hand eye crafts

I woke up this morning with an almost physical urge to cross-stitch.  Look how the little girl's sleeve is filling in: This is one of those pieces that you work and work on and don't see much progress.  It's also one of those that you have to appreciate at a distance. Another piece --- a little one --- will be started as soon as I can get to Michaels and buy some floss that I'm missing. AND, thank you for letting me know how many other Eaters Who Get Bullied there are.   Dee , my daughter also has an aversion to fish.  We can't eat it around her, which makes visits to some restaurants very difficult.

Some of you may have seen the "thing" on the Internet where people put lemon juice on watermelon and rave on about how much better it makes the watermelon.  I have to have said here before that I have never liked watermelon, and how I've been low-key bullied about it all my life.   "You don't like watermelon?  You weren't raised right." "You don't like watermelon?  You just haven't had a really good one." "Eat this watermelon.  Just a little bite.  I promise it'll change your mind." Today at the grocery I bought a small bowl of pre-cut watermelon pieces and a bag of lemons and limes.  There's no recipe or order of operation: you squeeze the lemon on the watermelon and you're done. It tastes like watermelon with lemon juice on it. What's the deal?  I don't get it.  And I can't even feed the leftover watermelon* to Tap, because, if you go by Internet posts, he is the only dog in the world who doesn't

Anyone else breathing a wee bit easier today?  Feeling a little more hopeful?  Realizing how gratitude feels?  Keeping those fingers crossed?

The other day, I realized the girl and bunny piece I've been working on will be the first nothing-but-stitches I've done.  My mother, on the other hand, did a lot of them, including SOLID STITCHING.  No fabric showing.  It's very likely that this piece has been mentioned here before, and may be again, but I often look up at it and shake my head.  That's how she was: the more complicated and detailed, the better.  The first piece she ever did was of a cottage surrounded by a large garden on 22-count fabric.  Who chooses 22 on purpose?  For the first time you try something ?  And I can promise you that the backs of all her pieces were as neat as a pin. Me, I got the courage to try to de-grid my fox.  (In our old and oft-used 13x9x2 pan.)  Here is the beginning: My trepidation made me think of what knitters must feel when steeking for the first time. An hour in: It's working!  But is all the "melting" color going to leave stains? Forty-five minutes more, and

For as long as I can remember, I have loved dot-to-dots.  Today, waiting in line at CVS, I saw this beside the check-out counter: Granted, this isn't like the dot-to-dots of my childhood, as I don't recall any circus animals or frogs sitting on lily pads having 434 dots. Another childhood favorite was trace-and-draw coloring books.  Does anyone else remember them?  They were coloring books that had pieces of onionskin paper between pages so you could trace the designs.  Crazy for those, and they may well have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

So, my psychiatrist is adding a new anti-depressant to my regime, and if it doesn't improve things, he may move to ketamine treatments. This sort of frightens me.  Ketamine is serious.  My doctor isn't certified to do the treatments, so I'd have to go to someone else.  This is giving me memories of our discussion about electroshock, 12 or 13 years ago.  I hope it doesn't get that far. This has been my view for most of the past several days: I feel like I'm making good progress, but there is still so.  Much.  Blue!