I’ve hardly even thought about anything internet-related for two days, and I have to say it’s pretty darn nice in a lot of ways.

We had a lovely turkey dinner with all the fixins this afternoon, complete with entertainment by my nephew and my grandfather’s new dog Molly, who is almost as cute as Shiloh. Yum yum. (The turkey is yum, not the dogs.)

But I’m also pretty tired, because we’ve been helping my brother and sister-in-law settle into their new house, which needs both unpacking and repair/remodeling work rightnow. It’s a lot of fun, but also involves more brainpower and physical effort than, say, lying on the couch all weekend.

I’ve also made very good progress on the second quilt project, but I had a minor disaster earlier tonight when I, through sheer carelessness, cut myself with the rotary blade. Imagine a pizza slicer with a precision razor-blade for an edge and you’ll get the picture of the weapon I was wielding. Luckily, it was a glancing blow and only lifted open about 1/2-inch of flesh (1/4-inch deep) on my left thumb. It’s even on a section of thumb that is both easily bandaged AND not very bendy, which means there’s a decent chance it will heal quickly. But blood has been shed. And then, being the go-get-’em gal that I am, I continued working on the quilt and executed three (count ‘em) three rather major mistakes. Luckily, they all have to do with the binding, which I wasn’t terribly happy with anyway. I have plenty of extra fabric for binding, and this gives me a very valid reason to pull it all off and start over on it. So it’s sort of good, except that I feel very silly.

And now, since it’s past my bedtime in Colorado and I’m currently in the land that lives two hours ahead of Colorado, I think it’s time I turned in for the night.

We have some very good friends who have taken care of Shiloh before when we were out of town – they have a fenced back yard, which she loves, and in general she doesn’t mind hanging out with them. It’s not as good as home, of course, but it’s better than a kennel. But since they had her last, they’ve gotten two cats – kittens, really, but not for much longer. Now Shiloh has been around cats before, but those cats are very crafty and generally chose to stay away from anywhere she was. She doesn’t tend to chase things with the intention of catching them, but sometimes (if they’re running) she’ll run after them just for giggles.

So we weren’t too worried, but we were cautious and aware of the fact that there might be Trouble. I took her over to meet the cats a few days ago, and things were peaceful enough to make it worthwhile to go forward.

I dropped her off last night, and about two hours later our friend send us a picture text showing the result of the first real encounter between Shiloh and Boots, the head cat there.

She inspires fear, doesn’t she? Such a masterful handling of the situation. Or not.

Yes, we have a dog who will debase herself so that everyone and everything loves her.

I think it’s hilarious.

We’re aiming to move next Sunday, despite the fact that we’re flying east tomorrow and won’t be back until Saturday evening. Needless to say, we’re busy here in the Whitt house.

My new suitcase arrived just a few minutes ago, and it’s lovely. Now I get to pack it for its first trip right away! Perfect timing. Aside from packing for the trip, I’m doing laundry today (so that I can pack) and I’ve paid this month’s bills. Also need to catch up on the at-home portion of work for my Bible study tonight. . . . will drop the dog off with our friends, go to Bible study, come home to sleep, and get up early to ride to the airport with friends whose flight schedules line up with ours remarkably well.

Have to remember to pack as many Christmas gifts as possible for the Ohio family – might as well take it now and not need to mail it in a few weeks. And if I can fit it in, I’m also going to take along some quilting so I can make progress on something tangible while I’m away.

Things are good. We’re excited about the move and the upcoming holidays and pretty much everything else.

And now I have to get moving or Matt will frown at me.

The quilt is done, except for the tag. I still don’t know what to call it, but it looks great. Tag info will include the quilt’s name (whenever I decide what that will be), who made it (that’s me), who it’s for and why (that’s a secret), and when it was made. I make the tags both for posterity and because otherwise I have no idea when I made which quilt. We have three or four of my quilts in our house, and two each at my parents’ and my brother’s houses, aside from the ones I’ve given away. I’ve only been quilting for six years, but I have no trouble imagining myself in 30 years trying to remember when the heck I made Matt’s Doubting Thomas quilt (I couldn’t even tell you now off the top of my head but it was. . . 5ish years ago??? Four? This is why I make tags.)

Anyway, so finishing a quilt, even a rather small quilt like this one, makes it a nice day to start off.

