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Today I actually went into the sewing room and straightened up a bit. That's got to count for something...

I looked at the garish fabric for Wrap Skirt #3 and decided that yes, actually, it won't be nauseating to look at once it's a skirt. It'll be fine. Really.

Additions - I forgot to mention in my list of Things that Need Doing to the rooms we've already done - I desperately need a new chair for my sewing. I'm using an old old old office chair that was cheap-ass when I bought it from Kmart in 1989 when I moved out of the imaginatively named Building A at JHU as a sophomore. And it hasn't aged well.

Senility sets in - so dear husband and I put tonight aside to head to Bed Bath and Beyond to clean out what's left of our wedding registry (did no one wish to purchase the much needed colanders for us?) with the 10% discount coupon they sent and the small pile of gift cards we have accumulated. But imagine our dismay when I realize that I forgot possibly the most important part - the gift cards. Which are sitting 15 miles away. At home. Argh. We consoled ourselves with dinner at La Hacienda Ranch. I paid, in a pathetic attempt to make up for my stupidity.

I wouldn't normally be too worried about this forgetting thing (everyone makes mistakes, right?) but I now have a track record. I forgot a conference call with one of my customers last week, and nearly forgot another (thankfully it had been delayed an hour, and I remembered half an hour before the new start time, so no one but me and Sadia, the nice lady who sits next to me at work and puts up with unbelievable amounts of my crap, knew). A few months ago, J and I went to Home Depot with a list, which I realized I forgot as soon as we walked in the door. I thought this was funny, but J most definitely did not, and stalked off down the lighting aisle in a huff. I stalked off to visit wallpaper, also in a huff now. We found each other, appropriately enough, near the toilet fixtures half an hour later, both bored rigid and neither having picked up a damn thing to buy.

The Knot - so tomorrow I am headed to the Irish Rover pub in Frisco for a get-together (GTG in Knotspeak) with my fellow North-of-Dallas Knotties. We shall see. Guess I'm looking for a table full of women who look like they don't know each other very well...?

more wedding musing - okay don't bombard my blog with hatemail (if anyone is listening at all, maybe raise your hand?) but I just realized that the two guests who I think might have been the wealthiest people at the wedding actually did not give us any presents at all. I know that sounds shallow, I'm not actually upset or pissed off, I think it's kind of funny. I suspect the reason is not miserliness (both are generous by nature) but maybe more that we work with the husbands, so the wives assumed the men would take care of the gifts? I just thought that was funny, is all. I am crawling my way through the last of the Thank-You's right now, and it just dawned on me that I hadn't written cards for either one of them. So I looked through all the gift receipts and such, and lo and behold, I was right. It's gonna make writing the Thank You that much harder... "Dear X, Thank you so much for the... enthusiasm you showed on the dance floor. I bet all those Shiners really helped to loosen the inhibitions!" Well, no, that just won't do. Must write them when I'm not so tired, perhaps...

Oh how embarrassing!

Husband has just sorted out why the VW CD player wasn't working. Somehow I'd gotten two CD's in there at once. D'ohh! (blush) My bad.

Erm... still no sewing.

Yes, there is no sewing to report. There's been some thinking about sewing though - I am planning a trip to Kay's Bridal Fabrics (conveniently right around the corner from work) for the supplies for the Bridal Memories Box from Clotilde's Sewing Savvy mag (link in previous blog entry). And I've been considering finishing off the denim chair cushion (only one, am testing suitability of size and my own ability to use the piping foot and also make covered buttons - neither of which I've done before).

Fleece Release - last year, I foolishly bought 3 large bags of fleece remnants from Malden Mills' online store. Somehow I had the impression these bags would be like kitchen-garbage-bag sized. Alas, they were industrial-tall-as-my-waist-and-much-much-bigger-around sized. I foolishly (again) opened them up, and they promptly expanded to fill my sewing room. I sorted by color and weight, cut out the stained bits, and stacked them in the closet. Every shelf was taken, and the leftovers towered higher than my head in the corner. I bought Space Bags, which helped contain them, but have not done a Damn Thing with any of it until this week, when I gave a big chunk away to a cow-orker's wife, who plans to make a few dog beds with the stuff. I could make a dog bed for my parents' dogs Daisy and Beau, if I ever get motivated to sew again.

FlyLady - I mostly blame FlyLady, by way of Kate, who put a link to her page in her blog - I'd never heard of her before then, for my current lack of sewing. I am now overwhelmed with a need to declutter the house. Newly minted husband James is tiring of this quickly, as it usually involves a) him moving things b) him being pushed by me to throw things away and c) him being annoyed because I've "hidden" everything and he can't find it. The good news is he'll be away for three nights this week in the Windy City, so I can declutter, consolidate, relocate and clean, and then announce to him that I have rearranged the kitchen. Normally when he's informed after the fact, he doesn't complain. I decluttered the pantry the other day without prior warning, and he's not bitching. He even put my aluminum foil box holders up on the walls without needing to be asked twice. Gotta love that. :-)

House Plans - So there are many things left to do on the house - even the rooms we repainted have a few small things left to do.

