From the ASP blog...

During this holiday season, let's show our troops we love and support them!!!! From OCTOBER 1 to NOVEMBER 24, I will be collecting holiday cards for troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Being away from home and living in harsh conditions during the holiday season is especially difficult ~ they need to know we have not forgotten them!!! Mail from home helps to keep our troops' morale strong, making a very real difference in their lives.

Send your signed, unsealed holiday cards to:
Mrs. Kathy Orr
OPERATION: LOVE FROM HOME
P.O. Box 1660
Loganville, Georgia, 30052

The cards can be handmade or store-bought. This is a great opportunity to get your Scout troop, school, church and other civic organizations involved in doing something to show support for our troops.

If you wish to send an email greeting,which will be printed off and mailed along with the holiday cards, please send an email to: LoveFromHome@Gmail.com
*IMPORTANT GUIDELINES: This is not a "dating service" of any type. Please do not send suggestive or otherwise inappropriate cards or materials. Please also refrain from making political statements of any nature. I will be reading and screening every card received to ensure that the above guidelines are adhered to. Remember: This is strictly to let the troops know that we love them, we are proud of them and that we HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN them! IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS, PLEASE CONTACT ME AT LoveFromHome@Gmail.com

Please note that “Operation Love From Home” is not a coporation or business entity of any kind , nor do I as an individual represent any other organization that I am or may be affiliated with.

We have had the hottest driest summer on record here. Yesterday it rained almost all day and I swear you could almost hear the trees weeping for joy. I know we all wanted to be out in it. It is funny how a gray day can be so enjoyable when you haven't had one in such along time. Truth be told though I love rainy days anyway. They are a perfect time to curl up with a book or sewing and just slow down.

I went yesterday afternoon and paid my FIL's bills and balanced his check book. Bless his heart, he is still hanging in there although I don't know how. He is not in pain but is in and out of consciousness.

Most of the day I spent just doodling around. I spent some time trying to get a new template up for my blog and didn't find anything that I liked that actually worked so I gave that up. I messed around looking at new patterns I "needed" and hence the Wish List that is going up today and I sewed some. Now that the weather is getting cooler, I can get back to my afghan (it was just too hot to have that big thing laying in my lap). I am running out of September to complete my September goals on the Needle and Thread board too. This morning, I have to get busy and pay some bills since today's date just really dawned on me. I don't know where this month has gone! I work today but am off tomorrow. Unfortunately, tomorrow is the TKD tournament here so I have to take my MIL to see the guys and she wants to go shopping as well so my day will be gone in a poof! After that, it is 5 days in a row again. *sigh* How come days at work drag on forever and days off fly by?

I was reading my Nordic Needle Newsletter on Monday and saw a mention to embroidery on paper. I checked out the books and they look interesting but are fairly expensive so I did a little search on the web and found a web site with some free patterns to try. This is what I came up with this afternoon. The body on the butterfly is little wooden beads. I think they are rather cute. They were fun to make but hard on my hands. I didn't require anything special to do them either. I just used a large quilting pin for the pricking, scrapbook card stock, embroidery floss and the cards are for pictures and I got them after Christmas last year so I already had them! Something different to distract me anyway! :-) Tomorrow it is back to my regular sewing. I am almost finished a butterfly pattern from My Aunt's Attic that is an exchange square on the Counting Our Blessings Board. After that it is back to my shamrock Sampler so I can get that out of the way and get to my nephew's wedding sampler. Dan and Chelsea are getting married December 15 so I don't have a lot of time.

My FIL was readmitted to the hospital via the ER on Saturday. He has internal bleeding and has been vomiting up blood. He is too sick and too weak to even do a scope to see where it is coming from. Right now, we are in a holding pattern since they are giving him medication to try and stop the bleeding and giving him blood as well. His blood pressure is getting dangerously low even with these measures. We are trying to protect my MIL from all that is going on but I don't know how long we can do that either.

What a sad mess we are in.

I finished this off this morning. By the time we got back from moving Tom's dad and having dinner last night I was too tired to be careful with the stitching so I didn't touch it. These are really fun to see come together but I have no clue how I will display them! My needlerolls are in a basket by my front door but they can stand on end. I don't know what I will do with these. I like them though.