But Matt called me a little while ago to read me the email reply from the owner of the condo we’re going to be renting – and to make a rather long story short, we’re going to be able to move into the new place almost right away and stay there for free through the end of the year. Whee! This will make almost everything leading up to residency and graduation easier, and it might turn January into a very pleasant month instead of a terribly hectic one.

I feel like dancing.

With any luck, it actually looks like I might have this quilt functionally finished by the time I leave work today. The Day Job should be quiet, and I think I’m just going to take the quilt to work on – all I have to do is tack down the edge of the hanging sleeve and turn the binding. Well, and then I’ll have to make a label and attach it, but that won’t happen at work. I’m putting it off a bit, actually, because I usually give my quilts some sort of name, and I have no idea what to call this one.

And since I’m fairly certain that this particular quilt’s recipient does read the blog at least fairly regularly (oooh, now you’re all wondering) I’m not going to post pictures, because that would ruin the lovely surprise. Or at least, I won’t post pics until well after all the upcoming holidays.

But it looks really great. I’m not 100% happy with the quilting, but I was trying/learning a new technique, and I might not have picked a great thread for the top – but in my defense, its appearances were deceiving on the spool. It’s variegated (shifts color as you sew) in shades from white through grey to black, and all in all looks much darker than I expected. I don’t know whether that’s because the color ratio is skewed toward the darker on the spool or just the chance of which fabrics I was sewing over when I hit the darker sections of thread. But it doesn’t look bad, just not what I expected.

Also in notable news, Shiloh is doing a lovely rendition of Disgruntled Dog this morning. She convinced herself that she must be leaving the house with Matt when he left for class this morning–45 minutes ago. And she’s still sulking and lying there staring at the front door, heaving sighs and looking at me, then back to staring at the door. Even every 10 minutes she changes location – first right beside me, then in front of the door, then back to me, and so forth. But always watching the door. It’s terribly cute, but don’t tell her that. It’ll just go to her head.

Hey, did I mention that we’re going to be moving soon? New apartment! We’re still excited and happy about the deal.

You know how sometimes you’d be perfectly happy to do something, but the trouble is that there’s a mountain of prep work before you can actually, really, DO it? Like you’d like to make dinner but first you have to clean the entire kitchen because everything’s dirty? Or you’d like to work on revisions but you keep putting it off because you have to compile comments from four people plus your own notes on things to tweak before you can really sit down to the editing itself? And the comments for consecutive bits of the project aren’t all in one file from each person, so you’ll have to copy and paste and then merge and then add comments from people who sent summary thoughts in an email, and then decide whether to print the whole thing out or work with it all electronically and if you do print it out that will have to wait until you get home and. . . and. . . and. . . . But you really need to just get it done?

Yeah. That’s me today.

Just needed to share.

The housing issue has been resolved. We looked at an apartment/condo last night and put down a deposit to hold it. It’s about two and a half miles closer to church, and gives Matt a shorter bike commute to school. The space is a little bit bigger than where we are now, it has a garage (detatched, but with a nice bit of extra storage space that will be lovely), lots of closets, a big porch, assigned parking right outside our door — and a handicapped spot right there, which is great for our friends — and we’ll be paying less per month than what we are now. Utilities will be handled a bit differently there, too, so essentially we’ll end up spending about $70 a month less in the new place than if we stay where we are (stupid rent raises). And they don’t even want a pet deposit or extra rent for Shiloh, because they’re probably going to replace the carpets in a few years anyway.

We are, suffice to say, ecstatic. God is good.

And we don’t have to move in right away, which means we won’t be overlapping rent at two places for very long. I expect the first weekend in January will be The Moving Date. Which means I most likely won’t be flying to Houston, but I hope my cousin will understand.

Did I mention I might get to have a deep freezer again? *besotted sigh* I would love to have a freezer.

So with all that happening last night, the quilt didn’t get worked on, especially since I had to make my Amish friendship bread once we got home. But I’m okay with that. There’s tonight for quilting. I’ll make the most of it. Maybe I’ll turn the rest of November into National Quick Quilting Month, and see if I can finish both quilt tops I need so I’ll have all of December to quilt and bind them. Hmmm.

And now, I’m going to work on last-stage revisions on A WARRIOR CHOSEN. Because I’d like to start querying with it as soon as I know what our new address will be.

