Happy/Merry Halloween/Thanksgiving/Chanukah/Christmas/New Years!

I know, I know, I've been gone a very long time. Lots has gone on over the past 3 months (in addition to the holidays listed above) and even a few crafts! I think about all of you often but have lacked the time to write a proper post. And even this is not a proper post, but I did want to let you know that I am still here.

And that it might be quiet around here for the next couple months. This week, I started my very last (yippee!!!) semester of my second masters program. I am soooo crazy that I am taking two classes over the next eight weeks and one of them is a research class. So don't expect to see too much of me around here.

I wanted to say hi and wish all of you a very happy new year. I am hoping to have a bit of time this weekend to show you the small projects I did over the past couple months...
An adult tutu in hot pink, lime green & purple with sparkly ribbons (worn for an entire half marathon)!
A wreath made entirely of ornaments that took 10 minutes and $7 to make!
And some great blogs that some of my friends are doing...

You like my teaser? Hope to see you soon!


P.S. For those of you that remember I live in Tucson, this week has been surreal but makes me proud to be a Tucsonan. This community has really come together to support each other and grieve. I still can barely believe that it happened or happened here.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I wanted to share this video with you because it really shows the Tucson I know and love, not the horrific tragedy. Mr. Crafty and I often refer to Tucson as a really big small town because we often get a small town feel even though we live in a community of a million people.

Please keep the vicitms & their families in your thoughts and prayers!

Crafty's in San Francisco

It's the end of a very long week... a very long training season... and a very long semester.

Mr. Crafty & I are in San Fran this weekend. Our first real vacation (not a trip to visit family) in... I don't know how long. I'm running th Nike Women's Marathon on Sunday.

We've had some fun today, I'll share the pics when we get back. Mr. Crafty has been using our dslr camera for most of the pictures.

Before we left, we had a hectic week. Cute, adorable, troublemaker Trixie decided to eat the elastic string from one of her toys on Saturday morning. And she had (not cheap) surgery on Monday to remove the elastic string. We had to scramble to find someone to take care of her while we're in SF...

I found this fantatic chandelier today. Mr. Crafty doesn't agree that we need it :-( For $4500, I guess I agree...

See you when we get back to Tucson!

The Craftys

Love this!

I totally forgot to tell this as part of yesterday's post. But I guess it deserves it's own post.

Last week, I got this email from my aunt:

Lindsey is Star of the Week in her class this week and today's activity is to bring in a special item and tell the class about it for Show and Tell. Lindsey brought in the crayon holder that you made her for Christmas last year!! Awww... :-)

Lindsey is my 6 year old cousin. My aunt and {former} uncle adopted her and her sister Hayley {age 8} from China. They are the cutest little girls ever. They love Mr. Crafty. He is their personal jungle gym when we see them because he flips them over and gets silly with them. {The last two times we saw them, he made the mistake of doing a tough arm workout at the gym in the morning and kept complaining to me how much his arms hurt. Hehe}

This is the crayon holder that my aunt is referring to {except that Lindsey's has an "L" on it}:

You can make your own by following the very first tutorial I ever wrote here.

And the owners of a wedding quilt I made last summer posted this on Facebook recently too. With the caption: "Thanks for the quilt, Jennifer! Molly loves it."

Just gotta love when people love the things you lovingly made for them :-)

Tomorrow, I am getting together with the Tucson Modern Quilt Guild ladies for a little sewing time. Yippee!!! We're each going to make a block or two for a Breast Cancer quilt that we'll then donate.

Still alive!

I assure you I am still alive. The past couple weeks have been busy ones in the Crafty household. Unfortunately, most of that busy-ness did not involve crafty-ness. Boohoo!

But I have some fantastic news! Mr. Crafty got a new job!!! In the past two and a half weeks, he's been a much happier Mr. Crafty. Which I am a BIG fan of!

He had the world's worst boss at his old job. He was sad to leave the people (except his boss!) but his new job has some fantastic opportunities. He's an Education Specialist for Cord Blood Registry. He's currently in training and learning all about pregnancy, stem cells, and lots of other information. He'll be helping families decide whether or not to store their babies' cord blood. So exciting!

I did get one project done recently. And it really made me wish I made the trip to Joann's and bought the specialty ruler. Ah well, live and learn!

My friends and coaches for Team In Training Ashley and Ryan are expecting their first child.
Ashley and Ryan are waiting to find out the baby's sex. And let me tell you, it is more and more challenging to find gender neutral infant stuff at the store. I did find a super cute duckie sleeper with ducks on the feet and a duck face on the butt and some cute onesies with zoo animals.

I made the family a fleece blanket. My mom had given me this fabric and I thought it was perfect. I made the blanket more of a rectangle than a square too.

Ashley is due basically any day now... her "due date" is October 26th but I keep advocating for a 10/10/10 baby! {I mean, seriously, how cool would that be???}

{Sidenote: Mr. Crafty's bday is 8/8/81. Pretty cool, right? We had a "Super Golden Birthday" party for him on 8/8/08. And yes, if you did the math, I am about a year and a half older than him.}

We also got a new member of the Crafty family... a new gnome from our alma mater!!!