We got my FIL into the nursing home but I don't know if I can stand to see him there. He has a pretty view out his window but there are no private rooms and the rooms are very small. While it is fairly nice as nursing homes go, it is older and dreary and smells. I don't know that this is going to work out at all. I have bought us some time though so I will call hospice on Monday and see how we go about getting some care if we bring him home. It is going to be really a chore though for us to do that juggling everything that has to be juggled. We will see. I think it has to happen though.

I am ready to put this one together I think. It is a pattern from Papillon Creations. I discovered them while browsing this weekend, and I really like a lot of their stuff. I love their "catch phrase" too: Let your Fingers Fly! The pattern is a freebie called Hearts and Flowers. I stitched it on 32 count linen from Silkweaver's Hand dyed collection with Anchor Variegated thread. The fabric color is Chocolate. It calls for some bead work and I am still debating that. I like it the way it is and 32 count fabric means you have to have really tiny beads!

This time instead of back stitching around the outside to join the two pieces, I cross stitched. I wanted more of a color border than I got with the backstitch so I can't wait to see how that goes.

On the hospital front we are stressing out more over what to do with my FIL than we are about the fact that he is dying. After being told on Sunday by the oncologist that he would not be moved until he finished his radiation (2 weeks) we got a call from his hospitalist asking us where we wanted him moved to! By that time Joe and Robin (Tom's brother and his wife) were on their way back to PA. Then we were given false information about what and how medicare would pay for the nursing home, told he qualified for in patient hospice care since he decided to stop treatment, told he didn't qualify for in patient hospice care since he might not be dead in the 5 days...(yes days) that medicare would pay for and then he would be moved to the nursing home after that... 3 moves in 5 days for a terminal patient??? What's the purpose of that?????? Then they wouldn't move him until he had a bed at the nursing home, now they are discharging him today no matter what. We don't have a clue what is going on but I am just about ready to go and get him from the hospital myself and screw them all. What it boils down to isn't what is right for the patient, it is "show me the money". What a miserable world.

Well with everything that has been going on this week, my "my" weekend just didn't happen. I was off Friday, Saturday and Sunday and was supposed to be at the Celebration of Needlework Conference in Louisville on Saturday. As my luck would have it, Tommy had a Battle Assessment weekend, Tom's brother and his wife came out from PA to see his dad and help make some decisions and my car decided that it may be time to be retired, so no trip for me.

In the end I guess the trip itself really didn't matter. I was too tired and too stressed to have really enjoyed myself anyway. Friday I made two 130 mile round trips to Maineville, OH where my son's unit is based. Saturday I convinced Tom to take him up in the morning and I spent most of the day just vegetating. I did a little on line shopping, played some Mahjongg, stitched a bit out in the sun and tried to relax. I left a little after 3 to get Tommy then stopped and picked up groceries for dinner at my mother in laws, came home a little after 8 and was in bed by 9. I was up again to take him to Maineville at 5 this morning.

The pulmonologist just called and wants to do the biopsy even though the swelling in his brain has not gone down enough to make it less risky. So the question is what do we do now. Do we let them do the procedure and take the chance he dies on the table or becomes brain damaged? If we do the biopsy and determine there is treatment to prolong life but not improve the quality do we opt for treatment? Nothing is going to change what has already happened. We can't erase it, we can't fix it,...What a position to be in.

Pray for us please.

Well I finally forced my FIL to go to the hospital last night as he has not eaten any food of consequence since last Wednesday. While I was there I started describing all his symptoms and mentioned that I thought he may have had a small stroke. The tested his neurological responses and ruled that out but decided to do a CT scan just to take a look and they discovered that he has four rather large tumors (quarter size) in his brain. Totally inoperable. There are more smaller ones as well. They are not alone since the cells that formed them came from somewhere. They admitted him last night and were running some tests today to see if they could find out where the cancer started but so far we have no news.

I am so sick of finding cancer around every day corner of my life. My grandmother,mother, my father, uncles, aunts, in laws everywhere I turn it rears it's ugly head. It has taken so may people that I love and maimed others. When they told me what was wrong last night I suddenly felt so hollow. I wonder sometimes about the resilience of humans. How we can stand so much and when does the breaking point finally come. Do we cease caring so we can't be hurt? Do we harden our hearts and look away? I wonder how we get through every day sometimes...sometimes I just wonder how I get through THIS day.

