Merry Christmas everyone

Merry christmas everyone.


Here is morning tea with pressies.

These are the pressies.

Then cooking the lunch

And finally too much lunch.

Hope you had a good one.

Happy summer soltice or the end of the world

Happy summer soltice, it is now downhill to winter or only 5 hours to go.

or

Whichever either will be fun.

Have a good one

121212

What a wonderful date, firstly happy birthday to my husband and then secondly went from 20% vision to 120% with one eazy bionification. Only received the lense and none of the cool stuff that allows for instant recognistion with stats.

Colours are bright .

Have a good one

December is here

Well this is it, the last month of the year, and soon we can all take a breath and relax before next year. I have finished the orange circle of the dear Jane and have done 2 of the red stripe.

December seems to be getting to be a busy month what with my husbands birthday being on the 12th. He already has his birthday present which was an upgrade to his PC. I got his old quad core 3.2 gig so I am not moaning at all. Monday sees me going to the opthamologist and Tuesday possibly eyeball surgery. Lets hope for the best with that one, and if not, we only have three weeks until the Mayans want the earth blown up. As yet I have not done any Christmas shopping but once again see the previous statement. Why borrow hassles of getting a whole lot of presents if the only people who will enjoy them are the Zombies. My eldest is betting on the zombies and is running away for the city until the 21st is over, and due to this not wanting to be with her mum if the world does end, I will only buy Christmas present on the 22nd.

This is probably not true as the reality is that I normally make sure that my husband has a cool birthday before buying present for Christmas. This is something I have done for the last sixteen years as he still has hangups about his birthday being ignored when he was a child and then him and his brother both getting the same presents around Christmas.

Another whine item this week was my eldest poking into a known button of mine is the fact that you can follow your dreams no matter what your resposibilities are... as normal I rose to the bate as I feel that once you have children you have to look after them first before you can go forth and do anything irresposible. Oh well, this is probably why she has not spawned :)

The weather here today is amazingly cool, but, we have bee suffering quite badly with the heat.

Keep cool and have an amazing Christmas.

November is here

Welcome to November. We are having a cold snap at the same time as Sandy was visitting new york. Let us hope the rest of the month has better weather.

I have been creating photobooks so my dear jane has slowed down a bit, I will update numbers later. The photobook is of my grandmother and it is just a little bit depressing doing research on all of these dead people. But yesterday was halloween so why not.


later
Have a good one

Another Friday

Yay yay it is Friday and yet this morning was buggered up by some idiot having stolen our beautiful gate motor. After having been robbed only 2 and a half weeks ago it is really bringing into question the enjoyment of the deepest darkest continent. The sense of decency and honourability is sadly lacking in almost all the citizens, with even the ones professing a religion not seeming to be able to understand right from wrong! Oh well, this too I will have to get over.

On a more amusing angle, I had to renew my drivers licence this week and this being the deepest darkest continent, our finger prints need to be taken for the re-issuing of said licence. Well due to my excessive hand stitching I have so many crags and fissures on my thumb that the machine could not discern my print. All the buggers had better take up stitching as it would allow them to destroy their finger prints.

Well have a good day and may your posessions still be yours until such time as you wish to give them away. Have a happy day.

Dear Jane Progress

October oh yay.

October oh yay.

If we lived in Germany then October would be amazing with lashings of beer and sour kraut.

Nummy. Though due to my ancestors being a bit dumbass and leaving Germany, here I sit in the deepest darkest continent on this planet. Though with them coming over to a new continent I have within my genetic make-up a mish mash of German, French, Irish, British and Scottish ancestors. So if biodiversity is good for the selection of stronger genes to carry forward in my gene pool then my children are extremely lucky even though they will never be entered in any pedigree show. Yay being a European pavement special. The other thing is that people that came to the wilds of Africa were either brave or scoundrels running away from their past so either way that does make us interesting..

We still have not everything replaced that the idiots who broke into our house stole. Today we are having the trellidoor reinstalled. Trellidoors are cages we keep our selves in, to protect us from the thieving bastards who roam our streets. I will be less cross when I have everything back as it was. This is about the 7th time that we have had our possessions redistributed against our wishes. It makes me cross due to the fact that we freely give people stuff on a continuous and never hoard items. aaargh.

Though once I had seen that they had destroyed our front entrance, I went into the study where they had stolen my husbands beautiful screen and thankfully left the tub with my dear Jane blocks in. Even though we have a horrid week or two, I managed to get up to 106 blocks which is 63% of the middle blocks and once again almost made it a block a day.

The weather has been vacillating between hot and cold. I never look forward to summer as it really gets too hot. The trees are getting all their new leaves and are looking amazing. I can't as yet take pictures as this is something else the shmucks stole. (Not the trees, but the camera)

Work is being annoying with them wanting me to fly to Bloemfontein as some piece of work, decided to redistribute the companies assets. I think this sucks as the plane is a turbo-prop and not even a real plane. Let see if my butt fits into the seats of this thing, if not I will climb off and the stupid lawyers can come up to civilisation.

We made suet blocks for the wild birds in the garden and they make an amazing noise with them competing for the food. I am still sad that we don't have squirrels in Gauteng.

OK keep cool and keep on.

Happy spring equinox

The spring equinox is here and with it the bright mornings and waking up at amazingly early times.

 


Spring equinox is also my husband and my wedding anniversary. We met on the winter solstice and married 3 months later. We probably would have got married sooner but it was cute to do it with reference to where the sun was.

This week has however been a bit of a stressful time with us experiencing a robbery at our house. The pieces of nonsense that broke it broke our 3 metre by 3 metre sliding door in our lounge and then used a crowbar to pop our security doors that where there to keep people like them out of our house.
They only had 3 minutes in our property before our security company was there, but in that time they managed to steal screens and destroy a whole lot of stuff. The other thing they stole was my camera and this makes me especially sad due to the fact that I have just recently got over my fear of damaging it and have started taking photos on a regular basis. Oh well this can be added to the challenge of living in the darkest continent on the planet.

My dear jane is coming along nicely. I am currently doing my yellow ring of blocks. I also finished the 4 heart block which was worrying me as I am not appliquing any of the blocks. One of the sides of one of the blocks is not perfect, but, otherwise it is ok. This quilt is a great leveler of perfectionists. I have come to realise that the original wasn't perfect so my version of it doesn't have to be perfect either. (It is either that or I will never finish it).

Everybody have an amazing spring equinox. 

September springs in.

September has meandered in with the sun returning to us and it is wonderful.

The blossoms are on the peach tree in glorious pink splendour. September is a fun month with my wedding anniversary happening on the 21st and this will be 16 years married. We met on the winter solstice (June 22) and got married on the spring equinox (September 21) we only waited the 3 month due to not wanting to look too enthusiastic. Yay what fun. My sister is up from East London so that has been very nice.

On a more sober note, tomorrow my mother has been gone for a decade. Sad to be a half orphan.

I have completed 77 blocks on my dear Jane so that means I did 29 blocks this month. The blocks are looking cute with me trying to inject a little humour in either the colour choice or the fussy cutting of things like stars of cob webs. Now that I am in the midst of the quilt my brain is being naughty and has started day dreaming about my next project. I think the next one will be a wall hanging,

I am looking forward to seeing which birds come back to the garden after them woosing out and going to visit their European homes. I just worked out though that saying birds springing in the garden just sound stupid. We may have a hardee dah pair creating a nest in one of the trees, that will be fun to watch.

Have an amazing spring.

August blows in

I have always liked August, not only for being given presents on the 10th, but for the sun that is coming back to us.

This August I was all pleased that summer was coming back and then I woke up and it was the coldest day so far this year. I still am holding out for the blossoms on our peach and plum trees in time for my birthday in a weeks time. Throughout the years I have photos of my sister and me (she is born 3 years before me on the day after my birthday) standing in front of a plum tree in the garden of the house that we gre up in, squinting into the sun as my mother took pictures of us and the blossoms. Now being old and knowing how much my mother loved her garden, I suppose we were lucky that we did not have to stand behind the tree. hee hee.

My dear jane is coming along nicely and in 2 months I have completed 20% of the quilt.