How are things working out for you?

Housing issues have me frustrated today. It’s most likely not worth it for us to stay in the apartment where we are now, not with the rent increase that’s coming. . . and we thought we had a good prospect for a place to move, but it turns out they’ve already rented it to someone else and it’s been moved into. Sigh. I suppose we were rather non-committal about our interest, but it would have been nice to have been told, at least.

On the up side, I’ve worked on a quilt Sunday and Monday, just a small one, and it’s coming along nicely. I might have the top finished tonight. We’ll see. I feel good about it.

There’s not much else of any interest. I think I’ve decided that my other priorities are going to overtake NaNo from here on out – there’s just too much to do between now and January, especially since I’d like to start submitting my thesis before residency. So I have a pretty solid start on the idea I was pursuing, and I’ll likely add words to it here and there, but it’s been back-burnered.

I have “watched” many of my friends approach their final residency for the SHU-WPF program. Some were super-organized and some were scattered. Almost none of them were prepared well in advance for their teaching modules.

And I’ll admit, I secretly thought, “I’m going to be more on top of things than that.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with chasing the ball a bit, just that I wasn’t going to do it.

Those of you who know me should be falling off your chairs laughing by now. I talk a good game, don’t I? Useless noise.

So I am taking this opportunity to declare – in an organized, on-top-of-the-ball fashion – that I will almost certainly not be ahead of the game come January. And I’m firmly cushioned by that irrational sense of peace that precedes panic, which will certainly remain until January 1st, when I’m on the plane flying to Houston for my cousin’s wedding. Then I’ll start wondering what in the world I’m doing a week before residency without anything more than an outline for my lesson plan.

Between now and then? I have other things to worry about.

I don’t talk much about my day job these days. That is in part because I’m wary about saying things online that can be traced to real life. It is in part because a lot of the time there’s not much worth saying, because I tend to work rather mundane jobs that allow me to spend my real brain power in other areas, like writing. And, to be frank, sometimes I’m in a mood to complain and day jobs just cry out for that sort of thing, whether they deserve it or not–but I try to keep the outright complaining to a minimum. Finally, there are subjects that I’ve always been taught to be very careful discussing in polite company (like religion and politics) and my jobs of late have been with religious institutions. So I try to tread softly.

I do things like refer obliquely to my job and whether or not it’s going well, but most people who just read my blog don’t know what I actually do. And I know I mentioned that I was switching jobs a few months ago, but again, I gave very few details.

But I’m having such a great time that I want to tell you about it.

I work for a gentleman, Dr. Grounds, who is 94 years old. He still comes into the office every day to meet with people and mentor students at the school where he has worked for the last 57 years. He usually arrives, picked up by a friend, by 7:30 in the morning, and we leave at around three in the afternoon, when I drive him home to the retirement community where he and his wife of over 70 years have lived for almost as long as I’ve been alive.

My job, essentially, is to make it as easy as possible for Dr. Grounds to come in and meet with people. I make appointments and serve as his hands and feet for quick errands around campus, make sure he eats lunch, and generally make sure he’s okay. Most of the time, when he doesn’t have a visitor, he reads or prays in his office; on a particularly sunny afternoon, he’s likely to doze off in his chair. Quite often, he encourages me to work on whatever writing I’m currently in the middle of.

“Is the genius burning?” he’ll ask. Thanks to him, it often is these days.

His office is in the back of the seminary library, through the Reading Room that is named for him and holds his personal library, which he has donated to the school–I don’t know for certain, but at a rough estimate I’d guess there are eight to ten thousand books in that room. It’s quiet back here, and sometimes Dr. Grounds sings to himself in his office; old hymns or popular songs from sixty or seventy years ago. His voice is strong, but roughened and a bit gravelly with age. He reminds me, in the best possible way, of a strange mix between my husband’s grandmother and Yoda. And he has a vivid imagination and dry, razor-sharp wit that regularly makes me laugh.

Last week, the library had a fire drill. We took the rear emergency exit and, as Dr. Grounds made his way with his walker around the building, he asked where we were headed. I told him we needed to meet up with the rest of the library staff, and he said, “Ah, is that so they know not to look for our charred corpses?”

“That’s exactly it, Dr. Grounds.”

I’m still chuckling about it more than a week later.