What happens when I can't blog for two and a half weeks

I should know better than to make plans, to attempt to work out a list—even if only a mental one—of goals for the year, because the gods which control such matters clearly have it in for me and have conspired over the years to sabotage all my efforts at self-improvement. Obviously, because despite the demonic exterior I am human, one of those goals is always to lose weight and exercise more. And it's not like I go crazy and do more than I'm capable of and get injured in the process. No, the thing that happens—and there's always a thing that happens and thus the sabotage—rarely has anything to do with the actual exercise I've been performing.

We spent Christmas at my mom and dad's place in Tennessee, as we've discussed, and while we were there there was a lot of talk about What To Do With All The Stuff. See, my parents have accumulated a TON of stuff over the years and then they built this lovely house in the middle of nowhere to hold it all, then bought MORE stuff - and now they have realized that they are not going to be able to take care of a ginormous house forever and so stuff has got to go. Unfortunately, they did not also provide for a way for me and my siblings to house all the stuff, even split three ways, so we have to be circumspect about what we can take.

Now, in one of the umpteen closets in the rooms where we all sleep when we visit (a closet that I have peeked into frequently because I needed to turn the light on inside it to use as a nightlight so I could make it from the bed to the bathroom at midnight without knocking myself out cold on something) there was a box of fabrics, all neatly folded, that were clearly Laurel Burch. And that box had been in that same spot, untouched, FOREVER. Since I had already caught my parents sneaking out to measure our car to see how much of their stuff they could sneak in and get rid of,  I figured that this was one of those rare times when asking, "Can I have that?" would not be rude.

When I told my mom about the box, she at first didn't realize there was such a box or that there was any fabric down there. I was pretty sure she was gonna go, "You mean I've got good shit down there? Hell, no you can't have it! I'm hoarding it for a reason!" But instead she said, "You can have it all," and even started pulling out fabric from the shelves right next to her.  So I went from hoping for a box of Laurel Burch to agreeing to house my mother's entire stash.

Not that I mind. I was thrilled, frankly, but when I went into that closet, and started exploring I discovered that there was a hell of a lot more there than I had realized.



This doesn't even include what Mom had in her room. I was only able to bring home a fraction of all this (I did snag the Laurel Burch and Kaffe Fassett though, just in case she tried to change her mind) so I lugged all this up to her room and ordered a bunch of flat rate boxes from the post office so she can ship the rest to me a bit at a time.

So we get home and I now have all this new yardage and no place to put it. The last time I rearranged my sewing room, I put all my fabric in an old dresser/changing table that hasn't left the room because it's too big to move and there's nowhere else to put it anyway. It was never a good system, but it kept everything out of sight, which seemed good, because this was the sight:

Not horrible, but not really user friendly. I had some shelves in a corner of the room that I had rejected for use as fabric storage because there was too much space between the shelves and I am not the sort of person that can build my own, so they had been used for books and magazines. But then I found some double cube things at Target and figured out that by not attaching the sides I could make them fit as inserts to my shelves and BOOM! I now had a perfect place for yardage.

Now, in order to make all the yardage fit properly, I had to re-fold it and It needed to be folded consistently. So I took an old acrylic ruler I never use that was about six inches wide and used that to sort of roll the fabric around (I got the method from this tutorial. No it's not dirty - I'm too sick to dickroll you today, sorry). This required a lot of ruler flipping, and apparently, this was too much for me.

I managed in just a couple days of fabric flipping to induce tendonitis in the base joints of my pinky and ring fingers on my right hand (the dominant hand, naturally). And Holy. Crap. it hurt like a motherfucker. And so for days I couldn't type, couldn't sew, couldn't cook. And I sure as shit couldn't fold fabric AND THERE WAS STILL FABRIC TO BE FOLDED.

I get very squirrelly and cranky when I can't do things and that is why this post is merely descriptive and not particularly funny. The tendonitis has, for the most part gone away, though there remains some residual soreness, just to remind me, I suppose, of the Perils of Planning. But no sooner did the tendonitis go away, than the flu arrived.

You know how you get a stuffy nose and a sore throat, maybe a cough, and you feel kind of icky for a day or two and you tell people you have the flu because, well, it's flu season, and you feel crappy so, ergo, its the flu. Yeah, that's not the flu. The flu smacks you so fucking hard that in the midst of it you smack your head and go, "Oh, yeah. THIS is the flu!" Every inch of your body hurts. Scalp. Teeth. Earlobes. The soles of your feet protest as you walk across the floor. Then there's the chills. Oh, Christ, the chills. You get so bone-deep cold, and you start to shiver uncontrollably (and look this symptom up and the advice all says, add an extra blanket or sweater to warm the patient) and all the sweaters and quilts in the house do nothing to help. And often the chills come when you are lying down and you desperately want to get up to go find that extra sweater or blanket, but getting up makes the chills worse so you lie there, freezing and shivering, until the chills finally subside and are replaced by fever and sweating and hoping for death. And through it all you are so tired that even reading is too much of a drag on your limited energy and so all you do is stare into space and hope to sleep.

So once again, I have been unable to do ANYTHING. Once again it seems as though the entire month of January is becoming a complete wash and despite my hopes to rev up this poor old blog and to reorganize my sewing room and get started on all my writing projects that I've put off for so long, I'm just sitting in a pile of used tissues and praying for sweet, sweet death. This is the first time in about six days that I've had the energy to type anything longer than a facebook status, so I suppose that means I'm on the upswing, but it probably also means I'm going to have to spend the rest of the day in bed to recover. I also know that this is one of those situations where many in the world have it worse off than me, and I admit this freely and without hesitation.

But I'm still miserable and I still feel sorry for myself.

So, to end this pathetic post on some kind of up note, I'll share with you something else I found in that closet. The first quilt my mom ever made. This baby is all hand pieced and hand quilted. No, I didn't get to take that, but finding it was like finding gold. I'd love to get it here so I can hang it from my patented Front Porch Quilt Photo Apparatus and get some really good shots of it, because a short husband and an eight-year-old weren't quite cutting it.