Currently / 8.13.18

Yesterday was the monthly Gulf Coast MQG meeting and it was the best one yet. We moved to a new location — a sewing studio that’s owned by the guild president and is opening this week — and also had our highest attendance ever with about 20-25 people there! I took my nearly-finished #100daysofsaroyscraps project for show-and-tell. After quilting it on a longarm last month, I decided to try a facing instead of a binding. I started it a few weeks ago but haven’t had the time to finish the hand-stitching. I had the first side done, and got the second side done yesterday during open sew. Just the top and bottom left to go!

We also talked about our plans for a GCMQG charity quilt to be made and displayed at QuiltCon next February (and then donated to a charity of our choice). After several design ideas, we narrowed in on a concept and after the meeting, four of us stuck around to hammer out some of the details. I came home and mocked up the design in Illustrator to figure out block size, etc, and y’all, I am SUPER excited about our design. I think it’s going to be a really fun thing to do, and a great way to “introduce” ourselves as a new local chapter of the Modern Quilt Guild. I’ll share more about it as we get started!

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I came home from the guild meeting to find Jose and the girls playing in the backyard. It was hot but not completely unbearable, so you take what you can get around here. After I got home, we set up our new portable hammock! This was totally an impulse buy on Friday night after Jose and I saw it while browsing REI during date night. (As you can tell, our date nights are super exciting. Ha.)

It’s the Roo Double by a company from Austin called Kammok. The hammock is made of ripstop nylon so it’s really lightweight, and goes up quickly and easily using carabiners and two webbed straps. You can seriously set this thing up in about 2 minutes. It’s rated up to 500 pounds, so theoretically it could hold all four of us although we didn’t try that. But clearly it can fit one adult and two kids quite comfortably!

Anyway, I promise this is not an ad or sponsored post at all, but I’m seriously obsessed with this thing already. (I’ve also spent time ogling their Instagram feed which is making me want to go camping immediately even though I haven’t been camping in years.) We set it up both Saturday and Sunday and it’s just so darn relaxing to sway under the trees, even if it is 90+ degrees and the mosquitos are biting.

Best impulse purchase I’ve made in quite a while.

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Today was my first day as an “acting branch chief” at work. For some context — I’m a group lead, with 5 people in my group. My group, plus another group also with a lead and 5 people, make up my branch. My branch chief has gone off on a 4-month rotation to another division, so the other group lead and I are splitting the time acting for her and I’m up first from now until the middle of October.

I’ve known this was happening for a while, and I’m excited for the opportunity to act in a larger role. I think it will give me some good insight into what the branch chief job is like, and that will obviously be good information to have in the future if/when there is a branch chief opening and I think about whether to apply.

So! Wish me luck! I started off the week by mistakenly sending a status email to Mark A. (who is not in my organization at all) instead of Matt A. (who is) so, you know, things are going well. Ha.

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One more week until Emma is officially a 1st grader. WHOA. School starts on Monday, so we’ve got a couple orientation-type things this week. Thursday night is Charlotte’s open house for the room she’ll be moving into at the daycare, and then Friday morning is “Meet the Teacher” at Emma’s school. It’s hard to believe that summer is over. I feel a little sad that we didn’t do anything big — no road trips, no real vacation. But then I think about all the stuff we did do, and we had plenty of fun here at home too.