Updated Life List

I wrote to a friend yesterday and mentioned my life list, told him he was on it (I've never actually seen him face to face and I want to -- we met online through blogging), and then realized that yes, he's on the list I'm writing but not the one I posted.

Here's my updated life list. I have 74 items so far:

1. Go on on Alaskan cruise.
2. Have Mom teach me how to make grape jelly. Done!
3. Dye my hair red.
4. Read every book I own.
5. Learn to spin yarn.
6. Learn to weave (maybe with the yarn I just learned to spin).
7. Make spaghetti sauce from scratch.
8. Take guitar lessons.
9. Make my home look the way I see it in my head.
10. Read Les Miserables in the original French.
11. Learn French (this should probably be switched with #10).
12. Knit a sweater.
13. Become a more confident seamstress.
14. Get my weight under control.
15. After I do #13 and #14-- make a quilt out of my "fat clothes."
16. See the Grand Canyon.
17. Learn how to apply make-up correctly.
18. Have a pint at The Eagle and Child in Oxford.
19. Ride a San Francisco cable car.
20. Taste 1000 kinds of fresh produce (originally "1000 fruits," shamelessly lifted from Mighty Girl's list; changed June 26, 2012 because really, I am more interested in vegetables than fruit).
21. Learn to drive.
22. Become dog-owned.
23. See Stonehenge.
24. Find my friend Suzanne's grave and lay flowers on it.
25. Learn Gaelic.
26. Take a yoga class.
27. Use every single thing I receive in my CSA crates for an entire season.
28. Make that storage room I've been calling a craft room into a real craft room.
29. Design a blog of my own instead of using a canned theme from Blogger.
30. Take a cross-country train trip.
31. Stand on the glass floor at the top of the CN tower in Toronto and look down between my feet.
32. Take Mom to the Stratford Festival of Canada.
33. Attend a BlogHer conference. Done!
34. Go fishing with my Dad.
35. Finish all of the half-done projects I have lying around.
36. Get all my finished embroidery framed.
37. Handmade Christmas (one year, everyone on my Christmas list will get a present handmade by me).
38. Visit Edinburgh.
39. Walk home from work for one solid month, regardless of weather conditions (except lightning!).
40. Pay my respects at the grave of Jane Austen.
41. Go Christmas caroling with my sister.
42. Grow tomatoes. Done!
43. Write a novel.
44. Join a choir again.
45. Make a calendar using 12 photos I took myself, and distribute this calendar as a present.
46. Learn to tango.
47. See the Mona Lisa.
48. Buy and decorate my own Christmas tree.
49. Wade in the Pacific Ocean.
50. Take a tai chi class.
51. Attend a Renaissance Faire. (Costume not necessary).
52. Own and wear (on a regular basis) a black leather biker jacket.
53. Visit the farm in New Zealand where Hobbiton was built for The Lord of the Rings movies.
54. Attend 100 live performances (Originally "100 films," but thought live performances would be more of a challenge.
55. Make a pie from fruit I picked myself. Done!
56. Meet G. face-to-face.
57. Own a piano.
58. Be able to play the piano in mentioned in #57.
59. Be able to do 30 real push-ups (no kneesies!).
60. Host a dinner party and enjoy it. (The enjoying will be the hard part)
61. Commute to work by bike one summer.
62. Keep bees.
63. See if I can find the "bloody field by Shrewsbury" that Edith Pargeter wrote about (Henry IV v. Owen Glendower)
64. Go kite flying with my Dad and sister.
65. Learn to lay tile.
66. Learn how to fix/replace/install a faucet. Done!
67. Get my copy of Suzanne's thesis professionally bound.
68. Start an arts and crafts business with my sister (I have the name all picked out and everything).
69. Learn to make soap.
70. Start (and complete) a 365 photography project (take one photo everyday for a year).
71. Visit the Key West Butterfly Conservatory.
72. Ride in a hot-air balloon.
73. Knit a pair of socks. Done!
74. Attend the Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival.

I think that's enough to keep me amused for a while. I need to stop listing all the things I want to do, and focus on doing some of them.

Unexpected progress

Life list #6 -- Learn to weave

I just bumped into someone in the staff break room who was doing something called Viking knitting -- weaving a tube out of wire with the aid of a large dowel. As I stopped to admire it she told me she learned the method at a class taught at the Weavers' Guild, of which she's a member.

Score! Found 'em! She's going to get me on the emailing list, try to scrounge up a loom for me to borrow (lap loom, I hope), and teach me some stuff.

Yaaaay! Looks like I'm taking aim at #6.

Y'know, these folks probably know how to spin as well. So there's #5. Maybe.

Quick update

At the moment all my free time is being spent furiously tidying the downstairs of the house. My parents are swinging by to pick me up on Friday to go to my sister's for the weekend, and I know they're gonna need to come in for a potty break before we take off. If I leave it the way it is right now, I'm sure my father will make a snide remark, and then I'll have to stab him. And blood is so hard to get out of the carpet.

When I have the time I need to post about the crewel workshop I took last weekend (or "StabThumbSwear Fest," as I dubbed it Sunday morning). Here's a picture of how the project looked at the end of Day 1 of the workshop:

Getting ready for BlogHer '10

So I guess today was the day that all the registrations opened up for the cocktail parties at BlogHer. I've signed up for three -- got into two of them: the People's Party, co-hosted by the Bloggess (the only party that I knew I wanted to go to before I registered for the conference) and Sparklecorn. I have absolutely no idea what that one is, but some of the people I read are going, so I thought "Oh, go on. Fling yourself right into the middle of things."

There's another one that sounds like fun that I've been wait-listed for -- CheeseburgHer. It started a few years back with some friends in a hotel room and a lot of take-out from McDonald's. Now it's an official party. The menu's the same, and I guess since at the first one they made hats of the McDonald's bags that's become tradition. Sounds like a nice, silly way to end a conference.

So that's what those two new badges in my sidebar are about.

Writer's block...

...it sucks.

I have stories to tell, but everything I write looks long-winded and uninteresting. Been trying for a few days now. I think I need to get away from things related to keyboards for a while so today I'm gonna garden a little, clean my kitchen a lot (call Ripley!), and work on crewel-work piece I bought to use as practice for an embroidery workshop I'm taking next weekend.

Oh, by the way. That employee I was talking about? Miss No-show? Tuesday she pulled the same "I'll be in an hour late" crap again. She said she had a quiz to take. That left me wondering whether she'd scheduled work time right over her classes. And then she showed up half an hour after she said she would. Wednesday she emailed me asking if she worked that day--she had made her own schedule, mind you--and when I told her yes she did (due in 20 minutes, actually), she asked to be taken off the schedule for Wednesdays. I did one better and took her off the schedule permanently. She'd signed up for 20 hours a week, and so far in two weeks she worked 2 and half, 2 and three-quarters, tops.

She went from "scatterbrain" to "sneak" in my book when I got a look at her online time card and saw she was padding her hours. The half hour to 45 minutes she was here the first day she submitted as two hours. I guess she thought I'd already left the building and wouldn't know when she'd quit for the day. The second day she worked she claimed 2 1/2 hours even though she was only there for two of them. Luckily as supervisor I have the ability to go in and adjust her time card before it gets submitted, and that's exactly what I did.

You know, dealing with this person may be what has me not wanting to write at the moment. I've been preoccupied with how to handle with her, and with trying to figure out how to make her see what I want from her. It hit me when I looked at that time card: it wasn't a communication problem. She was testing me to see how much she could get away with. I'd been a little scattered and nervous at the interview (she was my first one), and I guess she thought I was distracted and inattentive. An easy mark. *Buzz* Wrong!

Thursday I interviewed and hired someone who is also a student but in all other respects is the polar opposite of this girl I just fired. When we were talking about schedules, she told me about a vacation to England she'll be taking in a few weeks, and wanted to know if that would be a problem. Nope. As long as she's not texting me from the airport prior to boarding to tell me she won't be here for 2 weeks, I have no problems. Also, the other place she works has a different schedule over the summer, and it hasn't been posted yet. I told her to consider her other job the primary job. We'll rearrange her hours with me once the schedule at the other place is set. And yes, I talked to her supervisor before hiring her. Got a glowing recommendation. Yay for learning from one's mistakes!

So it looks like I did have something to write about after all. Next post should be something very unrelated to work, I promise.

Going home for Easter

The dryer is full of clothes that are going to get folded and stuffed into a duffel bag just as soon as possible. The phone and iPod are charged up and ready for use. Taxi ride to the bus terminal has been scheduled (5:45 in the bleeding a.m. Ugh). Bus ticket has been bought and is currently in my purse. In about 7 hours I'll start checking that purse every 15 minutes to make sure it's still there until I actually take them out to use it. Stuff to keep myself amused this weekend has been identified but not yet packed. Still trying to decide if I'm taking the laptop.

I'm heading off to into the woods of Pennsylvania (where cell service is pretty good but Internet, eh, not so much) to spend Easter with my parents. Haven't seen them since Christmastime.

It feels weird to be packing without Delilah supervising the process, eying me with mingled suspicion and disapproval.

Have a good weekend, everyone! I may post at some point from the BlackBerry if I can figure out how, and if the idea of typing a bunch of paragraphs on a touch screen keyboard while the device auto-suggests words that are so very much not what I was trying to say doesn't make me give up before I start.