• Guest Room - the guest room (and associated bathroom) are just about complete, just need a few small things left to put in there. Mom mentioned a full-length mirror would be nice to have in there (I agree) and I wanted to get a couple of luggage racks (like you find in hotel rooms) as I doubt anyone will actually stay long enough to unpack and use the tallboy dresser in there. In fact, I should get our friend Frank to make the top half of that sucker a TV cabinet and throw a TV in there.
  
  
• Sewing Room/Second Guest Room - repainting the ceiling and two of the walls for better light in there is definitely first on the list. Other than that, probably more baskets for shelves and a better organization of stuff in there would be good. I need to duplicate things like thread snips and pincushions and such - I find myself constantly leaving them at the machine when I've moved to the cutting table, and vice-versa. Another pencil holder wouldn't go amiss either. My VW Beetle CD player has died, so I need another source of music in there too, although I find I don't really notice or mind the silence when I'm in there.
  
  
• Brady Bunch Bathroom - ugh. Well, it unfortunately needs to be repainted - the blue wash paint effect that looked so good in the purple bathroom just looks a nightmare in the green one. The walls look mossy, fer Chrissakes. In my defense, when the painters were doing it, they showed me a little test patch, and it looked pretty good. However, take that test patch and cover the room with it, and it looks awful. So that's gotta go. Other than proper towels for guests who may use it (we barely go in there) that's probably the extent of it.
  
  
• Office - sitting in here right now, the only thing is that it is awfully crowded in here. We have two full-size computer desks facing each other, with two full computer systems, plus a built in desk behind me, an entertainment center with 36" TV plus two large Ikea bookshelves. These are leftover from my Munich apartment, where they dominated the living room. Now they are towering in the corners of the room. There's so much furniture in here! Closet is packed with the holiday decorations and leftover computer crap and gift wrapping crap and financial files and old guitar cases and... you get the picture. Window could use some drapes too - the whole house has 2" wood blinds, which are good for keeping the sun out, but not good for looking pretty. I really should do some drapes for them, but I could also pay my friend Pascale to do them for me. She's got her own business Seams to Me that she runs out of her home. She's not cheap though!
  

So that's what needs to be done upstairs, anyway. There's much more to do on the ground floor, but this post has become Steven King sized. And James wants to go out for a walk around the duck pond soon-ish, which would be nice. We haven't visited the ducks and geese and turtles and frogs and cranes and egrets in a while...

ooooh pictures!

This is YAOTP (Yet Another Off-Topic Post) - the wedding pictures are up and here. Sorry, no password to post - if I haven't emailed it to you, I don't want you to have it. :-) Nothing personal, but you have to be careful what you post on the 'net. How Brooks and Leighanne made us look so attractive is a mystery to me.

Troy - my friend Jean and I went to see Troy today. Okay, derivative Gladiator ripoff, but several Brad-Pitt-wearing-very-little scenes made it all worthwhile. I used to not like Brad much, but I really do have to say that the man is aging well. It was easy to tell when the salient plot points were occurring - they did this little camera slow-down at the key moments, a technique borrowed from rap videos.

Bush League baseball - last year was the inagural season for the Frisco Roughriders, the AA farm team for the Texas Rangers. Now, I am a big baseball fan, and unfortunately for me, the Ballpark in Arlington (can't bring myself to call it Ameriquest Field just yet...) is half a million miles (approx.) from my house, yet Dr. Pepper Ballpark is just about 10 minutes drive away, so I wind up heading to Frisco for my baseball fix. We got to watch Laynce Nix and Ramon Nivar before they got invited to The Show last year. We are headed there tomorrow night, which means... yet another night of not sewing. Jeez I'm kinda bad at this discipline thing.

Oh. My. Hello there.

So it appears all the activity here at Pfennigchen's has been noticed by Kate over at Yarnhead. (Hi Kate, we miss you on Servo. Was it something we said?) For those of you playing along at home, like Kate, I too have a Personal Trainer. However, it is not Ingrid. It is... Jan-Michael. He's about 20 and a total hottie. Makes me not mind the evil ab work so much since it usually involves looking at his legs at the same time. What are the odds his mother was an Airwolf fan?

We were hit by some serious storms here in the Metroplex last night. Half a million people lost power. Normally, my little town, McKinney, gets nailed and we have branches out the wazoo to throw over the back fence (one of the advantages of living with high power lines behind you) but we appear to have lucked out and only got a few minutes of heavy rain. Tonight might be another story though...

Unfortunately, my wedding photographers live in Arlington which was at the epicenter of the trouble last night, which means I have to wait another day or two for my wedding pictures. Friends and relatives are threatening to riot in the streets if they don't get to see the pictures soon...

My friend Jean and I are headed to go see Troy tomorrow night. We are hoping for glimpses of Brad's butt, but have been warned the view is brief at best. This is another in a long line of Convenient Excuses for not sewing. I prefer not to fire up the Pfaff when it's stormy as I do not have a surge suppressor for it. No, really. It's true. Really.