Hi, Everyone —

Sue has filled you in on most of our trip so far.  So I’m just going to offer some random stories.

Many of you may remember the midnight fire alarms at the seminar in Philadelphia — when Sue and I laughed ourselves silly!  Well — you guessed it — last night we had a fire alarm here in Louisville!  The voice on the loud speaker was much more calm, but never came on to announce that the crisis had passed.  We finally called the front desk to determine whether we could “resume our normal activities!”

To make it worse — twice early this morning (2 and 4 AM) — the same alarm beeps went off in our room.  At first we thought it was another fire alarm, but it sounded like the alarm was coming from my laptop.  I couldn’t find any issue with the lap top, but then I spied my cell phone and checked it.  Red Alert text messages were coming in — warning us about flash flooding in the area!    We did laugh hard at this one!  We had fallen asleep to some serious thunder storms earlier!

Oh and the kickoff of the Stanford game was awesome!

So today I visited the EGA book store while Sue was volunteering at the registration desk.  I found this wonderful fiction book called “The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen”.  It probably has nothing to do with stitching but I just couldn’t pass it up!  I bet there are quite a few Jane Austen junkies in this crowd!  (The store also carried dozens of mystery series with stitching in them — some of them even have cats, Mom!)

As Sue explained, we spent some time looking over Finca threads in the store.  Here are my colors:

Rosie’s Finca: Red, Brown, Aqua, Yellow, and Ecru

I have the greatest roommate — here’s why:  As we were standing in a very long line to check out with our threads, I lost my patience with shopping and was ready to abandon my threads and leave.  Sue volunteered to continue to stay in line and to purchase my threads for me.  We would settle up later.  I’m a slacker roommate because I took her up on the offer!

One of the things that we did was look over the offerings of classes for next year’s EGA in Phoenix.  There was a magnificent Or Nue piece with two butterflies.  The gold was couched in swirls.  It’s going to be a one day class focusing on the technique.  I wasn’t allowed to take a picture but I understand that all of next year’s class pictures will be up on the EGA website at the end of this week.  I guarantee that it will be worth your while to take a look.

Diane had mentioned that she had a friend from college, Jackie, that was a teacher of canvas work.  It appears that Jackie has a piece in next year’s EGA seminar called “Diamond Panes”.  It’s lovely and one that I circled as a possibility for Phoenix.  So please check that one out on the EGA website also!

Sue and I stitched most of the afternoon here in the room.  My goal was to get the October SOTM stitching done…I failed.  Here’s my status at the end of our Sunday stitching.

Rosie’s October SOTM Progress

Did anyone who was at Carol’s get this completed?  Sue teases that I stitch fast, but this month’s stitching was slow going!

Last and most odd:  Yesterday Sue and I watched barges loaded with coal going upriver.  This afternoon, they returned down river — STILL loaded with coal.  We figure it must have something to do with the government shutdown!

Cheers!  Rosie