...oof, I'm finally back... I fully intended to post a good ten days ago, but a few things got me off track. Please indulge me for a moment, and let me explain myself... About two weeks ago, I was in the middle of putting together some furnishings for my friend Molly who owns the shop, Molly's Furniture Salad. She was invited to decorate a room for the "Christmas at Hycroft 2009" event being held Nov. 19-22 in Vancouver. This event is held annually at Hycroft, a turn-of-the-century Vancouver heritage mansion which has been beautifully preserved, and is organized by the University Women's Club of Vancouver as a means to raise money for the its many scholarship and bursary programs and a number of charity and advocacy groups locally, nationally and internationally. The mansion is decked out in Christmas finery, local businesses such as Molly's shop are invited to decorate the different rooms, crafts and artisanal foods are sold, music is played and Santa Claus even visits (more info here). Molly approached me at the beginning of October to help her out with this project by making a few things that would work well in a child's bedroom, i.e., coverlets, pillows, banners, etc...
While I was pretty excited about the project, I didn't do much about it for the first two weeks after she told me... and then it hit me: I definitely needed to get going because of all the other things I had to get done in that time frame and because I was meant to leave for Florida on Nov. 18 to watch my 13-year old daughter play in a soccer tournament. Well, I am a crammer by nature...
About two weeks ago, despite having finished some of the bedding, I started to feel more stressed about it all; our usual chaotic family routine mixed in with a few other things that had to get done (such as my year-end bookkeeping... groan!) probably helped in the matter. I knew I was getting a bit edgy then because I had this dream, well, more like a nightmare: I was stuck in a submarine, many thousand leagues below sea level and the sub was flooding... Oy! And then a week ago, while making my children's sandwiches in my usual comatose 7:15am state (I am NOT a morning person!), I sliced the top of my middle finger with a bread knife so perfectly that I had to get it stitched up by my GP...
OK, so it was time to shed a few things on my agenda and... simplify. I realized then that I wouldn't be able to make quite as many things for the Hycroft event as I had hoped for with my finger in stitches, so I kept to finishing the most important items and, yes... I canceled my trip to Florida -- only my husband will be accompanying my daughter. Disappointing as the latter was for me as well as my daughter, I just really felt like I needed to slow down and grab some control back in all my chaos.
On the positive side, now that I'll be in town this weekend, I will be able to attend the Hycroft event. If you live in the Vancouver area and have a moment between Thursday and Sunday, I encourage you to attend as well and join in the festivities; if you've never been to Hycroft, it's definitely worth a visit and the fundraising work of this women's group is so very worthwhile given our government's forever shrinking budget for education. I will leave you with a snap of Molly's decorated bedroom which I took this morning while I was helping her out (aren't the bed finished by Molly and that big red cardinal in those beautiful leaded windows simply fabulous!) --