The blue one we got last year at Homecoming. He's also my profile picture and his name is Tobias Archibald Anthrax. There is a story behind the name... The yellow gnome with the #1 finger is our new addition to the family. {We actually got 2 of the yellow gnomes because Mr. Crafty wanted one for work because he works with a lot of University of Arizona Wildcats. Boo!}

Frustration...

I actually had a whole different blog written. It was my venting about the frustrations I've had the past couple weeks, mainly since Mr. Crafty left for his business trip.

The AC died last week {and is still very much needed here, it's been over 100 all week} and last night/this morning I found out that our mailman sent all our mail back to the senders. Including my tags for my car. And the DMV is closed today. But I have my printout showing I paid and I don't plan on getting pulled over so I should be OK. Just annoyed. Earlier, I might have been a more than annoyed...

The original post went much more into all that. And I just deleted it. I am letting it go.

So there's a back story to the next part of this blog post. When Mr. Crafty and I were planning our wedding, we wrote our own vows. I wanted them to be really personal and really us. I wanted to promise to always eat the pickle from his hamburger. But he thought that people would take that the wrong way. *clears throat* I mean you, Justin & Trevor.

You see, Mr. Crafty hates pickles. And I love them. He used to order his burgers without pickles. Now he orders them with pickles and picks them off and puts them on my plate. He also loves mushrooms. And I hate them. So I pick them out and put them on his plate. So I wanted to promise to always do that...

Mr. Crafty comes home tomorrow and I am ready for him to be home. We've gone two weeks without really being able to communicate with each other. He gets no cell reception in the part of rural Nebraska where he has spent the last two weeks. He had no desk, computer or phone of his own at work so I couldn't really email him. And there was no phone in his room, weird I know. He's my best friend and I miss him.

He's spending the night in Omaha before his flight home and the girls he's been working with in rural Nebraska were telling him all the "big city" things to do in Omaha. Apparently, they started making fun of sushi. {This was told to me via IM a bit ago when he got to an area where he actually gets cell reception. Hallelujah for cell reception!}

So I told him not to eat sushi without me. {I actually have wanted to ask him all week if we can have sushi for dinner tomorrow after he gets home but haven't had a chance.} He said he would never dream of it.

Mr Crafty: "Nor would I eat the pickle on my burger, that's yours"

Awwww, come home Mr. Crafty! Come home!

Trixie is ready for Mr. Crafty to come home and cuddle too!

Happy GleeKy Tuesday

{I'm going to apologize if this post appears twice. I was out of the office at a recruiting event and sent the post from my phone. Love that mobile posting via email. But the post I wrote never appeared on my page. And it's not in my gmail sent or draft folders. It's apparently lost somewhere in internet-land.}

GLEE Season 1 on DVD!!! And the special issue of people!

Happy GleeKy Tuesday!!!

I'd like to thank Target for having the DVD set on sale the day it came out {Target opened at 8am, I stopped by to get mine on my way to the recruiting event at 9:30am}.

I also may have had an irrational thought when I saw all the other cars in the parking lot of Target. I was worried they were ALL there to get their copy of Glee and they might be out. And then I realized the rest of the Target shoppers probably did not plan their morning around picking of their copy of Glee Season 1 like I did. OK, maybe a couple other shoppers... like my friend Scott who got his at 8am and was at the door waiting for Target to open.

Now I just have to explain this and the other things I got at Target to Mr. Crafty...

Happy Friday

So this week has been crazy! Like crazy, crazy.

Last night was the first meeting of the Tucson Modern Quilt Guild! Yippee! The time I should have used to read the 200+ pages I have to get done this weekend, mini-paper & journal response (both due today), I spent meeting the lovely ladies of the new Tucson Modern Quilt Guild. Our kinda-sorta fearless leader is Melanie of All Above Fabric.

I have no pics to share because I left my camera and projects to share at home. What??? I know! I ran home, took a quiz for one of my classes, changed and drove over to the meeting. There was a group picture taken and I know it will be posted on either the guild website or Melanie's blog on All Above Fabric. Fantastic ladies! Definitely my type of quilters. And we all seem to have the same fabric problem. We joked that we should be the fabric-holics anonymous.

If you are in Tucson, love quilting and fresh & modern fabrics, come join us for the next meeting! We're going to meet the 2nd Thursday of each month and have some other activities planned.

But here's the real Happy Friday for me... as of yesterday afternoon, this beauty is mine. ALL MINE!

Photo from Mac website

Yes, I am now the PROUD owner of a 13-in MacBook Pro! I have always been a Mac girl but somewhere along the line, I ended up owning a PC laptop. And then a PC desktop - which really is Mr. Crafty's computer. I was tired of using the PC, especially being tethered to the computer desk. So I finally persuaded Mr. Crafty that I NEEDED this. I was stalking my laptop via FedEx tracking all week. And yesterday at 12:53pm, it arrived.

Mr. Crafty also got a 160GB iPod Classic to replace his dying 5-year old 64GB iPod. So don't go feeling bad for him. Except that his new iPod arrived on Tuesday, the day after he left for his two week business trip. So he doesn't even get to enjoy it yet :-(

Now I just have to figure out how to set up our old wireless router...

{unless one of my neighbors wants to let me "borrow" their wireless}