July 10, 2014

I finished the last letter of my book cross stitch today and immediately following a minor tragedy struck. There was a small black fleck on the cloth and when I flicked it off it left a black mark. Great. I had no idea what caused it but I got a wet paper towel to try and scrub it out. The black mark went nowhere but the wet paper towel stained my cloth further. Super great. Trying to clean a stain and making it worse seems to be a fairly common problem. Not one that I have really experienced until today. I was more than a little annoyed. My plan now it to come up with a random design of some sort to cover up the mess I made. I'm not happy about that but maybe it will look better in the end. Hopefully.

I am apparently bad at estimating how long cross stitching takes me because I was fairly certain I was going to finish the book cross stitch at work today with hours to spare. Nope. The cross stitch includes two sets of nine books, looking like they're sitting on a shelf (minus the shelf), and I only managed to finish one set. It took forever and I thought my hands were going to fall off. The worst part was finishing it off with a border around each book. I like how it turned out but it was a freaking pain. And I still have the second set. But after I finish that, and whatever design I come up with to cover the stain, I'll finally be done and can hopefully move onto other things. I really hope I move onto other things. I don't want to lose interest but I don't seem to have much say in that.

Despite all the cross stitching I did some reading and came close to finishing S for the first time. Very close. But I'm still halfway through because I still need to go back and read all the marginalia and look at all the inserts. That will take awhile.

Tonight I had a thirty-minute visit with the new volunteer kid. We went to Sonic and got slushes and talked about random stuff. His sister has now moved in with him and the grandparents. He said it is going well but she makes him angry a lot. Most recently when she drank his last Mountain Dew. Sounds like a younger sibling. Hopefully it doesn't escalate though. The kid has anger issues and things sometimes escalate.

On my way home I was driving between the two roundabouts going over the highway and a dude on a dirt bike drove by me going the other way doing a wheelie. Highly unsafe, but he was wearing a helmet and leather jacket and other appropriate attire, and it looked pretty cool. He may have been practicing because I think he was just going back and forth between the roundabouts.

When I got home I read stuff and watched YouTube videos. Typical me. Now I'm going to stop typing and go to bed because my left hand hurts from all the cross stitching today. This is definitely an old lady hobby that I need to get out of my system while I'm still “young” because there is no way my hands or eyesight will hold up well enough in old age to continue it.