Gotta go, have a good one.

July almost over

What a miserable month July is. All the trees have lost their leaves and the grass is brown. And being africa, almost every day there are patches of grass that have been set alight. This leaves huge patches of black in an already depressing landscape. In Johannesburg where I live we have a summer rain season, so apart from being extremely miserable due to the landscape, we also are suffering from horrid static. Taking off clothing causes a minor lightening show and the poor cats are having bad hair days almost every day.

Okay that's it for whining.

Work is. See that almost sounds like whining again. oh well.

Stitching is going well and there is an exciting quilt show on the weekend.
Last weekend we went to a cat and dog show. We have been visalating between getting a Maine coon or an oriental after our white kitty past away last year after being with us for 15 years. Well last year just after she died we went to the same show and my husband really wanted one of those naked cats. (Sphinx). This year however once again the Maine coons are at the top of the list. It is such a big descision deciding who is going to join our family. The problem is that we have 2 spoilt monsters and we would hate for them to feel anything other than special. We will wait and see who actually comes to live with us.

The youngest is writing exams. This sounds fine except that the kids are supposed to be picked up after they have finished writing. This is fun as I have to dash out of work to pick her up and then dash home so that I can connect and then work from there. Thank goodness I can actually work from home, though it does cause extra stress of having to prove that work is happening.

Well let me get back to doing some work, though sitting at work all you have to do is prove that your butt is in your chair.

Have a good one.

Birds Wintering in our garden

Here are a few pics of the birds that are wintering at our house. We added a fruit station and some new birds came to visit.

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Have a good one

July is here and so is winter

July in all it's dullness is here and is horrid as ever. Living in deepest, we really only have two months when it gets really chilly and due to this fact, our houses are not insulated and we always sleep with the windows open. (mostly so that our cats can get in and out of our bedroom). Well when winter arrives our house is miserable. We tend to hibernate with dinner being eaten and then retiring to watch telly cuddled under the quilt. I like that bit about winter. The cats too are really affectionate, this too is a plus. On the other side however, the grass is all yellow, there are no leaves on the trees and everything is so dry that static has taken over the world.
In winter we also feed the birds that did not pop off for their european vacation. We seem to have at least 100 birds that come abd eat at the seed station. We also have 2 Ibisus which we call hardy dahs which live in the garden and stay need the pool. Well seeing as they are meat eaters we have been feeding them cat biscuits with inner gravy. They really seem to enjoy the biscuits. The funny thin is that they seem to be getting an extremely healthy shine on their feathers, so whatever the manufacturers of the add to make cats coats shine also works on birds. We feed our cats really larny cat food that will allow them to live until they are ancient, and the food that we feed the Ibusus is really not expensive. The 1 cat loooves the cheapo food, I think he thinks it is fast food.

I got my bolt of s28 arctic white so now I am all set to be able to do the whole of the dear jane in the same stunning colour. The only problem with having white as a background is that the orange cat draps the red soil from outside and deposits it on the quilt. On saturday the irish chain required 2 sessions through the washing machine to get rid of the evidence of where he snuggles up at night.

Progress on the Dear Jane is as follows:

Stay well and keep warm.

Dear jane as at the end of June

I have now being done my dear jane quilt for 1 month. here is my progress chart.  I have realised that although this quilt is amazing, I believe that it could drive even the most sane retiring quilter into a growling wreck with all the nonsence that it dishes out. I am attempting to do the whole quilt using the english paper piece method, which just adds to the sress level as it is amazing how a few 1 mm pieces of fabric over paper can do things to the layout of a block,

I made 21 block in June for the quilt and an extra 4 blocks that will not be getting to be in the main event. The blocks can be seen in the tab above. They really are not as good as I would have liked, but hey that is how it goes. I think that I need to allocate 120 hours to the quilt this month.
Have a good one

Happy Winter Solstice

Happy Winter soltice everyone. I know it is the start of winter but in reality we are hurteling towards summer.
The shortest day is over and from now on the chicken who lives next door will start saying good morning earlier and earlier. At the height of summer the stupid bird likes to wake up at 3:30 in the morning and that is just silly.

