TUSAL for 1/23/12

My jar is still empty. Haven't stitched a thing this month. I had a sore throat that put me in bed for three days. My coughing just won't stop. And I'm on 7-day antibiotics for an infected finger caused by a paper cut (of all things!) I got while decluttering my office. Unfortunately, that finger happens to be part of my "stitching hand"! It has been a miserable, miserable month...

Happy New Year!

Yesterday was very low-key for us. Newby was tired from his business trip, so we didn't get out of the house at all. Cooked dinner at home, and had cake and champagne to celebrate the new year...

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Our yummy dessert!

Plans for NYE and a finished project

We are staying home for the New Year's Eve, I think. We did get invitations to the festivities, but there weren't anything that would interest us so we sent back notes of regret.

Newby is out of town right now and when he comes home tomorrow, he's going to want to bum out in the entertainment room watching college football on his DVR.

We haven't decided about dinner...most of the restaurants around here will be full...just checked opentable.com...yep, no reservations left to be had. So I'll probably stop by the grocery store to pick up something to cook at home. I don't mind cooking...but it would have been nice to get out of the house for a few hours, though...

By the way, I just finished a coaster:



It was for our church's holiday bazaar, but I didn't finish it in time, because this small project took me 50 hours to finish.

Christmas in NYC

We spent all day in NYC on Christmas Day. We live only 75 minutes away, but before yesterday, we'd never spent Christmas Day in NYC. In the past, ever since we moved to Philly back in 2005, it was always too cold. So, as soon as we found out there was going to be fabulous weather in NYC, we knew we had to go. It was, all right...it was clear, sunny and balmy-like.

After parking our car at an underground parking garage, we walked about 20 minutes to the Rockefeller Center, where the Christmas tree and the ice skating rink are. Then we took an elevator up to the observation deck called The Top of the Rock...the 360-degree view of NYC was breathtaking...we could see everything. Then lingered back at Rockefeller Center...to our surprise, the shops there were open.

The center was so packed it was hard crossing the corners in some places. Finally we had enough of it, so we walked for about 20 minutes to make our 2:00 dinner reservations at Wolfgang's Restaurant. It was an interesting place...it looked like it's been in business for decades. All the waiters were male and much older. For an upscale place like this restaurant, the menu was surprisingly simple and mostly what we call "comfort food"...like old-fashioned French fries or a hot-fudge sundae, which we had along with steak for two...



Newby's Blackberry photo of me at the top of the 3-level observation deck called The Top of the Rock.

Welcome to my blog!

I'm a stay-at-home wife who lives in Philly. I've been married to a geographer for 23 years. We have no children, but consider our two cats and two dogs our "kids".

I love cross stitching. It relaxes me. It keeps me calm and balanced. I do all my thought processings and decision makings while cross stitching.

To my knitting and scrapbooking friends, I'm an anomaly. As much as I try to get myself interested in knitting or scrapbooking, I keep finding myself going back to cross stitching exclusively.

I've been cross stitching since the early 1980's. At first, I was into ornaments and small projects, but gradually, I worked up to larger kits. I regret not taking photos of my early completed projects...by my estimation, I must have finished about 25 kits before I started taking photos of them. I used to subscribe to lots of cross stitching magazines until they started shutting down, one by one. I miss them a lot.

I'm currently working on a very ambitious project called "The Moose in Autumn". You can see its model image below. It consists of 12 blocks. Each block takes me about 30 hours to complete. That's how huge it is. So far, I've completed one block and I'm almost done with Block #2. Below is a picture of Block #1.



As of July 21, 2011. On white Aida 18-count.

This is the model: