Sad Story

Headlines read on Sunday morning: Man dead in Montcalm County after falling through the ice...

This man's name was Lee Avery. This occurred at Crystal Lake. The incident was during an annual festival the little community hosts every year. Here's the sad part: This is the lake where I was raised. This was a man I grew up with as a child. The event was a good thing gone wrong. I'll be attending the funeral in two weeks.

I don't usually like to cloud my diary with sad stories, but this one kept hovering over me yesterday while working in here. I couldn't get Lee off my mind, nor all the folks I still keep in contact with up there. My good friend Amy...yeah, her husband is Lee's cousin. Her husband was in on the rescue since he's a volunteer fireman up there. My "old boyfriend" Mike. He too is on the fire department and although I've not heard anything about his involvement, I just know he was there too. He's always there when you need him.

I tried to immerse myself in my work in here to get back in my happy place. I'm having a hard time of it still. Obviously, or I wouldn't be writing about it. And, because of my wandering mind, I did a lot of boo-boo fixing yesterday while I was working. I guess my head just wasn't in the game

Here's my first attempt at working yesterday.

Mistake #1

I had to rip three seams here to get this corner corrected. Here's last weeks progress.

Eight more (What???)

Yep, another eight. Our moderator in all of this gave us a bonus block to do for Valentines Day.

I was getting ready to get the dog beds to the ECHS and noticed something was wrong after snapping this pic of the additional three we made (giving us a total of 11).

Three more (and mistake #2)

I had failed to close up the stuffing seams on all of these. Back to the sewing machine.

I moved along to my Ugly Sweater block. I messed up a sleeve on that block too and had to rip it out. I didn't grab a pic because by that point I was sick of all the mistakes I was making yesterday.

Ugly Sweater [corrected] Block #5

I'm attending a retreat in April again in Gladwin at The Springs. The cook for our retreat and his new wife are having a quilt constructed by our retreat administrator. She asked we make a 12 1/2" block to add in for their wedding present. She wanted it done in blues and browns. This is what I whipped up.

Wedding Block Contribution

I was having some weird back issues throughout yesterday morning. It seemed to get a little better as the day moved along, but I didn't want to temp fate by hauling my 55 pound long arm around. I hope to do some long arming today.

To keep me a little bit more under control, I actually started a new project just to try to get my mind off of things. Starting a new project keeps me a little more focused and makes me pay attention to what's happening at present rather then something I just can't change. I hope to finish it today (I didn't say it was a large project).

Here's hoping today is a better day and may less mistakes come my way.