It's been long enough....

So, my last post was waaay back in January. At that time I decided it was time to take a break away from posting and from this blog for a short while. Here we are in August and the Pacific Northwest is in the midst of a Heat wave. So much fun. I was really hopeful that we would actually not get into temperatures in the 100s. The heat arrived over the weekend and Sunday was day 1. It's been 100+ degrees since then. Yes, I'm a whiner, leave me alone!

The problem with temperatures over 90 degrees is that our old, old house holds the heat and it is downright miserable. We do have a couple of window AC units that we keep in key areas. One being the TV room and the other in the bedroom. Once the house heats up, it takes several days for our house to cool down to make sleeping or general living comfortable. Also, being a woman in menopause I'm experiencing sweating in brand new ways. It's awful.

Anyway, since the day is shaping up to be hot I'll be spending time inside today. Yesterday I was all over the place running errands and joining in on a prayer meeting for Operation Christmas Child. All good things really, but then I had to come home :( The rest of the afternoon found me in the TV room playing a game on my kindle and watching miscellaneous shows on Prime. Oh and I baked up some rustic bread - that doesn't help the kitchen that much.

What have I been doing up until now? Besides trying to get my head straight - I had the opportunity to go to Global Connect in Orlando, FL. It was an amazing time of fellowship with our OCC brothers and sisters from around the US AND world! That cool time was at the end of March and into the first of April. Afterwards, my friend and I tagged along with our OCC Area Coordinators on a little road trip to Savannah, GA. That was a fun trip! We spent three nights in an Historic Inn located in the historic part of the city. It's been said that one of the floors is haunted.....Okaaay. 

Some of the things - 

Took a Trolley Tour

Shrimp & Grits on the water front.

Ice Cream at Leopold's. I guess it pretty popular. which I can believe since the line went down the block and our wait OUTSIDE was around 45 minutes.

I wanted to go to Sweet Potatoes Kitchen. Waaaay back earlier this year I was watching Jolly on YT and the guys went to this restaurant and it looked so good! 

On our way out of Savannah to the airport we had time to stop at Waffle House. 

So that was the biggest thing that happened this year! Other than that, the regular farm stuff keeps happening. Piglets, garden, and piglets... OH and we also processed another 25 meat chickens and had a couple of hogs processed. 

In my last post I had lamented about my sewing machine and how it has been acting up. It was disappointing to see things not working like they should - especially since it was just serviced. So, I still worked on some projects despite some things not working. After a few weeks of sewing my machine really started to go haywire. It started to make a clunking noise while I was sewing. This is unacceptable! I continued to sew for a few more days, but it was not getting better. After some searches on YouTube I landed on a video that went through how to take apart a Viking Sewing Machine. Thank you YouTube University! Over the course of a weekend Tom and I took apart my sewing machine once together and I found that there was a lot of thread wound around the part where the thread is taken up and and down (I'm not technical). It seems that after all of the times that the thread has broken it got stuck inside the machine. Something that never occurred to me. I spent quite a while cutting away the thread and clearing it out. Once I was finished I got the machine back together. Afterwards I turned it on only to find out that even MORE things went belly up! This is when I decided to take my machine apart by myself and investigate what might have happened. As it turns out, the plug that goes into the circuit board was not properly seated. Whew, I thought we might have really ruined my machine.  This is what happens when simple things go fancy. Stupid circuit boards!

Anyway - machine is up and running again and I was sewing again, like crazy! Here are a couple of quilt tops that I finished. Over all I finished three quilt tops and made a tablerunner. 

My Stash Buster Quilt

Another Stash Buster that I pieced together on National Quilting Day. 

I also made a few tote bags for Operation Christmas Child, but that task is on hold until I go through my fabric again and set aside more fabric for more bags.

Also, in this year, Tom was laid off from the company that he started with last November. To be honest, I wasn't terribly saddened by that. The company had created the position for him because they were excited about what he had to offer, so he was hired to be a Design Engineer/Inspector. Well, he did a lot of work on a project that is a little bit of distance from here and it wasn't in the best shape overall. The job was a train wreck and Tom was able to identify some issues that should have been caught by past inspectors, but wasn't. It was up to him to get the people involved in the job to understand what needed to be done. In the end, some people were unhappy that Tom was doing his job and that was kinda rude. Fortunately, he didn't work on that project for the last couple of months he was with them. In the end, they didn't get contracts that they hoped that they would and wound up needed to cut a couple of positions. Yep, not sad about that place.

That was at the end of April. Since then Tom applied for quite a few jobs and got a couple of interviews. The first one I didn't have good feelings about and I'm glad that they went with someone else. The one that he did get is a small company that is located not far from where we live and the atmosphere of the office is super relaxed and everyone (that I met) is so nice! Before he started work there we were invited to join the team at a Portland Thorns game - we aren't soccer people, but thought it would be a fun outing on a Friday night. He is in his second week with them and he really is enjoying working there. He has his own office and has been working on a few different projects and even went on a field trip yesterday. He is fitting in and is enjoying the other people in the office too. The good thing is that they have quite a few projects that need to be worked on and the timeline for the projects is pretty relaxed. Kind of a get it done when you get it done kind of feel. I have visited for lunch once and got the tour and talked to a couple of people. Once lady is a quilter :) She invited me to go to a Clark County Quilter's Guild meeting. Ummm, that's too social, no thanks. She said that they also do a thing called sit and sew on Zoom. I could do that one! Anyway, I'm feeling really positive about this company!

It's a little bit of a process getting used to being home alone again. I guess partly because since I retired Tom has had two jobs and was let go from both of them after a few months. So, I guess part of me is trying to get into a new routine (again) and trying to be grateful that Tom has a new job that seems to be a good fit. For now Tom is still taking care of the animals in the morning and after dinner. At some point I will take over the care and maintenance of the piggies and the chickens/water fowl. Oh and Carl too. 

Going forward I will be posting a little more often. I think I'm over my major funk that I was in earlier this year.