A Lengthy & Overdue Post

In one of the last of my pre-disappearance posts, back in April, I said I'd post photos on Wednesday ... I  just didn't say which Wednesday.  In religion class, I would call that a lie of omission..  Now, I don't lie as a general rule.  But, somehow, life made a liar out of me.  May is always a very busy month in Religious Education: end of semester and quarter tests and progress reports, First Communion, Confirmation, Registration for next September, developing the calendar and volunteer roster for next September, the last catechist meeting of the year, regional and archdiocesan end-of-year meetings, updating permanent record cards, textbook inventory and orders.  To say the least, I was slammed at work.  And then, in June, there are all the end-of-year celebrations which I tend to consider worse than work: the parish's afternoon reception for volunteers, the parish team end-of-year dinner, the archdiocesan Communion Breakfast.  There's also plenty of clean-up and catch-up work leftover from May: making appointments for testing all the children whose parents thought Little League was more important than finals, continuing with registration, dealing with parents disappointed with their children's final progress report, dealing with parents who can't quite understand why they are closed out of the classes they "need" when they waited till the fifth week of registration to come in and why shouldn't their little darlings jump to the head of the Tuesday waiting list instead of being placed in a Thursday class where there is adequate room.  It's a fun month and probably the month with the highest number of complaints.  It's also the month when I consider a career change nearly every year.  But somehow I get through it with my sense of ministry and mission intact.  But, I don't think I have ever gone a whole month without blogging since I began writing this one.  Not only have I gone two whole months without barely a post or two ... I have been doing very little stitching, which explains why I had so little about which to blog!  Mostly I have been reading and vegging out.  I guess it's to be expected that as I get closer to retirement age that it takes me longer to spring back from a school year.  And it surely doesn't help that the Social Security Administration keeps moving the finish line.  I expected to retire with full benefits at 65 and now I'll have to wait till 66.5.   Hell, I remember  attending the World's Fair back in '63 in NYC where the folks at the GE Pavilion had promised that by the time the millennium rolled around, we would all be working from our homes on networked computers and we would be enjoying shorter work days and more leisure time.  Promises! Promises!

But, finally, I do have a few photos to show you of two off-goal projects ... with so little stitching time available to me, I just went haywire and worked on a few quick stitches/easy new starts.

The first is a bookmark started long ago, before I started lining my bookmarks, simply fringing them.  I  designed this one as I went along, using bands of my favorite specialty stitches.  I may go ahead and line this one after the fact, anyway.

And a small freebie sampler [from Plum Street Sampler, I think] that I changed up a bit, replacing the alphabet with the greeting "Happy Halloween".  I'll finish this piece either as a trick or treat bag for one of my grandchildren or as a small throw pillow.





Not much to show for two entire months ... just two tiny projects, one of which was already started.

But I hope to get back into my usual stitching routines in the coming months.  July is a much more reasonable month at work: ongoing registration slows to a trickle, the summer building maintenance walk-through is a thing of the past, the supplies inventory is done.  All that's left is  preparing the 2013-14 Catechist Binders, updating catechist files and some summer home study evaluations.  Mostly just paperwork.  And a more sanity inducing schedule of 9-5, Mon-Thurs.  I may even get ahead of the game, writing and developing some special Family Catechesis Events for November and March.  And then, in August, four glorious weeks of vacation before the whole thing starts up again in September.  There's a certain comfort in the cyclic nature of my work, since I can count on breathers after mad rushes.