WIP Wednesday: Wherein I Whine A Little and Show You a Puppy

I don't know about you guys, but I am tired of winter! I write this as I look out my window onto yet more snow falling. We've had bouts of "warm" (haha, if 38 degrees is warm) rain that has melted a lot of our snow, so it's been a lot of mush mixed in with new snow in a sort of endless cycle. I am thankful for the longer days though--in December, sunset is around 4:30, and it's the most depressing thing ever. Even with all the snow and slushy crud, it helps that it now stays light until almost 6:00, and it's getting later every day! Small mercies.

I haven't done a ton of sewing lately, in part because I think I messed up my machine a little bit. It does straight stitching and piecing ok, but when I try to quilt, it skips stitches or breaks thread. Boo...because I finally got the Christmas quilt basted during the Oscars on Sunday (so fun to tweet snarky comments with friends!) I tried basting on carpet and using only spray baste using Jennifer's method described here. I don't know how I feel about it yet. It seemed to use A LOT of spray baste--like a whole can of 505. Is that normal? And I'm just not sure I trust the spray, so I threw some pins on at the end anyway. We will see how it quilts. I'm doing a dogwood design and swirls in the border, so it will get quite a test.

My boyfriend is coming to visit tonight through Monday--yay! And next week, my mom is coming to fix my machine! (Haha, she's coming to visit like a normal person--but she's also going to try to fix my machine. After four years of teaching Home Ec, she's pretty good at troubleshooting machines.) Then, I'm going back to Nebraska for two weeks--I got an extra week of spring break because I'm going to be on a panel there while I'm back. Hooray for extra vacation (in sunny, tropical Nebraska--ha!)

Right now, I'm trying to finish a very, very rough draft of a dissertation chapter that I'm supposed to turn in today (heh). It seems woefully naive now, but I really didn't know how hard writing this thing was going to be. There are always more secondary sources to read, primary sources to find, read, and catalogue, and oh yeah, you're supposed to be crafting this into a coherent 250-page(ish) work as well, that communicates both with existing historiography and lays out your original findings. It is impossible. It makes me want to cry every day. One of the writers on the Oscar memorial slide show was quoted as saying "The hardest part about writing is writing" and I totally get that. Totally. But we all have our crosses to bear, right?

Sorry for the whining. Here's a puppy at the shelter where I volunteer to make up for all of that. :)

Things will be quiet around here for the next few weeks in between visitors and visiting, but I'll still be following your blogs when I can! Happy March! Pin It