Lots of Rows

 Work has slowed down. Thank goodness!  We had a long day yesterday. Kevin and I helped our Austin coworkers in New Braunfels. I texted my daughter that we were in New Braunfels (only a 15 minute drive away from Texas State) and that if she wanted to come by and visit at the convenient stores we were doing inventory at, I’d get her $20-30 worth of snacks. She said she would, but Mondays are her most busy days with classes. I know that, since I saw her schedule. It just would have been nice to see her. 

My psychic prediction is that we will have to help them out there a lot in the near future. They seem to need a lot of help, and Kevin and I make the most sense to send out since we live in Hempstead, which is “on the way” from Houston to Austin. I don’t mind the traveling, in fact I often prefer it. Today and tomorrow are short days and then we likely have a four day weekend. I am going to enjoy that greatly!!! It’s payday, too!

I have been trying to lower my fabric square stash by arranging the squares I have into rows of seven blocks. Each block is about a foot long. I made two more blue rows and actually a pink row!  With pink denim on the back and everything. I remember going to 25 cent day at the fabric store and getting a pair of size 26 pink jeans. They were very long, too. I got a lot of squares out of it. Those went on the back of the pink blocks and pink row. On the front of the pink row is different shades of solid pink and a little bit of pink floral print. I’ll take pics when I feel like I’m done making random rows. 

The idea with making random rows is that I will arrange them into random quilts, and since the quilts “have no color scheme or pattern that makes sense” then they would just be free gifts to people I could ship them to for practice shipping. But I’m starting to think that with what I have, I can actually make a couple more quilts with good enough color schemes/patterns to actually sell. We’ll see!  

Time Change What?

 I did not even realize that the time changed for daylight savings time. I do have a funny story, though. This happened exactly five years ago, when we “fell back” one hour in November of 2020.  

I have to back up and explain that Arizona doesn’t do daylight savings time. During the summer, Arizona is in pacific standard time, and during the winter, it’s in mountain standard time. Where I live in Houston is central standard time. In 2020, my side hustles paid extremely well, because not many people did them. I took the opportunity to travel around and do them, and this included going to Phoenix where my on again/off again boyfriend lived. He and I had gone to high school together and reconnected on social media. I lived in Arizona for nine years. 

It’s pretty standard to take I-10 all the way from Houston to Phoenix and back. Sometimes, if I did most of the jobs all the way there, I’d take I-40 back home and cut through Midland and Odessa, Texas. But this time, I was on I-10. 

The time changes from central to mountain standard when you reach the town of Van Horn, Texas. Then, if it’s the summertime, it will change again to pacific time at the Arizona state line. If it’s winter, it will just stay mountain. When the time “fell back” in November of 2020, I was on the road going either to or from Phoenix. I made the mistake of sleeping at the Arizona/New Mexico State line. I woke up the next morning and didn’t know what time it was. I couldn’t remember if fall was when we went forward or backwards with the time. I didn’t know what time zone I was in, I was confused about the change, and some stores I was going to do audits at opened at different times. Standard opening times were either 6:00 or 7:00 am, but since it was Sunday, some had later times. My phone was even confused, probably because I was on the state line. It quite literally could have been 4:00, 5:00, 6:00, or 7:00 am. There was no point in trying to work, because I figured a lot of employees might also forget the time change and be late. So I just sat at the rest area and watched the sunrise. In that part of the country, the sunrises are breathtaking. 

Restful Weekend of Creativity

 Yesterday was a good day. I gathered all of my 6 and 1/2 inch squares that were either denim or not and worked on arranging them into blocks and rows. I really do have a ton of them, but not enough to make one quilt with a good enough color scheme or pattern that makes sense. Making hodgepodge denim chenille quilts to ship to my closest friends out of town for Christmas will be a good way to learn how shipping these will work and get rid of my scraps so I have a cleaner area to start over with. I do have six quilts ready to list for sale, but I’m not sure if 6 is good enough for an Etsy shop. I had a 7th one that my mom gave me $50 for and donated to the church raffle. So I did sell a quilt, but the customer was my mom. The woman who won it is reported to love it. 

