Helpful Fiancé has picked Still Life with Parrot to be the project I work on for this next page, so updates of that probably next week.

On the laptop front, it is broken. Again. Now it doesn't recognize Internet at all which is problematic when one is going to school online. I'm still battling it out since it's still under warranty and I never had problems like this before it got "repaired."

And in my last news, we took engagement photos last week and they came out rather nice. Below are just a few of my favorites, but if you want to see all 200+ of them click here.

I'd write more but I'm actually really angry right now (about the laptop and the whole ordeal that has lasted over a month with it now) so I'm just going to go take a relaxing shower and bask in the glory of my page finish.

Happy stitching!

Vacation, part 1

Well, no stitching update to share so if you're not interested in reading about me and stuff I do then skip this. I won't be offended. I'm about 60 stitches away from a page finish on College, though, so an update of that should happen shortly after my return. But for now, I'm on VACATION!

Also, some of you were wondering where the haunted house pattern I stitched for the Halloween blog hop was from. It was a little freebie from this website. I didn't stitch the whole thing but the whole thing is rather cute.

Handsome Helpful Fiancé and I are on vacation. Finally! Saturday morning we rented a car and drove six hours to Dallas. After checking into our hotel we walked around the area a bit, visited the JFK assassination site, and grabbed some dinner. Soon, however, it was time to go to the show, which was the reason we went to Dallas in the first place.

Uhh Yeah Dude (UYD) is a comedy podcast run by Seth Romatelli and Jonathon Larroquette. They've been doing it since 2006 and have live shows fairly often. November 2, they came to Dallas. So we packed ourselves into our rental car and drove to the Texas Theater. The show was awesome. Absolutely hilarious and a great time. If you're interested in hearing what I heard that night, it'll be episode 395 of Uhh Yeah Dude on iTunes or wherever you get podcasts from. It hasn't been uploaded yet but so worth it once it is.

After the show the guys did a meet and greet, which I had been talking about for a long time and had been super excited to meet Seth. HHF and I are waiting there, he's obviously tired, and I'm chickening out. I keep telling him we should just go home, we won't get to meet him anyway, blablabla. Well finally the moment comes. The guys come out of backstage and we see Seth talking to some people. And then he finishes talking to them and there's no one around him and HHF says I should go talk to him. And I don't. Instead, I chicken out.

So what does HHF do? He puts his hand on my back and, literally, pushes me right into Seth Romatelli. Seth stares at me like, who is this crazy lady? I stare at him thinking, I bet he thinks I'm a crazy lady. When my brain starts working again, I mention that HHF has pushed me encouragingly to talk to him. We introduce ourselves and start chit chatting, which was awesome. He was really nice. Not a very long conversation since there were a ton of people there but he did agree to take a picture with me. We said our goodbyes and left.

And then HHF tells me that the flash didn't go off and the picture is actually really dark and it's almost impossible to see anything. Understandably, I'm bummed, but I still have the experience with me so I decided it wasn't that big a deal. After posting the photo to FB, however, first Jo (from Serendipitous Stitches) and then John (my wedding photographer) both edited the photo for me. So, here it is:

A little pink but totally discernible!

The next day we had some fun at the Dallas Aquarium and the Perot Museum. Lots of walking. Then Monday we flew to California and today we did our engagement shoot at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. When I get those I'll post some.

So far that's it. We've come to realize that this vacation is really a food vacation. We've been eating all the delicious things we can't really get in Texas. Or rather, in the part of Texas we live in. I didn't bring any stitching, but once I get back you'll get a page finish update. Yay!

Until next time, happy stitching!

Halloween Blog Hop!

Posting this a little early for everyone abroad!

Letter "O"

Next blog: Serendipitous Stitching!

Happy Halloween to everyone who celebrates it. Stay safe out there and have a blast! I'll be sure to post a full blog post update soon - promise! I've had good reason to stay away for a bit - a preview of it is when I got my laptop back from repair it was completely empty. They wiped the whole thing. It didn't even have drivers on it. So the last few weeks have been an adventure. Yay!...

College page 13, 2249 stitches to go!

Of course, the moment I get my stitchy bug back everything hits the fan.

First, in mid-September I flew to California for 5 days. It wasn't exactly a relaxing trip. I landed Thursday morning in California and immediately had to start driving around. In a period of 5 days I had an optical appointment, a dentist appointment, met two different friends for dinner on two different nights, saw my venue for the first time, did my cake tasting and finalized the wedding cake decorations and cake flavors (four tiers and two flavors: almond cake with tiramisu filling and chocolate cake with white chocolate mousse filling), had dinner with the in-laws, finalized bridesmaids dresses, went clothes shopping, and was in a wedding (which took two days, so everything else was done over the course of three days). For anyone familiar with California geography I spent time in Oakland, Davis, San Jose, Larkspur, Santa Clara, Auburn, Grass Valley, and San Rafael (kind of in that order with some driving back and forth). Suffice it to say I was exhausted upon my return.

But it didn't stop there! Then some people at work went on vacation so I worked nonstop, then had some papers due at school, and then (of course) some hardware in my new laptop started malfunctioning and I had to send it in for repairs before the warranty ran out. So now I'm laptop-less (using my desktop right now) because my old laptop wouldn't work, I've got a ton of schoolwork, AND yesterday marked one year to go to the wedding.

Whew.

Despite all this, I did manage some stitching, I just haven't managed to post about it until I deliberately set aside a bit of time to do it today. I've got 2,249 stitches to go on this page, and I'm pretty happy with my progress despite hoping to have been done with the page by now.

Before:

After:

Monday morning I fly to Dallas for my first dress fitting. It's way early because the designer messed up on my dress order and ended up sending it 8 months too early. Since the bridal salon will only hold the dress in-store for two months I had to set up my first fitting right now and just have a lot of time between fittings in order to keep the dress in Dallas a little bit longer before my mom flies it back to California for the wedding after the last fitting.

Suffice it to say I feel like I'm running on empty. The good news is, some of you know that I've been in a pretty bad funk for many, many months now. That is somehow easing. I hope it's more of a permanent ease as opposed to temporary relief, but I guess only time will tell.

In other stitchy news, I did succumb to the stash gods and bought this:

I'm so bad. And I'm completely okay with that.

Handsome Helpful Fiancé has been a real sweetheart since I've been so exhausted and since it's starting to get cold (well, colder, anyway) I've been getting swaddled in fleece blankets and receiving tea deliveries. We're hoping to get our engagement photos done in November, so I may end up posting some of those.

Until then, I hope you guys are having a wonderful stitchy time!