Hey - look at that.  It's been a month, and I've not updated.  

The Hair On Fire never really goes out around here.  It's Girl Scout Cookie season, so my evenings and weekends are booked (and my family room is full of cookies).  I have a quilt to finish, a quilt to make, some skirts to make, and an office to clean.

So I'm going to go take a walk instead.

 It's a quiet-ish evening right now.  Waiting on word from a client that they are ready for me to import some data for them, and trying to clean up email after a few days of hair-on-fire.

Prior to Christmas, I was sewing every morning before work.  I made a quilt for the grandson, and almost finished one for the granddaughter - a mistake at the warehouse left me without the backing fabric I needed until after Christmas.  I have noticed that no matter how crazy it was in December, the time spent playing with fabric was good for me - I was calmer and less stressed.  So when the current chaos settles, I'll be going back to blocking off part of my morning to sew. 

Yeah - that's a good plan.

 So, I have just rediscovered my blog and decided I may need to start writing again.  Less Payroll - that's not really my job anymore - and more me.  No one reads this anyway, so who is going to complain?  The NSA?

Toy Story, Bonnie Style

For the past few weeks I have been staging Bonnie's toys every morning before we leave for school and work. And every afternoon she goes into her room to see what her 'friends' were up to that day. It started with me hanging one of her toys from heroverhead light. Of course, being me, I couldn't leave it at that. On different days, Bonnie has come home to find her toys running races, coloring pictures, playing hide-and-seek, and anything else I can come up with and create with the items in her room, and a few stolen minutes while she's watching Phineas and Ferb.

Let's see if I can put pictures in here...

Here are her friends playing Train.

One day they built a see-saw. That's Piddlepots exploring the underside.

This was they day they ran a zip line from the wall to her bed. Bonnie loved this one.

These next two are from yesterday - cleaning Bonnie's room. Tank the dog was either putting clothes in the hamper, or taking them out. It's hard to tell with him sometimes.  If you look to the right you'll see Perry the Platypus putting away hangers in the closet.

And Flynn Ryder was climbing back on the shelf with his Rapunzel, with a little help from his friend, Bonnie Turtle.

I don't know if Bonnie knows I am behind all of this.  Her father thinks she does, but Bonnie lives in a pretty magical world right now.  She inherited my imagination, and she doesn't have siblings around to make fun of her for living in that world.  We just go with the flow here, and the only thing we don't allow is blaming her friends for making a mess.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap...

I put my book down the other day to get something from the other room - don't remember what, 'cause I'm getting old - and Bonnie picked it up. Other than reminding her not to lose my page (too late!), I didn't think anything about it.

Until 10 minutes later when I asked her a question. No answer.

I asked again. Still no answer.

"Bonnie - answer me!"

"Mama, can't you see I have a book in front of my face?"

Yep. She's my kid. I guess it really IS annoying when I ignore the world to read a book. Who knew?

It must be a weekend.

I am sitting in a recliner, eating potato chips and french onion dip, watching a generic "end of the world" movie on SyFy (as opposed to watching one of their generic "genetically altered creatures eat everything they see" movies), and I realize that it must be a weekend. Rick put a rather large section of beef to smoke on the back porch, he and Alex are out shopping - I mean, looking at items of interest at Best Buy - and Bonnie is playing games on my phone. JP is sleeping on the floor, and at some point I need to get up and start the weekend round of laundry and cleaning.

I don't want to. I want a cadre of brownies to keep my house neat and clean. I want pixies to keep the garden weed-free, and whichever fey creature it is that keeps the lawn trimmed. And dragonflies that breathe fire to keep the mosquitoes away. And while I'm at it, and little corner of inverse hyper-space so I have room to sew.

The question is, where do I get this stuff?

@#$%!*&^#

I spent two and a half hours crafting a post. I re-wrote it twice, because it was basically a post saying that we have 1100+ employees, and managers are just going to have to step up and do their jobs if they want payroll to be perfect every time, and that's not the kind of stuff I really want to post without a careful review.

And this piece of cr@p laptop that I was given as a loaner after my last piece of cr@p laptop died just went and deleted it because between the gremlin "m"s, the so-sensitive-it-scrolls-if-you breathe-on-it touchpad, and the keys that don't work unless you press them twice, I somehow managed to select all the text but one letter and delete.

IT wonders why I don't like them. I wonder why this POC laptop was available for anything other than spare parts. I wonder why the "just until we can get a better loaner for you, oh wonderful person who makes sure we get paid" laptop is still in my possession 3 weeks later.

I wonder who is sending me text messages at 2:45 in the morning.