Happy New Year!

I hope that the cold is starting to recede for my readers in the US. It was 1 degree here in Maryland yesterday morning. Which is just too cold. Except if you are a bubble. I couldn't get my bubbles to freeze. I just stood outside, looking silly.

So, I note that I lost a few readers in my long absence from blogging. And that's OK.  Thank you for sticking around. I am having trouble with my desktop, and not sure how long  this laptop is going to survive, but as long as it's here, so am I.

I promised a picture of what I am working on right now.

 

This is the most current picture I have of Santa's Pets, which was a design in the 2009 Better Homes and Gardens cross stitch calendar. I want this done in time for the fair this summer, and so I picked it up before Thanksgiving, and this was my progress about a week ago. I put it down to just take a wee break, and am working on a fairly simple afghan, which I will post next time. It's exciting to be able to stitch something fairly intricate again, I haven't been afforded the ability to do so for a long time, so it's a joy to work on this.

 

Other than that, I am working on my effort to get the house un-decorated from Christmas. I finally reached my limit after all these Christmases of having to look through 15 boxes to find our ornaments and then the sitting stuff, so I implemented a new rule: color-coded boxes. The sitting stuff went in navy boxes, the ornaments and tree-related items in purple boxes (they were on sale at Lowes, otherwise I would have gone with red and green).  I also cleaned out our ornaments, removing all the glass balls that we never use. Some of them were ones my mom bought for me before Left-brain and I got together, when she was worried I'd never have enough ornaments for a tree, the others were ones that Left-brain had from his first marriage. Like I said, we never put them on the tree, they're cheap, and I have seen all these wreaths made from glass balls, so I think that is a better use for them than having them taking up space in the boxes and never being used. We only took the simplest balls; I figure I can go buy more when Hobby Lobby puts them out next year, and maybe make two or three wreaths. Everything looks much neater now, and there are about 5 fewer boxes to sort through. It's a good start to my overall plan to neaten and organize around here. So we'll see how it goes.

 

Well, I have to run. My computer screen appears to be tripping out. So, I will post when I can.