My husband and I just had a very nice weekend away as a pre-anniversary celebration. It was a very relaxing weekend at the beautiful Niagara on the Lake and the Shaw Festival. Our anniversary isn't until later this month but I'll be away for work so we went a little early. The benefit to going early is that we were in Canada for their Thanksgiving weekend, which means two turkey dinners for us! Woo! We've gone to NOTL for our anniversary for years now. We usually see a play or two; this year we saw Pygmalion on one afternoon and Sweet Charity the next. Both were excellent, though I particularly enjoyed Sweet Charity. I had the soundtrack in college and knew all the songs well before I ever rented the movie version with Shirley McLaine to see what it was all about. To tell the truth, I was never a fan of the movie. This stage production, though? Fantastic. I did manage to restrain myself from singing along, however, though it was a Herculean effort.
In any case, I just wanted to do a quick post to let you know I still exist since I'm heading back out of town for work in two days so it'll be another couple whiles (as my kidlings used to say) before I can get a podcast out. I even spent about half an hour this afternoon doing a little embroidery--that's pretty major these days! I've started a new project from a book on Scandinavian-style embroidery designs I'd borrowed from the library awhile back. Felted wool, embroidery, and pudgy birds--can you get any more in my wheelhouse?
It's a very simple project--each little birdie has a small embroidery motif, and then you just glue another felt bird shape to the back to finish it off. It'll eventually become part of a garland. Maybe a gift, maybe not--depends on how well it turns out!
Besides the school-related usual accomplishments, I also swapped out seasonal clothing the morning I was packing to leave for our mini-vacation, and took the opportunity to do a major hauling out. I now have several large bags ready to go to the Good Will. I'm usually good at doing that about once a year but hadn't done it in awhile, so I was a bit behind. (And now I know where my wardrobe is a bit short, too--there's a reason I struggled to find outfits to put together on occasion.) When I got home today, I decided to finish the closet-cleaning trend and after all my other stuff was squared away, I pulled all of my jewelry out and sorted it while watching TV. I'm donating probably close to half of my accessories accumulated over the last 15 years or so. I realized I hadn't worn jewelry much this summer because the tie rack I use to hold it all had gotten so overloaded it was too much of a pain to find just the right necklace and pull it off without taking half the rest of the necklaces with it. Between the clothes and jewelry, I feel so much lighter! It's so nice to go into my closet and actually be able to see everything again, and to know what goes with what and how to accessorize it.
So I'm feeling very accomplished at the moment. My next big organizing plan is to tackle the pantry, but at this point I'm not going to deal with that until my daughter is packing to move out (she's working on a Nov 1 plan)--she'll be taking a lot of the pantry with her so it'll be easier to deal with once her stuff is gone. And then my Organizer Self will be able to rest easy again.