I’m back at work after a three-day weekend. Purple Systems didn’t have a holiday yesterday, and indeed I was looking forward to a smooth commute with so many other people having the day off. Instead, I ended up staying home. I probably have a touch of whatever germs are going around my office and keeping several of my coworkers home today, but the big problem yesterday was my head. Ouch doesn’t begin to cover it, but it’s feeling a lot better now, so I don’t want to dwell on it. I dwelled on it yesterday, trying to think of what I might have ingested or been exposed to that might have triggered the pain, but I couldn’t think of anything. If Denise had served red wine and smoked meat at her scrapbook party and forced me to have some, sure, I could explain a headache that bad, but she had yummy oatmeal cookies that in no way resembled the white chocolate cookie of pain that laid me low back in December.

Pre-head pain, I was out and about a lot this past weekend. Saturday morning and early afternoon were given over to quilt guild. The speaker was Pat Campbell, who amazed me by throwing many of her beautiful appliqué quilts out into the audience so we could pass them around. Wow. I’ve never seen that before. One of the first rules one learns going to quilt shows is “don’t touch the quilts!”, so for her to let us fondle them amazed me.

After guild and a stop at home to shovel a few inches of new fallen snow and switch vehicles, I headed south to visit my friend Lee in Maumee. Lee and I worked together about ten years ago and have kept in touch, sometimes sporadically, since. We hung out and went out to dinner and a movie with her husband and hung out some more before I crashed in their guest room. If I were a better friend, I would have gotten up to join her at the 8:30 church service she was singing in instead of just coming downstairs to say good-bye as she was heading out the door. Ah, well, maybe next time.

Sunday’s scheduled event was the aforementioned scrapbook gathering. What was I, someone whose method of dealing with family photos is to cram them in most definitely non-archival albums a year or two after they were taken and scribble a few notes on an acid-riffic 3-by-5 card to stick in beside them, doing at a scrapbook party? Being tempted by pretty papers, that’s what. I decided that maybe getting some scrapbook supplies would motivate me to finally get started on my quilt documentation book. In a week or two when the stuff I ordered comes in, we’ll see if that’s actually the case. In the meantime, I can work on my quilt in progress, which, when finished, will put me even farther behind on the quilt documentation project. I wonder what life will be like if I ever manage to catch up on all the things I want to do.

A year ago, more or less, I had exercise on the brain.