It’s been a month since I’ve blogged?! Oh crap. Hey, I’ve been busy.

For about 3 months prior to my grandmother’s 80th birthday (the first weekend of May), I’ve been cross-stitching a gift for her. And not cross-stitching from a pattern, mind you, but an original design I put together myself. (NEVER do that! The math alone — and I say this as a person who likes math — was aggravating to the nth degree. Ohmigawd, what a huge pain.) I finished it a whopping 15 hours before the start of her birthday party, only to discover that the frame I’d purchased for it was broken upon removing it from the packaging. Since it was 11-freaking-pm, I had no choice but to dash back to the store as soon as it opened the morning of the party and exchange the frame. Then I remembered why I hadn’t done cross-stitch in years (about 10 years, actually…) — framing that stuff is a stone bitch. (This was, most unfortunately, before I discovered a nifty product called “peel & stick mounting board,” which I will use for my next needlepoint project.)

Anyway, here’s the finished product, which is approximately 11″x13″ (forgive the lousy pic, it was taken in a hurry under less-than-ideal conditions):

All I can say is 18-count Aida fabric can BITE ME. That’s 18 itty-bitty cross-stitches per inch of fabric! Only certifiably crazy people use anything smaller than 14-count. (Thank the gods I didn’t try 22-count. I tremble in fear just thinking about it.)

In other craft-related news, there are 6 (SIX, gah!) projects that I have partly finished, and 2 more in the works that I really need to get started on as soon as possible (which means “after the wedding”). The partly-finished include an afghan for Anxiety, an open-work tunic-style sweater for Angst, a cap-sleeved summer pullover for myself, an artsy wall decoration that I keep forgetting to finish up, and some other stuff I’m keeping under wraps for the time being.

As for the rest of Grandma’s birthday, well…let’s just say that Grandma seems to be feeling the weight of every one of those 80 years. Maybe she was just distracted and caught up in the excitement of the day. I can hope. Anyway, my girls were (of course) beautiful:

And we did get a decent four-generation pic (from left: younger demonspawn, me, my mom, my grandma, elder demonspawn):

Upon escaping the gathering, I had to give Geoffrey & my girls a tour of the town (which is nominally where I grew up, at least from ages 9-16). Drove by the house I’ve lived longest of any place in my life, only to find some white trash jerks had let the place go to hell and chopped down the magnificent tree that was the prettiest for blocks around. Maybe it’s stupid, but I really feel bad that someone killed that tree…it was right outside my bedroom window, and when I was a little kid I believed it watched over me while I slept.

My high school was also gone. The “Spring Break Quake” of 1993 (which, ironically, I missed out on, since at the time I lived about 125 miles north of the epicenter) damaged the 70-year-old brick building to the point that it was eventually demolished. Mostly there’s just a grassy park left, and part of the grounds now house the new public library (which appears to be at least 10 times bigger than the old one that I grew up with!). It’s pretty eerie how the town has changed, really. When I lived there, it was a town of maybe 3,500 people with almost nothing but sawmills, churches, bars, a greasy-spoon diner, a pizzeria, and all of two grocery stores and two blinking red stoplights (the first actual traffic signal wasn’t installed until 2005!). Now there’s a swimming pool, a skatepark, tons of new housing developments and businesses…with over twice the population it had 25 years ago, it’s no longer an isolated rural logging town, but rather a “bedroom community” of Oregon City.

They say you can never go home. And they’re right…not that I ever considered that town home, exactly. It was mostly just a place where I was miserable for a lot of years, about which now I am comfortably indifferent.

However, we also stopped to visit a place where I wasn’t miserable — in fact, a place where some of my happiest memories took place! The summer that I was pregnant with Angst, I used to drive out to the next town over to take advantage of their much nicer library. After loading myself up with a few dozen books, I’d hit the local Mexican fast-food drive-thru, and head back toward where I lived. Just about at the halfway point of the journey, on the back country roads, I discovered a perfect place to sit and read and enjoy my lunch — the Bear Creek Cemetery.

Once a week or so, throughout my second trimester and well into my third, I would stop there to have lunch, read a book, and just enjoy the surroundings. There really is a little creek bordering the small cemetery, which only has about 70 graves, no few of which are of babies or very young children. This may seem morbid to some, but I used to sit on the graves of the babies when I stopped there, and wonder about them. It wasn’t creepy at all to me; quite the contrary, it was just about the only place I felt truly happy back then.

A few years later, I developed a theory that the Bear Creek Cemetery might be where I got the Black Hole, seeing as it started “activity” in my home during the tail end of my pregnancy (and moved with me to every place I lived thereafter, so it clearly wasn’t a location-bound thing). But even if that wasn’t the case at all, it was neat to show Angst around the place:

If I wasn’t intending to be cremated when I die, I’d want to be buried there. It’s just got such amazing energy, such a cozy and soothing feel to the place.

In other news, I’m currently working on preparations for the wedding (finally got the invitations mailed out today!), and there’s still a TON of stuff left to be done before June 21st. I ordered an outfit for myself and one for Anxiety from the Pyramid Collection, only to discover that the blouse I’d chosen for myself was too large (and unflattering, to boot), the skirt I’d chosen was thin plain cotton (the catalog photo made it look much lusher), and I’d really messed up in ordering the dress that Anxiety wanted (at least 2 sizes too big). So I returned the blouse and the dress, to get a refund on the blouse and exchange Anxiety’s dress for the correct size. The skirt I kept, and I like it muchly, but I don’t think it’s nice enough for a wedding. Geoffrey and I also mail-ordered our wedding bracelets (which we’re having in lieu of rings), and thank heavens they are as nice as we’d hoped.

I’m working on not having anxiety attacks over the wedding preparations. One way or another, it’ll all be over in forty days. (Aacckk!!!!)