I hate com­ing up with titles. Can you tell?

Hap­py New Year to all of you. I hope to see more of you in per­son this year!

I’m still not feel­ing well at all, so I haven’t been online much. Despite that, my wrists have been aching as if I were work­ing again. How does that hap­pen?

Our Yule was qui­et­ly pleas­ant. I hope your win­ter hol­i­day was as good.

I did final­ly fin­ish stitch­ing the Fairy Tale Sam­pler for Sam. It did­n’t take that much stitch­ing (so it can’t be blamed for the wrist pain), but I did have to re-pur­chase some Mill Hill beads. That gave me an excuse (like I need­ed it) to talk to Susan of Nease’s Needle­work, which is always love­ly. But now it’s fin­ished!

My cam­era bat­tery won’t recharge any­more, so I’ll have to con­vince the girl to take a pho­to of the piece for me.

I think I’m final­ly ready to do Deep Peace. It’s a gor­geous piece, and some peo­ple I love dear­ly got all the sup­plies for it as a gift for me a few years back. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, we broke up right after that, and every time I start­ed to work on it, I cried. I think there’s been enough time now that I can focus on the hap­py mem­o­ries instead of the hard stuff.

I think I need to start a small­er project, too, that I can car­ry around with me. Com­plex projects don’t lend them­selves to pro­duc­tiv­i­ty while doing any­thing else, any­way. Sam tends to get me so inter­est­ed in gam­ing that I can’t get much stitch­ing done. Mul­ti-per­son games are bet­ter for needle­work, because I stitch while the focus is on some­one else.

I’m not real­ly into New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions, and if I made them seri­ous­ly, I’d be more like­ly to do so at Samhain than the end of January/beginning of Decem­ber. Still, I’ve been real­iz­ing how much I’ve missed needle­work. My eyes are still giv­ing me trou­ble, but I got out an old, portable magnifier/travel light and that helps. I think it may be worth­while to check into a mag­ni­fi­er attach­ment for my Ott Lite (after get­ting new glass­es). I’m going to try stitch­ing more reg­u­lar­ly, and I’d real­ly like to learn needle­point and knit­ting and/or cro­chet­ing. I think I can man­age the needle­point on my own, but not the yarn stuff. Hope­ful­ly I can find some­one local who is will­ing to teach me. Appar­ent­ly there’s a group meet­ing at a local library that may be a pos­si­bil­i­ty.

I thought my DMC was get­ting too old for use or some­thing, because it kept fray­ing apart while I was stitch­ing. I final­ly real­ized (after buy­ing 3 new skeins of black floss) that I’d been using those nee­dles that does­n’t require thread­ing (which I love), and that they stress the floss (and the floss slips out eas­i­ly). I switched back to a reg­u­lar tapes­try nee­dle and presto! the prob­lem was gone. I can’t find those no-thread nee­dles any­where online, so I guess oth­er folks fig­ured that out far more quick­ly than I did! I have a two-sided nee­dle that came with a mag­a­zine or some such, but I don’t know that I can quite fig­ure out how to use it.

Sam and I are stay­ing in this evening, avoid­ing all the obnox­ious drunks in favor of our own cel­e­bra­tion. The girl is here, too, because her beau is in Europe with his fam­i­ly and most of her oth­er friends are also out of town (some­thing about a Flam­ing Lips con­cert?).

After get­ting caught up with all the shows I enjoy, I went look­ing for some­thing else to view. I enjoy Bones, but I find the sizist com­ments (and plots) high­ly offen­sive. I tried to watch the first episode of The Men­tal­ist online, but it keeps tim­ing out. Sam got the first disc of The Tudors from Net­flix, and it’s inter­est­ing at times. I tend to get annoyed with the lib­er­ties they’ve tak­en with his­to­ry, though.

My cre­ative time today was spent web­mistress­ing. I tweaked some Word­Press tem­plates to work bet­ter, and moved more stuff over from my old site for­mat to Word­Press. It may not seem like much, but I always rewrite and update as I do that, so I fig­ure it counts.

Sam and I had lots of fun in our game tonight. It’s a lit­tle weird to real­ize that some­one is an avatar of a deity and that not only does he not know it, he’s nowhere near ready to real­ize it. Then there’s the whole issue of not let­ting that lit­tle fact slip at all, because an entire race of peo­ple is wait­ing for his return (and they real­ly, real­ly need him now, of course).

I real­ly should go to the library tomor­row, but I don’t know if Sam will have time to dri­ve me there. I have books to return and books on hold to pick up. I’d best go to bed now, to improve my chances of wak­ing ear­ly enough to ask him.

I need to give Kioshi some extra scritchies, though, and I’m think­ing about Jen and her fam­i­ly, who had to let go of their newest feline fam­i­ly mem­ber today—he had feline leukemia. I always think of our Andre and Tom-Tom when­ev­er feleuk comes up. I’m glad Kioshi did­n’t catch it from his par­ents, as our babies and theirs prob­a­bly did. Please, vac­ci­nate all of your pets! Even if you don’t ever plan for them to go out­side!

The Stitch­ing Blog­gers’ Ques­tion of the week is:

What is your favorite past time while stitch­ing? Do you just enjoy
silence, lis­ten to music/audiobooks or do you “watch” TV/movies? Do
you have spe­cif­ic favorites you lis­ten to/watch while stitch­ing?

I like gam­ing while stitch­ing, but I’m find­ing that it does­n’t work so well in one-on-one games. When we played with oth­er peo­ple, I got a lot more stitch­ing done, because I could do that while oth­er play­ers were “on stage,” so to speak. I love lis­ten­ing to those inter­ac­tions, but I get fid­gety with­out some­thing to keep my hands busy.

One-on-one games are too intense, usu­al­ly, to get any stitch­ing done. I pre­fer to main­tain eye con­tact with Sam, which just does­n’t work while doing count­ed-thread work. If I ever learn to knit or cro­chet, I’m told it’s much eas­i­er to do those while look­ing else­where.

I used to stitch while “watch­ing TV,” too, but haven’t done it in some time. We don’t have cable, since we’re not big TV peo­ple, but maybe I’ll pop in a DVD of some­thing I’ve seen before.

I’d real­ly pre­fer hav­ing a gam­ing group again, though. Hope, Waya, and J‑Chan, when are y’all com­ing for a stitch-n-game week­end?

Sam has talked about this sub­ject in sev­er­al of his pod­casts, but I don’t think I’ve ever tried to address it. I may fail mis­er­ably, but I’ll try.

Sam and I had one of our twice-week­ly “date nights” tonight. That means that from about 7pm ’til we go to bed, we do noth­ing but have fun with each oth­er. The girl amus­es her­self oth­er­wise, or goes out, and we do what­ev­er we like. Usu­al­ly, that means we spend some time gam­ing.