Yesterday, I made several blue rows, two blue and gray rows, a red row, and an orange row. The mountain of squares in my daughter’s room is already less. She’ll love that when she comes home for Thanksgiving. 

Kevin voluntarily gave my car an interior detail. I wasn’t expecting that!  He even went to auto zone and got me new floor mats and seat covers. It looks so nice!  Since his car hasn’t been running well, we’ve been using mine. We just got around Friday to taking his to the shop. 

I’m also glad my thumb feels better enough to have done some sewing. I want to be creative in my free time, but my writing is too heavy for the headspace I’m in at the moment. 

There was another instance of a missing grown adult woman who made contact with law enforcement to confirm she’s safe, but her family members keep posting in missing person groups that she’s mentally ill and needs to come home. To me, that’s just infuriating. Since I have this weird fascination with finding missing persons, I follow a lot of their cases on social media. This comes up often. This woman’s family is acting like law enforcement is these big meanies because they closed the case. Well, I’m sorry but that’s what they do if the person was confirmed to be safe. A lot of people are learning that they can cut off their toxic and abusive family members, and the toxic family members end up doing this crap. It takes away from people who are truly missing and in harm’s way, with the idea being, if someone is looking for your grown child who doesn’t want to speak to you because you’re a piece of shit, they might miss someone who’s actually being trafficked.  I took this screenshot from

Charley Project:

Adults who do not wish to be found by certain people have the right to. Although I believe many may not be aware of this, and the people they’re trying to stay away from might claim mental health reasons why you should be controlled, it’s still true that you can walk into a police station and clear your missing person status and not have contact with whomever you ran away from- even if you were a minor when you did so.

With that being said, I have stayed away from social media due to some disturbing news in the Houston area as well. Sometimes the comments are worse than what happened. I still care about missing people, it’s just that all the cases in which the above happens are a little disappointing. 

Halloween Present and Tidbits

Anna sent me a selfie she took getting ready in her dorm for a Texas State University Halloween party on Friday night. I got this picture right after I published the post below with her past Halloween costumes over the years. 

I’m glad my daughter is there. She’s living her best life. I’m a little worried about her mental health when she graduates in 2029 or 2030 when she realizes that her degree isn’t really going to get her the career she believes it will. Hopefully, she’ll be right and I’ll be wrong, but it’s still a concern that I have not shared with her and don’t plan to share with her for at least another year. 

Secondly, I got an idea that will get rid of my fabric scraps, help me learn to ship things I make for when I open an Etsy shop, and give some Christmas gifts. 

My denim chenille quilt scraps are in squares, blocks, and rows as shown below:

 I don’t have enough of each color scheme to make entire quilts nice enough to sell. So I’ll just make really patchy looking ones, ship them to people very close to me out of town who won’t mind getting free quilts that don’t have a good color scheme, and it may be a Christmas gift. I’m working on this all day today, and my thumb injury feels a lot better.  So, I can!  

This also solves the issue of all the scraps I have taking up space in Anna’s room. I ordered these big mailers for shipping practice. 

Wreath Fix

 

This is the fall wreath I made a month or so ago. It's been hanging by my door like this, and has been bothering me. 

It wasn't symmetrical. The lower left of the wreath wasn't as full as the rest of it. So I got out my glue gun and just added two leaves. Much better!  Sorry for the before pic being shown twice. 

Halloween Past

 These were all in my Facebook memories. I don't remember exactly what year each one was. I really miss having a little one! 

