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Friday, May 27, 2011

Complete Change of Plans!

In my last post I mentioned taking Friday (today) off to make an extra long Memorial Day weekend, well to make a short story long (something I'm very good at)...

In January of each year I put in all my leave requests for the year - we're supposed to be on a first-approved-first-to-keep-if-leave-has-to-be-revoked system so I get my requests in early - and I had requested (and been approved) for the all of next week. Right after I put my requests in I was put on a ridiculously huge project (consolidating and updating 5 regulations) in less than a year. Now I know that sounds like plenty of time, but "they" want them written and published in final form in that time frame - I work for the Federal government and just the clearance/review process alone usually takes that long (lots of different agencies/divisions, most importantly our general counsel, get to review and comment before they even go out for public comments). So I diligently set to work on said project. I didn't take the week of leave I had approved in April and had decided to not take next week and just settle for taking Friday and having a 4-day weekend (not too shabby but still not a full week). Well, I am a month ahead of my schedule! Yes, an entire month! With that thought and the fact that I'm still not 100% better from whatever bug wrecked havoc on my system last week, I decided to take not only today, but next week off too. I have a list of things I'd like to get done, but nothing that *has* to get done, so it should be a very relaxing 10-days. To reduce the amount of cooking I have to do, I picked up lots of meat for grilling and plan to make macaroni and potato salad, baked beans and cole slaw today, so all I'll have to do for dinner is throw something on the grill and grab a salad out of the fridge. Now if I could just find self-cleaning dishes...

At the top of my list is to finish Egyptian Garden. Here's where I am as of today:
All the blank spaces in the outer border are filled with 3 Algerian eyelets. I've developed a rhythm stitching those so I should have them done today sometime.  I thought it would be a good idea to get them done as close to the start of my vacation as possible so I still have a bit of tension/stress in me so I can pull the eyelets the same as the previously stitched ones.

I also did some more stash shopping - I know you are all shocked by that. Karen at Wasatch Needlecraft put some new things on her clearance page and I found this chart by Alchemy Stitchcraft. It's done with one of my favorite threads, Carrie's Creations "Fat Tuesday" so I couldn't pass it up. I'm not sure I want (or can) do it on black but may try. I have still got some Christmas money left so I am hoping to celebrate the finish of Egyptian Garden with a trip to In Stitches in Alexandria next Friday.

2 comments:

Mouse said...

oooo enjoy your break .. you need it and good luck on getting the Egyptian garden done .. off to go and peek at what you have got :) love mouse xxxx

Lisa said...

Hope you've been having a great break from work.
Lovely progress on EG, can't wait to see this finished, it's stunning.