Thoughts for Thursday

I am getting too old to try and maintain the mad pace that has become my routine: up at 5:30 or 6:00 am to do several hours of laundry and house-keeping, squeeze in an hour's worth of stitching; run a few errands on the way to work at mid-day; work till 9:00 pm; come home to fix dinner and perhaps squeeze in another hour or so of stitching while watching a DVD.  Repeat Monday through Thursday.  Collapse on Friday.  Handle the usual parish duties at least half of the weekends between Sept-June, breaking up those weekends  into choppy little segments not particularly good for anything.  The allergy season from hell isn't helping much, either.  Last year's unusually mild winter and a very rainy spring/summer have made for a respiratory nightmare: leaf mold, mildew, pollen, particulates of every kind abound.    I walk around in a state of stupefaction brought about by sinus headaches and simple exhaustion.  I'd love to turn the clock back 20 years and return to a time when I could absorb such stress without so much as a blink of the eye.  The other option would be to turn the clock ahead four years to retirement but at this stage of my life, I am not about to give away four years.  Since I can't lay my hands on Hermione's time-turner [H. Potter fans will know what I mean], I'll just have to find a way to deal with my dilemma until retirement comes in the natural course of time.

I have gotten some more work done on Section 8 of the Woodland Angel.  This is the finicky part of the section.  I probably have less than 50 stitches to place but they are so scattered that progress has slowed to a snail's pace.  First, I have to find an unstitched space, identify the symbol, thread the needle, stitch one or two crosses, secure the thread, then scan both chart and project to see if there are any more empty spaces in the same color or color blend.  Note: I invariably miss one and have to repeat the above process after I've gone on to several other colors.  This is made more time consuming by the fact that I don't keep needles threaded for all the 50 or 60 possibilities in a TW chart.  I used to do that but I found that, whatever "needle-minders" I used, the needles would get separated from the symbols making it a headache to re-identify them or that the threads from adjacent needles would tangle and snarl making it difficult to select a needle without losing one or both of the strands, again making it necessary to do a search and identify examination of the tangled floss in hopes of finding the missing strand.  Lots of floss was wasted in the process.  So now I thread only one needle at a time and return the unused floss to the proper bobbin when moving on to the next symbol.  Perhaps this is not particularly efficient but it does save floss and prevents mistakes.

But, at the moment, I feel as though my head is going to explode or maybe my sinuses are going to implode.  I am not really sure.  In any case, it's bound to be messy.  So, I shall end this post.  There are dishes to wash and laundry to do and furniture to dust, then a stop at the bank before work.  But tomorrow is Friday and I plan on sitting and stitching all day, getting up only to eat and drink and occasionally stretch.