Life Lately / 11.16.23

*tap tap tap* Hello? Is this thing on?

I just upgraded my WordPress installation and the posting interface looks different. Hmm. I suppose I will figure it out as I go.

Anyway, as always, we have had a lot going on since my last life update…which was more than 2 months ago. Eek!

At the beginning of September, Charlotte officially turned 8 years old! We celebrated with a couple hours at Dave and Buster’s and other fun. She requested hot chicken from a local place for dinner and chose a cake from HEB that looked like a hamburger — both very unexpected choices that somehow felt appropriate. She keeps us on our toes!

Also in September, we got to meet Astros outfielder Chas McCormick after the girls were randomly selected for an autograph session via the Astros Buddies program. That was neat, and as a bonus we also met team owner Jim Crane who happened to be in the team store that day while we were browsing after getting the autographs.

We watched A LOT of baseball in September and October as the Astros went down to the wire. With a week left in the season, all options were still on the table — winning the division, getting a wild card spot, or being eliminated from the postseason entirely. Somehow, thanks to Astros wins and Rangers losses, they managed to win the division! We went to the first two home games of the division series against the Twins and had a blast as usual. (Also the weather was finally cool enough to wear my Astros sequin jacket!) We were all very bummed to see them lose the ALCS to the Rangers, but hey, that’s baseball I guess.

I kicked off October with a couple days in Raleigh for the Modern Quilt Guild board retreat. This is my first year on the board, so it was also my first retreat, and I enjoyed being a part of it. It was both fun and challenging to talk about the future of our organization. I am still learning what it means to be a board member — to be honest, I had a much better understanding of what the staff does, as opposed to the board. But I am learning!

We got a short tour of the Raleigh convention center while we were there, which is where QuiltCon will be held in February. It’s a really nice building and surrounding area, with several good restaurants within walking distance. We had gorgeous weather for the 2 days we were there there, and I’ve got my fingers crossed for good weather in February!

Also in October, I was invited to the NASA length of service ceremony for the very first time! I hit 25 years of civil service in August, which means I now get to go to a ceremony every 5 years. Ha. I invited Jose to come along, and it was cool to get a certificate and handshake from the JSC center director. There was one person at the ceremony celebrating 50 years of government service! 50 YEARS! That is seriously impressive, and a milestone I don’t expect to reach myself.

We also hit up our favorite October event — the Bayou City Arts Festival. It had been a little “meh” over the last few years for me, with a lot of the booths being repeats and/or items I wasn’t interested in. But this year it seemed like there were several new vendors and/or old vendors with interesting new work. We bought several small pieces and enjoyed awesome weather that day.

And oh! The eclipse! We had a great view (through eclipse glasses of course) from the soccer field, and it spurred me to finally take action to plan for the total eclipse that crosses over central Texas in April. I reserved a VRBO house near Austin in the zone of totality. I will hope hope hope for clear weather on April 8, but even if it’s bad, we’ll still have a fun long weekend in a nice VRBO.

Charlotte played soccer this fall for the first time and completely loved it. She was on a team with a bunch of her friends from school, and they ended up winning the championship last Saturday which made it even more exciting. This was our family’s first experience with a true team sport (swim team is a team, but obviously not in the same way something like soccer is) and I’m happy it went so well. The league we joined had everything on Saturdays — both practice and game — and not having anything during the week definitely helped schedule-wise.

Halloween came and went and brought its massive influx of candy to our house. It was chillier than usual, but actually felt pretty refreshing vs. sweating while we walk around the neighborhood. Charlotte was a witch/sorceress, Emma was Luna Lovegood, and I put together a very quick and dirty Julia Morales costume. (She’s the Astros team reporter and my favorite local celebrity. Also I posted a pic and tagged her in my IG stories, and she reposted it, so we are basically besties now.)

Our group of trick-or-treaters has grown over the years, and this year we hit a new record with 15 kids between the ages of 4 and 12! Whew. We also went farther than we ever had before, making the full 1+ mile loop around the main portion of our neighborhood. So all in all, a pretty epic Halloween.

Quilt Market and Quilt Festival were here a couple weeks ago, and I was able to spend time at both of them. I had about 3 hours at Market, but was able to meet several of my tech editing clients in person and chat with a potential new distributor for my patterns. Later that week, I went back for Festival with my friend Jenn — we’ve done this outing together for several years now and it’s always nice to spend the day with a friend! We spent time together browsing the vendor booths, and then split up for a bit while she took a work call and I did a deep dive on longarms because…I am upgrading my longarm!

After checking things out at Festival and then making the trip up to the Houston-area APQS dealer in Spring, I ultimately chose to get an APQS Millie. It’s getting delivered tomorrow! And getting set up on Saturday!! All the exclamation points!!! It is going into the garage space that we’ve been working on, and if I can manage to actually write another blog post or two in the next month, I will tell you all about it.

Getting the new longarm means I’m selling the old longarm, and after posting to a couple local guilds plus a Facebook ad I have several interested parties. This was the first time I’ve tried FB ads, and the first couple messages I got were clearly scammers. (You want to buy a longarm quilting machine with no questions asked and without testing it and you want to send me $3,500 via Venmo right now? Suuuuuuure you do.) But I’ve got at least 4 other people who are interested enough to request a test drive, so hopefully I’m able to sell it this weekend and get it out of our guest room soon.

As I’ve been writing this post, I thought of several more things, so let’s do a lightning round to wrap up.

1) Last week the girls tested for their red belts at Kuk Sool Won and broke a board for the first time! It was super exciting. I…was honestly not sure they were ready for that and had some hesitations, but swallowed those to be a supportive parent and they totally schooled me. I should never have doubted them. Super proud of them.

2) I ended up submitting four entries for QuiltCon this year, but only one is a new quilt, and my guess would be that one is the only one that has a decent chance of getting accepted. But we shall see! This is the new quilt, and then I entered 3 more that I made in 2021. Two are quilts I’d never entered, and one is a two-time reject so we’ll see if the third time is the charm there.

3) I just finished quilting a scrap quilt — one that I started a couple weeks before the QuiltCon deadline with the intent of entering it into the scrap challenge, but I just didn’t get it done. C’est la vie. But I do love the quilt! It was a challenge to fit on my current 8-foot longarm frame so in retrospect I should have waited until I have my new 12-foot frame! But I made it work. I’ll post more about this (and the QuiltCon entry) soon, I hope.

4) I went to the Nutcracker Market with Jenn last week — same friend who came with me to Quilt Festival, so we have done a lot of shopping together recently, heh. The Nutcracker Market is…pretty insane. Whew. SO MANY PEOPLE. I didn’t buy much but I did enjoy browsing.

Ok! Thus ends the epic life update/catch-up post!