Blah Blah Blah

I missed a call to take the night off from work--we have too few patients to run a full staff--so here I am. I could have used a night off, too. That's fine. I'm here. Let's get to work.

I am not tired; I actually got enough sleep today. And I got enough caffeine. Maybe too much caffeine. I try to moderate it so I won't stay up once I get home. I would like to go right to sleep, but I find that I am just not able to do that if I had too much caffeine too late into the night. (I try to cut myself off at 3:00 a.m., but sometimes, if I am especially tired, I will just keep going, having coffee or a soda as late as 5:30.)

It's cold tonight, but I have the window open to let in cold air. And the office can get kind of stuffy overnight, so I like some fresh air. I don't think everyone does, but from seven p.m. to seven a.m., it's my office, so I turn down the heat and open the window for a couple of hours.

Wednesday Dave and I went to dinner with my mother and brother. We went for pizza and salads. I ate way too much pizza. I'm still on holiday eating, which is terrible. I basically lived on cheese for the last three weeks or so. And I started eating sugar again, which was not great. So now I'm off sugar again. (I'm still eating a lot of cheese.) And I'm watching my carbs again. (Sigh.)

The Monday before, Dave and I went with Judi to see Paul. We took some BBQ to the assisted living place and sat and had dinner with him. I think he enjoyed it. He ate a lot anyway. After, we took Judi back to her house and had a visit with Buzz.

We were going to go again around new years, but ended up just hanging around the house. It was fine with me. I've been feeling pretty lackadaisical recently. I just have not wanted to do anything but lie in bed and read or look at quilting blogs on my phone and listen to episodes of Northern Exposure. This is my version of the winter blahs. Blah blah blah.

I did read a book that I thought I might want to bring in to add to the library in one of the cottages. The book (Be More Chill) turned out not to be a great book to bring to a psych hospital. First of all, the author committed suicide when he was 32. Then the book turned out to be about a deeply uncool kid who finds out about a bootleg computer, the size of a pill, that he can swallow and then he hears a voice in his head--the computer's voice--telling him what to do to become cool. Not great for kids who are having auditory hallucinations or delusional thoughts. The book is filled with drug and alcohol use, too. Something that we don't allow the kids to talk about while they're here. All in all, the book was a bust. But I'll bring it in and put it on the employee shelf and see if someone else wants it. 

Over my days off, I sewed a bit, working on some bits of a quilt--hard to explain. But when I first started sewing, I ordered a bunch of cheap fabric online. I hadn't quite gotten that with fabric, as with anything, you get what you pay for. The stuff was less than $3 a yard and when it came, it was barely worth that. I had ordered solids, various shades of pink and baby blue and white. It was so cheap that I didn't feel bad cutting into it. (That's a real thing: Buying fabric and then feeling bad about cutting it up to use it, and it's especially bad when the fabric is expensive. No pattern is ever quite good enough to "waste" good, expensive fabric on.) Anyway, I used that cheap stuff to put together my first quilt top and when I finished, it was so...80s (remember all that pink and blue stuff, near neon-hued, that flooded the clothing market in the 80s? I do, with a shudder. Not that I wore it, but just thinking back on it--ugh). I folded it up, slipped it into a gallon-sized Ziplock bag, and left it for almost two years. Recently I pulled it out again and thought: Let's see what we can do with this.

I had some various blocks made of the same pinks and blue and so I quilted one block using some pink thread that I got for cheap from Missouri Star Quilt Company. It looked....plain. So I used a dark thread (navy blue) to go over it. That looked a little better. But it still needs some edge to it. I want to add some edgy applique (there are two words you never thought you'd see together: edgy applique), maybe some raw-edged shadow figures cut out of black fabric. It needs something--but what that something is is yet to be determined. (Pictures to follow. Maybe.)

This new years did not see me make any resolutions. Maybe I'll do some more decluttering in the new year--but...that just seems like work, doesn't it? It's too hard to decide on that stuff.