So far I’ve cut all the connecting strips and corner squares and gotten all the blocks put together.

Next I have to make the large border around the entire thing (which I plan to do in navy) and then the fun begins… that was sarcastic, by the way.

The step after the border is done is putting the 3 layers (front, padding, back) together and then the quilting.  I don’t mind the quilting, I like it actually, but lord do I hate putting the three layers out and trying to get them together properly.  Especially in our flat where we don’t have a big enough table or enough floor space to do it.  Even if I do manage to make enough floor space, it doesn’t matter if I sweep and scrub, there still seems to be cat hair there.  Sorry, ranting.

I’m really looking forward to getting it completed.  I’m going to hang it on my livingroom wall and demand everyone keep their grubby little paws off it because I’ll be too afraid to wash it in case something runs or shrinks.

Anyway, there it is… I think it’s going to be awesome when it’s finished!

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I stood there waiting for it to ring again… but it didn’t. I was wide awake by that time and knew going back to bed was hopeless.

If something is important enough for someone to call at 6:30am and let the phone ring itself out.. why was it not important enough to phone THREE times?! Who was calling me at that ungodly time of the morning? I’ll probably never know and have no idea who to bark at for waking me up while it was still dark on a Sunday morning.

Today is ‘putting up the the tree’ day, finally!! I think I did pretty well, waiting until Dec 4 to put up the decorations, when I was actually ready to do it in mid Nov. I was looking around the house yesterday as I started putting up some of the deco and thinking about how much better it looks than it did this time last year. It’s really turning into a home…

My cat is definately insane. Spencer I mean, not Salem… Actually, they are both insane. Spencer is just worse.

At the beginning of this year Xander and I had reached the end of our rope with our whiney cat and took him to the vet. We were told that our cat has an anxiety disorder.. Yeah you read that right, our CAT has an ANXIETY disorder. Life at the zoo was getting to be too much for us, not being able to sleep because of his incessant whining, so we took him to the vet. He has been on this medication, Clomicalm, since… and it’s made a remarkable difference. He wasn’t nearly as whiney, not keeping us up at nights.. it was great. It had been almost a year though and I wasn’t sure if this medication was something he should be on for a lifetime, or if it was a temporary fix. So we decided to slowly wean him off the medication and see how it goes..

As I write this, he is walking from the livingroom, down the hall (past the door where Xander is sleeping and probably ready to come out and clobber him), whining and meowing like the last year never even happened. So I’ve pretty much come to terms with the fact that one of two things has to happen.

• Keep him medicated for the rest of his life
• Kill him

Not really the best options so I’m going to go for keeping him medicated. He didn’t seem like a drugged out cat for the last year, he seemed like a NORMAL one. Sleeping, coming around for cuddles, milling around at our feet at feeding time and eating my plants. Just like any other cat would do. None of this psycho cat screaming crap that is going on at the moment.

I’m still waiting for a stranger to show up at my door telling me how badly they want my cats and what a great home they’ll give them, so I can just hand them over guilt free and be rid of all things CAT in my house. That’s pretty much the only way I’d be free of them because I can’t bring myself to try to find a new home for them or bring them to an animal shelter or something. All I know is, when they are gone.. I will never, ever, own another cat for as long as I live. I love them, but I’d love them a whole lot more if they didn’t constantly kick their litter out of their litterbox, eat my plants, scratch and shed all over my furniture and play on my kitchen counter at night.

Now I know why my mother never let me have one growing up.

.. and why I’ll never let anyone have any in my house in the future.

I think I might have tried to give them away if I didn’t think the person would be back at my door a week later with cats in tow. I can’t imagine anyone wanting two cats thare are almost 10 years old, one needing daily medication for the rest of his life and the other coughing up hairballs in places you don’t notice till they squish under your feet. How could I ever subject some poor innocent cat lover to that?

Maybe I could rent them out to parents who want to teach children who whine for a pet why they shouldn’t get one. They could take Spencer for a week and take him off his meds. A few sleepless nights should cure any kid of wanting a cat.

This week I am working on the second last block of patchwork for my quilt. Then we start putting them together and begin the actual quilting process, which should be interesting. Not sure I like that part as much as the patchwork but it will have to grow on me. I took a pic of the first six blocks I’ve done, just to get an idea of what it will look like when it’s all together. So far I’m quite pleased!!

I’ve also decided to start another quilt on the side (not the triangle one I mentioned earlier, that one will have to wait) but one of the same pattern for my mother. She loves the one I’m working on for myself and said she’d like one with the same pattern, so I tried to pick out some fabrics in colors that will go with the colors in her livingroom. It’ll be interesting to see how different the same pattern can look when using different fabrics.

