Pop Goes the Weasel — Janet Szabo

The creature in the garden is a weasel, not a ferret. I was able to get up close to the garden fence to take a good look at it yesterday morning. It is indeed cute, but if it starts attacking chickens, it will no longer be cute and will be consigned to the same level of hell that the ground squirrels currently inhabit. I would not be distressed if the weasel picked off the Leghorns—the Chickens That Will Not Die—as they are no longer laying much. I doubt I could get it to kill them selectively, however. Hopefully it will be satisfied with the menu of rodents in the herb garden and around the chicken coop and leave the chickens be.

I don’t remember signing up to be the head zookeeper for all this wildlife. At least the bears have gone into hibernation.

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I spent a chunk of time yesterday afternoon moving the job search forward. I am pretty clear that I want a job, at least part-time. I also spent some time exploring Squarespace 7 in anticipation of moving my blog. I looked at WordPress, too, but I am familiar with Squarespace and I don’t have the patience right now to learn a different platform. Squarespace has the features I want. I think I may do simultaneous blog posts to both old and new Squarespace blogs for a few weeks until I am sure I have a handle on the upgrade, although I won’t make the new blog public until January.

I listened to the latest Love to Sew podcast on the way home from Spokane. Helen and Caroline, the hosts, interviewed Gretchen Rubin. Gretchen isn’t a sewist—she bills herself as a “happiness expert”—but she had a lot of interesting things to say and she did try to relate her comments to the process of making. (Do you schedule time for sewing and keep that commitment to yourself?) In one of their episodes a few weeks ago, the podcast hosts previewed this interview and suggested that listeners take the “four tendencies” quiz on Gretchen’s website. This is a personality assessment that evaluates how you respond to both outer and inner expectations. The quiz will tell you if you are an Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, or Rebel. I came down squarely in the Upholder camp, which should come as no surprise as Upholders have no trouble meeting inner or outer expectations. Indeed, they frequently wonder (sometimes aloud) why other people have such trouble managing their daily responsibilities. (The oft-heard refrain on this blog…)

Gretchen commented that she never goes back to look at or edit old blog posts. She said that she always wants to be moving forward. That really resonated with me. I know that some of you have expressed a desire for me to keep the past seven years of blog posts on the web in some format. I likely will download them to a flash drive just to have them, but truly—I have no emotional attachment to what I have written. Like Gretchen, I am most interested in what’s coming next.

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I lost my internal compass there for a while when my job disappeared. It’s nice that I am starting to feel its tug again, and I like the direction in which it is pointing. Being able to wander around Jo-Ann Fabrics for an hour at 7 a.m. on the Saturday after Thanksgiving had something to do with that, I think. Creative pursuits are an important part of what makes me “me,” and I have to acknowledge and honor that. I’m not just talking about quilting and sewing, either; blogging is a creative pursuit, too. Sometimes the words need to come out of my head just as badly as the quilts do.

One of the benefits of having a kid about to graduate with a degree in business and marketing—and who has more than 1000 followers on Instagram—is that she is readily available for free consults. I was able to get a crash course on how to better utilize some of these social media platforms. And she knows my personality and what I am trying to accomplish, so she doesn’t suggest things that don’t make sense for me.

The Tim Holtz subway blocks quilt is done:

I sewed the binding onto the quilt the weekend before Thanksgiving and then had to sit on my hands to keep myself from handstitching it down because I wanted to take it with me to Spokane to work on there. I was at loose ends again last night, though, because I wanted to sit and watch videos on YouTube with the husband but I didn’t have any handwork. All of my embroidery supplies are in a pile on my cutting table upstairs. One of the tasks that has now floated to the top of the to-do list is transferring some designs to linen so I can practice my embroidery stitches.