What a fun project. This is a freebie pattern from Dawn Lewis of The Needle's Work that you can find here if you are interested. The floss is an Anchor varigated pastel and the diamonds are Eterna silk. (LORD! What a great thread to work with!)

It was harder to put together than I thought but once I got going, I almost sewed it together without stuffing it. The bead in the center is czech glass with that magenta color swirled inside it. The pictures don't do it justice...

Now I am off to make another one! Woo hoo...what fun! I can't WAIT to see what I find at the Celebration of Needlework conference next week!!

Why is it that parent's feel that is it OK for their children to pitch a fit when they can't get their own way AND that is it OK to allow them to pitch this fit in public??

Now I am a mother, granted my kids are older now but it hasn't been THAT long since they were little. I have 2 nieces, 8 nephews and a multitude of little cousins that I spend time with and have spent time with and NONE of us (meaning the parents) ever allowed this behavior to occur. Now don't get me wrong, there are times when child get hurt and cries in public or a baby is over tired or hungry or whatever. That is one thing. I am speaking about kids that want a drink, or candy or book or toy or whatever and proceed to wail as if they have had a limb forcibly amputated while the parents just stand there and ignore them...or even worse, give them exactly what they are asking for so they do it over and over again.

Now I will admit that I am tired today and that we have been jam packed and short staffed at work and there is a level of stress induced annoyance speaking here but good grief! Not only would my children NOT have gotten what they were wailing for but they would have been taken out into the car until they could behave.

We worry so much about NOT diminishing a child's self esteem now that we have created children that walk all over us and everyone else.

Labor Day is a United States federal holiday that takes place on the first Monday in September. The holiday began in 1882, originating from a desire by the Central Labor Union to create a day off for the "working man". It is still celebrated mainly as a day of rest and marks the symbolic end of summer for many. Labor Day became a federal holiday by Act of Congress in 1894.

That's from Wikipedia...the source that knows everything except how I am supposed to get a holiday off. What a joke. We were absolutely slammed. Open from 7 AM until 6 PM and then people were mad that we were closing! Holy cannoli!! I was scheduled to work from 10-4 in the liquor room. I did that deliberately so I could work on my schedules for week 35. The phone rang off the hook, then to top it off, they were so busy and so many people had off (or were "sick") that there was no one to relieve me at 4 so I had to stay until 6. Sucked to be me! Oh well. I have my "ME" weekend in Louisville coming up so I will be glad for the extra money. Unfortunately, it won't show up until after I get back! LOL

I got some stitching in on my biscornu and broke out my Eterna silks to add to it and I am just loving it! I will post a picture as soon as I get one full side done. I have the backstitching done on both sides and am putting in the eyelets now. I can't wait to put it together. If I get off here, I may be able to get the stitching done tonight so I can put it together tomorrow since I don't have to be at work until 2:30. Thought I could sleep in but hubby has to be at his new job at 7:30 and he won't get his new truck until he gets there...and I am how he gets there!

OK, off to get the dog her pill and back to my stitching! Happy day to all those who labored!

You know, things have just seemed so over whelming for me for so long and a good part of that is having absolutely no downtime. What little time I have off from work I am doing housework or running someone somewhere or doing something for someone else...Today I planned a me day. This is the only day off I have in 10 days so I was bound and determined to not do any more than really necessary.

I sat out on the patio and had breakfast.
I finished reading Lisa Gardner's Alone.
I sat and dreamed through my fabric and thread stash to find something pretty for the Biscornu I am making for the Needle and Thread Board.

Then I had to get ready to take DS#2 to a parade where he was in the color guard for the Civil Air Patrol squadron that he belongs too. I dropped him off and headed for the end of the parade route. I did a little shopping at Big Lots and got some great beads and buttons to use in my stitching and when I got outside I could hear the sirens from the start of the parade as it got toward where we were. I got to see my son march as a color guard for the first time. They looked so nice and straight and tall. I was once again over whelmed to the point that I was finding it hard to swallow. My father was a color guard for his American Legion Post and for the VFW he belonged to for more years than I can count. I took one look at my son and could tell that my father would have been so very, very proud of him too. And I felt another torch being passed too. There have been so many of them this year. This turned out to really be a me day. :-)

The pictures are of them marching, The guard with Governor Fletcher and his wife and of the squadron in front of their now dismantled float that won best of show!