I finished the scarf that I was working on with the eyelash yarn that my mother sent me. Wednesday was the first time it was cold enough for me to wear it and as I was waiting for the tram home from my quilting class I realized that there was a big hole in it in one spot, it was starting to come apart! Apparently I missed some stitches somewhere and that was causing it to unravel in certain places. So I’ll have to undo it and knit it again and try to be a bit more careful this time. Oops!

Xander bought me the books Stitch ‘n Bitch and Stitch ‘n Bitch Nation to help me learn a bit more about knitting and some cool things I can make. They are great books because they are geared more towards younger women and the things they’d be interested in knitting, rather than the old ‘grandma’ crap that tends to be associated with the craft. They even have little knitted covers for your mobile phone and knitted bags. It’ll be fun to try to make some of this stuff.. My goal is to one day be able to knit sweaters for Xander. He LOVES “jumpers”, as he calls them, so it would be awesome to be able to make some for him. Baby steps though, first I will make him… SOCKS!

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1. Frazzled
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3. Shut Up, Spencer!

Not a whole lot new here. Been working on my quilting a lot and doing some knitting.. my scarf should be done just in time for when I’ll need it hehe.

This is the example of the block I’m working on this week. I’ll pop a pic up of mine when I have it completed. It’s a bit of a pain with the curved sides and it needs to be measured so -exact- so that everything matches up properly. So far so good though, I think I’ve got this one nailed. It looks better with my fabrics, in my opinion, than those ugly blue/yellow flowery ones … but I guess I’m a bit biased.

I also have a photo of the shop where I take the class. The area we work in is in the basement so you can’t see it. You can, however, see the quilt I’ve decided to work on as a side project. Here is a closer photo. This is the first one I saw when I first walked into the shop and really loved it, so I’m going to have a go at making that one as well. I’ve started collecting the diff fabrics for it and will cut out all the triangles and see how it goes.

Myself and a few of the girls have decided to start swimming. There is a place here in Rotterdam called Tropicana, which is basically an indoor tropical paradise, from what I hear. We are going to go there maybe 1-2 times a week and just have some fun splashing around. I’m sure the exercise wouldn’t kill me and I think the whole tropical (fake) sunny atmosphere might work well in battling my winter blues this year.

A few weeks ago I bought our first proper diningroom table, from Ikea of course. I’ve always wanted a white table with a pedestal leg and when I saw this one I absolutely had to have it. It can be made bigger as well, which is great. Not that we have company that often but when we do it will be great! The extension parts fit into a compartment under the table, I love that. I remember what a pain it always was lugging around the extensions for my mother’s wooden table.

I planned to get these chairs to go with it but they weren’t available at the time. I actually just checked as I was getting the photo and they ARE available now, so I’ll definately be going to get those this week!! Right now we have the brown wooden chairs from our old table with it, but it looks crap. They are full of paint and stuff because we weren’t too careful with them when we were painting the house. They are shitty chairs anyway so we weren’t too concerned.

Tonight my friend Lynda and her boyfriend are coming over to hang out. We are doing DIY Pizza and Xander is going to give James a look at our game (World of Warcraft). He likes games as well and after Xander was telling him about it last time, he wants to check it out. Lynda and I will prob watch a chick flick or gab while the boys do their thing.. That game is like crack and Xander is like… a dealer. I’m sure Lynda will hate us after James starts playing and she never sees him again.

November isn’t going by quickly enough. I want to put up my x-mas decorations but I know I have to wait till there is at least a December in the date. I’m petsitting the weekend of the 2nd so I figure when I get back from there, it’s fair game for the deco. I want to have it up for as long as possible because the x-mas deco just makes me so damn happy. When I sit in my livingroom at night with the tree lit up, I could just burst… it’s so nice. Is it December yet?!

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I passed my Dutch course. Didn’t just pass, did very well. Now I am free as a bird and don’t ever have to go back to those sily classes again. I can’t say I didn’t get anything out of it, because I did… but not enough. So I’ll try to learn as I go from here on… unless I hear about some really cool course that someone has already done and can assure me is worth the effort.

One weird thing has been happening to me a lot lately. Whenever I speak to Dutch people in Dutch, say on the phone or something, the first thing I’ll ask is if they speak English. Simply because things are easier for me to explain in English. Lately though, most have been responding “Yes, but you speak Dutch as well!” (only in Dutch of course) and just have no interest in speaking English to me. This is great for helping me learn more Dutch but kind of makes me go “GAH!!” at the same time.