Thoughts on Writing and the Next Step

 I know I had a setback over the last couple of weeks, but I'm ready to delve back into writing. I need to start racking my brains in order to remember a small lesson a woman from church gave me once called “Advocates in the Bible”.  She wrote the lesson herself years before she showed it to me, and taught it to me briefly when I was staying at her home between apartments. I was about 23 years old then, and she was a mom figure to me. I often referred to her as my “foster mom”, even though I was grown and not a foster child. To make a long story short, she was a spirit-filled Christian and was diagnosed with bone cancer. Her denomination believed in miraculous healings, and she prayed for one. She believed she would receive one, but didn't. Her passing was what made me sort of “give in” to dating my first husband, Anna’s father. I didn't believe that I really could ever have a partner, but grieving her just made me give up and be like “ok I'll go out with you.”  

Before her tragic passing, though, she did write this lesson called Advocates in the Bible, and perhaps she taught it to others in the past. She and I spent a few days at her table going through the lesson. She went through all these biblical characters and explained how they were advocates of a certain cause. I hope that makes sense. I was a little lost in life, because I really wanted to know what advocacy was, but was constantly told it meant I had to go to law school. An advocate can mean a lawyer, but it means many other things too. 

I no longer rely on the Bible for inspiration, but I did then. Over the past 20-something years since she passed, my faith has evolved. I deconstructed before deconstructing was popular. 

However, in the last couple of years, I honestly hate to say it, but the war in Israel has really caused a totally unexpected wave of deconstruction. Some people say this war started on 10-7-2023, some say it was 1945, but honestly, it started when Joshua fought the battle of Jericho and the walls came tumbling down. 

As I watched the news over the last couple of years, I realized that the stories in the Bible that used to bring me so much inspiration are actually stories of this same war that's been happening for thousands of years. The Queen Esther story was part of this war. When David killed Goliath, we are also taught that it was an inspiration for if you are facing an insurmountable problem.  When Moses went before Pharaoh (as an advocate) and said, “Let my people go”, it laid the groundwork for the following battles.  “The promised land” is used as a euphemism for either the end goal of something positive or maybe going to heaven, but it didn't start out meaning those things.  

Don't get me wrong, I'm not taking a side in a war in a part of the world I've never been to. I've struggled enough taking sides in my own country. I've spent the last year or two listening to the advocacy of Ms. Rachel, the education from Miriam (and the subsequent antisemitism against even her 1-year-old baby girl), and I can't stomach the hate against the innocents on both sides. That's all. 

Going back to those biblical stories and remembering my inspiration when it's now two decades later and I'm learning to associate those stories with current events is going to be really hard. There's no room in my book to talk about the war in Israel since 10/7/2023. I do talk about the crisis of faith in other ways. 

To sort of get back into the spirit of who I was when Mary sat me down at her table and essentially gave me what I wanted by teaching me what an advocate actually was, I've started listening to some songs that I stopped listening to. The main one is Jericho by Andrew Ripp.  It's supposed to be an inspirational song, and it is. The chorus goes, “All of my fears like Jericho walls gotta come down, come down, come down.”  No one is actually talking about what happened in Jericho- we just want our fears and anxiety to come down like Jericho walls. The song is about us, not them. I'm trying to get back into the innocent t headspace I was in when I was 23 or 24 and sitting at Mary’s table. 

Once, right after the October 7th attacks in Israel, I was venting to my mom that this has been going on since Joshua fought the battle of Jericho. Now my mom is very religious, but has never read the Bible. I think that's pretty common for her generation. When I said that, she told me, “I don't know the story of Joshua, but I do know the song.”  I thought she meant the Andrew Ripp song that I mentioned above. No, actually she meant when Mahalia Jackson sang it to MLK.  The fact that we have drawn so much inspiration over the millennia from the battles and wars that led to the events of today is wild to me now. 

In order to write about this effectively, I have to temporarily let go of all the ways in which the current events have clouded my view of the biblical stories in the actual lesson Mary had. Mary lived from the 1950’s until then early 2000’s, so probably never had the opportunity to watch the ongoing conflict live like we do now in 2025. RIP Mary C,

I'll do my best.