So, I survived another year of fiscal year end closing meetings. There are a couple more left but I’m all prepped and confident all will go swimmingly. This is the worst week of the year stress wise but it’s only a week so I’m lucky. Between work and the heat, the week flew by.
Monday started with me running reports from home at 5:30 a.m., after waking from mega stressful dreams. I went to work early, which is a feat for me, so I could prep the actual print outs for Mary, only to find she’d taken them off the printer and prepped the packages herself. Oh well, it’s not like I was able to sleep anyway. Nancy called and needed somewhere to hang in the evening so she brought a pizza, I opened a bag of lettuce and we had dinner of champions before heading to knitting. It was fair time so not much knitting went on as we all prepped our fair entries. There are six entries on each page of tags so I do 6 scrapbooking and 6 knitting entries. I had already picked which scrapbooking stuff to enter but ran around grabbing knitting projects just before knitting. Since I was helping check in 4H entries during the time we’re supposed to drop projects off, Andrea took my stuff for me.
Tuesday flew by again. I was able to sneak out to Panera for a salad at lunch with Darla. Got to get my fiber, closing meetings or not. I left work early to get to the fairgrounds for 4H check ins by 5:00. It’s an easy 3 hours of master gardener volunteering and it’s air conditioned so not miserable. I don’t know if it was the odd gardening season (late, wet spring then blazing heat) but we had about half of the entries we usually have. We had lots of chatting time and very little frenzy. Nice for us but not for the fair.
Wednesday morning was maniacal. Dale and I slammed through a ton of extra prep work that we hadn’t anticipated and were running on adrenaline. When I left at noon to knit at the union with Anne, I had to deep breathe to calm down. Knitting helped too. The rest of the day was uneventful. It was Dale’s last day and Nora was in South Dakota all week so I was on my own for the rest of the week. I could only hope I’d prepped enough so it wasn’t awful. I swam after work but knitting at Village Inn wasn’t happening, which I didn’t mind since I could use a quiet night.
Before I could head home, I had to stop at the fair to see what ribbons I’d gotten. I went straight to the knitting and saw red. Now I had complained a month ago about the need for a better knitting judge since whoever was doing it clearly had no clue about knitting. Well, I was mortified to see that the easiest project I’d entered, a pair of stockinette mittens with leftover self-striping yarn that I’d thrown in just to fill the 6th spot on my entry page, had won best of lot. I was SO embarrassed! They were something a 12 year old could have done and were absolutely nothing special. It was a miscarriage of knitting justice and every knitter who saw them would agree. There it was sitting next to beaded lace shawls, colorwork and elaborate, gorgeous projects. Now if my Latvian colorwork mittens had won, I'd have been thrilled but these? Lame! I left, pissed off at the continued bad judging.
With the blazing heat we’ve been having, there were storms most nights. I had learned to unplug my laptop before bed just in case but I woke up Thursday to find that the storm had fried my modem. I was high and dry with no internet. Good thing there were no morning meetings to prep for from home. I called Windstream when I got to work and they would replace my modem for free. When Mary left for a meeting, I walked downtown to pick up the new one. It was pea soup humid so a miserable walk but worth it to get my online life back so easily. Otherwise, Thursday was uneventful – more meeting prep with very little drama, lunch with Dodie, swimming and setting up my modem, which took half an hour. I had thought it would be plug and play. At least I was back.
Friday was another calm day. I had lunch with Layton and food shopped on the way home. I had a quiet weekend in store which worked for me. I had a hair appointment at 9:15 Saturday, which got me up and dressed early. I reclaimed my house from piles of crap. By the end of the afternoon, the counters were clear, the dishes done and I was ready to cook. I had been wanting chicken a la king for ages and finally made it. It was worth the wait and totally satisfied my comfort food cravings. As soon as I finished, I headed to the fair where I was sitting at the library table for 2 hours. It’s in an air conditioned building and all I have to do is tell people about library programs, hand out bookmarks and knit. Easy! I almost finished my 2nd pair of red, white and blue mittens so I stayed up to finish them when I got home.
Sunday dawned hot as ever. I made pancakes and bacon and made a to do list. I had grand plans for finishing my chores and cooking up a storm. Well, I did get the laundry done but didn’t cook another thing. I started a pair of easy socks for my sister, who has been begging for another pair for awhile. These were supposed to be my social knitting project but I ended up sitting on my butt for most of the day and by bedtime had half of the first sock done. These are size 1 needles with tiny yarn so that’s a lot of knitting. Oh well. Not the day I’d planned but all good none the less. And the good news is that this heat wave is supposed to break by mid-week. I can’t wait!
Let’s hope everything that didn’t get done last week won’t bite me in the butt this week.
I have to tell you that I have had your experience and I was only a sophomore in HS. One of the requirements of the photography class was to enter a photo in the fair. The only decent roll of film I had was compromised when developing because some of the male students were rough housing and I dropped the film and it rolled into the light. The two salvageable photos were definitely not the best I had seen. I won a first and second in the fair. There were hundreds of better photos. And then they put them in the local paper (small town). Ugh!
ReplyDeleteTry not to hold a grudge.
Blessings!