For example, the week before last Xander was off sick and an absolutely HUGE bill came in the mail. (The Eneco end of the year energy bill, for those of you who live in NL and might feel our pain haha) When Xander opened it, he became more pale than he already was and I thought he was about to have a cardiac arrest. He didn’t want to deal with it at all while he wasn’t feeling well, but I could feel the tension radiating from across the room. The entire time I’ve been here I’ve just let him deal with the bills, and there have been times where a surprise bill shows up that we weren’t counting on and he gets all wound up over how to pay it. A few times I’ve mentioned calling up to the place and asking if there could be some kind of arrangements made, but I was told “That’s now how it’s done here!” So I just would back off and go “alrighty then!”.

This time, though, I felt so bad for him and the stress he was feeling while he was sick. I said the hell with it and got the phone and called the number on the bill. I wanted to see if there was some way to make arrangements to ease the pain of this “Big Bill” (If you live in NL you’ll know why I said it like that, for those that don’t.. there is this ad on TV here all the time about getting Big Bills and Small Bills in the mail. With people carring midgets out of their mailbox and stuff.. like Bill, as in people. Hard to explain, guess you gotta be there). Anyhow, when I phoned up and got a guy on the phone, I asked if he spoke english and he gave me the “yeah but you speak Dutch anyway” answer. I ended up having to have the conversation entirely in Dutch and managed to figure out that the bill could be split into 3 monthly payments. Also, that it wasn’t quite as much as we thought, as our latest Eneco payment hadn’t been subtracted from it.

When I got off the phone I was so chuffed because the whole thing went off without a hitch. I phoned up and spoke to someone about our bills, made arrangements and sorted it all out IN DUTCH!! A small feat some may think, but it was huge for me. It wasn’t that idiot dutch that usually stumbles it’s way out of my mouth, I actually spoke to this guy and understood him when he spoke to me. It was great.. and it’s times like that that make me want to learn more.

I’m still in my quilting class, which I am really enjoying sooooo much. This is an example of the kind of quilt we will be making, and these are the fabrics I am using. Suitable for this time of year I think! :)

You can see some of the blocks I have already completed here:
(Light blue fabric isn’t part of it, it’s just a cloth I kepe it all rolled up in to keep it clean)

Star 1
Star 2
Squares
Squares 2

Eventually they will all go together (with 5 others) to make a quilt. At the moment I am working on the basket pattern that is in the middle bottom square of the example photo.

I never realized how much work went into quilts until I started doing this.. everything has to be measured so precisely and there is so much more that goes into it. The stitching is all done by hand and takes so much longer than I thought. I enjoy doing it though, it’s really relaxing.

I’ve started knitting as well. My mother sent me this really cool Bernat Boa yarn and some needles for me to start trying to knit. She had the stitches started for me but once I tried to knit I screwed it up, got frustrated and ripped it all apart. Then I had to look up how to cast on online and how to start the whole thing. I’m going to make this scarf only in black. At the moment it’s about the size of 3 facecloths together. I’m taking my time with it though as my quilting is my main project at the moment.

Xander’s birthday was on Nov 1st, he got geeky stuff, geeky stuff, some more geeky stuff and about 20 minutes of horribly altered Happy Birthday songs from me after midnight. You know how they go…. you look like a monkey and you act like one too! etc He’s 31 now, which means in a half a year I’ll be 31… god help me!! Last night as we were waiting for the train he was looking at the top of my head and said “I see a… ” He was cut off and threatened with death, so I never did hear what it was he saw, even though I know.

I’ve been seeing a fair bit more of my new Rotterdam gal friends. One of them more than the others as she is doing the quilting class with me as well. It’s so great to have girlfriends here in the city. This is the first time I’ve had that since I lived here and it makes the most tremendous difference in NL life. Sadly, I don’t think any of them are here permanently but it’s great to have them here now!

We are thinking of doing a one day scrapbooking class sometime this month. They want to try to get enough people together to have a class just in English but I’m not sure we’re going to be able to swing that. I think it would be too hard for me to translate for them in a Dutch class as well as there would be a tempo to keep up. It’s different if we go to a restaurnt or something, then I can translate the menu or help them order… or if we are in a shop and they need help with something. Translating on the fly during a class like that would be too hard though. Hopefully we’ll be able to sort something out, or find a class where the lady doesn’t mind explaining things in English as well.

Last week I got a box from home, the one the knitting was in. She was sending me a few items thatwere left from my nana’s house. When Nana died, she left some things to me that I could take rightaway (like her jewelry), other things had to be left in the house (like her diningroom furniture etc) for as long as Pearly was still alive. After Pearly died mom went through the things from the house and sent me some items she thought I would want. I don’t know what the postal guys did with the box (game of footie anyone?!) but when the box got here, all but 1 item were broken. I was heartbroken… some of the first things I’ve seen from my nana and pearly in years and they were broken. Xander is going to try to fix them for me, which I hope he can.. but it was still sad. We definately learned our lesson though, anything else breakable that will come from home will be coming with my mother when she and dad come here in the spring.

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