Moving into 2013

As I enter 2013, I am coming off more than a week long bout of flu.  I spent my Christmas vacation being thoroughly sick which meant lots more sleeping and lots less stitching than planned.  Not to mention no interaction with any loved ones beside my long-suffering husband.  I am not a patient patient and tend to snarl a bit when given  care below my own standards.  And let's face it: there are very few men who know how to care for the sick.  Generally, the species operates on two maxims: "If you don't ask for it, you don't need it!"  and  "If you haven't asked ten times yet, you didn't really mean NOW."

As you can probably tell by that last sentence, I am not entirely over the snarly part of being sick.  The aftereffects of splitting headache, persistent cough and really bad hair still linger.  I will give my husband points about the hair, though, since he never once so much as smirked no matter how many bizarre directions it took ... and I am talking electrocuted grunge rocker hair, here!  To be fair to the man, when asked to go out and get cough suppressant [when I finally surfaced from the coughing spasms long enough to form a coherent request] he did go out and buy two bottles.  Perhaps it was too much to expect him to come up with the idea on his own that first morning after an endless night of paroxysms.  He did mutter "emergency room" several times but I think that was more of a feeble bid to foist me off on someone else than a serious expression of concern.  Poor guy.  Well, things should return to full normal in a few days and all will be forgotten.

As to the stitching, there were some brief intervals of lucidity and a little was accomplished.  When last seen, on Christmas Eve, Midnight Moogies looked like the photo on the left.  But since then, I have filled in the Van Gogh like swirling stars in the night sky, stitched a bit more of the black and white checkerboard border, started the outer grey border  and continued work on the third cat.  I admit, not a lot of progress for more than a week ...  but, like I said, I have been sick.

And now, it looks like this.  I am happy to be moving along on this project and don't yet feel the yen to switch to another.  I believe as I am getting older I am becoming less of a rotation stitcher and more of a one project at a time stitcher.  I am not quite all the way through the conversion process.  I guess it would be more accurate to say that I have greatly reduced the size of my rotation [to about 2 or 3 active projects] and that I consider a rotation interval a full month now, rather than a week.  I think part of the reason is that I have gone back to large projects and class projects.  It simply takes longer to see progress on a BAP or a class piece.  And, as one sees some progress, one gets excited about the project all over again and one is reluctant to set it aside. In any case, I will probably give Midnight Moogies another week before switching to one of my other January goals.