7 quick takes - 032009

1. Tomorrow is the first Saturday in a month on which I do not have to be in class all day. I'm giddy with excitement. Well, not giddy; I don't do giddy. Shall we say I'm in a happy state of anticipation? The real question is what to do with all that time, particularly Saturday's early morning hours. Shall I sleep late (bearing in mind that "late" is in the eye of the beholder, and for me, anything later than 7 a.m. is positively decadent)? Or shall I troop out to Panera in the early hours, which I haven't done more than once since the turn of the new year?

2. The movies in hand for the weekend are Kung Fu Panda, Edward Scissorhands and Saving God. Nothing if not eclectic. The first sounds like fun, the second I've never seen and the third is constantly advertised during the "Christian top twenty" the country radio station broadcasts between four and six a.m. on Sundays, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. Ving Rhames seems an unlikely candidate to star as a preacher, but his personal character is much different from the villain roles he usually has - this film is from his heart.

3. The object of the movies is to watch them whilst sewing, something I haven't actually done since before Christmas. None of my current projects is currently calling my name; pulling fabric from the stash for a couple of wedding gifts sounds more appealing. Last Monday I spent part of the morning helping a young friend chose fabric for a quilt. If you click through, you will see the quilt needs nine fabrics of one color, shading from the lightest hue to the darkest shade; the pictured quilt is made from expensive batik fabric.

We, of course, were shopping at Joanne Fabric, in the cheap section. She was thinking of black and white until I mentioned she needn't stick to one color...if you have enough fabrics, you can shade from one dark through to another color. In the end, while we had a gorgeous dark teal down through lime green to palest lime set up in one spot, she went with the black to deep red through orange to pale yellow scheme. It sounds odd, and looked boring when it began with deep red as the darkest shade. By the time we reached this point, my friend had a much better sense of what we were trying to do, and it was she who pulled the red out and replaced it with the black. There was one more substitution I would have made, but she is very happy with it as it is.

Silly me - I only took my debit card with me into the store, and wasn't able to snap a picture.

4. I will, however, take a picture of the stack of books I'm currently reading. It's not my habit to peruse more than one at a time; I'm having a difficult time concentrating on finishing any one of them and tend to jump around. The entire stack is nonfiction - all good books, but not my favorite reading material. The bookshelf bases of my living room lamps are overflowing.

5. My muse has packed up and joined my mind in some undisclosed location. I'm sure they are having fun, but I do miss them. While they function best in tandem, at this point I'd take whichever one would like to come back. Lots of things in my head I'd like to post about, but nothing organized enough to put down in pixels.

6. Through the Bible in a year - are you reading along? No matter how many times I read a passage, something new comes up. I'm more or less on schedule. Translation: while I am current in the sense that I'm not technically behind at the moment, there is a week-long black hole back in February that I'm catching up on. The object is not to be perfect, but to be consistent. (I will, however, be perfect, as that's my personality on this particular thing. I'll get that week caught up, and any other days that may come up missing throughout the year, and by 12/31 will have done all the readings.)

7. President, or celebrity? Pardon me if I don't think that appearing on Leno Letterman? is an "historic event". Nor do I think that televising your NCAA picks (and I can't help but wonder - where there are sports picks, there is usually some illegal betting going on...) is an appropriate use of the President's time, especially in the current situation. Perhaps if his team had spent as much time vetting Timothy Geithner as O did making his picks, we wouldn't have a tax cheat as Treasury Secretary.