life is good... and time does fly by

and life has been happening since that last post... May 3. Jim left may 1 for his trans-Siberian rail trip, and came back may 22 having evidently had an excellent adventure! while he was gone my inner cinderella-harriet-housewife appeared from the depths and went to work purging some of the extraneous crap around here. Good Will is a big winner, along with my nieces who are the happy recipients of about 1/2 of my bead stash. Cinderella also tackled a lot of mess and dirt which should have been seen to long ago. it is always so much easier for me to get into a cleaning/purging project when i'm here alone. i'm so easily distracted that i might get a portion of a project finished and leave it for something more interesting (is that ADD?) and it is just lovely to be able to walk away from it mid-battle and come back when i'm ready, having been free to leave the mess in whatever stage it is and not even think about anyone being annoyed by having to trip over "stuff" and negotiate around a project that's only gotten to mid-way. also made several trips to plant nurseries and came home with veggie plants, a bunch of flower plants... and ready to beautify my queendom. and i had decided that Jim's upcoming 70th birthday on the 27th of may deserved some celebrating, so invited family (his and mine) and some special friends to come and party with us ... and somewhere between 35 and 40 of them came, so dome central was rockin' on sunday. Chris, Kate and kids arrived on saturday, though i really hated asking them to travel on this holiday weekend, and were a huge help in getting the rockin' launched. i did feel a little sorry for Jim... he got home tuesday night and i told him he could have wed. off to rest up and get over jet-lag, and then had 3 days to work his way thru the list of what needed to be done... e.g. the grass/weeds had grown almost a foot while he was gone! as always, he was a good sport about it...... and he did seem to enjoy his party!! during the party i was talking to my friend, Sarah, who asked "so.. what have you been doing" and i don't know if this happens to anyone else, but my mind went blank, and i finally mumbled something or other and Sarah said oh yeah she'd read that on my blog... so i invited her to tell me, and that confirmed to me that blogging is definitely a good thing. i can always look back and see just what i've been doing, or even tell friends to check out my blog cause i just can't always remember. that sounds pretty pathetic, but it seems like there is always so much going on that there is no time to dwell on it... just move on to the next adventure! Zylie wore her "gramma sweater" at the party, which received lots of admiration... and Kate said she acted as my "PR person" by showing around my printout of the cover of the new Twisted Sister book, which is the Zylie Sweater, and telling all about it. (the book comes out in august or sept., is The Twisted Sisters Knit Sweaters by Lynne Vogel and you can read about it on Amazon or the Interweave Press website)! My adrenalin rush over this is indescribable!! like who would have ever thought that i could/would ever knit a sweater that would end up on the cover of a book??? and then seeing it on my granddaughter is a whole 'nother rush! Another event in the last 3 weeks is that my niece Jennifer is close to graduating from UofPortland school of nursing and i went to her pinning ceremony on May 5. She deserves such admiration for starting nursing school when in her mid-30s, and while having 2 children and a partner, doing the whole thing so well and earning awards, too! i'm so very proud of her, as is her mom (also a nurse), and then there's her greatgrandmother, a nurse... my grandmother who i adored. She, Effie Miller, was a true strong pioneer woman who came from rural North Carolina in the early 1900s to Portland, OR to go to nursing school at a hospital which had been established by a doctor she knew from NC.

and that's about enough from this blabber-fingers for tonight!