Moving is Evil and must be stopped....

Today is a day free of unpacking! I will just avoid Goldie's disapproving stare...though I think she is starting to like hanging out on top of all the boxes...I have a new mantra though courtesy of Karen at Living Life at Leehaven, "moving is evil and must be stopped." I like it.

I spent yesterday afternoon at the doctors. Looks like I may have another kidney stone on the way. Not my idea of a good time. My blood pressure was sky high and about every 10 minutes I feel like someone is punching me in my side. Duhhhhh.... She did give me some good anti-spasm pills that at least got me to sleep most of the night. Amazing how good that feels!

So today is a relax, drink lots and lots of fluids, graze on the fruit salad Dh cut up for me this morning and hope it all goes away soon!

I picked up Carolina Clay - The Life and Legand of Slave Potter Dave at the library this week. If you are interested in American pottery or southern history this is a great book. The author is a distant relative of the man who owned Dave and set about writing the book in part to find out more about his own family history. This is by no means a hard-core history. He sometimes wanders off and makes it a bit more like fiction than history but tells you before he makes the trip so you can suspend disbelief and follow along without wondering where the heck he is going. He doesn't avoid the ugly parts of what was happening in this part of the country just prior to the civil war and the decade following. To say I am enjoying reading this book may be a stretch (it is about slavery and some evil times in our history) - but I am learning a lot and at times it is fascinating.

There is quite a bit about how the style of pottery/stoneware in the Edgefield area developed and the photos are wonderful. He even shows some of the face jugs that began to be popular here in the mid 1800's. It was through the facejugs that I first learned of Dave and Edgefield pottery. (on a quilting note...in the center of Edgefield is a small museum with lots of pottery and wonderful antique quilts!)

On a totally different subject...I pulled fabrics for Bonnie's new mystery quilt. I wanted to use some of my greens and purples instead of the blues and pinks she used in hers but now I am not so sure. I may just make a little test block today....is that cheating?!

Mystery to me....

Not a lot of quilting going on here. Most of my time is spent organizing and folding fabric. One of the challenges from the move is the movers sort of threw fabric in where ever to fill space...so a drawer is full in the bedroom, the jewelry box got a fat quarter, the inside of a casserole dish some 2-1/2 inch strips, and even in the shoe boxes were tucked some 6 inch squares. How they did this without my seeing is a mystery to me. So as I unpack any stray fabric pieces end up on the couch and every night I iron, fold and put away. Guess I didn't get too far last night since this is what greeted me this morning....

I did need a few minutes away over the weekend so I went out and bought some fun yarn colors. Do I have a plan how I will use it? No, but look at those colors....happy place.
The saga of the Tom cat continues. He was back several times courting Goldie this past weekend.He made the mistake of being out in the yard when Macbeth (my Scottish terrier) went out to play. Now Mac loves cats...most cats...maybe not cats who are stalking his little sister.
Tom got out of the tree fine after about 20 minutes of wiggling around on that branch!

I'm not sure if we are making progress on the unpacking or it just isn't bothering me as much. Either way things are better. Oh, I still can't walk into my sewing room but I do have a plan. Friends are coming over and moving the boxes out into the garage so we can put in the new (unbroken) bookcases and gradually move the fabric into place. If I am lucky this will happen before the end of the year....

Another reason for needing more bookcases for fabric (other than still having more fabric than I need!) is the number of books that find their way into out house. I must have given away a carload of books before I left England and still we have them piled in corners, on crowding counter-tops, double stacked on shelves and lined up on the bedroom windowsill.
Last night I finished "Ice Road" in the photo above. It is a historical novel based in St. Petersburg at the start of WWII. If you like historical novels or this period in history I would definitely recommend it. It is a fairly complex group of characters and it takes a good hundred or so pages before the plot gels...stick with it though. (I don't know if you could write a novel set in Russia and it not be a bit complicated!)

So it was a fairly lazy weekend. My DH did most of the heavy lifting when it came to the boxes. Did a bit of Christmas shopping, a bit of baking, and a lot of looking through recipes.

A question...a couple of years ago a quilter posted a "baked oatmeal" recipe. I made it a dozen times or so then lost the recipe. Does anyone have it or know who posted it?

The things you find

Today I am taking a day off from the move...not a day off however. My Dh offered my services to help bake for a party our friends are having tonight. Now normally this would not be a problem but when most of your things are still in cardboard boxes it is a bit of a challenge. I ended up making Cream cheese brownies, lemon bars, and pumpkin bars. They are all baked in 9x13 pans so I can put out one tray with three different bars on them and they fit well. I also made a try of pralines this morning. I had to put them in the car already so I can't "graze" on them.

I'm going over their house later to work on the appitizers...tzatziki, fresh hummus, stuffed grape leaves, grilled halloumi, spanakopita, bruscetta on garlic toast, and grilled marinated shrimp. Most of these are already put together and just need to be thrown on the grill or plated. The house smells good at least.

People react to stress...like moving...differently. When stressed I cook. This has been a stressful move. First the movers thought they lost our main shipment...it ended being a data input error but made for a couple of anxious days. Then our cat Goldie got out and somehow injured her back leg. Now of course this happens lat at night so she has to go to the late night vet causing us to have a late, late night while she gets it cleaned and stapled shut.So they finally find our shipment but by then they can't deliver until after Thanksgiving. No problem...I can sleep another two weeks on an airmattress. The morning before the shipment arrives worry that I may have pulled a musle cleaning the kitchen...by noon I was in the emergency room diagnosed with a kidney stone! Fortunately about midnight it passed but it left me really, really out of it for when the movers showed up at 7:30 the next morning.

The movers told us they were going to deliver 7 crates Monday and 7 more the next day. This sounded like a good plan until the first day was over. They delivered the frame and box spring for the king size bed and only the mattress for the queen size guest room bed. Still not a real bed in the house... Also, the first day was primarily boxes...no bookcases, dressers, or cabinets. Hard to put stuff away like that! Try as you can the boxes end up blocking spaces you want to put the cabinet that the stuff in the boxes go in! Duhhhhhh!!!! It was so nice when my quilting room was empty like the photo below...now I can't even get in to take a photo (all you see is the side of a box!)Then comes the damages part....The packers were incentivized to get the containers as densely packed as possible. The packed out the drawers of dressers and the inside of the cabinets for my sewing room...I'm not sure they realized how heavy fabric is...the three cabinets are all broken in one way or another and the fabric all has to be refolded. We are talking three 6-foot by 3 foot cabinets of fabric...I'll be folding for weeks! And instead of a sewing desk for Christmas I guess I will be replacing my cabinets (I lost one in the trip over to England...though that one was empty.)

Anyway, I am thankful it is almost over. I am unpacking 5 boxes a day (no more!) and have even put up a couple of Christmas decorations. Optimisticly it will at least be St Patrick's day before I am in my sewing room doing anything but organizing again. The quilt at the top of this post is one of my oldest projects...about 1997. It is from one of Mimi Dietrich's Smithsonian quilt books and is called the Cobb Quilt. I am hand quilting it so for the next month or so it will be about the only quilting/sewing I see myself doing.

I just reread this...what a whiney post! I'll do much better next time....