Oh well for those in the southern hemisphere, keep warm and those in the Northern Hemisphere all I can say is Chill!

Have a good one.

Happy Fathers day

Wishing my dear Husband a Happy fathers day. I need to thank him for being such a cool dad.


This weekend I spent Saturday making a Alice McGee pinafore for my eldest to wear to a fancy dress party. I find it so amusing that 21st birthday parties have to be fancy dress and have a theme, I would have thought that being a @!st then surely 21 would be the theme with all the associated shlock of keys and champagne and all the other guff. Personally I had just come back from an overseas trip which I paid for and had German Measles which I thought was hilarious that I had caught in Germany. I didn't have a huge party but my sister who is 3 years older did the whole think including the having a lamb on the spit...I think animals on a spit is a pretty gross thing to do.

With my sisters sacrifice , the heavens opened and the were many rush tarpaulin being erected around it. Even though this happened 35 years ago I can still remember the rain and mud being shlocked into the house and covering the kitchen and dining room floors. For my eldest she took her friends to a casino and they all enjoyed being adults by gambling and drinking too much, now that is a good way to declare that you are an adult.

I have been doing my Dear Jane blocks and gee whiz they are a pain in the Tookhes. I am doing them way slower that I thought I would. I decides to do a few of the same colour so that I didn't have to have 300 colours available in my work bag. This is going to cause the progress to be working from the outside in.
The weather has been horrid, but we are only a week away from the longest night and that is the official start of winter, but in reality it is the slide down to summer. Hee ha.

Keep warm where ever you are and have a good one

the 6th of the 6th

SO today is a cute date what with it being the 06 of the 06 and if you add that together you get the 12 thereby making 060612. See now that is the logic that has kept me employed for the last 34 years writing computer systems.

I have started making my Dear Jane quilt. I made 2 blocks and then realised that the backing was yuck. I have now remade them and added a few more. It is fun but shew the pieces are tiny, I think that these blocks will require Extra Zen to be added, there may even be the need for burning incense. I will post the pictures at the bottom of this post.

The weather is now officially cold, but, I am still wearing summer clothes in the office as the brain trust that runs the thermostat is keeping it at a sweltering 26 degrees c or 80 degrees f. This is what the temperature looks like for the rest of the week. Brrrrrrr.
We need to go out and buy another heater as the bedroom's ones switch blew up and I stole the study one.
I cut my hair, this is actually a big deal as my hair was very log about 2 feet down my back, unfortunately I was looking like a weird witchy type person, once you are over 50 it becomes dangerous in how you wear your hair. I kept on thinking that I looked like my mother when she was 65 ish. so now it is all short and bouncy. It was funny at the hair dresser, once the had cut the hair it almost seemed to be a big enough pile to look like a small animal.

Hope you all enjoy the 6th of the 6th and keep warm wherever you are.











These are the blocks that I have done so far in June

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June is here

June is here. Five months of this year have whizzed by and now here we are 3 weeks to go to the start of winter or actually the longest night of the year.

We are all now sleeping under 2 quilts and the kitties have learnt a new appreciation of snuggling up to their human family members. The biggest problem they currently have is static. The short hair keep his fur under control by jumping into the basin every morning after my husband has shaved. The poor long hair is running around and having a bad hair day almost everyday. Poor girl!

Last month I finished the Irish chain which is amazingly loud and warm. I started on my Dear Jane but once I had done the first two blocks I realised that the tea stain colour that I had bought for the background was just the wrong tone and bleached the colour out of the yellow blocks, I went out and bought some white and now there is an order to the States to get a bolt of S28 arctic white. I may use the tea stain fabric as my sashing.  

 

Two week end ago we went down to the bush and it was amazing. I just did not like the drive or the yucky mining towns that we had to drive through to get there. The animals were great and I almost want to do a wall hanging using some of the pictures of the elephants and hippos that were taken. but that will be later once I get bored with making the Dear Jane blocks.

Work is fine at the moment except that all of the initiators have been drain for month-end and currently my job is sitting in position 31.

Keep warm or cool and have a good one.